Category: Blog

March 24, 2025

Sanitizing Resumption of Genocide as ‘Pressure on Hamas’

The New York Times (3/21/25) reports the resumption of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as “pressure…to free more hostages.”

The New York Times produced an article on Friday, March 21, bearing the headline “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.” In the first paragraph, readers were informed that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had undertaken to “turn up the pressure” by warning that Israel was “preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.”

This was no doubt a rather bland way of describing mass slaughter and illegal territorial conquest—not to mention a convenient distraction from the fact that Hamas is not the party that is currently guilty of a failure to cooperate. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Israel annihilated the ceasefire agreement that came into effect in January following 15 months of genocide by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.

Over those months, Israel officially killed at least 48,577 Palestinians in Gaza; in February, the death toll was bumped up to almost 62,000, to account for missing persons presumed to be dead beneath the rubble.

The first phase of the ceasefire ended at the beginning of March, and was scheduled to give way to a second phase, in which a permanent cessation of hostilities would be negotiated, along with the exchange of remaining hostages. Rather than “cooperate,” however, Israel and its BFF, the United States, opted to move the goalposts and insist on an extension of phase one—since, at the end of the day, an actual end to the war is the last thing Israel or the US wants.

After all, how will Donald Trump’s fantasy of converting Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” ever come to fruition if the territory is not thoroughly pulverized and depopulated first?

Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide on Tuesday killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat—but, hey, that’s just how Israel “turns up the pressure on Hamas.”

Committed to the deployment of euphemism

What the New York Times (3/3/25) calls “pressure,” Amnesty International calls “a crime against humanity and a violation of international law.”

Were the US newspaper of record not so firmly committed to the deployment of grotesque euphemism on behalf of the Israeli war effort, perhaps the discussion of “pressure” might have included a mention of such statistics as that, between Tuesday and Friday alone, at least 200 children were among those massacred. But this, alas, would have required a humanization of Palestinians, and a dangerous encouragement of empathy fundamentally at odds with US/Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Instead, the Times simply noted that “Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages” in its possession, estimated to consist of “as many as 24 living captives—and the remains of more than 30 others.” No reference was made to the thousands of Palestinian captives held in mind-bogglingly inhumane conditions in Israel, though the Times did manage the—judgment-free—observation that,

even before the ceasefire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.

As Amnesty International (3/3/25) pointed out, that particular Israeli maneuver amounted to a crime against humanity and a violation of international law. But the Western corporate media wouldn’t be the Western corporate media if they reported straight facts.

‘To pressure Hamas on hostages’

Death by bombing and starvation is euphemized by the Wall Street Journal (3/8/25) as “gradually increasing pressure on Hamas.”

For its part, Reuters (3/21/25) explained on Friday that Israel had “intensified a military onslaught to press the Palestinian militant group [Hamas] to free remaining Israeli hostages.” The Wall Street Journal has, meanwhile, spent weeks preparing for the onslaught of “pressure” via such headlines as “Israel Draws Up New War Plans to Pressure Hamas” (3/8/25) and “Israel Chokes Electricity Supply to Gaza to Pressure Hamas on Hostages” (3/9/25).

A BBC article (3/21/25) on Katz’s orders to the military to “seize additional areas in Gaza” in the absence of a comprehensive hostage release is illustrative of the corporate media approach to round two of genocide. Specifying that “Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire,” the BBC quoted Katz as warning that “the more Hamas continues its refusal, the more territory it will lose to Israel.” The article did allow Hamas a line of space in which to respond that it is “engaging with the mediators with full responsibility and seriousness,” but the sandwiching of this quote in between US/Israeli accusations intentionally implied its disingenuousness.

Of course, the unmutilated truth does intermittently seep into media output, as in CNN’s Friday dispatch (3/21/25) containing these two sentences that lay out, in straightforward fashion, who is cooperating and who is not:

Hamas has insisted on sticking to a timeline previously agreed with Israel and the US that would move the warring parties into a second phase of the truce, in which Israel would commit to ending the war. But Israel has refused, saying it wants to extend the first phase instead.

Overall, however, the function of the corporate media is to endow demonstrably false US/Israeli accusations with a veneer of solid credibility, and to portray Hamas as the perennial saboteurs. Ultimately, unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire is about the equivalent, in terms of journalistic integrity, as unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of manufacturing nuclear jelly beans.

By implicitly blaming Hamas for renewed hostilities and legitimizing Israeli “pressure,” media outlets have offered themselves up as platforms for the de facto justification of mass slaughter.

A Thursday Fox News intervention (3/20/25) on Israel’s decision to “expand… activities in Gaza” noted approvingly that “the Israeli air force has continued to target and dismantle terrorists and terrorist infrastructure throughout” the coastal enclave. The article naturally came equipped with the assertion that Israel had resumed operations “following a short-lived ceasefire after it said the terror group repeatedly rebuffed offers to release the remaining hostages.”

To be sure, “activities” is as good a euphemism for genocide as any. And as the corporate media carry on with their own militant activities, one wishes some sort of pressure could stop the truth from being held hostage.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 21, 2025

Elite Media Paved Way for Trump’s Targeting of Columbia

Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.

Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).

And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”

But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.

‘Incessant valorization of victimhood’

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”

I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.

Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.

In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:

Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.

Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).

‘Fervor that borders on the oppressive’

The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.

The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).

The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.

The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”

‘Belligerent elite college students’

Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”

The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:

I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:

It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.

‘Death knell for a Jewish state’

While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.

Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:

The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.

Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”

Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?

The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 21, 2025

Decades of Media Myths Made Social Security Vulnerable to Political Attack

As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.

‘If nothing changes’

The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.

An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”

Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.

These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.

It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.

As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.

In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.

Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:

There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.

The easy and popular option is not an option

A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.

There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficit hawks at the Post.

But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.

In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.

To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”

Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.

Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-owned Post.

Useful misinformation

Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):

Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.

Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.

Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 20, 2025

Leading Papers Give Two Cheers for DOGE
Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”

The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.

Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.

Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.

Government spending ‘skyrocketed’

The New York Times (1/30/25) claims “even progressives now worry about the federal debt”—though an extensive recent analysis (PERI, 4/20) of the impact of debt by progressive economists found that “the relationship between government debt and economic growth is essentially zero.”

Corporate media’s ever-present fearmongering about spending is well-illustrated by the New York Times, which, within a week and a half of Trump’s inauguration, had already run the headline: “Even Progressives Now Worry About the Federal Debt” (1/30/25). The next day, the paper ran a separate article (1/31/25) by Michael Shear, which stated:

The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.

The paragraph at least avoided the classic tactic of throwing out raw numbers without giving any sort of metric, like GDP, to measure them against. But it nonetheless gave far from the full picture, not even offering numbers for spending as a percentage of GDP, which showed a minor increase of 3 percentage points over this period, to 23%—the same percentage that was spent in 2011.

Even more useful to include than this data, however, would have been international data showing how much the US spends in comparison to other rich countries. As it turns out, the answer is: quite little. And the US taxes even less.

Readers might also be interested to learn that tax cuts, not spending increases, have been primarily responsible for increases in the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio in recent decades, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (3/27/23). The group emphasized: “Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.” Given that reality, CAP concluded:

If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

Federal outlays as a percentage of GDP have been nearly constant for the past 75 years (FRED).

‘The big areas of the budget’

The New York Times‘ Michael Shear (1/31/25) wrote that Trump was attempting “to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

If corporate media like the New York Times were serious about informing readers about the causes of and answers to high government debt, they would, like CAP, debunk right-wing deficit hawk propaganda, rather than reinforce it.

Instead, the Times‘ Shear (1/31/25) decided to provide his readers with extensive quotation from Maya MacGuineas, an extreme deficit hawk who got an early boost in her career “from the patronage of billionaire investment banker and arch-austerian Pete Peterson,” as the New Republic (3/4/21) recounted in a 2021 piece. Shear merely described her as “the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”

MacGuineas is the only expert Shear cites in the piece, and the article closes with her warning that Musk’s cuts “would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.” “To make a real impact on the debt,” MacGuineas said:

We are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings—Social Security, healthcare and revenues—the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.

The decision to include only an austerity advocate, and to allow her proclamation about the need for cuts to Social Security to end the piece, inevitably grants legitimacy to her claims. These claims are at the very least meant to be taken seriously, even more so since they come from a supposedly independent expert rather than a politician or government official. The decision to include no left-wing expert has a similar effect in reverse.

Meanwhile, in the paper’s piece (1/30/25) from the previous day about “progressive worry,” reporter Lydia DePillis managed to bury the key point in the 21st paragraph:

But mostly, Democrats say, the government simply needs more revenue to support the increasing number of people who are becoming eligible for retirement benefits.

Debt-scolding reporting

The Washington Post (10/8/24) sounds the alarm over the United States having a debt-to-GDP ratio similar to that of Britain, France and Canada—and much lower than Japan’s.

The Times is hardly the only outlet to legitimize alarmism about government spending. In a debt-scolding piece of reporting from last fall, the Washington Post (10/8/24) hammered on the point that runaway spending should be a major concern.

The choice of headline, “US Deficit Hits $1.8 Trillion as Interest Costs Rise,” immediately linked debt concerns to spending, not taxes. The first paragraph described the $1.8 trillion figure as “an enormous sum”—probably equally applicable to any sum over a billion dollars in the average American’s mind—while the fourth paragraph warned:

The nation’s debt compared with the size of the overall economy, a key metric of fiscal stability, is projected to exceed its all-time high of 106% by 2027.

Once again, international comparison would have been helpful here. It could be noted that the US, in fact, has a rather typical amount of debt compared to many other rich countries these days, with Britain, Canada, Spain, France and Italy all posting similar debt-to-GDP numbers. Greece, meanwhile, has a debt-to-GDP ratio close to 170%, while Japan boasts a ratio of around 250%. As Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has noted:

If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.

The Post, evidently, had no interest in providing such context. No international figures were cited. Instead, the next lines were a quote from a conservative economist:

A [nearly] $2 trillion deficit is bad news during a recession and war, but completely unprecedented during peace and prosperity…. The danger is the deficit will only get bigger over the next decade due to retiring baby boomers and interest on the debt.

Notice once more the linking of the increase in debt to spending rather than tax cuts.

The ‘soaring’ debt that wasn’t

The federal debt the Wall Street Journal (9/16/24) claimed was “soaring” was a smaller percentage of GDP in 2024 than in 2020.

The piece continued on to cite deficit hawk MacGuineas—described as the president of “a top Washington fiscal watchdog”—denouncing the “patchwork of targeted fiscal bribes” being offered to voters by the presidential candidates. And it ended with a quote from “president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former CBO director” Doug Holtz-Eakin, reminding us that debt servicing costs will have to be paid and will crowd out other spending priorities.

Unmentioned by the Post is that Holtz-Eakin held high posts in the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain presidential campaign. He also oversaw the creation of an infamous bogus cost estimate for the Green New Deal. Yet the Post portrays him as just an expert who leans a bit to the right.

Though the Post consulted three right-wing sources, they failed to include a single left-leaning independent expert. It’s not hard to understand how that fails readers, or how it legitimizes a certain set of priorities, while suggesting other views lack credibility.

The Wall Street Journal, for its part, has been more than happy to join the general fretting in corporate media about government spending. Back in the fall, for instance, a piece in its news section (9/16/24) complained that the presidential race was not focusing sufficiently on the issue of rising government debt, and flagged Social Security and Medicare as “the biggest drivers of rising spending.” The headline read: “Federal Debt Is Soaring. Here’s Why Trump and Harris Aren’t Talking About It.”

The problem with that headline? In the fall of 2024, federal debt was decidedly not soaring. This holds whether you look at federal debt in nominal dollar terms or as a percentage of GDP. Federal debt had “soared” briefly in 2020, when the Covid recession hit and the government rapidly expanded its spending to deal with the downturn. But for most of 2024, the quarterly percentage increase in the federal debt in dollar terms was actually below the historical average going back to 1970. And the debt-to-GDP ratio was at roughly the same spot as it had been three-and-a-half years earlier, at the start of Biden’s presidency.

‘Shutting off the lights’

For the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25), refusing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is like saying you want to go on a diet except for the beer, chips and ice cream sundaes.”

Even more concerning than corporate media’s penchant for running articles in the news section fearmongering about government spending, though, is what has been going on in corporate outlets’ opinion sections, specifically with the output of their editorial boards. Here, the legitimization of DOGE has reached its highest heights.

Unsurprisingly, the unabashedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board has been the prime offender. Most recently, it published an editorial (3/14/25) with the headline “Don’t Cry for the Education Department,” applauding the unconstitutional DOGE-led attack on the Education Department, which the Journal chastened for “harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

The final paragraph began: “The closer Mr. Trump can get to shutting off the lights at the Education Department, the better.”

This was just one of numerous Journal editorials in recent weeks cheering on the DOGE project. A sampling of other editorials:
- “Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic” (2/4/25) argued that Musk should be contained, but that he is “also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the US Agency for International Development.”
- “The Federal Spending Boom Rolls On” (2/10/25) declared that “DOGE is a good idea,” and claimed that it had not gone far enough: “But for all of Mr. Musk’s frenetic tweeting, and the Beltway cries of Apocalypse Now, so far DOGE is only nibbling at the edges of Washington’s spending problem.”
- “Judge Wants DOGE Facts, Not Fears” (2/19/25) ended, “Democrats hunting for a constitutional crisis might want to show evidence before they cry ‘dictator.’”
In short, then, the Journal editorial board not only approves of a rogue pseudo-agency operating with no transparency or oversight, but has become a crusader in defense of DOGE’s attacks on constitutional checks and balances—which grant Congress, not a right-wing ideologue from the PayPal Mafia, the power of the purse.

Of course, you can expect little else from the Journal than salivation over cuts to federal spending—it has long been the lapdog of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But it is jarring to witness exactly how rabid the Journal editorial board can be.

Not ‘audacious’ enough

The Washington Post says it’s “true that the $36 trillion national debt is unsustainable and there’s plenty of bloat in government.”

For its part, the Washington Post editorial board, while describing DOGE as a “circus” (2/24/25), has substantially legitimized DOGE’s mission.

An editorial (2/7/25) from early February is case in point. Headlined “Trump Needs to Erect Guardrails for DOGE,” the piece offered five ways for Trump to “be clear about who is boss,” effectively endorsing the mission of slashing government spending while expressing concern over some of Musk’s tactics.

The first four proposed guardrails in the piece, which include “Vet Musk’s operatives” and “Limit Musk’s access to sensitive files,” are all reasonable, but the fifth proposal reveals the board’s substantive concerns about the spending cuts being executed by DOGE. These concerns are not about whether cuts should be made—it is taken for granted that government spending should be reduced. Rather, they have to do with which spending is cut, aligning with the concerns raised by the Wall Street Journal about DOGE not going far enough.

This proposal, labeled “Focus on the biggest drivers of the national debt,” read:

To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts, Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent. Other sensitive areas of the balance sheet, including the Pentagon budget and veterans’ benefits, cannot stay off the table forever.

For the Post, then, the focus on programs such as USAID is simply too limited. We must put Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits on the table!

‘Embrace the same thinking’

The “DOGE ethos,” according to the Washington Post (3/3/25), means making “governments leaner and more efficient.”

The Washington Post’s preference for substantial cuts to federal government is further illustrated by an editorial (3/3/25) published in early March, following Jeff Bezos’s rebranding of the Post as Wall Street Journal–lite.

The editorial, titled “The DOGE Ethos Comes to State Governments,” showered praise on state governments that are capitalizing on DOGE branding while pursuing a more “thoughtful” approach to reducing government spending.

The piece favorably cited Washington state Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson’s insistence that “I’m not here to defend government…. I’m here to reform it.” The board elaborated:

Democrats in DC ought to embrace the same thinking. It’s foolish to defend a status quo that most voters think doesn’t work well. By fighting Trump and Musk tooth and nail, at the expense of presenting an alternative vision, the opposition risks appearing overly keen to protect hidebound institutions even as the world changes rapidly.

The Post’s take on DOGE? Let’s not center its blatant illegality. Let’s instead focus on what we can learn from it. After all, with a few minor tweaks, it’s exactly what we as a country need.

‘A great American success story’

New York Times says of Elon Musk, “he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.” But he’s going about it the wrong way.

The appallingly low bar set by the competition leaves the New York Times to assume the role of the major national newspaper that will seriously attack DOGE. It takes to this role…poorly.

The Times editorial board’s pushback against DOGE has been embarrassingly feeble. Its most direct assessment of DOGE thus far (3/8/25), for instance, began with an uncomfortably obsequious description of Musk:

Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries.

The board quickly conceded a major point to Musk:

Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.

The editorial went on to make a number of criticisms of DOGE, but its critique was undermined by this odd willingness to bend over backwards to appease Musk and his supporters.

Meanwhile, though sharply critical of DOGE’s disregard for the Constitution, the editorial made no attempt at presenting a counter-vision of government. It lamented cuts to a hodgepodge of specific government programs, but it had nothing to say in defense of current levels of government spending, let alone in favor of even higher levels of spending. One would hardly know that many wealthy countries have significantly higher levels of government spending and happier populations—in fact, at least 16 OECD countries register both higher spending and higher happiness than the US.

A gaping hole

This, then, is the state of American corporate media at the start of the Trump presidency. Across arguably the three most important national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—there is broad agreement that government spending is out of control and that something, perhaps something drastic, needs to be done about it.

Even at the leftmost of these organizations, the New York Times, the editorial board appears incapable of mounting a case for social democratic levels of government spending in the face of extreme attacks on spending by the Trump administration. The Times, instead, finds itself caught between bowing before the titans of American capitalism and confronting their disregard for the US Constitution.

The Washington Post has been able to adopt a somewhat less tortured position, occupying the center/center-right in a way reminiscent of 1990s Democrats, supporting cuts to government, but in a “thoughtful” way.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is having the time of its life. Finding itself once again in an era when greed and meanness animate the daily actions of government, it must feel freer than it has in years to bare its teeth at the true enemies of the American republic: teachers’ unions and recipients of government aid.

News consumers have no major paper espousing a truly progressive perspective. On the topic of government spending, at least, the window of acceptable thought appears to span from the center to the far right. There is no direct marketing reason for this—there’s a sizeable audience in the US that would welcome a progressive outlet, the same way there’s a sizeable audience for right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.

Who doesn’t want such an outlet to appear? Ultra-wealthy right-wing Americans of the sort that own and sponsor much of the media landscape. If wealthy people aren’t willing to finance a progressive media outlet that can compete with major papers, it seems that such an outlet simply won’t exist. Crowdfunding could help progressive media overcome this issue, but the playing field is not level.

As it stands, a major progressive outlet that can compete with the existing dominant players does not exist, and does not seem to be coming anytime soon. The gaping hole left as a result is becoming only more apparent as we speed into Trump administration 2.0.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 19, 2025

In Return to ‘War on Terror’ Propaganda, Murdoch Cheers Suppression of Protest

Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.

As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”

In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”

Alarms raised

The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”

Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-pandering Washington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.

There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has

the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.

The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.

Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.

‘Inimical to the US’

The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”

The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”

Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.

While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”

The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.

Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).

Not ‘really about speech’

Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.

The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”

Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.

Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:

“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”

These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”

‘War on Terror’ playbook

Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”

Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.

As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.

Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).

So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.

To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:

“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.

“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.

Helping to crush dissent

The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”

Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),

becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.

Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.

Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 19, 2025

In Return to ‘War on Terror’ Propaganda, Murdoch Cheers Suppression of Protest

Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.

As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”

In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”

Alarms raised

The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”

Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-pandering Washington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.

There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has

the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.

The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.

Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.

‘Inimical to the US’

The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”

The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”

Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.

While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”

The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.

Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).

Not ‘really about speech’

Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.

The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”

Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.

Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:

“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”

These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”

‘War on Terror’ playbook

Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”

Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.

As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.

Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).

So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.

To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:

“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.

“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.

Helping to crush dissent

The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”

Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),

becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.

Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.

Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 19, 2025

A Look into Alberta’s Toxic Future with Coal Mines

While coal mining can leave a landscape devastated and denuded of life, it is in the water where some of coal’s most harmful impacts – such as selenium toxins – can be found.

Crystal ball gazing is notoriously unreliable. But when it comes to looking at the impacts of the newly proposed coal mine in the Eastern slopes we don’t need one.

For a glimpse into what Alberta’s Oldman River watershed could look like if Australian coal giant Benga Minerals is allowed to mine there, we need only to look across the Continental Divide into British Columbia. There we find the Elk River, which rises along the western slopes of the divide north of the town of Elkford, flows south through Sparwood and Fernie, and then enters the United States beneath the waters of Lake Koocanusa.

The experience there can provide Albertans with useful insights into what the Oldman River watershed might look like should Premier Smith’s plans to allow new coal mines. This would undoubtedly create a toxic and deadly future for Alberta’s eastern slope rivers.

Coal mining has been taking place in the Elk River since 1897 and currently the material is shipped to China for use in steel making, leaving gapping rents that desecrate entire mountain ranges, and leaving dozens of kilometres of waste rock piled on the slopes of adjacent mountains. However, it is beneath the waters of the struggling Elk River that we have to look to see some of the most potent impacts of coal mining.

The mining of coal directly contributes to the build of invisible pollutants, the most prominent and dangerous of which is a toxic metal like element called selenium. These toxins directly threaten species such as the Westslope Cutthroat Trout and their invertebrate foodsource – caddisflys, stoneflys and dragon fly nymphs.

Selenium is an essential component of various enzymes and proteins, called selenoproteins that our bodies need in very small amounts. It helps make special proteins that protect our cells from damage, fight infections, and help with reproduction and thyroid function. Without these trace amounts, our cells wouldn’t work properly.

Unfortunately, both elemental selenium and (especially) selenium salts are toxic in larger doses. Too much selenium causes a condition called selenosis, which makes people extremely tired, causes breathing problems, lowers blood pressure, and can lead to tremors and heart disease. Any more than 400 micrograms (one microgram is equal to one millionth of a gram; in strict scientific terminology, that is really, really small) can result in big trouble.

While selenium naturally exists in the limestone rocks of the Rocky Mountains, it usually doesn’t get into the water under normal conditions. Unfortunately, the large coal mines in the Elk River Valley have changed this. These mining operations have released harmful amounts of selenium into the water, polluting rivers that flow across boundaries.

This has occurred because the broken-up waste rock from coal mining has a high surface area, and without proper mitigation, the combination of air and water penetrating the waste rock produces conditions which lead to the formation of soluble selenium (selenate). The soluble selenium can then be flushed out of the waste pile by rain and snowmelt, entering creeks, streams, rivers and groundwater.

There is no known mitigation for removing selenium once it’s in a watercourse.

Selenium accumulates in fish, resulting in deformations that render the prized Westslope Cutthoat trout caught in the Elk inedible, and have forced the community of Sparwood to dig new water wells after one of the town’s wells was poisoned by the metaloid.

Why should Albertans care about what happens in Sparwood, Fernie, and across the Canada-US border in Montana? Because it offers a cautionary tale about what will likely happen in Alberta should we fall prey to the demand for more coal mines. Nearly all of the waterways feeding communities such as Lethbridge and Medicine Hat arise along the narrow strip of mountains Albertans call the Eastern Slopes.

The strip mining of coal will poison the water, threatening human health and lead to potentially devastating impacts on local fisheries, impacting the livelihoods of hundreds.

The world might want coal today, but as climate change decimates our water supply and worsens droughts, fresh water will be even more critical in the future. Meanwhile, steelmaking is evolving, with electric arc furnaces and hydrogen advancing. Instead of spending time, money, and energy digging new mines in Alberta, we could invest in green steel projects—ones that don’t scar mountains and leave a toxic legacy beneath the clear, but clearly poisoned, waters.

(We’ll look more carefully at the positive and negative impacts of mining coal and alternative steel making in our next blog on coal mining.)

Read the first instalment in our coal series here.

Stay tuned for a future instalment that looks at the impact of coal mining on local communities and their economy.

The post A Look into Alberta’s Toxic Future with Coal Mines appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 18, 2025

Stories of Hope, March 2025

This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
March 17, 2025

Know Your Enemy: Becoming Elon Musk, Part One

In the first of two episodes on Elon Musk, Matt and Sam explore the billionaire’s fraught adolescence and first years in Silicon Valley.

This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
March 13, 2025

Did Left Journalists Buy Into Right-Wing Ideology–or Were They Bought?

Owned (Hachette, 2025), by Eoin Higgins, traces the relationship between tech industry barons and two former left-wing journalists.

Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised. Putting his Occupy Wall Street days behind him, Taibbi has fallen into the embrace of the reactionary Young America’s Foundation. He recently shared a bill with other right-wing pundits like Jordan Peterson, Eric Bolling and Lara Logan. Channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon, he frets about “bullying campus Marxism” (Substack, 6/12/20).

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who helped expose National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13; New York Times, 10/23/14), has buddied up with extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, notorious for falsely claiming that the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. That’s in addition to Greenwald’s closeness to Tucker Carlson, the ex–Fox News host who has platformed the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust revisionism.

This is just a taste of what has caused many former friends, colleagues and admirers to ask what happened to make these one-time heroes of left media sink into the online cultural crusade against the trans rights movement (Substack, 6/8/22), social media content moderation (C-SPAN, 3/9/23) and legal accountability for Donald Trump (Twitter, 4/5/23).

Both writers gave up coveted posts at established media outlets for a new and evolving mediasphere that allows individual writers to promote their work independently. Both have had columns at the self-publishing platform Substack, which relies on investment from conservative tech magnate Marc Andreessen (Reuters, 3/30/21; CJR, 4/1/21). Greenwald hosts System Update on Rumble, a conservative-friendly version of YouTube underwritten by Peter Thiel (Wall Street Journal, 5/19/21; New York Times, 12/13/24), the anti-woke crusader known for taking down Gawker.

High-tech platforms

Some wonder if their political conversion is related to their departure from traditional journalism to new, high-tech platforms for self-publishing and self-production. In Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices of the Left (2025), Eoin Higgins focuses on the machinations of the reactionary tech industry barons, who live by a Randian philosophy where they are the hard-working doers of society, while the nattering nabobs of negativism speak only for the ungrateful and undeserving masses. Higgins’ book devotes about a chapter and a half to Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, but Musk is refreshingly not the centerpiece. (Higgins has been a FAIR contributor, and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas is quoted in the book.)

The tech billionaire class’s desire to crush critical reporting and create new boss-friendly media isn’t just ideological. Higgins’ story documents how these capitalists have always wanted to create a media environment that enables them to do one thing: make as much money as possible. And what stands in their way? Liberal Democrats and their desire to regulate industry (Guardian, 6/26/24).

In Higgins’ narrative, these billionaires originally saw Greenwald as a dangerous member of the fourth estate, largely because their tech companies depended greatly on a relationship with the US security state. But as both Greenwald and Taibbi drifted rightward in their politics, these new media capitalists were able to entice them over to their side on their new platforms.

Capitalists buying and creating media outfits to influence policy is not new—think of Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post (8/5/13; Extra!, 3/14). But Higgins sees a marriage of convenience between these two former stars of the left and a set of reactionary bosses who cultivated their hatred for establishment media for the industry’s political ends.

Less ideological than material

Matt Taibbi (X, 2/15/24) learned the hard way that cozying up to Musk and “repeatedly declining to criticize” him was not enough not avoid Musk’s censorship on X.

Higgins is not suggesting that Thiel and Andreesen are handing Taibbi and Greenwald a check along with a set of right-wing talking points. Instead, Higgins has applied Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda model, which they used to explain US corporate media in Manufacturing Consent, to the new media ecosystem of the alt-right.

Higgins even shows us that the alliance between these journalists and the lords of tech is shaky, and the relationship can be damaged when these tech lords are competing with each other. For example, right-wing multibillionaire Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X. Taibbi, who boosted Musk’s takeover and the ouster of the old Twitter regime, chose to overlook the fact that Musk’s new regime, despite a promise of ushering in an era of free speech, censored a significant amount of Twitter content. Taibbi finally spoke up when Musk instituted a “blanket search ban” of Substack links, thus hurting Taibbi’s bottom line. In other words, Taibbi’s allegiance to Musk was less ideological as it was material.

Greenwald and Taibbi have created a world where they are angry at “Big Tech,” except not the tech lords on whom their careers depend.

Lured to the tech lords

Owned addresses the record of these two enigmatic journalists, and their relationship to tech bosses, in splendid detail. In what is perhaps the most interesting part, Higgins explains how these Big Tech tycoons originally distrusted Greenwald, because of his work on the Snowden case. Over time, though, their political aims began to align, forging a new quasi-partnership.

As the writer Alex Gendler (Point, 2/3/25) explained, these capitalists are “libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves.” Taibbi and Greenwald, meanwhile, became disaffected with liberalism’s social justice politics. And thus a common ground was found.

In summarizing these men’s careers, Higgins finds that early on, both exhibited anger management problems and an inflated sense of self-importance. What we learn along the way is that there has always been conflict between their commitment to journalism and their own self-obsession. We see the latter win, and lure our protagonists closer to the tech lords.

Higgins charts Greenwald’s career, from a lawyer who ducked away from his duties to argue with conservatives on Town Hall forums, to his blogging years, to his break from the Intercept, the outlet he helped create.

We see a man who has always had idiosyncratic politics, with leftism less a description of his career and more an outside branding by fans during the Snowden story. Higgins shows how Greenwald, like so many, fell into a trap at an early age of finding the soul of his journalism in online fighting, rather than working the street, a flaw that has forever warped his worldview.

Right-wing spirals

As the lawyer for a white supremacist accused by the Center for Constitutional Rights of conspiring in a shooting spree that left two dead and nine wounded, Glenn Greenwald said, “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me” (Orcinus, 5/20/19).

The book is welcome, as it comes after many left-wing journalists offered each other explanations for Taibbi and Greenwald’s right-wing spirals. Some have wondered if Greenwald simply reverted to his early days of being an attorney and errand boy for white supremacist Matt Hale (New York Times, 3/9/05; Orcinus, 5/20/19), when he used to rant against undocumented immigration because “unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate” makes “impossible the preservation of any national identity” (Unclaimed Territory, 12/3/05).

Higgins gives us both sides of Greenwald. In one heartbreaking passage, he reports that Greenwald’s late husband had even tried to hide Greenwald’s phone to wean him off social media for his own well-being.

In a less sympathetic passage, we see that of all the corporate journalists in the world, it is tech writer Taylor Lorenz who has become the object of his obsessive, explosive Twitter ire. Her first offense was running afoul of Andreessen, one of Substack’s primary financers. Her second was investigating the woman behind the anti-trans Twitter account, Libs of TikTok (Washington Post, 4/19/22).

In Taibbi, we find a hungry and aggressive writer with little ideological grounding—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it leaves one vulnerable to manipulative forces. Higgins shows us a son of a journalist who had a lot of advantages in life, and yet still feels aggrieved, largely because details of his libidinous proclivities in post-Soviet Russia made him vulnerable to the MeToo campaign (Washington Post, 12/15/17). It’s not hard to see how the sting of organized feminist retribution would inspire the surly enfant terrible to abandon a mission to afflict the comfortable and become the Joker.

Right-wing for other reasons

Naturally, Owned doesn’t tell the whole story. While Musk’s Twitter has become a right-wing vehicle (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Al Jazeera, 8/13/24; PBS, 8/13/24), a great many left and liberal writers and new outlets still find audiences on Substack. At the same time, many of the platform’s users threatened to boycott Substack (Fast Company, 12/14/23) after it was revealed how much Nazi content it promoted (Atlantic, 11/28/23). And while Substack and Rumble certainly harnessed Taibbi and Greenwald’s realignment, many other left journalists have gone right for other reasons.

Big Tech doesn’t explain why Max Blumenthal, the son of Clinton family consigliere Sidney Blumenthal, gave up his investigations of the extreme right (Democracy Now!, 9/4/09) for Covid denialism (World Socialist Web Site, 4/13/22) and a brief stint as an Assadist version of Jerry Seinfeld (Twitter, 4/16/23). Christian Parenti, a former Nation correspondent covering conflict and climate change (Grist, 7/29/11) and the son of Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, has made a similar transition (Grayzone, 3/31/22; Compact, 12/31/24), and he is notoriously offline.

Higgins’ book, nevertheless, is a cautionary tale of how reactionary tech lords are exploiting a dying media sector, where readers are hungry for content, and laid off writers are even hungrier for paid work. They are working tirelessly to remake a new media world under their auspices.

To remake the media environment

Taibbi, who once upon a time spoke at Occupy Wall Street, has lazily morphed into a puppet for oligarchic state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) to literally repost Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich.

Thiel, Andreessen and Musk have the upper hand. While X is performing poorly (Washington Post, 9/1/24) and Tesla is battered by Musk’s plummeting public reputation, Musk’s political capital has skyrocketed, to the point that media outlets are calling him a shadow president in the new Trump administration (MSNBC, 12/20/24; Al Jazeera, 12/22/24). Substack is boasting growth (Axios, 2/22/24), as is Rumble (Motley Fool, 8/13/24).

Meanwhile, 2024 was a brutal year for journalism layoffs (Politico, 2/1/24). It saw an increase in newspaper closings that “has left more than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties—or 55 million people—with just one or no local news sources where they live” (Axios, 10/24/24). A year before that, Gallup (10/19/23) found that

the 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016.

The future of the Intercept, which Greenwald helped birth, remains in doubt (Daily Beast, 4/15/24), as several of its star journalists have left to start Drop Site News (Democracy Now!, 7/9/24), which is hosted on—you guessed it—Substack.

Rather than provide an opening for more democratic media, this space is red meat for predatory capital. The lesson we should draw from Higgins’ book is that unless we build up an alternative, democratic media to fill this void, an ideologically driven cohort of rich industrialists want to monopolize the communication space, manufacturing consent for an economic order that, surprise, puts them at the top. And if Taibbi and Greenwald can find fame and fortune pumping alt-right vitriol on these platforms, many others will line up to be like them.

What Higgins implies is that Andreessen and Thiel’s quest to remake the media environment as mainstream sources flounder isn’t necessarily turning self-publishing journalists into right-wingers, but that the system rewards commentary—the more incendiary the better—rather than local journalists doing on-the-ground, public-service reporting in Anytown USA, where it’s needed the most.

Greenwald and Taibbi’s stature in the world of journalism, on the other hand, is waning as they further dig themselves into the right-wing holes, and the years pass on from their days as scoop-seeking investigative reporters. Both ended their reputations as members of the Fourth Estate in favor of endearing themselves to MAGA government.

Taibbi has lazily morphed into a puppet for state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) space to literally rerun Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich. Greenwald cheered Trump and Musk’s destructive first month in power, saying the president should be “celebrated” (System Update, 2/22/25). Neither so-called “free speech” warrior seems much concerned about the enthusiastic censorship of the current administration (GLAAD, 1/21/25; Gizmodo, 2/5/25; American Library Association, 2/14/25; ABC News, 2/14/25, Poynter, 2/18/25; FIRE, 3/4/25; EFF, 3/5/25).

Past their sell-by date

And there’s a quality to Greenwald and Taibbi that limits their shelf life, a quality that even critics like Higgins have overlooked. As opposed to other left-to-right flipping contrarians of yore, the contemporary prose of Taibbi, Greenwald and their band of wannabes is simply too pedestrian to last beyond the authors’ lifetimes.

They value quantity over quality. There is no humor, narrative, love of language or worldly curiosity in their work. And they have few interests beyond this niche political genre.

Christopher Hitchens, who broke with the left to support the “War on Terror” (The Nation, 9/26/02), could write engagingly about literature, travel and religion. Village Voice civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose politics flew all over the spectrum, had a whole other career covering jazz. This made them not only digestible writers for readers who might disagree with them, but also extended their relevance in the literary profession.

By contrast, Taibbi’s attempts to write about the greatness of Thanksgiving (Substack, 11/25/21) and how much he liked the new Top Gun movie (Substack, 8/3/22) feel like perfunctory exercises in convincing readers that he’s a warm-blooded mammal. A Greenwaldian inquiry into art or music sounds as useful as sex advice from the pope. This tunnel vision increased their usefulness to the moguls of the right-wing media evolution–for a while.

Taibbi and Greenwald are not the true enemy of Owned; they are fun for journalists to criticize, but have slid off into the margins, as neither has published a meaningful investigation in years. The good news is that for every Greenwald or Taibbi, there’s a Tana Ganeva, Maximillian Alvarez, Talia Jane, George Joseph, Michelle Chen or A.C. Thompson in the trenches, doing real, necessary reporting.

What is truly more urgent is the fact that a dangerous media class is taking advantage of this media vacuum, at the expense of regular people.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 13, 2025

Why Canada Must Reject Trump-Style Politics
In recent years, some Canadian politicians have been using more and more aggressive Trump-style populist rhetoric. We’ve seen an increase in divisive language and misinformation that puts marginalizing political opponents ahead of what really matters: national unity, climate action, and protecting the well-being of Canadians.

The attacks on public services, climate action rollbacks and a drastic economic downturn, all of which happened in only the first two months of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president, should be a wake-up call for Canadians. If we don’t stand up for our values, we could be heading down the same dangerous road.

Donald Trump’s actions since his inauguration shows how reckless and damaging this style of leadership can be. In the last two months, Donald Trump has rolled back key climate policies in the US, installed an oligarch (Elon Musk) to destroy public services and cause massive layoffs in the public sector, undermined international alliances and initiated a trade war with Canada (and other countries) that will lead to rising prices and economic uncertainty.

On top of that, Donald Trump and his administration have made a point to dismiss Canada’s independence by referring to Canada as the “51st state”.

Canadians must look at what is happening south of our border as a warning and protect Canada from Trump-style politics. The only way to do that is by doubling down on what makes Canada strong and free:
- Standing up for Unity: Some Canadian politicians are trying to divide us – through fear, anger or misinformation – and they need to be called out. Canadians deserve a future government that will bring Canadians together rather than tearing us apart.
- Go All-in on Climate Action: Trump and his administration have doubled down on producing more fossil fuels and rolled back climate protections. Canadians must be wary of any politicians that want to follow suit. The world is moving away from fossil fuels and Canada must invest in renewable energy, the electrification of our homes and transportation, and implement climate policies that protect the people, the planet and our economy.
- Defend Our Social Safety Nets: Universal healthcare, worker protections and public education aren’t just policies – they’re core to Canadian identity. Canadians must be wary of any politicians that scapegoat the most vulnerable in our society. A strong social safety net protects everyone and keeps our country fair and prosperous.
- Stopping the Spread of Disinformation: Trump-style politics thrive on spreading disinformation through social media, which is currently completely unregulated. Canadians have a right to know the truth. Any future government must ensure that social media is regulated to follow the same standards of truthfulness as traditional media, while protecting public news broadcasters, like the CBC, as a shared resource for information.
A key part of Canadian identity is that we look out for each other. We recognize that protecting our land and climate isn’t just an environmental issue – it’s also about protecting our economy and safeguarding our way of life.

If we let Trump-style politics take hold, we risk losing these values. Slashing social programs, gutting environmental policies, and pitting communities against each other isn’t just bad policy – it’s an attack on what it means to be Canadian.

Photo by Maxime Dore via Unsplash

It is time for Canadians to stand up for Canada and push Trump-style politics out of our country. All we have to do is peek south of the border to see what is in store for us if we don’t. This type of leadership will lead to chaos, division and policies that puts the wealthy and powerful ahead of everyone else.

Canadians have a choice. We can let fear and division rule us or we can double down on what it means to be Canadian – unity, climate action and protecting the social safety nets that make us who we are. Consider that in the upcoming federal election and ensure that you, your family and your friends are voting for what it means to be Canadian.

The post Why Canada Must Reject Trump-Style Politics appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 12, 2025

US Media’s Sorry History of Abetting Immigration Panics

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has been underway for almost two months now, and every day brings headlines testifying to his determination to fulfil his promise of mass deportation of immigrants. Senate Republicans are moving forward with a bill allocating an additional $175 billion towards border militarization efforts—including deportations and border-wall construction.

Deportees have been shipped to remote camps and militarized hotels in Panama and Costa Rica, facing horrifically unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, and denied access to aid, lawyers and press. Venezuelan deportees detained at Guantánamo Bay—who have since been deported to Venezuela via Honduras—had been similarly mistreated by US immigration officials.

All of this, of course, comes after four years of US media and political classes working in lock-step to manufacture consent for such a catastrophic displacement event (FAIR.org, 8/31/23, 5/24/21). Both conservative and centrist media outlets associated immigrants with drugs, crime and human waste. During her bid for president, Vice President Kamala Harris supported hardening our borders, calling Trump’s border wall—which she once called a “medieval vanity project“—a “good idea.”

We’ve been here before many, many times. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself— but it often rhymes.

Media of all kinds—from tabloids to legacy outlets—have repeatedly sensationalized the immigrant “other,” constructing an all-encompassing threat to native-born US labor and culture that can always be neutralized through a targeted act of mass displacement or incarceration. The resulting violence addresses none of the structural problems that cause the immiseration of angry workers in the first place.

From Chinese exclusion to Japanese internment to Operation Wetback, this characterization of the foreigner has had catastrophic consequences for millions of human lives.

‘The Chinese question in hand’

The Seattle Daily Intelligencer (12/18/1877) argued that “Chinese should be restricted to one particular locality” so as not to “endanger” white property.

Chinese labor began to cement itself by the 1850s as a crucial element of westward expansion. American companies employed a steady trickle of cheap immigrant labor to extract precious minerals, construct railroads and perform agricultural work. For their willingness to work long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions, Chinese workers were scorned by their fellow workers—including minority workers—helped along by an unforgiving and vitriolic media ecosystem.

Juan González and Joseph Torres’ News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (Verso, 2011) documents how sensationalistic media coverage of Chinese immigrant workers contributed to creating the social-political conditions necessary for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In 1852, prominent broadsheet Daily Alta California argued that Chinese people should be classified as nonwhite, a decision eventually cemented a year later in a murder trial that rendered Chinese testimony against white defendants inadmissible, under racist rules of evidence that also targeted Black, Indigenous and mixed-race witnesses. Sinophobic violence against Chinese mine workers from whites, Native Americans and Mexicans subsequently became much more commonplace.

Meanwhile, instead of condemning the xenophobic violence faced by these workers, Bayard Taylor at the pro-labor, progressive-leaning New York Tribune (9/29/1854) called the Chinese “uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond conception,” and described them as lacking the “virtues of honesty, integrity [and] good-faith.”

Into the 1870s and ’80s, “The Chinese Must Go” became a rallying cry of California’s labor movement. A San Francisco Chronicle piece (7/21/1878) from 1878 described a “Mongolian octopus” growing to engulf the coast. Headline after headline described Chinese-Americans as “Mongolian hordes” and “thieves.”

Simultaneously, violent incidents targeting Chinese mineworkers became massive union-led anti-Chinese pogroms. Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (University of California Press, 2008) specifically details a late October 1871 pogrom in Los Angeles during which more than a dozen Chinese men and women were killed, with numerous Chinese homes looted for tens of thousands of dollars. At trial, members of the crowd testified to the jury that “Los Angeles Star reporter H.M. Mitchell had urged them to hang all the Chinese.”

Lynchings and pogroms were often accompanied by expulsions. In her The Chinese Must Go (Harvard University Press, 2018), Beth Lew-Williams details how Chinese laborer Hing Kee’s December 1877 murder was immediately followed by a driving-out of the two dozen other Chinese workers in Port Madison, Washington. Hing’s murder was reported by the Seattle Daily Intelligencer (12/18/1877) as merely an act of personal violence. Yet, in a different story on the same page, readers were encouraged to take the “Chinese question in hand” in a call to action to “restrict” Chinese workers from “endanger[ing]” white property by opening businesses outside of small ghettoized communities.

Finally, in 1882, the mania reached its boiling point. The populist groundswell, bolstered by media sensationalism, culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first major immigration restriction passed in US history and, for a very long time, the only one that specifically named a group for exclusion.

But the US economy still depended on cheap immigrant labor. Media had successfully diverted labor’s attention from the underlying systems that necessitated low-wage agricultural work—but without such a precarious class, who would take on such a thankless job?

Undisclosed numbers of ‘suspicious aliens’

The Los Angeles Times (12/8/1941) announced the “hunting down” of Japanese “subversives.”

As the Japanese took on the role of an exploitable immigrant labor class, similar nativist sentiment burgeoned, demanding an amendment to the Chinese Exclusion Act. After 1900, the Japanese had replaced the Chinese as the most sensationalized immigrant labor pool in California—while still making up a tiny proportion of the state’s total workforce.

Not White Enough, by Lawrence Goldstone (University Press of Kansas, 2023), catalogues the role that media outlets, among other political actors, played in setting the stage for Japanese internment during World War II. Into the late 1910s, politically ambitious media tycoon William Randolph Hearst ran headline after headline in the San Francisco Examiner warning of a Japanese invasion, and accusing Japanese workers of being disguised soldiers smuggling ammunition.

In the 1930s, as the Japanese empire expanded throughout Asia and the Pacific, anti-Japanese sentiment in the US grew with it. The FBI created watch lists of potential Japanese-American subversives, including Shinto and Buddhist priests, and the heads of Japanese-American culture and language associations.

In the early 1940s, Texas Rep. Martin Dies, chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, regularly leaked updates to journalists of baseless “findings” of Japanese-American subversion. In a July 1941 report, the committee declared it had found that “no Japanese can ever be loyal to any other nation other than Japan,” and that even generationally US-born Japanese-Americans “cannot become thoroughly Americanized.”

What Dies failed to mention was that every agent on the West Coast discovered to hold loyalty to Imperial Japan was white.

The rare examples of sympathetic coverage of Japanese Americans in local papers in San Francisco and Los Angeles evaporated after Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. As the FBI and ONI began rounding up the thousands of Japanese immigrants placed on watchlists, the Los Angeles Times (12/8/1941) ran a front-page story announcing the apprehension of hundreds of “suspicious” Japanese “subversives.” On the same morning, the San Francisco Examiner (12/8/1941) described these unlawful detentions as “taking into custody undisclosed numbers of ‘suspicious aliens,’ considered as potential saboteurs.”

Media clamored in a race to the bottom to produce the most provocative anti-Japanese headlines. While supportively covering raids on Japanese-American communities, they also published piece after piece detailing Japanese attacks on US soil and Japanese-American infiltrations that never occurred. In one particularly egregious instance, the Alabama Journal (12/8/1941) ran a piece headlined “How Jap Could Easily Poison City’s Water Supply.”

Though detentions began with the December 1941 round-ups, Roosevelt officially passed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942.

As shameless as the fabrications that led to and justified internment was media’s coverage of internment itself: FAIR has previously reported on the New York Times’ 1942 coverage (3/24/1942) of the concentration camps, describing the “trek” to a “new reception center rising as if by magic” as characterized by a “spirit of adventure.”

The role of media in demonizing Japanese Americans, ultimately resulting in internment, is undeniable. Newspapers worked dually as mouthpieces for unfounded FBI claims of subversion and as launching-pads for fantasies generated to maximize outrage at the perceived Japanese “other.” Then, once the “other” was contained, media went to work framing internment as a privilege.

Never mind that Japanese Americans produced 40% of agricultural output in California, that they had lived in and contributed to their communities for decades at this point— they were all double-agents, and they were neutralized.

A perfunctory disguise

The New York Times (3/26/1951) warned that “‘wetbacks’ filter into every occupation from culinary work to the building trades” and promised that “tomorrow’s article will discuss how the ‘wetback’ influx creates an atmosphere of amorality.”

Though undocumented Mexican labor had always been an instrumental part of agricultural production, especially in the US Southwest, it hadn’t actually garnered large-scale attention until the 1950s; even, in fact, with a mass-deportation event during the Great Depression. But just a few short years after the internment camps closed, the US undertook the high-profile mass deportation of Mexican laborers in Operation Wetback.

During World War II, with a shortage of agricultural workers, the United States came to an agreement with Mexico known as the Bracero Program. In exchange for tightening border security and returning undocumented immigrants to Mexico (on Mexico’s demands), the US would receive Mexican agricultural contract workers. On paper, the deal was a win/win for the US and Mexico: The US would receive workers, and Mexico would stop hemorrhaging its working population.

In practice, however, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, the predecessor of ICE) acted on the interests of big agriculture. The INS selectively enforced border security: It was common for INS to hold off on carrying out deportation orders until after the growing season. Farmers also preferred using undocumented labor to braceros, as undocumented workers could be acquired with less red tape and, usually, lower wages. Thus the INS worked specifically to uphold the precarity of Mexican labor, rather than to restrict its numbers.

Then undocumented Mexican labor became the center of a bizarre red-scare media sensation. Avi Aster (Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback; Latino Studies, 2009) pieces together the peculiar relationship between red-baiting and illegal immigration, and how it would ultimately lead to popular consent for Operation Wetback.

It began with a New York Times five-part story (3/25–29/1951) published in March 1951, detailing “the economic and sociological problem of the ‘wetbacks’—illegal Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern United States.” Times journalist Gladwin Hill took a dual interest in the horrible conditions under which Mexican migrant workers toiled, and in the imagined threat that these workers posed to US society. He also insisted that it was possible for Communist spies to cross the Rio Grande with Mexican migrant workers—that although it had never happened before, “in cold fact Joseph Stalin might adopt a perfunctory disguise and walk into the country this way.”

The media and political classes ran with these claims and never looked back. In 1954, the Times ran such headlines as “’Invasion’ of Aliens Is Declared a Peril” (2/8/1954) and “Reds Slip Into US, Congress Warned” (2/10/1954), while the Los Angeles Times (2/10/1954) announced a “Heavy Influx of Reds Into US Reported.” These marked a shift in rhetoric from warning about supposed Communist infiltrators amongst Mexicans to warning about Mexicans themselves.

In June 1954, Operation Wetback was put into effect. Hundreds of thousands were deported in the first year of the program, in a partnership between the US and Mexico. What was once a fringe issue for nativist labor leaders in the Southwest became celebrated policy. A day short of the one-year anniversary of the operation, the Los Angeles Times (6/17/1955) declared, “Problem solved: For the first time in the controversial history of the wetback problem, there is hardly any problem left.”

Again, nothing changed for workers—rather, the state’s security apparatus bolstered its budget, labor was sufficiently distracted, and the vague specter of Communism was kept at bay for another day.

Manufacturing consent

The International Teamsters (March 1954) joined in the media red-baiting, repeating the US government’s absurd propaganda that “more than 100 Communists a day are coming across the sparsely patrolled border.”

In every case of xenophobic hysteria, media have a critical role in sensationalizing the perceived “other” and establishing the political and social circumstances necessary to justify violent acts of mass displacement and incarceration.

Though these causes are often championed by right-wing populists, sensational, nativist narratives have not been confined to right-wing media. All kinds of sources, from penny papers to union publications to legacy outlets, lie about immigrants constantly and with reckless abandon. If media aren’t lying to sell more papers and accommodate the political ambitions or xenophobic tendencies of their financiers, they’re parroting the lies of the political class.

Whether framing them as an amorphous security hazard or merely as a danger to “native” labor, media are happy to play into the scapegoating of individual immigrant groups, leading to acts of mass violence, because, ultimately, nothing changes for labor.

“Native” labor champions the anti-immigrant cause, but ultimately, our capitalist system demands that when one low-wage immigrant group disappears, another must take its place. Our economy, especially in an increasingly globalized labor market, is built around the input of low-wage immigrant labor (particularly in the agricultural sector).

As long as organized labor scapegoats the perceived “other,” and as long as solidarity doesn’t develop between “native” and “foreign” labor, all workers are worse-off. This is the social and political ecosystem that corporate media work to maintain.

Better media are possible

Independent outlet Capital & Main (3/11/25) reported on conditions in immigration detention facilities: “A few who had spent time in state prison before being transferred to ICE custody said they received much better treatment in prison than in ICE custody.”

Responsible, ethical journalism would challenge rather than parrot false claims about immigrant and migrant workers promoted by the US political class—and not just when they’re at their most egregious, as when the right claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. Journalists should seek to examine the differences in treatment of foreign-born and native-born labor, run human interest stories, and highlight the violence and human catastrophe involved in mass displacement and incarceration, instead of downplaying them or running stories about how these events are an “adventure.”

And instead of advancing scare-mongering narratives about how immigrant workers pose a threat to native-born labor, journalists ought to be investigating who stands to gain from pitting the TV-watching and newspaper-reading public against an easy outgroup. However, as long as corporate media exist to advance the interests of wealthy financiers and the political class, the solution lies beyond individual journalists working towards reform within their institutions.

It’s important to note that as long as nativist mainstream media narratives have existed, they’ve faced alternative media resistance, especially from within targeted communities. Prior to Chinese exclusion, for example, Chinese-American advocate Wong Chin Foo established the Chinese American, a weekly Chinese-language paper that he used as a platform to organize the first Chinese-American voters association. During internment, Japanese-Americans published papers such as the Topaz Times to promote internal education about community-led schooling, recreation and other initiatives, as well as updates about relocation.

Today, there are journalists working outside the corporate media who are producing good, humane, hard-hitting coverage of immigration. Small independent outlets like the Border Chronicle, Documented and Capital & Main offer on-the-ground news that centers people rather than national security and xenophobia.

And the democratization of alternative media channels has also allowed for mass direct resistance to immigration authorities—much to the chagrin of border czar Tom Homan, for instance, who on CNN (1/27/25) frustratedly described sanctuary city residents as “making it very difficult to arrest the criminals” because of mass education. One outlet doing this work is NYC ICE Watch—an activist group that follows in copwatch tradition by using their Spanish/English bilingual Instagram account as a platform to provide real-time updates on ICE activity and raids, organize community training and call for mutual aid requests around New York City.

Beyond the grassroots level, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is using a different approach, utilizing public Chicago Transit Authority adspace to promote public education in a partnership with the Resurrection Project, National Immigrant Justice Center, and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on the Know Your Rights ad campaign.

In the absence of a corporate media ecosystem willing to lend its platform to this kind of work, independent media are more important than ever in resisting the ostentatious barbarism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

As long as establishment outlets derive material benefits from collaborating with the political and capital classes, cruelty towards the “other” can never truly be a mistake to be learned from: It’s merely a means to an end, another performance seeking to prevent US-born workers from developing consciousness of all that they have to gain by standing with their immigrant counterparts.

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

Media Obscure Message of Oscar-Winning Documentary No Other Land

When No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, corporate media outlets didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.

Several outlets have covered No Other Land accurately and candidly. The Guardian (3/2/25) said it focuses on “the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.”

The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to survive in the occupied West Bank, as settlers and Israeli soldiers steal their land, destroy their homes and attack them with impunity. It’s also a moving exploration of the friendship between two of the filmmakers, one free and one living under occupation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking itself. Palestinian activist Basel Adra made the film with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, co-directing along with Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal and Israeli filmmaker Rachel Szor. Adra and Ballal are the first Palestinians ever to win an Oscar.

Avoiding detail

Several outlets have covered No Other Land accurately and candidly. Al Jazeera (3/3/25) wrote that it “chronicles settler violence and the Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.” The Guardian (3/2/25) said it focuses on “the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.” A Nation story (11/4/24) published months before the film won an Oscar was headlined, “No Other Land and the Brutal Truth of Israel’s Occupation.”

But in reporting on its historic Oscar win, many publications avoided describing the film in detail, or even by title. Politico (3/2/25) rewrote an AP story, substituting different quotes from the filmmakers’ acceptance speeches, and initially ran it under the headline “Controversial Middle East Documentary Wins Academy Award.” In addition to revealing nothing about its content, the headline erased the film’s name and deemed it “controversial” merely because US companies lack the artistic commitment and political courage to distribute it (Washington Post, 3/4/25).

Politico later updated its headline to match the AP’s (3/2/25), which emphasizes that the film was not made by Palestinians alone: “‘No Other Land,’ an Israeli/Palestinian Collaboration, Wins Oscar for Best Documentary.”

Politico (3/2/25) rewrote an AP story and initially ran it under the headline “Controversial Middle East Documentary Wins Academy Award,” revealing nothing about its content, erasing the film’s name and deeming it “controversial.”

Other outlets relied on the passive voice to obscure the specifics of the film’s subject. NBC (3/2/25) wrote that Adra used his acceptance speech to describe the “issues faced by his village,” such as “home demolitions and displacement”—a neat way to avoid saying who was demolishing whose homes and why. In writing that Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham “called for an end to the violence that has consumed the Middle East for decades and worsened after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza,” NBC left readers with the impression that Abraham was primarily condemning the violence that has taken place after October 7. While the filmmakers are horrified by that as well, most of the violent acts they documented in No Other Land preceded the October 7 attack.

Israelis may have felt safer before October 7, but as the movie—which was shot mostly between 2019 and 2023, and wrapped before October 7—makes clear, Palestinians did not. Even before the genocide, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. At least 208 people, including 42 children, were killed there between January 1 and October 6, 2023 (Al Jazeera, 12/12/23). Israeli military and settler violence certainly intensified after October 7, but Palestinians were in serious danger beforehand.

Erasing context

ABC‘s (3/2/25) headline and subhead left out any mention of “Israel” or “Palestine,” offering simply that the film “details the struggle of a small community in the West Bank.” What community? What struggle? Readers would have to go far past the bland headline to find out. The article itself stated that “tens of thousands of people, including scores of noncombatant women and children in Gaza, were killed in the first year of fighting between Hamas and Israel following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack”—blaming “fighting” between a guerilla group and a nuclear-armed, US-backed military power for deaths caused almost exclusively by the Israeli military.

ABC‘s (3/2/25) headline and subhead left out any mention of “Israel” or “Palestine,” offering simply that the film “details the struggle of a small community in the West Bank.” What community? What struggle?

NPR (3/2/25) gave its story a surprisingly straightforward headline—“At Oscars, No Other Land Co-Directors Call for National Rights for Palestinians”—but added that the film’s directors “called on the world to end what they described as the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.’” It failed to note that the filmmakers are hardly alone in calling Israeli attacks on Palestinians “ethnic cleansing”—they are joined by UN human rights experts, former US intelligence officers, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, to name a few.

An MSNBC piece (3/3/25) highlighted the discomfort in the room and acknowledged the rarity of the perspectives the filmmakers voiced:

Even if for just a few moments, Adra and Abahams accomplished a remarkable feat: They forced attendees and viewers at home to confront a reality that so many Palestinians continue to face. Some in attendance may have chosen not to clap, but those who watched couldn’t escape acknowledging a reality so many have attempted to belittle or deny.

And yet in its descriptions of the film, it consistently failed to name a perpetrator—writing, for instance, that the film tells

the story of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in Hebron, being violently and systematically expelled through intimidation, from destroying water sources and other threats to assassinations.

The piece never said precisely who was expelling, threatening and assassinating these Palestinians, or why.

‘A broader trend’

The New York Times (3/2/25) noted:

Despite a string of honors and rave reviews, no distributor would pick up this film in the United States, making it nearly impossible for American filmgoers to see it in theaters or to stream it.

The paper added that this “made No Other Land part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.” Distributors were, the paper declared in its headline, “deterred” by the film’s “politics.”

The New York Times (12/18/24) noted that No Other Land’s lack of distribution “made [the film] part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.”
But as the Times’ linked-to article (12/18/24) on this “broader trend” pointed out, it’s not “topical” documentaries that struggle to find distributors, but specifically films with progressive viewpoints (e.g., pro-Palestinian or pro-labor), while “conservative documentaries are a partial exception.” It’s clear that No Other Land has no US distributors, not because it is a “topical documentary,” but because its topic is Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

The Times (3/2/25) further noted that the No Other Land filmmakers used their acceptance speeches to call for “serious actions to stop the injustice.” Which injustice is unclear, though the article does mention “Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes” and the filmmakers’ desire to “chart a more equitable path forward for Palestinians.”

The Times described the film as “often brutal, featuring disturbing images of razed houses, crying children, bereft mothers and even on-camera shootings.” But it implied that, as unpleasant as it is to watch, the actions that spur violence and bereave mothers are perfectly legal, because “Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the government has the right to clear the area depicted in the film.” An Israeli overseeing the demolition of Palestinian homes makes this point in the film: The Supreme Court ruling, he tells the people whose homes he is destroying, means that what they are doing is legal.

Blaming Trump, not US

Despite the fact that No Other Land was filmed almost entirely during Joe Biden’s presidency, several outlets sought to tie the filmmakers’ critique of US foreign policy to the administration of Donald Trump. AP (3/2/25) wrote that Abraham said, “United States foreign policy under President Donald Trump is ‘helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’” Variety (3/2/25), using almost the same words, wrote that Abraham said, “US foreign policy under the administration of President Donald Trump ‘is helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’”

AP (3/2/25) wrote that Abraham said, “United States foreign policy under President Donald Trump is ‘helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’” Abraham did criticize US policy, but none of the filmmakers mentioned Trump.
Abraham did criticize US policy, but none of the filmmakers mentioned Trump or the current administration. In its piece on the film, Reuters (3/3/25) noted that

US President Donald Trump’s call last month for Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza…has been widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond as deeply destabilizing.

The outlet did not mention that US policy on Israel and Gaza also drew international condemnation under Biden.

No Other Land deserves a wider audience, and Americans ought to be able to see and assess it for themselves. Press summaries of documentaries that would-be censors don’t want us to see are flawed at best, and deliberately misleading at worst. We cannot begin to combat injustice unless or until we understand what it is, and have the courage to face it head on.

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

Hear Me Out: The US-Sparked Trade War Is a Garbage Issue
The US-sparked trade war with Canada – and pretty much every other country – is a garbage issue. By that, I mean it’s going to seriously mess with how much stuff we buy…and throw away. And that presents an opportunity for us to do things better – for the environment and the health of our communities.

People in Canada are big consumers. We buy a lot – and throw away more per person than the people of any other country. That’s right, we win the gold medal for garbage. Most of the goods we buy are imported – electronics, toys, furnishings, clothing, even food and packaging – much of which ends up in the garbage after a brief use. That’s why our landfills are filling up and there’s a panic to find alternatives to stow our trash, including burning it (which is a terrible idea).

Learn more about dangers of waste incineration

So back to the trade war. Tariffs on Canadian goods going into the US will hurt industries – and affect jobs – up here. Meanwhile, tariffs on US imports and a lower Canadian dollar makes the goods we buy here more expensive.

Canada’s oil, gas, mining and manufacturing industries are looking for other export markets to replace the US, but what about a different approach to support workers and business in Canada while protecting the climate and our communities from pollution? This brings us back to garbage – or, more precisely, producing less of it.

Our “take-make-waste” linear economy demands a constant supply of raw materials – largely extracted from Indigenous territories in Canada and beyond – and generates millions of tonnes of scrap and waste that end up dumped in landfills, burned in incinerators or exported to other countries – including the US.

This is damaging to the environment and disproportionately harmful to people – including Indigenous, low-income and racialized communities – living near extraction, production and waste facilities. The story of plastic in Canada is a sad example.

Instead of simply finding other trading partners and continuing these wasteful and harmful ways, Canada should move quickly to adopt economic approaches that prioritize keeping the resources already in the economy to give them a new life. It is essential to reject the idea that we need to choose between the environment and the economy: the very basis of any economy and a good life is a healthy environment.

Here are three places governments, businesses and non-profits can prioritize to create a win for the economy and the environment:
- Support and improve refill systems for food and beverages. As trade in virgin packaging, recycling and waste becomes more complicated and expensive, so does single-use packaging. It will make more and more sense for companies to stop relying on garbage, single-use containers. What’s more, people want to buy food “made in Canada. Refillable containers would be a wonderful way to market food grown and/or made locally. This is the perfect time to implement refillable packaging at grocery stores and restaurants and for a national deposit-return program for beverage containers.
- Expand the repair, refurbish and resale sector. Price spikes for new electronics alone will boost the trend of buying refurbished phones and computers from local sellers. The federal government can support it by implementing the Right to Repair and all levels of government can fund expanded infrastructure for repair and refurbishment to create new jobs in this sector. There is so much stuff – furniture, appliances, tools, bikes, clothing – that deserve another life instead of a trip to the dump. “Repaired in Canada” has a nice ring to it.
- Support sharing. Book libraries are very important and must be well funded. How about growing the library movement to include more tools, sporting goods and stuff that we tend to only use from time to time? Most of us don’t need to have a power drill or camping tent at our disposal 24-7. Municipalities and Indigenous communities should be supported to scale up sharing libraries for all kinds of goods.
We didn’t ask for this trade war, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use it to build resilient and sustainable local economies.

The post Hear Me Out: The US-Sparked Trade War Is a Garbage Issue appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 6, 2025

MSNBC Sidelines Its Most Progressive Anchors

Dave Zirin (The Nation, 2/28/25): “MSNBC’s programming is now politically monochromatic—and moving as far to the right as the Democratic Party will allow.”

At a time when the Democratic Party’s opposition to the ongoing right-wing authoritarian assault on US government is failing miserably (FAIR.org, 2/27/25), MSNBC’s recent purge means it is all the more unlikely that the cable news network will have any role in holding Democrats’ feet to the fire.

The news channel has nixed or demoted their most progressive anchors, all of whom are people of color. These are the hosts who have drawn the most ire from Donald Trump’s online warriors, according to Dave Zirin of The Nation (2/28/25). They are also some of the few who were willing to air the network’s rare criticism of Israel. In their stead, MSNBC has elevated Democratic Party apparatchiks and a center-right never-Trumper. This rightward shift reflects the reality that the channel’s corporate ownership has never cared for its left-of-center brand.

The network’s overhaul, led by its new president Rebecca Kutler, cancels Joy Reid’s ReidOut, Alex Wagner’s nighttime spot and Ayman Mohyeldin’s weekend evening show, with Reid fired, Wagner demoted and Mohyeldin’s voice diluted into a co-anchor position.

The ReidOut is getting replaced by a panel show consisting of Symone Sanders-Townsend, the former Biden and Harris advisor; Alicia Menendez, the daughter of disgraced ex-Sen. Bob Menendez; and Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairperson, now a Democrat whose politics symbolize the Democratic Party’s disastrous fetish for centrist triangulation. Wagner’s 9 pm slot will now be anchored by Jen Psaki, another Biden alum.

As an indication of just how disruptive Kutler’s new vision for MSNBC is, even Rachel Maddow—the network’s biggest star with the most popular show—is getting a staff downsizing. The move seemed almost retaliatory, as it came after Maddow aired her grievances during one of her nightly shows (2/24/25). “Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let [Reid] walk out the door,” Maddow said. “It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think.” She added:

It is also unnerving to see that, on a network where we’ve got two, count ’em, two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.

Bucking the trend

Alana Wise (NPR, 2/25/25): “Reid’s firing takes one of the most high-profile Black women off the network at a time when the Trump administration has made attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.”

Joy Reid has had her disagreements with the left. Her ardent defense of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid veered frequently into baseless accusations, online scolding of Bernie Sanders and promotion of the Russiagate conspiracy theory (FAIR.org, 9/3/16, 6/30/17, 8/24/16). Altogether, that contributed to Democrats’ refusal to conduct a true postmortem of the Clinton loss, the ramifications of which still aid Donald Trump’s dominance.

But during Joe Biden’s presidential tenure, Reid proved to be progressive, relative not just to MSNBC’s other anchors, but many in the corporate media writ large. As New York’s skies turned orange amid historic Canadian wildfires in the summer of 2023, for instance, Reid was one of the few who called out the role of fossil fuels (FAIR.org, 7/18/23).

While other outlets were overemphasizing the inflationary impact of President Biden’s paradigm-shifting economic stimulus in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Reid bucked the trend, drawing the ire of right-wing media (FAIR.org, 7/13/23).

Perhaps most notably, Reid was an outlier in her coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and its backlash in the US. A FAIR study (8/15/24) found that Reid’s show was the only weekday news program studied to feature students expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment during coverage of the student Gaza solidarity encampments that cropped up at college campuses across the country last spring. The same study found that her show was the only one studied to have mentioned the words “divestment” and “police violence” more than “antisemitism” in relation to the encampments.

Similarly, as outlets like the New York Times provided Israel cover for its bombing of the densely-populated Jabalia refugee camp that killed and wounded 400 Palestinians, Reid questioned how Israel could justify such a disproportionate attack (FAIR.org, 11/15/23).

The panel of Sanders-Townsend, Menendez and Steele promises none of that nonconformity. Instead, they represent MSNBC’s decision to represent an even smaller sliver of the Democratic elite. By elevating the former Biden and Harris advisor Sanders-Townsend, MSNBC has empowered someone with an interest in defending the current Democratic guard’s rule.

The Lincoln Project–affiliated Steele similarly owes his ascendancy to the sort of Democratic group-think that spurred Kamala Harris’s ruinous gun-touting, Cheney-approved centrist presidential bid. Expect Hakeem Jeffries praise.

Pointing out hypocrisy

MSNBC‘s Ayman Mohyeldin (1/13/25) declared that “the US’s head-in-the-sand attitude toward Israel is not only inconsistent with its treatment of other countries, but it’s also a clear act of moral cowardice.”

Though not fired, Mohyeldin and Wagner are two more MSNBC figures who have elevated criticism of Israel and are now facing a demotion. Following ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s finding that Sudanese military forces had committed genocide against the Sudanese people, Mohyeldin (MSNBC, 1/13/25) took to the airwaves to point out Blinken’s hypocrisy:

The horrific atrocities committed against the Sudanese should be labeled as genocide. But Blinken’s declaration begs the question: Why is the US unable to apply that same standard to Israel?

If the Biden administration is calling out the famine in Sudan, why not also address the ongoing famine in Gaza, which has been condemned by independent experts from the United Nations?

After New York Mayor Eric Adams sicced the NYPD on Columbia and CUNY students who had erected Gaza solidarity encampments, Wagner (5/1/24) brought on Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and CUNY journalism professor (and MSNBC contributor) Peter Beinart, a well-known critic of Israel. During the show, Wagner said she agreed with Beinart that it’s “probably a good thing for our national discourse” if the encampment movement is remembered in history as a turning point for debate about US support for Israel. She also suggested that common misrepresentations of the student protestors as treasonous were a “cudgel” to distract from the issue of US foreign policy towards Israel.

Mouthpiece for elite interests

Julia Rock (Jacobin, 5/13/22): “Apparently, serving as press secretary to a Democratic president is great training to run interference for corporations.”

Wagner’s replacement is Jen Psaki. No one is more qualified to execute MSNBC’s crusade to become nothing more than a mouthpiece for elite Democratic interests. As Julia Rock wrote in Jacobin (5/13/22) when Biden’s former press secretary left the administration for her first MSNBC gig:

The skills required to act as a press secretary in corporate Democratic presidencies—saying little of substance, committing to nothing, dispensing snark and scoffs, and never even accidentally challenging power—appear to carry over well to playing pundit on MSNBC, the corporate network that serves as the Democratic Party’s de facto propaganda outfit.

As press secretary, Psaki was known for insensitive and condescending quips in response to the public’s desire for good things. After the Democrats’ John R. Lewis Act, which would have enacted broad voting rights reforms, failed to pass the Senate in January 2022, Psaki suggested the public “go to a kickboxing class” or “have a margarita” to rejuvenate their spirits (Business Insider, 1/21/22).

Then there was the time when Psaki got short with NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson in response to her question asking why the United States, unlike other wealthy nations, couldn’t distribute free Covid-19 test kits to every US household (Jacobin, 12/8/21). Psaki, suggesting the best way to provide tests was Biden’s convoluted plan for reimbursements through private insurance, asked Liasson, “Should we just send one to every American?” Feigning ignorance, she continued, “Then what happens if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?”

Psaki’s knack for subduing the electorate’s impulse for government to meet their needs will serve MSNBC’s priorities well. Add to that her gig as a “crisis consultant” (Jacobin, 3/20/21) for the Israeli AI facial recognition startup formerly known as AnyVision, whose services were used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank (NBC, 10/28/19), as well as her consultancy for the ride sharing giant Lyft (Business Insider, 4/1/22), and it’s no wonder she got the primetime 9pm slot.

Ideological thrashing

Other right-wing hosts featured on MSNBC before it accepted its leftish branding included Don Imus, Oliver North and Alan Keyes (FAIR.org, 8/28/21).

MSNBC’s rightward tack may come as a surprise to those who think it was born fully formed as Fox News’ liberal opposite. But its ideological thrashing over the years—oscillating between right-wing pundits like Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Michael Savage, and liberals like Phil Donahue and Keith Olbermann—before donning its current liberal identity in 2008, with the hiring of Rachel Maddow, shows the network is more akin to a cable news version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (FAIR.org, 8/28/21).

The owners of MSNBC—once Microsoft and General Electric, then GE alone, now the cable giant Comcast—have never held a commitment to its center-left brand beyond its capacity to capture as large a fraction of the market as possible. Now, as other mainstream corporate outlets like CNN are making similar adjustments (FAIR.org, 2/17/22), MSNBC seems to believe its best path to profit is shirking progressives.

The Democratic Party is facing an unprecedented—and justified—crisis in confidence among the public. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Democrats with just a 31% approval rating, the lowest since the school began measuring party approval. Meanwhile, a poll by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project found that “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was a top issue for voters who supported Biden in 2020, but cast their ballots for someone other than Harris in the 2024 election.

MSNBC’s firing and demotion of its most progressive ranks, the ones who aired criticism of Israel, means that the Democratic Party—currently America’s sole opposition party in Congress—is all the less likely to be held accountable as the authoritarian right attempts to steamroll through our democracy.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to MSNBC at MSNBCTVinfo@nbcuni.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 content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 6, 2025

Alberta continues to depend on dirty money for economic well-being

Four decades ago, Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed came to power, with the promise to make the province’s economy less dependent on the fluctuating price of oil and gas. Yet decades on, the province’s finances are still heavily reliant on royalties from bitumen sales to the United States, and natural gas sales across Canada and around the world.

Progress has been made. While it was a very different era to the one we find ourselves in today, Lougheed’s first few budgets were completely dependent on oil revenue, which at one point made up nearly 80 per cent of the income for Alberta’s provincial coffers.

In 2024 that number was closer to 27 per cent.

The 2025 budget introduced by Alberta finance minister Nate Horner on February 27th pegs the forecasted revenue from oil and gas at about 28 per cent, though they are cautiously budgeting it to be a few points lower.

In the last decade, the revenue share of Alberta’s budget which depends on oil and gas royalties has been as low as eight, and as high as 30 per cent.

What this means is that one out of every four dollars spent on health care, education, and critical social services depends on the oil and gas sector having a very good year. The financial well-being of the petroleum industry is so crucial to Alberta’s budget that a special Economic Outlook section focused almost entirely on the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude (pegged at $68/barrel).

I expect that by now you see the flaw in this logic. The American market is no longer a reliable purchaser of our crude oil. America is now the largest energy producer in the world and has high hopes for being energy-independent in the coming years. While many of the country’s refineries have been converted to process the heavy crude we sell them, only money is preventing them from re-tooling once again to manage the lighter oil produced throughout much of the US’s portion of the Western Sedimentary Basin.

A quick scan across the rest of the world doesn’t demonstrate much hope that our heavy, carbon-intensive, and very expensive crude oil is welcome anywhere else. The Trans Mountain Pipeline, heralded as a means of selling our goop to Southeast Asia and China, today sends most of its product to California. Just ten per cent went to China last year.

Europe doesn’t want our dirty oil. They are at the forefront of the energy transition. While natural gas might have been on their shopping list at the beginning of the war in the Ukraine, that ship has now sailed.

The reality is, within the next five years, it is projected that the world will be consuming 1,000,000 barrels of oil a day less every single year, as the energy transition kicks into high gear nearly everywhere else in the world except Alberta.

We’re stuck. We need the revenue that oil and gas bring to keep our schools and hospitals open, but we can no longer count on our number one market for our products, and we haven’t done nearly enough to diversify our energy economy. We have created major barriers to new renewable energy development to meet our domestic needs, but we continue to put nearly all of our eggs in the petroleum energy basket when it comes to our export market.

It is said that the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Alberta’s 2025-26 budget shows no signs of acknowledging that such a problem exists. A $4 billion contingency fund is in place to offset the impacts of American tariffs, but there is no complementary fund set up to invest in diversification so we’re less dependent on the US in the first place.

Why is it so hard for Alberta to have this conversation?

There are solutions, and Alberta has dabbled in them: the high-tech sector, health care research, international education, manufacturing, petrochemicals, agriculture, and tourism, to name a few. None of these on their own can supplant the massive impact that petroleum has on Alberta’s economy. It’s almost as if the province needs to have a group chat about what we want our economy to look like in a post-petroleum world. We should do that before it’s too late.

The post Alberta continues to depend on dirty money for economic well-being appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 5, 2025

The Wonderful World of Wetlands in Winter

When I think of wetlands, my mind automatically travels to the warmer summer months. I picture the beautiful greenery, the warm sunlight sparkling on the water, and I can almost hear birds call, frogs croak and reeds rustle.

When winter rolls around, the beauty that I associate with wetlands disappears underneath layers of ice and snow. Wetlands in the winter might look completely lifeless—the opposite of what we see in the spring and summer—but that could not be further from the truth. Underneath all that snow and ice, wetlands are working overtime to support the environment, nearby communities, and provide a safe winter hideaway for all sorts of critters.

What happens to wetlands in the winter?

Even in the winter, wetlands continue to work hard to prevent floods, clean water and store carbon. The winter is actually a crucial time for wetlands as they prepare for spring renewal.

As wetlands freeze over, the newly formed ice acts like a blanket, protecting life hidden beneath like fish, frogs and turtles. These and other wetland creatures escape the cold and flee to the warmer temperatures of the waters below. The icy layer also helps to ensure that all of the essential processes that happen within our wetlands such as nutrient cycling (the movement of nutrients to living and non living things) can continue feeding the wetland despite the harsh environment above the ice.

Once spring rolls around, the snow and ice starts to gradually melt away. The winter melt steadily filters through the wetland and eventually replenishes our rivers, lakes, and groundwater systems, which are an essential source of drinking water for some regions. The release of the melt is slow, and for good reason—to prevent floods. This is one of the many superpowers of our wetlands.

Protecting wetlands year-round

Wetlands are powerhouse ecosystems 24/7, all year round. Frozen wetlands play a vital role in the environment, helping to maintain balance in our communities and the natural world.

Unfortunately, Southern Ontario has already lost more than 72 per cent of its original wetlands. Our remaining wetlands are at risk of being drained and paved to make way for poorly planned, sprawling development projects. These projects are enabled by a weakening of provincial environmental protections.

We can’t sit back and allow the destruction of our last remaining wetlands. As one of the most productive ecosystems in the world, we have to protect them.

The post The Wonderful World of Wetlands in Winter appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 5, 2025

New Habitat Protection Order Spells Trouble for Sprawl Developers and Highway 413
After more than 15 years of delays, federal laws now prohibit activities that would destroy the habitat of the endangered Redside Dace. That’s great news for Redside Dace, and very bad news for well-connected developers who’ve been planning sprawl subdivisions, warehouses, and taxpayer-funded highways through Dace habitats in the upper reaches of the Humber River, Carruthers Creek, Duffins Creek and Rouge River.

As required by the Endangered Species Act and the Redside Dace Recovery Strategy and Action Plan, the Critical Habitat of the Redside Dace (Clinostomus elongatus) Order: SOR/2025-4 prohibits anyone from doing anything that would destroy any of the habitat value of the mapped rivers, creeks and tributaries that Redside dace depends on. Since the Humber River’s upper reaches and tributaries are identified as critical habitat in the Recovery Strategy, it’s now clearly illegal to build the parts of Highway 413 that cross them.

Redside Dace

The Protection Order also prohibits highway and sprawl construction currently being planned within the larger watersheds that feed Redside Dace habitats in the Humber River, Carruthers Creek and other waterways. That is because the Recovery Strategy makes it clear that activities including any “large increase in impervious surfaces” would constitute destruction of critical habitats even if they take place outside of the critical habitat itself. The Recovery Strategy explains that paved surfaces would destroy critical habitat, even if built outside it, because the Redside Dace is highly sensitive to the changes those paved surfaces always bring, including warmer water, lower oxygen, murky water, and changes in stream flow.

Of particular note the Habitat Protection Order seems to rule out:
- Provincial plans to bulldoze and pave large areas of the Humber, East Humber and West Humber watersheds north of Brampton into commercial and residential sprawl.
- Provincial plans to turn the land which surrounds the upper reaches of the Carruthers Creek into a new leapfrog sprawl development, and where the recent Toronto Region Conservation Authority’s Watershed Plan determined that development would “likely resul[t] in the loss of Redside Dace”.
- Any non-agricultural or natural cover development of the former Pickering “airport lands” which surround the headwaters of the Duffins Creek.
All of this is great news for the Redside Dace, and for the fight to curb the wasteful sprawl that has been squandering Ontario’s construction capacity and causing a housing shortage.

However the danger is still real. While the Endangered Species Act and Protection Order now prohibit the destruction of these critical redside dace habitats, the federal government might intentionally decide to allow the extirpation of this beloved endangered species – either by issuing official permits to destroy the habitat or by intentionally failing to enforce the law, allowing harmful activities, like sprawl development to happen without a permit.

It is up to all of us to maintain pressure on the federal government, and all federal MPs, to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The post New Habitat Protection Order Spells Trouble for Sprawl Developers and Highway 413 appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
March 4, 2025

Trump’s Protest Threat Reflects Belief That Free Speech Belongs to Some

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow note that the Western notion of freedom derives from the Roman legal tradition, in which freedom was conceived as “the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.”

Because of this, “freedom was always defined—at least potentially—as something exercised to the cost of others.”

You have to understand this notion of freedom—that to be free, you have to make someone else less free—to make sense of the idea that Donald Trump is a champion of “free speech.”

Ezra Klein (New York Times, 2/25/25) thought Martin Gurri’s argument that “maybe Trump is building something more stable, creating a positive agenda that might endure….was worth hearing out.”

This is, unfortunately, not a fringe idea. Last week, the New York Times (2/25/25) ran a long interview Ezra Klein did with Trump-supporting intellectual (and former CIA officer) Martin Gurri, who said his main reason for voting for Trump was that “I felt like he was for free speech.” “Free speech is a right-wing cause,” Gurri claimed.

Trump is the “free speech” champion who said of a protester at one of his rallies during the 2016 campaign (Washington Post, 2/23/16): “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that…? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

Trump sues news outlets when he doesn’t like how they edit interviews, or their polling results (New York Times, 2/7/25). Before the election, future Trump FBI Director Kash Patel (FAIR.org, 11/14/24) promised to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s FCC chair is considering yanking broadcast licenses from networks for “news distortion,” or for letting Kamala Harris have a cameo on Saturday Night Live (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

Nonetheless, Trump is still seen by many as a defender of free speech, because he sticks up for the free speech of people whose speech is supposed to matter—like right-wingers who weren’t allowed to post content that was deemed hate speech, disinformation or incitement to violence on social media platforms. As the headline of a FAIR.org piece (11/4/22) by Ari Paul put it, “The Right Thinks Publishers Have No Right Not to Publish the Right.” Another key “free speech” issue for the right, and much of the center: people who have been “canceled” by being criticized too harshly on Twitter (FAIR.org, 8/1/20, 10/23/20).

‘Agitators will be imprisoned’

Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25), of course, does not have the power to unilaterally withhold funds that have been authorized by Congress.

Now Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25) has come out with a diktat threatening sanctions against any educational institution that tolerates forbidden demonstrations:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!

The reference to banning masks is a reminder that, for the right, freedom is a commodity that belongs to some people and not to others. You have an inalienable right to defy mask mandates, not despite but mainly because you could potentially harm someone by spreading a contagious disease—just as you supposedly have a right to carry an AR-15 rifle. Whereas if you want to wear a mask to protect yourself from a deadly illness—or from police surveillance—sorry, there’s no right to do that.

But more critically, what’s an “illegal protest”? The context, of course, is the wave of campus protests against the genocidal violence unleashed by Israel against Palestinians following the October 7, 2023, attacks (though Trump’s repressive approach to protests certainly is not limited to pro-Palestinian ones).

On January 30, Trump promised to deport all international students who “joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” and to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” He ordered the Justice Department to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

A federal task force convened by Trump (CNN, 3/3/25) is threatening to pull $50 million in government contracts from New York’s Columbia University because of its (imaginary) “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” which has been facilitated, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, by “the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.”

So the expression of ideas—Palestinian solidarity, US criticism, generic “radicalism”—has to be suppressed, because they lead to, if they do not themselves constitute, “harassment of Jewish students” (by which is meant pro-Israel students; Jewish student supporters of Palestinian rights are frequently targets of this suppression). Those ideas constitute “censorship,” and the way to combat this censorship is to ban those ideas.

No one is talking about cracking down on students who proclaim “I Stand With Israel,” on the grounds that they may intimidate Palestinian students—even though they are endorsing an actual, ongoing genocide (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). That’s because—in the longstanding Western tradition that Trump epitomizes—free speech is the possession of some, meant to be used against others.

Featured Image: Demonstration in London in support of a free Palestine (Creative Commons photo: Kyle Taylor).

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 28, 2025

To Cozy Up to Trump, Bezos Banishes Dissent From WaPo

Elon Musk (X, 2/26/25) gives his seal of approval to the new univocal Washington Post.

“Bravo, Jeff Bezos!”

That was the congratulatory message Elon Musk posted on X, the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and subsequently turned into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Musk’s “bravo” was in response to Bezos’ shocking announcement that he was taking his media outlet, the Washington Post, in a Trumpian direction as well.

The Post’s opinion section will now advance Bezos’ “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Anyone not on board with this “significant shift” can take a hike, Bezos seemed to tell Post employees, in a note he also shared on X (2/26/25).

That was Wednesday morning. By evening, Bezos was dining with President Trump.

‘Those who think as he does’

Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25): “The audacity of claiming that free market ideas are ‘underserved’ in American media is staggering. Has Bezos somehow missed the existence of the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC and countless other outlets that have spent decades championing free-market capitalism?”

Bezos doesn’t give any detail on what he means by “personal liberties,” but in the context of the billionaire appearing behind Trump at the inauguration, and Amazon contributing $1 million to the inaugural festivities—on top of paying Melania Trump $40 million for her biopic—it’s doubtful that his paper will be talking much about the myriad liberties under attack by the Trump administration.

“When billionaires talk about ‘personal liberties,’” media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25) noted, “they’re usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation.”

Meanwhile, as Bezos professes his love of personal liberties, “his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” said former Post executive editor Marty Baron (American Crisis, 2/27/25):

It was only weeks ago that the Post described itself as providing coverage for “all of America.” Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.

Such limitations may not be limited to the opinion pages. Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a column about Bezos’ directive—and, according to former Post editor Gene Weingarten (Gene Pool, 2/27/25), “It was spiked. Killed, in newspeak.”

‘A wingman in the fight’

Michael Schaffer (Politico, 2/26/25): Bezos’ “latest edict effectively rebrands the publication away from the interests of Washington and toward the politics of Silicon Valley—and looks likely to cost it a chunk of the remaining audience.”

Bezos’ fidelity to his other pillar, “free markets,” is no less questionable, considering his companies hoover up billions of dollars in government contracts, are massively subsidized, and Amazon, which Bezos founded, is an egregious antitrust violator.

And somehow Bezos, the world’s third richest person, believes his so-called free market “viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” But as Politico columnist Michael Schaffer (2/26/25) noted:

Between the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the Economist, there’s no shortage of outlets that are organized around a generally pro-market editorial line. For that matter, there’s the Washington Post. Do you recall the publication editorializing against the free market? Me neither.

Yet Bezos is now committed to turning his paper into a second Wall Street Journal—a project already under way, as Bezos’ handpicked Post publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, comes from the Journal, as does executive editor Matt Murray.

Naturally, the Journal’s editorial page (2/26/25) welcomed Bezos’ “free markets” pivot, writing, “It will be good to have a wingman in the fight.”

Despite Bezos’ claim that his views are underserved, it’s actually the lefty end of the spectrum for which that’s the case (FAIR.org, 10/9/20). But those wanting anything left of authoritarian capitalism will have to look elsewhere. “Viewpoints opposing [my] pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos wrote, adding, “the internet does that job.”

It’s unclear if Bezos was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he wrote these words, but it’s unmistakable that he’s aligning his paper with Trump’s so-called “America First” agenda. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Bezos wrote.

The answer wasn’t ‘hell yes’

Sara Fischer (Axios, 2/26/25): ” Efforts by the Trump administration to scrutinize media have forced media, entertainment and tech companies to make difficult decisions about how far they will go to defend their editorial values.”

As shocking as Bezos’ groveling is, it’s just the latest in a string of extraordinary favors he’s done for Trump and the man Trump has turned much of the US government over to, Elon Musk.

Bezos and Amazon have thrown millions of dollars at the billionaire duo running our country. At the same time, the Post has been kind to both men, most noticeably when Bezos killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the election (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). For Musk, the Post not only spiked an ad critical of him, but also dismissed his Nazi salute on Inauguration Day as merely an “awkward gesture” (FAIR.org, 2/19/25, 1/23/25).

With Bezos’ new directive, the Post is all but formalizing its lapdog arrangement with Trump and Musk. How this will impact the Post, which Bezos purchased from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013, remains to be seen. But the fallout has been swift, and it comes on the heels of a mass exodus of both readers and top talent since the election.

Now joining the exodus is Post opinions editor David Shipley. Bezos wanted Shipley to lead the Post’s rightward turn, but only if he was all in. “If the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos told him. But Bezos’ directive was too much even for Shipley, who had previously proven his loyalty by spiking a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech executives groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).

‘More like a death knell’

Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25): “I foresee a mass subscriber defection from an outlet already deep in red ink; that must be something businessman Bezos is willing to live with.”

For those who remain at the Post, they do so warily.

Bezos’ “massive encroachment” into the opinion section “makes clear dissenting views will not be published,” wrote the Post’s Jeff Stein, who only days earlier had been promoted to chief economics correspondent:

I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side, I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.

Former Posties were also quick to weigh in. “Bezos’ move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization,” wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25):

Bezos no longer wants to own a credible news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.

Those commercial interests extend from earth into space.

“Amazon has a big cloud computing business. [Bezos’ space company] Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government,” Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25). “Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is [Bezos] going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.”

“It’s craven,” said Baron, who led the Post for eight years, nearly all of them under Bezos:

He’s basically fearful of Trump. He has decided that, as timid and tepid as the editorials have been, they’ve been too tough on Trump. He’s saying they’re going to have an opinion page with one point of view.

‘Contrary to the conspiracy theory’

Back when the Washington Post had “full independence” from Bezos, it was running twisted columns denying that the billionaire had a lot of money (FAIR.org, 10/3/17).

There’s an irony in Baron calling out his former boss, when he spent years attacking others for doing so.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a hair’s breadth away from securing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, questioned whether his critiques of billionaires (like Bezos) and low-wage behemoths (like Amazon) might be contributing to the Post’s blistering coverage of him (FAIR.org, 8/15/19).

“Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Baron said in response, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”

Fast-forward six years, and the mask is off, so much so that Baron now sounds like Sanders (to whom Baron owes a belated apology).

That the Post’s hard-right turn comes at a time when other corporate and billionaire-owned outlets are also cozying up to Trump, only makes this moment all the more fraught.

This alarming state of affairs highlights the importance of independent media watchdogs. “We launched FAIR nearly 40 years ago with warnings about the influence of media owners on news content,” FAIR founder Jeff Cohen said in an email:

The first issue of our publication featured a cover story on the corporate takeover of news written by legendary journalist and Media Monopoly author Ben Bagdikian. The recent antics of Bezos show that the need to scrutinize and expose corporate media owners is even greater today.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 27, 2025

“We are just like you”: How one LGBTQI+ community in El Salvador transformed their town

Around the world, the rights and safety of LGBTQI+ are under attack. But pockets of progress – life saving progress – do exist, often in unexpected places. “10 years ago, our sisters were getting murdered here,” says Antony Montesino, from his home in La Unión, El Salvador, and a member of the town’s LGBTQI+ community. …
Source

This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
February 26, 2025

FCC’s Knives Are Out for First Amendment

Deadline (1/22/25) noted that the last FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed the complaints Brendan Carr reinstated because “they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent.”

Brendan Carr, newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is waging a war on the news media, perhaps the most dangerous front in de jure President Donald Trump and de facto President Elon Musk’s quest to destroy freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Trump’s FCC has revived right-wing requests to sanction TV stations over their election coverage—complaints that had previously been dismissed by the FCC as incompatible with the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. The media industry news site Deadline (1/22/25) summarized:

The complaints include one against ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, alleging bias in ABC’s hosting of the September presidential debate; one against WCBS-TV in New York that accuses CBS of “news distortion” in the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris; and another against WNBC-TV in New York for alleged violations of the equal time rule when Saturday Night Live featured Harris in a cameo the weekend before the presidential election.

Deadline (2/17/25) followed up:

Carr announced an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of Comcast and NBCUniversal, and vowed that other media companies would face the same scrutiny. He targeted PBS and NPR for their underwriting practices, while warning that their government funding would be in the crosshairs of congressional Republicans.

FCC vs. dissent

Despite his claim that “”I don’t want to be the speech police,” Ars Technica (12/17/24) reports that Carr has “embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias.”

Carr has also made it clear that will use the FCC to attack dissent. Ars Technica (12/17/24) reported:

Carr has instead embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias. Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC’s authority to ensure that broadcast stations using public airwaves operate in the public interest, despite previous chairs saying the First Amendment prevents the FCC from revoking licenses based on content.

Revoking licenses or blocking license renewals is difficult legally, experts told Ars. But Carr could use his power as FCC chair to pressure broadcasters and force them to undergo costly legal proceedings, even if he never succeeds in taking a license away from a broadcast station.

The impulse to go after broadcast licenses for airing unsanctioned viewpoints is similar to the methods used by authoritarian regimes like Hungary, Russia and Turkey to crush the free press (Deutsche Welle, 2/9/21, 9/15/22; Reuters, 10/17/24).

And no Republican crusade would be complete without fearmongering about George Soros‘s alleged control of media and politics. Fox News (2/25/25) reported that Carr “is expected to brief GOP lawmakers on the FCC’s investigation into Soros, including an investment firm he’s linked to purchasing over 200 Audacy radio stations nationwide.”

Regulation to benefit the right

What Carr “wants to do is use his bully pulpit to bully companies that moderate content in a way he doesn’t like,” Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer told Wired (11/20/24). “And if he continues to do that, he’s very likely to run smack into the First Amendment.”

Carr, one might remember, wrote the policy section on the FCC in Project 2025, a right-wing policy agenda that is guiding the second Trump administration. In it, Carr complained that the “FCC is a New Deal–era agency,” which has the “view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes.” He vowed to eliminate “many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo.”

It all sounds like old school, free-market Reaganism, but Carr is actually very much inclined to use state power to interfere in the media marketplace when he has a chance to enforce the ideological limits of political discussion in the news media.

US conservatism likes to sell itself as a general resistance to federal regulation in the marketplace, allowing for capitalism to run wild without government interference. In reality, the struggle between American liberals and conservatives is more about what kind of regulation they want to see.

Just look at Carr’s record: He likes regulation when it benefits the right, and opposes it when it doesn’t. His reported use of his FCC power to investigate the Soros-linked fund buying Audacy stations contrast with his rejection of calls to block Musk’s takeover of Twitter (FCC, 4/27/22).

He has spoken out against social media content moderation (Wired, 11/20/24), but he has supported the move to ban TikTok (NPR, 12/23/22), a campaign based on anti-Chinese McCarthyist hysteria (FAIR.org, 3/14/24). And as the first Deadline piece notes, Carr revived FCC complaints about CBS and ABC, both Trump targets, but didn’t reintroduce a similarly dismissed complaint alleging

that the revelations from the Dominion Voting System defamation case against Fox News showed that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch lacked the “character” to hold a broadcast license.

While press freedom advocates fear Carr’s crusade against liberal speech, local television news giant Sinclair (11/18/24), known for its right-wing politics (On the Media, 5/12/17; New Yorker, 10/15/18), embraced Carr’s FCC leadership.

‘To punish outlets Trump dislikes’

Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz told the Guardian (2/24/25) that Trump plans to “use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen.”

The aggressive drive to go after outlets like CBS and ABC stems from Trump’s longstanding belief that these networks are conspiring with the Democrats against him. The Trump administration, as FAIR (11/14/24) had predicted, will try to use the state to cripple media it deems too critical to his regime.

The FCC’s tough approach is already having an impact. Trump sued CBS and its parent company Paramount for $20 billion on claims that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris; Paramount is considering settling the suit, despite its baselessness, as the litigation could impede a lucrative potential merger that requires government approval (New York Post, 11/20/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/17/25).

ABC has already settled another bogus Trump lawsuit for $15 million (FAIR.org, 12/16/24)—which indicates that even giving Trump massive amounts of money will not protect media outlets from the wrath of MAGA.

Carr’s ideological campaign will almost certainly have a chilling effect on any media outlet with an FCC license. News managers may veer away from too much criticism of the Trump administration out of fear that the FCC could strangle it with investigations and red tape. The Guardian (2/24/25) cited American University law professor Rebecca Hamilton on the danger that “the FCC investigations could affect journalists’ ability to report on the Trump administration”:

Valid FCC investigations can have a positive impact on the information ecosystem. But the latest FCC investigations launched by Carr are aligned with a broader effort by the Trump administration to punish outlets that Trump dislikes. Such investigations risk creating a chilling effect on the ability of journalists to report without fear of retaliation.

‘No regard for the First Amendment’

More than a year ago, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) warned that “the American press is facing, arguably, the gravest potential threat to its freedom in a generation.”

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told FAIR that “rather than guessing precisely what line of attack might come next, broadcasters will be incentivized to tone down their coverage overall, and make it more friendly to the Trump administration.” Worse, he added, the viewers won’t know that such self-censorship is happening. “We only know what gets aired,” he said. “We don’t know what gets pulled.”

Before Trump’s election, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) fretted that Trump was “overtly vowing to weaponize government and seek retribution against the news media, showing no regard for the First Amendment protections afforded to the Fourth Estate.”

We’re seeing those fears already beginning to materialize in the FCC. The only way to truly resist is for media outlets to simply not comply with the insane, authoritarian dictates of the Trump administration—as AP has done by refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico, despite having its White House correspondents blacklisted (FAIR.org, 2/18/25).

But now is the time to relentlessly and honestly report on the most powerful political figure on earth, and not to back down.

Stern said the press can continue to take legal action to defend the First Amendment under Trump. But also said journalists should advocate for free speech through their outlets. “Journalists are always hesitant to write about press freedom, for fear of making themselves the story, but the time for that is long gone,” he said. “You’re not making yourself the story, Trump is.”

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 26, 2025

NYT: Trump Unstoppable, Opposition Futile

Michelle Goldberg (New York Times, 11/6/24): “Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism…. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us.”

The New York Times editorial board (2/8/25) this month urged readers not to get “distracted,” “overwhelmed,” “paralyzed” or “pulled into [Donald Trump’s] chaos”—in short, don’t “tune out.” But what good is staying informed unless there are concrete actions Trump’s opponents can take to rein him in?

Right after the election, in a column headlined, “My Manifesto for Despairing Democrats,” Times columnist Nick Kristof (11/6/24) suggested readers “hug a lawyer,” get a dog, and/or remain “alert” to “gender nastiness.”

Michelle Goldberg (11/6/24) used her post-election column, “This Is Who We Are Now,” to castigate the voters who “chose” Trump, “knowing exactly who [he] is.” “This is…who we are [as a country],” she added mournfully, despite the fact that less than 30 percent of US adults voted for Trump. She did not mention the nearly 90 million Americans who were eligible to vote but didn’t, or explore why they were so alienated from politics. Her own instinct, she wrote, was to turn inward, and she predicted the next few months would be “a period of mourning rather than defiance.”

Although she saw “no point” in protesting Trump’s inauguration, she did express a vague hope that people would “take to the streets if [Trump’s] forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away,” and that they would “strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions.” The work of the next four years, she concluded, would be “saving what we can” and “trying to imagine a tolerable future.” But, for the moment, all she could do was “grieve.”

Even in a column headlined “Stop Feeling Stunned and Wounded, Liberals. It’s Time to Fight Back,” the Times‘ Charles Blow (1/29/25) presented fighting back as a strangely inactive process: “People, especially young people, are simply not built to passively absorb oppression,” he wrote; they will, at some point, “inevitably react and resist.” Yet he offered few suggestions for how they might do this, defaulting instead to vague proclamations like “Confidence has to be rebuilt” and “Power and possibility have to be reclaimed.” Finally, he noted, “resistance must be expressed in opinion polls and at the cash registers,” because “the people’s next formal participation in our national politics won’t come until the 2026 midterms.”

Reinforcing disarray

Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein (New York Times, 2/2/25): “Elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided…. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.”

While counseling patience, discipline and self-care, the paper runs several headlines per month painting opposition to Trump as pointless, ineffective, disorganized and/or pusillanimous. It is both fair and necessary to report critically on efforts to oppose Trump, and the New York Times has done that to some extent. But in headlines, framing and content, the paper often goes from reporting on Democratic disarray to reinforcing it.

Days after the election, the Times (11/7/24) began a story headlined “Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future” as follows: “A depressed and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future.” According to a photo caption in the story, “Many Democrats are left considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from enacting a sweeping right-wing agenda.”

From more recent stories like “‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump” (2/2/25), “Venting at Democrats and Fearing Trump, Liberal Donors Pull Back Cash” (2/16/25) and “Democrats Fear They Are Missing the Moment to Remake the Party” (2/17/25), we learn that Trump’s opposition is “demoralized,” plagued by “second-guessing” and “fretting.”

It’s true that many Democratic voters are furious at the Democratic Party. But other reporting suggests that a functional opposition exists. Democrats’ legal strategy is slowing Trump down. His approval ratings have notably declined. A broad majority of Americans feel the president isn’t doing enough to address the high prices of everyday goods, and a slim majority (52%) say he’s gone too far in using his presidential power. This has spurred a fed-up public to lead dozens of mass protests throughout the country. And Bernie Sanders recently held massive rallies in Omaha and Iowa City to pressure the area’s Republican representatives to vote against Trump’s federal budget in March, drawing overflow crowds of more than 2,500 in Omaha and 1,175 in Iowa City.

‘I think of socialism’

Shane Goldmacher (New York Times, 2/17/25): “For disillusioned Democrats…what is needed is a deeper discussion of whether the party’s policies and priorities are repelling voters.”

Because the New York Times treats the complaints of mega-wealthy donors as more legitimate than the fury of the Democratic base, it often presents money as the best and/or only means of affecting policy. “Prominent” Democrats have “lost faith in the party’s resolve to pinpoint its problems, let alone solve them” (2/17/25), and rich donors are “furious” over “Democrats’ tactical missteps and wasteful spending”—so they’re withholding their money accordingly (2/16/25).

The Times (2/17/25) quotes wealthy donors who blame progressives for the party’s losses at length, like personal-injury lawyer John Morgan, a “major Democratic contributor…who has often backed more moderate candidates”:

When I think “progressive,” I think of the Squad…. And when I think of the Squad, I think of socialism, and when I think of socialism, I think of Communism, and when I think of Communism, I think of the downfall of countries.

The needs and policy preferences of rank-and-file voters don’t get similar attention.

Though it framed the findings differently, the Times (2/17/25) mentioned a poll that showed a slender majority of Democratic voters—six points more than the share who favor more moderation—want the party to become more liberal or stay the same, and one which shows that a large majority of Democrats across all demographics want the party to focus on economic issues like wages and jobs (63%) rather than cultural debates (31%). These views are strikingly different from those wealthy donors typically express, with different implications than the polls’ headlines suggest.

When it comes to identifying what went wrong, Democrats are more aligned than the Times has indicated. Two weeks after asserting that “leaderless, rudderless and divided” elected Democrats have “no shared understanding of why they lost the election” (2/2/25), the paper reported that there is, in fact, “almost universal agreement on a diagnosis of the party’s problem with the working class” (2/17/25). And despite the fact that far more Americans didn’t vote in 2024 than voted for Trump or Harris, the Times has expanded its coverage of undecided and Trump voters, while demonstrating scant interest in the tens of millions of Americans who stayed home.

‘No parallel in history’

Peter Baker (New York Times, 1/20/25): “Trump…opened an immediate blitz of actions to begin drastically changing the course of the country and usher in a new ‘golden age of America.’”

The New York Times’ emphasis on Democratic weakness stands in stark contrast to its treatment of Trump. While the Democratic Party struggles to define “what it stands for, what issues to prioritize and how to confront a Trump administration,” Trump is “carrying out a right-wing agenda with head-spinning speed” (2/2/25).

After years of dismissing Trump as an amateurish reality television star (6/16/15, 12/22/15, 9/16/16)—in 2015, the paper couldn’t come up with a single reason why he might win the GOP nomination, despite having “really tried” (6/16/15)—the Times now sees him as forceful and decisive, if reckless; a born leader fulfilling his mandate with impressive speed and strength. He has engineered a “remarkable political comeback” and an “audacious and stunningly successful legal strategy that could allow him to evade accountability.” He has “redefined the limits of presidential power,” his “success in using his campaign as a protective shield has no parallel in legal or political history” (11/6/24), and he has “little reason to fear impeachment, which he has already survived twice” (2/5/25).

Compared to its headlines about Democrats, the Times’ headlines about Trump could just as easily have been written by the man himself: “With Political Victory, Trump Fights Off Legal Charges” (11/6/24), “For Trump, a Vindication for the Man and His Movement” (1/20/25), ” “A Determined Trump Vows Not to Be Thwarted at Home or Abroad” (1/20/25), “Trump’s New Line of Attack Against the Media Gains Momentum” (2/7/25) and “Trump Targets a Growing List of Those He Sees as Disloyal” (2/17/25).

The overall message is that Trump is virtually unstoppable, and even high-ranking congressional Democrats and billionaire donors, let alone ordinary Americans, have no idea how to stop him. The Times has answered its own question, “Resisting Trump: What Can Be Done?” (2/10/25) with a resounding very little, aside from responding to opinion polls and meekly waiting to vote in the 2026 midterms.

Acknowledging Trump’s political savvy is partly a business decision—as the Times (1/13/25) has noted, “many reporters, editors and media lawyers are taking [Trump’s threats against the media] seriously…. He is altering how the press is operating.” Some would rather stay proximate to power than take on a vindictive, litigious and power-drunk president. It’s also a mea culpa of sorts; chastened by criticisms from both left and right, elite journalists and editors have spent years thinking maybe they were too quick to dismiss Trump’s appeal and too late to understand it.

Fighting Trump’s agenda

The New York Times‘ Jacey Fortin (12/3/24) covered successful resistance to a culture-war bogeyman in Republican-dominated Montana.

Whatever the reasoning, it does not serve readers to present Trump as a force of nature, and avenues for resistance as minimal, especially when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Ordinary people are fighting Trump’s agenda through long-term political and labor organizing.

And the New York Times has covered elected leaders who have taken effective stands against anti-democratic bullies. When Montana Republicans barred her from the House floor in 2023 for “attempting to shame” them in a debate, state legislator Zooey Zephyr fought back to defend both “democracy itself” and the transgender community to which she belongs (New York Times, 4/26/23).

Her courage paid off. Zephyr was reelected, and in December she joined colleagues in defeating a GOP proposal to restrict which bathrooms lawmakers could use in the Montana State Capitol (New York Times, 12/3/24).

Weeks earlier, Tennessee legislators expelled two Democrats from the state House after they joined constituents in demanding stricter gun laws. An attempt to expel a third Democrat who joined the protest failed by one vote (New York Times, 4/6/23).

After being expelled, state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were quickly but temporarily reinstated, reelected several months later, and have “risen in national prominence” (New York Times, 2/2/24). Their colleague, Rep. Gloria Johnson, who survived the attempt to expel her, won Tennessee’s 2024 Democratic primary for US Senate. Johnson lost the Senate race to GOP incumbent Sen. Marsha Blackburn in November, but voters reelected her to the Tennessee House.

Even when efforts to prevent the passage of anti-democratic laws and policies ultimately fail, as they did when Texas Democrats fled the state to block voting restrictions in 2021, they inspire people to engage in politics and fight for their communities. The New York Times has a responsibility not to scold its readers for their supposed apathy, but to show them how to take on corrupt and lawless leaders like Trump. Hector a person for tuning out, and they’ll read the news for a day; show them how to use power, and they’ll civically engage for a lifetime.

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.
February 25, 2025

In the Face of the Trump Tariffs, Ontario Needs to focus on Made-in-Ontario Energy over imported American Natural Gas

If Ontario is serious about positioning the province as an energy powerhouse in the face of Trump’s tariffs – it has no choice but to change its current energy focus to one that reduces Ontario’s reliance on fracked American gas and instead builds on Ontario’s strength in natural resources.

We’ve all heard the quip “a week is a long time in politics” – an expression that certainly resonates with Canadians given all the recent changes in the political landscape in the U.S, Canada and Ontario.

Ontario is currently seeking proposals for new electricity generation in a process that’s been billed as “technology agnostic” and was supposed to deliver the lowest cost resources.

The direction provided by the Ontario government is important for two reasons: 1) it directs decision-makers not to favour one energy technology over another and 2) rightly suggests in the current inflationary environment that Ontarians will be best served by the most cost-effective resources.

But the thing is, that’s not actually happening…

Ontario is instead seeking proposals for new electricity generating facilities and instead of being technology agnostic and favouring the most cost effective energy, the energy procurement unfairly stacks the deck in favour of natural gas fired electricity generation. This is a big deal because Ontario is currently seeking projects totalling 1,600 Megawatts (MW) of energy – and if all these are awarded for new gas plants, that would be the equivalent to adding three more Portland Energy Centres in the province!

If the deck is being stacked for natural gas on this RFP – will Ontarians be able to trust a total procurement of 7,500MW in the next four years – enough to power over 1.6 million homes?

Natural gas power plant developers are being offered an unquestionable advantage in the upcoming Request for Proposal (RFP) by giving full points to natural gas developers and top points to facilities that can run for twelve hours continuously – something that only a gas plant can do. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, the current approach is neither technology agnostic nor does it reflect that Ontario’s peak demand is a maximum of six hours in any 24 hour cycle in both winter and summer.

Gas is also expensive. As evidenced in the recent LT1 procurement, battery storage beat out gas on price by a wide margin. We really need to question why the province stacked the deck in favour of gas, given that it’s way more expensive than battery storage. In Ontario and other jurisdictions, wind energy is now cheaper to produce than natural gas fired electricity, with even greater cost savings expected in the future. The unfair advantage being provided to natural gas facility developers through a procurement paid for by Ontarians is non-sensical and alarming.

Why is the role of natural gas important as we enter a potential trade war with the US?

While twenty years ago 100% of Ontario natural gas came from Western Canada, today the majority of the natural gas imported into Ontario is fracked in the Appalachia region of the US. According to a Statistics Canada report, in 2020 less than half of the natural gas imported in Ontario (or 1.1 Billon cubic feet per day) came from out West through the Northern Ontario Line.

Given Ontario’s dependence on U.S.-sourced natural gas for home heating and electricity, why is the province’s upcoming energy procurement still prioritizing gas-fired power reliant on American fracked gas? Especially as we enter a potential tariff war with the U.S.

It’s time to revisit the LT2 procurement. Now is the time to move away from American fracked gas in favour of made-in-Ontario energy generation.

The post In the Face of the Trump Tariffs, Ontario Needs to focus on Made-in-Ontario Energy over imported American Natural Gas appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
February 25, 2025

Beaver Lake Cree Nation No. 131 Calls for Federal Review of Massive Carbon Capture Project

By Crystal Lameman, Government Relations Advisor/Treaty Coordinator, Beaver Lake Cree Nation No. 131, Treaty No. 6 (Lac La Biche, Alberta)

The Pathways Alliance, a coalition of the largest oil sand companies, is proposing a massive carbon capture and storage (CCS) project within my First Nation’s territory, Treaty No. 6 in northeastern Alberta—an unprecedented proposal in scope and scale. This project, one of the largest of its kind globally, involves capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from up to 20 oil sands facilities, 600 kilometres of pipelines, and a vast underground storage hub beneath our Treaty lands. While the project is framed as a solution to address climate change, it disregards the environmental, health, and safety risks that will have devastating consequences for our Peoples, waters, Treaty lands, Way of Life, and inherent and Treaty rights. (You can read more about the project here.)

The risks to our First Nation

The project’s scale is alarming. It would include carbon pipelines and a storage hub that poses real risks to our First Nations, communities, and the environment. Carbon dioxide, the gas that would be captured, is an asphyxiant—meaning it can displace oxygen and create life-threatening situations for those who come into contact with it. CO2 leaks are difficult to detect because the gas is colourless and odourless, making them especially dangerous. A rupture of a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi in 2020 resulted in 300 people being evacuated and 45 people hospitalized. Our First Nations and communities would be similarly vulnerable to this hazard. Take into further account the vulnerable state of our local healthcare system, where the Emergency room is often closed, and there are no doctors available—leaving us with inadequate support in times of crisis.

The transportation and storage of CO2 in Treaty No. 6 and Treaty No. 8 is at a scale never before seen in Canada. Furthermore, leaks from pipelines or storage sites could contaminate our water, particularly underground aquifers. Increased CO2 levels may leach toxic substances like lead and arsenic from rocks, contaminating water sources critical to our health and the health of our ecosystems. CCS infrastructure demands significant amounts of water to cool equipment, which would likely be sourced from the Lower Athabasca watershed, which is already stressed by climate change and industrial use.

This project is unlikely to generate any revenues for our Nations. Instead, we are likely to be burdened by future liabilities, given that the project requires permanent monitoring. We are already struggling to deal with the enormous unfunded financial liabilities of the oil and gas sector.

This project is being used to justify ongoing oil and gas production within and near our First Nations, which degrades our lands, waters, and traditional resources. As it is, our Treaty is being infringed. We are on the brink of having no land left to practice our inherent and Treaty rights in a meaningful way. The Pathways project would make it even more difficult to maintain this connection, further limiting our ability to live in harmony with the land.

A failure in regulatory oversight

These threats to our First Nations are highly concerning on their own; however, our concerns are intensified by the absence of any real regulatory review in Alberta. Far from seeking consent or even engaging in real consultation, Alberta’s regulatory process prevents First Nations from making an informed decision on this massive industrial project. It fails to consider or protect our inherent and Treaty rights and interests.

First, Alberta has failed to provide adequate oversight for this megaproject. The Pathways has split the project into over 100 individual assessments, making it impossible to understand the full scope of potential impacts. This fragmented approach overwhelms First Nations, like ours, which are often forced to react to new information at the last minute. Functioning in this reactionary state, underfunded and under-resourced, leaves us continually vulnerable.

Second, there is no mechanism for identifying and monitoring risks posed by cumulative impacts. We asked Alberta to conduct an environmental assessment of the entire project to better understand the risks and impacts, including but not limited to our inherent and Treaty rights but the government refused. Moreover, Pathways has repeatedly failed to provide essential information regarding the impacts on our inherent and Treaty rights, and Alberta has allowed them to bypass these obligations. The province has consulted with us only on the pipeline aspect, neglecting to address the storage hub despite its potential to cause irreversible harm.

Third, Alberta does not require an emergency response plan for CO2 pipelines. Pathways has stated that emergency management plans will only be created after the project is operational—long after the potential damage is done.

Finally, what little engagement is taking place is grossly underfunded, which leaves us unable to conduct the technical review needed to understand and respond to the project. Inadequate funding compounds all other issues, creating a power and information deficit that lets industry drive projects forward that infringe on our rights.

These risks exacerbate the impacts of projects on our inherent and Treaty rights to use our land for traditional purposes, sustenance, and to maintain our livelihoods, which depend on the health of the land, the water, and the resources around us to continue our Way of Life.

Our leaders and many of our members have a legitimate mistrust of Alberta’s ability to effectively regulate industry – given our decades of experience. We cannot be expected to live on top of this project forever without a fair regulatory assessment that is focused on understanding, mitigating, and accommodating impacts on our rights and Reserve lands.

Call for federal intervention

The situation is dire, and it’s clear that Alberta is not upholding its obligations to First Nations like ours. That is why we are calling on the Government of Canada to step in and order an environmental review of this megaproject.

The federal government has an obligation to each of our First Nations with respect to the care, control, and protection of our Reserve lands for our use and benefit in perpetuity. Allowing a project of this magnitude to proceed without a thorough and independent review is unacceptable. We need the government to seek our consent and uphold its duty to consult and accommodate our concerns—concerns too often ignored by provincial authorities.

Nothing about us without us

A federal environmental assessment is a crucial first step, but it is important to recognize that First Nations have the final say on any project that affects our lands, waters, resources and Way of Life. We hold the power to say yes or no to developments that impact us, and no project should proceed without our consent.

The Beaver Lake Cree Nation’s lands and rights and calls for accountability from both Alberta and the federal government in addressing the risks posed by the proposed carbon capture project will not stop.

Take action and support our call for a federal environmental review of the Pathways CCS project.

The post Beaver Lake Cree Nation No. 131 Calls for Federal Review of Massive Carbon Capture Project appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
February 25, 2025

State of Play: Why the Commons Select Committee needs to become a strong public voice in media policy debates
The Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport recently held an open consultation called ‘State of Play’, asking the public and interested groups to suggest debates or areas of policy the Committee should review in its work over this parliament.

The Media Reform Coalition submitted our proposals for how the Committee can and should play a much bolder role in forthcoming media policy debates.

READ: The MRC’s submission to the Commons Culture Committee ‘State of Play’

We also encourage the Committee to rethink how it conducts inquiries into media policy, emphasising the urgent need to engage much more widely and directly with the public and civil society – rather than depending solely on the largest media groups and established industry interests for its evidence and policy analysis.

Here’s a summary of our submission, making the case for the Commons Select Committee to become a much more powerful public voice ahead of so many vital policy debates.

The high stakes of media policy

The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee covers some of the most important and universally impactful areas of public policy affecting British society, culture and democracy. Over the next few years the UK’s major media institutions will face significant, overlapping and potentially existential challenges – and the government will be making major decisions that will shape the future of British media.

But policy areas like public service broadcasting, news publishing, digital platforms and local media are not solely matters concerning the business and regulation of large media companies (as important as these are). These media institutions – and the policies that govern them – are essential to the cohesion of British society, to the creation and representativeness of British culture in all its diversity, and to informing the British public to take part in our democratic processes.

In its own work on these vital debates, the Commons Select Committee needs to become a platform for open and comprehensive public debate about the kinds of reforms that are urgently needed to fix the failures in Britain’s media. Decades of ineffective media policies have put the private gain of large media companies about the needs and interests of the public, and resulted in significant on-going harms to the public:
- the catastrophic loss of plurality and dangerous concentrations of corporate ownership in our news media;
- the underfunding of the BBC’s services and the resulting decline in provision of valued public service genres;
- the unabated growth of local news ‘deserts’ that has left hundreds of UK towns and cities without reliable, trusted local journalism;
- and the saturation of the online media landscape with disinformation, extremist and harmful content, exacerbating distrust, political division and public disaffection.
Addressing the democratic deficit in UK media

All of these harms, and the policy failures underlying them, make the Committee’s role and focus over the course of this parliament vitally important. To best represent the public interest and address urgent crises in the UK’s media sector, we recommend that the Committee explore the following policy debates during the current parliament:

Embedding public participation in the official review of the BBC’s Royal Charter. The government is required to review and renew the BBC’s Royal Charter by the end of 2027, but recent statements suggest the government is sticking to the undemocratic, unaccountable and behind-closed-doors model of ‘Charter review’. In past Charter reviews the Commons Select Committee made progressive recommendations for BBC reform, such as as removing government’s power to appoint the BBC Chair and making the licence fee more independent from political control, but sadly these were ignored.
The Commons Select Committee must use its role in the forthcoming Charter review to ensure the process is open, accountable and properly democratic, and become a platform for wider public deliberation and engagement with questions around the future of the BBC.

The decline of the UK’s local media. Local media in the UK has collapsed after decades of corporate consolidation and takeovers, causing thousands of job cuts and the closure of hundreds of newspapers, radio stations and local TV networks. Approximately 4.7 million people – 7% of the population – live in news ‘deserts’, areas without a single dedicated local news outlet. The ‘hands off’ market-based model of local media has completely failed to support or sustain a diverse local media sector that is made for and about our communities.
The government is due to publish terms of references for its ‘Local media strategy’, according to the Culture Secretary’s remarks to the Committee in December 2024. As with BBC Charter review, this should be an opportunity for an open public debate about the public’s needs, interests and priorities for how they use and engage with local media in their communities. The Committee should engage much more closely with the UK’s growing movement of smaller independent local media outlets (rather than the handful of dominant players), and explore their examples of community ownership and funding for public interest news as solutions to the local media crisis.

Implementation of the Media Act 2024 and the future of the UK’s public service broadcasting (PSB) ecology. The Media Act 2024, passed just before the general election, updated many of Ofcom’s regulatory responsibilities for PSB, but the Act also significantly narrowed the legislative definition of public service broadcasting (PSB), and abolished Channel 4’s ‘publisher-broadcaster’ status – enabling the publicly-owned company to make in-house content for the first time in its history. Ofcom’s implementation of the changes in the Media Act will require constant scrutiny to protect audience interests and the sustainability of public service content.
The Commons Select Committee needs to closely hold Ofcom to account in monitoring the falling provision of vital public service programming, which is likely to worsen following the removal of specific named genres from the legislative conditions that define Ofcom’s oversight of PSB. Commercial PSB investment in children’s content has fallen by 95% since 2003, when children’s programming quotas were removed. The Committee will also need to monitor any changes Channel 4 makes to its commissioning strategy, and consider recommending further regulations – such as an ‘SME Guarantee’ quota – to preserve Channel 4’s founding mission as an investor in and creative engine for SME production companies.

Tackling the UK’s crisis in falling media plurality and concentrated media ownership. The UK is facing a severe crisis in concentrated media ownership. Just three companies – DMG Media, News UK and Reach – control 90% of national newspaper circulation, and these same publishers account for more than two-fifths of the online reach of the UK’s top 50 news websites. Recent media mergers – such as the UAE-backed purchase of Telegraph Media Group or the sale of The Observer – have further exposed the limits of a regulatory model that allows for unaccountable transfers of media power without any recourse to the public interest. Ofcom’s statutory duty to monitor media plurality is massively out of step with the realities of media ownership and concentration in the shadow of dominant tech platforms, who amplify the reach and market share of already-dominant news publishers.
The Commons Select Committee should explore how the UK’s media plurality regime can be updated to better protect diversity of opinion, freedom of journalistic expression and independence from concentrated ownership – as has been recommended by the Leveson Inquiry, the 2013 DCMS consultation on media plurality, the 2014 Lords Communications Committee inquiry, and many civil society organisations. This should include investigating the introduction of clear legislative thresholds on market/ownership shares for triggering regulatory intervention, as well as ‘Public Interest Obligations’ to require dominant media companies to reinvest in public interest journalism.

Regulating Big Tech in the public interest. The online platforms and new digital technologies at the centre of our modern lives operate by opaque algorithms, unaccountable technological biases and an unrestrained commercialisation of user data. These have all helped to amplify disinformation, political polarisation and collapse revenues for ‘traditional’ media. Regulating the global Big Tech companies that control these platforms is essential to ensure they work in the public interest. The Commons Select Committee will need to play a close role in researching and scrutinising a range of different potential public interventions and regulatory changes to ensure that the impacts of Big Tech do not result in wider harms to the British public and media users on online platforms.
Under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, the Competition and Markets Authority now has legislative power to impose and enforce corrective remedies on dominant tech companies. The CMA is currently exploring designating Google’s general search services as having ‘significant market status’, and the Commons Select Committee should play an active and on-going role in making sure this new legislative power benefits British audiences and the sustainability of UK public interest journalism. In particular the Committee should ensure that the interests of small and independent publishers are properly reflected in any deals or frameworks introduced on any designated SMS platforms.

Transforming the Commons Select Committee into a platform for public policy-making on the media

How the Committee conducts its media inquiries is just as important to the effectiveness of its work as the topics and policies the Committee chooses to investigate. Firstly, the Committee needs to ensure that it speaks to and for the public in its investigations, and holds the government to account for (not) properly including the British public in its media policy decisions. Despite media being fundamental to the public’s rights and interests, media policymaking in the UK is defined by a dangerous and undemocratic lack of public participation.

Second, the Committee needs to broaden the range of groups and interests it consults on media policy by engaging more openly and regularly with independent media outlets and civil society groups, rather than focusing on the largest media companies and established sector grandees. The recent Lords Communications Committee inquiry into ‘The future of news’ examined a range of challenges and considerations at the heart of addressing the sustainability of high quality news and journalism in the UK – yet the Committee spoke almost exclusively to politicians, regulators, executives at large news publishers and a handful of academic institutions. Out of the 52 people invited to give testimony to inquiry sessions, only one represented an independent local media outlet. If the Commons Select Committee seeks to properly understand the challenges and opportunities in the UK’s media sectors, it will need to speak to smaller and independent media outlets who are succeeding through alternative ownership structures, different models of ‘doing journalism’, and funding and creating media content that engages with marginalised and under-served audiences in ways that larger established media businesses are not.

Third, the Committee should strive to undertake and interrogate qualitative analysis of the impact of UK media – both positive and negative – and not limit its understanding to quantitative reports, or assuming taken-for-granted ideals are being fulfilled. The public’s relationship with media is about more than hours of content consumed or surveyed scores of trustworthiness or brand recognition. The Committee should explore qualitative methods of media research such as Citizens Assemblies, that involve the public in identifying, assessing and critiquing how media institutions contribute to social cohesion, cultural self-expression, democratic participation and individual connection with different communities.

Finally, the Committee must recognise across all of its work that the challenges facing the UK’s media sectors can no longer be addressed in isolation from one another. The growing dominance of a handful of Big Tech platforms and global streaming services on how media content is funded, distributed and created – alongside the generational shifts in media technologies and audience habits – has meant that the crises in local news, public broadcasting, media concentration and media accountability require a combined approach to reforming and strengthening the UK’s media policies for the benefit of the public.

A Public Commission on Media and Democracy

We also recommend that the Committee explore the mechanisms and terms of reference for establishing a comprehensive Public Commission on Media and Democracy. For too long governments have taken an inconsistent and intermittent interest in media policy, acting only when there is a perception of political opportunity, or to tackle abuses of powerful media interests long after they have already harmed significant numbers of people. A public commission would create the space for understanding the many systemic failures of in our media system, identifying the mistakes in politics and policies that enabled them, and developing a more democratic relationship between media and the public.

The Commons Select Committee could lead on establishing and hosting the commission, by sourcing original research, expert testimony and extensive public engagement. Its core areas of inquiry could examine a wide range of topics relating to the media, from intricate questions of regulation and policy intervention to deeper considerations about the media’s role in facilitating cultural self-expression, social cohesion and democratic citizenship.

The UK has a long history of reviews and inquiries into broadcasting and the press: with the rapid changes across our modern, digital media system, and the ineffectiveness of many recent policy interventions to adapt to these changes, an in-depth, detailed Public Commission on the future of our media is needed now more than ever – and the Commons Select Committee is perfectly placed to start the conversation.

The post State of Play: Why the Commons Select Committee needs to become a strong public voice in media policy debates appeared first on Media Reform Coalition.

This post was originally published on Media Reform Coalition.
February 25, 2025

Looking towards 2025: Blog post by OMCT Secretary General Gerald Staberock

In this interview, OMCT Secretary General Gerald Staberock shares his vision for 2025 and key priorities in the fight against torture. From the launch of the Global Torture Index to the SOS Defenders platform, he highlights the initiatives that will shape the movement and strengthen global human rights efforts, including the Global Week on Torture—an event not to be missed.

His message for 2025 is clear: “resilience and unity, not despair.”

What is your vision for 2025, and what priorities should we focus on to maximize our impact on human rights?

In my vision, 2025 is the year in which we rise to the challenge and stand up in the anti-torture movement and uphold the absolute prohibition of torture. Today, in an increasingly dangerous world where states are turning away from human rights, fostering division and weakening protections, and some questioning universal norms altogether, the message must be resilience and unity, not despair. It is essential to protect all victims of torture and to defend the universality of human rights, which is under threat.

I am convinced that our SOS Torture Network must serve as an anchor for human rights and universality. As a movement, we stand united—to protect those at risk, to support our fellow human rights defenders under threat, and to ensure that the absolute prohibition of torture remains intact.

What impact do you hope the launch of the Global Torture Index will have?

The Global Index on Torture is the new flagship program of OMCT, with its launch anticipated in June 2025. I think it is the tool we have been lacking for years, and a tool all actors working against torture can benefit from. It combines reliable data with often-overlooked narratives to make the hidden reality of torture visible. This index will allow us to measure its scope, its impact on society, and advocate for political and legal reforms. It will help identify risks and develop effective anti-torture strategies. This index is not only an OMCT tool but a collective resource to support the efforts of network members towards concrete reforms and the prevention of torture.

Why is the Global Week on Torture important and what can people expect?

Four years ago, we held the first ever Global Week Against Torture, and we saw the power and energy that such a week can create. Many of us, especially those of our members working in very complicated dire situation, often feel alone. It offers a unique opportunity to share experiences, best practices and to learn from each other and to stand in solidarity across countries and regions. The Global Week all makes us feel and understand that we are united in a struggle and reflect that the real force of the OMCT is in its SOS Torture Network.

How will the SOS Defenders platform and the SOS Database help serve human rights defenders?

One of the most important achievements in 2024 has been the launch of the SOS Defenders platform. The platform gives a face to more than 400 human rights defenders that are currently imprisoned because they stood up for human rights. We don’t forget them. We want to demonstrate to governments that the detention of these defenders is an attack on democracy and freedom, and we need to make states who support human rights understand that this is the moment to step up in their actions. OMCT, along with its SOS Torture Network must raise the alarm bells and act to protect from torture and ill-treatment in detention.

https://www.omct.org/en/resources/blog/%C3%A0-lhorizon-2025-le-secr%C3%A9taire-g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ral-de-lomct-sur-lavenir-des-droits-de-lhomme

This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
February 21, 2025

Covering Attack on USAID as if Constitutional Restraints Were Up for Debate

NBC News (2/4/25) put Trump’s unconstitutional attack on USAID in a Cold War frame.

Are the corporate media outlets reporting on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian takeover smarter than a fifth grader? Recent coverage of the president and his henchman’s blatantly unconstitutional dismembering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would suggest some are not.

Reports on the agency’s shuttering (Politico, 1/31/25, 2/14/25; NBC, 2/4/25) have often failed to sufficiently sound the alarm on how Trump’s efforts are upending the most basic—and vitally important—federal checks and balances one learns about in a Schoolhouse Rock episode. Instead, these reports have framed bedrock constitutional principles as if they were up for debate, and neglected to mention that the Trump administration is purposefully attempting to shirk executive restraints.

Meanwhile, much of corporate media’s justified attention on the foreign aid agency’s demise has wasted ink on a narrower, unjustifiable reason for audiences to draw objections: the loss of the “soft power” USAID gives America in its battle over global influence with its adversaries (CNN 2/7/25; New York Times 2/11/25). This sets up the precedent that Musk’s federal bludgeoning should be assessed based on the value of his target, rather than the fact that he is subverting the Constitution.

‘The least popular thing’

Michael Waldman (Brennan Center, 2/19/25): “Trump’s power grab…is the culmination of decades of pressure from conservative organizations and lawyers who have sought a way to dismantle government and curb its power to intervene in markets.”

A lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees against the Trump administration lays out the five-alarm constitutional fire the shuttering of USAID has set off. USAID was established as an independent agency outside the State Department’s control by an act of Congress in 1998.

Longstanding judicial precedent holds that only Congress has the ability to create and dissolve federal agencies. Last year, the legislature prohibited even a reorganization of USAID without its consultation in an appropriations law. The Trump administration’s actions—justified solely by an extreme interpretation of executive authority—violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, and are indeed designed to do so.

Together Trump and Musk share interest in reconstituting US governance. The checks and balances that help to constrain executive power, along with civil service workers, are also roadblocks to the billions in federal contracts that have underwritten Musk’s empire. USAID has become the first target in their federal bludgeoning, because its relative unpopularity among voters means they might get away with rewriting the Constitution without too much public outrage. Its “the least popular thing government spends money on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to a USAID official earlier this month. (Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much the US government spends on foreign aid, and think it should be reduced to a level that is actually far more than USAID’s current budget—Program for Public Consultation, 2/8/25.)

Trump and Musk’s withdrawal of nearly all foreign aid funded through USAID is another grave challenge to the constitutional order. Since those funds were congressionally appropriated, neither Trump nor Musk has the authority to stop them, especially not on the basis of their political preferences.

The act of a president indefinitely rejecting congressionally approved spending is known as impoundment, which has been effectively outlawed in all forms since 1974. Trump has been explicit about his intent to bring impoundment back, which threatens to render Congress—which is supposed to have the power of the purse—irrelevant.

‘Musk has been clear’

Politico (2/14/25) would have better helped readers’ understanding if it hadn’t taken “Trump’s plans to shrink the federal workforce” at face value.

Such a threat to democracy requires calling it for what it is. Simple but consequential abdications of responsibility abound, though. Politico (2/14/25), for example, saw fit to reprint at face value Trump and Musk’s claims that they just wish to drastically reduce federal spending. An explainer article on Trump and Musk’s efforts made no mention that they might have ulterior motives.

In response to the question, “What is Trump and Musk’s goal?” Politico simply answered: “With Trump’s blessing, Musk has been clear that his goal is to drastically reduce the size of the government.” That Musk, the richest person in the world, whose business empire spans the globe and dominates whole industries, has resolved to dedicate his undivided attention to the cause of reducing federal spending deserves more skepticism. The fact that Musk has prioritized going after federal agencies that have had the temerity to investigate his businesses suggests a more plausible scenario.

Though the article, which is meant to give readers a brief but comprehensive overview of Trump and Musk’s efforts, briefly mentions some of the court-ordered pauses to Trump’s orders, it doesn’t discuss the overarching implications for US democracy.

Another Politico story (1/31/25), breaking the news that Trump intended to subsume USAID into the State Department, gave the move a stamp of approval by pointing out it was the fulfillment of long-held bipartisan aspirations—corporate media’s highest praise—while ignoring the unconstitutional means that brought it about. For years, the article says, “both Democratic and Republican administrations have toyed with the idea of making USAID a part of the State Department.” That’s because, Politico claimed,

there have always been tensions between State and USAID over which agency controls what parts of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid apparatus, regardless of which party is in power.

The article qualifies that USAID “describes itself” as an independent agency, as if this were up for dispute.

‘Keep America safe’

CNN (2/3/25): “Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly shut down USAID is at odds with Congress’ distinct role in forming and closing federal agencies.”

Corporate media’s failure to foreground the authoritarian threat of Trump and Musk’s USAID takedown also includes a narrow focus on its geopolitical ramifications that smooths over the unsavory aspects of the agency’s humanitarian work.

USAID oversees billions in foreign aid that is responsible for lifesaving food, medical care, infrastructure and economic development. The massive disruption in that aid is already causing death, hunger, disease outbreak and economic hardship. But a defense of that lifesaving work, and the democratic norms threatened by its unraveling, need not require a rosy picture of its imperialist motivations.

That’s exactly what the New York Times’ Daily podcast (2/11/25) accomplished, though, in an episode titled “The Demise of USAID and American Soft Power.” As has become all too frequent, nowhere during the episode’s 35-minute run time did the host, Times reporter Michael Barbaro, or his two guests, Times journalists Michael Crowley and Stephanie Nolen, mention the constitutional principles at stake in USAID’s closure (though the following episode was dedicated to the constitutional crises Trump has provoked—Daily, 2/12/25).

Instead, the podcast focused on what Barbaro described as Trump’s overturning of a decades-long bipartisan consensus about the best way to “keep America safe.” That safety, Barbaro learned by way of his guests’ contribution, is a supposedly serendipitous return on investment America receives through its strategic generosity abroad (effective altruism, one might say?). Trump has now abandoned that generosity, leaving a more brutish impression of America’s global role, and ceding ground to geopolitical adversaries, Barbaro and company said.

What threats do they identify that Americans have needed to be kept safe from? At first, Crowley said, it was the Soviet Union’s relative popularity in the developing world. After the Cold War ended, though, USAID’s justification for existence seemed thin, he acknowledged. But that didn’t last long, because it just so happened that after 9/11, “America realized that the Soviet Communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology,” Crowley explained.

For one, it wasn’t just USAID, but the entire military industrial complex, that was inevitably going to identify a new justification for its existence, 9/11 notwithstanding. But the podcast also completely leaves out USAID’s modern role in conditioning aid to developing countries on opening up their economies to the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations, creating the conditions for neo-colonial dispossession and Western dependency.

Dedicating a whole episode to portraying USAID’s work as a mutually beneficial marriage between developing nations’ humanitarian needs and US national security interests, all so that audiences might selfishly conclude that preserving foreign aid is in their own interests, perpetuates imperial propaganda. Pointing out how Trump’s actions harm people, including his own supporters, is well and good. But the loss of imperial soft power is not an example of that. And pointing out the actual harms without discussing the autocratic way they were inflicted risks suggesting that unconstitutional actions are acceptable as long as their results are beneficial.

Some journalists are doing a fine job of exposing the assault on USAID (e.g., New York Times, 1/28/25, 2/5/25; CNN, 2/3/25). But amid this unprecedented blitz on democratic norms, others are showing that they might need to revisit their elementary school textbooks.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 20, 2025

Media Afraid to Call Ethnic Cleansing by Its Name

News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).

After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”

Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that

Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Clarity in the minority

Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.

I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.

A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.

Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).

A ‘plan to free Palestinians’

A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.

Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”

While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”

Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that

Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.

Ethnically cleansing the West Bank

Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”

A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.

Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:

Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.

The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palestinian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.

In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7, Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by

the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.

Unnoteworthy violations

I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”

Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.

Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.

‘Battling local militants’

The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”

Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.

A Washington Post report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”

Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.

The rights of ‘neighbors’

This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.

The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”

The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”

Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.

Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 20, 2025

Ontario’s Fixation on Highway Sprawl Caused our Housing Shortage
Three years after Ontario’s government committed to building more homes faster, the number of homes built in Ontario is dramatically down and government sources show that without radical change fewer than half of the 1.5 million homes promised will be built by 2031.

Ontario has had all the tools it needs to house a fast-growing population, even with high interest rates. But its laws prohibit labour-efficient multi-family housing on almost all existing low-rise “neighbourhood” streets, limiting apartment buildings to tiny high-rise pockets where family-sized homes aren’t viable. They require that most homes large enough for families be built in inefficient low-density types and put on farmland and natural areas where construction resources are wasted on building roads, sewers and other infrastructure from scratch. These are the very same laws and policies that cause car-dependency, threaten Ontario’s Greenbelt, destroy rare wetlands and sensitive wildlife habitat. They also make Canada vulnerable to U.S. threats of “economic force” by eating away at the farmland we need to produce food ourselves

This election is Ontario voters’ chance to fix these problems by electing MPPs who – whatever their previous views – are now committed to turning the way we plan our housing on its head by scrapping plans for wasteful car-dependent subdivisions and McMansions and focussing construction on family-friendly apartments on existing residential streets. Ontario needs a legislature with the guts to overhaul outdated zoning, unfair fees, building codes, and tax rules quickly, and from the top-down.

Why not just “get government out of the way” by cutting taxes, fees, and red-tape for all new housing?

Ontario’s housing crisis emerged even though construction workers and equipment were running at full tilt. Unlike fast-growing states in the United States “sunbelt”, who ruthlessly exploit a bottomless supply of undocumented and underpaid migrant construction labour, Ontario can only deliver more homes, faster by getting builders to make better use of the labour, equipment and materials that we already have. That means ensuring that the mid-rise infill housing development that produces family housing most efficiently is also easier, more cost-effective, and less risky for builders than competing formats and locations.
- Whether you’re angry and scared about the shortage of low-cost housing in the places you want to live, or determined to protect our farms, forests and wetlands, your provincial election litmus test should be the same. Let candidates know that if they want your vote, they need to:
- Lower land costs for labour-efficient buildings in all of Ontario’s existing lowrise neighbourhoods, starting with blanket permission for six-storey apartment buildings on every existing residential major street and avenue and four-storey apartment buildings on every suburban, city and small town residential lot throughout Ontario
- Cut construction costs for mid-rise housing by allowing use of simple wood frame construction, removing residential parking minimums, ending “step-back” requirements, and legalizing single staircase designs for buildings up to six storeys and permitting mass timber construction up to eight storeys.
- Stop the wasting of construction capacity, by reversing all designations of rural land for sprawl development since 2022. Requiring that any development on land designated before that house at least 100 people per hectare and expand the Greenbelt to the rest of southern Ontario’s farmland and natural areas permanently.
- Cancel planned subsidies for inefficient sprawl, starting with the destructive multibillion dollar Highway 413.
  Fund deeply affordable public and non-market housing, especially when market construction is stalled.
- Unlock existing towns and suburbs for families without cars and new homes that don’t waste land and materials on parking by immediately funding more bus service and quickly approving, funding, and installing bus rapid transit lanes on existing arterials and collectors.
We know how to end the housing crisis. A future Ontario government has the advice of experts, and even a government appointed task force. Unfortunately, over the last several years progress has been slowed and reversed by dismantling the modest measures taken by the previous government to promote density and efficient land use while promoting wasteful, expensive sprawl and low-density housing.

Don’t be fooled by vague promises to cut red tape and taxes or claims that more sprawl is the solution to our housing crisis. Don’t let provincial candidates pass the buck to federal and municipal governments. There’s only one path to solving the housing shortage, saving farms, forests and wetlands, and fixing car-dependent suburbs. Between now and election day, candidates must commit to following it.

The post Ontario’s Fixation on Highway Sprawl Caused our Housing Shortage appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.