radiofree.asia 
radiofree.asia 
radiofree.asia 

Category: Blog

  • CNN’s Tapper Smears Tlaib With Baseless Charge of Bias

     

    CNN‘s Jake Tapper took a baseless accusation made on X and elevated it to a national story, smearing Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib as antisemitic.

    Detroit Metro Times: Tlaib slams Nessel for targeting pro-Palestinian students at U-M: ‘A dangerous precedent’

    Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Detroit Metro Times, 9/13/24) described the indicted protesters as “people that just want to save lives, no matter their faith or ethnicity.” 

    In an interview with the Detroit Metro Times (9/13/24), Tlaib accused Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel of “biases” in her prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters and not other protesters:

    “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib says. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

    Tlaib went on to blame the influence of academic officials for the prosecutions: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.”

    It’s a pretty straightforward charge that drew no particular notice for many days. A week later, Nessel—who is Jewish—posted on X (9/20/24): “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as attorney general. It’s antisemitic and wrong.”

    ‘Quite an accusation’

    CNN: Michigan AG Nessel Accuses Rep. Tlaib of Antisemitic Remark After Tlaib Suggested Protester Charges Were Biased

    Referring to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s prosecution of pro-Palestine protesters, Jake Tapper (CNN, 9/22/24) asserted that “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that…she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not.”

    Nessel’s accusation is clearly groundless, as anyone reading Tlaib’s actual quote can see. But CNN‘s Jake Tapper (9/22/24), interviewing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, presented the false accusation as fact, and used that newly invented fact to try to force Whitmer to condemn Tlaib for something she didn’t do.

    Tapper quoted only one sentence from the Metro Times report—the one beginning “it seems the attorney general decided…”—followed by Nessel’s accusation. Tapper then asked Whitmer: “Do you think that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased was antisemitic?”

    When Whitmer tried to avoid the bait, Tapper pressed on:

    Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not. That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

    Contrary to Tapper’s assumption, some of the protesters charged by Nessel are, in fact, Jewish (CAIR, 9/23/24).

    Tapper’s remarkable misrepresentation had ripple effects in corporate media, as other journalists (and their editors) repeated the smear without bothering to do any factchecking. Jewish Insider‘s Josh Kraushaar (9/22/24) reported on Tapper’s interview and mischaracterized Tlaib’s Metro Times interview as having “claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.” (The article later changed the word “claimed” to “suggested,” as if that were more accurate.)

    CNN‘s Dana Bash (9/23/24) brought Tapper’s interview up on air the next day, comparing Whitmer’s response to Sen. Tom Cotton refusing to condemn Donald Trump’s declaration that if he loses, “it’s the fault of the Jews.” CNN political director David Chalian responded, perpetuating the smear as fact: “It’s not very hard to say that Rashida Tlaib saying that Dana Nessel is pursuing charges because she’s Jewish is an antisemitic thing to say.”

    ‘Never explicitly said’

    USA Today: Tlaib makes antisemitic comments again. Whitmer's response isn't enough.

    USA Today‘s Ingrid Jacques (9/24/24) charged Tlaib with antisemtism even after Metro Times (9/23/24) confirmed that Tlaib never referred to Nessel’s ethnicity.

    The Metro Times published a factcheck (9/23/24) the day after Tapper’s interview, calling the characterization “spurious,” and clarified that “Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism.” It noted that “Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.”

    But even after that piece should have put the issue to rest, USA Today published a column by Ingrid Jacques (9/24/24) that repeated the falsehood in its very headline: “Tlaib Makes Antisemitic Comments Again.”

    Tapper’s initial segment warranted an on-air correction and apology. Instead, he doubled down, bringing on to discuss the matter the next day (9/23/24) the very person who initially smeared Tlaib. Only after giving Nessel a platform to repeat her baseless charge—”Clearly, she’s referencing my religion as to why she thinks I can’t be fair,” Nessel said—did Tapper tell viewers that he “misspoke” in the previous day’s segment, explaining, “I was trying to characterize [Nessel’s] views of Tlaib’s comments.”

    He then asked Nessel:

    What do you make of those today, noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion, and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?

    “Explicitly”? Tlaib never said it, period, which is what any responsible journalist would point out.

    ACTION ALERT: Messages to CNN can be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

    You can also sign a petition calling on CNN to retract its false report.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Throw Everything But the Facts Against Harris’s ‘Price Control’ Proposal

    Debates over whether Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s economic proposals constitute Communist price controls or merely technocratic consumer protections are obscuring a more insidious thread within corporate media. In coverage of Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal, it’s taken for granted that price inflation, especially in the grocery sector, is an organic and unavoidable result of market forces, and thus any sort of intervention is misguided at best, and economy-wrecking at worst.

    In this rare instance where a presidential hopeful has a policy that is both economically sound and popular, corporate media have fixated on Harris’s proposal as supposedly misguided. To dismiss any deeper discussion of economic phenomena like elevated price levels, and legislation that may correct them, media rely on an appeal to “basic economics.” If the reader were only willing to crack open an Econ 101 textbook, it would apparently be plain to see that the inflation consumers experienced during the pandemic can be explained by abstract and divinely influenced factors, and thus a policy response is simply inappropriate.

    Comrade Kamala?

    When bad faith critics call Harris “Communist,” maybe don’t misrepresent her policies as “price controls”? (Washington Post, 8/15/24)

    For all the hubbub about Harris’s proposal, the actual implications of anti-price-gouging legislation are fairly unglamorous. Far from price controls, law professor Zephyr Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) noted that anti-price-gouging laws 

    allow price increases, so long as it is due to increased costs, but forbid profit increases so that companies can’t take advantage of the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that attends emergencies. 

    Teachout situated this legislation alongside rules against price-fixing, predatory pricing and fraud, laws which allow an effective market economy to proliferate. As such, states as politically divergent as Louisiana and New York have anti-price-gouging legislation on the books, not just for declared states of emergency, but for market “abnormalities.”

    But none of that matters when the media can run with Donald Trump’s accusation of “SOVIET-style price controls.” Plenty of unscrupulous outlets have had no problem framing a consumer protection measure as the first step down the road to socialist economic ruin (Washington Times, 8/16/24; Washington Examiner, 8/20/24; New York Post, 8/25/24; Fox Business, 9/3/24). Even a Washington Post  piece (8/19/24) by columnist (and former G.W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen described Harris’s so-called “price controls” as “doubling down on socialism.”

    What’s perhaps more concerning is centrist or purportedly liberal opinion pages’ acceptance of Harris’s proposal as outright price controls. Catherine Rampell, writing in the Washington Post (8/15/24), claimed anti-price-gouging legislation is “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food…. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding.” Rampell didn’t go as far as to call Harris a Communist outright, but coyly concluded: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘Communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

    Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie mounted a similar attack in the Wall Street Journal (8/22/24), ripping Harris for proposing “national price controls” and thus subscribing to a “fantasy economic theory.” Opinion writers in the Atlantic (8/16/24), the New York Times (8/19/24), LA Times (8/20/24), USA Today (8/21/24), the Hill (8/23/24) and Forbes (9/3/24) all uncritically regurgitated the idea that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls. By accepting this simplistic and inaccurate framing, these political taste-makers are fueling the right-wing idea that Harris represents a vanguard of Communism.

    To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. Additionally, many of the breathless crusades against Harris made use of various cliches to encourage the reader to not think deeper about how prices work, or what policy solutions might exist to benefit the consumer.

    Just supply and demand

    “According to the Econ 101 model of prices and supply, when a product is in shortage, its price goes up to bring quantity demanded in line with quantity supplied.” This is the wisdom offered by Josh Barro in the Atlantic (8/16/24), who added that “in a robustly competitive market, those profit margins get forced down as supply expands. Price controls inhibit that process and are a bad idea.” He chose not to elaborate beyond the 101 level.

    The Wall Street Journal (8/20/24) sought the guidance of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who is indeed the author of the most widely used economics textbook in US colleges. He conceded that price intervention could be warranted in markets with monopolistic conditions. However, the Journal gently explained to readers, “the food business isn’t a monopoly—most people, but not all, have the option of going to another store if one store raises its prices too much.” Mankiw elaborated: “Our assumption is that firms are always greedy and it is the forces of competition that keeps prices close to cost.”

    Rampell’s opinion piece in the Washington Post (8/15/24) claimed that, under Harris’s proposal, “supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.” Rampell apparently believes (or wants readers to believe) that grocery prices are currently set by nothing more than supply and demand.

    The problem is that the grocery and food processing industries are not competitive markets. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian (7/14/21) and Food and Water Watch showed the extent to which food production in the United States is controlled by a limited group of corporations:

    A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans…. A few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.

    While there is no strict definition for an oligopolistic market, this level of market concentration enables firms to set prices as they wish. Reporting by Time (1/14/22) listed Pepsi, Kroger, Kellogg’s and Tyson as examples of food production companies who boasted on the record about their ability to increase prices beyond higher costs during the pandemic.

    Noncompetitive market conditions are also present farther down the supply chain. Nationally, the grocery industry is not quite as concentrated as food production (the pending Kroger/Albertsons merger notwithstanding). However, unlike a food retailer, consumers have little geographical or logistical flexibility to shop around for prices. 

    The Herfindahl Hirschman Index is a measure of market concentration; markets with an HHI over 1,800 are “highly concentrated.” 

    The USDA Economic Research Service has found that between 1990 and 2019, retail food industry concentration has increased, and the industry is at a level of “high concentration” in most counties. Consumers in rural and small non-metro counties are most vulnerable to noncompetitive market conditions. 

    The Federal Trade Commission pointed the finger at large grocers in a 2024 report. According to the FTC, grocery retailers’ revenue increases outstripped costs during the pandemic, resulting in increased profits, which “casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs.” The report also accused “some larger retailers and wholesalers” of using their market position to gain better terms with suppliers, causing smaller competitors to suffer.

    Unchecked capitalism is good, actually

    If one still wishes to critique Harris’s proposal, taking into account that the food processing and retail industries are not necessarily competitive, the next best argument is that free-market fundamentalism is good, and Harris is a villain for getting in the way of it.

    Former Wall Street Journal reporter (and mutual fund director) Roger Lowenstein took this tack in a New York Times guest essay (8/27/24). He claimed Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal and Donald Trump’s newly proposed tariff amount to “equal violence to free-market principles.” (The only violence under capitalism that seems to concern Lowenstein, apparently, is that done toward free enterprise.) 

    Lowenstein critiqued Harris for threatening to crack down on innocent, opportunistic business owners he likened to Henry Ford (an antisemite and a union-buster), Steve Jobs (a price-fixing antitrust-violator, according to the Times—5/2/14) and Warren Buffett (an alleged monopolist)–intending such comparisons as compliments, not criticisms. Harris and Trump, he wrote, are acting 

    as if production derived from central commands rather than from thousands of businesses and millions of individuals acting to earn a living and maximize profits.

    If this policy proposal is truly tantamount to state socialism, in the eyes of Lowenstein, perhaps he lives his life constantly lamenting the speed limits, safety regulations and agricultural subsidies that surround him. Either that, or he is jumping at the opportunity to pontificate on free market utopia, complete with oligarchs and an absent government, with little regard to the actual policy he purports to critique.

    A problem you shouldn’t solve

    Roger Lowenstein (NYT, 8/27/24) informed unenlightened readers that high food prices are “a problem that no longer exists.”

    Depending on which articles you choose to read, inflation is alternately a key political problem for the Harris campaign, or a nonconcern. “Perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest political vulnerability is the run-up in prices that occurred during the Biden administration,” reported the New York Times (9/10/24). The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) also acknowledged that Biden-era inflation is “a real political issue for Ms. Harris.”

    Pieces from both of these publications have also claimed the opposite: Inflation is already down, and thus Harris has no reason to announce anti-inflation measures. Lowenstein (New York Times, 8/27/24) claimed that the problem of high food prices “no longer exists,” and Rampell (Washington Post, 8/15/24) gloated that the battle against inflation has “already been won,” because price levels have increased only 1% in the last year. The very same Post editorial (8/16/24) that acknowledged inflation as a liability for Harris chided her for her anti-price-gouging proposal, claiming “many stores are currently slashing prices.”

    It is true that the inflation rate for groceries has declined. However, this does not mean that Harris’s proposals are now useless. This critique misses two key points.

    First, there are certain to be supply shocks, and resultant increases in the price level, in the future. COVID-19 was an unprecedented crisis in its breadth; it affected large swathes of the economy simultaneously. However, supply shocks happen in specific industries all the time, and as climate change heats up, there is no telling what widespread crises could envelop the global economy. As such, there is no reason not to create anti-price-gouging powers so that Harris may be ready to address the next crisis as it happens.

    Second, the price level of food has stayed high, even as producer profit margins have increased. As Teachout  (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) explained, anti-price-gouging legislation is tailored specifically to limit these excess profits, not higher prices. While food prices will inevitably react to higher inflation rates, the issue Harris seeks to address is the bad-faith corporations who take advantage of a crisis to reap profits.

    Between January 2019 and July 2024, food prices for consumers increased by 29%. Meanwhile, profits for the American food processing industry have more than doubled, from a 5% net profit margin in 2019 to 12% in early 2024. Concerning retailers, the FTC found that

    consumers are still facing the negative impact of the pandemic’s price hikes, as the Commission’s report finds that some in the grocery retail industry seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further raise prices to increase their profits, which remain elevated today.

    In other words, Harris’s proposal would certainly apply in today’s economy. While the price level has steadied for consumers, it has declined for grocers. This is price gouging, and this is what Harris seeks to end.

    Gimmicks and pandering

    Once the media simultaneously conceded that inflation is over, and continued to claim inflation is a political problem, a new angle was needed to find Harris’s motivation for proposing such a controversial policy. What was settled on was an appeal to the uneducated electorate.

    Barro’s headline in the Atlantic (8/16/24) read “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart.” He claimed that the anti-price-gouging plan “likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics,” but will appeal to the voters, who “in their infinite wisdom” presumably know nothing about the economic realities governing their lives.

    The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) wrote that Harris, “instead of delivering a substantial plan…squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.” Steven Kamin, writing in the Hill (8/23/24), rued “what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.”

    Denouncing Harris’s policies as pandering to the uneducated median voter, media are able to acknowledge the political salience of inflation while still ridiculing Harris for trying to fix it. By using loaded terms like “populist,” pundits can dismiss the policy without looking at its merits, never mind the fact that the proposal has the support of experts. As Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/19/24) pointed out in relation to Harris’s proposal, “just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”

    If a publication wishes to put the kibosh on a political idea, it is much easier to dismiss it out of hand than to legitimately grapple with the people and ideas that may defend it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to assume the role of the adult in the room, and belittle a popular and beneficial policy as nothing more than red meat for the non–Ivy League masses.

    Inflation and economic policy are complicated. Media coverage isn’t helping.

    Perhaps the second easiest way to dismiss a popular policy is to simply obfuscate the policy and the relevant issues. The economics behind Kamala Harris’s proposed agenda are “complicated,” we are told by the New York Times (8/15/24). This story certainly did its best to continue complicating the economic facts behind the proposal. Times reporters Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek wrote that

    the Harris campaign announcement on Wednesday cited meat industry consolidation as a driver of excessive grocery prices, but officials did not respond on Thursday to questions about the evidence Ms. Harris would cite or how her proposal would work.

    Has the meatpacking industry become more consolidated, contributing to “excessive grocery prices”? The New York Times (8/15/24) couldn’t be bothered to do basic reporting like checking the USDA website—which, in addition to showing clear consolidation, also noted that evidence suggests there have been “increased profits for meatpackers” since 2016.

    Generally, when the word “but” is used, the following clause will refute or contradict the prior. However, the Times chose not to engage with Harris’s concrete example and instead moved on to critiquing the vagueness of her campaign proposal. The Times did the reader a disservice by not mentioning that the meat industry has in fact been consolidating, to the detriment of competitive market conditions and thus to the consumer’s wallet. Four beef processing companies in the United States control 85% of the market, and they have been accused of price-fixing and engaging in monopsonistic practices (Counter, 1/5/22). However to the Times, the more salient detail is the lack of immediate specificity of a campaign promise.

    Another way to obfuscate the facts of an issue is to only look at one side of the story. A talking point espoused by commentators like Rampell is that the grocery industry is operating at such thin margins that any decrease in prices would bankrupt them (Washington Post, 8/15/24). Rampell wrote:

    Profit margins for supermarkets are notoriously thin. Despite Harris’s (and [Elizabeth] Warren’s) accusations about “excessive corporate profits,” those margins remained relatively meager even when prices surged. The grocery industry’s net profit margins peaked at 3% in 2020, falling to 1.6% last year.

    This critique is predicated on Harris’s policies constituting price controls. Because Harris is proposing anti-price-gouging legislation, the policy would only take effect when corporations profiteer under the cover of rising inflation. If they are truly so unprofitable, they have nothing to fear from this legislation.

    The other problem with this point is that it’s not really true. The numbers Rampell relied on come from a study by the Food Marketing Institute (which prefers to be called “FMI, the Food Industry Association”), a trade group for grocery retailers. The FTC, in contrast, found that 

    food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs.

    Yale economist Ernie Tedeschi (Wall Street Journal, 8/20/24) also “points out that margins at food and beverage retailers have remained elevated relative to before the pandemic, while margins at other retailers, such as clothing and general merchandise stores, haven’t.” In other words, if you look at sources outside of the grocery industry, it turns out the picture for grocers is a little rosier.

    British economist Joan Robinson once wrote that the purpose of studying economics is primarily to avoid being deceived by economists. It takes only a casual perusal of corporate media to see that, today, she is more right than ever.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Paul Hedreen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Know Your Friends: 100th Episode Mailbag

    Matt and Sam answer listener questions for their 100th episode—and hear from friends of the podcast, new and old.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • WSJ Calls for Keeping Judiciary in Shadows

     

    Election Focus 2024A New York Times investigation (9/15/24) has given us great insight into Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who—unlike the president and the speaker of the House—enjoys a great deal of shielding from press scrutiny. The paper reported that when a flurry of cases about the January 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol reached the court, the “chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited [former President Donald] Trump.”

    The paper’s investigation drew “on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders” from all partisan stripes. They spoke, reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak said, “on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.”

    It was splashed on the cover of the Sunday print edition for good reason: The Supreme Court is a mysterious institution, and Roberts has long been thought of as a more temperate and prudent judicial conservative, a breed apart from the partisan hacks appointed by Trump. The investigation gives us some illustration of what happens behind closed doors, and drives home the point that Trump has benefited legally from the normal channels of American power, not just the followers of his MAGA cult.

    ‘Damaging to the comity’

    WSJ: John Roberts Gets His Turn in the Progressive Dock

    The Wall Street Journal (9/15/24) called the New York Times report (9/15/24) on the Trump immunity deliberations “slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times.”

    Roberts is probably not a happy man these days. Joining him is the Wall Street Journal, which continues to drive home the point that Supreme Court operations, for the sake of the republic, must be hidden from the public and remain a murky affair. Anyone shining the light too brightly is burning through the Constitution.

    In an editorial (9/15/24), the paper said that the most “damaging to the comity at the court…are leaks about the internal discussions among the justices.” The editorial board said that an “account of the private conversation among the justices after an oral argument…is a betrayal of confidence that will affect how the justices do their work.” It speculated that this “leak bears the possible fingerprints of one or more of the justices.”

    Much of the editorial is a defense of the conservative justices in the Trump cases, as is the paper’s partisan lean. But it goes further, saying that the “intent” of the Times investigation “is clearly to tarnish the court as political, and hit the chief in particular.” It went on:

    The story in the Times is part of a larger progressive political campaign to damage the credibility of the court to justify Democratic legislation that will destroy its independence. That this campaign may have picked up allies inside the court is all the more worrying. We are at a dangerous juncture in American constitutional history, and Mr. Trump isn’t the only, or the greatest, risk.

    In the rest of the Murdoch-owned press, the New York Post editorial board (9/16/24) republished snippets of the Journal editorial and Fox News (9/16/24) also bashed the leaks.

    ‘Malice aforethought’

    WSJ: The Public Has a Right to Know Who Leaked the Dobbs Draft

    For Alan Dershowitz (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/22), the public doesn’t have a right to know that their reproductive rights are about to be taken away, but they do have a right to know who would dare inform them of such a thing.

    A news article painting the Supreme Court as a politicized part of government in 2024 is a little like a scientific inquiry into whether water is wet (CounterSpin, 5/19/23), and it’s easy to disregard the Journal’s anger at the Times as a mixture of partisan feuding and journalistic envy.

    But something else is at work: The Journal has a track record of advocating that the court operate without public scrutiny. When Politico (5/2/22) reported that a draft court decision would soon overturn Roe v. Wade, the Journal went into attack mode.

    Trump-defending legal scholar Alan Dershowitz took to the Journal (10/30/22) to advocate finding out who the leaker was, saying, “Learning and disclosing the source of the leak would strengthen the high court by preventing future breaches.” In a later piece (2/1/23), Dershowitz asserted that “the argument for compelled disclosure is strong because the source didn’t seek to expose any wrongdoing by the government.”

    In direct response to the Politico report, the Journal editorial board (5/3/22) called the leak “an unprecedented breach of trust, and one that must be assumed was done with malice aforethought.” It added that the response to the report was “intended to intimidate the justices and, if that doesn’t work, use abortion to change the election subject in November from Democratic policy failures.” A Journal op-ed (6/24/22) called the leak an “act of institutional sabotage.”

    Sheltered from citizens

    What is going on here is a seemingly bizarre, but not unprecedented, case of a journalistic institution opposing the actual act of real journalism. When the Guardian (6/11/13) reported on widespread National Security Agency surveillance, thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, or when Chelsea Manning was sentenced for leaking intelligence information to Wikileaks (PBS, 8/21/13), a few journalists absurdly asserted that both the leakers and the outlets acted irresponsibly in exposing secret documents (FAIR.org, 5/1/15, 1/18/17, 5/25/17,  4/1/19).

    But other than spot news, journalism is the publishing of materials that weren’t meant to be public. Reporters commonly get their scoops because someone in power gave them a heads up that shouldn’t have happened—a tip on a grand jury indictment, details of an upcoming corporate merger, etc.

    Like its campaign against the leak to Politico, the Journal’s outrage against the Times story isn’t just rooted in its allegiance to conservative policy-making in all three branches of government. The editorial reaction here is the defense of the idea that the court is not a normal branch of government, that it is an esoteric council of secret elites who must operate in the shadows away from the citizenry and, of course, the press.

    In other words, the Journal is against, of all things, journalism that exposes how powerful institutions function.

    Featured image: New York Times photo illustration from its report (9/15/24) on Chief Justice John Roberts’ deliberations.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Study: To US Papers, ‘Identity Politics’ Is Mostly a Way to Sneer at the Left

     

    Election Focus 2024Following the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times’ “Critic’s Notebook” (8/23/24) published an analysis of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pantsuit choices during the event.

    “For the most important speech of her life, the presidential candidate dressed for more than identity politics,” read the subhead.

    “In the end, she did not wear a white suit,” the piece began, later explaining the linkage between the color and its symbolism of women’s solidarity. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman outlined the significance of Harris’ navy blue suit choice in accepting the Democratic nomination.

    New York Times: Kamala Harris, Outfitting a New Era

    The New York Times (8/23/24) said that Kamala Harris came to her convention speech “dressed for more than identity politics.”

    “Ms. Harris made a different choice. One that didn’t center her femininity—or feminism (that’s a given)—but rather her ability to do the job,” Friedman wrote, as if those points were mutually exclusive.

    A politician’s fashion choices are undoubtedly symbolic. Friedman has also recently published pieces about Donald Trump’s use of his suits to define patriotism (6/14/24), JD Vance’s use of his beard to portray traditional masculinity (7/18/24) and Tim Walz’s use of rugged clothing to define his “regular guy” image (8/22/24).

    In each of these instances, the white male politician is using his style to communicate a message about his—and his constituents’—identities. But only in the piece about Harris’ clothing choice does Friedman use the term “identity politics,” lauding her for not defaulting to “when in doubt, women wear white!”

    In fact, a FAIR study of US newspapers found the overwhelming majority of times the vague term “identity politics” was mentioned, it was referring to Democrats and the left.

    What is identity politics?

    Even though the right has taken to derogatorily using it against the left, “identity politics” is commonly understood to mean forming political alliances based on identities like religion, ethnicity and social background.

    That definition applies equally to MAGA Republicans’ explicit or implicit appeals to white, Christian and traditional gender identities as it does to the left’s emphasis on ethnic, sexual and religious minorities. The DNC and RNC’s pep-rally atmospheres are both designed to project unity under political—and politicized—identities.

    But a FAIR study of newspaper coverage during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic national conventions found that news media largely peddle the right-wing application of the term. A search of Nexis’ “US Newspapers” database for the phrase “identity politics” during July 14–21 and August 18–25  turned up 52 articles (some of which were reprints in multiple outlets) that related to the major parties, their conventions, and their presidential and vice presidential candidates.  Forty-five of those articles used the term to refer to Democrats and the left, four used the term to refer to Republicans and the right, and three referred to both groups.

    When Identity Politics is Mentioned in US Newspapers, Which Party Is Being Talked About?

    A New York Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd (8/23/24) was one of the 45 articles that associated “identity politics” with Democrats and/or the left. It applauded Harris for how little she discussed her identity, except for promising that she’d sign a bill restoring abortion rights.

    “Aside from that, she barely talked about gender and didn’t dwell on race, shrewdly positioning herself as a Black female nominee ditching identity politics,” Dowd wrote.

    Harris “dwelling” on her race and gender—as someone who would be the first woman, first South Asian and second Black president in the country’s history—would have been poor judgment, Dowd implied.

    Arizona Republic: Arizona mom shares 'everyday Americans' struggles at RNC: What she said

    “While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics,” the Arizona Republic (7/16/24) quoted an RNC speaker, “we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God.”

    However, in two Arizona publications (Arizona Republic, 7/16/24, 7/19/24; Arizona Daily Star, 7/20/24), another woman emphasized her lived experience as “a single mother” to uphold her support of Trump—without the term “identity politics” being assigned to her. Instead, Sara Workman, one of the “everyday Americans” who spoke at the RNC, was quoted assigning it to Democrats:

    “While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics, we are here tonight because we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God,” she said.

    The irony of criticizing “identity politics” while invoking a line in the Pledge of Allegiance that was added to the oath in 1954 to assert the country’s Christian supremacy was lost on the outlets that published this quote.

    Similarly, a piece referencing Vance playing up his “working-class roots” and “rags-to-riches” upbringing not only didn’t acknowledge the “identity politics” in such a presentation, but granted space to another Republican source to use the label derogatorily against the left (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/17/24). RNC committee member Harmeet Dhillon, was quoted saying Trump’s decision to pick the white, male Vance instead of “a woman or a minority” was “a sign of maturity and confidence in our party being able to succeed based on our ideas, not on identity politics.”

    The ‘balance’ double standard

    Another concerning idea echoed in the press was the assertion that Harris, simply by being a woman of color, would alienate white male voters, and therefore thank goodness she chose a white man as her running mate!

    Detroit Free Press: COMMENTARY 5 things Harris can do at DNC to make this Michigan never-Trump Republican vote Democrat

    In the Detroit Free Press (8/22/24), a Republican wrote that Harris needed to “commit to ending identity politics” to get her vote.

    In a commentary for the Detroit Free Press, headlined “Five Things Harris Can Do at DNC to Make This Michigan Never-Trump Republican Vote Democrat” (8/22/24), guest columnist Andrea Bitley listed “commit[ting] to ending identity politics” as one of her stipulations. It’s “historic” that Harris is a “woman of color,” Bitley wrote, then connected that to an important qualification: “However, returning to the heart and soul of democracy and broad-based politics that don’t play favorites with niche groups will make casting my vote easier.”

    Bitley’s implication is that being Black, South Asian or a woman itself requires special effort to avoid pandering to identity groups—and ignores Donald Trump’s playing favorites with the extremely niche group of billionaires he counts himself among.

    Before Harris officially became the Democratic nominee and announced Walz as her running mate, the Lexington Herald Leader (7/21/24) in Kentucky discussed the possibility of another white man, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, becoming the VP pick.

    “If you’re looking to balance a ticket that’s headed by the first Black and South Asian woman presidential nominee, then having a young white guy provides pretty good balance,” Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political journalist and observer, told the outlet. He added, “We live in an era of identity politics, and his identity is a white guy.”

    The New York Times (7/21/24) also reported:

    Well aware of the cold reality of identity politics, Democrats assume that if Ms. Harris, the first Black and Asian American woman to be vice president, were nominated to the presidency, she would most likely balance her ticket with a white man.

    In other words, the press regularly advises Harris to avoid identity politics at all costs—except when the identity being favored is white male.

    These pieces did at least acknowledge that white and male are identities, but didn’t acknowledge the double-standard of Harris being called to “balance” her ticket out with a white man, when the last 43 of 46 presidencies have been held by white men with white male running mates.

    Both-sidesing

    Boston Globe: America Is at a Turning Point, Yet Again

    Some say Donald Trump is a “threat to democratic values”; others say “identity politics” (and federal regulation) are the “true threat” (Boston Globe, 7/21/24).

    Meanwhile, the Boston Globe equated the dangers of “identity politics” to Trump’s threat to democracy. Guest columnist (and former Washington bureau chief) David Shribman (7/21/24) quoted Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner:

    The Republicans believe the country is halfway to the Soviet gulag. The Democrats believe the country is halfway to Adolf Hitler. They both see this election in apocalyptic terms.

    Shribman continued:

    Both sides—those who believe Donald Trump represents a threat to democratic values, and those who believe that identity politics and an inclination toward a highly regulatory federal government are the true threat—consider this year’s election a moment that will define the country for a generation.

    People on the left believe Trump’s America is “halfway to Adolf Hitler” because many of his supporters are literal neo-Nazis. They believe Trump is a threat to democratic values because he encouraged his followers to carry out a deadly insurrection on the Capitol after he could not accept that he lost the 2020 election, and he is preparing to overturn the 2024 vote.

    People on the right see the US as “halfway to the Soviet gulag” because…Democrats want you to acknowledge slavery and respect they/them pronouns?

    This false equivalence is dangerous, and it is difficult to understand how white supremacy, a worldview based entirely on race, is not considered “identity politics” in this case.

    Rare mentions of the right

    NYT: On Cat Ladies, Mama Bears and ‘Momala’

    Tressie McMillan Cottom (New York Times, 8/19/24): J.D. Vance’s evasions on his “childless cat ladies” line “reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.”

    Out of the four articles that used the term “identity politics” to refer to the right, three were from New York Times writers.

    In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (8/19/24) referred to the “egregious right-wing identity politics” in the context of Vance’s uncreative—and Gileadean—attacks on “childless cat ladies.” The Times‘ TV critic (7/19/24) also referenced the performance of macho male identity politics at the testosterone-laden displays at the RNC, saying, “This is what male identity politics looks like.”

    Lydia Polgreen interrogated the derogatory application of the term “DEI candidate” to Harris, arguing that if Harris is a “DEI candidate,” so is Vance (New York Times, 7/21/24). Polgreen argued:

    All politics is, at some level, identity politics—the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country.

    Pointing out that white is a race, male is a gender and identity plays into all politics are arguments missing from most of the coverage, which failed to truly interrogate what people really mean when they apply these terms only to people of color and other minorities.

    The fourth piece applying “identity politics” to the right came from the right-wing Washington Times (7/16/24) under a headline declaring that Black Republican speakers at the RNC “Put Identity Politics to Rest”—after leaning on their family “histories” that included slavery, cotton picking and “the  Jim Crow South.” “That was where the identity politics ended,” the paper assured readers.

    Invisible identities

    Race theorists like john a. powell have long interrogated the idea of whiteness and maleness being treated as “invisible” defaults:

    White people have the luxury of not having to think about race. That is a benefit of being white, of being part of the dominant group. Just like men don’t have to think about gender. The system works for you, and you don’t have to think about it…. The Blacks have race; maybe Latinos have race; maybe Asians have race. But they’re just white. They’re just people. That’s part of being white.

    San Diego Union Tribune: Biden Is Gone. What Is Next?

    Harris as vice president is a “symptom” of the Democrats’ “perspective…based on identity politics.” (San Diego Union Tribune, 7/21/24).

    This belief that the normal, default human form is white and male is what allows people like Tom Shepard, a longtime San Diego political consultant quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune (7/21/24), to imply that Harris being chosen for the 2020 ticket as vice president is merely a symptom of the Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics, and one of the “fundamental problems” with the party’s policy:

    The Democratic Party, for all of its strengths, has over the last several decades kind of developed a perspective that is based on identity politics, and the reason that Kamala Harris was on the Democratic ticket as vice president is, at least in part, a symptom of that approach.

    It’s the same reason why terms like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), “diversity hire” and “identity politics” are used derogatorily against people of color, women and sexual minorities, disabled people and other underrepresented groups that dare to attempt to achieve equity with white men (CounterSpin, 8/8/24; FAIR.org, 7/10/21).

    Without specificity in definition and equal application to either party’s politicking based on identities, “identity politics” becomes yet another dog-whistle used against those who simply dare to not be white or male.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Carbon Capture Leaks Can Be Deadly

    Last week in Illinois, a carbon capture project was found to be leaking.

    Carbon capture is the process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from where it is being released, such as a power plant or refinery.

    Though most of the carbon being captured is used to pump out more oil, small amounts are being stored underground. In this case, the CO2 must be compressed and liquified, so that it can be transported through pipelines to injection wells. Carbon capture utilization and storage system description outline diagram. Labeled educational scheme with CO2 gas injection underground in soil pipeline vector illustration. Emission dioxide solution

    The leak happened at an injection well – which is where compressed carbon dioxide is pumped underground. This is the first injection well for permanent geologic storage in the United States.

    The cause? Corrosion. 

    The leak occurred about five miles outside of a critical aquifer. Leaks like this put underground aquifers at risk, jeopardizing sources of drinking water. That’s because an increase in CO2 can cause leaching of lead and arsenic contained in rocks into the groundwater. 

    It’s the reason that in Australia, farmers led the charge and got carbon storage banned in the country’s largest groundwater basin.

    We know that carbon capture isn’t an effective climate solution, and is being used by the oil and gas industry to greenwash their business. However – as this leak shows – the problem is even worse, given the risk to public health and safety posed by carbon capture projects. 

    It’s not just injection wells that can leak. In the United States, there have been over 100 leaks or ruptures on existing carbon pipelines since 2004. In response, numerous counties have passed temporary moratoriums on carbon pipelines given the health and safety risks. 

    Carbon capture projects are being proposed across Canada. The largest project is being pushed for by the Pathways Alliance – a coalition of the largest tar sands companies. They’re proposed storage site is two times the size of the city of Calgary – and will require nearly 20 injection wells.  

    Yet, little information is being shared with impacted Indigenous communities and other frontline communities about the types of risks these projects introduce.

    Clearly, it’s not a matter of if carbon capture facilities leak, but rather when. 

    The post Carbon Capture Leaks Can Be Deadly appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • What Did ABC Think Voters Needed to Hear From Harris and Trump?

     

    Election Focus 2024The questions ABC News‘ moderators asked in the September 10 presidential debate they hosted between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump could be faulted for not doing much to illuminate many of the issues important to voters. They did, however, ask some surprisingly pointed questions about perhaps the most important issue in this election—the preservation of democratic elections themselves.

    And in sharp contrast to CNN, which hosted the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden in June, ABC‘s David Muir and Linsey Davis made at least some effort to offer real-time factchecking during the debate.

    Economy & healthcare

    Linsey Davis and Donald Trump

    Asked by ABC’s Linsey Davis if he had a healthcare plan, Donald Trump replied, “I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.”

    On the economy—which was identified, along with “the cost of living in this country,” as “the issue voters repeatedly say is their number one issue”—ABC‘s Muir asked only a handful of specific questions. He started out by asking Harris a question that he said Trump often asks his supporters, and which was famously asked by Ronald Reagan during a 1980 presidential debate: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”

    Aside from that rather open-ended query, the only specific questions ABC asked about the economy concerned tariffs, a favorite topic of Trump’s. Muir asked the former president whether “Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs,” while he asked Harris to explain why “the Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place.” (The skepticism of both questions reflected corporate media’s traditional commitment to the ideology of “free trade.”)

    The healthcare questions both candidates got from Davis were superficially similar—”Do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?” to Trump, and “What is your plan today?” for Harris. But Trump’s question was set up by noting that “this is now your third time running for president,” and that last month, when asked if he now had a plan, he said, “We’re working on it.”

    Davis prefaced her query to Harris by noting that “in 2017, you supported Bernie Sanders’ proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run healthcare system”—following the insurance industry-promoted terminology of “government-run” vs. “private,” rather than “public” vs. “corporate” (FAIR.org, 7/1/19).

    Another question had the same theme of citing earlier, more progressive positions Harris had taken when running for president in 2019—on fracking, guns and immigration—and seemingly asking for reassurance that she had indeed changed her mind on these issues: “I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?” The line of question reflects corporate media’s preoccupation with making sure that Democrats in general and Harris in particular move to the right (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

    Abortion

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate

    Trump tells Kamala Harris that her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth.”

    Addressing abortion, a motivating issue for many voters, Davis laid out Trump’s changing positions on abortion rights and an abortion ban, then posed the question:

    Vice President Harris says that women shouldn’t trust you on the issue of abortion because you’ve changed your position so many times. Therefore, why should they trust you?

    While both candidates frequently avoided giving concrete answers, Davis pressed Trump on his position, asking whether he would “veto a national abortion ban,” and again asking, “But if I could just get a yes or no”—helping to make his refusal to answer clear to viewers.

    Perhaps in response to Trump’s claim that Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth,” Davis then asked Harris if she would “support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion.” It’s a bit of a trick question without context, though. Many people say they oppose abortions later in pregnancy; media have long bought into the right-wing notion that “late-term” abortions are beyond the pale (Extra!, 7–8/07). But in practice, abortions later than 15 weeks are exceedingly rare and largely occur because of medical necessity or barriers to care (KFF, 2/21/24)—a nuanced reality that Davis’s question left little space for.

    Immigration & race

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate

    Harris looks on as Trump claims, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats…. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

    Despite Trump’s repeated invocation of a border crisis and vilification of immigrants, ABC only asked him two immigration questions. One asked how he would achieve his plan to “deport 11 million undocumented immigrants”; the other followed up on Harris’s charge that Trump killed a border bill that, as Muir stated, “would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.” Neither of the questions challenged Trump’s narrative of the “crisis” or the idea that further militarizing the border is necessary. (See FAIR.org, 6/2/23.) (ABC did counter Trump’s outrageous claim that immigrants were eating people’s pets.)

    In his sole immigration question to Harris, Muir offered a right-wing framing:

    We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

    The media, like Trump, regularly neglect to put immigration numbers in context. Border crossings have increased markedly under Biden, but so have deportations and expulsions, as Biden kept in place most of Trump’s draconian border policies (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

    And the suggestion that Biden “waited…to act” further paints a false picture of the Biden administration as not having “tough restrictions”—immigrant rights advocates called them “inhumane”—prior to 2024.

    The one question introduced as being about “race and politics” addressed Trump’s race-baiting of Harris: “Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?”

    Democracy

    David Muir questions Donald Trump

    Recalling the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, ABC‘s David Muir asks Donald Trump, “Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?”

    On the crucial issue of democratic rule, ABC did not pull many punches. To introduce his first question on the theme, Muir addressed Trump:

    For three-and-a-half years after you lost the 2020 election, you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks, leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you lost by a whisker, that you, quote, didn’t quite make it, that you came up a little bit short. Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?

    When Trump claimed he said those things sarcastically, and argued that there was “so much proof” that he had actually won in 2020, Muir challenged his claims directly, first noting, “I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” then continuing:

    We should just point out as clarification, and you know this, you and your allies, 60 cases, in front of many judges….and [they] said there was no widespread fraud.

    (Trump interrupted this factcheck with another lie, falsely declaring that “no judge looked at it.”)

    Muir continued his pushback against Trump in his subsequent question to Harris:

    You heard the president there tonight. He said he didn’t say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election that was won by President Biden and yourself.

    Muir’s question to Harris highlighted Trump’s recent social media post declaring that those who allegedly “cheated” him out of victory would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”

    Harris was also asked to respond to Trump’s charge that his numerous prosecutions reflect a “weaponization of the Justice Department.”

    International policy

    Donald Trump debates Kamala Harris

    Harris tells Trump that “the American people have a right to rely on a president who understands the significance of America’s role.”

    ABC devoted the widest variety of specific questions to the topic of international policy—often with the implicitly hawkish perspective debate moderators tend to take (FAIR.org, 12/14/15, 2/11/20, 12/26/23). Muir set up his questions on Ukraine with a prelude that left little doubt what the right answers would be:

    It has been the position of the Biden administration that we must defend Ukraine from Russia, from Vladimir Putin, to defend their sovereignty, their democracy, that it’s in America’s best interest to do so, arguing that if Putin wins he may be emboldened to move even further into other countries.

    Muir then asked Trump, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”—evoking an aspiration for a military victory in the conflict that has seemed improbable at least since the failure of Kiev’s counteroffensive in the spring of 2023 (FAIR.org, 9/15/23). Failing to get the response he wanted, Muir reframed the issue as a matter of making America great: “Do you believe it’s in the US best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no?”

    For her part, Harris was asked, “As commander in chief, if elected, how would you deal with Vladimir Putin, and would it be any different from what we’re seeing from President Biden?”—and also, in response to a false Trump claim, “Have you ever met Vladimir Putin?”

    Muir asked about the end of the US’s 19-year occupation of Afghanistan—presented as a shameful moment, as he invoked “the soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal.” His questions to both Harris and Trump implicitly criticized their connection to the war’s end: “Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?,” Harris was asked, while Trump was asked to respond to Harris’s accusation that “you began the negotiations with the Taliban.”

    ABC‘s moderators asked three questions about the Gaza crisis, which was framed as “the Israel/Hamas war and the hostages who are still being held, Americans among them,” though Muir went on to note that “an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead.”

    Harris was asked how she would “break through the stalemate”—and also to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Muir asked Trump how he would “negotiate with Netanyahu and also Hamas in order to get the hostages out and prevent the killing of more innocent civilians in Gaza.”

    ABC asked one climate crisis question, addressed to both candidates. It took climate change as a fact and asked what the candidates would do to “fight” it. While not a particularly probing question—and disconnected from the debate’s discussions of fracking—it’s a slight improvement over previous presidential debates that have ignored the vital topic altogether (FAIR.org, 10/19/16, 9/22/20).

    Factchecking

    David Muir corrects Donald Trump

    Muir points out to Trump that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

    The presidential debate between Trump and then-candidate Biden was hosted in June by CNN, which made the remarkable decision to not attempt any factchecking during the live event (FAIR.org, 6/26/24). Post-debate factchecks turned up countless fabrications by Trump (and several by Biden), but that was entirely overwhelmed in the news coverage by pundits’ focus on Biden’s obvious stumbles.

    ABC took a different tack, choosing to counter a few of Trump’s more noteworthy lies. Post-debate analysis counted at least 30 falsehoods from Trump and only a few from Harris; Muir and Davis called out Trump four times and Harris none.

    Muir and Davis intervened on some of Trump’s most outlandish fictions. For instance, when Trump claimed that immigrants were “eating the pets of the people that live” in the communities they moved to, Muir noted that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

    In addition to Muir’s pushback against Trump’s election fraud lies, Davis countered Trump’s insistence that Democrats support “executing” babies, drily noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

    ABC also challenged a Trump falsehood that many prominent media outlets continued to propagate long after it was no longer even remotely true (FAIR.org, 11/10/22, 7/25/24): that violent crime is “through the roof.” (As Muir pointed out, “The FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”)

    Of course, the vast majority of Trump’s lies went unchecked, demonstrating the inherent failure of the debate format when one participant exhibits a flagrant disregard for honesty (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).

    ABC did not explicitly correct any of Harris’s claims, in part because there was less misinformation in her rhetoric. Some of Harris’s more dubious statements were of the sort that are often found  in corporate media, such as her allusion to the claim that Covid originated from a Chinese lab, when she blamed President Xi Jinping for “not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid.” There is no more evidence for this than there is for immigrants eating pets in Ohio—but as it’s a media-approved conspiracy theory (FAIR.org, 10/6/20, 6/28/21, 7/3/24), one would not expect debate moderators to call her out on it.

    Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Stories of Hope, September 2024: Defending Democracy

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

  • A Nicaraguan journalist in exile speaks truth to power with a bold, new book

    In 2018, Nicaragua’s citizens rose up against the repressive, authoritarian government of President Daniel Ortega, who has been in power since 2007. The largely student-led demonstrations were met with heavy force from the police and paramilitary groups, leaving hundreds dead and imprisoned, and thousands wounded. In the thick of this violence and mayhem was Gabriela …

    Source

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

  • BBC, bias and Gaza: A partial study of impartiality

    The much-publicised Asserson Report, which claims the BBC is “heavily biased against Israel”, flies in the face of other specialist and academic studies, writes MRC co-founder Des Freedman. This article was originally published by Byline Times and is republished here with kind permission.

    Last week’s Sunday Telegraph was dominated by a headline that the ‘BBC “has breached rules 1,500 times” over the Gaza war’. This referred to a new Report by the Israeli-based lawyer Trevor Asserson which alleged multiple breaches of the BBC’s impartiality regulations and and claimed that the BBC ‘was heavily biased against Israel’.

    The story was extensively covered in right-wing news outlets including the Express, Mail, Sun, Jewish Chronicle and Spiked as well as on GB News and Talk TV. It played out internationally with coverage in the Jerusalem Post, New York Post and Variety.

    Yet a comprehensive analysis of UK news reporting of Gaza published by the Centre for Media Monitoring in March 2024 that came to quite different conclusions – that there have been repeated misrepresentation of Palestinian perspectives – received no attention at all in mainstream media at the time. 

    This is the balance of power when it comes to UK media coverage of Gaza.

    Artificial Intelligence

    The Asserson Report is no lightweight document. It runs to 199 pages with a separate 188-page supporting document and claims to have used both human and artificial intelligence to assess some nine million words of BBC output from 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024.

    But there is little intelligence in the analysis itself and instead pages and pages of charts that attempt to prove just how badly the BBC has treated Israel and its supporters.

    This is partly a result of a flawed methodology which relies on a very naïve conception of AI,  not least its claim that ChatGPT is ‘not subject to inherent human subjective judgement’ (p. 23) and is instead an ‘unbiased proxy for the “casual everyday audience for news” that does not have an opinion on the conflict’ (p. 123). AI may not have an opinion on the conflict but those asking the questions do and, in any case, its language models are only as good as the content they depend on, a significant proportion of which is generated by major news organisations such as the New York Times who certainly do have skin in the game.

    The Report’s reliance on ‘human sympathy analysis’ (carried out here by both humans and AI) is also flawed. Of course there was likely to be significant amounts of sympathy towards Palestinians at a time, after 7 October, when it was they who were being bombed, starved and forcibly required to leave their homes. Not even the mainstream media could fail to notice this. The Report’s finding that the ‘sympathy analysis showed a very marked pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli imbalance across all principal television news programmes’ (p. 41) is therefore hardly surprising and reveals the frustration of pro-Israeli voices that anyone should be sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians under siege rather than a breach of impartiality across four months of coverage.

    The background of the Report’s authors is revealing. Asserson himself is a long-time critic of the BBC’s coverage of Israel and has partnered with a series of Israeli lawyers and data scientists organised via a group called Research for Impartial Media (RIMe). There is no information about this group other than that its convenor, Dr Haran Shari-Narkiss is a neuroscientist whose most recent paper is on the ‘Stability and Flexibility of Odor Representations in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb’.

    Crucially, it appears that no media researchers or indeed journalists were part of the research team and there is no reference at all in the nearly 400 pages of documents to studies, such as the CMM one, that have found systematic bias against Palestinians in mainstream media coverage of Israel and Palestine.

    Asymetry

    The Report is based around allegations that the BBC’s coverage has been marked by absences, inaccuracies and linguistic failures all of which amount to a serious breach by the Corporation of its commitment to impartiality.

    Asserson’s crucial argument is that BBC coverage of Gaza is marked by multiple omissions. This includes the BBC’s failure systematically to refer to Hamas as a ‘terrorist organisation’ (p. 82). Yet not only is there no international journalistic consensus on whether to label Hamas using this term but presumably Asserson would not wish every mention of the state of Israel to be preceded by a reference to ‘plausibly genocidal’ as per the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Ruling. The Report even includes a chart showing that the BBC is more likely to describe the West Bank as ‘occupied’ than to equate Hamas with terror (p. 84) which is, once again, odd given that there is an international consensus that the West Bank is indeed occupied.

    A further omission according to the Report is that the BBC does not sufficiently acknowledge what it claims as the Hamas-induced lack of journalistic freedom inside Gaza (p. 78). Perhaps the more obvious omission is that the Report totally fails to mention the forced exclusion by Israel of all foreign journalists from Gaza. While the Report claims that Freedom House has praised Israel’s press freedom (p. 81), it neglects to mention that Reporters Without Borders, for example, placed Israel 101st out of 180 states in its press freedom ranking, noting that ‘more than 100 journalists were killed in six months in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces…Disinformation campaigns and repressive laws have multiplied in Israel.’ This is not mentioned in the Report.

    The Report then condemns the BBC for not giving equal treatment to ‘war crimes’ perpetrated by both Israel and Hamas (p. 87). This shows not just its pro-Israel sympathy – for example the Report acknowledges ‘that there are more Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths, but those deaths are not obviously evidence of War Crimes’. Really? It also reveals an extraordinary lack of understanding of journalism given that the ongoing (though of course not the only) story for effectively 123 of the 124 days of the sample was about Israeli attacks on Gaza as opposed to Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October. Not surprisingly, there were more stories linking Israel to war crimes, genocide and breaches of international law because this what was taking place each day after 7 October.

    Indeed, news organisations like the BBC have been extremely reluctant to describe Israel’s assault as a ‘genocide’ (unlike their willingness to do so in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). The situation changed only when the South African government brought evidence to the ICJ in January 2024 which then found that there was a ‘plausible’ case that genocide was taking place. However, that was a brief interlude after which BBC stories about a genocide taking place in Gaza were few and far between.

    The Report also states that the BBC’s reporting neglects to acknowledge the ‘existential   threat to Israel’ and fails ‘to explain the military threats to Israel’ (p. 91). This is a pretty extraordinary claim given the amount of airtime provided to IDF spokespeople and government ministers (a fact acknowledged in the Report) and the reluctance of the BBC and other news organisations consistently to recognise the context of occupation.

    This failing was clearly set out in the BBC’s own 2006 Thomas Report – ironically namechecked by Asserson (p. 192) in his own Report despite coming to very different conclusions – when it spoke of the ‘asymmetry’ between the situation faced by Israel and that of the Palestinians. Thomas noted the BBC’s

    Failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation. Although this asymmetry does not necessarily bear on the relative merits of the two sides, it is so marked and important that coverage should succeed in this if in nothing else.

    (Asserson Report, p. 31)

    Asserson then goes on criticise the BBC for relying on Hamas’ own figures for casualties and its failure to raise concerns about Hamas as a reliable source (p. 119). Given that the IDF refuses to give any indication of the deaths it has caused and that the Gaza Ministry of Health figures are widely accepted around the world (though not of course by Israel) as the best measure of casualties, this is an entirely disingenuous criticism.

    Ambiguity

    Finally – and perhaps most brazenly – the Report condemns the ‘obscure or ambiguous language’ (p. 127) used to report on Israeli as opposed to Palestinian casualties. This ignores the many studies that have been carried out, such as the one produced by the Centre for Media Monitoring, that concluded that Palestinian deaths were reported using ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel)’. The CMM Report found that more than 70% of the use of terms like ‘atrocities’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘massacre’ referred to Israeli victims while ‘emotive language’ was deployed when speaking about Israeli, rather than Palestinian, victims.

    Researchers from the Glasgow University Media Group analysed BBC reporting of Gaza from 7 October to 4 November 2023 and also found that

    ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could be seen in relation to ‘massacre’, ‘brutal massacre’ and ‘horrific massacre’ (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinians deaths).

    Far from finding that BBC reporting was more likely to legitimise Palestinian perspectives, the researchers concluded that ‘[f]or the BBC and other western media to simply repeat the propaganda of one side while denying legitimacy to the other will in the long run to nothing for the cause of peace’.

    These are just some of the disingenuous claims made throughout the Report though there are also some genuinely baffling findings.

    For example, the Report claims that Newsnight broadcast ‘no programmes positive to Israel during the Reporting Timeframe’ (p. 41). Even the briefest glance at Newsnight’s output would refute this. For example, it devoted a whole programme on the war on 13 October which featured a range of pro-Israel voices including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, General Amir Avivi from the IDF and the British journalist Hadley Freeman talking about the anxious state of the Jewish population in London.

    What exactly would a programme ‘positive to Israel’ look like? Presumably, one without any Palestinian voices. Or perhaps the fact that the episode was titled ‘Desperation in Gaza’ was enough to show its pro-Palestine bias.

    The Report also condemns the BBC’s choice of interviewees. Its Executive Summary notes the ‘heavy bias in favour of interviewing civilians amongst Palestinians, with few government or army figures. Far more Israeli interviewees were government or army representatives’ (p. 7).

    Actually, conventional academic scholarship associates the use of accredited sources (such as government and army representatives) with authority and power. For Asserson, however, this is a problem because ‘official personnel’, ie the ones giving the orders to bomb Gaza, are likely to ‘evoke less sympathy’ than civilians who are ‘often viewed as innocent and vulnerable’ (p. 58).

    Yet ‘impartial’ reporting would not involve an equal distribution of ‘sympathy’ to both Israeli and Palestinian populations but would reflect the simple fact that, for the vast majority of the sampling period, it was Palestinian civilians who were being bombed and not Israelis.   

    Focusing on the ‘elite’ status of Israeli interviewees is also an absurd decision given that the Israeli state is much bigger and has a far more extensive PR operation than the virtually non-existent machinery of a non-existent Palestinian state.

    The Report’s conclusion that the BBC was overwhelmingly biased in its coverage of Gaza flies not only in the face of other specialist and academic reports and studies but reflects the authors’ frustration that there was ‘sympathy’ for a civilian population under attack. The authors appear to think that the BBC’s acknowledgement – however constrained and intermittent – that a deadly assault on Gaza was taking place was in itself a breach of impartiality regulations. In reality, and despite the Israeli government’s best effort to suppress this coverage by preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza, the fact that these awful scenes have made their way into public consciousness, is actually thanks more to brave reporting from Palestinian journalists inside Gaza than it is to a BBC that is often reluctant to criticise Israel for its actions, let alone to describe them as genocidal.

    This piece originally published by Byline Times and republished here with kind permission.

    The post BBC, bias and Gaza: A partial study of impartiality appeared first on Media Reform Coalition.

    This post was originally published on Media Reform Coalition.

  • There are no coincidences in climate science

    Sometimes you have to work hard to make the connection between events to tell a story, and sometimes the events just connect themselves. 

    The first story was trumpeted as great news! Alberta’s oil producers had outdone themselves and sucked four million barrels of oil a day out of the ground to set a new record for July. About 80 per cent of that output is from the tar sands bitumen, one of the most polluting forms of energy on earth. 

    All in all, this milestone is nothing to cheer about. 

    The second story was that July 2024 was the hottest month on record for both Edmonton and Calgary, with Edmonton recording 11 days above 30 degrees. The average is just two. 

    HeatwaveHotter temperatures, year over year, created the conditions for the Lesser Slave Lake, Fort MacMurry (the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history), and Jasper fires, along with multiple devastating hail storms, a four-year-and-counting drought, and the second most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, the 2013 southern Alberta flood. 

    The final story is from the Narwhal, which revealed, through documents obtained through the province’s freedom of information process, that the Minister of Utilities, Jason Nuedorf’s, office was bullying senior bureaucrats in the province’s independent electricity regulator to lie to support the government of Alberta’s justification for a moratorium on renewable energy projects. 

    TAKE ACTION: Tell the Alberta government it’s time to turn the power back on for Alberta’s clean energy future! 

    Red button that says "take action"

    So, let’s take a crack at connecting these dots. 

    While the Town of Jasper was burning as a result of fires made more probable and intense as a result of a warming climate, Alberta was producing a record amount of carbon-intensive tar sands oil, and doing its best to quash any internal opposition to a politically motivated, anti-free enterprise moratorium on vitally important clean energy. 

    Sound about right? 

    Of course, these are just three examples that happened to cross my desk within an hour of each other. Unfortunately, there are more. Lots more. 

    The Alberta government is opposing any meaningful policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that the federal government is attempting to implement. Of the policies being proposed by the feds, it’s hard to pick the one that the province of Alberta hates the most, but the cap on oil & gas emissions would have to be in the top two, along with the clean energy regulations. 

    Meanwhile, oil and gas companies spend millions of dollars to convince Canadians they care about climate change while at the same time, they lobby governments to delay or stop actions that reduce their pollution. 

    We need to hold polluters accountable for driving climate change. 

    It’s time the government of Alberta oil and gas companies took responsibility to reduce pollution and prevent further weather disasters that impact millions and cost billions to clean up.

    We are seeing this happen across Canada but in Alberta, it has the added sting of irony that while we celebrate big polluters’ accomplishments and crush the aspirations of clean energy companies, we suffer the consequences of our actions with record-breaking heat, wildfires and incalculable tragedy again and again. 

    That’s not a coincidence, that’s just connecting the dots. 

    The post There are no coincidences in climate science appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • NCAC 50th Anniversary: Standing Shoulder to Shoulder with Woodhull

    Since its founding in 2003, Woodhull Freedom Foundation has been an unwavering champion of free speech, recognizing it as the cornerstone of our fundamental human right to sexual freedom. As a human rights organization, we have consistently stood at the forefront of the battle against censorship, particularly in defense of sexual expression, which has […]

    The post NCAC 50th Anniversary: Standing Shoulder to Shoulder with Woodhull appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • AJWS Grantee UNIR Fights Exploitative Gold Mining in Haiti by Building Bridges across Latin America

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

  • Rich Kruger: The Nightmare on Oil Street

    The impacts of climate change are downright frightening. But the villain behind one of Canada’s biggest tar sands companies can also cause a real jump-scare. Introducing Rich Kruger – the nightmare on Oil Street. 

    Rich Kruger is the CEO of Suncor, a company responsible for nearly 35 million metric tons of climate pollution annually – the equivalent of 8.3 million gas-powered cars driving for a year. He was called to testify at Parliament Hill twice in the last year and was grilled by members of parliament about the company’s emissions and failure to act responsibly on climate change. 

    Suncor is also a founding member of the Pathways Alliance, a fossil fuel industry association made up of six major tar sands producers and the newest major lobby group. This lobby group has been trying to re-brand tar sands companies as they are working on climate solutions. It spent millions of dollars on its rebranding ad campaign and is lobbying hard for false solutions like carbon capture so that the oil companies can continue justifying increased oil production. We’ve called out their misinformation, and they’re currently under investigation by the Competition Bureau. 

    That’s not all. After the government passed new rules to crack down on greenwashing, the Pathways Alliance scrubbed its website and social media of all of its climate and carbon capture content. It didn’t have the evidence needed to back up their claims. The Pathways Alliance and Suncor have both opposed these new greenwashing rules in online statements. 

    That’s why we need your help to make sure the greenwashing rules don’t get weakened. The Competition Bureau is conducting a public consultation right now in order to develop guidelines for how the rules will be enforced. Will you send a letter demanding fair and strong enforcement of anti-greenwashing rules?

     

    Red button that says "take action"

     

     

    • Suncor Energy Inc: 2023-Present
    • Imperial Oil Ltd: 2013–2019 
    • ExxonMobil Corp: 1981-2013

    Villain Career Profile

    Rich Kruger has a long and storied career in oil. In fact, he’s been developing oil for longer than the lives of millennials and Gen Zers, who will deal with the escalating consequences of the climate crisis fuelled by Kruger’s companies. He began working at Exxon in a technical role in 1981. He then rose through the ranks at Exxon during the time when the company was successfully suppressing and denying climate science and spending big on climate denial and political obstruction. He joined regional leadership in 1999, became executive VP Production in 2006, and President of Exxon Production and VP of Exxon Corp in 2008. During the 1990s, Exxon promoted disinformation about the certainty of climate science despite findings by Exxon and Imperial Oil (a subsidiary of Exxon) confirming climate science in the 1970s-1980s. It wasn’t until 2007 that Exxon publicly acknowledged that climate change was occurring and largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Despite this, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, it continued to publicly cast doubt about climate science, fund climate denial groups and think tanks and promote fossil fuel expansion and use.

    Rich Kruger then brought his world-class expertise in resource exploitation to the tar sands in Canada, becoming CEO at Imperial Oil in 2013. During his tenure as the head of Imperial, Kruger was critical of government environmental policy, such as the clean fuel standard, and he had little interest in branching out into renewable energy. When he advocated against the Alberta government’s climate action, he said it wasn’t about opposing then-premier Notley’s climate plan but rather his objection to putting any sort of production limit on the industry, a position he maintains to this day. 

    Kruger had retired from Imperial but couldn’t resist the call of money and that sweet, sweet crude. His dedication to producing climate pollution was so strong that he came out of retirement for the role of CEO at Suncor – and for $37.8 million in compensation in his first year. That same year, Suncor weakened its climate reporting by ending the inclusion of scope three greenhouse gas emissions (the emissions that come from burning the oil and gas that Suncor sells and profits off of). Their climate report does not include a 1.5-degree scenario, the threshold to which countries have agreed to limit global warming. This followed previous advocacy by the company that argued against rules that would force companies to share how climate change risks disrupting their business plans and finances. 

    Suncor is the oil company with the highest annual emissions in Canada. While Suncor has been a top polluter for many years, there was a time when the company was also involved in renewables. Suncor sold off its wind and solar assets in 2022, and now Kruger is taking up the mantle of resisting the energy transition. In one of his first meetings with shareholders, Kruger explicitly said Suncor had been too focused on the energy transition and, under his leadership, would prioritize short-term profits for shareholders through oil and gas. 

    Now that Rich Kruger is back in the game, he’s fighting for Suncor’s right to pollute the planet for profit. With his years of tireless service to fossil fuels, Kruger is proud to be one of the top Climate Villains in Canada. 

    TOP SKILLS

    CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

    Polluting like a Pro

    climate villains ribbonRebranding the Oil Lobby with Greenwashing 

     

    climate villains ribbonHelping the Rich get Richer

     

    • Kruger has made clear that Suncor’s interests are growing profit for their shareholders through doubling down on fossil fuel expansion. During one of the first shareholder meetings in his role as CEO he said “I very much believe in making money. We are in the business to make money and as much of it as possible, and everybody starting with me needs to see how they do that.”
    • A recent academic study demonstrated how ownership of Canada’s largest oil sands companies, including Suncor, is highly concentrated among just 14 prominent shareholders who collectively control significant share value. Over 70 per cent of these major shareholders are foreign entities. That means most of the financial value extracted from oil sands don’t stay in Canada, but flow through private investment firms to large shareholders elsewhere. 

    climate villains ribbonFailing Workers 

     

    The Climate Villains campaign highlights the leaders of the fossil fuel industry that play key roles in expanding and financing climate-wrecking fossil fuels, blocking climate action, and spreading disinformation. These villains are more concerned about their profits and wealth than the future of the planet, and that’s why we’re profiling the ‘resume’ of each climate villain. 

     

    The post Rich Kruger: The Nightmare on Oil Street appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Not Reporting on Trump as a Threat to Democracy Is Also a Threat to Democracy

     

    Election Focus 2024New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the  Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”

    Sulzberger details Trump’s many efforts to suppress and undermine critical media outlets during his previous presidential tenure, as well as the more recent open declarations by Trump and his allies of their plans to continue to “come after” the press, “whether it’s criminally or civilly.” He documents the ways independent media have been eroded in illiberal democracies around the world, and draws direct links to Trump’s playbook.

    You might expect this to be a prelude to an announcement that the New York Times would work tirelessly to defend democracy.  Instead, Sulzberger heartily defends his own miserably inadequate strategy of “neutrality”—which, in practice, is both-sidesing—making plain his greater concern for the survival of his own newspaper than the survival of US democracy.

    ‘Wading into politics’

    WaPo: How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America

    New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) says his paper is “taking active steps to prepare ourselves for a more difficult environment” regarding press freedom—but not, crucially, by reporting on Donald Trump as though he were a clear and present danger to democracy.

    “As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence,” Sulzberger writes, “I have no interest in wading into politics.”

    It’s a bizarre statement. Newspapers, including the Times, regularly endorse candidates. Presumably, then, he’s referring to the “news” side of the paper, rather than the opinion side.

    But, even so, you can’t report on politics without wading directly into them. Which political figures and issues do you cover, and how much? (See, for example: media’s outsize coverage of Trump since 2015; media’s heavy coverage of inflation but not wage growth.) Which popular political ideas do you take seriously, and which do you dismiss as marginal? (See, for example, the Times‘ persistent dismissal of Bernie Sanders’ highly popular critiques.) These decisions shape political possibilities and set political agendas, as much as the Times would like to pretend they don’t (FAIR.org, 5/15/24).

    Sulzberger goes on (emphasis added):

    I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. 

    Sulzberger is always raging against critics who, he claims, want him to skew and censor his paper’s reporting (FAIR.org, 5/19/23). The Times must instead be steadfastly “neutral,” he claims. But those very political coverage decisions that media outlets make on a daily basis make it impossible for the outlets to be neutral in the way Sulzberger imagines.

    Neutrality could mean, as he suggests, independent or free from the influence of the powerful in our society. This is possible—if difficult—for media outlets to achieve. Yet the Times, like all corporate media, doesn’t even try to do this.

    Instead, the Times seems to take neutrality as not appearing to take sides, which in practice means finding similar faults among both parties, or not appearing overly critical of one party or the other (FAIR.org, 1/26/24). This strategy didn’t work particularly well when Republicans and Democrats played by the same set of rules, as both parties took the same anti-equality, pro-oligarchy positions on many issues.

    But it’s particularly ill-suited to the current moment, when Republicans have discarded any notion that facts, truth or democracy have any meaning. If one team ceases to play by any rules, should the ref continue to try to call roughly similar numbers of violations on each side in order to appear unbiased? It would obviously be absurd and unfair. But that’s Sulzberger’s notion of “neutrality.”

    It would be brave for a media outlet like the Times to take a stand and oppose Trump’s candidacy. But it would make a big difference if the paper would even do the bare minimum of calling fouls fairly rather than evenly.

    ‘A fair and accurate picture’

    Sampling of New York Times headlines about Biden's age

    Sampling of New York Times headlines raising doubts about President Joe Biden’s age (Campaign Trails, 9/5/24). The Times highlighted more than two dozen stories about President Joe Biden’s age in a single week (CSSLab, 3/24/24); since his withdrawal from the race, the paper has not spotlighted similar concerns about Donald Trump’s competence.

    “It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away,” Sulzberger continues. “At the Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it.”

    A “full, fair and accurate picture” of the election and its stakes are exactly what the Times‘ critics are asking for. Instead, the Times offers a topsy-turvy world in which crime is still a top concern (it’s at its lowest level since the 1960s—FAIR.org, 7/25/24)); inflation has been brought down to near the Fed’s ideal rate of 2%, but it’s still “a problem for Harris” (7/23/24); the nation’s “commitment to the peaceful resolution of political difference” is primarily threatened by neither party in particular (FAIR.org, 7/16/24); and Biden’s age merits more headlines as a danger to the country than Trump’s increasing incoherence–or his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the election.

    It’s not “giving up independence” for a news outlet to try, through its reporting, to prevent a tyrant from taking over the country. There’s no reason the paper can’t put the threats posed by Trump on its front page every day while continuing to offer careful scrutiny of the Harris campaign. But it’s also worth asking: What good is a “free” press if it can’t protect democracy before it’s gone?

    ‘Balance’ at all costs

    Sulzberger concludes by explaining how he plans to confront the looming challenge Trump presents—by preparing for lawsuits and harassment and, most crucially, by not taking sides:

    through it all, treating the journalistic imperative to promote truth and understanding as a north star — while refusing to be baited into opposing or championing any particular side. “No matter how well-intentioned,” Joel Simon, the former head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote last month on what he’s learned studying attacks on press freedom, “such undertakings can often help populist and authoritarian leaders rally their own supporters against ‘entrenched elites’ and justify a subsequent crackdown on the media.”

    Does Sulzberger actually think that by writing a several-thousand-word warning against Trump’s threat to press freedom, but simultaneously announcing that he will resolutely oppose “taking sides” in this election, he is somehow inoculating himself against right-wing populist hatred of the Times, and any future retribution from a Trump presidency?

    The far right has learned how to exploit this central weakness of corporate media, its adherence to “balance” at all costs. Sulzberger might think he’s working to fend off Trump’s attack on an independent press corps; in fact, he’s playing right into Trump’s hands, and working to speed along his own paper’s irrelevance.

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

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Democratic Futures

    A preview of our Fall 2024 issue.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • This activist collective is nurturing the future of African democracy

    “We live in different African countries, but the challenges and the conditions of life are almost the same,” says Sylvain Saluseke, the operations team lead at Afrikki. Sylvain and fellow activists are using those shared experiences to build a future that’ll benefit them all, their communities and entire nations. In 2016, three African youth activist …

    Source

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

  • Spring 2024 Fossil Fuel Lobbying Surge: Enbridge’s Intense Efforts Lead the Pack

    As the second quarter of business reporting came to a close, the oil and gas industry posted another round of sky-high profits. But that’s not all they were up to in Q2.

    We track how frequently the fossil fuel industry lobbies the federal government, and we’re ready to share some Q2 updates as well. 

    The fossil fuel lobbyists had 289 meetings with the federal government between April and June. 

    That brings the total to 546 meetings so far in 2024.

    Top Fossil Fuel Industry Lobbyists (Q2: April – June)

    1. Enbridge had 41 meetings
    2. Pathways Alliance had 25 meetings
    3. CAPP and Imperial Oil tied, with 22 meetings each

    Ministers lobbied most (Q2: April – June)

    1. Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland took 3 lobby meetings with the fossil fuel industry. She met with Pembina Pipeline Corporation, Cedar LNG, and BHP Inc. in April. 
    2. Minister of Innovation, Science & Economic Development Francoise Philippe Champagne took 3 lobby meetings in Q2. In April he met with Enbridge, and in June he met with Cedar LNG and Pembina Pipeline Corporation. 
    3. President of the Treasury Board Anita Anand took 2 meetings in May with Imperial Oil. Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development Mary Ng took 2 meetings with Enbridge, one in April and one in May. Minister of Labour and Seniors Seamus O’Regan took one meeting in April with Exxon and one meeting in June with CAPP.

    Ministries most lobbied (year to date) 

    1. Natural Resources Canada: 164 meetings
    2. Privy Council Office: 98 meetings
    3. Environment and Climate Change Canada: 90 meetings

    When we collect lobbying data, we also see which Members of Parliament are being lobbied the most. 

    MPs who took the most lobby meetings between April – June

    • Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs had 10 meetings
    • Conservative MP Andrew Scheer and Liberal MP George Chahal had 7 meetings each
    • Conservative MP Chris Warkentin had 6 meetings

    How does this compare to lobbying by the fossil fuel industry last year? I’m glad you asked! We’ve compiled all the insights about oil and gas lobbying in 2023 in a new report Big Oil’s Big Year: A Summary of Big Oil’s 2023 Federal Lobbying. Visit the webpage to learn more. 

    TAKE ACTION TO STOP BIG OIL FROM POLLUTING OUR CLIMATE

    Red button that says "take action"

    The post Spring 2024 Fossil Fuel Lobbying Surge: Enbridge’s Intense Efforts Lead the Pack appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • CPJ, others reject 7-year prison sentence for Brazilian journalist over blog

    The Committee to Protect Journalists joined the 10 other members of Brazil’s Coalition in Defense of Journalism in condemning the August 12 sentencing of journalist Ricardo Antunes to seven years in prison for slander, libel, and defamation after he published five blog posts about a businessman.

    The posts dealt with an investigation into an alleged corruption scheme involving the businessman, a company, and Caruaru City Hall in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, in the organization of events.

    “Criminal justice is not the appropriate response to dealing with slander, defamation and libel. These should be addressed solely through civil lawsuits, to enable the balancing of rights and preserving freedom of expression and of the press,” the statement said.

    Read the full statement in English here.

    Read the full statement in Portuguese here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Bookstore Brouhaha Confuses Whose Speech Is Being Curtailed

     

    NYT: A Bookshop Cancels an Event Over a Rabbi’s Zionism, Prompting Outrage

    The New York Times (8/21/24), knowing that “outrage” sells, saves for the last paragraph the information that a supposedly canceled author turned down an offer to reschedule his talk in the same bookstore.

    Author and journalist Joshua Leifer is the latest scribe to be—allegedly—canceled. A talk for his new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled when a member of the store’s staff objected to Leifer being joined by a liberal rabbi who was also a Zionist, although still critical of Israel’s right-wing government (New York Times, 8/21/24).

    Leifer’s book is doing well as a result of the saga (Forward, 8/27/24). Meanwhile, the bookstore worker wasn’t so lucky, when the venue’s owner said “he would try to reschedule the event” and said “that the employee” responsible for canceling the event “‘is going to be terminated today’” (New York Jewish Week, 8/21/24).

    It’s worth dissecting the affair and its impact to truly assess who can gain popular sympathy in the name of “free speech,” and who cannot, and how exactly Leifer has portrayed what happened.

    ‘One-state maximalism’

    Atlantic: My Demoralizing but Not Surprising Cancellation

    To Joshua Leifer (Atlantic, 8/27/24), opposition to platforming Zionists is “straightforwardly antisemitic.”

    Leifer is a journalist who has produced nuanced coverage of Israel and Jewish politics for Jewish Currents, the New York Review of Books and other outlets. Reflecting on the bookstore affair, Leifer said in the Atlantic (8/27/24) that Jewish writers like him are in a bind because of the intransigence of the left, saying “Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.”

    He added:

    My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on US military aid—as beyond the pale.

    The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing US policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.

    No ‘destruction’ required

    For me, personally, canceling Leifer’s talk was a bad move. No one would have been forced to listen or attend, and if someone wanted to challenge the inclusion of a moderate Zionist at the event, they could have done so in the question and answer session. Speech should usually be met with more speech.

    But Leifer is somewhat disingenuous about a “zero-sum” game that forces people into the “morally repulsive” concept that “requires Israel’s destruction.” Many anti-Zionists and non-Zionists believe that the concept of one state, “from the river to the sea,” means a democratic state that treats all its people—Arab, Jew and otherwise—equally. Leifer’s counterposing being “committed to Israel’s existence” with “one-state maximalism” suggests that the Israel whose “existence” he is committed to is one in which one ethnic group is guaranteed supremacy over others. People who are committed to the preservation of Israel as an ethnostate are probably going to have a hard time being in a “big tent” with those who “work to end its domination over Palestinians.”

    It is understandable, given the context, that some people might object to a Zionist speaker on a panel while a genocide is being carried out in Zionism’s name. Would the Atlantic have reserved editorial space if an avowed Ba’athist was booted from a panel on Syria?

    And Leifer is hardly being censored, and he has much more than a “little room to maneuver.” He has access to a major publisher and the pages of notable periodicals, and is pursuing a PhD at Yale University. His book sales are doing fine, and the event’s cancellation has, if anything, helped his reputation. (It got him a commission at the Atlantic, after all.)

    Free speech protects everyone

    New Republic: The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism

    Osita Nwanevu (New Republic, 7/6/20) writes in defense of “freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values.”

    Meanwhile, a bookstore worker who expressed a questionable opinion got fired. Free speech debates tend to value the importance and rights to a platform of the saintly media class—the working class, however, doesn’t get the same attention, despite the fact that “free speech” is meant to protect everyone, not just those who write and talk for a living.

    And expressing the opinion that a bookstore should not be promoting Zionism is just as much a matter of free speech as advocating Zionism itself. The First Amendment doesn’t stop publications, university lecture committees, cable television networks and, yes,  bookstores from curating the views and speech they want to platform. As FAIR has quoted Osita Nwanevu at the New Republic (7/6/20) before:

    Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

    Whose speech is punished?

    Science: Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict

    eLife‘s Michael Eisen’s approval of an Onion headline (“Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”) was deemed to be “detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build” (Science, 10/23/23).

    Worse is what Leifer leaves out. While his event should not have been canceled, he fails to put this in the context of many other writers who have suffered more egregious cancellation because they exercised free speech in defense of Palestinians. Those writers include Masha Gessen (FAIR.org, 12/15/23), Viet Thanh Nguyen (NPR, 10/24/23) and Jazmine Hughes (Vanity Fair, 11/15/23).

    New York University has “changed its guidelines around hate speech and harassment to include the criticism of Zionism as a discriminatory act” (Middle East Eye, 8/27/24). Artforum fired its top editor, David Velasco, for signing a letter in defense of Palestinian rights (New York Times, 10/26/23). Dozens of Google workers were “fired or placed on administrative leave…for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel’s government” (CNN, 5/1/24). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor of the science journal eLife (Science, 10/23/23) because he praised an Onion article (10/13/23).

    Leifer’s Atlantic piece erroneously gives the impression that since the assault on Gaza began last October, it has been the pro-Palestinian left that has enforced speech norms. A question for such an acclaimed journalist is: Why would he omit such crucial context?

    ‘Litmus test’

    Atlantic: The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending

    The lead example of “antisemitism on…the left” offered by the Atlantic (3/4/24) was a high school protest of the bombing of Gaza at which “from the river to the sea” was reportedly chanted.

    Leifer has allowed the Atlantic to spin the narrative that it is the left putting the squeeze on discourse, when around the country, at universities and major publications, it’s pro-Palestinian views that are being attacked by people in power. The magazine’s Michael Powell (4/22/24) referred to the fervor of anti-genocide activists as “oppressive.” Theo Baker, son of New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, claimed in the Atlantic (3/26/24) that his prestigious Stanford University was overrun with left-wing “unreason” when he came face to face with students who criticized Israel.

    Franklin Foer used the outlet (3/4/24) to assert that in the United States, both the left and right are squeezing Jews out of social life. Leifer is now the latest recruit in the Atlantic’s movement to frame all Jews as victims of the growing outcry against Israel’s genocide, even when that outcry includes a great many Jews.

    Leifer’s piece adds to the warped portrait painted by outlets like the New York Times, which published an  op-ed (5/27/24) by James Kirchick, of the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, that asserted that “a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” A great many canceled pro-Palestine voices would have something to add to that, but they know they can barely get a word in edgewise in most corporate media—unlike Kirchick, Foer or Leifer.

    Leifer’s event should not have been canceled, and I would have been annoyed if I were in his position, but he continues to have literary success and is smartly cashing in on his notoriety. He should not, however, have lent his voice to such a lopsided narrative about free speech.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Canada keeps handing public money to Big Oil’s favourite greenwashing schemes

    carbon capture

    A new report released by Oil Change International reveals that governments worldwide have already wasted over $40 billion on carbon capture and hydrogen projects. Just five countries account for 95 per cent of those billions – and Canada is third on the list. 

    Around 45 per cent of the $40 billion was spent on projects that are not even operational today. That’s why we say the money was wasted. 

    Even worse, these governments are gearing up to waste billions more – over $300 billion more!

    That money could be put to much better use – like installing heat pumps in everyone’s homes to decrease energy bills. 

    Why is government spending on carbon capture & hydrogen a problem?

    The climate crisis impacts us all. The unnatural storms, fires, droughts and heatwaves across Canada this year will keep getting worse until we transition off of fossil fuels and the pollution they create.

    Fossil fuel companies are promoting hydrogen and carbon capture as dangerous distractions from real climate action. Take carbon capture. Did you know it has a 50-year track record of failure, and these projects are also dangerous for local communities? 

    Hydrogen also carries serious health and safety risks. Plus, due to the high costs of these ineffective technologies, they can increase consumer prices depending on where they’re implemented. That’s the last thing we need as people struggle with affordability. 

    These false solutions will not help in reducing pollution,  but they will enable oil and gas companies to continue pumping out polluting fossil fuels and earning massive profits. Watch the video below to learn more.

    So how much is Canada spending?

    The report tracks approximately $5 billion in spending to date. However, tallying the full amount distributed by federal and provincial governments is challenging – so this is very likely an underestimate.In fact, our research a few years ago found governments in Canada had spent $5.8 billion.

    The really concerning issue is the amount of money that governments in Canada have already committed to spending in the future. Since 2020, governments in Canada have announced new policies that could funnel over $55 billion into carbon capture and hydrogen – more than any other country except the United States. However, if you compare the amounts to the size of the economy, the handouts in Canada are proportionally much, much higher!carbon capture

    End all subsidies to fossil fuel companies now

    Oil and gas companies are pretending to care about the climate crisis and are pushing dangerous distractions, like carbon capture and hydrogen,  that they claim can help address greenhouse gas emissions – while allowing them to keep extracting and burning dirty fuels. But these are the same companies that for decades have lied about climate science and discredited climate solutions. Their real goal is to continue business as usual in order to make as much money as they can, while they pollute the planet.

    We need to turn off the taps to the most polluting industry in Canada.

    Take Action: Stop Big Oil from Polluting our Climate!  Red button that says "take action"

     

    The post Canada keeps handing public money to Big Oil’s favourite greenwashing schemes appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Nature as Victim: A New Paradigm for Post-Conflict Justice in Colombia

    Image via greenandgrowing.org By Sungeun Choi, Keira J Jones & , Itzia Miravete Veraza  Rethinking Reparation and Restoration for Indigenous Communities and the Environment The Colombian armed conflict’s devastating impact extended far beyond human casualties, reaching into the heart of nature itself and disrupting ancient relationships between indigenous communities and their environment. For over 50 years, the […]

    This post was originally published on Human Rights Centre Blog.

  • Know Your Enemy: Political Fictions

    Matt and Sam talk to Vinson Cunningham about his debut novel Great Expectations, political theater, and Barack Obama.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • US Press Loses Interest as Winners of French Election Aren’t Allowed to Take Power

     

    One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.

    Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.

    NYT: French Far Right Wins Big in First Round of Voting

    When the far-right won the first round of French elections, that was front-page news in the New York Times (7/1/24). When the left won the second round, that was much less newsworthy to the Times.

    It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.

    Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.

    France is in an unprecedented political situation, in which there is no clear governing coalition in the National Assembly. After the snap elections concluded on July 7, the left coalition New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, beating out both Macron’s centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally (RN). (While the sitting president’s coalition won the second-most seats, it actually got fewer votes than either the left coalition or the far right.)

    These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party.

    Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.

    ‘Institutional stability’

    WaPo: France's leftist coalition fumes over Macron's rejection of its candidate to become prime minister

    When someone in a headline “fumes” (Washington Post, 7/27/24), that’s a signal that you’re not supposed to sympathize with them.

    Where US corporate media do comment on Macron’s denial of the election, their framing is neutral or even defensive of the president’s equivocations. Critiques are couched as attacks from the left; one AP piece published in the Washington Post (8/27/24) reports not that Macron is denying an election, but simply that France’s left is fuming:

    France’s main left-wing coalition on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of denying democracy…. Leftist leaders lashed out at Macron, accusing him of endangering French democracy and denying the election results.

    Left unchallenged are Macron’s claims that he is simply trying his best to preserve stability, election results be damned:

    On Monday, Macron rejected their nominee for prime minister—little-known civil servant Lucie Castets—saying that his decision to refuse a government led by the New Popular Front is aimed at ensuring “institutional stability.”

    AP left out of its story the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), the supposedly most objectionable member of the NFP coalition, even offered to accept an NFP government led by Castets, with no LFI members in ministerial roles, to assuage the fears of centrists. This olive branch did not impress AP, which instead relayed Macron’s call for “left-wing leaders to seek cooperation with parties outside their coalition.”

    Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.

    ‘Scorched-earth politics’

    NYT: France’s Political Truce for the Olympics Is Over. Now What?

    To the New York Times (8/23/24), the idea that a left coalition would try to implement the platform it successfully ran on is a “hard-core stance.”

    The New York Times’ reporting (8/23/24) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.”  Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”

    She went on to admit, however, that Castets, the NFP’s choice for prime minister, “has softened her position from its original hard-core stance”—that is, that the coalition would implement the program it ran on—and that “she says she would pursue something more reflective of minority government position.”

    However, the Times continued, “the biggest party in her coalition, France Unbowed, has a history of scorched-earth politics that makes the pledge for conciliation feel thin.” In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.

    The Times seemed to accept an equation between LFI and the RN, which was founded (as the National Front) as an explicitly neo-fascist movement. The paper reported that it was not only a departing minister from Macron’s party, but “many others,” who

    consider France Unbowed and its combative leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, to be as dangerous to France’s democracy as the extreme right.

    The anti-immigrant agenda of France’s extreme right, as represented by the RN, includes repealing birthright citizenship in favor of requiring a French parent and implementing strict tests of cultural and lingual assimilation. Mélenchon’s LFI, in contrast, favors medical aid for undocumented migrants and social support for asylum seekers.

    Despite the Times’ previous reporting (7/9/24) that LFI is a “hostile-to-capitalism” party, the party’s platform only calls for more state intervention in the market economy, with a critique that is more anti–free market dogma than anti-capitalist, per political scientist Rémi Lefebvre.

    Whether supporting intervention in the market is as extreme as supporting ethnic determination of “Frenchness” is left as an exercise for the reader. But according to the French government’s official categorization (Le Parisien, 3/11/24), LFI is categorized simply as “left,” while the RN is indeed categorized as “extreme right.”

    Despite the sparse and incomplete coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, they must be given credit for covering the story at all. A Nexis review of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS NewsHour reveals next to no reporting on Macron’s refusal to name a prime minister, with no critical reporting whatsoever.

    Since July 23, when Castets emerged as the left’s choice, there have been two brief mentions of Macron’s lack of a decision, on CNN Newsroom (7/24/24) and Fox Special Report (8/23/24). Neither program mentioned Castets, much less the exceptional circumstances faced by the French electorate.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A Demonstration of Working-Class Power

    Labor Day was the first national holiday that a social movement both created and persuaded the state and businesses to honor.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Breaking News Alerts Keep Public Posted on Trivia and Trump

     

    Much like the front page, breaking-news newsletters demonstrate which stories news outlets think deserve the most attention. It’s important real estate: By pushing these stories to readers, they influence the way we think about the world, even what in the world we should be thinking about. Even if readers don’t click through, just seeing the headlines can shape our perceptions. And, as a new FAIR study has found, those headlines often feed into predictable patterns that parrot official narratives, and prioritize clicks over well-informed citizens.

    Breaking News: Get informed as important news breaks around the world.

    Outlets like the New York Times promise to send readers alerts about “important news.”

    Most major outlets produce a variety of email newsletters for readers, which have increasingly broad reach. Subscription numbers are generally not made public, but the New York Times‘ top newsletter, the Morning, reportedly has over 5 million readers daily, and CNN advertises over 1 million total newsletter subscribers.

    To see what kinds of stories outlets present to readers as urgently important, FAIR studied four national outlets that offer unpaywalled breaking news email alerts over the course of two months. We subscribed to alerts from the New York Times, USA Today,  CNN and Fox News from April 1 to May 31, 2024, and recorded each alert sent. These outlets advertised that subscribers would receive “24/7 alerts” as the “biggest” and most “important” stories to “stay on top of the news.”

    We excluded the occasional roundups of top stories, as these were outside the “breaking news” format. The Times and USA Today periodically offered op-eds as breaking news alerts, and we did include these. FAIR recorded 630 alerts during the study period.

    We coded each alert by topic (National Politics, International Politics, Business/Economy, Crime, Entertainment, Sports, Health, Science, Disaster, Personal Advice, Miscellaneous) and subtopic (e.g., Gaza Protests, Abortion Rights, Foreign Aid Bill). Seventy-five alerts were assigned to more than one topic; for instance, a story about the trial of a celebrity might be coded as both Crime and Entertainment.

    National politics dominates

    NYT: Stormy Daniels Describes Sexual Encounter With Trump and Is Grilled by His Lawyer

    Trump’s hush money trial, with its titillating details, was the subject of numerous breaking news alerts (New York Times, 5/7/24).

    The outlets put out alerts with varying frequency—USA Today put out the most (224, or almost four per day) and CNN the fewest (83)—but National Politics stories dominated across all outlets, making up 274 (43%) of 630 total alerts. Within these stories, Donald Trump figured prominently, referenced in 121 alerts (44% of all National Politics stories). Eighty-eight of these, or 73% of the total stories about Trump, were about his trials—predominately his criminal trial in Manhattan, which ran through all but the first two weeks of the study period.

    The Times, with 207 alerts sent out overall, devoted the highest percentage of its National Politics alerts (79) to Trump’s legal woes (39%), while Fox, with 116 alerts sent out, afforded them 17 articles of 63 National Politics stories—the smallest percentage of the four outlets (27%). Twice—the day Stormy Daniels testified (5/7/24) and the day the jury announced its guilty verdict (5/30/24)—the Times sent three trial-related alerts to its subscribers over the course of the day.

    President Joe Biden received far less attention in National Politics stories; he was referenced in 35, or 13% of them. Fifteen of these stories were about the election, of which only two (USA Today, 5/28/24; Fox News, 5/1/24) did not also mention Trump.

    Gaza, at home and abroad

    After the Trump trials, the top National Politics topics included the university campus protests for Gaza (41), abortion rights (16) and the foreign aid bill (6). (We coded stories about abortion into the Health category as well.)

    Twenty-six (61%) of the 41 alerts about campus Gaza protests came from Fox News, accounting for 22% of all Fox alerts across categories, making it the outlet’s single most frequent alert topic. On seven days between April 17 and May 3, Fox sent multiple alerts about the protests; its fixation peaked on April 30, when the network sent five such alerts in a single day.

    Fox’s encampment alert subject lines consistently referred to protesters as “agitators,” calling them “anti-Israel” and even “antisemitic” (4/30/24). (The New York Times called them “pro-Palestinian protests,” and USA Today simply referred to them as “protests.”) “Columbia University, Anti-Israel Agitators Fail to Reach Agreement as Unrest Continues” read a typical Fox subject line (4/29/24). “Facilities Worker Says Anti-Israel Columbia University Agitators ‘Held Me Hostage’” read another the next day (4/30/24).

    Fox: King Charles returning to royal duties following cancer diagnosis

    The only Fox News alert (4/26/24) for an international issue other than Gaza was about King Charles’ health.

    There were many other Gaza protests occurring around the country during the study period (Democracy Now!, 4/18/24, 4/24/24, 5/22/24, 5/30/24, 5/31/24), yet only one alert (Fox News, 4/9/24) mentioned any besides those on college campuses.

    The second-most prevalent news category was International Politics, which had 97 alerts (15% of all). Sixty-three of these (65%) pertained to the ongoing Gaza crisis (not including the campus Gaza protests, which were coded as National Politics). Iran was sometimes mentioned in Gaza-related alerts, but it was also featured in eight unrelated alerts (8%) concerning the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Other recurring topics included Ukraine and the Ukraine War (6%), the shooting of the Slovakian president (5%), British elections (3%), China (3%) and Julian Assange (2%).

    Curiously, while Fox advertises its breaking news alerts as keeping subscribers “in the know on the most important moments around the world,” it only produced seven alerts on international issues—six of them on the Gaza crisis. (The other article discussed King Charles’ return to royal duties after his cancer diagnosis.) That’s just one more alert on Gaza during the entire study period than Fox put out on its peak day of breaking news coverage of the encampments. At the other three outlets, International Politics stories were the second most frequent alerts.

    Climate crisis not breaking news

    CNN: Planet endures record-hot April, as scientists warn 2024 could beat heat records for second year in a row

    This CNN story (5/7/24) about climate change breaking heat records was not deemed urgent enough to qualify as breaking news.

    It’s impossible to argue that the climate crisis isn’t an ongoing urgent news story. Yet the Science/Environment category had the fewest number of alerts, at 24, making up just 4% of alerts tracked. And only seven (1%) of the subject lines that appeared in our inbox referred or even alluded to climate-related topics.

    During the study period, there were multiple major climate crisis stories that CNN, USA Today and the Times (but not Fox) reporters covered—but, for the most part, the outlets chose not to include these stories in their breaking news alerts.

    It’s perhaps unsurprising that a right-wing outlet like Fox put out no alerts about climate change; its lone science story (4/8/24) was about the April solar eclipse. But CNN and the New York Times did only marginally better. CNN sent alerts for two Science stories, only one of which (4/15/24) was about the climate crisis: “Ocean Heat Is Driving a Global Coral Bleaching Event, and It Could Be the Worst on Record.”

    At the same time, CNN‘s website reported on extreme ocean temperatures causing mass marine mortalities (CNN, 4/21/24), extreme heat causing health emergencies (CNN, 4/18/24) and April’s record-breaking heat (CNN, 5/7/24), among other climate change–related topics. On the days that these stories were published, however, CNN only sent out National Politics alerts, or simply no alerts at all.

    One of the eight Science stories that the Times pushed was directly about the climate crisis, a story (5/13/24) about federal regulations impacting renewable energy (which we also coded as National Politics). Another Science article (7/3/24) that was not primarily about the climate crisis did mention its role in increasing turbulence experienced on airplane flights.

    The Times does offer a paywalled newsletter for stories about climate, called Climate Forward. But they also have a free newsletter called On Politics, offering election-related news alerts—and that didn’t stop them from promoting eight articles directly related to the 2024 presidential election as breaking news.

    In its online and print editions, the Times reported plenty of stories related to the climate crisis—but, as at CNN, they simply didn’t deem them important enough to send as breaking news alerts. On April 10, the Times published a story about ocean heat shattering records, and on April 15 it covered the coral bleaching event. Neither were sent as alerts.

    NYT: The Best Mattresses for 2024

    The New York Times found mattress reviews more urgent than climate change.

    On May 28, the Times published a piece headlined “Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year”; that story wasn’t deemed “important news” that day by the Times’ breaking news alert team, but the “Best Mattresses of 2024” was.

    All the outlets studied also failed to send out stories about major flooding disasters in Brazil, Afghanistan and Indonesia (Democracy Now!, 5/13/24, 5/14/24), or about the major heat waves in South Asia that killed hundreds of people (Democracy Now!, 5/28/24; CBS News, 5/15/24). All of these crises are major examples of how climate change is affecting people around the world in drastic ways.

    USA Today did best on climate, sending out 13 alerts under the Science/Environment category; four of them discussed climate change, including topics such as carbon emissions and pollution. That’s still less than 2% of the paper’s alerts during the two-month period.

    Corporate outlets have long been more than willing to leave climate change out of their stories about weather phenomenons and natural disasters around the world (FAIR.org, 9/20/18, 7/18/23, 6/28/24).

    According to data published by the Pew Research Center in August 2023, 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat. According to data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication up until the fall of 2023, 64% of the nation is worried about global warming, 58% believe global warming is already harming people in the US, and 70% think that global warming will harm future generations.

    If more than half of the public views global warming and climate change as an urgent issue, why do these major publications not treat it as one?

    Crime, entertainment over economy

    Fox: Alec Baldwin's 'Rust' armorer sentenced to maximum time in fatal on-set shooting

    Many Crime alerts involved celebrities, like one for this Fox News story (4/15/24) about Alec Baldwin.

    Although news media frequently report that the economy is “voters’ top concern,” leading into the 2024 election FAIR identified only 40 news alerts as belonging to the Business/Economy beat—6% of all.

    Fox and CNN suggested to alert subscribers that Crime stories were more than twice as important, making up 21% of Fox‘s alerts and 19% of CNN‘s. (USA Today and the Times only devoted 7% and 4% of their alerts to crime, respectively.) The violent crime rate has actually gone down 26% (and the property crime rate 19%) since President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, according to the New York Times (7/24/24), but media (including the Times) still focus heavily on the topic (FAIR.org, 7/25/24).

    Mass shootings made up 21% of Crime alerts (13) across all outlets, which is not surprising, considering there have already been 348 mass shootings in 2024.

    Celebrity crimes made up a large portion of Crime alerts across all outlets, at 25 (40%) out of 62. Many of these stories were about Alec Baldwin (5), OJ Simpson (5) and Scottie Scheffler (5).

    Fox’s Crime alerts featured headlines meant to catch a reader’s attention—but not provide a lot of information. Take the May 17 news alert from Fox, “Pelosi Hammer Attacker Learns Fate During Sentencing,” for example. Why not include what the sentence was—30 years in prison—in the alert itself?

    On April 15, when three out of four alerts sent out by Fox were about Crime (the fourth was a story about Trump’s hush money trial, coded as National Politics), one was headlined “Search for Kansas Women Takes a Turn as Spokeswoman for Investigators Gives Update.” The “turn” was an announcement that officials had given up hope of finding the missing women alive.

    For its part, the New York Times gave its readers more Entertainment alerts (18) than Economy alerts (14), pushing out 46% of all Entertainment stories tracked in the study. The paper also put out the highest number of Personal Advice (81% of all) and Miscellaneous stories (72%). The Times and USA Today were the only outlets to send out Personal Advice stories as breaking news alerts, such as “The Six Best White Sneakers” (New York Times, 5/15/24) and “Being a Bridesmaid Can Be Expensive. Should You Say Yes or No?” (USA Today, 5/5/24).

    A few New York Times Personal Advice stories (5/15/24, 5/28/24, 5/30/24) were from Wirecutter, the product-review website the Times bought in 2016. The website states at the top of each article that “when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” (This process is explained in a bit more depth here.) In the Times’ annual report, revenue made from Wirecutter commissions is listed as part of “Other Businesses,” a category that made the Times $265 million in 2023. These Wirecutter stories are not urgent news stories—but they do help the Times make a profit off its readers (FAIR.org, 6/17/21).

    Questionable urgency

    NYT: Taylor Swift Has Given Fans a Lot. Is It Finally Too Much?

    Stop the presses! The New York Times (4/22/24) reports that some songs on Taylor Swift’s latest album “sounded a whole lot like others she has already put out.”

    The New York Times and USA Today sometimes considered op-eds newsy enough to dedicate an entire alert to, in addition to their regular “breaking news.” An op-ed about Gmail’s 20th anniversary warranted an alert, just like the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did. An op-ed on the dangers of sexual choking got the same weight as the news of the ICC preparing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. And in both instances, alerts were pushed on the same day within hours of each other.

    The Times also published the most Health stories (21) about seemingly random (rather than breaking news) topics, such as whether oats and apple cider vinegar can really help you lose weight, why we age and tips for a better sex life. (Many of these Health stories were dually coded into Personal Advice.) These types of stories may have surprised readers who subscribed in order to, as the Times advertises, “get informed as important news breaks around the world.”

    Times alerts of questionable urgency were often sent out with no apparent rhyme or reason, in the midst of other, more obviously newsworthy alerts. For example, on April 24, the Times sent out alerts about abortion laws in Arizona and Idaho, and the US secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine—along with a story headlined “Has Taylor Swift Fatigue Finally Set In?”

    The next day, April 25, the Times pushed a story called “‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ and the Science of Birth Order” at 8:37 am, and then another email listed as “The U.S. economy grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a sharply slower pace than late last year.” just six minutes later. The article about “eldest daughter syndrome” was actually published by the Times ten days earlier, making it clear that it wasn’t exactly “breaking” news.

    Many of the Times’ stories we coded as “Miscellaneous” had obvious clickbait headlines, like “A Hiker Was Lost in the Woods. Snow Was Falling. Time Was Running Out” (4/30/24) and “These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement” (5/8/24). The latter was linked to the New York Times Magazine, the Times‘ weekly Sunday magazine that highlights interviews, commentaries, features and longer-length articles—again, not urgent news.

    On May 27, when over 2,000 people died in Papua New Guinea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the tent massacre in Rafah, the Times thought it reasonable to also send alerts about Manhattanhenge, nude modeling and a celebrity obituary that linked to its recently-acquired sports news site, the Athletic. As we’ve seen before (FAIR.org, 6/7/24), the Times enjoys focusing on trending and glamorous topics.

    These media outlets offer newsletters that promise comprehensive news alerts about important breaking stories occurring everywhere. After tallying the topics covered, we can confidently state that that’s not what subscribers are getting.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • NYT Uncritically Reported Israel’s Version of Golan Bombing

    As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

    Israel and the US immediately blamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC, 7/28/24).

    But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.

    NYT: Fears of Escalation After Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field

    The New York Times (7/28/24) matter-of-factly described an explosion of disputed origin as a “rocket from Lebanon.”

    Despite multiple eyewitnesses describing an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor missile falling on the field during the time of the Majdal Shams strike (Cradle, 7/28/24), the New York Times insisted on spotlighting Israeli and US claims in its headlines, rather than genuinely assessing the facts on the ground.

    On July 28, the Times published “Fears of Escalation After Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field,” pinning the blame squarely on Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The next day, reporting on the potential escalations, the Times headline (7/29/24) described the strike as a “Deadly Rocket Attack Tied to Hezbollah.”

    While the July 29 subhead acknowledged that Hezbollah denied responsibility, the assertion in the headline undermined any reference to alternative explanations. Attribution to Hezbollah was then repeated without qualification in the first paragraph of the story.

    Rebroadcasting government talking points not only does a disservice to newsreaders as Israel has a long history of misleading the public, but it also serves Netanyahu’s goals of justifying an escalation against Hezbollah. Predictably, the New York Times did not contextualize accusations of Hezbollah responsibility with information about Israel’s current objectives for wider war. This continues a long trend of US media outlets obscuring and distorting reality in order to downplay Israel’s aggressive regional ambitions (FAIR.org, 8/22/23).

    Israel an unreliable source

    Al Jazeera: Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing: Lies, investigations and videotape

    Even lying about the murder of a journalist doesn’t make Western journalists skeptical of official Israeli claims (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22).

    The first problem is that the New York Times accepts narratives from Israeli military and government officials at face value. From peddling evidence-free claims about Palestinian use of human shields during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 (Amnesty International, 2009; Human Rights Watch, 8/13/09), to dodging responsibility for its assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22), to consistently attempting to conceal its use of illegal white phosphorus munitions across the Middle East (Haaretz, 10/22/06; Human Rights Watch, 3/25/09; Guardian, 10/13/23), the Israeli military has been known to circulate disinformation to the international public for decades. Neither in headlines nor in the text of its pieces does the Times acknowledge this well-established history.

    The current assault on Gaza has made the central role of lies in Israel’s public relations arsenal clearer than ever. As early as October 17, there was controversy over the origin of a rocket strike on the Al-Ahli Arab hospital that killed hundreds of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 11/3/23). In the media confusion, Israel released audio it said captured two Hamas militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by Britain’s Channel 4 news (10/19/23) found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together. In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip to substantiate the notion that it had not committed a war crime.

    In November, Israel laid siege to Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital facility, leaving behind mass graves. In another dubious public relations campaign, Israel justified its assault on Al Shifa hospital by alleging that there was a Hamas command center underneath the facility, and that no civilians were killed in the operation (FAIR.org, 12/3/23).

    NBC: Information missteps have led to questions about Israel’s credibility

    What might be labeled “disinformation” when it comes from an official enemy is called “information missteps” from Israel (NBC, 11/18/23).

    During and after the assault, Israel pumped out high volumes of low-effort lies (NBC, 11/18/23; New Arab, 11/14/23) to convince the public that there had indeed been a Hamas operations base in the basement, going so far as planting weapons in hospital rooms to insinuate Hamas activity in the area (CNN, 11/19/23). In the face of mounting public ridicule, Israel’s official Arabic Twitter account was compelled to delete a staged video of an Israeli actress boosting the Hamas-hospital-occupation theory while pretending to be a Palestinian Al Shifa nurse (France 24, 11/15/23).

    However, after the mainstream outlets expressed skepticism at the claims and acknowledged that Israel had not provided sufficient evidence to back them up (New York Times, 11/17/23; Guardian, 11/17/23), Israel announced that the supposed Hamas base was actually in southern Gaza.

    At the same time as the Al Shifa raid, Israel stormed Rantisi Children’s Hospital, and engaged in similarly preposterous propaganda efforts to justify its attack. Noting the presence of hospital gowns, baby bottles and toilets in the children’s hospital, Israeli spokesperson Daniel Hagari declared that this was proof of hostages in the facility (Jerusalem Post, 11/13/23). Hagari (Al Jazeera, 11/17/23) later pointed to what he said was a handwritten list of Hamas fighters hanging from one of the hospital’s walls, holding that “every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift, guarding the people that were here.”

    But, this was not, in fact, a damning roll call of Hamas fighters, but instead an Arabic calendar. All that appeared on the calendar were the days of the week, though this was unknown to most of Hagari’s largely non-Arabic-speaking audience (Electronic Intifada, 11/14/23).

    Even recently, when Netanyahu visited Washington, DC, the Israeli prime minister gave a speech to lawmakers that was filled with obvious lies, including the contention that during attacks on Rafah, no civilians were killed, save for the two dozen who were murdered in a Hamas weapons depot explosion (New Arab, 7/25/24). This flies in the face of numerous reports detailing fatal bombings and rocket attacks in Gaza’s southernmost city, including a single Israeli missile that killed at least 45 people (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).

    It is not possible that the writers and the editors at the Times—the supposed newspaper of record—are ignorant of this seemingly unending series of deceptions. The decision to uncritically accept the word of the IDF regarding the Golan Heights strike demonstrates a deliberate editorial decision to knowingly advance the deceitful public relations goals of a genocidal state.

    Justifying a wider war

    Cradle: Washington gives Netanyahu ‘full backing’ to expand war on Lebanon: Report

    Two days before the Majdal Sham massacre, Israel was reportedly told that “now is the right time” to escalate its war against Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24).

    In light of Israel’s past lies, serious journalism ought to refrain from regurgitating Israeli claims without significant context or qualification. This is especially true when doing so would advance goals as disastrous as Netanyahu’s current aims. In the case of the Majdal Shams strike, media proliferation of Israeli propaganda manufactures consent for escalating the war on the northern border—something Israel has long stated as its goal, and something American officials have long been concerned about.

    Multiple generals have bragged about Israel’s combat readiness in the north. In February, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that if a ceasefire was reached in Gaza, Israel would increase its fire against Hezbollah, and later said his government is preparing to send Lebanon into the “stone age.”

    Although some in the Israeli press believe that Israel is incapable of handling a front against both Hamas and Hezbollah (Cradle, 6/28/24), statements of readiness have intensified in summer months. The IDF announced on June 18 that it had approved operational plans for a war in Lebanon. Later, Axios (6/24/24) reported that the US envoy to Lebanon warned Hezbollah, “The US won’t be able to hold Israel back if the situation on the border continues to escalate.” Just two days before the Majdal Shams strike, Israeli media reported that Washington had given “full legitimacy” to an IDF campaign in Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24), contrary to apparent earlier efforts to avert a wider war in the Middle East.

    On top of neglecting to acknowledge Israel’s flimsy credibility in their Majdal Shams analysis, Times reporters failed to address this readily available information about Israeli military objectives. By ignoring Israel’s strategic aims, they are ensuring the reader doesn’t encounter further reasons to question Israel’s account about the strike.

    Who fired the rocket? 

    NYT: Israel Says It Killed Hezbollah Commander in Airstrike Near Beirut

    Though it included a pro forma denial from Hezbollah, the New York Times (7/30/24) referred throughout this article to a “rocket attack” rather than an air-defense misfire.

    When reporting on Israel’s “reprisal” assaults on Lebanon following the strike on the soccer field, the New York Times (7/28/24) again asserted Israeli claims as fact, saying in the first paragraph that “a rocket from Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town,” which “prompted Israel to retaliate early Sunday with strikes across Lebanon.”

    Was Lebanon—and implicitly Hezbollah—the source of the explosion that killed the 12 children? The Times does not care to examine this question, which warrants exploration. Israel’s military chief of staff declared that the damage was done with an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket fired by Hezbollah, a claim that was uncritically repeated as fact by the New York Times (7/30/24), despite the lack of independent corroboration. While there has been fighting in the area, and Hezbollah acknowledged that they fired Falaq-1 rockets at the nearby IDF barracks, there is significant reason to doubt that one of these rockets struck the soccer field.

    The Falaq-1 was described by Haaretz (7/28/24) as a munition that targets bunkers. But, images from the aftermath of the attack show that the damage to physical structures was far from bunker-busting. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the Hezbollah expert Saad cited military specialists who told her that “if [Hezbollah] had used the Falaq-1, we would have seen a much larger crater…. It would be much, much bigger and there would be much more destruction.”

    As discussed above, Israel, well-known for planting or fabricating evidence for propagandistic ends, released images of rocket fragments that it alleged were found at the impact site, though the Associated Press (7/30/24) was unable to verify their authenticity.

    A substantial case can be made that the projectile came from the IDF. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, multiple eyewitnesses told Arab news outlets the projectile was a misfired Iron Dome missile (Cradle, 7/28/24; Drop Site, 7/30/24). The New York Times omitted this from its coverage of this event. 

    Contrary to the mythos behind the high-tech defense system, there have already been several cases of Iron Dome missiles falling on populated areas within Israel since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/11/23; Jerusalem Post, 12/2/23, 7/25/24; Times of Israel, 5/4/23, 8/9/24) with many such instances resulting in civilian injuries and deaths. There was even a report of an Iron Dome malfunction near Majdal Shams, months before the recent July strike.

    Bolstering the case for an Iron Dome malfunction, OSINT researcher Michale Kobs noted that the sound profile of the projectile suggested that its speed was constant until it hit the ground. Hezbollah’s projectiles constantly accelerate as they fall on their targets, since they are driven by gravity, whereas Iron Dome missiles are propelled throughout their entire flight.

    For their part, the Druze people in the Golan Heights—an Arabic-speaking religious community which has largely declined offers of Israeli citizenship—repudiated Israel’s displays of sympathy for their slain children, rejecting the use of their suffering to advance Israel’s plans for a broader war (Democracy Now!, 7/30/24). Locals even protested a visit from Netanyahu, chanting “Killer! Killer!” and demanding he leave the area (New Arab, 7/29/24).

    In the Times reporting on the strike, Lebanese and Syrian denials of Hezbollah’s responsibility for the strikes were acknowledged and reported, but portrayed as predictable denials that did nothing to alter the narrative. By omitting the evidence pointing to Israeli responsibility for the strikes, the New York Times assists Israel in yet another propaganda campaign to mislead the public in order to justify further regional strife and bloodshed.

    Featured image: Screenshot from a New York Times video (7/28/24) that claimed to know that the explosion in the Golan Heights was caused by a “rocket from Lebanon.”

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

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Three Women, Endless Impact: Thoughtshop Foundation empowers young leaders to tear down India’s patriarchy

      “We always start with a question — that’s where everything begins,” says Himalini Varma, the director of AJWS grantee Thoughtshop Foundation. Her organization, co-led with her partner Santayan Sangupta in 1993, has transformed the lives of thousands of young women across West Bengal, India, by approaching change through this lens: opening up space to …

    Source

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

  • NYT Can’t Forgive Donahue for Being Right on Iraq

     

    NYT: Phil Donahue, Talk Host Who Made Audiences Part of the Show, Dies at 88

    The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings.

    If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:

    In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.

    Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.

    1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.

    MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.

    2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New York Times (2/26/03).

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Oil and Influence: Analyzing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s 2023 Lobbying

    Have you ever wondered why progress on climate change is so slow despite widespread public support for climate action? How often does the fossil fuel industry try to influence the government’s climate policy decisions? Maybe you’ve even been curious about if Big Oil has lobbied the Member of Parliament representing your community. 

    If any of these questions have ever crossed your mind, then I have great news for you! 

    Figure 1 Top Ten Oil and Gas Company Lobbyists

    Environmental Defence Canada has just released a new report called Big Oil’s Big Year: A Summary of Big Oil’s 2023 Federal Lobbying that digs into it all. The report finds that oil and gas companies and industry associations try to influence the government through persistent lobbying. In 2023, they had at least 1,255 lobby meetings with the federal government, which is the equivalent of meeting nearly five times per workday. Big Oil primarily targets the ministers and ministries responsible for climate policy.

    The report compiles data from the Federal Registry of Lobbyists. It highlights the most active fossil fuel companies and industry associations, as well as the ministries and ministers most targeted for lobbying. Additional findings include these key takeaways:

    • The federal ministries most frequently targeted by lobbyists were Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and Finance Canada (FIN).
      • NRCan staff participated in at least 313 meetings with oil and gas lobbyists, including 34 with Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson present. 
      • ECCC staff participated in 253 meetings, including 12 with Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guiltbeault present. 
      • Finance Canada staff participated in 118 meetings. 
    • Oil and gas companies and industry associations lobbied various Members of Parliament 410 times.
    • Industry associations were two of the top three most active fossil fuel lobbyists in 2023, with the Pathways Alliance registering 104 meetings and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers registering 91.

      Figure 2: Top five Industry Associations lobbyist

    While the relentless nature of the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying is astounding, we know this is just the tip of the iceberg. These figures do not capture the entire extent of the industry’s access, given that the data only includes meetings initiated by the companies that meet the requirements for lobby reporting and not meetings set up by the government. 

    More scandalous still, new investigative research revealed the lengths these corporate lobbyists are willing to go to try and push the government into line with fossil fuel interests. The Narwhal recently exposed a leaked recording of a lobbyist working for TC Energy, the company responsible for projects such as the Coastal GasLink Pipeline and Keystone XL pipeline. The lobbyist, who has now resigned, was giving a presentation instructing a group on how to sway the government. He described having people bump into politicians outside of work to blend the personal and professional, drafting proposed policies that they give to “underpaid and overworked” government staffers to submit as briefing notes on government letterhead, and even working to influence Canadian ambassadors abroad to deliver pro-fossil fuel industry messages to politicians. This is just one story in the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long effort to ensure they have the ear of politicians from all parties and at all levels of government across the country. 

    Whether it’s delaying climate policy, carving out loopholes in regulations, or asking for government handouts, Big Oil lobbying is obstructing climate action. Their emissions are polluting our planet, and their corporate influence is polluting politics. 

    If you agree that it’s time to remove Big Oil from government decision-making rooms, join us in taking action. 

    Red button that says "take action"

     

     

    The post Oil and Influence: Analyzing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s 2023 Lobbying appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.