Category: Crime & Punishment

August 14, 2024

‘Trying to Pull the Strings on a Prosecutor’s Judgment Is a Serious Problem’: CounterSpin interview with Shayana Kadidal on Guantánamo plea deal

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Shayana Kadidal about the Guantánamo plea deal for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (via PBS, 8/2/24)

Janine Jackson: Years of negotiations led to the recently announced pretrial agreements for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of directing the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that would’ve meant their pleading guilty to charges, including murder and conspiracy, and receiving lifelong prison sentences.

As AP put it:

The torture that the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has slowed the cases and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts still uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.

But at the 11th hour, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stepped in to override the agreements, claiming to do so in the name of victim’s families, the US military and the American public, who, he says, “deserve the opportunity” to see a military commission trial play out.

Here to help us understand what happened and what happens now is Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shayana Kadidal.

Shayana Kadidal: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Media attention to Guantánamo Bay, and what happens to those held there, has been spotty and, in recent years, largely absent. So listeners may have forgotten that men were held there for years without charge, much less conviction. Some have been approved for transfer, meaning they’ve been determined not to be a threat, yet have remained there. And, of course, it’s undisputed that many have been tortured and abused at this extralegal military prison.

So these plea agreements came with all of that context, all of that history, and they weren’t seen as a victory for anyone; those aren’t the terms to think in. But they were seen as a meaningful and overdue step, yes?

Shayana Kadidal: “They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch.” (image: TRT World, 3/3/17)

SK: Yeah, I think any plea bargain is a compromise, right? I’ve seen these described as kind of the least-worst solution, given the history of these cases. And, basically, they’ve been presented as trading off the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea.

But I think the thing listeners need to really know is that prosecutors, the military prosecutors, really badly wanted this deal done, because they think, like everyone else who is observing these cases, they recognize that the death penalty was never, as a practical matter, going to happen in these cases, for a bunch of different reasons, right?

First of all, the military commission system is incredibly slow. They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch. So things that have been well-established for two centuries in the federal criminal system have to be reasoned out from the beginning in the military commissions.

And then, on top of that, there are these issues around the use of torture evidence that have really slowed things down. That’s not to say that torture evidence is the main problem standing in the way of a conviction. There is plenty of evidence against these particular defendants that isn’t contaminated by torture, including interviews they did with media before they were ever captured.

But the bottom line is that this process is going along really slowly. The defendants are in their mid-50s, the two older ones, already.

And then there are a bunch of other questions. Even if they got a guilty verdict, then there would be a sentencing phase, where a military jury gets to decide between death and probably life imprisonment. And we know that the CIA is very reluctant to produce its own officials as witnesses in that kind of phase or proceedings. They basically refused to do it in another case that we had involving a plea bargain. So that may end up being something that stands in the way of a death penalty verdict.

Then, on top of that, there’s a way that military juries will do what some civilian juries have done, and react to the torture at Guantánamo with clemency, that they’ll want to punish the government by issuing a life sentence instead of death.

So, bottom line, the prosecutors really wanted this deal badly.

JJ: That might surprise some folks, I think, on the face of it. And then, on the other hand, some people might imagine that any kind of plea deal would be opposed by the families and friends of those killed, the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, but that wasn’t really the case, was it?

Fox News (8/2/24)

SK: Yeah, it’s a very mixed bag, I must say. The family members—there are a small group of family members who are very heavily engaged in the details of these cases, including the politics of it, and they fall all over the spectrum, just like regular Americans. We’ve got 9/11 families who have been out there saying that they were strongly in favor of this deal, because it offered some semblance of finality, and because part of the deal, apparently, was the ability to pose questions, I believe, in writing to the defendants, and have them answered within 45 days. And those questions would go to, not just things like their motivations for carrying out the attacks, but also some detailed things that we don’t have a lot of information about, even from their interrogation, things like the financing of the attacks, right? So the families wanted answers to these questions, and this is really the only way they were going to be able to get it.

On the other side, you’ve got folks who have been on Fox News a lot, talking about how the commissions are much tougher than the civilian criminal system—which, really, I think at this point in history, we can say is definitively not true—but have been very actively organized in favor of keeping these cases in the military system, right?

I suppose it’s probably worth noting that if these cases had been brought to the civilian system, they probably would’ve been over a long, long time ago. Eric Holder had made the decision in 2009 to bring these cases to New York and try them in front of a civilian jury. If that had been the case, as he said last week, these guys would’ve been a memory. The cases would’ve gone to trial in a year or two, the appeals would’ve been over in a year or two, and they probably would’ve received pretty severe sentences, maybe even death, and the cases would have been over. As Holder said, it was “political hacks” who stopped the cases from being brought to New York, where they would’ve been disposed of much more quickly than in the commissions.

PBS (11/10/15)

But, again, that’s political water under the bridge. Congress has banned bringing men to the United States for trial from Guantánamo. So, again, this is kind of the least-worst solution, plea bargain in the military trial system.

JJ: When people hear that Defense Secretary Austin revoked the pretrial agreements because there ought to be trials, I think a lot of people might be misled about what is meant by a “trial” in this situation, a military commission trial. What should we know about that?

SK: The first thing is that it’s going to take years to get there. These charges originally were brought in February 2008, and so it’s been, what is that, 15, 16 years of pretrial motions, and they’re nowhere close to being done with that. Then once you get to a trial, there are going to be all sorts of issues about, again, the CIA producing witnesses, to what they did to these men, not just in the merit phase, but also in the sentencing phase.

And then, also, where it took place. We have a lot of sensitive diplomatic concerns around where the secret prisons the CIA held these men in were located, right? So that may stand in the way of actually conducting a trial.

And after that, we’ve got appeals, into a military appeal system, and then from there into the appellate courts and the federal system, and then to the Supreme Court.

So, again, the oldest of these defendants is 56 years old. They are de facto already serving life sentences, if you think that these cases are never going to come to a resolution after a trial and appeals. And so, again, it made perfect sense for the prosecutors to pursue this.

New York Times (8/4/24)

The real question is, what was Lloyd Austin thinking? He had to have been aware that these negotiations were underway and were pretty close to being resolved. The New York Times even reported over the weekend that DoD officials knew about the progress of the negotiations. So why the reversal? I think there’s no explanation other than politics and the election.

JJ: That’s what I was going to ask, because Austin says he’s long believed that military trials were the only way forward. So that rings a little weird, given the timing.

SK: When you see people like Tom Cotton coming out and saying that this is Biden being soft on the terrorists with the plea bargain deal, you can understand why it might’ve been everybody’s preferred timing on the political end for this to happen after November.

But what comes next looks like it’s going to be legal challenges. There are very narrow circumstances where an assigned pretrial agreement like this, a plea bargain agreement, can be withdrawn. So I think the defendants are first probably going to challenge whether or not what Austin tried to do in voiding the agreements was even effective, whether he has power to void them.

And on top of that, military prosecutors are supposed to be relatively independent of the people above them in the chain of command. In the federal civilian criminal system, everybody knows that President Trump can relieve the attorney general if he doesn’t like some prosecution that he’s undertaking. But there are some norms about how the AG is supposed to be relatively independent in making judgment calls, right?

Well, on the military system, those aren’t norms; they’re actually written into the two major statutes, the Military Commissions Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So when you have civilian officials like Lloyd Austin, political appointee, trying to pull the strings on a prosecutor’s judgment, it’s a serious problem, and dismissal of the case is the usual remedy for that. So, again, something that could add years and years more delay to a system that wasn’t exactly moving along quickly.

JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note.

We’ve been speaking with Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can track their work on Guantánamo cases and others at CCRJustice.org. Shayana Kadidal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SK: Thanks for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 9, 2024

Lee Hepner on Google Monopoly, Shayana Kadidal on Guantanamo Plea Deal

This week on CounterSpin: You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins,” that “corners the market,” does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We’ll hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay

Also on the show: A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001, “plunged the US” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right; choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside US law. None of it was inevitable. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We’ll get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 25, 2024

Crime Is Way Down—But NYT Won’t Stop Telling Voters to Worry About Crime

In a piece factchecking Donald Trump’s claims in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, the New York Times‘ Steven Rattner (7/24/24) responded to Trump’s claim that “our crime rate is going up” by pointing out:

Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

The Times illustrated the point with this chart, which shows violent crime decreasing by 26% since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and property crime going down 19%:

In a rational world, voters would be aware that crime went down sharply during the Biden/Harris administration, continuing a three-decade decline that has made the United States of 2024 far safer than the country was in 1991. To the extent that voters see national elected officials as responsible for crime rates, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris would benefit politically from these trends.

One thing polling tells us is that leading news outlets do a poor job of informing voters about the crime situation (New York Times, 7/23/24).

But we don’t live in a rational world—so in the days after Harris became the apparent presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, she got a series of warnings from the New York Times.

“Today, many Americans are worried about crime,” David Leonhardt wrote in the Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24). “Many voters are concerned about crime and public safety,” lawyer Nicole Allan wrote in a Times op-ed (7/23/24). “Ms. Harris, especially, will run into problems on immigration and crime,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in another op-ed (7/23/24).

“Ms. Harris was a constant target last week at the Republican National Convention,” Jazmine Ulloa reported in a Times news story (7/21/24). “In panels and onstage, speakers tied her to an administration that they say has led to increases in crime and inflation.”

In none of these mentions did the Times‘ writers attempt to set the record straight on the actual crime situation in the country—that crime rates are low and heading lower. In the case of the news report, such an observation would likely be seen inside the Times as editorializing—a forbidden intervention into the political process.

But most people don’t get their ideas about how much crime there is by personal observation; with roughly 1 person in 300 victimized by violent crime over the course of a year, you’d have to know an awful lot of people before you would get an accurate sense of whether crime was up or down based on asking your acquaintances.

As with immigration, and to a certain extent with the economy, people get the sense that crime is a crisis from the news outlets that they rely on. If they’re being told that “many Americans are worried about crime”—then many Americans are going to worry about crime.

Research assistance: Alefiya Presswala

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.
July 16, 2024

Trump’s Shooting Should Not Silence Warnings About His Threat to Democracy

Immediately after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when little was known about the white male shooter (except that he was a registered Republican), right-wing politicians directly blamed Democratic rhetoric for the shooting.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X (7/13/24), just days before Trump named him as his running mate:

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

(That Trump might be considered a fascist did not always seem so far-fetched to Vance; in 2016, he privately worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler”—Reuters, 7/15/24.)

“For years, Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy,” Sen. Tim Scott posted on X (7/13/24). “Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”

Rather than denounce both the assassination attempt and these hypocritical and opportunistic attacks on critical speech, the country’s top editorial boards cravenly bothsidesed their condemnations of “political violence.”

‘Unthinkably uncivil’

The Washington Post (7/14/24) described Trump’s exhortation to “remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness” as a call for “national unity.”

In an editorial headlined, “Turn Down the Heat, Let in the Light,” the Washington Post (7/14/24) praised Donald Trump for appearing to call for national unity. The Post wrote that the assassination attempt offered Trump the chance to “cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction.”

The editorial board quickly admonished both sides equally for “unthinkably uncivil” actions and “physical violence.” They pointed to protesters who “harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes,” universities that have “become battlegrounds,” and the “bipartisan hazard” of political violence, citing Nancy Pelosi’s husband and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise.

(The link the Post inserted leads to an earlier editorial in which they condemned peaceful protests outside Supreme Court justices’ houses as “totalitarian,” and recommended that the protesters be imprisoned—FAIR.org, 5/17/22).

New York Times editors, meanwhile, called the shooting “Antithetical to America” (7/13/24), a formulation clearly more aspirational than actual. “Violence is antithetical to democracy,” the editorial board wrote, acknowledging moments later that “violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.” They explained:

Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series “The Danger Within” in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.

It’s a remarkable obfuscation, in which responsibility is ascribed to no one and—as at the Post—everyone.

‘Leaders of both parties’

Is the shooting of a political candidate really “antithetical” (New York Times, 7/13/24) to a country with more guns than people, and 50,000+ gun deaths every year?

Curiously, the 2022 editorial series the Times cites (11/3–12/24/22) did make clear where most of the responsibility lay, explaining that “the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.” It pointed out that of the hundreds of extremism-related murders of the past decade, more than three-quarters were committed by “right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists.” While there have been occasional attacks on conservatives (like the attack on a congressional baseball game that wounded Scalise), the Times noted,

the number and nature of the episodes aren’t comparable, and no leading figures in the Democratic Party condone, mock or encourage their supporters to violence in ways that are common from politicians on the right and their supporters in the conservative media.

But two years later, the Times, like the Post, carefully avoids bringing that much-needed clarity to the current situation and apportions responsibility for avoiding political violence equally to both sides:

It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.

Of course, there’s a crucial difference between criticizing Trump and his allies for their anti-democratic positions and actions—which is what the Democrats and the left have done—and actually threatening and calling for violence, as the right has been doing.

The list of examples is nearly endless, but would prominently include Trump’s incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6; his personal attacks on prosecutors, judges and politicians who have subsequently required increased security protections; and his refusal to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” His supporters have repeatedly called for armed uprisings after perceived attacks on Trump, including immediately after the assassination attempt.

That’s why it’s critical that leading newspapers push back against right-wing attempts to equate criticisms of Trump with calls for violence.

‘Grossly irresponsible talk’

The Wall Street Journal (7/14/24), unsurprisingly, took this bothsidesism the farthest.

Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.

We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.”

Readers of those top US papers would have to look across the pond to the British Guardian (7/14/24) for the kind of clear-eyed take newspaper editors with concern for democracy ought to have: “There must also be care that extreme acts by a minority are not used to silence legitimate criticism.”

Research Assistance: Alefiya Presswala

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 26, 2024

Assange Is Free, But US Spite Will Chill Reporting for Years

WikiLeaks director Julian Assange pleaded guilty “to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information” (CBS, 6/25/24).

In some ways, the nightmare for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is coming to an end. After taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he was arrested in 2019 by Britain, who have since been trying to extradite him to the United States on charges that by publishing official secrets he violated the Espionage Act (FAIR.org, 12/13/20; BBC, 6/25/24). Once he enters a guilty plea, he will be sentenced to time served and walk away a free man (CBS, 6/25/24).

Assange’s case has attracted the attention of critics of US foreign policy, and those who value free speech and a free press. His family has rightly contended that his treatment in prison was atrocious (France24, 11/1/19; Independent, 2/20/24). A group of doctors said he was a victim of “torture” tactics (Lancet, 6/25/20). In 2017, Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that the “CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation” and that CIA and Trump administration insiders “even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.”

His supporters noted that the charges against him came after he harmed the US imperial project, particularly by leaking a video showing US troops killing Reuters journalists in Iraq (New York Times, 4/5/10). Under his watch, WikiLeaks also leaked a trove of diplomatic cables that the New York Times (11/28/10) described as an “unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.”

Press freedom and human rights groups like the International Federation of Journalists and Amnesty International had long called for his release. Several major news outlets from the US and Europe—the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País—signed a letter calling for his release (New York Times, 11/28/22). They said his “indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

Hostility toward press freedom

Assange will owe the Australian government half a million US dollars for his flight home from imprisonment (Guardian, 6/25/24).

Assange’s loved ones and supporters are certainly glad to see him come home (Guardian, 6/25/24). But let’s be perfectly clear-eyed: The entire ordeal and his plea deal are proof of a hostile climate toward a free press in the United States and the wider world, and its chilling effect on investigative journalism could substantially worsen.

Assange’s deal has echoes of the end of the West Memphis Three case, where three Arkansas men were wrongfully convicted as teenagers of a heinous triple homicide in 1993 (Innocence Project, 8/19/11). The three re-entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. They won their freedom, but their names were still attached to a terrible crime, and the state of Arkansas was able to close the case, ensuring the real killer or killers would never be held accountable. It was an imperfect resolution, but no one could blame the victims of a gross injustice for taking the freedom grudgingly offered.

Something similar is happening with Assange. It compounds the persecution already inflicted on him to force him to declare that exposing US government misdeeds was itself a high crime.

“On a human level, we’re thrilled that he’s out of prison, including the time in the embassy,” said Chuck Zlatkin, a founding member of NYC Free Assange, a group that has held regular protests calling for his release. “We’re thrilled for him personally.”

But the deal shows how eager the US government is to both save face and remain a threatening force against investigative reporters.

‘Criminalization of routine journalistic conduct’

Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24): “Under the legal theory used in the indictment, any journalist could be convicted of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining national defense information from a source, communicating with a source to encourage them to provide national defense information, or publishing national defense information.”

As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24), said in a statement:

It’s good news that the DoJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.

The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case, but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.

And that is all happening while threats against leakers and journalists remain. Edward Snowden, the source in the Guardian’s investigation (6/11/13) into National Security Agency surveillance, still resides in Russia in order to evade arrest. I recently wrote about the excessive sentencing of the man who leaked tax documents to ProPublica and the New York Times showing how lopsided the tax system is in favor of the rich (FAIR.org, 2/2/24). NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking documents to the Intercept on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US election (Vanity Fair, 10/12/23).

Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who brought Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance to light, said that Assange’s conviction could silence reporters doing investigative reporting on the US government (New York Times, 12/21/20). Chelsea Manning, Assange’s source for these investigations, spent only seven years in prison out of the 35 years of her sentence thanks to presidential clemency, but that is still a harrowing experience (NPR, 5/17/17).

‘Not transparency’ but ‘sabotage’

The New York Post (6/25/24) predicted that Assange’s release would be cheered by “anarchists and America-haters.”

Worse, some in the so-called free press have rallied behind the government. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/11/19) cheered the legal crusade against Assange, arguing that the leaks harmed national security. “Assange has never been a hero of transparency or democratic accountability,” the Murdoch-owned broadsheet proclaimed.

The neoconservative journal Commentary (4/12/19) dismissed the free press defenders of Assange, saying of Wikileaks’ investigations into US power: “This was not transparency. It was sabotage.”

And the British Economist (4/17/19) said, in support of Assange’s extradition to the US:

WikiLeaks did some good in its early years, exposing political corruption, financial malfeasance and military wrongdoing. But the decision to publish over 250,000 diplomatic cables in 2010 was malicious. The vast majority of messages revealed no illegality or misdeeds. Mr. Assange’s reckless publication of the unredacted versions of those cables the following year harmed America’s interests by putting its diplomatic sources at risk of reprisals, persecution or worse.

Unsurprisingly, Murdoch outlets gave the plea deal a thumbs down. “Don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted ‘publisher,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) warned.

The New York Post editorial board (6/25/24) disparaged Assange’s motives, saying he “wasn’t interested in justice or exposing true abuse; he simply relished obtaining and releasing any secret government or political material, particularly if US-based.” Alleging that the documents he published were sensitive, the paper argued in favor of government secrecy: “Uncle Sam needs to keep some critical secrets, especially when lives are on the line.”

In reality, US intelligence and military officials have never been able to trace any deaths to WikiLeaks‘ revelations (BBC, 12/1/10; Guardian, 7/31/13; NPR, 4/12/19)—and certainly have never identified any damage anywhere nearly as serious as the very real harms it exposed. (NPR did quote a former State Department lawyer who complained that WikiLeaks‘ exposes “can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts.”) Alas, some publications side with state power even if journalistic freedom is at stake (FAIR.org, 4/18/19).

‘Punished for telling the truth’

The vindictive plea bargain the Biden administration forced on Assange might provide Donald Trump in a potential second term with tools he could use to put establishment journalists in prison (CNN, 12/7/23).

Assange’s case is over, but he walks away a battered man as a result of the legal struggle. And that serves as a warning to other journalists who rely on brave people in high levels of power to disclose injustices. Stern is right: Another Trump administration would be horrendous for journalists. But the current situation with the Democratic administration is already chilling.

“All he was being punished for was telling the truth about war crimes committed by this country,” Zlatkin told FAIR.

And without a real change in how the Espionage Act is used against journalists, the ability to tell the truth to the rest of the world is at risk.

“We’re still not in a situation where we as a general population are getting the truth of what’s being done in our name,” Zlatkin said. “So the struggle continues.”

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 14, 2024

‘The Press Has a Problem Being Forthright About Trump Where the Right Has Rallied Around Him’: CounterSpin interview with Matt Gertz on Trump guilty verdict

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about Trump’s guilty verdict for the June 7, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (5/31/24)

Janine Jackson: A Manhattan criminal court found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. This ruling is clearly not the be-all, end-all of a legal redressing of Trump’s myriad crimes; he’s already been found liable in a civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, and he’s facing another three trials for mishandling classified documents, conspiring to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 election, and encouraging the violent January 6, 2021, rampage at the US Capitol.

But commentary from much of the news media—where we learn about what’s happening, what it means, and what we might do about it—is platforming the idea that this might be a disputable issue, that has to do with personal feelings about this particular man. You could joke, “Tell me you’re moving the goalposts without telling me you’re moving the goalposts.” But there are real-world stakes here, and the contortions media are going through to make a convicted felon who boasts of his crimes one side of a reasonable debate is telling us something about Trump and his followers, sure, but it’s also telling us something about news media.

Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America; he’s been working on this issue, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

Matt Gertz: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: There seems to be an overarching conversation here, which is that if a legal process convicts someone you like, it must be a political—meaning partisan—action, only aimed at silencing a political opponent. I’m not sure that everyone advancing that idea right now is thinking, really, about the implications, that if you decide the law is just whatever you do or don’t like…. Is murder a crime? What if you like the person who did it, you know?

I want to talk through the specifics and the examples that Media Matters has been putting out, because concrete examples show us that we’re not just giving sweeping characterizations. But I just wanted to ask you, first, for your general response to the effort from some media to say that these crimes aren’t really crimes, it’s really just a political hit job. Are you surprised at all by that response?

Matt Gertz: “A good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit.”

MG: Not really. I think that what we’ve seen over the last nine years, since Trump’s rise began, is that the mainstream press has a big problem coming out and being forthright about Donald Trump’s actions in cases where the right has rallied around him.

And at this point, what we see when we monitor the right-wing media, when we look at what Republicans are saying, is that they are four-square behind him. They are not only denying that he committed the crimes that he was convicted of; they are saying that he is the real victim here, that this is a politicized prosecution, and that now the only recourse is for Republicans to start throwing their own political opponents in jail.

Given the volume and the inflammatory nature of these claims that are coming from the right, I think a good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit. But instead, what we tend to see is a lot of he-said, she-said coverage, in which there is a certain amount of credence being given to these claims, and that just lets them infest the public discourse in a way that is both unhelpful and, I think, in the longer term dangerous.

JJ: Let’s talk about a couple of the particular counter-narratives that we’re seeing now from right-wing media, to address them. One of them is that the charges against Trump are unprecedented, “nothing like this has ever happened before”; that’s one of the popular ideas, along with the idea that the jury and the judge are somehow tainted in some way. What are you seeing there?

MG: What’s unprecedented, obviously, is that a former president has been repeatedly charged with and, in this case, convicted of crimes. It’s also unprecedented for so many of a former president’s closest associates to be charged with and convicted of crimes, but that is also the case here.

What the right has needed to do, to deal with the fact that often Republican prosecutors and Republican investigators are finding all of this Republican criminality, is they’ve created this vast conspiracy theory, this idea of a “deep-state” plot to get to Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. The reality is much simpler: There are a lot of criminals around Donald Trump because he is an incredibly shady person.

And so what we’ve seen is a full-throttle, round-the-clock effort to try to undermine and delegitimize every aspect of, not only this prosecution, but the two federal probes and the one in Georgia that you alluded to earlier. In this case, that involves attacking not only the New York jury, not only the New York prosecutor, but also the judge, and really every aspect of this case. They leave no stone unturned in their efforts to defend Donald Trump.

CNN (4/7/24)

JJ: I can’t think of a time where someone would say, “Let me tell you what the child of the judge does, and therefore….” It just feels like untested waters that, I guess, I just wish journalists would step up to do more.

MG: I think that’s absolutely right. We really are in uncharted territory; when you see attacks coming in on particular jurors, which we saw early in the trial, and then the excuse-making after the fact that because the trial was in New York City, there was no way Donald Trump could get a fair trial. I mean, you’re really in pretty dangerous territory there.

I will note, by the way, that the claims that Donald Trump could not get a fair trial in New York City came almost immediately after the very same people were bragging about how many people were coming to Donald Trump’s rally in New York, and how he was going to make a real play at winning the state in the 2024 presidential election. You kind of have to pick a lane on that one, but I guess they feel like they can get away with it, because no one will call them on it.

JJ: And hypocrisy is apparently no longer a thing.

I just want to give you a chance to name some names. There are some particular actors and particular outlets that are in this business, and I know that Media Matters does work, not just doing broad, sweeping things, but actually giving examples of particular people, and I think that’s the value. You know, we’re not saying, “The right wing does this.” We’re saying, there are particular instances, and are there any that stand out for you?

New York Times (6/5/24)

MG: Sure. One of them, obviously, I would say Steve Bannon—who is the long-time Trump advisor, and host of the War Room podcast—he spent the days since the verdict making the case for the need for widespread prosecutions of Democrats as a matter of retaliation.

You also see it running the gamut on Fox News, but in particular people like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, are very invested in defending Trump on his conviction specifically.

And then you think about someone like Ben Shapiro—the Daily Wire co-founder—who was famously opposed to Donald Trump when he first ran for president back in 2016, but now, due to the incentives of the right-wing press, he’s come around, and said that the charges against Trump were spurious, and entirely made up so that the media and Joe Biden could claim that he’s a convicted felon, that this is all in evidence of incipient tyranny.

Really just a wild level of rhetoric going on through every aspect of the right, as they try to get around the fact that they’re supporting someone who has been convicted of felony charges.

JJ: Just to pivot for a second, and acknowledge the painful hilarity of the idea, and we kind of talked about it, but the idea that an appeal by Trump would be passed to the New York state’s appellate division, a branch of the New York Supreme Court—and “oh my God, they’re all Black women; obviously he won’t get a fair shake.”

Which, first of all, you’re telling on yourself with that, right? Like, obviously Black people and women would hate him because, you know, he’s just like Jesus Christ, who was famously hated by Black people and women.

But also, like so much that we’re seeing on our screens, it’s just not accurate. The women of color on the meme that people are looking at are five of 21 judges who could be selected to sit for the case. In other words, and maybe we’ve said it, but going bold on disinformation is part of the landscape now.

CNN (5/14/24)

MG: Absolutely, and because of the bifurcation of the news landscape, because you have Republicans bubbled off within their own media sphere, the contrary information doesn’t enter the bubble. They don’t get exposed to the facts or the contradictions that are inherent in what’s going on.

There’s been this big push that I mentioned to declare the Justice Department somehow politicized by Joe Biden, and that is happening at the same time when Joe Biden’s own son is on trial in a federal court for gun crimes. This is an investigation that was launched during the Trump administration, under a Republican attorney general and a Republican FBI director, and is currently carried out by a Trump appointee who Joe Biden kept on.

There’s just not a similar groundswell of people on the left or in the mainstream press who are desperately trying to defend every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, and try to invalidate the entire judicial system for political gain, the way you see happening literally simultaneously regarding the Trump conviction.

JJ: My complaint about corporate news media right now is that I feel like they are just narrating the nightmare, and they don’t acknowledge how insufficient that is right now, in a society with democratic aspirations, as I say, that relies on public information to make choices. And it’s not about how I feel about a political person, it’s what I’m looking for from a press, and I just wonder, what do you think—you don’t need to name names, but what do you think responsible journalism would look like right now? We’ve said it’s contested waters, it’s difficult. It is a hard time, but what would be the role for independent, responsible journalism right now?

AP (8/29/23)

MG: I think it would be keeping the focus as much as possible on the stakes over the next several months. We are looking at an election where we have, on the one hand, a fairly normal set of politicians, and on the other hand, you have people calling for radical and dangerous changes at every turn. And I think giving people the full explanation, the implication of Trump’s worldview and the policy changes likely to happen if he becomes president, and has, as we might expect, much more leeway within his own party than he had during his last term, is crucial. I don’t think the American public is getting that sort of information about what the election might mean for themselves, and for the future of the country.

JJ: We’re not talking about Trump versus Biden. We’re talking about what journalists could do to lay clear what the information is, what’s at stake, what Trump has said he will do. You don’t have to be politically partisan to ask more of reporters.

MG: That’s absolutely right.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. They’re online at www.MediaMatters.org. Matt Gertz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 7, 2024

Matt Gertz on Trump Trial Verdict, Kandi Mossett on Dakota Access Struggle

Yahoo (5/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.

New York Times (11/21/16)

Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
May 31, 2024

New York Man Goes Down the New York Way

Donald Trump is now the first former US president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty on 34 counts of “in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex” (AP, 5/31/24). Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement (5/30/24) that Trump was found “guilty of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal damaging information from American voters during the 2016 presidential election,” and that his prosecutors “proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump illegally falsified 34 New York business records.”

Trump’s shot at retaking the White House is far from finished (Guardian, 5/30/24), and he may very well evade jail (NBC, 5/30/24), but the right-wing press is howling anyway.

‘A bizarre turducken’

“If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again,” the Wall Street Journal (5/30/24) warned, as “Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/30/24) painted Bragg’s case against Trump as “a bizarre turducken, with alleged crimes stuffed inside other crimes.” It suggested the DA was motivated less by executing the law than by kneecapping Trump’s bid for the White House. The whole affair, the paper said, leads us to more division:

What if Mr. Trump loses the election and then is vindicated on appeal? If Democrats think that too many Republicans today complain about stolen elections, imagine how many more might next year.

The conviction sets a precedent of using legal cases, no matter how sketchy, to try to knock out political opponents, including former presidents. Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor. If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again. Mr. Bragg might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics, and no one can say how it will end.

The New York Post (5/31/24) ran the front-page headline “Injustice,” while its editorial board (5/31/24) argued that Democrats’ happiness at the conviction “itself is ample reason for the court of public opinion to vote [President Joe Biden] out come Election Day.”

The Washington Post (5/31/24) reported on the meltdown at Fox News:

“This is a very sad day for all of us, irrespective of party, irrespective of affiliation,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the network’s 5 p.m. show. “We have seen the criminal justice weaponized to bring down a candidate for president and a former president.”

On her 7 p.m. show, Laura Ingraham called it “a disgraceful day for the United States, a day that America may never recover from,” while 9 p.m. host Sean Hannity called it “a conviction without a crime.”

All too typical

Talkshow host Charlie Kirk (Alaska Must Read, 5/30/24) warned that “there will be an unprecedented push to say that Trump CANNOT be allowed to win, that we CANNOT elect a convicted felon.”

What comes up over and over again in coverage of both the Manhattan hush-money case―as well as two federal cases against Trump, and one election-related case in Atlanta―is that the prosecution and conviction of a former president is without precedent (Fox News, 5/30/24; New York Times, 5/30/24; NPR, 5/30/24). The theory goes that these prosecutions are so divisive, in such a politically volatile moment, that they should force us to weigh the pursuit of justice against political stability.

Yet, for journalists who looked at the Manhattan courtroom, Trump sat there like many other New York politicians and political influencers whose criminality brought them down. Trump, who was born in Queens and made his name in Manhattan, is a businessman shaped by the New York City real estate industry and the political machines around it. That’s an exciting place to be. But it’s also a very corrupt one (WHEC, 8/13/21).

In this context, Trump’s conviction is less a partisan witch hunt or a crossing-the-Rubicon moment for US history, and more another New York politician getting caught up in a scandal that is all too typical of the city and state that made him.

New York, of course, is hardly unique in having a tradition of officials getting caught with their hands in the till. But those who follow New York politics can cite a long line of prominent politicians brought down by corruption investigations.

Sheldon Silver, the lower Manhattan Democrat who for 20 years ruled the state assembly with an iron fist, died in federal custody due to corruption charges (Guardian, 1/24/22).

The Washington Post (5/12/16) could have run this exact same headline about two different New York senate majority leaders over a four-year period.

On the Republican side, former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was convicted, along with his son, for “pressuring companies that relied heavily on government contracts to give his son nominal but lucrative jobs” (Washington Post, 5/12/16). Joe Bruno, Skelos’ Republican predecessor, was also found guilty on corruption charges, though he was acquitted in a retrial (New York Times, 5/16/14).

A Democratic senate majority leader, Democrat Malcolm Smith, was given “seven years in prison after being convicted of trying to bribe his way onto the Republican ballot in the 2013 race for New York City mayor” (Politico, 7/1/15). Smith was followed by Pedro Espada Jr., who was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling from federally funded healthcare clinics (New York Times, 6/14/12).

While former Gov. Eliot Spitzer never saw a courtroom, a federal investigation into a prostitution ring revealed him as a client and ended his political career (NPR, 3/12/08).

The current New York City mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, is under federal investigation for possible illegal connections to Turkey (CBS, 5/21/24). His buildings department commissioner, Republican Eric Ulrich, has been charged with running “a years-long scheme doling out political favors in exchange for more than $150,000 in bribes” (New York Post, 9/13/23).

Prosecution of corruption isn’t confined to the public sector; the former federal prosecutor for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, made a name for himself by going after white-collar criminals (New Yorker, 3/13/17). And let’s not forget the many union leaders nabbed for corruption over the years (New York Post, 7/26/00; New York Times, 5/20/09, 8/5/09; CNN, 8/5/23).

Removed from sordid politics

Obviously, in the US consciousness, the president stands above all over elected leaders, including Supreme Court justices and congressional leaders, as well as the top honchos at the state level. The president leads the military, represents the nation on the world stage, and stands (theoretically) as a unifying figure for the American people. But this mythology of a sort of king-like figure not only warps the notion of small-r republican governance, but removes the president from the rest of sordid politics in an extremely dishonest way.

For those who have studied Trump’s career, despite rising to the White House and photo shoots all over the world, he is, in essence, a product of New York City. His business empire, political dealings and image in the tabloid press were created and shaped by New York’s dirty political culture.

The conviction will be the stuff of partisan rabble in the media for days and weeks. But in reality, he’s just another member of the city’s political and business class who got caught committing banal crimes. Media would be better off framing his conviction in the context of how routine it was, given the venue, rather than offering it as a novel soul-searching moment for the nation.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 10, 2024

‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’: CounterSpin interview with Robert Weissman on Boeing scandal

Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman about the Boeing scandal for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CNN (3/25/24)

Janine Jackson: Boeing CEO David Calhoun is going to “step down in wake of ongoing safety problems,” as headlines have it, or amid “737 MAX struggles,” or elsewhere “mishaps.”

Had you or I at our job made choices, repeatedly, that took the lives of 346 people and endangered others, I doubt media would describe us as “stepping down amid troubles.” But crimes of capitalism are “accidents” for the corporate press, while the person stealing baby formula from the 7/11 is a bad person, as well as a societal danger.

There are many reasons that corporate news media treat corporate crime differently than so-called “street crime,” but none of them are excuses we need to accept.

Public Citizen looks at the same events and information that the press does, but from a bottom-up, people-first perspective. We’re joined now by the president of Public Citizen; welcome back to CounterSpin, Robert Weissman.

Robert Weissman: Hey, it’s great to be with you.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

JJ: Boeing is a megacorporation. It has contractors across the country and federal subsidies out the wazoo, but when it does something catastrophic, somehow this one guy stepping down is problem solved? What happened here versus what, from a consumer-protection perspective, you think should have happened, or should happen?

RW: Well, I think the story is still being written. Folks will remember that Boeing was responsible for two large airliner crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed around 350 people. The result of that, as a law enforcement matter, was that Boeing agreed to a leniency deal on a single count of fraud. It didn’t actually plead guilty; it just stipulated that the facts might be true, and promised that they would follow the law in the future. That agreement was concluded in the waning days of the Trump administration.

Fast forward, people will remember the recent disaster with another Boeing flight for Alaska Airlines earlier this year, when a door plug came untethered and people were jeopardized. Luckily, no one was fatally injured in that disaster.

But the disaster itself was exactly a consequence of Boeing’s culture of not attending to safety, a departure from the historic orientation of the corporation, and, from our point of view, directly a result of the slap-on-the-wrist leniency agreement that they had entered after the gigantic crashes of just a few years prior.

So now the Department of Justice is looking at this problem again. They are criminally investigating Boeing for the most recent problem with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. And we are encouraging, and we think they are, looking back at the prior agreement, because the prior agreement said, if Boeing engages in other kinds of wrongdoing in the future, the Department of Justice can reopen the original case and prosecute them more fully–which it should have done, of course, in the initial instance.

Public Citizen (3/25/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the DoJ. I’m seeing this new report from Public Citizen about federal corporate crime prosecutions, which we think would be entertained in this case, and particularly a careful look back at choices, conscious choices, made by the company that resulted in these harms. And this report says the DoJ is doing slightly more in terms of going after corporate offenders, but maybe nothing to write home about.

RW: Right. There was a very notable shift in rhetoric from the top of the DoJ at the start of the Biden administration, and not the normal thing you would hear. Much more aggressive language about corporate crime, and holding corporations accountable, and holding CEOs and executives accountable.

However, that rhetoric hasn’t been matched in good policymaking, and we had the lowest levels of corporate criminal enforcement in decades in the first year of the administration. We gave them a pass on that, because that was mostly carrying forward with cases that were started, or not started, under the Trump administration. But we’ve only seen a slow uptick in the last couple years. So it has increased from its previous low, but by historic standards, it’s still at a very low level, in terms of aggregate number of corporate criminal prosecutions.

By the way, if people are wondering, what numbers are we talking about, we’re talking about 113. So very, very few corporate criminal prosecutions, as compared to the zillions of prosecutions of individuals, as you rightly juxtaposed at the start.

JJ: And then even, historically, there were more corporate crime prosecutions 20 years ago, and it’s not like the world ended. It didn’t drive the economy into the ground. This is a thing that can happen.

Robert Weissman: “There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy.”

RW: Correct. The corporate criminal prosecutions don’t end the world, and moreover, corporate crime didn’t end. So we ought to have more prosecutions than we have now. I mean, we’re just talking about companies following the law. This is not about aggressive measures to hold them accountable for things that are legal but are wrong, which is, of course, pervasive. This is just a matter of following the law. There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy. It doesn’t diminish the ability of capitalism to carry out what it does. In fact, following the rule of law, for anyone who actually cares about a well-functioning capitalist society, should be a pretty core principle, and enforcement of law should be a core requirement.

JJ: And one thing that I thought notable, also, in this recent report is that small businesses are more likely to face prosecution. And that reminds me of the IRS saying, “Well, yeah, we go after low-income people who get the math wrong on their taxes, because rich people’s taxes are really complicated, you guys.” So there’s a way that even when the law is enforced, it’s not necessarily against the biggest offenders.

RW: Yeah, that’s right. Although the numbers are so small, that disparity isn’t quite that stark. I think the big thing that illustrates your point, though, is the entirely different way that corporate crime is treated than crime by individual offenders, street offenders.

First of all, the norm for many years has been reliance on leniency agreements. So not even plea deals, where a corporation pleads down, or a person might plea down the crime to which they are admitting guilt. But a no-plea deal, in which they just say, “Hey, we promise to follow the law going forward in the future, and if we do, you won’t prosecute us for the thing that we did wrong in the past.”

Human beings do not get those kinds of deals, except rarely, in the most low-level offenses. But that’s been the norm for corporations, for pervasive offenses with mass impacts on society, sometimes injured persons, and instances where the corporations, of course, are very intentional about what they’re doing, because it’s all designed based on risk/benefit decisions about how to make the most profit. The sentences and the punishments for corporations in the criminal space and for CEOs in the criminal space are just paltry.

JJ: So if deterrence, really genuinely preventing these kinds of things from happening again, if that were really the goal, then the process would look different.

RW: It would look radically different. I think that there’s a lot of data when it comes to so-called street crime. You need enforcement, obviously, against real wrongdoing, but tough penalties don’t actually work for deterrence. It’s just not what the system is, in terms of the social system and the cultural system, people deciding to follow or not follow the law and so on.

But for corporations, deterrence is everything. They are precisely profit-maximizing. They’re the ultimate rational actors. If the odds are good that they will be caught breaking the law and suffer serious penalties, then they will follow the law, almost to a T. So this is the space where deterrence actually would work, and we see criminal deterrence with aggressive enforcement and tough penalties really missing from the scene.

And this Boeing case is the perfect example. The company was responsible, through its lax safety processes, for two crashes that killed 350-plus people; they got off with a slap on the wrist. As a result, they didn’t really feel pressure to change what they were doing, and they put people at risk again. If they had been penalized in that first instance, I think you would’ve seen a radical shift in the company, much more adoption of a safety culture. We would have avoided this most recent mishap.

Seattle Times (2/26/24)

JJ: Let me, finally, just bring media back in. There was this damning report from the Federal Aviation Administration last month, and the reporting language across press accounts kind of incensed me.

This is just the Seattle Times: “A highly critical report,” they said, “said Boeing’s push to improve its safety culture has not taken hold at all levels of the company.” “The report,” the paper said, “cites ‘a disconnect’ between the rhetoric of Boeing’s senior management about prioritizing safety and how frontline employees perceive the reality.”

Well, this is Corporate Crime 101. I mean, there are books written on this. It’s not a disconnect: “Oh, the company’s at war with itself; leadership really wants safety really badly, but the workers just aren’t getting it.”

This is pushing accountability down and maintaining deniability at the top. So the CEO doesn’t have to say, “Oh, don’t follow best practices here.” They just need to say, “Well, we just need to cut costs this quarter,” and everybody understands what that means. Anybody who’s worked in a corporation understands what “corporate climate” means.

And so I guess my hopes for appropriate media coverage dim a little bit when there is so much pretending that we don’t know how decision-making works in corporations, that we don’t know how corporations work, when I know that reporters do.

RW: Yeah, well, I’ll just say that is so 100% correct in characterizing what happened at Boeing, because not only is that fake, and obviously culture is set from the top, this is a place where the culture of the workers and the engineers wants to, and long did, prioritize safety. They’re the ones who’ve been calling attention to all the problems. So it’s management that’s preventing them from doing their jobs, which is what they want to do.

Public Citizen (3/18/19)

I think in terms of how media talks about this, I agree with your point, and I think the reporting on Boeing has been pretty good in terms of documenting what happened. But what is often missing from even really good reports in mainstream news media is the criminal justice frame.

Now, admittedly, that partially follows from the failure of the Department of Justice to treat it as a criminal matter seriously, but I think it does change the way people think about this stuff. If you call it a crime, it’s exactly as you said, it’s not errors, it’s not just lapses. It’s certainly not mistakes. These are crimes, and they’re crimes with really serious consequences, in this case, hundreds of people dying.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. You can find their work on Boeing and many, many other issues online at citizen.org. Robert Weissman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

The post ‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’: CounterSpin interview with Robert Weissman on Boeing scandal appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘The US State Department Is Complicit With Juan Orlando Hernández’ CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran ex-president conviction

Janine Jackson interviewed Pitzer College’s Suyapa Portillo Villeda about the conviction of Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández for the March 15, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (3/8/24)

Janine Jackson: The lead on AP‘s March 8 piece told the story:

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in New York of charges that he conspired with drug traffickers, and used his military and national police force to enable tons of cocaine to make it unhindered into the United States.

US Attorney Damian Williams said he hopes the conviction “sends a message to all corrupt politicians who would consider a similar path: Choose differently.” Heady stuff.

The US attorney added that Hernández “had every opportunity to be a force for good in his native Honduras. Instead, he chose to abuse his office and country for his own personal gain.” Well, that sounds horrible, not caring about the good of everyday Hondurans.

Nowhere in AP’s account is the role of the United States, here presented as bravely bringing criminal Central Americans to justice for their efforts to pollute our country with their drugs, nowhere is the role of the US in shaping the political landscape in Honduras.

So that’s the storyline corporate news media are selling right now. But what is missing from that, that might complicate it, or deepen our understanding of current events?

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College. She’s also author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda: Thank you for having me.

JJ: First and foremost, I would ask you to please fill in some missing history for us, in terms of US involvement in Honduran elections and Hondurans’ ability to choose their own political future. And you can go back as far as you want on that timeline.

Suyapa Portillo: “The United States, through the coup d’etat, was in cahoots with elite power in Honduras that replaced a democratically elected president.”

SPV: I’m glad that you’re raising and questioning corporate media, because they don’t really tell you the story of US involvement in Honduras. And I’m a historian, so whenever I teach about this, I go back 200 years, 300 years, to the US becoming the neo-colonial power over Latin America after independence movements, and being involved in Central America, throughout the 20th century, through warships, financial deals, through dollar diplomacy, the United Fruit Company. We can go on and on and on.

But I wanted to, specifically with the Juan Orlando Hernández case, talk about how the US put him in office for two terms. We don’t know what the inside machinations were, but we do have WikiLeaks that do tell us that the United States, through the coup d’etat, was in cahoots with elite power in Honduras that replaced a democratically elected president, or actually kidnapped a democratically elected president. The US embassy was involved, during President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, were involved in the kidnapping of the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, putting him on a plane to Costa Rica in his pajamas.

What’s eerie about this whole scenario in 2009 is that a similar thing happened with President Ramón Villeda Morales, who was also a Liberal Party member, in 1962, was also kidnapped in his pajamas and taken out of the country. So the US has its hands all over this kind of activity in Central America, and all over the world, the developing world and the South.

When this happened, President Obama denies the coup d’etat, denies it, and we academics, scholars all over Latin America, as well as the United States, spent a lot of time talking to press and anybody who would listen, and US Congress, as well as news media outlets all over the world, about why this was a coup d’etat. And it almost felt like we were in the Twilight Zone.

HuffPost (3/12/16)

But then later in 2011, we saw WikiLeak cables that revealed that the US embassy was definitely in cahoots with the elite and the military in Honduras, who wanted to oust Manuel Zelaya Rosales for his “connections” to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela at the time.

And that coup d’etat changed everything in Honduras. And it spearheaded the decline of human rights, and the decline in civil and political rights for people, for women and children specifically. It was extremely violent for women and children, and has led to the 2017, 2018 migrant caravans that people have been seeing on TV.

The femicides have increased. We’re looking at 700 women killed per year. We’re looking at transfemicides also. We’re looking at 200, 300 women killed per year, trans women. So it’s an incredible level of violence against young people who fight for their rights.

What that does is then it opens a door for someone who would’ve never been elected as president, who had run two or three times before, and that’s Porfirio Lobo. And Porfirio Lobo, who’s also been linked to narco trafficking and the whole apparatus, gets into power through sham elections, which the State Department supported and the US embassy supported. But over 68% of the Honduran population abstained, because they felt, why should we vote if we had a democratically elected president? Why should we go to an election after this coup? What needs to happen is a reversal of the coup.

CounterSpin (5/1/15)

And something really important gets born then. And some of the proponents were Xiomara Castro Zelaya, Zelaya’s wife, who’s now in power, but also Berta Cáceres, Miriam Miranda, leaders of the Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous movements, began to propose this notion of refounding the country. So while there was a lot of calamity happening, a lot of violence, there was also a resurgence in popular movements. The idea that you could have a different Honduras was also born in 2009, out of this calamity.

When Juan Orlando Hernández was elected, it was a contested election. I was an observer at the time, and it was the first time the Libertad y Refundación party ran. The party itself was just beginning to organize. The resistance movement had gone through a split. There were some people that wanted to continue the social movement aspect, and then there was another group that wanted to organize it into a political party. And there were fierce debates about this.

And when you go to the polls, there was just a lot of corruption. It was very contested.

And so Juan Orlando gets into power. The United States supports this sort of stabilizing force; they see the National Party as a stabilizing force. So one of the first things he does is he establishes the military police, which is something that had been eradicated, with the Peace Accord post-the wars in Central America in the early ’90s.

And the military police is this weird sort of police force that are military men with bayonets and war armament walking around the cities acting as police, right? So you have these multiple police entities in the city, but the military police is to be feared. These are the people that committed the disappearances. These are the people that engaged in violence against people in the ’80s, during the dark years of anti-Communism.

Bringing them back was almost a suggestion of the US embassy, which then, after, came out and said, “No, no, no, we never suggested this.” But it was something that Juan Orlando Hernández did in cahoots with the US embassy.

And, in fact, the military police then comes back into power, and begins to be the entity that harms most in the cities. He also begins to work with the elites, right, with the Evangelical churches, and an agenda that’s extremely anti-women, anti-children, anti-LGBT, anti-human, really, right?

Youth are the enemy of this administration. We just witnessed this extremely violent repression of young people, right? People who defended territorial rights… Berta Cáceres, one of the brightest leaders in the resistance… I think at one point, he issued 330 concessions on environmental lands that had been hard-fought protected, rivers and flora and fauna that were going to be stripped for mining.

CounterSpin (12/24/21)

One thing I want to say is, during his elections, the second time he was reelected, there were so many inconsistencies. I’ve served as an election observer on all those elections, and the second time, I brought students, so we could cover a larger ground in San Pedro Sula. And it was clear from all of our observations, the winning parties—because you stay till the end, til the counting—and at one point, I had to shelter with my students in one of those locations, because we had gone until one in the morning, during counting.

And the military started throwing tear gas into the voting center, and there was a skirmish there between the military and who knows who. We were kind of sheltered in a room. And with the counting, we didn’t want to leave the voting machines!

I think about what an experience that was for my students, because when we think about protecting our rights in the United States, and voting rights, we rarely see that level of violence inside a voting precinct. It’s completely illegal.

There was trafficking votes, there were all kinds of irregular things happening, like the National Party people were setting up offices within the voting precinct; you’re not supposed to see that. Just outright mayhem. It was like the wild, wild West under Juan Orlando Hernandez. It was the most extreme dictatorship, that can only be compared to Carias Andino in the ’30s.

And people just wanted this man out, because of the rampant violence, the abuse of power, and stealing from the coffers. I mean, at one point, $90 million stolen from the Social Security Administration, which is sort of like what workers pay into.

But at state hospitals, there were fake pills given to people who had cancer; there was no response to Covid except extreme lockdown, which, people died because he instituted a curfew law, and anybody that was out after 10 o’clock could be shot or could be thrown in jail. And sometimes people are coming back from work, or didn’t have transportation. A young woman in Berta Cáceres’ hometown died because she was arrested at 10 o’clock, because she was out, and then appeared dead the next day, right?

Just the extreme violence that the police and the military all engaged with, looking back as a historian, I think these are crimes against humanity. This guy went down for engaging in drug trafficking, but really he needed to be tried for crimes against humanity, as do many other presidents, right, across the world.

But what’s a little scary about this ruling is, people knew he was trafficking drugs, but you couldn’t say anything, because you would be dead. And so many, many journalists died trying to tell the story, but it was held down and shut.

And in fact, many of the newspapers in Honduras cannot be trusted, because they were, first of all, not telling the story of the protest. So if you go searching those newspapers, La Tribuna, El Heraldo, right, for these years, as a historian, I think there was this complicity between the elite, the rich, the landowners, those who wanted more land and more land, taking it away from Indigenous people, and Juan Orlando profiting from narco trafficking, allowing narco trafficking to happen, and the narco traffickers, to hurt people in the areas where they did in the north coast of Honduras, the Garifuna territories, to go after leaders of those local environmentalists, protecting the environment, protecting the rivers, protecting the oceans from encroachment.

I wanted to say, yes, everybody knew Juan Orlando Hernández was a narco, but how do you challenge the Honduran people who are organizing? There needed to be more awareness from the US embassy, and I think the US embassy was complicit. And, true, maybe the DEA built this case from the beginning, and it took them many years, but they were also not in support of the resistance, and the fact that he did not win that election, the second time, and that there was a blackout right at the end that lasted a couple of hours, and all of a sudden, three days later, he’s president.

University of Texas Press (2022)

The US allowed for this man to lie to the Honduran people, to steal from the Honduran people, and to sit in that office that is the highest office for Honduras, while all these people were dying, and they committed this crime with him, they’re complicit with him. The US State Department is complicit with Juan Orlando Hernández.

So when he’s extradited, I think for Hondurans, it was a relief to be rid of this pseudo-dictator narco-president. But there’s a concern as well. There’s something kind of malignant about that, you know what I mean? That the US becomes all-powerful, and the decider of a country’s fate, and that’s scary.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Suyapa Portillo Villeda of Pitzer College in California, and also author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras, where you can find much more information about what we’re talking about today. Thank you so much, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, for speaking with us today on CounterSpin.

SPV: Thank you for having me.

The post ‘The US State Department Is Complicit With Juan Orlando Hernández’ CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran ex-president conviction appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 31, 2024

‘We Know What Keeps Us Safe: People Need Care and Not Punishment’ – CounterSpin interview with Monifa Bandele on reimagining public safety

Janine Jackson interviewed the Movement for Black Lives’ Monifa Bandele about reimagining public safety for the January 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin240126Bandele.mp3

Janine Jackson: Redirecting public resources away from punitive policing and toward community-centered mechanisms of public safety like housing, like healthcare, is the sort of idea that, years from now, everyone will say they always supported. Talking heads on TV will stroke their chins and recount the times when “it was believed” that police randomly harassing people of color on the street would decrease crime, and that neighborhoods would greet police as liberators.

The ongoing harms of racist police violence, and the misunderstanding of ideas about responses, are illustrated in new research from the Movement for Black Lives and GenForward.

And joining us now to talk about it is Monifa Bandele, activist with Movement for Black Lives, as well as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Monifa Bandele.

Monifa Bandele: Thank you for having me.

Mapping Police Violence

JJ: Let me ask you to start with the findings of the latest from Mapping Police Violence. I suspect some folks might be surprised, because we’re not seeing police killings on the front page so much anymore. But what did we learn, actually, about 2023?

MB: What we saw in 2023 was actually the highest number on record of police killing civilians in the United States since we’ve been documenting, which was higher than 2022, which 2022 was a record breaker. So police killings have actually been increasing year over year.

Contrary to what people believe about the activism of 2020—and while we have seen emerge very important and successful local initiatives to shift public safety away from police into community alternatives, and those things are working—overall, across the country, there’s been an increase in police budgets. So police budgets have gone up, these killings have gone up, and the data shows locally, in places like New York, which you can maybe say it’s happening all over the country, is death in incarceration is also increasing.

So just in January, here in New York City where I live, you’ve already seen two people die on Rikers Island, and the first month of the year isn’t even over.

JJ: Yeah. Let’s get into the new perspectives on community safety, because so often we see corporate news media’s defense of police violence presented as, “It’s just liberal elitists who oppose things like stop and frisk. The people in these communities actually support aggressive policing, because they’re the victims of crime.” So, it’s “you can pick safety over safety,” and it’s this false frame. And what’s interesting and exciting about this new report is the way it disengages that.

So tell us about this “Perspectives on Community Safety From Black America.” What was the listening process? And then, what do you think is most important in the findings?

Movement for Black Lives (12/5/23)

MB: Absolutely. Black people are just like any other people, right, all over the world. And so, for a long time, people had no idea what options there could be, what alternatives there could be, for community safety other than policing.

It’s not just presented in our policies and what we see on the streets, we’re fed a daily dose of it in our larger popular culture. The police shows, the true crime series. All of your favorite actors at some point have been on the policing shows, or even if it’s shows about “gangsters” or “criminals,” it really has what we call this copaganda—which is police propaganda—storyline, which ultimately says, you need police, you need vigilantes, you need this tough-on-crime entity in order to have some semblance of safety in your community.

So I’m actually really proud and impressed in the Black community, because what our report shows is that, even though we are really bombarded, millions and millions of dollars are spent to convince people that this is the only way that you can get safety, and people have lived their entire lives only experiencing this one model, that large portions of our community are really questioning that, and are really listening to folks who are saying: “Hey, we actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”

And this is something that, while we do it sometimes in our buildings and in our tenant associations or in our families, this could be scaled up community-wide. This could be scaled up citywide, statewide, nationally, where we actually figure out and get to the root of violence. You prevent most of it from happening, because you have the right mechanisms in place. And then when people are in crisis, and may cause harm to themselves or others, we combat that by giving them what they need to not be in crisis in that moment.

So the report is showing us, really, that 2020, where the discussion around “defund the police” really, really exploded, it’s not that we’re in a retreat of that, but that it launched a conversation, and that that conversation is growing year over year, and people are saying, you know what? I’m sick of people dying on Rikers Island who have yet to, one, be charged with anything, and even if they were, they shouldn’t be dying incarcerated. And I’m sick of feeling the fear of my loved ones when they interact with the police, and having to feel like that’s also the only way that we can be safe.

JJ: Well, to me, the fact that the report shows that support for alternative responses, for community-centered responses, goes up when specific solutions are named, solutions rooted in prevention, in things like mental health—when you name possible responses, folks can see them and believe in them. And, of course, the flip side is—and I’m a media critic—when those responses and alternatives are never named, or are presented as “not feasible” or marginal, then that’s a factor in whether or not people believe that they’re possible. So this report to me is really about possibilities, and how we need to see them.

Monifa Bandele: “What invest/divest demands is the investing in mental health support, the investing in first responders who actually know what to do in a crisis.”

MB: Absolutely. And it also disrupts the myth that somehow people who believe in the abolition of police and policing aren’t concerned with public safety. When mass media report on, initially, the Vision for Black Lives, and the demand to defund the police, and take off the whole entire invest/divest framework that’s also presented in that same platform, they actually are misrepresenting the demand, and therefore causing people to look at it through a false prism.

What invest/divest demands is the investing in mental health support, the investing in first responders who actually know what to do in a crisis, depending on what the crisis is. People know that when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, and that that’s not effective.

And we also have to remember that, particularly around this mental health crisis piece, we are in a larger mental health crisis right now. We know the stories of Mohamed Bah and Daniel Prude and Walter Wallace, and these are recent cases where families called for help. They called for an ambulance, or they called to get some mental health support for someone having an emotional health episode, and the police come and kill them. These are real families, and communities and people recognize, “You know what? I’m actually being duped here. I’m left with a solution that’s not a solution. It doesn’t work. And no one is talking about the alternative, because I actually picked up the phone to call for help, I called for care, and instead what I got was cops.”

So the solutions are named by activists, and that is growing. It’s spreading, because it also just speaks to what people know. People know that in their heart. Sometimes even on my own block, I have a neighbor who has mental health episodes, and we send around an email to the block association saying, “Don’t dial 911, because they might come and kill her.”

JJ: Well, I thank you very much, and I just want to ask you, finally, there’s kind of a conversation happening about whether we’re “saving journalism,” or whether we’re serving people’s information needs. And I’m loving that paradigm shift, because it’s like, are we trying to stave up existing institutions, just because they’re existing institutions, or do we want to actually have a vision of things being different? And do we want to look at the needs those institutions say they’re serving, and talk about other ways to meet those needs? So there’s a conversation even about reporting that is about some of these same questions.

And I just wanted to ask you, journalism is a public service. Corporate media is a profit-driven business, but journalism can be a public service. And I wonder what you think reporting could do to help propel this forward-looking movement forward? What would good journalism on this set of issues look like to you?

Fox‘s KTVI (8/9/14) reporting the police killing of Mike Brown.

MB: Good journalism would have to be brave journalism. Some of the things that we see when it comes to reporting on police violence, when it comes to reporting on death in prisons, or torture, solitary confinement, false imprisonment, is that all of a sudden, journalists lose—it’s almost like, did you take writing?

I mean, passive voice when it comes to state violence, it makes my skin crawl. It speaks to the anxiety and the fears of the individual reporter to not name a thing a thing. “Police kill 14-year-old” instead of “14-year-old dies”—that would be rejected by my English teacher if I wrote it. How are we all of a sudden not these brave truthtellers and storytellers?

So one of the things that we really do need is a level of integrity when it comes to state violence, and we find very few outlets and very few journalists stick to that, regardless of where they lean on the subject, or how they feel overall about prison and policing abolition, but just to say, this thing happens to this family, to this individual, and the perpetrator is this person, and they are in the police department.

And the reason why we were always taught not to use too passive a voice, because it does alter one’s feeling about what you’re saying about the incident, right? Someone just walks down the street and dies? That’s going to make me feel a lot different than if you articulate if they were killed, and this person was killed by this other person, or this entity or this institution.

And then we have to really figure out how to separate the money, because I think a lot of that fear, a lot of that lack of bravery of reporting, has to do with the fact that this is how we get paid, or this is how our institution, when we talk about corporate media, this is how we stay on the air, or this is how we keep the papers printed, is that we are owned by someone who’d be very upset if we were too truthful about this.

I’m also really excited about community-based reporting, some podcasts that I’ve seen emerge, where people are telling the stories of their communities, and the voices of members of the communities, like really reporting self-determination, so to speak, emerging that I’ve been listening to. I think these are all really important ways to counter what we’re seeing in corporate media, where it seems like the story is twisted in a pretzel to support the status quo.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Monifa Bandele, activist with the Movement for Black Lives. You can find the report that we’re talking about, “Perspectives on Community Safety from Black Americans,” at M4BL.org. Thank you so much, Monifa Bandele, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MB: Thank you.

The post ‘We Know What Keeps Us Safe: People Need Care and Not Punishment’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 29, 2023

‘”Material Support” in the Form of Speech Can Be Criminalized’Wadie Said on the new Gaza McCarthyism

Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Colorado’s Wadie Said about the new Gaza McCarthyism for the December 22, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231222Said.mp3

Janine Jackson: Depending on when you hear this, the Rutgers/New Brunswick chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine might be the most recent campus group to be suspended for what administrators called “disruptive and disorderly conduct,” and “failure to comply with university or civil authority.”

Truthout (12/13/23)

SJP is a student-activist network of campus groups in support of Palestinian lives and liberation, and naturally very active now in the midst of Israeli military attacks on Gaza that, as we record, have killed some 20,000 Palestinians minimally, injuring and displacing orders of magnitude more.

Calls for a ceasefire, at least, are growing in this country and around the world, but that’s in the face of ever-more aggressive, top-down efforts to shut those calls, and the people making them, down. If we are to resist what many are calling a new McCarthyism, we need to inform ourselves of what and where the concerns are, and to stay in conversation with one another.

Here to help us with both of those is Wadie Said, professor of law and dean’s faculty fellow at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror, out from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Wadie Said.

Wadie Said: Thank you for having me.

JJ: Listeners will have heard the unsettling reports—more, it seems, each day—of not only student groups being shut down on campus, but powerful people calling for publishing lists of the names of any students who even sign a petition, so that they can be denied future jobs.

We’ve seen editors and journalists and other workers fired, forced out or reprimanded for indicating in any way that they oppose, not even the state of Israel, but the killing and harming and displacing of thousands and thousands of people. Poetry and art events canceled, just for suggesting support for Palestinians, and many of it coming with this kind of fig leaf of: This targeting—which to be clear, we do hope ruins your life—it isn’t just because you don’t support Israel in all of its actions, but because, by our reckoning, you insufficiently oppose Hamas and what it does.

Dissent (12/8/23)

It is lost on few people who are paying attention that we are living in a very disturbing moment for an aspiring democracy, and it’s within this context that we see the piece that you recently co-authored with Anthony O’Rourke for Dissent, in which you warn that this is potentially moving beyond private institutions like universities or Wall Street companies using their power to sanction or to intimidate—not that that doesn’t mean real, material harm—but moving to federal law enforcement facing pressure to employ a particular federal statute that kicks a number of other things into play.

And you note that this tool wasn’t even at the hands of the FBI during the COINTEL Program, which some of us will remember from the 1960s. So there are levels of troubling things happening here, but let’s get started with: What is the statute that you’re talking about, and why are you concerned that it could come into play right now?

WS: The ban on providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations, with the law that was passed by Congress as part of a larger omnibus bill that purported to reform both—and, I use “reform” in the most euphemistic sense of the word, it was actually a kind of crackdown on immigration to this country, and also on habeas corpus rights for federal and state prisoners, where the avenues for relief were significantly narrowed.

And within the confines of this larger bill, there was an element that purported to take on the problem of terrorism. And this was in 1996 that the law was actually passed. So it predates the September 11 attacks by over five years. And the way the law works, is it gives the secretary of state the authority to designate organizations, provided that they’re one, foreign; two, engage in terrorist activity; and three, that terrorist activity hurts American national security, or other foreign interests or economic interests of the United States.

And this is a finding that’s completely within the province of the secretary of state. So this isn’t something that you or I or anyone else can challenge in a court. In fact, the only way to challenge a group being designated as a foreign terrorist organization is if someone were to argue, well, you got the wrong group, or you got the name wrong, or something like that. Just on purely administrative basis. There’s no substantive basis to challenge this.

And once the group is designated as an FTO, or foreign terrorist organization, individuals, wherever they are, are prohibited from providing what is called material support. And when the law was passed in 1996, the idea was that there was a problem in the United States that Congress was cracking down on, terrorist organizations raising money via humanitarian or charitable activity.

And the idea was that Congress made a finding in passing this law that money is fungible, and so money for legitimate charitable activity—the government never challenged that the activity in question was charitable activity. They just said that if a terrorist group is raising money for charity, that frees up money for buying weapons and conducting violent activity. And it can be banned as such. It can be criminalized as such.

The interesting thing here of—well, there are many interesting things, but some of the interesting things here are, for example, one, this bill created a list of foreign terrorist organizations, but it was passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, which was a decidedly domestic act. And there’s no corresponding list of domestic terrorist organizations.

Two, this purported problem of terrorist organizations raising money in the United States under the cover of humanitarian activity, I personally have never seen, and I’ve been following this law since it was passed, and litigating it and studying it for over 20 years. And I do have to say I have never seen evidence that this was a really pressing problem, that the United States was somehow a way station for terrorist organizations to raise money under cover of charitable activity. So there’s that issue as well.

And then, the final issue is that the concept of material support, money and weapons and things like this, tangible items that contribute to an organization’s illegal ends or illegal goal, that has expanded to include things like free speech. So in 2010, the Supreme Court, in a case called Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, decided that “material support” in the form of speech could be criminalized.

So the group of the day is Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement; if I wanted to say, “Hey, you need to work according to international law and be less violent and use peaceful means to pursue your goals and get away from violence,” I could be prosecuted for providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, provided that that support is done in coordination with, or under the direction of, the foreign terrorist organization.

The key stop that the Supreme Court put in place, because they realized that this was going after what was otherwise protected free speech, the key stop or safety valve provision that they put in, well, they said, provided the speech that is being criminalized with material support has to be “in conjunction with,” or “at the behest of,” a terrorist organization. Independent advocacy is not covered.

So that’s why when we see, for example, the Brandeis Center (which is not affiliated with Brandeis University, as my co-author Tony O’Rourke has pointed out several times), and the ADL, when they make the call for students, pro-Palestinian activist students, to be investigated under this law, it’s disingenuous for numerous reasons, but primarily because there is no evidence, as far as I know of, that these students are acting in coordination with or at the behest of Hamas, for example.

So this is a kind of an interesting gray area, where the call to investigate and the concept of material support, it’s broad enough that perhaps the FBI or other federal agencies could investigate. It may not lead to criminal charges, but the fact of an investigation is enough of an impediment and enough of a chill to be alarming to those of us who believe that free speech rights should be much better protected.

JJ: Absolutely. And I think the word “chill” is of course important here. There was, listeners may know, a Senate resolution that condemned anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups. And that language—you don’t have to be a historian or a regional expert to understand that “anti-Israel,” “pro-Hamas,” is very inexact language, and intentionally broad and leading. And you can hear the echoes of it. If you were someone who condemned the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there were people online who called you pro–Al Qaeda or whatever, but it didn’t necessarily, although it did in some cases, come with this law enforcement, federal definition that that speech was in fact in support of a foreign terrorist operation.

So I think what we’re trying to say, or what I’m trying to say, is there’s a whole lot of discretion involved here by federal law enforcement: who they choose to identify as a threat, what they call material support, who they use it against, who gets to bring the cases. These are kind of the questions that you’re bringing up in that piece, that it’s not like, this is a law and it’s just being applied. This is a law with a whole lot of discretion being very particularly or potentially particularly applied.

Wadie Said: “There’s a question of who gets on the list…. It’s not something that you or I can say anything about or influence.” (image: The Mosaic Rooms)

WS: Of course. And I think one of the things that I identified, again, many years ago, when I was a federal public defender and working on a case involving material support charges, and I’ve talked about this quite a bit in terms of my writing, but I initially saw it in the context of a terrorism prosecution, where you see how the material support law has what I call a double selectivity problem.

The first is, “Who gets on the list?” So it’s not every group that engages in—not every non-state group, it has to be said; these are all non-state actors, with the one exception of the Iranian, it’s kind of confusing, the Iranian Republican Guard, but they call themselves the Islamic Republican Guard, that’s part of the Iranian government. So that’s the one exception to the whole apparatus that targets non-state groups, with the one exception of this Iranian group, but basically targets these non-state groups.

So there’s a question of who gets on the list, OK, which is 100% within the discretion of the secretary of state. It’s not something that you or I can say anything about or influence.

And then there’s a question of, even if a group gets on the list, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone’s going to be prosecuted for providing material support to any particular FTO, because, like you mentioned, this is all discretionary. Prosecutors have basically unreviewable discretion to bring these type of cases, provided they’re free of overt bias, which is almost impossible to prove.

But, for example, I tried to make the argument that my client and his co-defendants were being singled out and prosecuted for providing material support, or conspiring to provide material support, to the Islamic Jihad Movement for Palestine, or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is also a designated foreign terrorist organization, because the government didn’t like their politics, and was singling them out.

Whereas there were individuals in this country who the FBI had investigated who were active on behalf of an Israeli foreign terrorist organization, called Kach or Kahane Chai, and the FBI investigated the Kahane movement in the United States, and it raided their offices and seized all sorts of equipment and computers and documents, etc. And it knew exactly who these people were. And it looked from media reports that they were actively raising money in the United States, but nobody, to my knowledge, from the Kahane movement in the United States or outside was ever prosecuted.

And now, interestingly, in 2022, the Biden administration, actually Secretary of State Blinken, actually removed the Kahane organization Kach from the list of foreign terrorist organizations. I could say a lot more about that, given that some of their main leaders are now actually high-ranking ministers in the Israeli government.

This is all a way of saying that this statute is rife for eye-of-the-beholder kind of discretionary, I would argue unfair, or selectively prosecuted, types of cases.

JJ: Well, and just adding to that, and I definitely want to indicate for folks that DissentMagazine.org is where this piece by Wadie Said and Anthony O’Rourke appears that we’re talking about. But the FBI, as you also point out, they’re trying to enlist campus law enforcement on these crackdowns and on these sort of lists. And, again, it’s a kind of authority versus authority. And we’ve seen campus law enforcement resist those efforts when it comes to immigration, for example. So in other words, these tools that are being used to get onto campus and name people who we’re going to call violators of law, campus authorities have had an opportunity to say the degree to which they’re going to get federal law enforcement involved in what they’re doing, and they’ve chosen against it other times. So there are tools they have to use if they want to resist this kind of encroachment.

WS: That’s a really interesting point, because I think in the context of immigration, there’s an understanding on behalf of university leadership around the country, private and public universities, that immigration and foreign students, and being attractive as a place for where foreigners would want to come and study, is a critical interest of the American university system, and how it operates and generates—I hate to use this horrible phrase—but generates revenue. And it basically is a kind of critical component in the way the American university markets itself.

So like you said, universities, when faced with draconian immigration laws and calls for crackdowns on immigrants, the universities resist, and university administrations resist. What we saw, I think it was two weeks ago, with the university presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn being called before a committee in the House to testify about on-campus tumult and the issue of antisemitism, and they were faced with Representative Stefanik saying that “intifada” is a call for genocide of Jews, and “from the river to the sea” is a call for the genocide of Jews, which to me is an afactual assertion at best, and a malicious falsehood at worst. And when that occurred, none of the university presidents challenged her on the facts and said, “This is an outrageous assertion that you’re making.”

So in the Palestinian context, the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was a largely peaceful uprising against what was then, and still now, the longest military occupation of modern time. So it’s a moment of great pride in the Palestinian consciousness, and she was basically equating it to a call for genocide of Jews.

And the phrase “from the river to the sea” is also intentionally misunderstood and misused for purposes that don’t reflect the facts of what it stands for. And none of the university presidents said anything about that. They didn’t say, “Well, actually your assertion is wrong.” They just kind of dithered and kind of wound themselves up, which provided fodder to people like Representative Stefanik and those who share her position, that this was somehow denying or endorsing calls for genocide, which is of course the monstrous twisting of the fact.

And it’s on that note that I think university administrations don’t fully grasp, or are scared to grasp—and I can’t figure out which it is. In my mind, for example, my question was, do these university presidents really not know what the term “intifada” means? It means “shaking off” in Arabic, or loosely translated as “uprising.” Do they really not know that, or do they know and are they scared to engage? Either way, it’s alarming.

So I think that in that context, there’s a real deep fear that university administrators must have in grappling with these issues that they don’t, for example, in the context of say, immigration.

Lannan Foundation (12/4/19)

JJ: Just to sort of pivot from that, I feel a certain sense of desperation in terms of: Anybody asking questions is supposed to shut up. And then you go on TikTok or any other social media, and you see all kinds of people, not only young people, saying, “I just don’t believe what the media’s telling me. I see the message they’re trying to give me, but I’m just not buying it.” And the idea that questioning and dissenting should mean that you should go away doesn’t read to people. It doesn’t land in the same way as maybe some folks will think that it is.

But I do think that it has to do with some people’s understanding, including my own, of law. You think that there’s a law, surely this is against the law, and if we just apply the law, and I remember this from a conversation I had with Noura Erakat a couple of years ago, the importance of not equating law with justice, and of helping the public conversation understand that law and justice are not the same thing. But it’s a difficult thing to interpret and understand.

WS: Yes, for sure. So one thing I think that you mentioned, that was exceedingly important to my view, is that you’re seeing these calls for a crackdown. You’re seeing attempts at what has been deemed McCarthyite or a new type of McCarthyism, and you’re seeing young people just not letting it deter them. They’re not being deterred, which is, I think, a real point of hope, a point of departure from the past, from the McCarthy era itself.

And I think that when you have, for example, wealthy billionaires, hedge fund managers, saying they want to know what students are saying so that they don’t hire them, I think you’re hearing the message from students that also they don’t really care to work for people like that. So they’re going to continue to advocate for the principles that matter to them, as opposed to kowtowing to people they think are not worthy of their time or energy anyway to begin with. There’s no meeting of the minds there.

Source: Wikipedia/Mapchart

And to feed it into the last point, and what you were talking about with Noura, the law itself is clearly, in this context, the material support law, but other laws that target Palestinians and pro-Palestinian advocacy, like we’ve seen over 30 states with anti-BDS laws, etc.—there’s a reckoning that’s taking place between what people in this country believe about what they think their freedom should be, what they think their rights should be, with the First Amendment at the heart of it, and the laws that the government has passed.

It was really interesting to me that, very early on in this current Israeli assault on Gaza, when the calls for the first poll came out, it was in a couple of weeks, then the first poll came out that said the majority of Americans support a ceasefire. And almost no one in Congress had called for that at this point.

And Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, mentioned something, she said the American people are not where Congress is on this issue. Or she maybe said it the other way around, that Congress is not where the American people are. It’s very interesting, because you see popular support for a ceasefire continues to grow. The latest polls were, for example, that the handling of this current war, assault on Gaza— the fifth major one in the last 15 years, by the way—people are overwhelmingly unhappy with the Biden administration’s response, and the Biden administration doesn’t seem to understand why.

So this issue of justice and what is right and what as a country we should be standing for is still incredibly contested, despite government and certain political leaders and certain business leaders taking the opposite stand, and people are standing up to them, which is I think giving those of us who are deeply concerned and highly alarmed at what’s going on in Gaza, and the Middle East more generally, as a source of hope.

JJ: Well, and we’ll be continuing this conversation, I’m quite sure, going forward.

We’ve been speaking with Wadie Said, professor of law and Dean’s Faculty Fellow at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror, which is out from Oxford University Press. You can find his article, “Terrorism Investigations on Campus and the New McCarthyism,” co-authored with Anthony O’Rourke, online at DissentMagazine.org.

Wadie Said, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

WS: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.

The post ‘”Material Support” in the Form of Speech Can Be Criminalized’ Wadie Said on the new Gaza McCarthyism appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 20, 2023

US Media Suppressed Their Government’s Role in Ousting Brazil’s Government

In a new peer-reviewed academic article in Latin American Perspectives (11/19/23), “Anticorruption and Imperialist Blind Spots: The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup,” Sean T. Mitchell, Rafael Ioris, Kathy Swart, Bryan Pitts and I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the US Department of Justice was a key actor in what we call Brazil’s “long coup.” This was the period from 2014, beginning with the lead up to the illegitimate 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, to the November 2019 release of then-former, now-current President Lula da Silva from political imprisonment.

“For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story,” we wrote; “the second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.” The article criticized US scholars on Latin America for ignoring a significant body of evidence of this involvement. It called on Latin Americanists to return to the anti-imperialist tradition that established their field as a leading source of informed criticism of US foreign policy.

In this article, I will make the same call to US journalists who lived in Brazil during this period who remained silent about their government’s role in removing Brazil’s front-running presidential candidate in the 2018 elections, opening the door for the right-wing extremist No. 2 candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.

Collusion revealed

The Intercept (3/12/20) explored “The Secret History of US Involvement in Brazil’s Scandal-Wracked Operation Car Wash.”

For nearly five years, Brazil’s huge anti-corruption investigation, called Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato in Portuguese), received glowing coverage in US media (FAIR.org, 3/8/21). Articles treated investigation and trial judge Sergio Moro as a heroic, anti-corruption crusader, rarely challenging the public prosecutors’ official narrative. Media failed to question judicial overreach, even when prosecutors did things like illegally wiretap former President Lula da Silva’s defense team’s law offices (Consultor Jurídico, 12/19/19).

This narrative began to crack in 2019, thanks to a long, slowly released series of articles in the Intercept, based on a huge archive of hacked Telegram chats revealed by hacker Walter Neto Delgatti. The texts showed collusion between the Operation Car Wash taskforce and Judge Sergio Moro, and revealed, among other things, that they knew they didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute Lula in a fair trial (Intercept, 6/9/19).

Four months after Lula was released from jail, while the Covid-19 pandemic was dominating world headlines, Intercept Brazil’s 97th article in the series (3/12/20) revealed that a team of 18 FBI agents, led by special agent Leslie Backschies, had met regularly with members of the Car Wash taskforce for years.

During these meetings, FBI agents coached the Brazilian prosecutors on using media leaks to damage the reputation of top-ranking Workers Party officials, including Lula. They also gave lessons on effective use of the coerced plea bargain, an ethically questionable tactic, widespread in the US, that had recently been legalized in Brazil.

The Intercept article was the final evidence that Brazilian journalists who had been challenging the official narrative on Operation Car Wash had been waiting for for years. However, there was already enough public record of the DoJ role in Car Wash before the Intercept article. In June 2019, Brazilian congressmember Paulo Pimenta had presented a dossier to the European Parliament, and a group of Democratic US congressmembers, in which he made a convincing argument that DoJ wasn’t just a partner, it was leading the investigation.

Hardly a secret

This 2016 New York Times article (12/21/16) was the paper’s last acknowledgment of the US role in Brazil’s corrupt anti-corruption taskforce until 2021 (2/26/21).

The US role in Operation Car Wash was hardly a secret that had to be uncovered by rigorous investigative reporting. Between December 2016 and June 2019, the DoJ publicly acknowledged its relationship with the Car Wash taskforce in a handful of press releases and a speech (7/19/17) made by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco at the Atlantic Council.

For example, the DoJ put out a press release (12/21/16) about the largest foreign bribery case ever settled in a US court, which levied $3.5 billion in fines on Brazil’s Odebrecht Construction Company and Braskem Petrochemicals. The release bragged about the collaboration of the FBI’s New York field office, the DoJ Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs and the US SEC with Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry and Federal Police.

A Reuters article (12/21/16) on the same subject described Operation Car Wash as a Brazilian investigation that involved collaboration with US authorities, who said they hoped “to pursue more criminal cases that fall under their jurisdiction.”

The New York Times article (12/21/16) on the ruling described Operation Car Wash and quoted Sung-Hee Suh, deputy assistant attorney general of the DoJ Criminal Division:

Such brazen wrongdoing calls for a strong response from law enforcement, and through a strong effort with our colleagues in Brazil and Switzerland, we have seen just that.

In 2016, US collaboration in Operation Car Wash was also widely covered in Brazil’s corporate media. For example, one of Brazil’s largest daily newspapers, Estado de S. Paulo, ran an article (5/21/16) whose headline translates as “US Justice Department Increases Corruption Investigations Against Car Wash Companies.” The story reported:

DoJ staff have been in permanent contact with the Brazilian judiciary in search of information on corruption, and also to collaborate with Brazilian investigations, say our sources. Recently, the chief of the Department of Justice’s FCPA Unit, Patrick Stokes, came to Curitiba, where he spent four days meeting with Judge Sergio Moro and members of the Car Wash taskforce.

December 21, 2016, was the last time US involvement in Operation Car Wash would be mentioned in the New York Times until February 26, 2021, in an op-ed article (2/26/21) by Gaspard Estrada.

Disappearing connection

Anyone who was following news on Brazil closely should have known by the end of 2016 that the US DoJ was a partner in Operation Car Wash. Furthermore, even if a journalist had missed all the articles in the US and Brazilian media about the DoJ’s role in the investigation in 2016, wouldn’t the long history of US interference in progressive governments in Latin America prompt any reporter interested in finding the truth to investigate the issue?

To the contrary, during that horrible year of 2017, when the coup government set labor rights back 80 years, privatized key sectors of Brazil’s economy, drove millions below the hunger line and set up Brazil’s most popular political leader in history for arrest without presenting any material evidence, the issue of US involvement in the process all but disappeared in the US media.

In July 2017, Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco gave a speech at the Atlantic Council that was transcribed and published on the DoJ website and made available for viewing on YouTube. In it, he bragged about Lula’s conviction and praised the constant, informal communications between DoJ officials and the Car Wash taskforce.

The New Yorker labeled the trumped-up prosecution of Lula da Silva “the Most Important Criminal Conviction in Brazil’s History”—but failed to note the US role in taking Lula down.

That September, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist turned Fox News regular Glenn Greenwald gave a keynote speech at an event hosted by Canadian billionaire Peter Allard, in which he heaped lavish praise on the Car Wash taskforce. Nevertheless, in early 2019, he would accept a portion of the leaked Telegram chats between the taskforce members, leading to the Intercept article series that demonstrated their collusion with Judge Sergio Moro. It was a brave act of journalism that earned Greenwald numerous death threats. But as of April 2022, as documented in a FAIR article (4/3/22), he still hadn’t mentioned US involvement in the investigation.

On the pages of the New Yorker in July 2017 (7/13/17), Alex Cuadros, who had honed a progressive image, labeled the kangaroo court procedure that removed Lula from the 2018 elections, which ushered in the presidency of the neo-fascist Bolsonaro, “the Most Important Criminal Conviction in Brazil’s History.” He made no mention of the DoJ’s role in this “most important” conviction.

Moving forward, a slew of 2019 “what went wrong” articles released after Lula’s arrest, Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency, and his appointment of Car Wash judge Sergio Moro as Justice Minister, including Vincent Bevins’ Atlantic article “The Dirty Problems With Operation Car Wash” (8/21/19), failed to mention the dirty hand of the US.

Even progressive Jacobin, which ran 38 articles with a negative take on the Brazilian Workers Party between 2014 and the end of 2017 (Brasilwire, 12/12/18), appears to have only run its first article mentioning US involvement in Operation Car Wash in August 2020, five months after the Intercept (3/12/20) finally published leaked Telegram chats documenting collusion with the DoJ and FBI and 9 months after Lula was released from jail.

Too high a career cost?

Why would so many Brazil specialists—even those like Greenwald and Bevins, who have reputations as being fierce critics of US involvement in coups in other countries—remain silent on the DoJ’s role in Brazil’s long coup?

Could they have simply missed the 2016 New York Times and Reuters articles, the DoJ press releases and the Brazilian press coverage of the issue? If so, it shows that they aren’t as knowledgeable about Brazilian politics as they present themselves to the reading public.

But more likely, the omission of the DoJ role suggests that there’s a much higher perceived cost, career-wise, to saying “the US has corrupted this government” than “this government is corrupt.”

If, for whatever motive, journalists knew about Washington’s involvement and chose not to write about it—as a Guardian journalist made clear to me in a personal conversation in April 2018, on the eve of Lula’s arrest—they are complacent in what Gaspard Estrada (New York Times, 2/26/21) calls “the biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.”

The post US Media Suppressed Their Government’s Role in Ousting Brazil’s Government appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 12, 2023

‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ – CounterSpin interview with Rodrigo Camarena on wage theft

Janine Jackson interviewed Justicia Lab’s Rodrigo Camarena about wage theft for the October 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3

Retail Dive (9/27/23)

Janine Jackson: Investigation by the National Retail Federation found that the effect of store theft by shoplifters and by employees is largely on par with historical trends. But mere data don’t stand a chance against corporate media’s energetic interest in the smash-and-grab phenomenon, which they confidently explain is the reason that Target, for instance, is closing stores in what one news account called “a series of liberal cities.”

News media can make something a crisis, a thing you should worry about, when they want to. Video can be found; harmed people can be interviewed.

But what if there’s no CCTV? What if the harm isn’t being done erratically, sporadically, caught on camera—but every day, in documents, in tax filings, in one-on-one unrecorded conversations between employees who need their job, and bosses who want their profit rate?

News media interested in crime—its impact on human beings, on society, its cost to the economy—would be interested in wage theft, the more than $50 billion a year stolen from workers in this country. But when is the last time your nightly local news talked about that, or encouraged you to be outraged and concerned and moved to action about that? There are efforts to address this ongoing, mundane thievery, but so far it seems to be under the radar of news outlets that, in every other way, suggest they care very much about crime, all the time.

NonProfit Quarterly (9/6/23)

Rodrigo Camarena is director of Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is also co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rodrigo Camarena.

Rodrigo Camarena: Hi, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I don’t think it’s crazy to say that many people truly don’t know what wage theft is, how it happens, what it is. What would you have us know about, first of all, the scale and the impact of wage theft? What does it look like?

RC: Sure. Wage theft is so common and so ubiquitous that we don’t really consider it in our day-to-day lives. But, like you mentioned, it’s this huge problem. It’s actually the largest form of theft, when you compare it to burglaries, armed robberies, motor vehicle thefts combined. And it happens whenever a worker is deprived of the wages that they’re owed lawfully. So that could mean not being paid a minimum wage, not being paid overtime, having deductions from someone’s paycheck made, or just not paying someone; they show up at the job one day and the person that hired them isn’t there anymore. Failing to honor sick leave or other benefits is another form of wage theft.

So it’s very common. It’s a term that we use as advocates to underline what is happening here, which is that you’re being deprived of what you’re owed and it’s being taken from you, but it’s not a legal term per se.

JJ: Yeah, I always think of the older sibling that holds your hand and makes you hit yourself, and says, “Why are you hitting yourself?” It’s like, something is going on, but you’re not allowed to complain about it, because somehow it’s your fault. Somehow you didn’t take that pay stub home and say, oh wait, I’m owed this and I didn’t get this. It seems like it’s a very invisible kind of crime.

Rodrigo Camarena: “In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage.”

RC: That’s right. It’s something that happens on a daily basis, actually, and in some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage. And it’s a problem that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, women and immigrants, and in particular undocumented immigrants, who often don’t feel like they can stand up for themselves, or request what they’re owed lawfully, because of their status.

So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about your rights as a worker that might prevent people from standing up for themselves and defending these rights, but this is part of the challenge in addressing this problem.

JJ: I wanted to ask you, there does seem to be a particular impact on immigrants here, and it’s not to say that it doesn’t affect low-wage workers across the board, but immigrants are in a particularly precarious situation.

RC: That’s right. And in the state of New York, where I am, and I think this is probably the case in many other states, it’s twice as likely for you to experience wage theft if you’re foreign-born than if you’re native-born.

This makes complete sense, when you think about immigrant labor in this country. It’s often some of the toughest jobs, that a lot of people don’t want to do, but that immigrants are willing to do because they need income; they’re here to work and contribute. And that puts them in a precarious position, because it allows the employer to not only pay them very little, in many cases less than they’re lawfully owed, but also exposes them to other forms of exploitation and harassment.

We can talk about sexual harassment, we can talk about discrimination because of language, of country of origin, gender or sex, and these are overlapping issues that really do a lot of harm to people that we depend on for some of the most critical industries in our country.

JJ: And I know that victims often don’t even understand that they were supposed to be paid for overtime, or they were supposed to get sick leave. There’s an absence of education from the jump, so that workers don’t even know what they’re entitled to.

RC: That’s right. Very few people will tell you what the minimum wage is, both federally or at the state level. It’s difficult to know sometimes that there’s been a change to sick leave laws in the state, or wages. And so much of the problem is really about getting this information out there more proactively.

In the state of New York, again, where I am, it’s actually required that an employer communicate what your wage is and if that wage has changed, and they can be fined for not doing so. But this is not the case across the country, and it’s often not the case even when it is mandated by law.

Albany Times Union (9/12/23)

JJ: Well, that’s the thing. I mean, I’ve read about efforts to combat wage theft, and there is legislation in the works, and I hope to talk about it. Kathy Hochul, here in New York, is saying wage theft is now larceny under New York penal law, which means that prosecutors can seek stronger penalties.

But what are your thoughts in general, in terms of the legal—this is a crime, theft is a crime, but what are your thoughts on the state of the legal response to this problem?

RC: Absolutely. Theft is a crime, and I think we need to understand it. It’s not just a crime that impacts workers who have been victims of wage theft, but it’s a crime that impacts all of us.

Wage theft contributes to poverty; the Department of Labor study of California and New York, showed this a couple of years back. It contributes to people’s need to use public benefits or welfare, and it steals from city and state tax revenues.

So it’s a crime that doesn’t just hurt the most vulnerable amongst us, but it’s a crime that impacts all of us indirectly. We need to treat it as a societal crime. We need to treat it as the severe act of injustice that it is. And I think raising the cost for employers is certainly one approach. In some municipalities, businesses can lose their licenses if they are found to be repeat offenders. So there’s a lot of policy solutions.

But I think part of what we need to understand is that there’s also a cultural expectation at this point that if you are either a low-wage worker, a new worker, someone who has been marginalized by society, that you shouldn’t expect more than what you might be paid by an employer. And I think that’s wrong.

CBS News (6/30/23)

JJ: And I want to just pull you back, in terms of the problem, that sometimes folks will say, “Oh, they won this case,” but sometimes even when you win, workers don’t collect. I just wanted to just bring you back to the reality of it, that the law may say, yes, wage theft happened here, and it still might not be possible to make workers whole.

RC: That’s right. In many cases, even when an employer is found guilty of having committed wage theft, they might then declare bankruptcy, and in some cases start a new company where they go ahead and repeat these same offenses. There are some efforts to try to hold assets accountable and put them on liens, in the event that a business has declared bankruptcy.

But, you’re right, the problem is also structural. We punish businesses after the fact. There isn’t a lot of prevention that’s happening during the event of wage theft, right? Many folks report after they’ve had their wages stolen, or they’ve been fired by their employer.

So I think there needs to be a lot of work at the local and state level to encourage people to report wage theft, to encourage people to know and understand their rights, and find solutions while they’re being victimized.

JJ: Right, and then I want to ask: Why do workers, who are already so vulnerable, who already have their whole life hanging by the thread of this job, why do they have to be the one to bring the complaints? I know that that brings us back to how Justicia Lab worked with Make the Road New York to develop this ¡Reclamo! tool. And I want to ask you to talk about the need that you saw for that, and then talk a little bit about this ¡Reclamo! tool and what it does.

Center for Public Integrity (5/4/21)

RC: Sure. So the ¡Reclamo! app was a collaborative effort between us at Justicia Lab, which is a program of Pro Bono Net, and Make the Road New York, a worker center here in New York City and New York state.

And I think the need we saw was twofold. One, in the short term, there aren’t enough lawyers to help address every wage theft claim, or enough investigators at the state level to investigate these claims. So we said, how can we use technology that, one, helps someone identify if they’ve been a victim of wage theft and, two, file a wage theft claim in New York State, but also perform strategies that we know are effective at recovering stolen wages, like writing a demand letter, which is typically written by an attorney, or just calling the employer and having a structured conversation around how they can settle this matter.

So ¡Reclamo! does all those three things. It files a complaint with the state of New York. It produces a demand letter, which is something a lawyer might make, and it helps you have a conversation with an employer around what wages you’re owed and how they can settle the matter.

And I think in the long term, what we’re really trying to do with this tool is empower non-lawyers to feel comfortable navigating this very convoluted process, and also give advocates data that they can use to tackle the structural problem here, to inform enforcement.

In some cases, advocates like Make the Road have approached the Department of Labor and said: “Hey, we see a problem in the car wash industry. Can we approach this problem together, enforce this problem together?” And that’s been effective as a strategy as well.

So there’s a number of solutions that we’re trying to put forward with this initiative, and we’re very excited about the response so far.

Axios Boston (1/12/23)

JJ: Do you see any role at the federal level for this? I mean, it seems such an across-the-board problem, and I read about Maura Healey, I read about people, and it sounds like people are saying, “We’re going to pass some legislation to make crime illegal”—wage theft should already be illegal, and so is it a matter of enforcement? And do you see any role at all at the federal level here?

RC: Definitely. I mean, the federal government can do a lot. One, they can start by raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 for decades, but they can invest more in enforcement. They can invest more in public education. They can increase the cost to employers that might commit wage theft, repeat offenders.

And they can help advocates by sharing data proactively, both federal data and state-level data around this problem. There’s a lot of information that we still don’t have about the scale of this problem, and I think if there’s better collaboration between advocates and government, we can really make a dent on this issue.

JJ: I can’t really see a more compelling story for news media. They’re reporting every day about people’s difficulties, and the idea that somehow they would not include the fact that their employers are systematically keeping their wages, while they’re out of the other side of their mouth fighting to make those wages lower, that they’re keeping some of the wages that these people have actually earned.

I don’t understand why that is not a meaningful story. It’s a story about crime and violence, frankly. People’s lives are being affected here. And so I just wanted to, finally, ask you, what do you make of media coverage of wage theft, but also just of the conditions around it that allow it, that support it? Is there anything that you would change about the way reporters approach the issue?

RC: I think we have to recognize that wage theft and worker exploitation is, in many cases, built into the business models of many industries. Our food is relatively inexpensive, given the amount of labor it takes to grow and pick it. Our restaurants and other services, domestic work, it’s severely undercompensated, and that’s by design, in many cases. But it’s also something that we don’t talk about.

We don’t talk about immigrant labor being the backbone of a number of industries; what we do talk about, I guess on the right, is immigrants stealing jobs and incurring more costs for society. But we don’t talk about the subsidy that they provide to many businesses and many industries.

We don’t talk about our dependence on low-wage work. And I think that’s the reality that many Americans and policymakers don’t want to address, because it’s complicated, and it forces a conversation around comprehensive immigration reform and workers’ rights more broadly, which I know is something that in many cases is just not popular to talk about.

JJ: Who would reporters talk to that might change the story that they tell?

RC: I think talking to large agricultural producers, talking to restaurant groups, talking to construction companies that, in many cases, employ immigrant workers to get the job done at a certain cost, I think would be valuable. We don’t scrutinize the cost of labor in many of these industries.

Even as consumers, we don’t want to know that our food was grown and picked by someone that was making $8 an hour, or was being paid by each piece of crop that they harvested. We don’t want to know that someone that is in the service industry isn’t getting paid an hourly minimum wage, or getting paid on tips, or not being paid at all in many cases, because they’re maybe earning their ability to one day perform that job.

So I think there’s a lot of different approaches that we can take to understanding this problem, but it does require understanding how businesses have built this into their business model, as well as the societal impact at large when it comes to how families are affected, and also how states are undercut when it comes to the collection of tax revenue.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s director of Justicia Lab online at JusticiaLab.org, and you can learn about that ¡Reclamo! tool that we’re talking about at MakeTheRoadNY.org. Thank you so much, Rodrigo Camarena, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RC: Thanks so much, Janine. Happy to be here.

The post ‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 6, 2023

Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft

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This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.”

There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them.

We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests.

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The post Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 5, 2023

Why Are Michael Lewis—and 60 Minutes—Hyping SBF?

Detail from a New York Times photograph (10/2/23) of Sam Bankman-Fried leaving a courthouse earlier this year. (photo: Hiroko Masuike)

Sam Bankman-Fried, once a celebrity of the cryptocurrency market, is now on trial for fraud and money-laundering charges related to the collapse of his billion-dollar crypto exchange, FTX, and its associated firm, Alameda.

The accusations, according to the New York Times (10/2/23), have made Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) emerge “as a symbol of the unrestrained hubris and shady deal-making” that have defined the cryptocurrency business. The trial will “offer a window into the Wild West–style financial engineering that fueled crypto’s growth,” which “lured millions of inexperienced investors, many of whom lost their savings when the market crashed.”

A year ago (FAIR.org, 11/19/22), I wrote that the business media, leading up to Bankman-Fried’s arrest, failed in their duty to scrutinize FTX and question what was going on behind its public relations. Far too often, he was lionized as a quirky visionary, a big-hearted man willing to funnel his profits into philanthropy and political progress. Bankman-Fried’s boy genius image collapsed with his arrest, but the business media’s credibility took a hit, too.

SBF’s chief defender

60 Minutes (10/1/22): “Michael Lewis has never before written something that dovetails so dramatically with a sensationalized news event.”

Today, acclaimed business writer Michael Lewis has stepped into the role of SBF’s chief defender. He interviewed Bankman-Fried over more than a year for his upcoming book on him, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Wall Street Journal, 10/4/23), and he took to CBS’s 60 Minutes (10/1/22) to tell the world that the accused was simply misunderstood.

“This is not a Ponzi scheme,” he said of FTX, adding:

In this case, they had a great real business. If no one had ever cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customer deposits, they’d still be making tons of money.

Lewis reiterated this point on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes (10/3/23), saying the “alleged crime makes no sense.”

This is the reporting (CoinDesk, 11/2/22) that Michael Lewis dismissed as “aspersions.”

It is true that CoinDesk (11/2/22) obtained documents showing that

Bankman-Fried’s trading giant Alameda rests on a foundation largely made up of a coin that a sister company invented, not an independent asset like a fiat currency or another crypto.

And as the New Yorker (9/25/23) later put it, “The disclosure raised questions about the true value of Alameda’s holdings and about the conflict of interest between the two supposedly independent companies.” This revelation led to doubts about and then a run on the exchange (CoinDesk, 11/10/22; New York Times, 11/14/22).

In essence, Lewis is upset that some parts of the business press and the cryptocurrency investing community were too probing of FTX and Alameda, despite the fact that no one disputes CoinDesk’s findings. As CoinDesk even noted, the exchange’s quick demise spoke to the risks involved in new markets with scant regulation:

The immense scope of this black swan-style event serves as a key reminder of just how rapidly confidence can erode in the parallel financial universe of digital assets—where there are no central banks to bail out the key players—as happened in 2008 when nearly all of Wall Street ran short of liquidity and had to turn to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding.

‘Misappropriating billions’

CoinDesk (11/16/23) compared the FTX/Alameda collusion to the corporate fraud behind Enron.

And even if Lewis genuinely believes the CoinDesk exposure or other players’ doubts about FTX unfairly caused an asset run, that still doesn’t negate the serious criminal activity being alleged. For starters, a Department of Justice press release (12/13/22) states that SBF

perpetrated a scheme to defraud customers of FTX by misappropriating billions of dollars of those customers’ funds. As alleged, the defendant used billions of dollars of FTX customer funds for his personal use, to make investments and millions of dollars of political contributions to federal political candidates and committees, and to repay billions of dollars in loans owed by Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund also founded by the defendant.

The federal government also accuses Bankman-Fried of “conspiring with others to defraud FTX’s lenders ‘by providing false and misleading information to those lenders regarding Alameda Research’s financial condition,’” and alleges that “he conspired with others to make illegal donations to political candidates, using the names of other persons to mask and augment political giving” (CNBC, 12/13/22). The prosecution claims that his wealth and power—highly lauded and accepted at face value in the establishment press until the moment of his collapse—was “built on lies” (Reuters, 10/4/23).

Like anyone, Bankman-Fried is innocent until proven guilty, and has the right to defend himself in court. And it is, of course, an open question if what SBF is accused of engaging in was a Ponzi scheme or mere fraud (Guardian, 12/17/22). In fact, CoinDesk (11/16/23) likens the FTX downfall not necessarily to a Ponzi schemer like Bernie Madoff, but to the shady energy company Enron: “One core similarity is the role of publicly traded, equity-like assets ultimately linked to the performance of the firms themselves,” it wrote; in “both cases, these internal assets flowed between entities that were nominally or even legally separate, but that in fact served the same masters.”

But it’s remarkable for an esteemed business journalist to use one of the country’s most important news programs to declare that everyone except SBF was to blame for a business collapse that had enormous consequences for everyone involved. It’s even weirder to hear a business writer insinuate that critical reporting and asking key questions about the health of a business constituted casting “aspersions.”

‘Effective altruism’

Dylan Matthews (Vox, 12/12/22): “SBF was an inexperienced 25-year-old hedge fund founder who wound up, unsurprisingly, hurting millions of people due to his profound failures of judgment.”

More bizarrely, Lewis went on to say that the world is poorer without SBF at the helm of a cryptocurrency exchange. “A lot of people wanted there to be a Sam,” he said. “There is still a Sam Bankman-Fried–shaped hole in the world that now needs filling. That character would be very useful…. What he wanted to do with the resources.”

One can only imagine that Lewis means SBF’s commitment to “effective altruism” (Vox, 12/12/22), a philosophy that often advocates amassing as much money as possible in order to have more to give away. But Lewis’ declaration here displays the narrow vision the business press has for the world: Society doesn’t need a massive market for internet-based currency, and surely no one needs to profit off such exchanges. Nor can social problems only be addressed by bleeding-heart rich people.

There is a hole in society. But it isn’t another crypto capitalist we need, but a system that taxes the wealthy to fund social programs and to curb the influence of money in our political system. Lewis’ desire for a new SBF is as much a political statement as it is commentary on SBF’s case.

And Lewis’ political naivete came on full display when he told 60 Minutes that SBF came up with an idea to pay Donald Trump not to run for president, an idea that would no doubt delight many liberals. However, putting aside the question of how much Trump ever entertained such a buy-off, the sleazy scheme would likely have no meaningful impact on our politics today. Whether Trump gets the nomination this year or not doesn’t change the fact that his ideas have become firmly rooted in the Republican Party, and living on in the policies of Republican governors around the country.

One has to wonder if SBF’s openness with Lewis inspired Lewis to cross the line into a guest of his source, compromising his vision. Andy Kessler wrote at the Wall Street Journal (10/1/23) that “Lewis spent more than 70 days in the Bahamas” with SBF, where FTX was based, “on a dozen different trips.” “That’s commitment,” Kessler wrote, noting that “Lewis had all access.”

Lewis told the Journal that in his many discussions with SBF, under house confinement at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California (Lewis lives nearby in the East Bay), “nothing he said was untrue.” He added, “If you asked him the right question, you got the answer.”

Judging from both this and the 60 Minutes appearance, Lewis is looking at the FTX and Alameda collapse not with a cold outside eye, but the view of an insider, by SBF’s side.

‘Too much in love with his subjects’

Michael Lewis (60 Minutes, 10/1/22): “The story of Sam’s life is people not understanding him.”

Lewis, a prolific author and a contributor at Vanity Fair, is far from just another business journalist. He is a rare kind of successful writer who can turn business reporting into drama, which has made him rich both via book sales (starting with Liar’s Poker in 1989) and movie deals (The Blind Side, Moneyball, The Big Short).

While his narratives about business and other spheres of life are popular around the world, some wonder if he’s on the other side of career peak. As long ago as 2015, Columbia Journalism Review (1/15) was noting he had been lambasted by critics for “journalistic laziness” and “falling much too in love with his subjects.” The Washington Post (5/5/21) called his pandemic account The Premonition “disappointing” and “murky and unconvincing.”

Then his book The Blind Side, about the adoption of future African-American football star Michael Oher by a wealthy white family, became the subject of a scandal all its own (People, 8/17/23), when Oher revealed that he was never actually adopted, and charged that the idea that he had been was “a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense” (ESPN, 8/14/23).

Personal tragedy also struck: Lewis told 60 Minutes (10/1/23) that he almost stopped writing after his daughter, along with her boyfriend, was killed in a car accident (AP, 5/29/21).

Lewis’ appearance on 60 Minutes is an extension of the press enthusiasm for SBF that FAIR documented before the fall of FTX. Lewis is entranced at SBF’s friendships with celebrities, his charismatic shabbiness, his lofty ambitions, and his obsession with news and information. All that creates an image of an adorable whiz kid rocking the stodgy world of Wall Street. But it really is the media’s job to look behind that and see him for who he really is: a competent adult who ran a business accused of serious wrongdoing.

But worst of all, Lewis’ praise for Bankman-Fried is the kind of business advocacy that not only takes the boss’ defense at face value, but doesn’t have any kind of empathy or interest in the victims of FTX’s collapse (Atlantic, 1/30/23; Fortune, 10/1/23). Skeptics of cryptocurrency often disregard cryptocurrency investors as dupes or small-time scammers. On 60 Minutes, Lewis dismissed the ethical implications of Bankman-Fried’s machinations: “What you’re doing is possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas.”

However, many people are attracted to cryptocurrency investing for the same reason people invest in other risky ventures that promise great reward: Wages are not keeping up with the cost of living, and thus people are desperate to find other ways to attain financial security (Business Insider, 1/12/20). Though some people come to crypto exchanges because they want a Lamborghini, others just want to create a nest egg for retirement, start a college fund or pay off their mortgage.

Whether it’s the subprime crisis of 2008 or the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, all financial collapses create victims, very real people whose lives are upended by greedy financial barons. We should be hearing more about the victims of financial collapse on venues like 60 Minutes.

The post Why Are Michael Lewis—and 60 Minutes—Hyping SBF? appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 29, 2023

Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment

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New York Times (9/27/23)

This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop.

When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.”

Come again?

If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy?

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press.

We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.”

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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup.

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The post Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
May 24, 2023

The Character Assassination of San Francisco

CNN (5/14/23) aired a special report on “What Happened to San Francisco?”—although what mainly happened to the city is that it became the target of right-wing attacks.

CNN has joined the media chorus decrying the death of San Francisco with a one-hour special (Whole Story, 5/14/23). On an episode hosted by Sara Sidner, the network declared that “the city by the bay is now at the forefront of the nation’s homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction crises,” while some “residents worry Northern California’s largest municipality could become a so-called failed city.”

The narrative of San Francisco’s demise has been building for some time. In the corporate press, the closure of a Whole Foods (Newsweek, 4/11/23; ABC, 4/12/23; New York Times, 4/30/23) is like the moment Afghans clung to a US Air Force plane as the nation fell to the Taliban. The story of this store’s exit is more complicated than criminal activity (48Hills, 4/11/23)—but no matter, the narrative holds that permissive policies protecting the homeless have allowed a zombie army of criminals to exert control over the city, countered only by a police force that can do nothing, Democratic politicians fearful to act and tech bosses cowering in fear.

CNN has had some more reasonable coverage of the city in the past, placing its crime statistics in a national context (4/7/23) and a fuller picture of why a much-hyped Nordstrom closure had less to do with crime and more with general retail trends (5/3/23).

But in the lead-up to the documentary, CNN (5/14/23) also told a heart-wrenching story about a San Francisco mother who lamented that the city’s policies led her son into drugs. She may genuinely feel that way, but that doesn’t make it so: West Virginia leads the nation in drug deaths (CBS, 8/2/22), with more than three times the per capita rate of California; why is there no media drumbeat against Gov. Jim Justice?

‘No one is safe’

A local ABC reporter’s hyperbolic comment to CNN (5/14/23) becomes a Fox News headline (5/15/23)—because it’s San Francisco.

It’s normal for the Rupert Murdoch–owned press (Fox News, 5/11/23, 5/15/23; Wall Street Journal, 5/3/23; New York Post, 5/4/23) to obsess about San Francisco falling apart. Tucker Carlson, formerly Fox News’ most-watched host and a San Francisco native, ran a weeklong special on the city called “American Dystopia” (Fox News, 1/6/20), which Media Matters for America (1/13/20) described as “dehumanizing homeless people.”

But this trend is embraced by the more centrist corporate press, too. The New York Times gave space to venture capitalist Michael Moritz (2/26/23) to lament the excesses of Democratic governance and repeatedly eulogize the city’s retail establishments (12/17/22, 2/9/23, 4/30/23).

When tech boss Bob Lee was fatally stabbed “in an enclave of high-rise condominiums,” the Times (4/7/23) took at face value statements from fellow tech bosses about how he was the victim of the out-of-control anarchy allowed by progressive leaders. As it turned out, Lee was likely the victim of sex-and-drug-fueled, tech boss–on–tech boss violence (New York Post, 5/12/23, 5/14/23).

In another example of media outlets showing their hand, CBS (4/7/23) reported, “A brutal and brazen attack on former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani” left “him battling for his life and neighbors on edge.” The person who had attacked the former commish was unhoused, fueling the sentiment that the streets were filled with roving sociopaths targeting people of all ranks, including civic leaders. Along with the Lee killing, “both violent assaults have ignited an intense debate over safety in the city.” The New York Post (4/7/23) highlighted the attack as evidence that “no one is safe” in San Francisco.

The New York Times (4/7/23) presented the stabbing of tech exec Bob Lee as a symbol of “deepening frustration over the city’s homelessness crisis”—before another “tech leader” was arrested for his murder.

But as with the Lee story, the media assumptions were premature. Video evidence later revealed that Carmignani had attacked the homeless man with bear spray and that the homeless man acted in self-defense, although Carmignani disputed this (CBS, 4/26/23; CNN, 4/27/23; LA Times, 5/11/23). In fact, lawyers for the homeless man in the case “alleged that Carmignani may be involved in other incidents in which homeless people were sprayed in the Cow Hollow and Marina District neighborhoods” (NBC, 4/27/23). Carmignani also has his own checkered past: he resigned from his commissioner post “one day after he was arrested in connection with an alleged domestic violence incident” (SFGate, 9/24/13).

At the Atlantic (6/8/22), Nellie Bowles—a California heiress (SF Chronicle, 10/28/21; LA Times, 6/14/22), former New York Times writer, and a participant in the conservative and lucrative anti-woke propaganda network (Daily Mail, 11/5/21)—brought an out-of-touch upper-class perspective to a San Francisco she, like CNN, called a “failed city.” Her heart no doubt bleeds for suffering people on the street, but she placed the blame on a regional culture of permissiveness:

This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan, blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism. The roots of this belief system reach back to the ’60s, when hippies filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment. Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes.

‘Failed city’

San Francisco’s homicide rate has dropped by half since the early 2000s—prompting the Atlantic (6/8/22) to run an essay on “How San Francisco Became a Failed City.”

The casual use of the phrase “failed city” is insulting hyperbole. The analogous term “failed state” was popularized in an early ’90s Foreign Policy article (Winter/92–93), which defined the “failed nation-state” as one “utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community”—a definition that seems designed to invite intervention by said “community.” (See University of Chicago Law Review, Fall/05.) A failed state is a technical term for a place, due to internal mismanagement and external pressure, where civil society has broken down amid collapse in central governance. There is no major world body that considers the loss of a Nordstrom store (SF Chronicle, 5/3/23) a valid metric of societal meltdown.

But even if we forgive journalists for their flexible poetic license, the media narrative that San Francisco stands outside the US norm runs contrary to reality.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that the highest rates of drug overdose mortality are in West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Kentucky, with California far behind. US Department of Agriculture research shows that the highest poverty states are Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico and Mississippi. Forbes’ list (1/31/23) of the most dangerous cities cites New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis and Memphis (as well as Mobile and Birmingham, Alabama), but not San Francisco. San Francisco/Oakland does appear on the list of cities with the highest homelessness rates—but seven cities have higher rates, including New York City, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Surreal media narrative

Toro Castaño (KQED, 9/27/22) on homeless “sweeps”: “A lot of things they’re taking are warm clothes, warm jackets, blankets, things that you need just to survive.”

It’s a surreal media narrative for Zal Shroff, a senior attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, who recently helped win an injunction against what the group calls the city’s discrimination against homelessness. “On paper, the city has 3,000 shelter beds for 8,000 unhoused people,” he told FAIR, noting that while residents may be frustrated with street homelessness, there are often few places for the homeless to go.

“There is no avenue for an unhoused person to seek shelter. You can only get it after you’ve been harassed by police and beg for it,” he said. “You can’t go to the police and ask, they have to threaten you with citation and arrest, and then maybe they’ll ask to see if there is a shelter bed.”

Despite the media narrative about the city’s lawlessness, LCCRSF’s summary of the lawsuit states—and so far, one court agrees—that the city’s unhoused population are subjected to “brutal policing practices that violate [their] civil rights.” As Toro Castaño (48Hills, 9/27/22), who was homeless in the city from 2019 to 2021, told the court, “I was harassed by San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and Department of Public Works (DPW) staff several times a week for the entirety of the two years I was homeless.” He noted in the court papers that while living on the street in May 2020, he was “harassed by police officers from the Castro beat every day for five weeks.”

KQED (9/27/22) noted that “Castaño had his belongings taken from him by the city four times during the pandemic, according to the complaint,” and that “while Castaño was unhoused, he said he was asked to move nearly every day.”

As Sarah Cronk, an unhoused person said in court papers, “If the City does not have adequate shelter or housing for us, then it should not be harassing us.” She and her partner “are just trying to scrape by and build as much of a life for ourselves as possible—with both dignity and safety,” Cronk said, but the city government “makes that impossible for us.”

This is hardly the “lunatics are running the asylum” image the media would have the public believe is the case.

For Shroff, the situation is frustrating, because while the injunction is meant to stop police harassment of the homeless while encouraging more affordable housing and shelter services, in the city’s narrative, his organization is calling for outright anarchy (SF Chronicle, 1/23/23; Law360, 4/26/23). “That’s the narrative that’s out there and is winning the day in the press,” he said, “which is interesting, because we’re winning this case.”

Myth of soaring crime

San Francisco did have a high murder rate in the early 2000s, but it has since fallen dramatically, to close to the US and California averages.

And then there’s the mythology of the city’s soaring crime. As the San Francisco Standard (12/22/22) reported, the city’s “crime totals cratered in 2020 when the city hunkered down for the first waves of Covid,” and then rose again. But “crime in San Francisco has not yet increased to pre-pandemic levels—with a few key exceptions.”

The online news outlet said crime rates “have fallen tremendously since peaks in the 1990s, which mirrors trends in cities across the country,” and that the “city’s most recent crime spikes came in 2013 for violent crime and 2017 for property crime.” (To put this admission into perspective, the Standard is financed by the aforementioned Michael Moritz.)

SFGate (1/7/22) also noted that violent crime rates in San Francisco matched national trends, and were not national outliers. Despite ideas of the city’s lawlessness and left-wing calls to “defund the police,” the “San Francisco Police Department budget increased overall by 4.4% from 2019 to 2022” (KGO-TV, 10/13/22), and Mayor London Breed has called for “a $27 million budget supplemental to fund police overtime citywide” (KGO-TV, 3/8/23). The right blamed the property crime spike on former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, but with his recall (FAIR.org, 7/11/22), there is no longer a George Soros–backed boogeyman to hold up as a scapegoat (The Hill, 6/9/22).

Oddly enough, the “failed city” has “the fastest growing economy in US” (SFGate, 11/16/22).

And while it is true that the city’s population has decreased (SF Chronicle, 1/26/23), the housing market is still hot, “with rents returning to pre-Covid levels, and a median one-bedroom there now priced at $3,100 a month, up 14% and the highest in two years” (Bloomberg, 7/26/22). The city’s tourism economy is currently booming, after the pandemic hurt the sector (SF Chronicle, 3/21/23). The city’s unemployment rate had been sitting at a low 2.9% (KPIX-TV, 3/10/23; SF Chronicle, 4/21/23) and has only recently spiked—not because of some progressive City Hall policy, but thanks to nationwide layoffs in the locally concentrated tech sector (SF Chronicle, 4/21/23). One report (SFGate, 11/16/22) showed that the “San Francisco Bay Area led the country in economic growth in 2022, with a 4.8% increase in GDP.”

The skyrocketing wealth is connected to the homelessness problem, Schroff said. While there is a mythology that street homelessness in San Francisco is the result of outsiders traveling there for the services and the mild weather, Schroff notes that LCCRSF research has shown that a bulk of unhoused people are long-time area residents who cannot find shelter.

The group’s lawsuit said “San Francisco failed to meet state targets for affordable housing production between 1999 and 2014—ultimately constructing 61,000 fewer very low-income units than needed.” From “2015 to 2022, the city only built 33% of the deeply affordable housing units it promised, and only 25% of actual housing production went to affordable housing.”

“The mental health services and the drug addiction services are robust, but that doesn’t solve that two thirds of unhoused people are reporting that they can’t find affordable housing,” Schroff said. “There is no exit option.”

American Gomorrah

New York Post (10/15/22): “San Francisco is governed by a leadership that is so enamored of the city’s progressive, humanitarian self-image that the idea of enforcing basic laws—even ones that save people’s lives like controlling drug sales and consumption—has come to be regarded as reactionary.”

In a country where a state like Texas has seen six mass shootings this year (USA Today, 5/8/23), why is San Francisco the object of such obsession? The San Francisco Bay Area, in the imagination of the American right, is the closest thing America has to Sodom and Gomorrah. San Francisco is identified as the epicenter of gay liberation, the home of the hippies, vegan restaurants and streets where Cantonese and Spanish are heard as much as English. Berkeley, just across the Bay, was a primary site of 1960s student radicalism and counter-culture, and the flagship UC campus continues to be a dreaded symbol of state-funded academic wokeness (Berkeleyside, 12/12/18; Washington Examiner, 8/21/22; Daily Beast, 10/31/22).

Affluenza has cleansed the Bay of much of its bohemia, but its national political legacy lives on in Democratic establishment titans like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The area’s tech industry, like Hollywood in the southern end of the state, is a lucrative capitalist sector that the right, not incorrectly, associates with Democratic voting (Open Secrets, 1/12/21; Wall Street Journal, 2/20/21).

So to paint San Francisco as an example of failed governance is, in the right-wing narrative, to prove that the progressive urban experiment has broadly failed. The Nazi Joseph Goebbels probably didn’t say, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” but it remains a central principle of propaganda. The failure of San Francisco has been a drumbeat in the conservative press, and as a result, major corporate media are acting as if this is true, or at least arguable. CNN, the New York Times and the Atlantic, by buying into this mythology, are able to call into question compassion for the homeless and alternatives to aggressive policing.

In fact, the Washington Post (5/21/19) seemed a little lonely in the corporate press when it argued that it was an “earthquake of wealth” that permanently worsened the city’s character, not the poor or any overly compassionate social policy.

But all of the recent negative coverage surrounds the issue of homeless people. Homelessness and poverty are the tragic results of unfettered capitalism and raging inequality, whether it’s in rural West Virginia or in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Drug addiction is a public health crisis that the US healthcare system neglects, like many other ailments. These media pieces aren’t appalled by the conditions that create seas of unhoused people, but are appalled that housed, professional people have to deal with them. The New York Times and CNN are in many ways different from Fox News and the New York Post, but this is where their worldviews meld.

This is media outrage focused not at systemic injustice, but based in disgust at the victims of injustice.

Correction (5/30/23): A previous version of this article incorrectly said that tech boss Bob Lee, a former resident of the Bay Area, was killed “near his home.”

The post The Character Assassination of San Francisco appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
May 19, 2023

Dehumanization Killed Jordan Neely—and Dominated Coverage of His Death

An earlier Daily News headline (5/2/23) was “Brawling NYC Subway Rider Dies After Chokehold, NYPD Says.”

Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man, appeared to be in the throes of a mental health crisis and asking for money on a New York City subway train when another passenger—a 24-year-old white man—put him in a chokehold for several minutes, killing him.

The dozens of other passengers in the car of the northbound F-train did not stop the attack, although in a witness video, one bystander can be heard warning Penny he was “going to kill” Neely. The video also reveals some passengers cheering, while two other men stood above Neely, holding him down while Penny choked him for several minutes until he went limp.

The death was ruled a homicide. The killer’s name, Daniel Penny, was not released to the media for four days. Penny was not charged until May 11, ten days after the killing, and after protests took place across the city demanding that he be arrested. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter, but released on $100,000 bond. A fundraiser on a right-wing Christian crowdfunding website called GiveSendGo has raised more than $2.5 million as of May 19.

‘A man in pain’

Roxane Gay (New York Times, 5/4/23) raises questions “about who gets to stand his ground, who doesn’t, and how, all too often, it’s people in the latter group who are buried beneath that ground by those who refuse to cede dominion over it.”

Neely, who often busked as a Michael Jackson impersonator, had a history of mental illness and trauma. Before he was killed, he was reportedly yelling on the train, complaining of hunger and thirst and throwing his jacket down in a way some witnesses described as aggressive.

“I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” a witness quoted Neely saying. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”

No witness accounts suggested he was physically violent. Even so, much of the corporate press deliberately refrained from framing Neely as a victim, and far-right media outlets have gone even further to dehumanize him and excuse the killing.

An opinion piece by Roxane Gay for the New York Times (5/4/23) rightly grouped this killing in with other recent wannabe vigilante–style assaults: 16-year-old Ralph Yarl shot for ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City; 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis fatally shot for pulling into the wrong driveway in upstate New York; competitive cheerleaders Heather Roth and Payton Washington shot after one got into the wrong car in a parking lot in Texas; a father and four members of his family—including an 8-year-old boy—fatally shot for asking his neighbor to stop firing an AR-15 assault rifle in his yard.

Gay writes of Neely:

Was he making people uncomfortable? I’m sure he was. But his were the words of a man in pain. He did not physically harm anyone. And the consequence for causing discomfort isn’t death, unless, of course, it is.

Dehumanization

The New York Daily News (5/2/23) announced Neely’s killing under the headline “NYC Man Threatening Strangers on Manhattan Subway Dies After Marine Corps Vet Put Him in Chokehold.” The lead made it clear that his killer was to be understood as the “good guy” in this story:

A disturbed man threatening strangers on a Manhattan subway train died after getting into a brawl with the wrong passenger—a US Marine Corps veteran who put him in a chokehold.

Of course, Neely didn’t “get into a brawl” with Penny, who by all accounts approached Neely from behind. But this framing of Neely as the instigator of violence was common.

New York Times columnist David French (5/14/23), suggesting that Neely’s death was fundamentally a failure of the “rule of law”—not because of Penny’s vigilantism, but because of the city’s failure to keep Neely behind bars for more than 15 months after a 2021 assault charge—called Neely “reportedly aggressive and menacing.” French’s only evidence of this characterization was Neely’s yelling about needing food and water and being ready to die.

As Neely’s killer knew nothing about his arrest record, Newsweek‘s headlining it (5/4/23) suggests the magazine thinks it should affect how sorry we should be that Neely is dead.

Piling on the dehumanization, Newsweek (5/4/23) published an article centered on Neely’s prior criminal record: “Man Killed on Subway Had 42 Prior Arrests.” While quoting homeless advocates who condemned the ways poor and homeless people are demonized and dehumanized, Newsweek simultaneously framed the piece in a way that demonized and dehumanized Neely, relying on law enforcement accounts.

Sara Newman, director of organizing at the housing justice group Open Hearts Initiative, told Newsweek:

Jordan Neely’s murder is the direct result of efforts to dehumanize and demonize New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness, living with mental illness or just existing in the world as Black and poor.

But Newsweek‘s piece overall did just what Newman condemned, citing a “police spokesperson” who outlined Neely’s arrests between 2013 and 2021: four for alleged assault and others for low-level crimes and crimes of poverty, including transit fraud, trespassing and violations like having an open container in public.

Activists quoted in the article called out the NYPD’s willingness to disclose Neely’s entire record as an attempt to vilify him and justify his killing, but that didn’t stop Newsweek from leading with the police narrative.

At the time of publication, Penny’s name had still not been public, but nearly a decade of Neely’s prior arrests that had nothing to do with the incident that got him killed were headline news.

‘Was this heroism?’

NBC‘s New York affiliate (5/4/23) asks, “Was this heroism, or vigilantism?”

Reporting on Neely’s death being ruled a homicide caused by the chokehold, NBC New York (5/4/23) still managed to pose the question: “Was this heroism, or vigilantism?” The report described Neely’s killer as someone “initially hailed as a Good Samaritan.”

FoxNews.com (5/4/23) reported that demonstrators chanted “Fuck Eric Adams” and implied that was because the New York mayor had said “that the DA should be given time to conduct his investigation.” In fact, protesters were angered because, as FAIR (6/25/22, 12/7/22, 4/4/22) has documented, Adams’ policies have stigmatized homelessness and mental illness, while inflating police budgets and cutting funds for education—and doing little to make people safer.

New York Times (5/4/23) and NBC (5/4/23) headlines also referred to the killing as a “Chokehold Death.” Even well-intentioned reporting that highlights the demands of protesters is eclipsed by the passivity in this language. If a chokehold causes someone’s death, it’s more than just a death; it’s a homicide.

Gay’s piece for the Times put it best:

News reports keep saying Mr. Neely died, which is a passive thing. We die of old age. We die in a car accident. We die from disease. When someone holds us in a chokehold for several minutes, something far worse has occurred.

A ‘debate’ of their own design

USA Today (5/18/23) suggests that one way to look at Neely’s killing is that a “former Marine” drew “accolades” for “choking him into submission.”

USA Today (5/17/23) illustrated the “Grand Canyon-size rift between the left and the right” in how people view the death of Neely:

A former Marine stops a violent homeless man from harassing subway passengers, choking him into submission and drawing accolades for his willingness to step in.

A well-known Black street performer who struggled with mental health and homelessness for years dies at the hands of a white military man in front of horrified onlookers.

The headline online was, “An Act by a ‘Good Samaritan’ or a Case of ‘Murder’: The Rift in How US Views Subway Chokehold Death.” In print, “Chokehold Death Hardens Stark Divide” says the same thing in fewer words: The value of Jordan Neely’s life is up for debate.

The New York Times (5/4/23) also both-sidesed New Yorkers’ opinions on this killing, calling it a “debate”:

For many New Yorkers, the choking of the 30-year-old homeless man, Jordan Neely, was a heinous act of public violence to be swiftly prosecuted, and represented a failure by the city to care for people with serious mental illness. Many others who lamented the killing nonetheless saw it as a reaction to fears about public safety in New York and the subway system in particular.

And some New Yorkers wrestled with conflicting feelings: their own worries about crime and aggression in the city and their conviction that the rider had gone too far and should be charged with a crime.

It later explained, “Many have grown worried about safety on the subway after experiencing violence or reading about it in the news.”

But the overwhelming majority of riders have not experienced violence on the subway themselves. As FAIR (12/7/22) has pointed out, one’s odds of being the victim of a crime while riding New York City public transportation is approximately 1.6 out of 1 million. The NYPD’s own statistics show transit crimes essentially flat for the past 10 years, excluding the dramatic drop during the pandemic, when ridership plummeted. On the other hand, if you follow the news, you’re virtually guaranteed to hear about supposedly rampant subway crime—meaning the fear of rising crime in the city and the subways has been almost entirely manufactured by the news media itself.

‘Paths crossing’

The New York Times (5/7/23) describing a killing as “paths crossed” recalls its reporting (11/23/14) a police officer shooting an unarmed man in a stairwell as “two young men” who “collided.”

A later Times piece was titled “How Two Men’s Disparate Paths Crossed in a Killing on the F Train” (5/7/23). In true Times-style storytelling, a man killing another amounts to “paths crossing.”

“Was this a citizen trying to stop someone from hurting others? Or an overreaction to a common New York encounter with a person with mental illness?” mused the paper of record. The article explained that the type of chokehold Penny used resembled one taught in the Marines. The Times reports the maneuver is meant to cut off blood and oxygen to the brain but not crush the windpipe (it did). It quotes a Marines press release from 2013 that describes choking techniques as a “fast and safe way to knock out the enemy” (1/31/13).

Characterizing Penny’s chokehold as a generally harmless maneuver gone wrong is irresponsible. Chokeholds like the one Penny used are designed for combat—not the subway. In 2021, the Justice Department banned the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement agencies unless lethal force was authorized. In a piece for Military.com (5/9/23), Gabriel Murphy, a former Marine who started a petition to prosecute Penny for Neely’s death, explains that these martial arts methods Marines learn in training are “not designed to be non-lethal or safe.”

Unlike much coverage of unhoused murder victims—of whom there are many—the article did offer some humanizing details about Neely’s life: that his mother was murdered when he was 14, and that a former high school classmate remembered him as a good dancer and a well-behaved student.

But it then focused on his record of arrests and use of K2, a potentially dangerous form of synthetic marijuana, and his voluntary and involuntary hospitalizations over the years. The paper paraphrased a hospital employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “because they were not authorized to discuss his history.” In other words, the employee was granted anonymity to violate patient privacy laws and air Neely’s personal medical history.

Meanwhile, a “surfing friend” of Penny got the last word in the piece: “He could only guess at Mr. Penny’s mind-set: ‘Knowing Danny and knowing his intentions, it was to help others around him.’”

Right-wing depravity

“The rhetoric from Mr. Neely was very frightening, it was very harsh,” the New York Post (5/18/23) quoted an anonymous bystander. “I sensed danger.”

Right-wing media coverage of Neely’s death reached yet another level of depravity. “Shocking Video Shows NYC Subway Passenger Putting Unhinged Man in Deadly Chokehold,” read one New York Post headline (4/2/23). In the piece, the victim was described as a “disturbed man” and a “vagrant,” while the person who killed him for yelling on the subway was a “subway passenger” and a “Marine veteran.”

The Post quoted freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, who captured the video of the incident. “I think that in one sense it’s fine that citizens want to jump in and help. But I think as heroes we have to use moderation,” he said, adding that if police had shown up earlier, “this never would have happened.” (The Post did not challenge this suggestion that police are not notorious choke-holders themselves—see George Floyd, Eric Garner, Elijah McClain.)

Fox host Brian Kilmeade (Media Matters, 5/4/23) justified the killing, saying the other passengers who “felt threatened” “helped out,” too. He added that Neely had prior arrests for “assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating.”

“I can’t tell you how many times you see this guy—these guys—walking up and down screaming, and you think to yourself, this can be out of control at any moment,” Kilmeade said. He added:

You have a 24-year-old who we trained in the military, lives on Long Island, hopping on a subway, and said, let me help out the American people again, when I’m not in Afghanistan, let me just grab this guy and hold him down. No cops around, because they are understaffed and they are not on the trains. They are upstairs. And this guy takes action. And now you have people protesting for the homeless guy? Were you protesting when he was throwing garbage at people and threatening people in their face? So, I have no patience for these people.

Assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating, throwing trash and disrupting passengers are not punishable by the death penalty in a court of law—and certainly not by a subway passenger who decided to play judge, jury and executioner on his afternoon ride. No matter how short on patience Kilmeade is for people he sees on his commute to his $9 million/year job, Jordan Neely was a human being.

Mental illness is not a crime

Additionally, Adams’ police “omnipresence” plan deployed more than 1,000 extra officers underground in early 2022. Despite record levels of police underground, the April 2022 subway shooting that injured at least 29 people still happened. Officers on the platform that Michelle Go was fatally shoved off of that same year didn’t stop her murder, either.

In April 2023, the NYPD reintroduced a $74,000 robotic police dog to spy on people in Times Square. Meanwhile, the city’s department of education may lose $421 million in additional budget cuts next school year (Chalkbeat, 4/4/23).

It can’t be repeated enough that mental illness and homelessness are not criminal, and that the demonization of both things are leading to policies and prejudices that cost lives. Homelessness and mental illness are both conditions that make someone more likely to be victims of crimes, not perpetrators (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 1/24/22; NIH, 1/9/23).

But as the corporate media has demonstrated with Neely’s story, even a victim of homicide is framed as guilty when he is Black, unhoused and mentally ill.

The post Dehumanization Killed Jordan Neely—and Dominated Coverage of His Death appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
April 28, 2023

Jen Senko on the Cost of Hate Talk

Kansas City Star (4/20/23)

This week on CounterSpin: The grandson of the elderly white man who shot a Black teenager in the head for ringing his doorbell told the Kansas City Star that their relationship had unraveled as his grandfather began watching “Fox News all day, every day,” and sank into a “24-hour news cycle of fear, of paranoia.” Those words had a poignant resonance for many people who feel they’ve lost family members and friends to a kind of cult, that’s not secret, but pumped into the airwaves every day. Hate-fueled and hate-fueling media have political and historical impacts—and interpersonal, familial ones as well.

The Brainwashing of My Dad—the 2016 film and the book based on it—reflect filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko’s effort to engage the multi-level effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media, as well as how we can respond. We hear from Jen Senko this week on CounterSpin.

CounterSpin230428Senko.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of a potential UPS strike.

CounterSpin230428Banter.mp3

The post Jen Senko on the Cost of Hate Talk appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
April 7, 2023

Saurav Sarkar on Starbucks Organizing

      CounterSpin230407.mp3

(CC photo: Elliot Stoller)

This week on CounterSpin: Former President Donald Trump was arrested this week, but we’re going to talk about another kind of crime: the slow, steady drip drip of crime that doesn’t leap out to reporters—the day-to-day crushing of workers’ attempts to organize themselves to have a voice in the workplace, not just about their pay, but their well-being and their dignity. Crushing those attempts to work together is against the law—but it’s not the sort of crime that elite media seem able to identify. And it’s much harder to fight when the law-breaking megacorporation is as media-savvy and faux progressive as Starbucks.

Saurav Sarkar has been reporting Starbucks workers’ efforts—not to quit their workplaces, but to transform them into places where they can make a living and have some say in their lives, while, yes, also giving you your cappuccino.

Sarkar writes for Labor Notes, Jacobin and FAIR.org, among other outlets. We hear from them this week on CounterSpin.

      CounterSpin230407Sarkar.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of the Chicago mayoral election and the projected Antarctic current collapse.

      CounterSpin230407Banter.mp3

The post Saurav Sarkar on Starbucks Organizing appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 30, 2023

Murdoch Uses Nashville to Stoke Anti-Trans Hate

Aiden Hale used three of the seven guns he bought in an assault on a Christian school in Nashville, killing six people, including three children. Hale, a former student at the school, was killed by police (NPR, 3/28/23).

The tragedy is numbingly added to an endless list of school shootings like Stoneman Douglas, Uvalde, Columbine and Sandy Hook. Every time one of these heartbreaking incidents hits the news, some of us have a small hope that this might make America realize that it needs to love its children more than it loves its guns.

But we are living in an age where Republicans have swapped the American flag for an AR-15 as the ultimate nationalistic symbol (Time, 2/7/23). A dream of a disarmed America seems out of reach. The Onion has reused its infamous “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” 31 times since 2014 (most recently 3/27/23).

And this time around, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is using Hale’s transgender identity to ratchet up its campaign against transgender people.

Cashing in on bias

The New York Post (3/28/23) does not seem to have ever used the phrase “cisgender killer.”

The cover of the New York Post (3/28/23) couldn’t have been clearer. It featured a photograph of the Nashville killer juxtaposed against the image of a terrified child in a school bus, with the blaring headline “Transgender Killer Targets Christian School.” The Post (3/27/23) reported some speculation that Hale “may have been driven to kill by ‘resentment’” for having to attend a Christian school. While reporting in a separate story on Hale’s access to guns—which, in the case of any mass shooting, should be a primary focus of news coverage—the Post (3/28/23) again reminded readers that the shooter was trans in the headline.

Reducing a crime suspect to their gender identity in a headline is irresponsible journalism—just as identifying a suspect by their race, religion or sexual orientation, which is why you don’t see headlines talking about an “Asian killer,” a “Mormon killer” or a “bisexual killer.” Such shorthand inevitably holds an entire group responsible for the action of an individual, and, in the case of a group that faces widespread prejudice, puts many people in danger.

Given that nearly all school shooters are cisgender, there is simply no rational reason for the Post to highlight the shooter’s gender identity other than to cash in on readers’ biases.

Hale did, in fact, belong to a demographic group that is responsible for a wildly disproportionate number of mass shootings: He was male. As FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Olivia Riggio (6/30/22) have noted, media outlets often fail to report on how misogyny and masculinity play a role in many mass shootings.

Hallucinating a ‘pattern’

Laura Ingraham (Fox, 3/28/23) claimed that Hale’s identity “didn’t quite match the preferred criteria of the media.”

Murdoch’s Fox News (3/28/23) reported that “a radical transgender group said the transgender Nashville shooter felt ‘no other effective way to be seen’” adding that “the Trans Resistance Network (TRN), a far-left transgender ‘collective,’ released an inflammatory statement” that Hale resorted to violence because Hale had “no other effective way to be seen,” while still saying the action was tragic. (The obscure group appears to have gotten no media coverage at all prior to March 27, according to a search of the Nexis database.)

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told the network (3/29/23) that the incident should be investigated as an anti-Christian hate crime. “We’ve seen a lot of language directed at the Christian community with regard to particularly trans issues, calling them hateful,” the senator said. “That kind of rhetoric is dangerous, and we’re seeing its effects right now.”

(That hateful speech can have consequences seems like a new position for the senator, who responded to Attorney General Merrick Garland warning about “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators from people people opposed to masks and Critical Race Theory, Hawley charged that this was “a deliberate attempt to chill parents” who wanted to “express concerns”—American Independent, 10/5/21.)

Fox (3/28/23) also said the incident “is part of a pattern of mass shooters having ‘sexual identity dysfunctions’ and psychological confusion that must be addressed,” according to Jonathan Gilliam, a former Navy SEAL and FBI special agent. Gilliam said that “the majority of school shooters and mass shooters that we’ve had in the recent history of this nation are all people who have sexual identity dysfunctions.” (Mother Jones‘ Abby Vesoulis—3/29/23—based on the magazine’s long-running database mass shooters, assesses that three out of 141 mass shooters over the last four decades may have been trans or nonbinary, what Fox means when say “dysfunctions.”)

Fox host Laura Ingraham (3/28/23), with a frame of Hale in the background carrying the words “A TRANS KILLER,” said the “killer’s identity didn’t quite match the preferred criteria of the media, which is usually white male.” In fact, Hale was a white male—and Fox is part of “the media.” Ingraham noted that Hale “referred to herself [sic] as he/him and was reportedly in the midst of a so-called transition process,” going on to insinuate that Hale’s medical treatments may have been a factor in the shooting.

Christianity’s ‘natural enemy’

Fox‘s Tucker Carlson (3/28/23): “We seem to be watching the rise of trans terrorism.”

But Tucker Carlson (3/28/23), Fox News’ top-rated host, stole the show in a segment that warned about “the rise of trans terrorism.” First, he downplayed the general problems trans people face every day, saying that they have an easy time getting into Harvard. From there, Carlson launched into a declaration of war:

The people in charge despise working-class whites, but they venerate the trans community. People are just responding to incentives. It’s rational in a way…. Why are some transpeople so angry, and why do they seem to be mad specifically at traditional Christians? We can’t think of any trans person who’s ever been murdered by a pastor. As far as we know, that has never happened. So, it’s not an actual threat of violence from Christians that’s inspiring some trans people to buy an AR-15. No, it’s got to be more fundamental than that, and it is. The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy…. Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled.

Carlson wasn’t done. The next day (3/29/23), he hosted Federalist CEO Sean Davis, who told (Federalist, 3/29/23) Carlson “this murder, this massacre of children was done by someone because of this evil transgender ideology.” Both Davis and Carlson agreed that the killer’s transgender identity, and the imagined idea that the government and media are a part of some kind of transgender agenda, represents a “spiritual war” against Christians.

FAIR (1/6/23, 3/9/23) has shown repeatedly how conservative media, especially Murdoch’s media, have elevated incitement against transgender people, while Republicans push measures in several states to criminalize gender-affirming care. And of course the Murdoch framing here turns the so-called war involving trans people upside-down. While the religious right has escalated its attacks on the trans community (American Civil Liberties Union, 9/16/16; Southern Poverty Law Center, 10/23/17; Miami Herald, 6/9/21; MSNBC, 1/16/23), UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute (3/23/21) found that “transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.”

And a Human Rights Campaign statement (ABC, 3/28/23) issued after the incident noted, “Every study available shows that transgender and non-binary people are much more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrator of it.”

Spreading transphobia

Fox (3/29/23) went after NBC (3/28/23) for suggesting that trans people might be in danger in the wake of transphobic media coverage like that coming from Fox.

But just as 9/11 was an opportunity to spread Islamophobia (FAIR.org, 3/1/11), Fox and the Post are exploiting this moment to raise the temperature against the trans community. According to the Murdoch press and some figures within the Republican Party, trans people are an active existential threat to God-fearing Americans. Indeed, NBC (3/28/23) reported:

Within 10 minutes of police saying that the suspect was transgender, the hashtag #TransTerrorism trended on Twitter. Around the same time, Republican lawmakers — including Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.—insinuated in social media posts that the shooter’s gender identity played a role in the shooting. And by Tuesday morning, the cover of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post read: “Transgender Killer Targets Christian School.”

“We are terrified for the LGBTQ community here,” Kim Spoon, a trans activist based in Knoxville, Tennessee, said. “More blood’s going to be shed, and it’s not going to be shed in a school.”

However, Fox (3/29/23) pounced on this report, saying “NBC News raised eyebrows on Tuesday for a report suggesting the Tennessee transgender community was under threat following the mass shooting.” Fox added that NBC “appeared to frame the perpetrator as among the victims.” NBC did not frame Hale as the victim, as Fox’s evidence for this was NBC’s “headline ‘Fear Pervades Tennessee’s Trans Community Amid Focus on Nashville Shooter’s Gender Identity.’”

This response is sadly to be expected for media who have latched on to the anti-trans moral panic, as a way to both attract a right-wing audience and to bolster the cultural platform of the contemporary Republican Party. But just because it’s not surprising doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

The post Murdoch Uses Nashville to Stoke Anti-Trans Hate appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 11, 2022

Turning a San Francisco Recall Into Rout for Police Reform

San Francisco voted on June 7 to recall its district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a reformer who had challenged the traditional “lock ’em up” policies of big-city prosecutors. The margin was initially reported as a lopsided 61%–39% landslide, in what major news media across the country reported as a blow to progressive Democrats.

As New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller, in an article published the day after the election (6/8/22), put it, under a headline declaring “Voters in San Francisco Topple the City’s Progressive District Attorney, Chesa Boudin”:

Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday put an end to one of the country’s most pioneering experiments in criminal justice reform, ousting a district attorney who eliminated cash bail, vowed to hold police accountable and worked to reduce the number of people sent to prison.

Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney, was removed after two and a half years in office, according to the Associated Press, in a vote that is set to reverberate through Democratic politics nationwide as the party fine-tunes its messaging on crime before midterm elections that threaten to strip Democratic control over Congress.

‘Decisively to the right’

Yahoo (6/8/22): “Statistics failed to persuade voters who routinely had to step over the broken glass of car windows, human excrement and drug paraphernalia.”

The Times wasn’t alone in portraying San Francisco’s successful DA recall as a watershed moment for the United States, with progressive voters allegedly turning against police and prosecutor reforms in favor of “tough on crime” policies.

Yahoo News White House correspondent Alexander Nazaryan (6/8/22) termed the recall a “decisive” defeat, predicting that it was “sure to reverberate nationwide.” Nazaryan wrote that the recall election result represented

a reprise of February’s successful effort by San Franciscans to recall three school board members who were seen as engaging in progressive cultural issues while doing little to open schools that had been closed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Citing that earlier recall, as well as the latest LA Democratic mayoral primary that sent billionaire realtor Rick Caruso, a former Republican, into a runoff against progressive Rep. Karen Bass, he wrote, “In both cases, Left Coast voters moved decisively to the right.” He then quoted (without naming him) Democratic strategist Garry South, who has also represented the real estate and telecom industries: “People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood. It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”

Wait a minute, though. District attorneys aren’t responsible for dealing with homelessness, nor do they have anything to do with gasoline prices! Does this even qualify as political analysis?

Jumping the gun

Yahoo News columnist Rick Newman (6/8/22) said ex-Republican billionaire Rick Caruso’s “suprisingly strong showing” in the LA mayoral primary was an “ominous” sign for Democrats. Caruso actually came in second to progressive Karen Bass by a slightly larger margin than predicted by polling.

Like many news organizations ready to find meaning in Boudin’s recall, the New York Times and Yahoo News were so excited by the result they jumped the gun in saying that he had suffered a rout. Once all the absentee and mail-in ballots were counted a few days later, Boudin had actually lost not by a 22-point margin but by a less overwhelming 10 percentage points—a 55%–45% vote.

Since Boudin only won election in 2019 in a 50.8%–49.2% runoff, he hadn’t actually lost that much support over his almost three years in office.

Yahoo‘s Nazaryan was also caught flat-footed by reaching his “progressives are getting whupped” conclusion too early in the LA mayoral primary vote count. His report had ex-Republican Caruso leading Bass by 5 percentage points on the evening of the voting, but by Friday, when nearly all the mail-in votes had been tallied, the LA Times (6/17/22) was reporting that lead had flipped, the election had flipped, with Bass, running on a police-reform platform, enjoying a definitive lead of 6 percentage points. (Bass, whose final lead was 7 points, will face Caruso in a November runoff.) Other progressives running for LA’s city council also did well as mail-in ballots poured in following primary day.

Massive financing

The really dramatic margin in the Boudin recall was in the money shoveled into the “Yes” vote. Neither the New York Times nor Yahoo—nor, indeed, most news reports on the Boudin recall—even mentioned the massive financing behind the recall effort.

They should have. Since money and media are so important—and so corrupting—in US elections, it’s important for the public to know who’s behind such campaigns.

The San Francisco Chronicle did a creditable job of covering the recall campaign, endorsed Boudin in an editorial (4/23/22) and reported less apocalyptically on the results than leading national news media. The hometown paper (6/7/22) reported that recall supporters—primarily wealthy donors from real estate and venture capitalist companies, as well as wealthy doctors and lawyers—raised and spent a stunning $7.2 million to oust Boudin. It also noted that the bundlers who donated a whopping $4.7 million of that total showed an average contribution of $80,000. Boudin’s campaign to defeat the recall raised only $3.3 million, most of that reportedly coming from small donors.

Remarkably, most news articles, including the Times and Yahoo News, ignored the fact that on the same Election Day, two neighboring California counties—Alameda and Contra Costa—either elected or re-elected progressive reform DAs, while a progressive candidate won the Democratic nomination for state attorney general (KQED, 6/7/22). Altogether, the day hardly constituted a wave of anti–justice reform voting (CounterSpin, 6/17/22).

Contradictory evidence

Perhaps national news organizations felt that it was okay to focus on the Boudin recall because of his celebrity/notoriety—based on being the child Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two Weather Underground members who were convicted of murder for participating in a lethally botched Brinks robbery in 1981. Chesa Boudin, born in 1980, was raised by two Weather Underground founders, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

But even if that could justify their focus, publications should have provided some contradictory evidence to their shaky theory of progressives losing their passion for criminal justice reform. One major counterexample is the big re-election win in 2021 by Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner, a former public defender and defense attorney, and perhaps an even more radical reformer than Boudin.

Philadelphia Inquirer (5/20/21): A National Academy of the Sciences panel “found that a so-called tough-on-crime approach doesn’t significantly lower gun violence rates.”

While Pennsylvania doesn’t have recall votes, Krasner was challenged both in the spring Democratic primary and in the November general election by former assistant DAs he had fired in a big clean-out of hard-line prosecutors hired by his predecessors. According to Ballotpedia (which gives final results), he trounced his primary opponent, former Assistant DA Carlos Vega, winning by a 65/35% margin. Vega was heavily funded by big donors, with Philadelphia’s traditionally powerful police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, his biggest donor,

Krasner then went on last November to defeat Republican candidate and former Assistant DA Chuck Peruto, also a big recipient of FOP money and support, winning by 69/31%. That’s not that much lower than his 75% blowout win in his first election to DA, and surely doesn’t suggest that Democratic voters and independents are souring on progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia.

Even the Philadelphia Inquirer (5/20/21), which had been hard on Krasner through his first term and this past election season, had to admit after his re-election that there was little reason to believe that he was responsible for the rise in gun violence:

Philadelphia’s rise in shootings and homicides began in 2015, three years before Krasner took office. And while gun violence has indeed skyrocketed during the pandemic, that’s happened across the country and Philadelphia’s increase hasn’t been worse than other cities.

As the Inquirer article put it, “One reason the anti-Krasner argument didn’t stick may be that there’s little evidence to back it up.”

‘Bogus backlash’

Radley Balko (Washington Post, 6/14/21): “Violent crime in [San Francisco] was down in 2020. Overall crime was down 25 percent from 2019.”
Amid all the drivel published about the purported significance of a multi-million-dollar recall campaign taking out Boudin, kudos to the Washington Post for running a column by cop-turned-journalist Radley Balko (6/14/22), which noted that many of the claims made against Boudin were untrue:

Ultimately, the case against Boudin rests on two assumptions: that crime in the city has exploded and that Boudin isn’t charging people at the rate his predecessors did. And neither of those assumptions is true. There’s also little evidence that progressive policies such as ending cash bail or refusing to charge low-level offenses have anything to do with the spike in violence nationwide. The 2020 figures are expected to show a homicide surge coast to coast, in rural areas and urban areas, in jurisdictions with both reform-minded radicals and law-and-order stalwarts in the DA’s chair.

Balko’s data were readily available. Why don’t editors make political reporters do their research?

The post Turning a San Francisco Recall Into Rout for Police Reform appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 30, 2022

Mass Shooters’ Most Common Trait—Their Gender—Gets Little Press Attention

There were a few things the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shooters who killed a combined 31 people had in common: Both used AR-15-style rifles bought legally. Both were just 18 years old. But perhaps most overlooked in the corporate press as a shared characteristic worthy of commentary: They were both male.

Scholars, activists and even healthcare professionals have long highlighted the gendered nature of mass violence. Since 1982, of 129 mass shootings that killed four or more people, men or boys were perpetrators in 126 of them (Statista, 6/2/22).

Toxic masculinity

Newsweek (5/28/14): “Misogyny—and the sense of entitlement that comes with it—kills.”

The concept of toxic masculinity originated in the pro-feminist men’s movement of the 1980s, and argues that hegemonic ideals of masculinity that promote emotional repression, violence and power are deeply harmful, not only to society at large, but to men themselves (American Psychiatric Association, 9/18).

There’s also a significant connection between mass shootings and other types of misogynistic violence and ideology: Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen allegedly emotionally, financially and physically abused his wife prior to the 2016 massacre (Rolling Stone, 6/13/16). Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza had a Word document on his computer explaining “why females are inherently selfish” (New Yorker, 3/10/14). University of California shooter Elliot Rodger posted a YouTube video in which he ranted about women not being attracted to him and swore to seek revenge (BBC, 4/26/18). Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho allegedly stalked and harassed two students leading up to the massacre (Newsweek, 5/28/14). Nova Scotia shooter Gabriel Wortman allegedly restrained and beat his partner leading up to—and just hours before—the shooting (Business Insider, 5/16/20). This list is far from exhaustive.

A 2021 study (Injury Epidemiology, 5/21/21) found that in 68% of mass shootings that injured or killed four or more people between 2014–19, the perpetrator either killed at least one partner or family member or had a history of domestic violence.

A 2013 essay by Jackson Katz published in the pro-feminist men’s activist journal Voice Male (Winter/13) argued that news media have repeatedly failed to identify maleness as one of the greatest predictive factors of mass violence. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the press rushed to blame jihadism and Islamic radicalism, but overlooked

the ideology of a certain type of manhood that links acts of violence to masculine identity. It is the idea that committing an act of violence—whether the precipitating rationale is personal, religious or political—is a legitimate means to assert and prove one’s manhood.

Between the Buffalo shooting on May 14 and June 9, more than two weeks after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, US newspapers published more than 20,000 articles discussing one or both shootings, according to a search of the Nexis database and the website of the Washington Post (which is not in the Nexis database). But of those thousands of articles, FAIR found only 37 unique pieces that made links to toxic masculinity, misogyny, or differences in socialization of boys and girls. Seven were syndicated columns reprinted in multiple outlets, bringing the total times such pieces appeared to 51.

‘Differences in socialization’

The fact that nine of the nine deadliest mass shootings since 2018 were committed by males is apparently a less disturbing pattern to the New York Times (6/2/22).

Only eight of those 51 total pieces were published in the news sections of newspapers; the rest were in the opinion sections. Four of the mentions of masculinity or misogyny in news articles (USA Today, 5/25/22, 5/25/22, 5/26/22; New York Observer, 5/25/22) referenced the successful lawsuit brought by the families of the Sandy Hook victims against Remington, the producer of the semi-automatic rifle used in the assault, which ran ads targeting young men and suggesting the weapon granted them their “man card.”

A front-page New York Times article (6/2/22) sought to investigate why so many mass shooters tend to be young, largely downplaying the question of gender and masculinity, but did quote Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine pediatrics professor Sara Johnson, who pointed out “major differences in socialization for males and females related to aggressive behavior, appropriate ways to seek support, how to display emotions and acceptability of firearm use.”

Notably, the Washington Post referenced misogyny and/or masculinity in three news articles (5/15/22, 5/28/22, 6/3/22)—more than any other paper in our search—and embedded a 2019 Post mini-documentary on American masculinity and gun culture in another (5/24/22), which otherwise did not mention the topic.

In its June 3 news article, the Post described the trend of young men committing acts of gun violence, chalking it up mainly to age and lack of brain development, but also cited a study that noted the role male socialization plays:

Peter Langman, a psychologist who researches school shootings, noted in the Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention that “the sense of damaged masculinity is common to many shooters and often involves failures and inadequacies.”

The reporters also quoted Eric Madfis, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma, who said, “We teach boys and men that the only socially acceptable emotion to have is not to be vulnerable and sensitive, but to be tough and macho and aggressive.”

The other two Washington Post articles covered the Uvalde shooter’s history of threatening teen girls online (5/28/22), and a post by the Buffalo shooter using misogynist slurs to complain about New York’s gun laws (5/15/22).

‘Confronting misogyny’

Leah Binkovitz (Houston Chronicle, 6/7/22): “Misogyny intertwines and cross-pollinates with a range of extreme ideologies, from white supremacy to anti-Jewish hate, because of the way they appeal to a retrenchment of supposedly threatened identities.”

In opinion sections, most mentions of the gendered nature of mass shootings came in columns or op-eds (35), with an additional eight mentions in editorials.

While most of the opinion pieces (72%) agreed that toxic masculinity and misogyny contribute to mass violence, it was seldom more than a fleeting mention. Out of these 31 opinion pieces that viewed these as factors, only eight (26%) centered their arguments on it. The majority tended to focus on other issues, mentioning pathologies related to masculinity in passing.

“The motives and reasons for mass shootings are varied: disputes, racism, misogyny, festering grievances, work-related issues, mental illness,” wrote Thomas Gabor in a column that focused on the need for stricter gun laws and background checks (Gainesville Sun, 5/29/22; Palm Beach Post, 5/31/22). An op-ed by Rich Elfers (Enumclaw Courier-Herald, 6/8/22; Quincy Valley Post Register, 6/8/22) suggested “de-glamoriz[ing] guns as a symbol of masculinity and coolness” as one way to prevent mass shootings.

In one of the more pointed columns drawing attention to the role of misogyny in mass shootings, Leah Binkovitz (Houston Chronicle, 6/7/22) wrote:

The connection between mass shooters, who are overwhelmingly men, and domestic violence, sexual harassment and misogyny has been made again and again and again. And yet it remains, by and large, a muted part of our response and soul-searching each time. Confronting the full scope of gun violence, however, has to include confronting misogyny.

Two papers (Eagle Times, 5/24/22; Columbian, 5/26/22) published a column by activist Rob Okun, urging Americans to stop ignoring “how these murderous men were socialized as boys and men” and recognize that Buffalo, like countless other mass shootings, was not only racist but also “an affirmation of male supremacy.”

‘Womanish wimps’

Cynthia Allen (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 6/4/22): “Our decades of eschewing gender roles and their associated characteristics in pursuit of equality have had some undesirable effects.”

To compare, all 12 of the opinion pieces arguing against the idea that toxic masculinity leads to mass shootings made it their central argument.

The most-reprinted column, by conservative Tribune News Services columnist Jay Ambrose, appeared in seven different papers, including the Boston Herald (6/1/22) and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (6/2/22). It attributed teen mass shooters’ behavior to “raggedy families,” arguing that “a missing father can mean missing lessons in masculinity for the boy,” which leads to bullies harassing them as “womanish wimps,” culminating in “supposedly brave, masculine acts” of violence by the fatherless boy. It ended with a call for “helping to rebuild the family in this country” and “restoring certain old norms.”

Another syndicated column, by Cynthia Allen, blamed the poor police response in Uvalde on “decades of eschewing gender roles and their associated characteristics in pursuit of equality,” and the Uvalde shooter’s actions on fatherlessness (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 6/4/22; Miami Herald, 6/8/22)

In an even more direct attack on the concept of toxic masculinity, Miranda Devine at the New York Post (6/2/22) wrote that the reason for the much-criticized police inaction on the day of the Uvalde shooting was that men are “vilified” and bullied for bravery.

Out of all of the outrageous and horrific details of the shooting, Devine chose to bemoan the fact that heavily armed officers, who opted to handcuff one distraught parent and pepper spray another as a shooter took 21 lives inside, failed to act because “the only acceptable man now is a man who wants to be a woman. We celebrate ‘pregnant men’ and ‘chestfeeding’ men.”

Miranda Devine (New York Post, 6/2/22): “We pathologize manly virtues and bow to the tyranny of identity politics that seeks power by overthrowing a make-believe patriarchy.”

Eight of the opinion articles were editorials—six agreeing that toxic masculinity contributes to violence, and two disagreeing. One was from the news organ of a right-wing think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (5/25/22), which argued (citing Jordan Peterson) that blame on toxic masculinity is “misplaced,” because “aggression is an innate part of human nature,” and that it’s incorrect to think boys and girls should be socialized in the same ways. The other was part of a list of “fast takes” compiled by the New York Post editorial board (6/1/22), citing a Spectator World (6/1/22) piece that argued that not all masculinity is toxic, and that “there must be consequences to telling men that…their behavior is wrong, and that all their intentions are tainted by dint of their chromosomes.”

Relegating the bulk of these conversations to the opinion sections of papers presents them as adjacent “culture war” debates between the left and right. If the central role that gender and masculinity play in mass shootings is never acknowledged as a fact, how can it ever be addressed?

The writers who sought to dismiss the significance of toxic masculinity in their columns and editorials demonstrated a deliberate false understanding of the concept, beating a straw man to argue that not all masculine traits are harmful. The “not all men” argument distracts from the very real crisis that a disproportionate number of men are driving.

It’s a bogus way for the right to play the victim in the midst of unspeakable tragedy—a harmful ruse accommodated by an overall lack of coverage, a dearth of news articles, and a shortage of opinion pieces that truly center toxic masculinity’s role in mass shootings.

Featured image: Collage of mass shooters compiled by JSTOR Daily (10/21/15).

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 24, 2022

‘The Miscarriage of Justice Catalyzed a Whole Movement Led by Asian Americans’

Janine Jackson interviewed Helen Zia about the legacy of Vincent Chin for the June 17, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220617Zia.mp3

Vincent Chin (1955-1982)

Janine Jackson: Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit in June 1982, by two white auto workers who reportedly said it was because of him that they had lost their jobs. At the time, listeners may recall, Japan was being widely blamed for the collapse of the Detroit auto industry. Chin was Chinese-American.

Elite media, as reflected by the New York Times, didn’t seem to come around to the story until April 1983, with reporting on the protests emanating from Detroit’s Asian-American community about the dismissive legal response to the murder. Chin’s killers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were given probation and fines, with Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Charles Kaufman infamously saying they “weren’t the kind of people you send to jail.”

It took protest for big media to attend to that legal perversity, and the broader context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating. And it’s civil rights activism that has been the legacy of Chin’s death, 40 years ago this week, activism of which our guest is a key part. Helen Zia is co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, among other titles. She joins us now by phone from Detroit. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Helen Zia.

Helen Zia: Well, it’s my honor to be with you, Janine.

JJ: I saw you speak recently in Detroit and say that Vincent Chin’s horrific murder, its circumstances and then the legal failures, are all extremely important, but that that’s not the whole story that’s being acknowledged right now with this 40th remembrance and rededication. The story of Vincent Chin’s killing is also about what came after, what grew from it. Can you talk a little about what that was, and is?

HZ: Oh, absolutely. It was a horrific killing, and not only that, but a continued miscarriage of justice, where the justice system failed at every turn, for a young man who was killed and attacked on the night of his bachelor party, because of how he looked, at a time of intense anti-Asian hate. And all of that was very important. It brought attention to the whole idea that Asian Americans are people, that we are humans, that we are Americans, and that we experience racism and discrimination.

But that’s not all that was important, because that event and the miscarriage of justice catalyzed a whole movement, a civil rights movement led by Asian Americans, with Detroit, Michigan, as the epicenter of that civil rights movement that reached all across America for Asian Americans, and also had a huge impact on, really, democracy in this country, in many, many different ways. And it represented the solidarity of people from all walks of life.

Helen Zia: “An injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety.”

We were in Detroit, now a majority Black city, back then was a majority Black city, and we had incredible support from the Black community, as well as the Arab-American community, multi-faith, multi-class, people from all walks of life, not only in Detroit. And then it became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.

And that’s why we’re talking about this. It’s to remember that moment, but the legacy as well—of people coming together in solidarity, with the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety. That we are part of a beloved community, that no community should live in fear of violence or hate. And this notion of all our communities being so divided, can we ever be allies, let alone come together…

And so that’s what we’re remembering: Let’s not forget that, actually, we have been in solidarity. And let’s take the lessons of that and move it forward to today, because we need that desperately.

JJ: When you say remembrance and rededication, which is what this event series is about, I really like that rededication part, which has to do with acknowledging that, as you say, an injury to one is an injury to all.

HZ: And that’s completely right. And that’s why we are saying it’s more than remembrance, it’s about rededication. It’s about taking the hard work that happened, and coming together in unity and in solidarity and building a movement. There’s nothing simple about that; there’s no Kumbaya. It really takes people working hard together to bridge understandings and undo misunderstandings, break down stereotypes and build a common understanding and a common bond between communities.

And so when, as you say, communities are portrayed in the news or in TV or in movies, that this is just that community’s concern; it doesn’t involve other people… Anti-Asian violence, well, hey, “that’s just Asians. And we don’t even know that they’re Americans. We don’t even know that they were on this continent for several hundred years.”

And so I think you’re right, that’s a way of sort of pigeonholing people and keeping us apart, instead of looking at the true commonality. If we talk about Vincent Chin or violence against Asian Americans, we also talk about Buffalo and we talk about Coeur d’Alene, and how ideas of white supremacy and even active white supremacist groups, they lump us together. They don’t see us as separate groups. They connect the dots in a very negative way. And so it’s really incumbent on all thinking people, and especially our media, to be able to connect those dots too, and not keep us separate.

And it is often, I think, an unconscious way of saying, “Well, that’s this group’s problem, then the other group has this problem, and never the twain should meet.” And, unfortunately, that’s part of what, on the ground, we have to overcome, and do that education, to say no, actually, we’re all in this together. And media has such an important role to play in that, if we can break through that as well.

New York Times (9/10/83)

JJ: Yeah, and I just wanted to add, it did seem from my looking into it that it took the protests for big media to attend to Chin’s murder, but even then, some of what we saw was—here’s this Times piece from September 10, 1983, “Asian-Americans See Growing Bias.” And then the opening is, “Asian-American leaders say they are alarmed by what they regard as rising discrimination against their people.” So even there, there’s kind of a “maybe it’s not true. Maybe it’s just a perception.”

I wonder, have you seen shifts in media? You’ve obviously been working on this for a long time. Are there more openings now? Do you have to explain things less? Have you seen shifts in the way that media approach this set of issues?

HZ: You know, there are shifts, there has been progress. But I have to say, we still have to do that basic “Asian Americans 101” all the time. Back in 1982, ’83, Asian Americans were so invisibilized, and so minoritized, that the whole country really had no concept of who Asian Americans are. So when we started first trying to raise this as an issue, and have our press conferences and things like that, we were asked questions like, “Well, where did you all come from? Did you all just sort of land in America?” More or less saying, “Are you all fresh off the boat?” And we would have to say, “Well, many Asian Americans are immigrants, but, actually, we have been also on this continent for hundreds of years, fighting in the Civil War, having records that go back to the 1500s in the Spanish archives of Mexico and ‘New Spain’ of that time.”

And it was all about an education to say, you know what, we are not this foreign invader that just landed here. And that’s what we had to do over and over again. Questions like, “Do you all speak English?” And you would just have to say, “What do you think I’m speaking with you now?” And then, “Why do you speak such good English?” And I have to answer it more grammatically, saying “Well, I speak English well because I was born and raised here.”

And, yes, we’ve progressed from that time. But, unfortunately, even as we see in this terrible pandemic, the dual pandemic of Covid and hate, that includes the anti-Asian hate that’s been going on, when those were first reported by people who were attacked in different incidents, and they put it on social media, the first response, overall, was, “Wow, this happens to Asian Americans? Who knew that?” It was more surprise, and eye-opening.

And so that was, in a way, the news. And we see that not being challenged by media. When, for example, in Atlanta eight people were killed as the killer went in search of Asian Americans, and killed six Asian women who were working, and the police immediately say, “Oh, this has nothing to do with race.” And we don’t see the pushback on that, querying that. It’s sort of like it’s almost accepted — until, now, what makes a difference is the communities, the grassroots, the people on the ground, saying, hey, what do you mean? This has everything to do with race, it has everything to do with gender and how Asian Americans are viewed.

So the difference is that there’s more of a voice, there’s more of a community, and organizations that actually can correct failings, or just where the ball is dropped, and the questions that should be asked or followed up on aren’t. So that’s a difference. Maybe we have to explain a little less. But, really, we have to explain over and over again.

And to your point about this being seen as, “Well, it’s just an Asian-American issue.” Part of the teaching constantly has to be, no, this is really connected. Hate crimes are connected. The Vincent Chin case had a big role to play in the Hate Crimes Prevention Act that was signed in 2010 by President Obama, that also included gender and sexual orientation and disability.

The broadening of the concept of civil rights, and who’s protected, really was argued in 1983 by Asian Americans to say that immigrants and Asian Americans should be protected by federal civil rights law, because that was not a given. There were a lot of racism deniers back then, and even today, so unfortunately we do have to counter kind of the same misconceptions that existed then and today. The fight and the education never ends.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice. You can learn about the 40th remembrance and rededication at VincentChin.org. Thank you so much, Helen Zia, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

HZ: Thank you, Janine. Thank you and FAIR for all the work you do.

The post ‘The Miscarriage of Justice Catalyzed a Whole Movement Led by Asian Americans’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 22, 2022

‘The Times Is Telling You to Choose Between Rights and Safety’

Janine Jackson interviewed Alec Karakatsanis about the recall of Chesa Boudin for the June 17, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220617Karakatsanis.mp3

Politico (6/1/22)

Janine Jackson: Politico, in a not-stupid piece on the ultimately successful recall campaign against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, referred offhandedly to Republicans across the country running on public safety, “betting voters will punish Democrats for embracing a more lenient approach to sentencing and incarceration.”

In reality, the work of decarceration, as understood by people who’ve been studying and advocating and doing it for decades, involves deep engagement with communities and their human needs. It’s nothing less than an intentional, accountable reprioritization of social resources. It is emphatically not doing less, which is what is implied by the term “leniency.”

That kind of apparently lazy but very meaningful misrepresentation in a phrase, writ larger, is the media coverage of Chesa Boudin’s recall, coverage that our guest has been monitoring and breaking down on Twitter and elsewhere.

Alec Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a civil rights lawyer and public defender. He’s author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Alec Karakatsanis.

Alec Karakatsanis: It’s so great to be here; thank you so much.

New York Times (6/8/22)

JJ: Everyone knows somebody who argues by only mentioning information that supports their point of view, and obscuring rather than engaging any that doesn’t, no matter how germane. It’s an obnoxious, regressive way to have a conversation. But it’s something worse when you pretend it’s journalism. So I’d like to have you talk us through the problems with this June 8 New York Times article, but maybe just start by saying why you chose to take it up. We see crap crime coverage every day. Why did this stand out to you?

AK: I think elections are a particular moment of consciousness, where people are paying attention more than they ordinarily would to political punditry, to commentary, to articles about policy. And I think it was a particularly important moment at 5 am, the morning after the election, when the New York Times put this article online.

And based on the placement the Times gave it in various of its platforms, it is estimated by the analytics tracking company Meltwater to have had the potential reach of 170 million people. So for me, it was a very prominent and very important article, which the New York Times pitched as its main takeaway from last Tuesday’s elections.

And so, for that reason, I thought it was profoundly troubling that the Times created such a dishonest and dangerous narrative, that what the voters were somehow telling us is that we need to double back down on mass incarceration policies that, by every conceivable available metric, have been an utter failure as a matter of keeping us safe, and a disaster as a matter of human rights and basic human dignity.

JJ: So how did this story do that? What were the sort of mechanisms in the story itself that pushed that conclusion?

AK: If we had 10 hours, we couldn’t cover them all, but I’ll do my best!

JJ: I know!

AK: Virtually every word and clause in the article was an effort designed to concoct, out of nowhere, a false narrative that the election was a victory for tough-on-crime right-wing policies.

So the first problem with the article is, who is it relying on? Who pitched it? How did it get there and why?

I think the second and most glaring problem, that I lead with in my analysis of the article, is that it bases its entire thesis, that voters are sending a “tough on crime” message, on just two races: the mayor’s race in Los Angeles, and the DA recall in San Francisco. In order to do that, the article had to ignore the vast majority of elections in California and across the country.

And if you look at the other elections in California on these issues, progressive candidates trounced their opponent. The following races were completely and utterly ignored by the New York Times: the California attorney general’s race, where a progressive reformer absolutely trounced the tough-on-crime opponent, who everyone had been talking about and boosting prior to the election. She ended up coming in, like, fourth place. Tiny percentage of the vote, trounced by the progressive California reforming attorney general. Same thing with Contra Costa, Alameda.

LA Times (6/17/22)

If you look at the local races in Los Angeles, well, the Times gives almost the entire article to boosting Rick Caruso, the former Republican, billionaire real estate developer. As more results have come in in the days since the election, he actually is now losing, and Karen Bass is beating him.

And if you look at the other local races, a city-wide race for controller was a referendum on police budgets, and the progressive candidate, Kenneth Mejia, trounced the longtime, multiple-incumbent city councilperson. And Mejia ran a transparent, clear, effective campaign about very popular things: investing in our safety through schools, housing, healthcare, treatment—rather than more and more cash for surveillance technology and overtime. And these are very popular positions, it turns out. And the Times just ignored all of that, as well as a number of other LA city council races.

I’ll just pause there, because I want people to understand that the entire framing of the article was based on two examples, one of which has now turned out to be utterly false, in terms of the local Los Angeles mayor’s race, where the very basis of their narrative, that this former Republican billionaire had won, is now incorrect, as more votes have been counted. But two, it all relied on ignoring these other races.

JJ: Right, and that selective storytelling amounts to an important misrepresentation, and then misdirection. And just to tease out one thing that you’ve said, the focus on elections often leads media to talk about people and individuals, and to ignore the voters and the public. And what you have indicated repeatedly is that the policies, these policies about engaging the criminal justice system, about reprioritization—these are popular policies. And if the media were genuinely interested in being the people’s voice, then even if a particular candidate lost, they would still be engaged with whether the particular policies and ideas were well-received and popular with the people.

AK: Absolutely. This is another key point. So if you look at the New York Times article, it claims that voters were motivated by what it called “unchecked property crime” in San Francisco. If you look at the actual data from San Francisco police themselves, property crime is significantly down under the tenure of the current DA. So is violent crime, way down in San Francisco. By every conceivable metric on which every local prosecutor and police budget and set of policies are measured, the tenure of this progressive DA was an enormous success.

What the Times ignores is there was a huge $7 million effort led by Republican billionaires and the police union to tarnish the DA himself. And much of that was based on complete fabrications, total disinformation, lies—but a very, very active local media effort.

Another tech venture capitalist rich person hired an entire media outlet and its full-time reporter to just boost these right-wing lies in San Francisco itself, the kind of resources that are hardly ever thrown at local journalism anymore. It was really incredible to watch.

All that was ignored by the Times, and, instead, they tried to make it look like the voters were rejecting Boudin’s policies. But if you actually look at the available polling that we have for voters in San Francisco, every single one of Boudin’s major policy priorities were enormously popular with the voters. This is a really interesting story, and the Times just completely ignored it, because this does not fit its narrative that voters don’t want progressive policy.

New York Times (6/8/22)

JJ: Here’s a bit from a Times piece:

California called for order. Wracked by the pandemic, littered with tent camps, frightened by smash-and-grab robberies and anti–Asian American hate crimes, voters in two of the most progressive cities sent a message on Tuesday: Restore stability.

There is a breathtaking amount of work being done there. The definition of “stability,” poverty is a crime, sickness somehow is also a crime, Asian Americans want a carceral response. It’s so freighted. And it’s just their kind of “Hey, here’s our conclusion, take this away,” you know?

AK: I think I want to highlight something that you said, which is incredibly important. Obviously, there’s so much misinformation and propaganda in there. But one thing in particular stands out. And there were a few other moments in the Times coverage where it was a little bit more explicit about this. But essentially what the Times is saying is that there is a tradeoff between what it calls order and stability, and civil rights, or humane treatment of people in the criminal system, and that by being more “lenient,” we actually lead to less stability and order.

This is the core flaw, and what I call propaganda element, at the center of so much New York Times reporting. And I think the reason is that there is a scientific consensus. What the Times is doing is violating that scientific consensus, as if the Times were saying that climate change is not happening. There is a scientific consensus that the solution to problems of drug use and mental illness and homelessness and the low-level behavior and activity that the Times is referring to when it talks about “disorder,” there’s a consensus that you do not solve those problems through more police, prosecutors and prisons.

Those problems must be solved through investments in medical care and mental health treatment, and affordable housing and places to live, and investment in schools. One of the most robust findings in the scientific literature is that investment in early childhood education, in schools and teachers, actually reduces all forms of crime years into the future.

Alec Karakatsanis: “The only way we’re going to get to real safety in our society…is by actually investing in the things that lead to safety.”

We know all of these things. What the Times is trying to do is tell people you have to choose between respecting people’s rights and treating them “leniently,” and safety. And this is false, because the only way we’re going to get to real safety in our society, the way that every other comparably wealthy country has achieved much higher levels of safety and lower levels of violence, is by actually investing in the things that lead to safety.

There’s one other thing that I want to point out, which I think is very important. The Times suggests that the voters and the politicians who are pursuing progressive policies somehow don’t care about safety. They say, “Some voters are foremost demanding action on systemic disparities, while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods.”

So this says, “Some people care about social justice, while other people care about safety.” That is absurd. Does anyone seriously believe that the millions of poor people, Black people, young people, immigrants, teachers, nurses, public health experts, faith leaders, crime survivors, who’ve been fighting against systemic injustice and inequality in their community, they don’t care about the safety, also, of their neighborhoods? That is just such a false dichotomy, and it’s so prevalent in reporting in the New York Times over the last couple of years,

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alec Karakatsanis of Civil Rights Corps. The book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System is out now from the New Press. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AK: Thank you so much.

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June 17, 2022

Helen Zia on Vincent Chin Legacy, Alec Karakatsanis on Chesa Boudin Recall

Vincent Chin (1955-1982)

This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times didn’t address the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin until 1983, in response to ongoing protest centered in Detroit’s Asian-American community, about the killing and the lack of justice—at which point the paper ran a story with a lead claiming that when “two men were quickly charged and prosecuted…the incident faded from many memories.” One, the process was hardly that tidy. And two, whose memories, exactly?

It’s 40 years since Vincent Chin’s murder, with a depressingly resonant context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating, that corporate media, with their thinly veiled drumbeating for “war” with China—over trade or Covid or presence in Africa—do little to dissuade. We’ll talk with activist and author Helen Zia, about the ongoing effort to remember Chin’s murder by rededicating to the work of resisting, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Asian ideas and actions, but also those separating us each from one another in the fight against those who, let’s face it, hate all of us.

CounterSpin220617Zia.mp3

Chesa Boudin (cc photo: Lynn Friedman)

Also on the show: We’re told not to “overanalyze”—which seems to mean to analyze at all—the language of reporting, and not to think about what’s behind the scenes; it’s official news from a neutral nowhere. But if the New York Times, for example, has enough intentionality to delete, without acknowledgement, declarative claims about “rising crime” in an article about how concerns about that are moving people to vote out reformist officials like San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, can we not imagine that they are likewise intentional about what they leave in? We’ll talk about coverage of that recall, of which elite media are making much conventional wisdom hay, with Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System.

CounterSpin220617Karakatsanis.mp3

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June 10, 2022

‘But for the Failures of His Attorneys, He Would Not Have Been Convicted’

Janine Jackson interviewed Liliana Segura about the Supreme Court and innocence for the June 3, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220603Segura.mp3

Janine Jackson: “Innocence is not enough” are words to chill your heart. That’s the language Arizona state prosecutors used as a reason not to revisit the conviction of Barry Lee Jones, after the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Jones had not received effective counsel, and that if he had, his jury would likely not have convicted him of the murder of his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter.

And the Supreme Court agreed this week. They voted six to three, in a case called Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, that incarcerated people, including death row inmates like Jones, have no right to bring new evidence in their claims of ineffective lawyering in federal court, even if that evidence would show they’d committed no crime.

Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling “perverse” and “illogical”; experts like Christina Swarns, head of Innocence Project, noted that ineffective assistance of counsel is a leading cause of wrongful conviction. And it was lost on few that the same judges who insist that the sanctity of life demands that fetuses mean more than the people carrying them show no evidence of such interest here.

Pretty much any deep account of this court ruling will cite the work of our guest. She has been reporting criminal justice and the death penalty for many years, and was writing about Jones’ case in particular back in 2017. Liliana Segura is a reporter at the Intercept. She joins us by phone from Nashville. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Liliana Segura.

Liliana Segura: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Can I ask you to talk us through the key points of the case against Barry Lee Jones, and the issues with that case, such that it wound up at the Supreme Court?

Barry Jones

LS: Absolutely. So Barry Jones was convicted in 1995 of the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. Rachel was living with her siblings and their mom in Jones’ trailer, at a place called the Desert Vista Trailer Park in Tucson. This was a place where there was pretty pervasive poverty and drug use, and a lot of folks sort of living on the margins.

And what happened was that on the morning of May 2, 1994, Rachel was found unresponsive in her bed at Jones’ home, and Jones and Rachel’s mom rushed her to the hospital, where she was declared dead on arrival. There were some disturbing signs of injury all over her body.

But crucially, an autopsy, which was not performed until the following day, found that Rachel had died from an apparent blow to her abdomen that had torn part of her small intestine. And this led to a fatal injury called peritonitis.

But also crucially, from the start, the investigating detective with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department never looked into exactly how Rachel had sustained this injury. There was no real investigation of that key medical evidence. Instead, before they even knew how this little girl died, she turned her sights directly onto Barry Jones.

So if you fast forward, Jones was tried in 1995. There should have been a lot of evidence that his trial lawyers could have brought to cast doubt on his guilt in this case. There was really no physical evidence, or very little physical evidence, linking him to Rachel’s injuries, and especially important was the fact that the case was really based on circumstantial evidence, a very narrow timeframe on the day before this little girl died where she had been spotted with Jones by people around the trailer park. And so the state presented a case in which her fatal injury had been inflicted within this very narrow timeframe, the day before she died.

Now, Jones’ trial attorneys should have investigated this; they should have talked to somebody who could consider the medical evidence to see if this held up. But, instead, they never did that. And, in fact, they really failed to investigate the case at all. And instead, when it came time for them to present evidence, they put on a single witness at the guilt phase, and that was Jones’ 12-year-old daughter, Brandie. That was their only witness.

So Jones’ jury finds him guilty, and a judge sentences him to death.

JJ: And then there’s an appeal, which, again, there’s another problem. That’s part of the issue here, is there’s a couple of layers of ineffective lawyering, right, before it makes it up to the Supreme Court.

Intercept (5/28/22)

LS: That’s exactly right. So, in our system, at least in theory, after you are convicted, and certainly sentenced to death, you have the right to bring forward an appeal. And, crucially, you have a right to bring evidence that your trial attorneys failed you, that they provided ineffective assistance of counsel.

This is a really important avenue for relief, especially for people on death row, because it’s that kind of evidence that can lead to a conviction being overturned, or somebody being exonerated. The problem is that there’s absolutely no guarantee that your lawyer who handles that appeal is going to do what they need to do.

And in Barry Jones’ case, this is precisely what happened. He was represented at state post-conviction by a man who basically replicated the same mistakes his trial lawyers made. He did not investigate the medical evidence underpinning the state’s case against Barry Jones.

And what’s so significant about that failure is that, because of the way that our system is set up, and these incredibly onerous procedural barriers that exist once a case is at that stage, once a post-conviction attorney fails to bring forward that evidence of bad lawyering, you can never bring that evidence into federal court at a later stage. It’s basically barred.

And so that’s what happened to Barry Jones. Until—and this is what leads us to the Supreme Court situation—in 2012, the US Supreme Court handed down a really important ruling in a different Arizona case, and this ruling was called Martinez v. Ryan. And in this ruling, in a 7–2 decision, the court held that, essentially, if you had a situation, as with Barry Jones’ case, where your trial lawyers failed you and then your state post-conviction lawyers also failed you, that you should actually have a shot to bring forward this claim, to bring forward, potentially, evidence to prove that you received ineffective assistance at trial.

This was a really big deal when it came down in 2012. But it was meant to be a narrow remedy, a sort of safety valve, precisely to avoid miscarriages of justice, and to ensure that people on death row and people incarcerated are able to vindicate their Sixth Amendment rights.

And this ruling was also really noteworthy because Chief Justice Roberts was in the majority. So was Sam Alito, it bears mentioning. So 7–2, this is 2012. And it’s ultimately that decision that allows Barry Jones to bring forward all this evidence that should have been brought forward in 1995 at his trial.

JJ: Thank you very much. This latest, Shinn vs. Martinez Ramirez, seems to be gutting that Martinez ruling that you’re talking about. It’s this weird thing, and folks can learn more about it, but as I understand it, writing for the majority, Clarence Thomas is saying, You can still bring your case about having ineffective counsel to federal court, you just can’t introduce any new evidence, which presumably would be the stuff, as you’re just explaining, that your ineffective counsel left out.

So I’ve heard this new ruling described as hollowing out Martinez without actually explicitly overturning it, but still taking all the meaning out of it.

Liliana Segura: “Jones’ lawyers present[ed] just an incredible wealth of evidence pointing to his innocence…. It really just dismantled the entire case.”
LS: That’s precisely right. And it really bears mentioning, first of all, that Clarence Thomas was in the minority in Martinez. So he never agreed with this decision to begin with. But, you know, all of this sounds bad, but it’s sort of theoretical until you consider what this looks like, for example, in Barry Jones’ case.

What this means is that, as I said, in 2012, Barry Jones gets this new door to be able to present his evidence. He finally is able to do that at an evidentiary hearing in federal court in 2017. I attended part of this hearing; this was the start of my reporting. And it was at that hearing that Barry Jones’ lawyers present just an incredible wealth of evidence pointing to his innocence. Technically, what they needed to show was ineffective assistance of counsel, but it really just dismantled the entire case against Barry Jones.

And it was stunning to watch the judge presiding over this; at times, he would question law enforcement who took the stand, saying, “Well, didn’t you consider this?” or “Why didn’t you consider any other suspects?” The case really sort of fell apart. And in 2018, this federal judge overturned Barry Jones’ conviction, and said that, but for the failures of his defense attorneys, he would not have been convicted by a jury, and he ordered a new trial. And he said, essentially: The state of Arizona, you have to release or retry Barry Jones.

And instead, the state of Arizona appealed and appealed and appealed. Once the Ninth Circuit, lost there, went back to the Ninth Circuit, lost there again. But then you get the Supreme Court, and they took their shot. And they got lucky, because now we have this conservative supermajority at the Supreme Court that was willing to listen to their arguments.

JJ: And to say, as Thomas said, “intervention,” in other words, introducing the information that can prove or illustrate that this person may not have committed this crime, or did not commit this crime—”intervention is an affront to the state and its citizens who returned a verdict of guilt after considering the evidence before them.” In other words, states’ rights? Is that what we’re talking about here? It’s a process question, and it’s insulting for the federal court to intervene in this case? That seems to be the load-bearing idea in Thomas’ opinion.

LS: Exactly. And this goes back to a long argument on the right, about basically insisting that federal courts really have no business messing with the outcomes in state proceedings. And this long precedes Barry Jones’ case, but it’s really disturbing to see it in this way.

And also, that particular line that you mentioned is especially ironic to me, because, as part of my reporting, I got in touch with some of the jurors involved in Barry Jones’ case, who expressed serious misgivings about this whole situation. And one in particular came to believe that Barry Jones is absolutely innocent, and she died in the past couple of years, but in our correspondence, in our interview, she was just really tormented by her role in helping send Barry Jones to die.

So this idea that it’s an affront to the citizens to return to this verdict, it’s just so dishonest.

David Martinez Ramirez

JJ: I want to add something here, because details matter very much, of course, and I think, at the same time, they can also fill this sort of human need to find exceptions, to find a reason this would never happen to you, to find a way that this makes sense even though it doesn’t really make sense, because system failure, I think, is just hard for our brains to grasp. And so, in some sense, details can fight with principle.

And with that in mind, Ramirez—there’s a reason that Ramirez appears in this case name, and the Ramirez case is different. It’s not about innocence, but it’s still about inadequate counsel. And it’s still about federal involvement showing multiple failures that had happened at the state level. Can you just tell us quickly why the Ramirez case fits here?

LS: Yeah, and I’m glad you bring this up, because this is a question of innocence. But in Ramirez’s case, it is a lot more difficult for a lot of people to express concern about, but it should be no less disturbing in terms of the implications of this ruling.

Ramirez—and I should say, I have not reported on his case—but the basics are that he was convicted of murdering his girlfriend and her teenage daughter in 1989. He did not have an innocence claim, but he did have, I understand, significant mental impairments, and a long history of childhood trauma, abuse and neglect. All of these things are very common among people who end up on death row. And Ramirez’s lead trial attorney had never handled a death penalty case, did not investigate any of this evidence. And as with Jones, his post-conviction lawyer essentially failed to do the same.

And so it makes its way through the courts. But essentially what happens is that there’s a finding in federal court that he’s entitled to an evidentiary hearing in light of Martinez, in order to bring forward this evidence, which is the kind of evidence that can also help a person get off of death row, because, ostensibly, we’re not supposed to execute people where there should have been a significant finding of childhood trauma, abuse and neglect that could have come out at trial, during the course of what’s called “mitigation.”

Essentially, if there had been evidence that jurors had heard that might have moved them to vote differently, that should have come out. Same thing with intellectual disabilities and other kinds of mental problems.

Again, because these are such common characteristics of death penalty cases, Ramirez, in many ways, represents a lot of the same stakes that men and women on death row have, and Martinez should have really allowed them to get back into court to present these findings. And instead, as with Jones, the court said, You know what, none of that matters. And if the evidentiary hearing already happened, too bad, none of it counts.

JJ: Ramirez’s lawyer said that she “wasn’t prepared to handle the representation of someone as mentally disturbed” as he was. And I think, just as laypeople, we think that should have meaning.

It’s hard not to read something into the careful carelessness of this ruling. It looks like emphasis on procedure over people, but it seems really like emphasis on some people over others. Shoring up state power helps certain kinds of people. And it’s hard to avoid the idea that there’s a sense that the people who are being harmed here are just of “the harmable class,” and that there’s some reason that we shouldn’t care about them.

And I think for many people, thinking about people ends once you say the words “death row.” There is a sense that they’ve been through all the process, they’ve been found guilty, they must be guilty of something. And you’ve been working on that story and those people for a long time. I just think that there can never be enough reporting on the realities of the death penalty, and the people that are involved there, because I think for a lot of folks, it’s a thought-stopper.

LS: Thank you for saying that. One thing that’s sort of surreal about this whole situation, in most cases like this, by the time the case gets to the Supreme Court, a lot of these issues become abstractions, you know? It’s very rare that we know the story behind the people who appear in these court case names, and in Barry Jones’ case, I never would have predicted that this would have ended up making it all the way to the Supreme Court.

But it shows the difference that this kind of storytelling can make, when you can say, this is a human being, and here are the people in his life who knew him and who remember this, and who could’ve brought forward evidence, and continue to speak out about the problems in this case.

So I’ve been fortunate to be in a position to correct parts of the record. Unfortunately, in terms of the Supreme Court and the federal court, that road has really come to an end for Barry Jones for the moment.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I’ve seen a few things—”go to Congress.” What do you see as ways forward here, along with continued reporting, such as you’re doing?

LS: That’s sort of what I’m figuring out now. In terms of Congress, well, I don’t have a whole lot of hope, but I will say that this has sparked yet another round of discussion about this horrible 1990s-era law called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was essentially weaponized in this case to deny relief, as it’s been denied to many, many people on death row. This law is insidious, it’s destructive, it really should be repealed. That’s something that is an evergreen subject among people who know this issue.

And more in terms of Barry Jones’ case, my next steps are essentially to see what remaining avenues there are for him to bring, possibly, an actual innocence claim in state court. Because otherwise, we’re talking at a time when Arizona has restarted executions after eight years, and there’s a very real danger that Barry Jones could, in the not-too-distant future, end up with an execution date. So I think publicizing this case, especially at the local level and Pima County, is going to be very important.

And finally, there’s a Conviction and Sentencing Integrity Unit in Pima County that, at least in theory, should be looking at this case, and up until now, they haven’t been. I’m really hoping to see if that’s a possibility going forward, because they really should be looking at it.

JJ: Thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Liliana Segura. Find her work at TheIntercept.com, on this case and many other issues. Liliana Segura, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LS: Thanks so much again.

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May 20, 2022

Matt Gertz, Eric K. Ward on the Buffalo Massacre & ‘Replacement Theory’

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21)

This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now.

CounterSpin220520Gertz.mp3

And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Policy Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place.

CounterSpin220520Ward.mp3

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May 6, 2022

‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’

Janine Jackson interviewed Copwatch Media‘s Josmar Trujillo about hyper-policing for the April 29, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220429Trujillo.mp3

New York Times (4/13/22)

Janine Jackson: When the news got out that someone had shot people in New York City’s subway system, many of us knew just what would come next, and we were not surprised. Immediate, urgent calls for more police and more policing, for tougher treatment of homeless and/or mentally ill people. Forget tolerance or empathy or social services, because look where that gets us.

It’s an argument that we’ve heard for decades, but it’s not an abstract debate. Just because patterns and practices are old doesn’t mean their harms are not fresh. So, yes, it matters very much whether the news convinces people that they’ve just been saved from lethal threat by, as the New York Times explained, “hundreds of officers from a multitude of agencies,” using methods “as modern as scrutinizing video from surveillance cameras and parsing electronic records, and as old-fashioned as a wanted poster.”

And it matters how that tees up your reaction to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ declaration of the suspect that, “if all goes well, he will never see the outside of a prison cell again,” as unmitigated celebration and a renewed sense of security.

Josmar Trujillo is an activist and writer. He works with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that does print and video reporting about law enforcement’s effects on hyper-policed communities. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Josmar Trujillo.

Josmar Trujillo: Great to be back. Hi, Janine.

JJ: It seems worth talking about the Frank James coverage, the suspect in this subway shooting, in part because it was so boilerplate, and it shows the bare bones of a conversation, or what pretends to be a conversation, that we have seen countless times. What would you say were the key markers here? What made this sort of classic copaganda?

JT: So the subway shooting incident was a little bit of a mix of copaganda, and also a little bit of a throwback to big crisis moments, not quite at the level of 9/11, but moments of panic, sheer panic. For the last couple of years, local media, not just in New York City but around the country, have been spreading copaganda, inciting fear and pushing the conversation away from the issue of Black lives mattering or social justice, and towards this idea that we’re all not safe.

A subway shooting, because it’s in a public space where millions of people jump on a transit system to go to work, to go around the city, was treated like it was an attack on the entire city. So it had that extra element of fear, of panic, that this could happen to anyone, anywhere. And that escalated the level at which the copaganda operated.

Now, some of the things that were clear were, one, the NYPD was thrust into the leading role, to be some agency that’s there in the forefront, looking to bring the bad guy into custody and to keep us all safe. And the NYPD not only didn’t stop the subway shooting from happening—even though thousands of police officers have been added into the subway system, and there’s cameras in every subway station in New York City—but were also unable to capture him. Part of the copaganda was, one, putting them in the forefront to say they’re going to stop this guy, they’re going to catch this guy, which they did neither.

NBC News (4/14/22)

But then the media also just ignored and politely overlooked the fact of what the NYPD was unable to do, and that the suspect—and we should note that he’s a suspect; because the cameras in the subway weren’t working, we don’t even have clear footage that he did what he did—but the fact that he was suspected of doing it, he called the authorities on himself, after 30 hours of walking around some of the most densely populated parts of the city in broad daylight, using the subway system for hours after the incident, where you would think the police would be looking for him.

I mean, this spectacular failure of public safety was on full display. And the media not only ignored it, but afterwards still managed to somehow credit the NYPD, and the brave men and women of the NYPD, for capturing the suspect, while begrudgingly noting that he actually did call—he was seen by regular people on the street, who had to point out to police officers that he was on the street, but that he also had to, at some point, just call Crimestoppers on himself.

And that was, to me, one of the most amazing things, is this idea that not only will the media always lionize the cops, but when the cops are clearly inept, and clearly not doing what they’re theoretically supposed to do, that the media will cover for them, and politely omit that failure.

Washington Post (4/16/22)

JJ: And it’s so important, because this isn’t a moment where we’re just talking about an event that happened and made people scared. It’s linked to solutions, and the solution is more police. So it’s meaningful. It’s not just like, oh, we should call out cops because their crackerjack work didn’t actually wind up apprehending this suspect.

It’s because we know—and we saw, it’s already happened, the solution has already been called for, and it’s more police and more policing. So it’s extra meaningful that that actually doesn’t work. Forget the ideology for a moment. It just doesn’t seem to work in terms of what people are claiming it works for.

JT: Yeah. Police enjoy a really convenient arrangement in terms of perception of crime, and the responsibility for keeping the public safe. On the one hand, when crime goes down, when a crime stat goes down one percentage point, they’ll hold a press conference and pat themselves on the back, and say, “Look at us, you should praise us. We’re the men and women of the NYPD, and we keep you safe. Look at the crime stats going down,” which they did for many years, as crime continued to decline in New York City.

But when crime goes up—and some crime categories have gone up, because of the pandemic. That’s another conversation, that the media has failed to factor in the pandemic effect into some crime categories going up, and also across the city, which was predictable.

But you would say, well, if police deserve credit when crime goes down, whose responsibility is it when crime goes up? The police are nowhere to be found. Then they’ll point the fingers at anyone else. And in the case of the NYPD, there’s a big conversation about bail reform, a really disingenuous conversation about some of the moderate reforms that were passed in New York state about incarceration, [claims] that are completely fabricated, have no basis in any evidence at all, but have been used to blame reforms for causing crime.

And so they push blame for crime increases on everyone else: Black Lives Matter protest, social justice movements, anything except themselves. So it’s like a “heads we win, tails you lose.” They only get credit for when things go right in terms of crime stats. And when things go wrong, it’s the fault of social justice movements.

JJ: Let’s lateral into media, because it’s such a co-operative relationship. There’s kind of a sideways acknowledgement from reporters that more police don’t actually make people more safe, but they make people feel more safe, and that perception is what we’re going to address. It’s very shadows on the cave wall. Like, we’re not going to actually deal with safety, we’re going to deal with perceptions of safety.

And that’s why I feel like media are so core to this conversation. The stories that reporters tell people have a lot to do with what people believe about what law enforcement does, what it doesn’t do, who’s harmful, who’s not harmful, and all of that.

JT: And people should understand the term “copaganda,” which I know is being used now more readily. It’s not just an example of when police are overly quoted in a story, or used as the only source in the story, or when there is favorable coverage or bias given to them. The stories are the symptoms. The core of copaganda is that symbiotic relationship between the press and police. Police rely on press and press rely on police.

For example, local reporters here rely on access to police officers to get access to crime scenes, to get information that is not yet publicly available, because the police hold so much public information before it goes out.

That access, to be able to say, “Hey, can we interview you for this new policy that’s going into effect? Can we go for a ride-along for this operation that you’re planning?” This symbiotic relationship, that’s at the core of copaganda, so the stories that you see are the products of that relationship, and that relationship, I think, is what we need to talk about more and more, and why the media is relying—not all of the media, but much of the mainstream and corporate media, and especially the local media, they’re very dependent on access to police officers or police officials.

The City (4/26/22)

And then how police also utilize the press, to, one, stoke fear when they need to, because fear is a really crucial element to validate police authority, and how that goes both ways. And it’s an unspoken relationship, and it goes on and on, and it creates an element of fear that makes the public much more malleable in terms of what they’ll allow to happen without being skeptical, whether you want to bring back stop and frisk, or you want to bring drones to New York City for the police—any return to a horrible form of policing or an escalation of a new form of policing depends on people being properly scared enough.

And police benefit from it, because they’ll have their budgets expanded, which just happened yesterday; the mayor is proposing more funding for the NYPD. But also it sells newspapers, it gets clicks. It gets people to buy into this narrative that the media has been cultivating for the better part of two years, and you can even say longer than that—many, many years. So there’s a benefit for both sides of that arrangement.

JJ: Absolutely. So much I could say… I do think that honest, observant people would acknowledge that the game-changing media on police brutality, on police racism, has not come from salaried journalists, who are charged with and constitutionally protected for speaking truth to power.

It’s not come from there. It’s come from—we’re calling them “citizen journalists.” What they are are regular people on the street with a phone who, I was going to say “are not afraid to use it,” but I think often they are afraid to use it, but they just know that if they don’t record this… they recognize that they’re now the historical record, and if they don’t record this and show it, then people are going to deny that it happened.

And so if we could just talk about the redefining of journalism, the fact that if we’re talking about police brutality and aberrations by police, it matters so much that just regular folks are creating media and reporting about it.

JT: Absolutely. And this goes back, in a very recent history, to Ferguson. This goes back to the highs of the Black Lives Matter movement, the recording of the interaction that killed Eric Garner in Staten Island, the Ferguson protesters who were using social media to shoot images out to the world of what the police department was doing in response to protests.

So you can call it “citizens”—we use “copwatch,” because copwatch is a form of people using cameras to be vigilant of police and tracking what they’re saying, because, unfortunately, we live in a society where police’s word is always taken at a higher value than a regular person’s word.

So you need that camera. You need that evidence, but you also need to show the world what’s happening. We use “copwatch,” we use “citizen,” you can just say “the public.” Some people will say “activist.” I never got a card in the mail that said I was an activist. I was a person who just started to give a crap about what was going on, and I started to do things about it, you know?

It’s regular people being able to document what’s going on. And in particular with the police, because policing is most harmful in communities of color, it’s those people in low-income communities of color that have the most experience, the most perspective, the most context to be able to speak about this.

And not just write about it for a one-time story because, you know, the story is hot, or an editor told you to go over to Harlem and check out what’s going on, but because maybe you live there and maybe you know what’s going on. Maybe you have connections in the community that enlighten your understanding of what’s happening from just a one-time incident to a continuation of a historical oppressive system.

So I think it’s really important that that conversation of us not relying on salaried, constitutionally protected reporters, or card-carrying members of the press, to understand that storytelling is about people. And that’s the most important element that we can start from, and in terms of policing, there are certain people that are policed more than others. And if we acknowledge that, then we also have to acknowledge that they might be the better suited ones to have an honest conversation about it.

JJ: Absolutely. You know, if video evidence were enough, we wouldn’t be in conversation right now. We’ve seen videos. We have video—Rodney King—we have video, video exists.

JT: No, I’ll, I’ll never forget what you told me once. I think it was some event that we saw you at, where you said evidence is not the problem. It’s never been about a lack of evidence, like we just need to compile more evidence, more proof.

It’s important to document things, but it’s also important to understand that this is not just about winning over people with the rationality of our argument, but really understanding this is a war of information, and a literal war as well.

I mean, there’s physical violence, death. There are things that are happening in communities at the hands of the police. There is a literal and figurative war that’s happening, and in those cases, it’s not about you sitting down and having an honest intellectual debate with someone who will concede when you have a point.

They will not concede. The people who are against this are not willing to acknowledge that bail reform has not contributed to crime. It’s beside the point, the facts don’t matter to them. It’s just about pushing an agenda forward, and being the loudest and the most aggressive in that way. I think if we understand that, I think we’ll also have a better understanding of how to counteract that.

JJ: Well, precisely, and thank you very much, Josmar, for that. And I just want to ask you, finally, if you do think about—you know, we’re not anti-reporter, we’re not anti-journalism—if you think about what useful journalism around this set of issues would look like, or what it would include, what are we talking about? How do we get off the dime on this conversation?

Josmar Trujillo: “We have to understand that journalism is something that anybody should be able to do. We should all be able to document our stories.” (image: Joseph Hayden)

JT: Well, this is a long conversation. We could have a big conversation, a couple of days’ worth of conversations, about that. But there’s been kind of a reckoning, from what I’ve seen, in media about, at the very basic level, diversity in the newsroom, right? Like just acknowledging that, right? Not to mention, people aren’t moving enough in that direction, but acknowledging that white supremacy is not just an issue of people in power in police departments or in government, but also in the people who shape and tell the stories of our society.

But there’s this idea also that it’s not just about diversity. It’s also about tearing down the walls of saying, like, this person is a reliable person because this person has a press pass, and this person is a crazy or a fringe person because they put their stuff on social media.

There has to be, I think, room for us to understand that citizen journalism and journalism can be made stronger by not thinking of ourselves in these silos, and not thinking of ourselves as “real reporters and people who are really objective,” and “people who are not credible,” and start to open up that conversation.

Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of stuff since the Capitol riots where there’s this whole battle for information about who’s right and who’s wrong. And there’s a deeper conversation about censorship and all of this stuff. But I think we have to understand that journalism is something that anybody should be able to do. We should all be able to document our stories, and there needs to be, I think, a push for traditional newsrooms to understand that, possibly create programs and put resources into helping bridge that gap, right? So we’re not just hiring from the journalism schools, and we’re creating apprenticeships or creating programs, ways for people to be able to enter the profession, but also for us to not think that the profession is the end all and be all of storytelling, because it’s not.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo. You can find Copwatch Media online at Copwatch.Media, and his work many places around the internet, including FAIR.org. Thank you so much, Josmar Trujillo, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JT: Thanks, Janine. Thanks so much for having me.

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