Category: zSlider

September 12, 2025

Kirk Coverage Downplayed MAGA’s Culture of Violence

The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood (9/11/25) expressed doubt that “this disgusting scene of high-definition murder…will restore the moral senses of all those who have hitherto been casually pro-violence.”

The assassination of far-right podcaster and political activist Charlie Kirk in Utah was truly shocking in every sense. It happened in the open, at a college campus in broad daylight with 3,000 onlookers. Graphic and close-up video footage of his final moment, showing a bullet placed precisely at his carotid artery at the very second Kirk was questioned about mass shootings, seemed out of a movie. The man who once said gun deaths were worth the price of the Second Amendment (Newsweek, 4/6/23) became an illustration of what that price looks like before our eyes.

Flags at half mast. A moment of silence at Yankee Stadium. The vice president skipped a 9/11 memorial event to be with Kirk’s family (USA Today, 9/11/25), and Kirk’s body was transported back to his home state on the vice president’s aircraft (CBS, 9/11/25). He was no mere pundit or activist, but a valued capo in the Trump political machine.

“Charlie Kirk’s murder was one of the worst moments in recent American history,” read the subhead of an Atlantic piece (9/11/25) by Graeme Wood. (It was apparently much worse than US support for killing thousands of children in Gaza, about which Wood shrugged, “war is ugly,” arguing that it’s “possible to kill children legally”—Atlantic, 5/17/24.)

Wood was not alone in the press, as much of the coverage has framed the murder as a moment where the United States crossed the Rubicon when it comes to political violence. While Kirk’s murder was bad news for democracy—as no one ever deserves to be killed for their speech—the media reaction glossed over the role that President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and Kirk himself, as a prominent supporter of that movement, have helped to legitimize the kind of political violence that Kirk apparently fell victim to.

‘Epidemic of leftist violence’

The assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June 2025 was one of several right-wing attacks that New York Post columnist Miranda Divine (9/11/25) ignored in order to claim that “political violence is almost exclusively from the left.”

The right-wing press, as expected, has whipped itself into a frenzy over a wave of domestic terrorism that is only coming from the left, though the motives of the killer at the time were unknown. “We are suffering through an epidemic of leftist violence,” said Miranda Divine of the New York Post (9/11/25), adding that Kirk’s killing is “the latest manifestation of the hateful rhetoric aimed at President Trump and his MAGA movement.”

President Trump has fanned the flames. As the New Yorker (9/11/25) noted:

Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”… Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned.

Elsewhere, coverage didn’t blame the left, but did suggest that Kirk’s killing had brought US society to an inflection point. The New York Times (9/11/25) said that before Kirk’s killing, “there were signs of a looming political crisis” and increased “polarization and the coarsening of public discourse.” While there have been other acts of political violence, reporters Richard Fausset, Ken Bensinger and Alan Feuer wrote, the “killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus…raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.”

The Times quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, saying “I think that you have a cultural civil war underway.” (Gingrich has been waging cultural civil war for a long time now; in 1990, he put out a memo urging Republican candidates to tar their opponents with words like “sick…pathetic…traitors”—Extra! Update, 2/95).

The Washington Post editorial board (9/10/25) noted, while listing off other instances of political violence:

Months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, the conservative activist warned about the spread of “assassination culture.” He cited the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, as well as the killing of a healthcare CEO. And now it seems all too likely that he himself became a victim of that violent fervor while speaking on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.

The Post’s news side featured a report (9/11/25) claiming that the nation is “facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s.” The paper summoned memories of the “assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”

CNN’s Stephen Collinson (9/10/25) said Kirk’s murder “will unleash unknown consequences in a nation that is angry and already confronting a fractured political future.”

‘More frequent and deadly’

Donald Trump posted an image of himself as an Apocalypse Now character as he declared war on Chicago.

Most of these pieces rightly situated Kirk’s murder with other acts of political violence that targeted both Democrats and Republicans. But what these pieces miss—or actively try to hide—is how much this dangerous era escalated when Trump came into the White House. The president and his allies in right-wing media not only provided the rhetoric that inspired an enormous amount of political violence, but worked actively to normalize it.

From Trump’s calls for violence against protesters who disrupted his rallies (FAIR.org, 3/12/16) to official presidential social media posts depicting Trump as Robert Duvall’s napalm-loving colonel from Apocalypse Now, MAGA is a political agenda that celebrates violence (FAIR.org, 11/1/19).

PBS’s Frontline (4/21/21) reported:

“We’ve seen a rising tide of attacks by far-right extremists in recent years,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Frontline. “The threat is coming from a host of ideologies, from white supremacists to incels, to everything in between. Unfortunately, the attacks are becoming both more frequent and deadly.”

To track that change, Frontline analyzed data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS defines terrorism as the “deliberate use—or threat— of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact,” a similar definition to the one used by the FBI.

According to a CSIS database, there were 405 such terror attacks or plots in the US from 2015 through 2020—more than double the total number in the previous decade. And in the last five years, those attacks or plots were predominantly carried out by white supremacists, militias and other far-right extremists: 63% and increasing. Far-left incidents are also on the rise but made up a smaller portion of the whole, 13% from 2015 to 2020, according to Frontline’s analysis. Religious extremists accounted for 19%, with the remaining 5% linked to “ethnonationalist” or “other” ideologies, per CSIS categorizations.

Meme from Rancho Relaxo.

Political violence is of course nothing new in American culture; deadly extremism, coming mainly though not exclusively from the right, was rampant both before (Extra!, 3–4/95, 7–8/95; Extra! Update, 10/96) and after September 11, 2001 (FAIR.org, 4/16/13, 6/13/14). But MAGA has moved what was once far-right rhetoric and tactics to the center of the US right. As the Brookings Institution (3/12/21) pointed out, many right-wing tactics of the Trump era were pioneered by self-styled militia groups that have operated along the US’s southern border since the 1980s:

Many of the right-wing armed groups’ tactics exhibited during Trump’s presidency—harassment of minorities, purposeful recruitment of military veterans, cultivation of allies in law enforcement forces and among politicians, and efforts to influence elections—had years of beta testing at the US/Mexico border.

Five years ago, the Guardian (3/18/20) also painted a frightening picture:

White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the Trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a “surging” racist movement continues to be driven by “a deep fear of demographic change.” Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity groups and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs.

‘Bring a gun with you’

The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) wrote admiringly of Kirk’s “moxie and fearlessness.”

Charlie Kirk was a central actor in the right-wing hate machine that fomented violence. He encouraged violence against immigrants (Media Matters, 3/22/24):

At what point is it time to start to at least use rubber bullets, or use some sort of tear gas, to prevent this and quell this invasion?… And at what point do we use real force?. . . Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?

He incited partisan division and hatred, and encouraged the purchase and use of weapons in that context (Media Matters, 10/12/23):

You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. if you go into a public place, bring a gun with you…. Thank goodness in Arizona we can carry, and we carry.

Where the New York Times (9/10/25) saw “a charismatic right-wing activist” who “showed a genius for using social media and campus organizing,” those who found themselves targets of Kirk’s “genius” saw something entirely different.

Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” doxxed academics Kirk claimed “advanced leftist propaganda”; those listed quickly found themselves and their universities subject to a torrent of abuse—including racial slurs and death threats—from Kirk’s followers, at times requiring universities to offer those academics extra security. Journalism professor Stacy Patton, who experienced this harassment firsthand when she was put on the list in 2024, observed:

Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.

This is the activism that the New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) described as “practicing politics in exactly the right way”:

He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.

‘Throbbing middle finger to God’

Charlie Kirk (X, 9/11/23): ““The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God is the transgender thing happening in America.”

Kirk referred to LGBTQ identity as a “social contagion,” and called trans people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God” (Erin in the Morning, 9/11/23).

He said that Black women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson “had to go steal a white person’s slot” through affirmative action, because they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” he declared (Wired, 1/12/24).

Upon Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary, Kirk posted: “Twenty-four years ago, a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim socialist is on pace to run New York City.” “When we think of what it means to be an American, is [it] someone by the name of Islami Mohamed?” he remarked on another occasion (Media Matters, 8/19/25): “I don’t think so.”

“You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population,” Kirk insisted (Religion News, 1/7/25). He also claimed (Media Matters, 8/19/25) that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

‘Disgracefully ill-timed’

MSNBC‘s Rebecca Cutler said it was ““inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable” to connect Kirk’s murder to his hate speech (Guardian, 9/11/25).

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, it was taboo to point out that his politics, and those of the MAGA movement he embraced, contributed to a culture of hatred and demonization. MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd was promptly fired by the cable network after he observed:

Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions…. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.

When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in condemning violence, remarked that “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” the Washington Post (9/10/25) editorialized that this was “a disgracefully ill-timed comment.”

In fact, there is no better time to point out that the right-wing movement Kirk was a crucial part of has played the leading role in dehumanizing others and normalizing violence. Failure to honestly examine the politics that are driving extremism will steer us away from the kind of analysis and action that are needed to prevent more tragedies.

Research assistance: Caitlin Scialla

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 12, 2025

When Trump Took Over DC, NYT First Ignored, Then Belittled Protests

Thousands of people marching against the military occupation of our nation’s capital (Washington Post, 9/6/25) was not a news story to the New York Times.

Despite the late-summer sun bearing down, thousands of protesters marched towards the White House last Saturday carrying anti-Trump and Free DC signs. Many hailed from unions, activist organizations and religious groups. Two friends drove all the way from Illinois; “absolutely” it was worth it, they told the Washington Post (9/6/25).

Also at the protest was John Hanrahan, a longtime editor and journalist, and a former Post reporter who worked alongside Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Metro section—where he was a “third-string Watergate reporter“—until he refused to cross the Post pressmen’s picket line in 1975 (Esquire, 3/1/78).

Sunday morning, when Hanrahan picked the New York Times off his doorstep—yeah, he’s old school and still gets the paper edition—he didn’t see a single word or picture about the march. So late Sunday night, he wrote a letter to the editor lamenting the Times’ lack of coverage, even as other major outlets found the protest newsworthy.

“Not worth even a few column inches when thousands upon thousands of residents of a nation’s capital city stand up to protest against the ruling regime’s unwanted and unjustified takeover?” Hanrahan asked:

Would such an anti-authoritarian protest have gone unnoticed by “The Newspaper of Record” had it happened in Caracas, or Havana, or Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran? The question answers itself.

‘Only a few scattered protests’

A valuable New York Times story (9/6/25) about grand jury resistance to the military occupation dismissed widespread street activism as “only a few scattered protests.”

Less than eight hours after firing off his letter, Hanrahan scooped the Monday Times off his doorstep. Once again, there was nothing on the march. There was, however, a story (9/6/25) on how DC grand juries are rejecting charges brought amid Trump’s crackdown.

“In what could be read as a citizens’ revolt,” the Times reported,

ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president’s immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force.

The Times story was good—as has been much of the paper’s coverage (8/12/25, 8/16/25, 8/20/25, 9/10/25) of Trump’s DC takeover—but its opening line didn’t sit well with Hanrahan:

In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents, there have been only a few scattered protests.

DC has had more than a few protests against Trump’s military occupation, and Hanrahan is in a position to know. Despite clocking in at 87 years of age, he’s been a regular presence at protests over the past month, including numerous ones “ranging from 500 to 10,000 participants,” he wrote in an email to FAIR.

Explosion of smaller-scale actions

The Nation (8/29/25) described how DC’s night patrols “document the constitutional violations or brutality…so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing.”

“If a single massive protest could get rid of this man, it would have happened already, right? And so we have to think of different things,” Alex Dodds, co-founder of Free DC, told the Washington Post (9/6/25). “What fixes this is sustained resistance and noncooperation with people who are attempting to use our government, which belongs to us, to harm our communities and to harm us.”

And DC has seen an explosion of smaller-scale actions in response to Trump’s takeover. Parents have organized “walking school buses” to ensure kids make it safely to and from school. Others have mobilized to protect the homeless. More impromptu gatherings have formed to thwart ICE agents from snatching people off the streets. And each night at 8pm, neighbors bang pots and pans in protest, while deeper into the night, teams of volunteers go on night patrols.

This multifaceted, coordinated response has been taking place, even as thousands of DC residents have taken part in more traditional protest marches—like the September 6 march that the Times ignored. To dismiss the vibrant grassroots resistance to Trump’s occupation of DC as “only a few scattered protests” is a distortion that only serves to normalize authoritarianism.

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 12, 2025

Alex Main on Venezuelan Boat Assault

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Image of the boat released by Donald Trump on social media.

This week on CounterSpin: The US ordered a lethal strike on a small boat in the southern Caribbean that, we’re told, carried Venezuelan drug cartel members on their way to poison this pristine country of ours. How do we know that? We don’t. Who were they? We don’t know. Does it matter? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

News media have basic questions to address on behalf of the US people: Can the Trump administration, or any administration, declare people guilty and treat them as criminals, absent the transparent legal processes we all understand as fundamental? Can they summarily kill people based on that declaration? And can they aim that illegal nightmare overwhelmingly at brown people and “enemy nations” without any principled interrogation on journalists’ part?

We hear about the killing in the southern Caribbean, and its various contexts, from Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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

‘Kennedy Is Not a Skeptic. He Is an Anti-Vaccination Enthusiast’: CounterSpin interview with Elizabeth Jacobs on RFK Jr. and public health

Janine Jackson interviewed Defend Public Health’s Elizabeth Jacobs about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and public health for the September 5, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Post (8/31/25)

Janine Jackson: “I have a Kennedy,” Donald Trump allegedly bragged to donors, about putting in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services. Creepy as that statement sounds, you can almost imagine some reporters saying the same.

RFK Jr. is nothing if not “colorful,” what with the brain worm and the bear in the car. But what if news media centered their reporting on the millions of lives affected by the weird man with the famous last name? Would we still be joking about his belief that he can diagnose children walking past him in airports? Or would we be interrogating the systems that elevated such a delusional person, and determining how to mitigate the impacts of his work?

What if media took their eyes off the bouncing ball, and focused on how to safeguard hard-won medical advances, and fight assaults on the idea of health as a boutique purchase, rather than the very definition of a shared concern?

The group Defend Public Health has come together in that effort; our guest is a founding member. Elizabeth Jacobs is an epidemiologist and professor emerita at the University of Arizona. She joins us now by phone from Tucson. Welcome to CounterSpin, Elizabeth Jacobs.

Elizabeth Jacobs: Thank you so much for having me today, Janine.

JJ: I will start by saying that, looking for someone to talk about RFK Jr., I had no interest in talking with someone who only just now decided that he shouldn’t be allowed to touch public health with a pole. Kennedy was not a pig in a poke. There was plenty of record. So while we can be surprised every day by the brazenness of this administration and its believers, there was never a reason to believe that Kennedy as HHS secretary would be, to put the most generous face on it, helpfully critical of pharmaceutical companies, or corporate medicine, in service of regular people.

CNN (1/29/25)

But there were reasons that some people thought Kennedy was a wagon to hitch to. So let me ask you first, what was the appeal? What void did people think they were filling, do you think?

EJ: I think he talks a really good game, and he was saying things that a lot of people have wanted to hear. Like he wants to look into things like pesticides or environmental toxicants—which, by the way, is a very broad category that he is usually fairly vague on—and I think a lot of people wanted to hear that.

But the issue is that scientists have been studying these things for a long time. And the thought that Mr. Kennedy was going to be the one who is going to address these issues is not one that I ever personally fell for. With that said, I completely understand why he appealed, at least on paper, to many other people. He simply said the right words.

JJ: And we’re in kind of new waters now. Susan Monarez, the head of the CDC, was fired, and then four other top leaders quit. Heads of federal agencies walking out together on principle is not an everyday occurrence. So what do we know about why those CDC officials felt they couldn’t possibly do what they were now being tasked to do? It’s about vaccines, right?

CBS (4/28/25)

EJ: Right. And we are all faced with a choice: Do we want to believe what Mr. Kennedy says about why they left, or do we want to believe what the scientists themselves are saying?

And I choose the scientists. These are people who are career federal workers, who do this job because they’re dedicated to the public health of the United States of America. Working at the CDC isn’t a glamorous job. It doesn’t come with a huge paycheck compared to, say, if you worked in industry. So I tend to trust these individuals more than I trust Mr. Kennedy.

Their departure, the number of people who have been leaving the CDC, is unprecedented. And, frankly, it really provides a very strong hint as to the existential crisis that is happening right now with Mr. Kennedy as the head of Health and Human Services.

And a great example of that is the fact that he has just installed a person with no scientific training or background at all as the temporary head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is simply an outrageous, dangerous and unprecedented situation in which we find ourselves.

Guardian (8/28/25)

JJ: And let me just ask you to expound a little bit on the effects. What can we see coming down the road with RFK Jr. and his appointees leading public health policy? I hate to ask you to say it, but what could we be looking at?

EJ: I’ll start with the less obvious one, and then talk about vaccines. So the less obvious concern that I have, for example, is that Mr. Kennedy has said that he wants to fire all the members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force. And that group is responsible for providing recommendations for things like which cancer screenings we should get, and when we should start getting them. And their recommendations are what causes health insurance companies to be required to pay for those screenings. So if he disbands a committee like that, there is a likelihood that our health insurance companies will no longer cover things like cancer screenings.

The very obvious danger that we are in, and that several senators brought up today in his hearing with the Senate Finance Committee, is that vaccines are being undermined daily by Mr. Kennedy. And he protests this, and claims that he’s not an anti-vaxxer, yet he takes actions like replacing every member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices with people who are anti-vaccine, or hold other very dangerous, pseudo-scientific opinions on this topic. And so it’s going to be a very serious issue with regard to the vaccination coverage in this country. And it’s truly almost impossible for me to believe that this is happening in the United States.

JJ: It feels like a Dr. Seuss world we’re living in, in which the White House statement said that CDC head Susan Monarez was “not aligned with the president’s agenda of making America healthy again.” This is weird. This is just weird.

EJ: Yes. And Dr. Monarez, just one month ago, was praised as a very knowledgeable, ethical leader at CDC, which I agree with. So her dismissal is, again, a funhouse mirror.

If you listen to Mr. Kennedy, he claimed today in the hearing that Dr. Monarez was asked if she was a trustworthy person, and she responded “no.” I find that absolutely impossible to believe. I do not believe that’s what happened. I believe what she says, which is that she was fired because she would not agree with orders, so to speak, from Mr. Kennedy to approve things that were coming out that she did not see the data for, that were going to be released by a group of people who themselves are not trustworthy.

JJ: Public health and public information, as you’re indicating, are very much connected. The man, for example, who shot bullets at the CDC’s windows, that killed a police officer, was, we were told, motivated by beliefs he got from somewhere about Covid vaccines. So it matters very much what ideas we allow into the ether, and that’s where media comes in.

Elizabeth Jacobs: “It is my opinion that misinformation—not just scientific, but all kinds—is the greatest existential threat to the United States right now.”

EJ: That’s right. And it’s both legacy or traditional media and social media. It is my opinion that misinformation—not just scientific, but all kinds—is the greatest existential threat to the United States right now. And we are seeing this play out, and I’ll use social media as the first example.

Social media companies make money through engagement, and therefore they have no motivation whatsoever to stem the tide of misinformation on their platforms. We know, for example, that false information tends to spread on social media orders of magnitude faster than factual information does. And that’s dangerous, because it promotes controversy and engagement, which makes social media companies money.

Now, with the legacy media, my biggest concern is false equivalence. So, for example, when stories are run about vaccines, they may have a doctor on who says vaccines are good; they’re safe and effective. But then they’ll also interview somebody who says, “Oh no, vaccines are no good.” And the problem with that is it creates a false image that those two viewpoints are equivalent, when, in reality, if you wanted to show the equivalence of these two opinions, you would have 100,000 scientists or healthcare professionals who are talking about the benefit and safety of vaccines, versus one person who says that they are dangerous or harmful in some way. And so this false equivalence adds to this misinformation and distrust of science.

JJ: I appreciate that, and Defend Public Health’s Bruce Mirken wrote a great piece back in June, which I saw on 48 Hills, about the “sane-washing,” as we call it, of RFK Jr. And it was great because it talked about precisely what you’re saying: Reporters should note that he says things that are wackadoodle. But then also, they do this thing where they say, “Well, he’s a skeptic on vaccines.” And that ticks a box for a lot of folks, as though RFK Jr had principled concerns. He’s a “skeptic,” and aren’t we all skeptics?

I just want to ask you about the role of journalism here. You’ve started to indicate it, but what could they do less or more of, do you think?

48 Hills (6/5/25)

EJ: So I really do think it’s critical to present factual information, and call things what they are. Mr. Kennedy is not a skeptic. He is an anti-vaccination enthusiast. He spreads propaganda. He actually actively spreads disinformation to the people of the United States of America. If he were skeptical, he would actually consider the just massive amount of scientific data to which he has access, which has shown time and time again that vaccines are safe and effective.

So the words that we choose are really important, and I just think there are media outlets who are doing better and better at this. But I just want to repeat that this is an existential crisis for the United States, and we have got to be clear about the danger that Mr. Kennedy poses. This isn’t a minor scientific disagreement. This is the complete undermining of the entire scientific infrastructure of the United States, and our vaccine program.

JJ: There are efforts, finally, including your own, to start with—not end with—getting RFK Jr. out of there. But there’s much more that we need to do.

EJ: Absolutely. And, again, I’m certainly far from alone. People who believe that Mr. Kennedy needs to be removed from office or resign, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands now, who agree with this. And I guess one bright spot from the hearing today is that there are now three Republican senators who spoke on the record about their concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s actions.

So I really hope that this keeps up. I hope that physicians and other healthcare practitioners, nurses, will come forward and really talk to their elected officials about their concerns. Because, again, this is not a trivial worry.

JJ: And let me just ask you, finally, if there’s reporters listening, is there anything that you would ask them to stop doing, or start doing, in terms of journalism? And not just RFK Jr., but public health in general—are there questions you would like them to start asking, or stop asking? What are your thoughts on media?

EJ: I’m not a journalist, and I have a lot of respect for how difficult this job is. I would just say to avoid any sort of desire to look for false equivalence, or present “the other side of the story,” when there are situations where there is no other side of the story. So to make sure that you’re talking with experts in regard to the field that you have under discussion, and, honestly, I would just really prefer to see people who are pseudoscientific quacks get a lot less ink and a lot less airtime, because they do not reflect the beliefs and the understanding of science among the majority of scientists and healthcare practitioners in this country.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Elizabeth Jacobs. You can find her work, and that of others, at Defend Public Health, right where you would expect to find it, DefendPublicHealth.org. Elizabeth Jacobs, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. Thank you so much.

EJ: Thanks for having me, Janine.

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

CBS Drifts Further Toward Right-Wing State Television

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Face the Nation (8/31/25) “shamefully edited the interview to whitewash the truth” because it cut out what AP (9/5/25) called “a series of unproven accusations about Abrego Garcia.”

After Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (X, 8/31/25) complained that several minutes of her August 31 Face the Nation interview had been “shamefully edited…to whitewash the truth,” CBS News announced that its flagship Sunday morning program will no longer edit its interviews, except for “legal or national security” reasons (AP, 9/5/25).

According to AP, CBS said it had edited the interview, which ran 16 minutes and 40 seconds in its original form, for length, and posted the full interview on its website and YouTube. As the AP correctly noted, Noem “made a series of unproven accusations about Abrego Garcia” in the portion of the interview that was cut. This is a pattern of behavior by the administration with respect to Kilmar Abrego Garcia (FAIR.org, 6/20/25; USA Today, 9/8/25), a Salvadoran refugee who had been illegally deported to the CECOT concentration camp in his country of origin.

In the context of the recent capitulations by CBS News and its parent company Paramount in the face of Trump administration demands, the announcement is noteworthy—and dangerous.

Uneditable propaganda

As Variety (9/5/25) says, “Making decisions that seem to come in response to backlash from public officials is not seen as sound journalistic practice.”

Writing for FAIR, Ari Paul noted in July (7/24/25) that, in order to facilitate a merger with Skydance,

Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement.

Variety (9/5/25) argued that CBS‘s promise not to edit Face the Nation‘s interviews, which overwhelmingly feature government officials,

is an unorthodox one, potentially leaving show moderators and producers unable to remove false statements or propaganda uttered by political operatives and officials and undermining the authority and credibility of Margaret Brennan, the moderator of the Sunday public affairs program.

An anonymous CBS source weakly protested to the AP that Face the Nation‘s Brennan would “still be able to factcheck or challenge claims made by interview subjects.” But corporate media outlets have never been good at stopping political figures from spewing propaganda (FAIR.org, 6/28/11, 6/26/24, 2/28/25, 7/31/25), particularly those from Trump and his minions, who produce falsehoods at such a rapid clip that it’s impossible to challenge each one. Now CBS will have even fewer tools to do so.

Installing a commissar

AP (via KIRO, 9/9/25) points out that Kenneth Weinstein will not actually be an ombud, i.e., a person who resolves complaints from the public; “Paramount said it does not envision Weinstein having any public-facing role.”

In yet another move to the right, days after its editing announcement, CBS News (9/8/25) announced that, to fulfill part of its settlement with Trump, it would be appointing Kenneth R. Weinstein to serve as an ombud. In addition to being a prominent conservative—Weinstein previously headed the Hudson Institute for over a decade—the new appointee was nominated by Trump for ambassador to Japan in 2020 (though his nomination was never confirmed—Reuters, 9/8/25). Weinstein “will review editorial questions and concerns from outside entities and employees,” CBS said.

While FAIR has lamented the gradual disappearance of ombuds from major journalistic outlets over the years (FAIR.org, 6/1/17), and the loss of accountability to their audiences that that entails, it’s critical that ombuds be independent. Weinstein’s clear ideological tilt, his connection to the Trump administration and his position’s creation at the command of that administration stand as obvious obstacles to him performing any role but state censor.

FAIR (7/24/25) also pointed out that Paramount was looking to give right-wing journalist and censorious “free speech” activist Bari Weiss a top role at CBS News. It has since been reported that the company is looking to buy her publication, the Free Press, for as much as $200 million (Puck, 9/3/25).

Featured image, from left: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, CBS News “ombud” Kenneth Weinstein.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 5, 2025

‘Insurance Companies Are Moving to Protect Their Profits in a Short-Term Way’: CounterSpin interview with Cathy Cowan Becker on insurance and climate disasters

Janine Jackson interviewed Green America’s Cathy Cowan Becker about insurance and climate disasters for the August 29, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The Trump administration’s aggressive whistling past the graveyard notwithstanding, climate disruption is still actually happening, as reality doesn’t bow to weird political whims. In reality, people have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to insurance companies, money every month their whole working lives, with the idea that if a storm destroys their house, or a fire burns down their business, that will be acknowledged and they can be made whole, based on the insurance they have paid for for precisely this purpose for many years.

And yet here we are, where, as our guest reports, insurance companies are responding to people needing insurance by dropping them, canceling them, and straight up just not paying them, while continuing to monetarily support the industry that’s driving the crisis.

So what the heck is happening here, and why do news media make us feel that we’re somehow too dumb to understand the problem, or to see a way out of it?

Cathy Cowan Becker is responsible finance campaign director at the group Green America. She joins us now by phone from Ohio. Welcome to CounterSpin, Cathy Becker.

Cathy Cowan Becker: Thank you so much for having me.

Other Words (7/30/25)

JJ: I saw your piece on OtherWords.org, headlined “Big Insurance Companies Are Fleecing Disaster Survivors—and the Rest of Us,” And I would encourage folks to find that piece. But then I saw the piece–and I was happy to see it carried and reprinted and put in front of people; that’s the point–but I saw it in another outlet, and the headline was changed. And listeners know reporters don’t write headlines, but this Florida paper gave it the headline, “Insurance Rates Rise Due to Climate Disasters.” And I thought, well, that doesn’t sound like precisely what she’s saying. There isn’t an automatic cause and effect; there are still choices being made.

So my question for you is: What are insurance companies doing right now in the face of climate disasters—and that’s plural, disasters, and multifaceted. What are they doing, and how does it stand up against what they might be doing, and what many folks thought they would be doing right now?

CB: Yes, thank you. Those are excellent questions. And I’m also very glad that you are pointing out making the connection to the climate crisis, because that’s at the root of this ongoing insurance crisis. The great increase in the number and severity of climate and weather events across the world—things like floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires—we saw in the United States last year 27 such events costing $1 billion or more, a total of $182 billion. And that’s up from about three of those sorts of events in the 1980s, according to NOAA.

So you’re right that when you buy insurance, you expect, if your house or your property is hit with a fire or storm, that your insurance policy will help you replace or rebuild. And insurance is designed for such one-off events, that if my whole neighborhood is buying insurance and my neighbor’s house catches fire, all of our premium costs will help go to help that neighbor rebuild. But it is not designed for systemic climate disasters that touch entire neighborhoods and towns and villages, and are becoming more intense and widespread every year.

Cathy Cowan Becker: “What they’re paying out in climate-attributable losses is almost the same as what they’re taking in from the fossil fuel companies in premiums.”

So what insurance companies are doing now, how they’re reacting to this right now, they’re taking a very short-term view of this unfolding disaster. So instead of looking at what is the root cause and how do we address that, they’re just moving to protect their own profits in a short-term way. So they’re, as you said, canceling policies, raising rates and not paying claims.

LendingTree just had a report that homeowners insurance has gone up over 40% in the last six years; that’s nationwide. There are many, many reports of companies canceling policies, not renewing policies in climate-vulnerable and really other areas, sometimes based on drone footage that they took of someone’s house without the homeowner’s knowledge or consent. And then we have insurance companies that are closing claims, many of them legitimate claims that people make; some of them have closing rates over 40%, where someone files a claim and there’s simply no payment. That’s according to Weiss Ratings.

The other just really baffling thing insurance companies are doing is they are insuring fossil fuel projects and investing in fossil fuel companies. So they’re insuring and investing in fossil fuels. And, as you know, fossil fuels are at the root of the climate disaster. So there is a coalition called Insure Our Future, and they’ve studied this problem for several years. They found that the amount that insurance companies, when they actually pay, what they’re paying out in climate-attributable losses is almost the same as what they’re taking in from the fossil fuel companies in premiums. So it just doesn’t make any sense for them to be investing in this industry that is making this problem that they are having to pay for worse. But they are.

So we know from a German nonprofit called Urgewald that tracks fossil fuel investments worldwide that GEICO’s parent company, which is Berkshire Hathaway, headed by Warren Buffett, they’re by far the largest investor in fossil fuels, at $95 billion. State Farm has $20 billion invested in fossil fuels, and other big insurance companies like USAA, AIG, Nationwide, Allstate, Travelers, all have a billion or many billions invested in fossil fuels. I think the second half of your question is, what should they be doing instead? Is that correct?

JJ: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. What we would be looking for them and hoping, as we write our checks every month, that they would be doing?

CB: Yeah, exactly. So the No. 1 thing, the first thing they should do, is to stop insuring and investing in fossil fuel companies that are making this climate crisis worse. This is to insure their longer-term future, insure everyone else’s longer-term future.

So big institutional investors, insurance companies, really have a role to play on where this kind of capital and funding goes. So instead of investing in fossil fuels, they could be investing in resiliency projects to make local communities, help them adapt to climate change. Things like levies or public works that would help save major storm systems, that would help cities deal with increased rainfall. They could be investing in that. They could be investing in clean energy projects and energy efficiency projects that lower the carbon pollution that’s causing climate change. So, basically, instead of sending their institutional capital to make the problem worse, they could be sending it to solutions that make it better.

So another set of things they could do is to work with policy makers to create an all-hazard insurance. So many people don’t know that in order to get flood damage covered, you have to have separate flood insurance policy. Your regular policy doesn’t cover that. And there’s also earthquake damage, that’s also a separate policy.

NBC (8/12/25)

And on top of that, the FEMA flood insurance maps are very out of date. So places that are now susceptible to flooding are not shown on these flood insurance maps.

And so as a result, only 2% of people in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, and only 3% of people in Kerr County, Texas—both of which, as most people know, had recent major flood damage, flash flooding, as the result of tropical storms and hurricanes that came near where they were—hardly any of those people had flood insurance. And that means their claims are not going to be paid. And that is a real travesty.

And so what we need is an all-hazards insurance, whether that’s public or private, where you don’t have to have several different policies. You have one policy, and it covers fires, floods, earthquakes, even terrorism, just any sort of hazard that faces people.

And then, finally, is public policy. So recently, Florida passed a spate of what they call “insurance reforms,” but basically those laws are making it harder for people to sue when their insurance company doesn’t pay a claim, and instead they’re forced into unfair arbitration.

And so, instead, insurance companies could be offering people incentives, like, say, a break on their premium rates, to prepare their homes for climate disaster. So things like fortified roofs, or paying to trim nearby vegetation or install an additional sump pump. People could afford to do that if they got a break on their insurance rates. And then the companies wouldn’t have as many claims, because these houses would be better prepared for climate disasters. And there’s a program in Alabama called Strengthen Alabama Homes that shows the success of that approach. So those are some things insurance companies could be doing instead.

JJ: I would ask you, though, what is their business model? Is there something baked into what big insurance companies see as their business model that allows them, or encourages them, to pit policy holders against what I’m understanding as profits?

Because listening to what you’re saying, it sounds like insurance is a bait and switch. You pay for it every month, but then when you need it, they say, “Oh, no, no, now you need it? No, we’re not going to do that.” Is that something that is baked into insurance, or is that something that companies could do differently if they chose?

CB: Yeah. Well, it’s a question of the stock market.

There’s kind of two models for insurance companies. So some are stock insurance, which means they’re owned by shareholders, they’re traded on the stock market for a profit. And so they are under great pressure to take a quarterly approach, a very short-term approach, and just try to increase profits. And that’s what clearly a number of them are doing.

There’s also a model called mutual insurance, which is kind of how insurance started, where the insurance company is owned by its policy holders. It’s not traded on the market. There’s less of an immediate pressure for short-term profits.

That’s not totally a guarantee that they will always do the right thing, because it may depend on who those policy holders are. So, for example, Liberty Mutual has a lot of policy holders that are fossil fuel companies, and they provide a lot of insurance to fossil fuel companies. And so they are actively making the problem worse that way, in terms of exacerbating climate change. But in general, a mutual insurance company will be less driven by that profit incentive.

JJ: And I wanted to ask you, in your piece for OtherWords.org, for Green America, you talk about, there’s a difference between bigger and smaller insurers, and there are different things that folks who are looking for insurance can look out for. What are some of those ideas, in terms of, you’re looking for an insurance company, where—climate disruption is happening; it’s not like it’s going to turn off tomorrow, it’s going to happen, floods, heat, all of this. We’re not going back on it. There’s going to just be more and more of it.

And I want to add, also, not being able to be insured is a thing for people. So in terms of news we can use, as individuals, and as maybe small business owners, what are you looking for in an insurer? What are the sort of tabs or things to look out for, in terms of what you’re going to get from an insurance company?

CB: So we encourage people to look locally for your local and regional insurance companies, many of them mutual insurance companies. Because they are local, they’re less likely to treat policy holders as a number, because they live in the same towns and the same neighborhoods.

And also, these smaller companies don’t have enormous advertising budgets. So they don’t have to make a huge profit in order to hire an A-list Hollywood actor to star in an amusing commercial that’s aired nationwide. They’re not doing it that way. So they’re not household names, but many of them have been quietly doing business in their community for decades, some even a century.

So what we tell people to do is, well, first to shop around. So don’t just go with the first one that you know about. Call several different insurance brokers in your area. Ask them for quotes from local and regional insurance companies. And the reason to call more than one agent is, different agents work with different companies. So that’ll give you a better idea of what’s available in your area.

Consumer Reports (11/1/24)

There are things you can do to save money. So bundle home or renters and auto insurance. If you bundle insurance, that saves money. Use any discounts you have from things like AAA, AARP, an alumni association. If you can’t pay one annual lump sum upfront, pay in monthly installments. Make sure your quote is for adequate coverage to rebuild completely if your property is a total loss. And keep in mind that construction and labor costs are going up.

A couple of other things you can do is check the company’s ratings in AM Best, make sure that they are financially secure, they’re not going to go out of business in two months. And also, Weiss Ratings has listings of nonpayment of claims rates for companies, for most large companies. And so if you find that a company has over 40% in nonpayment of claims, avoid that company.

And then, finally, if you get a non-renewal notice from your insurance company, there are several things you can do. (This is from Consumer Reports.) You can call them and ask for a written explanation. You can ask for any photos or videos they have. If their explanation isn’t accurate, file an appeal. If it is accurate, find out how you can remedy the problem, and then do it, and show them that you did it. And also ask for an extension on the non-renewal, so you have time to shop for a new company. And do shop, even if you’re trying to resolve it with your original company, do still shop for a new company. So those are some practical things that people can do during this time of great chaos and transition.

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that. And finally, I want to shout out Chicago Crusader reporter Stephanie Gadlin, who reported how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as you were just talking about, a lot of people learned that their homeowner policies didn’t include flood damage, and how the rebuilding has focused on higher-ground neighborhoods, and it’s left out a lot of Black communities. Richard Rothstein, listeners will know, has reported and worked for many years on how housing and insurance can often leave out race and racial discrimination as a consideration. And that has to do with the way media talk about these issues that we’re talking about.

And I would just ask you, finally, are there big misunderstandings that you face? What would you hope that news reporting, talking about this issue of insurance and climate change, what would you like them to do more of? What would you like them to avoid? What are your general thoughts about reporting on this set of issues?

Consumer Federation of America (3/11/24)

CB: First, tell the stories of people. So as insurance rates go up, people have to have insurance in order to have a mortgage. And that prices a lot of people out of having a mortgage, especially young people and people of color, the populations to drop first from being able to own their own homes. So tell that story.

And there are people who go without insurance, it’s called going bare. And so Consumer Federation of America has a report about that showing, I think it’s 7.4%—don’t quote me on that, because that’s off the top of my head—there’s people going without insurance at all, and then one storm and their home is gone.

So one solution to this is wrapped up in a bill in New York State called the Insure Our Communities Act. And this bill would require insurance companies to phase out insuring and investing in fossil fuels, but instead it would require them to do a certain amount of investing in their communities. And this is modeled off of the Community Reinvestment Act that requires banks to invest a certain amount in their communities. The Community Reinvestment Act, that was passed back in the ’70s to try to do away with redlining. And so this would kind of take that idea to insurance, and get insurance companies to do the same thing. So those are the kinds of solutions we’re looking for.

JJ: And that we would hope that media would talk about, yeah? And put before people.

CB: Yeah, exactly. And so I guess a reporter can’t write about that if they don’t know about that, but look into that.

JJ: All right, then. Well, we’ve been speaking with Cathy Cowan Becker. She’s responsible finance campaigns director at the group Green America. They’re online at GreenAmerica.org. Cathy Becker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: Happy to do it. Thanks for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 5, 2025

Elizabeth Jacobs on RFK Jr. and Public Health

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

New York Times (9/1/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Multiple previous heads of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention wrote for the New York Times that “what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the CDC and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months—culminating in his decision to fire Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago—is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.” Kennedy, they wrote,

fired thousands of federal health workers, and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of US support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage.

Sounds like speaking truth to power, facing fascist fantasy with fact, like…journalism. Except that the country’s so-called paper of record labeled it “opinion.” It’s only an opinion, the Times says, that it’s wrong that the leadership of our federal health agency is a guy without a medical degree who claims he can diagnose children he walks past at the airport. For a lot of folks, that’s A-OK! And they deserve to be heard!

Corporate journalism is failing us at every turn, and the only upside is that every day they make it more obvious, and re-direct us to other sources. On RFK Jr., one of those sources is the group Defend Public Health. We’ll hear from a founding member, Elizabeth Jacobs, on this week’s show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of genocide and starvation.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 4, 2025

NYT Buries News That Experts on Genocide Say Israel Is Committing It

The Washington Post‘s headline (9/1/25) on the IAGS resolution didn’t mince words–though it did get Israel calling the resolution “disgraceful” into the subhead.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution on August 31 declaring that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, with 86% of voting members in agreement.

The declaration by the group, described as “the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars” (Reuters, 9/1/25), was widely seen as significant news. Prominent US media sources like CNN (9/1/25), NBC (9/1/25), ABC (9/2/25), CBS (9/3/25), PBS (9/1/25), NPR (9/2/25), AP (9/2/25), Time (9/1/25) and Newsweek (9/1/25) published stories on the IAGS resolution. They bore headlines like the Washington Post‘s “Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Leading Scholars’ Association Says” (9/1/25). So, too, did numerous international news sources, with the BBC (9/1/25) running the headline “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say.”

But the New York Times (9/1/25), which has repeatedly come under fire for its bias against Palestinians during Israel’s two-year-long rampage in Gaza, buried the news in the 31st paragraph of a story headlined “Israel’s Push for a Permanent Gaza Deal May Mean a Longer War, Experts Say.” The article immediately followed the brief mention of the IAGS resolution with a response from the Israeli government that called it an “an embarrassment to the legal profession,” and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.”

The New York Times (9/1/25) thought the “experts” who thought Israel was risking a longer war were more newsworthy than the ones who thought Israel was committing genocide.

The Times‘ treatment as an afterthought of the confirmation by genocide scholars of an ongoing genocide in Gaza recalls the paper’s real-time coverage of the Nazi Holocaust, which often relegated news of mass death to its back pages, and sometimes to the last paragraphs of unrelated stories (Extra!, Summer/89). Those pieces rarely quoted the genocidaires justifying their atrocities, however.

The Times story of the IAGS resolution included this little nugget that promoted the conflation of Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters:

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including about 18,000 children and minors, according to Gaza health officials, whose toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

While the reporter on the story, Isabel Kershner, can’t be held responsible for the headline, FAIR has written previously on her history of misleading readers through pro-Israeli bias and her conflicts of interest. The activist organization Writers Against the War on Gaza has also thoroughly documented why she might not be the most objective source on Israel/Palestine.

But she may have just been following the directives of her editors, who warned staffers last year away from using the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza (FAIR.org, 8/4/25). “We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not,” the memo told employees.

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

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

Media Dance Around Illegality of Trump’s Third-Country Deportation Scheme

Back in March, 29-year-old Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran native who had lived and worked in the United States for nearly half his life—became the face of Donald Trump’s sadistic mass deportation campaign when he was unlawfully sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison and torture center.

The US government itself acknowledged that Ábrego García’s removal had transpired as a result of an “administrative error.” However, both the Trump administration and that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—the self-described “coolest dictator in the world”—were huffily opposed to rectifying said error. Ábrego García was at last returned to the US in June, only to now face deportation to…Uganda, the east African country that has been roped into serving as one of numerous international dumping grounds for asylum seekers and undocumented persons who are unwanted in the US.

AP (8/26/25) reports that some say an agreement to exile Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda “stinks”—not because of its violation of human rights law, but because of a “lack of parliamentary approval for the agreement.”

On August 26, the Associated Press selected the following headline for its report on the new twist in the Ábrego García case: “The US Wants to Deport Abrego Garcia to Uganda. Critics There Say the Murky Deal ‘Stinks.’” The article explained that Uganda is not the first African nation to succumb to such agreements with the global hegemon; in July, the US deported five men to the southern kingdom of Eswatini, while eight others were shipped to South Sudan. Rwanda has also promised to accept up to 250 deportees from the US.

The article went on to note that “opposition figures and others in Uganda on Tuesday questioned the lack of parliamentary approval for the agreement”—which is what we are told makes the arrangement “stink.” And yet the AP did not find it necessary at any point to mention the sheer illegality of such “third country” deportation schemes, which happen to constitute a violation of international law—in other words, the “stink” is a whole lot bigger than we are led to believe.

As noted in an April United Nations press release on “illegal deportations” from the US to El Salvador:

The international law duty of non-refoulement prohibits deporting any person to a place where there is a substantial risk of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, unfair trial or other irreparable harm.

The US State Department’s 2024 writeup on human rights practices in Uganda included “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention,” and much more.

Fantastically unsafe destinations

“The Trump administration takes Panama up on its offer to act as a stopover for expelled migrants,” AP (2/13/25) reports without a hint of criticism.

Indeed, a common denominator running through the list of ostensible “safe third-country” destinations for US deportees—from Eswatini and South Sudan to Honduras and Guatemala—is that they are fantastically unsafe. The US government has warned its own citizens against travel to South Sudan “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict”; Honduras and Guatemala both produce significant numbers of refuge seekers themselves, precisely on account of sky-high levels of violence, much of it owing to decades of pernicious US meddling.

And while US corporate media have not shied away from reporting on the third-country deportations, they tend to dance around the illegality of the whole matter—not to mention the fact that it is batshit crazy. Imagine for a moment that you are a refuge seeker who has risked your life to reach the US, only to wake up one day and find yourself in a country where you don’t speak the language, and perhaps have never even heard of in the first place—with nothing to protect you from “irreparable harm.”

In February, AP (2/13/25) reported on the deportation of the first batch of 119 migrants, from Afghanistan, China and an array of other nations, to be deported from the US to Panama—as if it were the most normal thing in the world for a Central American country to be acting as an intermediary for the illegal expulsion of refuge seekers with no criminal record.

The report mentioned that since Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino took office in 2024, “Panama has made dozens of deportation flights, most funded by the US government.” Many of the almost 300 migrants ultimately sent to Panama by the US were effectively incarcerated in the country’s Darién region bordering the notorious Darién Gap, the veritable migrant graveyard that hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers have been forced to traverse in recent years in the hopes of reaching safety in the US.

Relying on ‘critics’

CBS (8/21/25) begins a story by reporting that the Trump administration is persuading “countries around the world to aid its crackdown on illegal immigration.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that that administration is actually “rerout[ing] asylum-seekers to countries that” it claims “can fairly hear their claims for humanitarian protection.”
Of course, corporate media have never been known for empathy, and so, instead of painting a picture of the acute human plight occasioned by illicit and ludicrous US policy, journalists rely on a variety of “critics” to call out what should be objectively condemned by anyone supposedly in the business of speaking truth to power.

A recent CBS News dispatch (8/21/25), for example, specified that

human rights advocates have strongly denounced the Trump administration effort, saying migrants could be deported to countries where they could be harmed or returned to the place they fled.

The CBS article noted that the US government is pursuing a “large-scale diplomatic effort…to strike deportation arrangements with nations across several continents, including those with problematic human rights records.”

A similarly noncommittal approach was taken in a July Washington Post piece (7/4/25) on the “imminent deportation to conflict-ridden South Sudan” of eight men from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Sudan and Vietnam—whose authors dispassionately observed, “Lawyers for the migrants said it is illegal and immoral for the US government to deport people to places where they could be killed.”

‘Uniquely barbaric’

Reuters (8/2/25) quoted Trump officials calling deportees “the worst of the worst” and “heinous illegal criminals.”

In early August, Reuters (8/2/25) calculated that, since Trump’s reassumption of the presidency in January, there had already been thousands of third-country deportations to Mexico, and hundreds to other countries. The aforementioned five-man deportation in July to Eswatini—which comprised individuals from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen—was praised by Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin as a “safe third-country deportation flight [that] took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”

And while Eswatini hardly qualifies as safe, “uniquely barbaric” would seem to be a pretty good description of current US policy. In her social media post on the five “depraved monsters” who had been “terrorizing American communities,” McLaughlin listed some of the crimes attributed to them—murder, robbery, “operating a motor vehicle under influence of controlled substance”—which, while certainly constituting criminal acts, are not exactly singularly barbaric. In fact, America’s ongoing habit of bombing civilians left and right across the globe—most recently including 11 alleged drug smugglers murdered in cold blood—could be perceived as rather more barbaric than, I dunno, driving under the influence.

Furthermore, as former US ambassador to Bulgaria Eric Rubin has pointed out (New York Times, 6/25/25), the Trumpian project of expelling folks to countries they have nothing to do with is an exercise in “terrorizing people…. Most of the people we’re talking about have not committed any crime.”

As for the alleged “refusal” by home countries to take their “monsters” back, this claim doesn’t really hold water, either. For instance, when Trump kicked off the eight-man South Sudan deportation that included one Mexican citizen, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government had not even been informed (Reuters, 8/2/25).

Shameless racist bullying

The New York Times (6/25/25) frames US coercing countries to participate in human rights abuses as “global deal-making”—just the way Donald Trump would want it described.

In June, meanwhile, a New York Times would-be exposé (6/25/25) headlined “Inside the Global Deal-Making Behind Trump’s Mass Deportations” shone a bit of light on how the US administration was “pushing nations around the world, including ones at war, to take people expelled” from the land of the free. Rwanda, for one, was said to appear “eager” at the prospect, after the US paid the former genocide-afflicted nation $100,000 in April to accept one Iraqi citizen.

Of a total of at least 58 countries that US diplomats had been instructed to approach as possible deportee dumping grounds, many had already been subjected to—or were contenders for—“a new full or partial travel ban to the United States by the Trump administration.”

Alluding nonchalantly to the administration’s shameless racist bullying, the Times brought up a State Department cable that “instructed diplomats to tell the countries being considered, most of which are in Africa, that they might be able to stay off the list if they agreed to take deportees who are not their citizens.” The paper went on to apply egregious euphemism to an utterly sociopathic spectacle:

At a cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with passion about the process: “We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries, and will you do that as a favor to us?’”

Again, it seems the US newspaper of record might have conjured a slightly more valid assessment of Rubio’s performance than one of “passion”—his own “despicable” would have been more appropriate. The article’s authors proceeded to allow the usual space for “critics of the deportations and lawyers” to argue that “the administration is ignoring the potential for human rights abuses in some of the countries willing to play host.”

Then comes the roundabout, watered-down verdict:

That appears to be the point. Administration officials say they are trying to send a message to those in the United States illegally that they could end up in brutal conditions in a faraway land if they don’t leave voluntarily.

One of the “faraway lands” listed as being targeted for a third-country agreement was Libya, which as the American Civil Liberties Union (6/6/25) has noted is “known for electrocuting and sexually assaulting migrants imprisoned in militia-run detention facilities.”

Don’t connect the dots

“Resettle” (Reuters, 8/15/25) sounds so much better than “ethnically cleanse.”

And this is basically the corporate media template for reporting on the blatant violation of human rights and international law: Go ahead and admit that the US government is consciously and intentionally setting refuge seekers up to “end up in brutal conditions,” but don’t bother dwelling on where that slippery slope might lead us all, or connecting the dots between illegal third-country deportations and Trump’s current mission to do away with the law altogether. (It is ironic, to say the least, that an administration so obsessed with going after “illegals” is committed to entirely illegal behavior.)

Nor, to be sure, are media concerned with exploring the implications of the racist, imperial hubris that causes the US to view much of the world—and African nations in particular—as potential carceral colonies. As coincidence would have it, America’s megalomaniacal partner in crime, the state of Israel, is also reportedly seeking to “resettle” the native Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip in—where else?—South Sudan. As per the typically disingenuous language of a recent Reuters writeup (8/15/25):

The plan, if carried further, would envisage people moving from an enclave shattered by almost two years of war with Israel [read: US-backed genocide by Israel] to a nation in the heart of Africa riven by years of political and ethnically driven violence.

By further coincidence, Israel in 2013 signed a secretive deal under which African asylum seekers in the country were deported to Rwanda and disappeared. But, hey, surely it’s become a “safe third country” in the meantime.

In June, CBS (6/24/25) reported on the Supreme Court’s

lift[ing of] a lower court order that prevented the Trump administration from deporting migrants to countries that are not their places of origin without first giving them the chance to raise fears of torture, persecution or death.

The article quoted Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion that the court was “rewarding lawlessness” and undermining due process. And as the corporate media tiptoe around reporting on this lawlessness, they may be rewarding just that, as well.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 29, 2025

More Coverage of Gaza Starvation Did Not Necessarily Mean Deeper Coverage

International human rights organizations have pleaded with governments to oppose Israel’s blockade of aid into Gaza for the better part of the past year. But it wasn’t until late July, when dramatic images of emaciated children circulated widely, that corporate media and establishment politicians finally took notice. After 21 months of relentless bombing and even more decades of occupation, the news cycle gave extended attention to Palestinian starvation (FAIR.org, 7/29/25).

Quantity, however, does not always equal quality. To see if the content of reporting on the engineered Gaza famine matches the seriousness of the situation, FAIR surveyed coverage from nine different news outlets (New York Times, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, BBC, NPR, Time and Politico) during the week after the initial proliferation of reportage (7/24–31/25) to assess how or whether they discussed the full scope of the crisis.

Apart from the acute, potentially fatal consequences of starvation, malnutrition comes with permanent, long-term side effects that could affect the population for generations. Though increased coverage pushed the immediate issue into the limelight, we found that media did not consistently report on the stakes and long-lasting impacts of starvation on Palestinians’ health.

The New York Times’ infamous addition of an “editor’s note,” explaining that a Gazan child depicted in a report as facing starvation should be re-interpreted as suffering from “pre-existing” conditions, highlighted the need for honest journalistic assessments of starvation’s impacts, as well as its causes.

‘Medical consequences’

NPR‘s article (7/29/25) provides detailed information on the effects of starvation—but the headline avoids saying who’s causing it.

NPR published two articles on July 29 that broke down the physiological process of starvation. In an article (7/29/25) headlined “People Are Dying of Malnutrition in Gaza. How Does Starvation Kill You?,” it elaborated on the “five phases of starvation,” where depletion of carbohydrates and fats leaves one first feeling fatigue before experiencing weakened organs and cardiac arrest. If one is pregnant, then starvation could result in “preterm birth, stunting, impaired immune function” and, for the babies, “long-term risks for noncommunicable diseases like diabetes.”

In another article, headlined “As Gaza Starves, the Next Generation May Also Endure the Consequences,” NPR (7/29/25) cited credible research that saw how children born to those pregnant during a famine were “more likely to experience obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and shorter lifespans.” The trauma of starvation is even remembered on a molecular basis, affecting “how genes are turned on or off,” where “those epigenetic changes can be passed down to descendants.”

Further, Time (7/30/25) platformed experts who warn that malnourishment and missed meals for pregnant people increase “the likelihood of miscarriage, stillbirth and undernourished newborns.” “Reduced IQ, learning disabilities and behavioral problems that persist through life,” along with compromised immune systems, are among other pressing health concerns for children consistently denied proper nutrition.

In discussing “The Medical Consequences of Starvation,” Time (7/31/25) not only touched upon lifelong mental health struggles for children like “anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and mental illnesses like schizophrenia,” but also the immediate threat of “refeeding syndrome.” Bodies that have adapted to an altered diet must slowly be reintroduced to normal food intake in an intensely monitored environment, lest they trigger “cardiac arrhythmia, organ dysfunction and death.”

Despite serious efforts in these articles to highlight how starvation will affect the Palestinian population beyond this “war,” none of them named Israel as the perpetrator in their headlines.

Israel not held accountable

This was a pattern in coverage: Even when outlets adequately addressed the dire consequences of food deprivation, reporting still fell short of holding Israel responsible for deliberately inducing starvation. Rarely if ever did these media label Israel’s food blockade as a tool of genocide.

Though one of the aforementioned NPR articles (7/29/25) attributed “what the UN is calling ‘catastrophic hunger’” to “Israel’s blockade and military offensive,” the outlet refused to explicitly call out the intentionality behind such a blockade. Instead, the article identified “conflict” as one of the root causes of prolonged starvation in Gaza.

While other articles (e.g., NPR, 7/29/25) cited a collapsing ceasefire deal with Hamas as the reason for Israel’s total blockade of aid into Gaza, Time (7/31/25) did not bother with such justification. The article simply stated that “Israel reimposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, preventing the entry of food, fuel, medicine and other humanitarian aid.” By restricting discussion of Israel’s responsibility in manufacturing famine to a single sentence, the magazine encourages complacency, an acceptance of the blockade and subsequent crisis as a natural consequence of a “conflict.”

Seeking Trump’s ‘moral leadership’

Discussions of “starvation” and “famine” became significantly more newsworthy when Trump was involved.

Headlines on July 28 largely focused on President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement of the crisis, dedicating equal, if not more, attention and platform to a figure who has himself threatened the people of Gaza with genocide than to those decrying the disaster.

Many outlets (NPR, 7/28/25; NBC, 7/28/25; Politico, 7/28/25; CNN, 7/28/25; BBC, 7/28/25; PBS, 7/28/25) reported how Trump saw what he called “real starvation” in Gaza, and how he’s breaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this front, who vehemently denies evidence of starvation and blames any malnutrition on Hamas. These articles, however, did not go beyond reporting the current available number of hunger-related deaths to illuminate the long-term, possibly permanent, bodily damage caused by starvation, and why it’s considered genocidal.

The New York Times (7/28/25) suggested that the Gaza famine, engineered with the active participation of the US government, would be a test of Trump’s “moral leadership.”

The New York Times (7/28/25) went further to claim that “For Trump, Starvation in Gaza Tests His Foreign Policy Approach,” putting a frame of political strategy on an urgent humanitarian crisis:

Global crises, especially those unfolding far from the United States, have often been tests of whether American presidents would show moral leadership on the world stage…. Now, it is Mr. Trump’s turn to address the question of whether America still intends to take a leading role among nations in confronting the humanitarian effects of war.

By casting US intervention as an opportunity to signal “moral leadership,” the Times attempted to obscure our direct participation in arming a genocide and financing famine. It is like asking whether someone is going to be a hero for saving the residents of a burning building they helped set fire to–without mentioning the arson.

The Times (7/31/25) also decentered Palestinians in another piece headlined “Anger Over Starvation Leaves Israel Incredibly Isolated.” This article brought in several political analysts to assess Israel’s standing with the global public, showing more concern for Israel’s abstract economic health than Palestinians’ physical health: “As anger grows over widespread hunger in Gaza, Israel risks becoming an international outcast.” The piece continued:

“What’s happening in Gaza is appalling,” and it diminishes the willingness of people to travel to Israel and to work with its scientists and companies, [Bernard Avishai, an Israeli American professor and analyst,] said. “For the Israeli economy,” he noted, “this is already devastating.”

While the Times gathered five analysts to discuss Israel’s economy and international image, the only source to amplify the plight of Palestinians was the generic collective “aid groups,” who were said to have documented “mounting malnutrition and cases of starvation.” Further, even though one of the quoted analysts mentioned “genocide,” it was not to illuminate how Israel’s actions constitute crimes against humanity. Instead, it was in reference to how the increasing use of the characterization was emblematic of Israel’s dwindling influence on public opinion.

And as noted, even when the New York Times (7/24/25) dedicated an article to actually covering the crisis, the outlet felt the need to apologize for it. Under the outrageously passive headline, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” the Times featured heartbreaking personal stories from doctors constrained by limited resources, and parents helplessly watching their children waste away. It noted how “doctors warn that malnutrition in early childhood can have long-term effects, disrupting growth, cognitive ability and emotional development.”

However, the Times issued an editor’s note five days after its initial publication, “clarifying” that one of the children featured in the reporting as “suffering from severe malnutrition” has “pre-existing health problems.” The paper of record seemed to expect readers to temper their outrage with this new information, as if manufactured famine does not exacerbate poor health.

‘Famine determination may not matter’

The word “Israel” appears only once in this ABC News article (7/30/25) , in the ninth paragraph, when an Oxfam official is cited saying that “much more food needs to enter Gaza than is currently being let in because of severe restrictions put in place by Israel.”

The media are also creating unnecessary debate around the classification of “famine.” ABC (7/30/25) platformed humanitarian workers and food security experts who expressed how “a famine determination may not matter because the time to intervene is now. Assessing famine often comes after many lives are lost.” And yet the news outlet didn’t heed their own advice, immediately following this with a section asking, “What is the criteria for how a famine is determined?”

NBC (7/29/25) similarly discussed “How Famine Is Assessed.” This was the concluding section of an article that was brimming with several alarming statistics from humanitarian organizations about rising death tolls and hospital admissions, due to starvation and malnutrition alone. To focus on the technicalities of classification rather than elucidate the realities of prolonged starvation reveals how media still fail to prioritize Palestinian lives.

The effects of starvation are neither obscure, unknown, nor drastically varied. They are quite universally applicable to any given human body. However, media seem confused as to whether they consider Palestinians human enough to afford such attention.

Starvation and famine are not mere moments in time, as per establishment media’s characterization. They are disastrous phenomena and traumas that a population carries long beyond the immediate crisis. They are not easily fixed by simply allowing in aid or reintroducing food to the body. And yet corporate media rarely admit the true scale of what has been destroyed and what that destruction signifies, let alone imagine what true repair would require. Substandard coverage distorts and conceals the gravity of the crisis.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 29, 2025

The Miami Herald‘s Fuzzy Math Makes Case for Economic Warfare on Cuba

This story was written in collaboration with Belly of the Beast, an independent outlet that covers Cuba and US/Cuba relations.

The Miami Herald‘s exposé (8/6/25) of the Cuban state enterprise GAESA appears to be based on a willful misreading of a financial document.

In an article published earlier this month, Miami Herald journalist Nora Gámez Torres (8/6/25) claims to have obtained a “trove of secret accounting documents” proving that Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA (GAESA), the conglomerate run by the Cuban military, has been stockpiling $18 billion in cash while the Cuban people endure a devastating economic crisis.

The “wealth amassed by the Cuban military at the expense of the Cuban people is a secret no more,” proclaimed Gámez Torres. She added that GAESA is “squeezing the state out of the funds it could use to invest in healthcare, energy and food.” The documents, she wrote, demonstrate “that the Cuban government has been falsely blaming the US embargo as the sole cause of the island’s impoverishment.”

No credible evidence was presented to back up any of these sweeping claims.

As for the $18 billion dollars—it seems the Herald may have made an egregious error in interpreting the one “secret” document upon which the entire article appears to hinge. (For a deeper look into the numbers, and why we have more questions than answers about GAESA, check out Belly of the Beast’s interview with economist Emily Morris.)

This shaky, contextless reporting is par for the course for Gámez Torres, whose work has been repeatedly used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Cuban-American hardliners to legitimize the US government’s economic war on Cuba.

Fuzzy math

Gámez Torres claims to have obtained 22 financial statements, but the Miami Herald published only one—a low-resolution screenshot of a balance sheet that shows all the assets under the control of GAESA’s companies. Gámez Torres asserted that the screenshot shows GAESA has assets of $18 billion in US dollars, $14.5 billion of which are in cash in readily accessible bank accounts. She went on to explain that this amount of monetary assets is larger than the reserves of Panama, Uruguay or Costa Rica.

There is one significant problem with this potentially bombshell discovery: It seems to be based on a conspicuous misreading of the one document the Herald published. The figures that carry the Herald’s argument can be found in Column 8, under the heading “USD.” (See the screenshot below). At the top of this column, in bold, total assets are listed as nearly $18 billion ($17,895,719,315.39), and two lines down, total assets in bank accounts appear as around $14.5 billion ($14,467,838,651.66).

The upper-right cell of GAESA’s spreadsheet reads “Unidad de Medida: Pesos Cubanos con dos decimos”—or “Unit of Measure: Cuban Pesos with two decimal places.” The Miami Herald ignored this straightforward explanation.

But the upper-right cell of the header of the spreadsheet states in plain language that the unit of currency for the financial statement is not US dollars, but “Cuban pesos with two decimal points.” This indicates that the figures under the USD heading have been converted from their original dollar value to a value in Cuban pesos. (The fact that the figures have a dollar sign in front of them is not determinative; that symbol is commonly used to denote Cuban pesos as well as US dollars.) Since the Cuban government generally calculates one US dollar to be worth 24 Cuban pesos, GAESA’s US dollar assets would be worth $745 million dollars (1/24 of 17.9 billion pesos)—or about 4% of the figure reported by the Herald.

There’s another reason to think that the Herald has greatly exaggerated the numbers in the screenshot. The spreadsheet adds the figures in Column 8, which the Herald claims are US dollar amounts, to the figures in Column 7, which are labeled “CUP”—the standard abbreviation for Cuban pesos. You don’t have to be a CPA to know that adding two different currencies with different values together without first converting one of them is an accounting no-no. The logical conclusion is that the columns labeled “USD” and “CUP” are in the same unit of measurement—and the header note indicates that that unit is Cuban pesos.

The Herald didn’t acknowledge the note in the spreadsheet’s header about all the numbers being in Cuban pesos, although it did speculate as to why GAESA would be adding dollars and pesos as if they had the same value: “to conceal its dollar holdings” from the rest of the government.

Gámez Torres did not indicate why she believes such a patently obvious mistake would deceive anyone, much less number-crunchers at Cuba’s tax authorities or its National Office of Statistics and Information. It’s also unclear why she thinks the government of Cuba wouldn’t notice a diversion of wealth equal to almost 50% of the nation’s GDP. (Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information calculated GDP in 2023 to be 869.2 billion Cuban pesos, which is $36.2 billion dollars at a 24:1 rate.)

It’s not clear whether Herald reporter Nora Gámez Torres is intentionally distorting GAESA’s accounting, committing an innocent blunder, or, for some reason, withholding information that led her to draw these seemingly baffling conclusions.

It might not matter, since her reporting aligns with the widely accepted narrative that Cuba’s military is profiting off the backs of the Cuban people. Far from being questioned for her lack of journalistic standards, Gámez Torres is winning prestigious awards and being showered with praise by Republican politicians from Florida.

The case for economic warfare

Gámez Torres has spent the better part of the last year reporting on GAESA. Last December, she reported on documents allegedly leaked from Gaviota, a tourism company under the GAESA umbrella that manages many hotels and resorts on the island. Although she did not disclose any documents, she claimed that the company and, by extension, the military were “sitting on about $4.3 billion.” She wrote that the Cuban military used GAESA companies to “divert” massive public funds to the country’s military-run companies while ordinary Cubans face food, medicine and fuel crises.

Gámez Torres has since earned accolades from pro-embargo politicians, who use factoids from her reporting to push for ever-harsher sanctions on Cuba. In turn, she regularly quotes them in the Miami Herald.

In an article about GAESA earlier this year (3/4/25), Gámez Torres quoted Cuban-American Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who gushed over her “skill, determination and well-cultivated sources.” Díaz-Balart praised her reporting as “essential to policymakers and the American people to strengthen our national security.”

Gámez Torres’ latest article on GAESA provides another example of this echo chamber: She cites Rubio citing…herself.

She also quotes a State Department official who references her dubious reporting to justify sanctions:

Evidence of secret dollar reserves held by GAESA, while the Cuban people lack basic needs, serves as further evidence that President Trump’s actions to strengthen the US policy towards the Cuban people was of the utmost importance.

This policy, which amounts to economic warfare, has had disastrous consequences for the Cuban people.

Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, which he imposed during his first term and were largely kept in place by Biden, have sought to bring about regime change by destroying the island’s economy. Over the last eight years, the sanctions have taken a toll, causing scarcities of fuel and medicine and driving unprecedented numbers of migrants to the United States.

As much as the Herald reports on Cuba, it has done almost no reporting on the impact of sanctions on the Cuban people. Nor has it shown any interest in looking into the millions of dollars flowing through Miami to the pro-embargo activists, NGOs, media outlets and politicians who have helped sustain the US government’s Cold War–era policy.

Instead, Gámez Torres regularly downplays the massively destructive role the US embargo has played in bringing about the country’s economic collapse, and ridiculed the Cuban government for blaming sanctions—its “favorite whipping boy.”

The Herald’s recent exercise in trying to paint GAESA as a greedy hoarder of cash is a prime example of why the Cuban government may wish to maintain a high level of secrecy regarding the conglomerate’s finances. Any details might not only fuel the narrative that the Cuban government is to blame for the country’s deepening crisis, they might also provide useful information for hardliners like Rubio in their efforts to find “creative” ways to deprive the state—and ultimately, its people—of resources.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 29, 2025

Cathy Cowan Becker on Insurance and Climate Disasters, Aviva Chomsky (2016) on Workers’ Voices

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Other Words (7/30/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption and its predicted, measurable, life-altering impacts provides a clear example of an instance where countries and industries and science could come together: Here’s this problem that’s facing literally all of us. How do we cut it off at the source, and mitigate its obviously unequal fallout? “We have the technology.”

But the people using jets to ferry them from one state to another are not the same people who can’t escape the heat in treeless communities. The CEOs of fossil fuel companies can move home any time they want; they don’t have to care that communities are newly exposed to droughts or floods or storms. Climate change, according to elites, is a “sucks to be you” sort of problem. So much so that they can spend time ginning up arguments about how it isn’t even happening, so as to get more money out of the money machine while they can. And for the kicker, corporate media will recite those arguments and hold them up alongside science and humanity, as though we can and should choose what to believe as it suits us.

One obvious stress point of this institutional dystopia is insurance. You buy insurance in case something bad happens—like a fire, or a flood. But if that fire or flood is driven by climate disruption? Well, wait a minute. Turns out you’re no longer covered. And the fact that your insurance company is deeply invested in the fossil fuel companies that are driving the disaster? Well, that is neither here nor there.

We need journalism that would help us connect those obvious dots and act on what we learn. We’ll talk about that today with Cathy Cowan Becker, responsible finance campaigns director at the group Green America.

Beacon Broadside (1/13/16)

Also on the show: As we go into Labor Day weekend, we’ll revisit a conversation we had about the simple power of including worker voices in reporting—and, maybe more so, the power of silencing them. In 2016, the Boston Globe brought a story to its own doorstep with the decision to contract out its subscriber delivery service. We heard about it from Aviva Chomsky, history professor and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University, and author of, among other titles, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. We’ll hear part of that conversation this week.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
August 28, 2025

Media Like Newsom’s Fighting Words—But Are Words Enough to Beat Trump?

NBC News (8/21/25): “the Democratic Party’s base above all else is itching for a fighter to take on Trump and the GOP”—but can Newsom “overcome the Golden State’s reputation for lurching too far to the left”?

Corporate media outlets, and the consultants and former administration officials who work for them, have a message for Democratic voters: To revive its dwindling appeal, their party needs a fighter to take on Trump. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has lately made headlines for parodying Trump on X, is the man for the job.

What makes Newsom the “fighter” (Bloomberg, 8/20/25, NBC News, 8/21/25, Newsweek, 8/21/25) Democrats need? He is “owning the MAGAs” (CNN, 8/19/25) and “forcefully push[ing] back against President Donald Trump and his red state allies” (Bloomberg, 8/20/25). He has “hit a nerve by hijacking [Trump’s] tactics…flood[ing] social media with a steady stream of all-caps screeds mocking the president’s signature style” (NBC News, 8/21/25).

He’s adopted an “aggressive posture…both in policy and style” (Newsweek, 8/21/25). Moreover, he has “rocketed…to algorithmic dominance” with his “MAGA-parodying strategy” (Politico, 8/20/25). The Sacramento Bee (8/20/25) has dubbed him “feisty and statesmanlike.”

Arguably as eager as many Americans for someone to take on Trump, the Canadian press has jumped on the bandwagon; the Globe and Mail (8/21/25) recently published a column headlined, “Is Gavin Newsom the Last Best Hope for American Democracy?” Columnist Gary Mason praised Newsom as a “defender of American democracy” whose “televised speech to Californians during [Trump’s] ICE raids was a master-class in communication.”

‘The one we need’

Sara Pequeño (USA Today, 8/21/25): If he “could help win over some disaffected Democrats who want to see the party stoop to Trump’s level…Newsom may be the party’s best bet for the next presidential election.”

Even those with mixed feelings about Newsom have concluded that he is the man for the moment. Politico (8/23/25) wrote that although his decision to host influential right wingers (like Steve Bannon) on his podcast was “provocative,” and his social media posts were “posturing,” they had nonetheless “positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party.”

CNN analyst Aaron Blake (8/19/25) acknowledged 2024 polls that showed that most Americans who had heard of Newsom viewed him unfavorably, but argued that Democrats should nevertheless draw inspiration from the fact that “one of their own is showing some wherewithal in charting a path forward.”

USA Today columnist Sara Pequeño (8/21/25) declared that Newsom “isn’t the Democrat we want,” but he is “the one we need against Trump.” Newsom, Pequeño continued, “may come off like a sleazy politician, but at least he’s our sleazy politician—someone willing to be aggressive and stand up to Trump.”

Best of all, as far as these outlets are concerned, Newsom has accomplished all of this while “rejecting the belief of many liberal activists that effectively fighting Trump requires the party to move left” (Bloomberg, 8/20/25)—a belief shared by 50% of Democrats polled in April 2025. (Only 18% said their party should “become more moderate.”)

‘Long known for pragmatism’

AP (5/15/25) reports that Newsom is trying to “rebrand” himself, as if his brand hasn’t always been “business-friendly centrist entrepreneur.”

The problem with anointing Newsom the savior of the Democratic Party is the paucity of evidence that rank-and-file Democrats will be excited to vote for someone who claps back at Trump on social media, when that someone has a record of harming and betraying vulnerable Americans: seizing homeless people’s belongings and calling on cities to dismantle their dwellings, slashing healthcare for undocumented immigrants, restricting the rights of protesters, successfully pressuring lawmakers to gut California’s landmark environmental law, and calling it “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports.

Because corporate media outlets have taken Trump’s 2024 victory as evidence that the Democratic Party has moved too far left, they are eager to portray Newsom’s shifts as part of a commonsensical and pragmatic effort to broaden his appeal by tacking right.

Others say Newsom’s politics have been fairly consistent. In a 2022 story about the governor’s coziness with California business interests, Politico (12/29/22) asserted that he “has long been known for pragmatism on economic matters,” quoting a former adviser who said that Newsom had for years supported “social policies that don’t threaten economic privilege.”

The AP (5/15/25) headlined a recent story “California Gov. Gavin Newsom Tries to Rebrand Himself Ahead of a Potential Presidential Run.” “California’s Democratic governor is appealing to the political center and trying to shed his national reputation as a San Francisco liberal,” the article reported—though as a former San Francisco mayor, Newsom was a conservative in that city’s terms. The millionaire business owner campaigned on “get-tough ballot initiatives on homelessness and panhandling,” and won office with the help of the local Republican Party, which phone-banked for him (New York Times, 12/11/03).

Regardless of how these outlets frame Newsom’s decisions, it’s clear that his positions are out of step with the needs and priorities of most California Democrats and many of the state’s voters. Although multimillion-dollar anti-trans ad campaigns have weakened support for trans rights, Democrats are still much likelier—by margins of more than 30 points—than Republicans to support policies that safeguard the rights of trans people.

Californians of all stripes, including majorities of Republicans, support a range of policy solutions to homelessness other than banning encampments; California lawmakers voted down an encampment ban for the second time in 2024. And a statewide poll conducted by Tulchin Research in June revealed across-the-board support for California’s environmental law, including from a majority of Republicans.

Hungry for leadership

The key words here are “for people like you” (NBC, 4/25/25).

Most polling contradicts the belief that Trump won in 2024 because Americans, including those who are or lean Democratic, have soured on trans rights, the rights of homeless people and environmental protections. Attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, which are contradictory and media-driven, likely had more of an effect. Nor is there any compelling evidence that Democrats can win back Congress and the White House by strategically selling out small but vulnerable constituencies, or gutting popular environmental protections as floods, storms and wildfires ravage the country.

Just ask former US Rep. Colin Allred, the Democrat who challenged Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024, what happened after Allred—instead of defending trans kids and pivoting to issues more people care about—released an ad saying, “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff.” (Spoiler alert: He lost to Ted Cruz by 8.5 points.)

Multiple reports and a number of polls do reflect rank-and-file Democrats’ desire for a national leader who can effectively counter Trump. They also reveal widespread dissatisfaction with our politics; a sizable plurality of American adults now say neither major political party fights for people like them. In 2024, nearly 90 million Americans—far more than the 77 million who voted for Trump or the 75 million who voted for Kamala Harris—were eligible to vote but didn’t.

Americans who oppose Trump are clearly hungry for strong leadership at the national level. Yet the only policy Newsom has recently put forth that has garnered significant public support is his push for California to redraw its congressional districts to favor the Democratic Party. Newsom has presented this as a necessary response to Trump’s efforts to further gerrymander Texas—a move, Newsom has said, that requires fighting “fire with fire.” California lawmakers have approved the governor’s proposal for a special election on a ballot measure to replace its current district map with one that favors Democrats.

It’s wise for the Democrats to fight back on gerrymandering, at least in the short term. (In the long term, federal legislation is necessary to ensure that state governments implement truly fair and independent redistricting processes.) But Newsom seems to think that all he needs to bolster his 2028 prospects is one splashy issue he can fight Trump on–and a little help from his corporate friends, donors and media outlets. The problem is, without a robust policy agenda designed to ease their lives, words won’t protect ordinary people from Trump.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
August 28, 2025

WaPo Editors Doing Their Best to Conceal Reporters’ Vital Work on DC Occupation

When the Washington Post (8/20/25) asked 604 DC residents about Trump’s takeover, Post editors didn’t like what they said, so they took it out of the headline.

As President Donald Trump commandeered DC’s police, and placed tanks, troops and federal agents on the city’s streets, DC’s hometown paper took the pulse of residents. The results from the Washington Post poll were unmistakable.

DC residents “overwhelmingly oppose” Trump’s moves, with around 8 in 10 opposing Trump’s takeover of DC police, the Post reported (8/20/25).

“We’re becoming a police state. I’m afraid of that, I really am,” Joseph Clay, an 89-year-old Black veteran who’s lived in his Northeast DC home since 1966, told the Post. “I wonder if they’re looking at Blacks and browns, and if I myself could be stopped and asked for my credentials.”

The Post noted that “nearly 9 in 10 Washingtonians say their neighborhood is an excellent or good place to live.”

These findings provide a stunning refutation to the stated premise for Trump’s takeover: that DC is experiencing a crime emergency. DC violent crime is, in fact, at a 30-year low.

But what most caught my eye in the Post story was DC resident Joseph Clay’s other quote. “The only crime I hear about is what I read in the Washington Post,” he said.

The story’s reporters—Joe Heim, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin—surely didn’t need to include this quote. My guess is they did so as a shot across the bow to their colleagues on the Opinion Page, who’ve echoed Trump’s false DC crime narrative (FAIR.org, 8/14/25).

But it’s not just the Opinion Page who needs a wake-up call; so do editors on the news side, at least those responsible for writing headlines.

The poll results story’s strong opening stated DC residents “overwhelmingly oppose” Trump’s moves, but the headline only read “Most DC residents oppose” them. And even this downgrade, from “overwhelming” to “most,” wasn’t enough for Post higher-ups, who further weakened the headline to “We Asked 604 DC Residents About Trump’s Takeover. Here’s What They Said.”

‘First day of school to look different’

The Washington Post (8/24/25) put a “please don’t read me” headline over Lauren Lumpkin’s harrowing story of children terrified by a state of siege.

This isn’t the only time Post editors slapped on a misleading headline. Monday was the first day of school in DC, and in addition to the normal jitters, students and parents had new ones to navigate.

“I’m kind of scared of being stopped,” Zoe Amen, a 17-year-old high school senior, told the Post (8/24/25).

“I’ve heard from several parents that have decided not to send their children to school because they’re afraid of being detained on the way or on the way back,” Vanessa Rubio, an elementary school mom, told the Post. “I know police and ICE have been present today in our neighborhood.”

Even though students can ride free to and from school on Metro, Yolanda Corbett told the Post she’s considering sending her Black teenage son to school via Uber for as long as she can afford to do so—two, maybe four weeks if she stretches things. Corbett is considering this at a time when federal agents, including masked ones, are lurking around Metro stations.

Rather than make DC residents feel safe, Trump’s takeover has struck fear in parents and students alike. (A worried five-year-old “asked if Donald Trump was going to come into his school,” the Wall Street Journal reported—8/20/25.) The Post’s eye-opening story, by Lauren Lumpkin, ran under the anodyne headline, “For Some in DC, First Day of School to Look Different Under Trump Crackdown.”

‘Trump fulfills dream role’

The Washington Post‘s Paul Schwartzman (8/23/25) whitewashed the military occupation of DC as Trump “inserting himself into the hurly-burly of city life.”

The headline and framing of another Washington Post story—“Donald Trump Fulfills a Dream Role: Big-City Mayor” (8/23/25)—“gave a light-and-frothy treatment” to Trump’s takeover, wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Substack, 8/25/25).

Sullivan took issue with the “soft-pedaled” subhead as well, which read, “The president’s showy effort to ‘clean up’ DC crime, streetlights and even the Kennedy Center has ruffled city leaders who say he has overstepped his authority.”

“With Trump in full dictator mode…mild words like ‘ruffled’ are absurd,” noted Sullivan. If Post readers felt similarly, they could post their concerns beneath the story—under a prompt asking, “What are your thoughts on Donald Trump’s approach to managing DC as if he were a big city mayor?”

Despite the “offensive prompt,” over a thousand Post readers weighed in, “overwhelmingly [to] criticize” Trump’s approach, “likening it to an authoritarian power grab,” according to the Post’s AI summary of reader comments.

Others took to social media to voice their displeasure with both Trump and the Post. “Stop minimalizing and attempting to normalize this shit,” wrote one commenter. “He’s a wannabe dictator… This is about asserting control like any strongman would.”

‘Tactics employed by Franco’

The original headline on Kathleen Parker’s column (8/15/25) was “DC Residents Should Be Outraged Over Trump’s Takeover”—so Post editors changed it to one less likely to outrage them.

But the most head-scratching headline appeared atop one of the only Post columns to meet this fraught moment.

Kathleen Parker began and ended her column (8/15/25) noting how Trump’s DC takeover serves as a distraction from a certain other news story: “Ever since he sent in the National Guard, hardly anyone has been talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files,” Parker wrote. (Trump was closely tied to the late child molester.)

Parker also called out the racialized nature of Trump’s targets. In addition to DC, Trump is going after “other liberal-leaning cities: New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland and Chicago—all places where the mayors happen to be Black,” Parker wrote.

But it’s on the subject of Trump’s authoritarianism that Parker soared:

I don’t want to suggest that Trump is acting like a military dictator. But I have seen—and felt—this type of intimidation before, when I was a student in Spain and witnessed tactics employed by Gen. Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1975. Franco and Trump share not only an obsession with loyalty but also a willingness to use military force to maintain civilian order.

The inexplicable headline atop Parker’s searing column? “Trump Has Brilliantly Orchestrated a Legal Coup.”

(Parker’s column marked such a departure from the rest of Post Opinions that I reached out to ask if she was leaving the paper, as record numbers of her colleagues have recently done. I didn’t hear back.)

‘Scale it up beyond DC’

Washington Post Opinion (8/21/25) framed a discussion of Trump’s occupation of Washington the way he wants it: He’s there to “fight crime” and DC is a “crime scene.”

Despite these misleading Post headlines, the reporting they sit atop has often been invaluable. But it’s unclear if Post Opinion columnists even bother to read their colleagues’ reporting.

“Many” view Trump’s DC takeover “positively,” Post columnist Shadi Hamid (8/22/25) wrote. Instead of the Post poll from two days earlier—which showed the opposite to be true—Hamid opted to cite another survey. But when I clicked on the link to the survey, I was met with a surprising headline: “Voters Oppose Trump’s Military Deployment in Washington, DC” (Data for Progress, 8/20/25).

Deputy Opinion editor James Hohmann took a different approach to negating his own paper’s poll. “Despite the polls, I think there’s a silent majority that is quite happy to have this packet of Band-Aids,” Hohmann (8/21/25) wrote in regards to Trump’s DC takeover.

“Something is clearly rotten in society when 14-year-olds from out of state are routinely carjacking people,” Hohmann falsely asserted, before calling on Trump to take his DC putsch to other cities:

This is a chance to come down hard on the gangs and hopefully make the whole community safer, with help from Uncle Sam. Then we just have to figure out how to scale it up beyond DC.

Hohmann’s responsibilities include “overseeing the Editorial Board.” His boss is the Post’s new 33-year-old Opinions editor Adam O’Neal, who’s promised an opinion page that’s “unapologetically patriotic” and conveys “optimism about this country.” O’Neal is only parroting the edict from billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos, who has been open about aligning his paper with Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25, 1/22/25, 2/28/25).

The Post is rotting from the head down. It’s a credit to the paper’s reporters that they continue to produce such quality reporting in this fraught moment, even as Post opinion writers and higher-ups debase themselves and the city they call home.

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

On the Ethics of Embedding With Génocidaires
On Sunday, August 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a dramatic announcement: After 674 days of barring foreign media from Gaza, Israel was planning to begin staging guided tours, under Israeli military control, for embedded members of the foreign press.

“We have decided, and have ordered, directed the military, to bring in foreign journalists—more foreign journalists, a lot,” said Israel’s premier, in a rambling, paranoid half-hour press conference—staged, he said, to dispel “the global campaign of lies” against Israel. “There’s a problem with assuring security, but I think it can be done in a way that is responsible and careful to preserve your own safety.

Just seven hours later, Israel assassinated the beloved, world-renowned Palestinian Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, along with five other journalists, in a targeted airstrike as they sheltered in a tent for members of the press just outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

The timing of this announcement was no coincidence. Nor was Netanyahu’s pointed reference to guaranteeing the “safety” of journalists. Since the beginning of the so-called Global War on Terror, military regimes have used access to occupied territories as a tool to control and manipulate the media: first by denying that access, often through violence; and then by offering “safe” access in the form of highly coveted embeds. And from the beginning—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places—mass media have all too eagerly played along.

In a grotesque tweet posted after assassinating Anas and his colleagues, Israel’s military exulted over the killings and repeated the smears it had been airing for months as trial balloons for his murder: that he was “head of a Hamas terrorist cell” who “advanced rocket attacks” on Israelis.

To their eternal shame, many Western news outlets repeated these fabrications in their coverage of his killing—a cowardly act of ventriloquism that they refuse to perform when other foreign governments make false accusations against reporters from the West.

Today, as the Israeli regime grows exponentially more violent, the implied promise of safety for embedded journalists increasingly means the explicit threat of killing for the unembedded.

Make no mistake: When journalists accept Israel’s terms of embedment, they accept the murder of their colleagues as an acceptable price to pay for a coveted moment of access to a killing field—granted to them by the killers, on their terms and conditions.

We know what the resulting stories will look like, because Israel’s military has already done this: In October 2024, during its illegal invasion and occupation of parts of southern Lebanon, it took roughly a dozen of the world’s most prestigious media outlets on tours of the Lebanese villages it was occupying.

The Public Source conducted an in-depth analysis of the resulting articles and broadcasts. We found them to be riddled with distortions, disinformation, dehumanizing language, and factual errors: in effect, state propaganda masquerading as actual news—but without any of the questioning, fact checks, or balance that distinguish legitimate newsgathering from public relations.

The Gaza tours promise to be an even more shameful attempt to manipulate the media into repeating meaningless lies, covered by the barest fig leaf of attribution. “One of the things you’re going to see is precisely our efforts to bring in Gazans, or rather to bring in food to Gaza,” Netanyahu said, in a preview of the kind of lines that Israel will be feeding its willing stenographers—the usual litany of falsehoods, the purpose of which is not belief, but instead what Hannah Arendt called the “trembling, wobbling motion” we experience when reality is drowned out by a constant chorus of lies.

Israel is offering these tours because it is, as Netanyahu admitted, losing “the propaganda war.” Israel is losing its war on the truth—and on reality itself—because of courageous professionals like Anas and his colleagues, who gave everything they treasured, including their lives, to show the world the reality of Israel’s genocide.

To go on one of Israel’s propaganda tours is to accept the bargain that Israel is offering: accept the murder of real reporters on the ground in exchange for a brief, stage-managed glimpse at genocide, shown to you by its perpetrators, with the goal of legitimizing it.

This calculus should be unacceptable to any journalist with professional ethics, integrity, or a conscience. Even those who don’t care about their colleagues should care about the truth.

Western governments have long chosen to normalize the state-sanctioned murder of journalists. But journalists don’t have to. They can and should say no. We are calling on news organizations and individual journalists to stand up and say no to Israel’s propaganda tours. Here’s what a principled news outlet or individual would do:

FOR NEWS OUTLETS: Refuse to send your reporters on Israel’s propaganda tours of Gaza. Issue a statement to your readers explaining why.

Instead of sending reporters on embeds, hire Palestinian journalists in Gaza and offer them the same protections as non-Palestinian correspondents.

FOR INDIVIDUAL REPORTERS: Refuse to go on military embeds to Gaza.

Sign letters and statements to newsroom leadership asking them not to send your colleagues on military embeds to Gaza.

This open letter originally appeared as an editorial in the independent Beirut-based outlet Public Source (8/27/25).
This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 26, 2025

‘The FCC Is Trying to Roll Back Protections Won Over the Past 60 Years’: CounterSpin interview with Joseph Torres on FCC and structural racism

Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Joseph Torres about the FCC and structural racism for the August 22, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

(Verso Books, 2012)

Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners don’t need to be reminded of how central journalism is to everything we care about. Authoritarian leaders want to silence even half-awake news media, because information is so important to people’s understanding of the world, and how we might change it.

It’s also important to see, as on many issues, that Donald Trump didn’t invent bad, racist, anti-democracy media, or the legal landscape that allows it to thrive. As on other issues, there’s a history to understand and contend with if we’re serious about the goal of growing responsive, inclusive, intelligent news. And that history includes hope, as well as a lot of harm, much like the country itself.

Joseph Torres is senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator with Collette Watson of the project Media 2070, and he’s co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joseph Torres.

Joseph Torres: Yeah, Janine, thank you. Thank you for having me.

JJ: Well, I’m not saying that we aren’t in special times. Trump is daylight extorting from media corporations: “I give you the regulations you want, you give me the coverage I want.”

But for a lot of folks in 2025, it seems like the answer is government regulation in the service of the public good. And I think that sounds a lot better if you don’t understand how it’s worked up until now.

So in 2025, what should we know about the FCC, the ostensible defender of the public in the media world? What should we know about the FCC and Black and brown people?

Brendan Carr

JT: The current Federal Communications Commission, and its chairman, a man named Brendan Carr, are basically a part of Trump’s overall plan, overall scheme. The Trump administration—the far right, if you want to call them that—has now captured the presidency. It’s basically the ideology that is fueling this current moment of trying to undo all the gains that have been made for this period of 60-plus years, where equal protection rights in the 14th Amendment, and other civil and human rights, were extended to contend with the history of racial segregation in this country, and the history of racial subjugation in this country, starting from the very founding, and the system that’s been in place that resulted in enslavement of Black folks, and the land theft and genocide of Native American communities. And media has always played a critical role in this project of racial hierarchy.

And so the Federal Communications Commission today is trying, as part of Trump’s agenda, to roll back the very protections that were won over the past 60 years, as a way to consolidate power. The FCC is playing a critical role in that, because media is a place where the public understands what’s going on, and also derives meaning from, to understand the circumstances that they’re dealing with. Even though our media system has never truly shared the immediate information needs of Black folks and other people of color. (I’m being very kind by saying that.)

The FCC is rolling back, pushing companies to roll back their commitments to DEI, but really, it’s saying the presence of Black and brown people within institutions represents something inherently illegal or unlawfully gained. We got to get rid of any kind of programming, and the presence of Black and brown journalists or other content creators in the institutions; we cannot be trying to actually increase the presence of Black and brown people in the institutions.

And Janine, you and I, we’ve talked about it for years, these companies have never really sufficiently addressed what we need, our communities, the information needs they need to service. DEI commitments were actually committed to–and we could talk about our troubles with DEI, too–but after the George Floyd uprising, because these companies had not been serving those. But in order to have an authoritarian regime, you have to continue to ensure our voices are not heard.

Objective Journalism (7/18/25)

This traces back to this recent essay I wrote, which is basically how, even though the FCC was created in 1934, [and] its mission is media policies to serve the public interest, you didn’t have to consider the public interest obligations of Black folks in 1934, because the 14th Amendment that was passed during Reconstruction didn’t exist then, because of Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow racism and all the racial violence that was happening during this period. You didn’t have to consider the public interest obligations for Black folks, because there was no equal protection rights. The equal protection under law was not being enforced at that time.

And so this is why we created a segregated media system, in a sense. Well, segregated media system is actually being too kind, we created a white-controlled media system, where white folks controlled all the broadcast stations, when the FCC was actually providing licenses to media companies that supported segregation, or profited off of segregation. And we have not contended with that history.

JJ: And I think a lot of folks don’t understand. They imagine that there was a time when media supported the public interest, and then somewhere along the line, that got perverted or confused, and you need to say: What you think of as the “public interest” was not something that included Black and brown people. So these ideas that you imagine you’re going to “get back to,” where everything was fair, you need to interrogate that understanding. You need to complicate that understanding, because that’s not how it actually worked.

And this is a conversation we always have, as Black media critics, as Black and brown people concerned with media, folks who are very smart understand top-down bias, and they understand capitalism and corporate capitalism bias, but they still want to say, “It’s not Black and white, it’s green.” And then we have to show up and say, “Yeah, it’s still actually Black and white.” You still have to look at that piece of it, because that piece never went away.

Josephus Daniels

JT: Yeah, I mean, just to illustrate that point, just to give examples, in the essay I tried to point out that the government’s role in the birth of commercial radio really started to accelerate during World War I, when the US Navy was investing heavily in wireless technology. The head of the US Navy, the secretary of the Navy, was a man named Josephus Daniels, and this is under Woodrow Wilson’s administration.

And Josephus Daniels was a newspaper publisher, a powerful newspaper publisher. And in 1898, he owned the Raleigh News and Observer. And he helped to orchestrate a coup of the multiracial government that existed, that was formed following Civil War Reconstruction, to overthrow the multiracial government in Wilmington, North Carolina. And he worked hand in hand with the Democratic Party to orchestrate that. And he called his newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer, to rally up support for the criminalization of Black folks, to overthrow the local government. And he called his paper the “militant voice of white supremacy.”

Now he is in charge in overseeing the development of commercial radio under Woodrow Wilson, with his devout white supremacist father who was a slaver, hosted Birth of a Nation at the White House, president of Princeton University. In his own writings, he talks about, in extremely racist terms, his hatred of Reconstruction, and the idea that Black people would actually be in some sort of position of power during Reconstruction. So he detested the idea of growing Black power in the South through the Reconstruction.

So these are the folks who developed commercial radio.

Then, following World War I, the US wanted to make sure that radio remained in control of the US. There was the Marconi radio company, that was the British-based company, and the foreign ownership broadcast stations that would become radio stations in the United States.

And so they created the Radio Corporation of America. First they tried to have the government be able to control radio, but then they compromised–Congress rebuffed that effort, and they created the Radio Corporation of America, RCA, where there was a trust, called the Radio Trust, where folks who were concretely involved in wireless radio technology all got together, and colluded together, helped to create the birth of commercial radio in this country.

And then Herbert Hoover, who was the president of the United States in 1929, but was the head of the Department of Commerce for most of the 1920s, oversaw the licensing of radio stations. But he also was a person who was using his department to promote racial housing segregation in the country.

So these are some of the forces, critical central forces, powerful forces, who were behind, not just the birth of commercial radio, but what would become the Federal Radio Commission in 1927. And then the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who was the last chairman of the Federal Radio Commission—the Federal Radio Commission from 1927 to 1934 became the Federal Communication Commission when it was formed. But the chairman sat on the Mississippi Supreme Court, appointed by Governor Bilbo, who was one of the most notorious white supremacist governors, and later senators, to serve in any kind of public office.

He was a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court for about eight years. And so the idea that he’s the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission…. I didn’t write in this piece, but there were other commissioners who were very devoted to white supremacy, or were mayor of, I believe, Charlotte, North Carolina, which was a segregated city. And so these white supremacists, in Wilson and the publisher Josephus Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer, these are the forces who helped to birth commercial radio.

Joseph Torres: “We have not reconciled the history of… how government regulation was just reinforcing the racial apartheid that exists in our country.”

And there were Black folks who were trying to get broadcast stations. There was a lot of interest in the Black community in broadcasting, and becoming broadcast owners. And so the whole point of it is that we have not reconciled the history of how our broadcast, not just institutions, for sure, but how government regulation was just reinforcing the racial apartheid that exists in our country.

And then it took until the 1960s, to the Civil Rights Movement, to this famous case in Jackson, Mississippi, WLBT, where the civil rights activists in Jackson, along with the United Church of Christ, were able to successfully challenge the broadcast license for a racist station in Jackson, that opened the door to give US citizens rights to actually challenge FCC policy, to where we saw Black and Latino and Asian American, Indigenous groups, filing license challenges in the late 1960s and 1970s, all over the country, that resulted, really, in the first wave of any kind of significant integration of our broadcast systems.

And that’s the fight we’ve been on for the past 50-plus years, trying to integrate these systems. And this is what the FCC is trying to undo. Again, that integration of these systems hasn’t been sufficient. We’ve been fighting to integrate these systems, and we can have an argument whether we’re integrating these systems that haven’t served our needs. But at the same time, the hope of ownership dwindles away, the idea that we can own broadcast stations dwindles away, because of the massive consolidation of our media system that starts happening in the 1980s, that continues through the 1996 Telecom Act, and all this massive consolidation that’s still happening now, that even more consolidation that’s going to further entrench the de facto media apartheid system.

JJ: Absolutely. And folks will know about those increased efforts at consolidation, where companies are what we call “skating where the puck’s going to be.” What they’re trying to do might be illegal right now, in terms of consolidating companies, but they’re pretty sure they’re going to get laws in their favor, so they’re going ahead and doing it anyway. And that is also not new to the Trump administration.

So I want to direct folks to your piece that we’re talking about at ObjectiveJournalism.org. And I want to just underscore what you’re saying: It’s history, it’s not rhetoric. It’s not like, if only Black and brown folks would’ve, could’ve tried something back in the day. We did. People did, and they were shut down repeatedly, officially. It’s not a question of “folks should have worked through appropriate channels” or “if folks had just built a better mouse trap, then maybe they could have won in the corporate world.” We’re still talking about deliberate racial discrimination. That’s part of the story that we have to tell, and you’re just not going to understand it if you can’t accept that that’s part of it.

JT: And in the piece I wrote, in 1927, there was a Black newspaper in Detroit, a weekly newspaper, that was saying, “Hey, we have to own our own radio stations. We can’t tell our stories and advocate for our community through the white man’s radio.”

In 1930, the Kansas City American, a Black newspaper as well, actually applied for a license to build a radio station, and they were denied. And there were other stations, in Hawaii, someone applied for a license to serve Japanese languages, serving the Italian communities or an Italian-language station. But these applications were denied, and it was basically like, “Hey, your community’s already being served by a radio station that exists.” Again, this is also a time with really, a lot like now, anti-immigrant sentiment in the country.

So this effort in the ’60s to try to desegregate our media system, that included to try to get increased radio ownership, it was always a recognition of the importance of ownership that was understood. In 1914, 1915, early 1900s, there were Black radio clubs being formed across the country to teach ourselves wireless communication technology, to be able to build their own radio sets, listen to broadcasts broadcasting from other parts of the country.

Rufus P. Turner

The first Black person—this is something that’s not too well-known, I only learned about it in the past couple of years. That’s the point with history. We’re still learning things we should know are buried in history, right?—there was a teenager named Rufus P. Turner, who was a real genius, who created the world’s smallest radio set. He was really received well in the radio community for his genius. At only 17 years old, he got the ability to be the first commercial radio station, a low-power station to serve the DC area in the mid-1920s. But this was before the official birth of commercial broadcasting, and the regulations around commercial broadcasting. And newspapers, and Black newspapers in Washington, DC, were hailing this young man as a genius.

The point is, we still don’t have the full story of how our communities were really embracing this new technology, because the story of the history of the FCC is often not told through this vantage point. There’s not too many folks who are studying this history from the issue of race and racial subjugation. But understanding that history, and understanding what is happening today—the circumstances are different in essence, but the DNA of how the system was created, we still have not resolved that.

So this FCC chairman can easily call for companies to get rid of their DEI commitments. And companies are able to say, of course, because we’re furthering our bottom line. And the idea for major companies, they’re not committed to our community, they’re committed to the bottom line.

Because, as you know, Janine, it’s hard to create any kind of lasting change with anti-Black narratives, and narratives against other people of color, that criminalize you, dehumanize you. And you see all this overt racism happening now, and just the cruelty of it is because these narratives have continued to work to dehumanize us. And when you dehumanize us, you can actually do anything to us.

And so I don’t know how we fight to get out of the situation we are at without addressing the history of anti-Black racism, and not just institutional, but structural. This is what the essay is attempting to do, is to place the media at the center of the current struggle that our communities have been fighting for a long time, to ensure that civil and human rights, especially the 14th Amendment, continue to be something to expand the possibility of redress.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, this is an ongoing conversation; we’ll just pause it for now.

We’ve been speaking with Joseph Torres; he’s senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at Free Press, co-creator of Media 2070 and co-author of News for All the People. His article, “Reckoning With the Federal Communication Commission’s History of Structural Racism,” is online at ObjectiveJournalism.org. Thank you, Joe Torres, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JT: Thank you, Janine, so much for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 22, 2025

Western Media Manufactured Consent for Israel’s Murder of Palestinian Journalists

In his last dispatch for Al Jazeera (8/10/25), journalist Anas al-Sharif reported, “For the past two hours, the Israeli aggression on Gaza City has intensified.”

Israel’s targeted assassination of six Palestinian media members in the Gaza Strip on August 10 sent shockwaves through the journalism community. Though the murder of journalists has been a common tool of the Israeli’s government’s suppression of information coming out of Gaza, the loss of Al Jazeera‘s Anas al-Sharif was particularly harrowing.

Many of us had been moved by al-Sharif’s heart-wrenching coverage, from watching him remove his press vest in relief when a ceasefire was announced (1/19/25), to seeing a languid al-Sharif reporting on the famine (7/21/25) as people fainted around him. “Keep going, Anas, don’t stop,” said a voice off-camera. “You are our voice.”

Three of the victims were al-Sharif’s colleagues at Al Jazeera, one of the few media outlets that was able to keep journalists reporting in Gaza despite Israel’s blockade. As millions around the world grieved not just for al-Sharif but for his colleagues Mohammed Qreiqeh, Mohammed Noufal and Ibrahim Zaher, and freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi, we were also gravely concerned about the vacuum their murders created of on-the-ground coverage of the genocide.

Establishment media, however, used these courageous journalists’ murders as an opportunity to continue parroting the same Zionist talking points that contributed to manufacturing consent for their killings. FAIR looked at 15 different news outlets’ initial coverage of the murders: the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, BBC, Politico, Newsweek, Associated Press and Reuters.

We found that they overwhelmingly centered Israel’s narrative, attempted to delegitimize pro-Palestinian sources, and failed to contextualize the killings within the larger context of the genocide.

Prioritizing Israel’s pretext

Fox News (8/11/25) went farthest in embracing Israel’s “terrorist” narrative.

All of the articles mentioned Israel’s allegation that al-Sharif was a member of Hamas posing as a journalist, a claim that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Foreign Press Association and the United Nations have all found to be baseless.

Four of the 15 articles (New York Times, 8/10/25; NBC, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) mentioned the allegations in either the headline or subhead. “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalists in Airstrike, Claiming One Worked for Hamas,” was NBC‘s headline, with Israel’s smear that al-Sharif “posed as a journalist” in the subhead. Fox offered “Israel Says Al Jazeera Journalist Killed in Airstrike Was Head of Hamas ‘Terrorist Cell.’”

Reuters’ original headline (8/11/25) was “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” only later changed to “Israel Strike Kills Al Jazeera Journalists in Gaza.”

Al-Sharif had been targeted and smeared by the Israeli Defense Forces for months prior to his murder, and had written a statement in anticipation of his killing. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice,” he wrote. He asked the world to continue fighting for justice in Palestine: “Do not forget Gaza.”

Six of the articles (ABC, 8/11/25; BBC, 8/11/25; New York Times, 8/10/25; NBC, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) completely omitted references to or quotes from al-Sharif’s final statement. Of those six articles, the New York Times, BBC, NBC and Fox did include quotes from Israeli government representatives—perplexingly choosing to prioritize the voices of al-Sharif’s killers over his own.

The New York Times (8/10/25) gave the Israeli government ample space to smear one of the journalists it had just killed, claiming he was “the head of a terrorist cell” who was “responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.”

Coverage by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times devoted the most space to advancing Israel’s pretext for the killings. The Journal’s Anat Peled dedicated the first three paragraphs of her article to detailing al-Sharif’s supposed Hamas affiliation. Ephrat Livni of the Times also spent three paragraphs on the bogus allegations, allowing only one paragraph for a rebuttal from Al Jazeera and CPJ.

Every article except the ones from the New York Times (8/10/25) and Fox (8/11/25) cited the historically high number of Palestinian journalists that have been killed since October 7, 2023. The death toll currently stands at 192, according to the CPJ. However, only four articles (ABC, 8/11/25; CNN, 8/10/25; Politico, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) listed Israel as the primary perpetrator of these murders. More typically, the AP (8/11/25) wrote that “at least 192 journalists have been killed since Israel’s war in Gaza began,” leaving the identities of both these journalists and their killers unmentioned.

Six (ABC, 8/11/25; BBC, 8/11/25; Newsweek, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; CBS, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; LA Times, 8/11/25) of the 15 articles failed to mention Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and none mentioned the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.

Critically, only two articles (Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; Washington Post, 8/11/25) even noted the fact that the other five slain journalists had not been accused of belonging to Hamas. With this omission, the other outlets accepted and transmitted to audiences Israel’s premise that any number of bystanders can legitimately be killed in order to target a supposed Hamas member.

Unnecessary qualifiers

Including the October 7, 2023, breakout as background for the killing of journalists, NBC (8/10/25) specified that “many of the targets of those attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.” Palestinians killed subsequently by Israel, by contrast, were just described as “people…in the Hamas-run enclave.”

A common practice for Western media has been the use of unnecessary qualifiers to delegitimize information that comes from Palestinian sources. The coverage of al-Sharif’s assassination was no exception.

The BBC (8/11/25) wrote, “More than 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military operation began, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.” Western media have taken it upon themselves to seemingly rename the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) in order to cast doubt on the extent of Israel’s atrocities. They rarely note that a Lancet study (2/8/25) has found that the death toll could be up to 40% higher than what the GHM is reporting. The New York Times (8/10/25) and Reuters (8/11/25) also utilized “Hamas-run” to describe figures from the Gazan government.

These outlets also showed a clear bias as to how they characterize casualties. The New York Times (8/10/25), when reporting on the death toll in Gaza, wrote that the GHM doesn’t “distinguish between civilians and combatants.” Later on, the Times reported on Israeli deaths—and failed to distinguish between Israeli civilian and combatant deaths.

The implication is that some Palestinian deaths might be considered to be of lesser importance, or even justified, based on victims’ potential “combatant” status. Israeli deaths, meanwhile, are to be counted simply as human beings. The Washington Post (8/11/25) exhibited the same double standard in its reporting.

NBC (8/10/25) wrote, “Many of the targets of [the October 7] attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.” When reporting Palestinian deaths, NBC made no mention that over half of those killed by Israel have been women, children and the elderly. A more recent investigation found that civilians make up 83% of deaths, according to the IDF’s own data. The report also didn’t describe what Palestinian victims might have been doing when they were killed, such as the almost 1,400 who have been shot while seeking aid.

In addition to the usual rhetoric, eight of the 15 articles cast doubt on Al Jazeera by repeatedly mentioning its ownership by the Qatari government. (Qatar, like Israel, is one of 20 countries worldwide officially designated as a “major non-NATO ally” by the United States.) Three of the articles (New York Times, 8/10/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; LA Times, 8/11/25) mention the Israeli government’s adversarial relationship with Al Jazeera, with the New York Times and the Journal dedicating several paragraphs to the outlet’s alleged ties to Hamas as the presumed basis for the conflict, rather than Al Jazeera‘s critical coverage of Israeli actions.

False equivalences

Reuters‘ original headline (8/11/25) was written from the point of view of al-Sharif’s killers.

Only three of the articles use the word “famine” (Financial Times, 8/10/25; CNN, 8/10/25; Newsweek, 8/10/25), and only the Financial Times mentions the word outside of quotes. Reuters (8/11/25) and the Wall Street Journal (8/11/25) called the situation “a hunger crisis” and “a humanitarian crisis that has pushed many Palestinians toward starvation,” respectively.

Media outlets continue to push the narrative that this so-called conflict began less than two years ago, as when NBC (8/10/25) wrote, “Israel launched the offensive in Gaza, targeting Hamas, after the Hamas-led terror attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023.”

Though the rate of killing greatly escalated after the October 7 operation, Israeli violence against Palestinians goes back to before the founding of the state, as many historians have carefully explained. In the decades immediately prior to the Hamas operation, the Israeli human rights group B’tselem counts more than 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces between September 2000 and September 2023—most of them noncombatants, over 2,400 of them children under 18. (Over the same period, some 1,300 Israelis—civilians and military—were killed by Palestinians.)

The Financial Times (8/10/25) described the ongoing genocide as “triggered” by the October 7 attacks, as if the al-Aqsa Flood operation were a random act of violence unrelated to the apartheid system that Israel imposes on Palestinians. The BBC (8/11/25) described Israeli violence as a “response to the Hamas-led attack,” completely erasing Israel’s history of occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that long precedes the existence of Hamas. Obscuring this sort of context is part of the motivation for Israel’s systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, including al-Sharif and his colleagues.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 22, 2025

Joseph Torres on the FCC and Structural Racism

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Objective (7/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Trump’s threats to media corporations are laying bare what many already knew: Media corporations are reliant on government for policies that benefit them as profit-driven corporations, because they are primarily profit-driven corporations, even though we may still see them as the journalistic institutions whose job is to inform us about the world and one another—without, as is sometimes quaintly referenced, “fear or favor.”

But while many are meaningfully and rightfully engaged in this White Houses’ harmful overreach and gross predations on the First Amendment, there is less attention to the role of the 14th Amendment—meant to secure basic rights of equal protection and due process for formerly enslaved people.

That’s in play here too; if, like our guest, you are able to contextualize this retrograde White House’s assaults on the press corps as part of, and not ancillary to, their direct assaults on Black and brown people, on the policies that aim to afford us equal rights, on the programs that allow us to enter the country as immigrants, on the laws that resist active discrimination against us on jobsites, in public accommodations, in housing, on the street, at the bank. They don’t actively, aggressively, despise Black and brown people over here, but then just have some sort of principled problem with news reporters, separately, over there; it’s all of a piece. And that piece has a history that we’d do well to learn—not only because of the ongoing, institutional harms it helps us see, but also the hope and resistance that’s there in that history, as well.

We get into it with Joseph Torres, senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator of the project Media 2070, and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump and TikTok.

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

How NYT’s Bad Reporting Helped Justify Trump’s Tariffs on Brazil

The New York Times (9/26/22) has long argued that Brazil’s attempts to hold coup plotters accountable are themselves undemocratic–a storyline Donald Trump has unsurprisingly embraced.

US President Donald Trump officially declared the state of bilateral relations with Brazil a “national emergency” on July 30, using the decision to justify imposing 40% tariffs on all imports from Brazil.

Although he had previously cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to bypass Congress and unilaterally impose tariffs on dozens of foreign nations, the Brazil case was more complicated. Unlike most other countries—where Trump cited trade deficits to justify these so-called emergencies—the US had maintained a trade surplus with Brazil for years.

It was time to pull a rabbit out of his MAGA hat, so Trump turned to a false narrative long pushed by the Bolsonaro family, and legitimized for years by figures like Elon Musk, Intercept cofounder Glenn Greenwald and, perhaps surprisingly, the New York Times.

As revealed in three separate investigations conducted by Brazil’s parliament, federal police and the Attorney General’s Office, the “authoritarian judiciary” narrative was systematically used by former President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies as the primary tactic to normalize a Trumpian “Stop the Steal” campaign. This storyline was developed for two years before it was instrumentalized after Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election. It served to justify a failed coup attempt, including the mob invasions of Brazil’s National Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Federal Court headquarters in Brasília on January 8, 2023.

Political cards on the table

“Members of the government of Brazil have taken actions that interfere with the economy of the United States, infringe the free expression rights of United States persons, violate human rights, and undermine the interest the United States has in protecting its citizens and companies,” Trump (7/30/25) declared.

“Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has abused his judicial authority to target political opponents, shield corrupt allies and suppress dissent,” Trump (or whoever actually drafted the document he signed) wrote. Claiming that Moraes, the judge who oversaw the coup investigation that resulted in Bolsonaro’s indictment, was violating the First Amendment rights of US persons, Trump proceeded to lay his political cards on the table:

Brazilian officials are also persecuting former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro. The government of Brazil has unjustly charged Bolsonaro with multiple crimes related to Bolsonaro’s 2022 runoff election, and the supreme court of Brazil has misguidedly ruled that Bolsonaro must stand trial for these unjustified criminal charges.

He was referring to a 272-page indictment by Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office, which he clearly hasn’t read. He went on to write:

Should the government of Brazil take significant steps to address the national emergency declared in this order and align sufficiently with the United States on national security, economic and foreign policy matters described in this order, I may further modify this order.

This text was widely viewed in Brazil as a threat: Annul Bolsonaro’s indictment, and I will think about dropping the tariffs.

Shortly after releasing the declaration, which contained a list of nearly 700 products exempt from the tariffs—including most of Brazil’s industrial goods, and eight of its 10 top exports to the US—Trump announced the tariffs would rise from 40% to 50%. His administration also invoked the Magnitsky Act to impose personal sanctions against Moraes.

‘Going too far?’

New York Times (8/5/25): “Justice Moraes has been criticized for going too far in his quest to safeguard Brazil’s young democracy.”

On the day Trump announced the tariffs, the New York Times (7/30/25) broke from its cycle of predominantly negative articles about the Brazilian government (FAIR.org, 5/14/24, 12/6/24) to publish a glowing interview with Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, headlined “No One Is Defying Trump Like Brazil’s President.”

Could the Times finally be abandoning the Bolsonaros’ “authoritarian judiciary” narrative—which it first embraced six days before Brazil’s first-round 2022 presidential election, with “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?” (9/26/22).

Six days after the Lula interview, the paper answered this question in an article (8/5/25) headlined, “Bolsonaro House Arrest Casts Shadow Over Brazil/US Trade Talks.” After correctly explaining that many people support Justice Moraes for protecting democratic institutions from ex-President Bolsonaro and his allies, reporter Ana Ionova rehashed key elements of the Trump/Bolsonaro “authoritarian judiciary” storyline.

“At times, Justice Moraes has been criticized for going too far in his quest to safeguard Brazil’s young democracy,” she wrote:

He has ordered social media platforms to take down popular accounts that he claimed threatened democracy, but refused to disclose how. He has jailed people for online threats and presided over cases in which he was both the judge and the prosecutor.

Days later, another Times article (8/11/25) by Ionova continued the critique:

[Moraes] has jailed people without trial for threats they made online, blocked news outlets from posting content critical of politicians and ordered the removal of popular social media accounts, while refusing to explain how they threatened democracy.

Since the Times has, once again, failed to properly explain what is controversial about the actions of Brazil’s supreme court—even while citing Musk, Greenwald and others‘ criticisms in a series of articles pushing the “authoritarian judiciary” narrative since 2022—it’s worth deconstructing its arguments to expose the paper’s mistruths, half-truths, and misrepresentations of contentious but legally sound actions.

Far-right threats against judges

The same right-wing campaign to intimidate judges is underway in Brazil that Reuters (2/29/24) documented in the US.

According to records from the US Marshals Service analyzed by Reuters (2/29/24), violent threats against members of the US judiciary rose by over 300% between 2015 and 2022, corresponding to the announcement of Trump’s first campaign for the presidency and the start of his attacks on judges who rule against him. During this period, the average number of threats against US federal judges rose from 1,180 per year to 3,810.

From 2020, when Trump dramatically increased his criticism of the judiciary, the number of serious threats—dire enough to trigger an investigation by the Marshals—rose from 220 in that year to 457 in 2023. Reuters counted 57 convictions of people making violent threats against US judges since 2020.

The US Marshals serve as a police force for federal judges, but due to their control by Trump’s politicized Department of Justice, a group of American judges is now working to transfer them to direct control by the judiciary. The unprecedented rise in death threats, and the DoJ’s failure to act on them, has led judges to seek unprecedented means to protect themselves and their families.

Over the last seven years, due to constant communication between Jair Bolsonaro, his son Eduardo, Steve Bannon and other key players in the US far right, nearly every tactic used by Trump has been imported to Brazil—from Covid-19 denialism to the “stop the steal” polemic to capital riots. Threats against the judiciary are no exception.

In Brazil, these threats started in 2018, when ex-President Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a federal deputy, threatened to violently shut down the supreme court on a social media livestream that was watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

Inciting ‘disturbed people’

Justice Alexandre de Moraes gave to O Globo (3/21/19), Brazil’s largest newspaper, the explanation for why banned social media accounts threatened democracy that the New York Times (8/5/25) claims doesn’t exist.

Unlike the US, Brazil’s supreme court doesn’t have its own police force. When supreme court justices receive death threats, they normally request the Attorney General’s Office to open an investigation, which is then undertaken by the Federal Police. But what can they do if the attorney general refuses to act? Just as US judges are trying to transfer authority over the US Marshals to the courts, Brazil’s supreme court worked within legal guidelines to take matters into its own hands.

In March 2019, Chief Justice Dias Toffoli issued a decree calling for the court to oversee an investigation of threats against itself and its justices, delegating the task to Justice Alexandre de Moraes. One week later, Moraes ordered search warrants and the removal of dozens of social media accounts.

The New York Times (8/5/25) claimed Moraes “refused to disclose how” the accounts threatened democracy. In fact, at the time he told reporters from O Globo (3/21/19), Brazil’s largest newspaper, that he had ordered social media platforms to block accounts dedicated to spreading messages designed to incite hatred against the supreme court. These accounts, he said, were suspected of being financed by groups interested in destabilizing the judiciary. He added that these actions were inciting “disturbed people” to commit acts of violence—exactly the same concern judges are raising in the US.

When asked for more details about the investigation, Moraes explained to reporters that, as in any criminal investigation, some information must be withheld from the public to avoid compromising the procedure.

‘Judge and prosecutor’

One month later, after Moraes issued search warrants for the homes of four people under investigation for making threats against the supreme court—including retired Gen. Paulo Chagas, a politician who had been a hardliner in the military dictatorship—Attorney General Raquel Dodge announced she was canceling the investigation. Moraes refused to comply, arguing that the attorney general’s move to dismiss an investigation she didn’t initiate violated Brazil’s constitution, and was therefore illegal. At the time, this ruling was supported by many in Brazil’s legal community, including the powerful Order of Brazilian Lawyers, a kind of national bar association.

Although this complex legal controversy has been watered down by the Times to saying Moraes “presided over cases in which he was both the judge and the prosecutor,” it’s important to note that no Brazilian supreme court justice can judge a case by themselves. Any individual ruling has to be upheld at minimum by one of the court’s two five-member working groups, with defendants often petitioning for a subsequent ruling by the full 11-member court.

That June, Moraes’ decision was upheld by the full body of the supreme court, by a vote of 10–1. The move was criticized by some legal scholars as overstepping boundaries, with accusations that Moraes was assuming prosecutorial roles. Of course, it’s hard to find any significant judicial decision made in any country that doesn’t draw criticism from some members of the legal community: The field of law demands sharp critical skills from the people who practice it, and critics are going to criticize.

It’s also important to note that this occurred six years ago. After Dodge left office on September 17, 2019, the Attorney General’s Office changed its stance on the investigation. In June 2020, Attorney General Augusto Aras—a conservative who dismissed 104 supreme court requests for criminal investigations against Jair Bolsonaro—officially endorsed Moraes’ decision to continue the investigation after his predecessor attempted to cancel it, while requesting that he establish an end date.

After analyzing the Federal Police’s findings, current Attorney General Paulo Gonet produced his report on the 2023 coup attempt, ultimately upholding the police recommendation to indict former President Bolsonaro and 32 of his allies for plotting a military coup, which included plans to assassinate President Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and supreme court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

The fact that Bolsonaro’s indictment—first recommended in a 2023 parliamentary inquiry—was upheld by subsequent Federal Police and attorney general investigations is crucial context. Every time the Times claims Moraes has acted as both judge and prosecutor, it misleadingly implies this applies to the investigation of Bolsonaro and his cronies, who are now facing possible prison sentences of up to 44 years.

It’s also relevant to mention that this investigation has been completely separate from Dias Toffoli’s original investigation into threats against the court, which is repeatedly cited when accusing Moraes of acting as “judge and prosecutor.”

‘Attacks against free speech’

The New York Times (1/22/23) quoted Elon Musk saying that Moraes’ moves were “extremely concerning,” while Glenn Greenwald “debated a Brazilian sociologist…about Mr. de Moraes’ actions.”

Regarding the New York Times‘ repeated statement (1/22/23, 8/11/25) that Moraes has “jailed people without trial,” as shocking as that may sound out of context, it’s common practice in the United States. Some 400,000 people are currently sitting in US jails waiting for their trials to begin, due to not being able to raise bail, or to being deemed by a judge to be either a flight risk or a threat to society. Lamentably, this is a perfectly legal and common practice in Brazil, as it is in the US and many other countries around the world.

When the Times began its campaign against Brazil’s “authoritarian judiciary,” it gave space to people like Greenwald and Musk—libertarian Trump supporters with limited knowledge of Brazilian law. The paper ( 9/21/24, 7/10/25) repeatedly quoted fugitive investor Paulo Figueiredo, whom the Times itself (1/31/19) once reported had fled to Florida in 2019 to escape prosecution for a fraudulent real estate deal involving Trump Enterprises. Citing him as a critic of Moraes, the paper didn’t mention that he is the unapologetic grandson of João Figueiredo, who oversaw indigenous massacres and the torture and murder of labor union and student leaders as Brazil’s intelligence chief before becoming Brazil’s last dictator.

As I reported for FAIR (5/14/24) in 2024, this series of Times articles became the most-cited source used by Republican lawmakers in a US congressional hearing on “attacks against free speech” in Brazil, during which Figueiredo and Public founder Michael Shellenberger falsely accused the Brazilian government of authoritarianism.

Now the arguments presented in the Times—combined with false narratives promoted by figures like Greenwald and Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon—have bolstered Trump’s justification for imposing tariffs on Brazilian goods like coffee (which the US barely produces), a move made for political reasons that will hurt US consumers.

Isn’t it time the New York Times exercised a minimal amount of self-awareness about its role in this process, and retracted its misleading and hypocritical “authoritarian judiciary” narrative?

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

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

NYT Complains Trump Isn’t Anti-Media Enough

A New York Times editorial (8/8/25) insisted that an anti-TikTok law “did not target speech based on its content, function or purpose”—but in fact congressional opponents argued for a ban based on claims that too many videos critical of Israel were being shared on the app (FAIR.org, 11/13/23).

A New York Times editorial (8/8/25), headlined “Trump Is Letting TikTok (and China) Win,” illustrates why the paper is ill-equipped to counter the tyranny of this out-of-control administration. The editorial criticized President Donald Trump for being authoritarian, but also not authoritarian enough.

To review, Trump in his first term, along with congressional right-wingers, raised concerns about the social media app TikTok, largely because it was owned by a Chinese firm, ByteDance (FAIR.org, 3/14/24). Many attempts had been made to ban the app (FAIR.org, 5/25/23), but under the presidency of Joe Biden, the federal government enacted a law to force a sale of the app that would divest it from Chinese ownership (CNN, 4/24/24). The argument had been that the app’s content contained propaganda, and that data collection by a Chinese firm posed a national security threat (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 12/6/24, 1/23/25).

All of this could lead to a ban of the app. The BBC (6/19/25) explained that if no deal is reached in September TikTok could “face a US ban and be pulled from app stores.” It noted, “The executive orders extending the time to find a buyer do not overturn the sell-or-ban law passed by Congress and upheld by the US Supreme Court,” meaning “a ban remains at least a legal possibility.”

Free press and anti-censorship activists have opposed efforts to ban TikTok, saying such concerns are overblown, and are in any case equally applicable to US-based social media like Meta and X. Content-based government censorship of social media, they warned, generally takes us into authoritarian territory. As I wrote last year (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), citing the University of Chicago’s Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24), “The corporate structure of ByteDance does not indicate that China’s Communist Party has firm control on day-to-day operations as the US government contends.”

Trump has since changed his tune on TikTok, and has delayed implementation of the law, and so the video app has lived in limbo since Trump began his second term (AP, 1/19/25). It isn’t lost on anyone that the publicity-obsessed former reality television star has quite a following on the app (Reuters, 6/3/24). TikTok is also reportedly in talks to form a US partnership with Oracle, which has been described as called Oracle the “Trump administration’s favorite tech company” (Slate, 9/14/20).

The ban had bipartisan support, and was upheld by the Supreme Court. Alas, the Times is disappointed that since Trump’s inauguration, his “administration has simply refused to enforce the law.” This leaves TikTok free to “operate as before,” thus allowing the “ruling Communist Party” to continue “to amass personal data about Americans and shape national discourse through its secretive algorithm for promoting videos.”

To be sure, the Times editorial makes a fair point in the first half. If you leave aside the substance of the law, it’s a real problem that a far-right president is picking and choosing what laws will actually be applied. As TikTok lingers in limbo, the situation has given him leverage of Big Tech, and he’s shrunk congressional authority by ignoring his mandate to enforce the law. Given everything else Trump’s done to control media, and attack civil rights and public safety, the Times is right to raise the alarm bell on anything that undermines the rule of law.

Uncensored speech is for suckers

“Banning [TikTok] it or forcing it to be sold off wouldn’t be a bad idea, wrote Tim Wu and Peter Harrell (New York Times, 3/18/23), but it “accounts for just a small part of the Chinese technological surveillance threat.”
But the New York Times is angry because it supports the muzzling of TikTok for Cold War–inspired reasons. This isn’t surprising, because the Times has run lots of anti-TikTok commentary, including a podcast with Times columnist David French (1/13/25) defending the ban on security grounds.

It earlier ran an op-ed (3/18/23) by two former Biden administration officials that said the federal government should have “the ability to ban TikTok,” but that banning the platform alone didn’t go far enough in restricting Chinese-owned tech. Concerns that such bans are incompatible with an “open and democratic country” are “misplaced,” it said, because being “an open and democratic country does not mean being a sucker.” Free speech absolutism is unmanly on the world stage, in other words, and such a ban would justifiably be an eye for an eye.

“Accepting unequal treatment is not a badge of honor,” the pair, Tim Wu and Peter Harrell, argued. “The United States would be justified in responding to China’s limits on US companies by imposing its own limits.”

After the Supreme Court upheld the ban, the Times offered an op-ed (1/19/25) by a 17-year-old at a Manhattan private school who pleaded for government intervention to break her of her addiction to the app. It’s a moving testimony, but such an argument could be applied to social media generally, or even smartphones, a place the Times (whose subscribers are roughly 95% online) might not want to go.

Silencing voices on Taiwan—or Gaza?

The problem with TikTok, the recent New York Times editorial (8/8/25) said, is that the app’s algorithm doesn’t just promote the most-liked content:

Instead, the researchers found, pro-China videos (including those with patriotic scenes and tourism promotion) received more views than their number of likes suggested they should. Anti-China videos (such as those honoring the Tiananmen Square protests) received fewer. This combination is a sign that TikTok’s algorithm amplifies pro-China videos and suppresses anti-China content. Tellingly, the same patterns do not hold on YouTube.

Other studies also found evidence of TikTok’s bias. These findings suggest that TikTok is already a vehicle for propaganda, potentially influencing Americans’ opinions about issues like the future of Taiwan and China’s repression of predominantly Muslim Uyghurs.

You’d be hard pressed to find any media—whether it’s social media or the corporate press—that doesn’t have some kind of bias when it comes to hot button issues. For example, since Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk and became X, the site has amplified more right-wing views (Bloomberg, 6/12/24; PBS, 8/13/24), and has increasingly agreed to censorship requests by authoritarian governments (Guardian, 4/4/23; Middle East Eye, 2/14/25).

Things aren’t much rosier at Meta, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shifted his politics to the right in response to the second Trump administration (NBC, 1/8/25). Since the war in Gaza started, Human Rights Watch (12/21/23) reported that

Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media.

The Times might be right that TikTok users might be influenced to take a particular view on Taiwan, but then FAIR (e.g., 3/13/24, 10/7/24, 5/16/25, 8/4/25) and other media critics would say the same thing about Times coverage of Israel/Palestine. (Recall that Congress passed the TikTok ban largely out of concern that young people were getting too much news about the genocide in Gaza—FAIR.org, 5/8/24).

‘They seek to weaken the US’

Treating free speech and security as being at odds, as the New York Times (1/10/25) does, is a sure-fire way to get less free speech.

The New York Times dismissed First Amendment concerns with the forced sale of TikTok, like Wu and Harrell did, because the law was upheld by a conservative Supreme Court that has given the Trump administration a slew of other victories (Reuters, 6/13/25; NPR, 6/27/25; USA Today, 7/4/25). Further, it said, “During the Cold War, Soviet organizations would not have been allowed to own Life magazine, NBC or American radio stations.” Times opinion page editorial director David Leonhardt (1/10/25) made the same point earlier this year.

In other words, the Times accepts as a given that the United States citizenry are engaged in an existential and long-term ideological war with China. Thus, the First Amendment’s presumption that citizens are free to seek out whatever ideas they choose is no longer operational, because of “national security.” Warned the Times: “China’s leaders have made clear that they seek to weaken the United States globally and strengthen other authoritarian leaders, most notably Vladimir Putin of Russia.”

It’s no use bickering with the Times’ worldview; its editors surely see no problem with the US seeking economic and military dominance over other countries, or with its historic alliances with tyrants abroad. Nor could it ever accept the fact that China’s global ambitions are normal for an industrial superpower, or that it is applying soft power globally largely because of a vacuum left by the US (Politico, 7/11/25).

But the Times must be confronted with the hard truth that it is demanding more authoritarian action from Trump’s government. The idea that a media organization could be using bias to steer public opinion in one direction or another is the rationale the Trump administration has offered to defend its attacks on CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS and the AP.

The Times (e.g., 2/4/25) has normally not supported Trump’s impulses here. But Trump and the Times share a distaste for Beijing, and therefore the paper is asking the former to unleash his anti-media impulses against TikTok. Here the Times seems to be trying to rewrite the first line of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem: “First they came for the Communists—and that was OK, because they have made clear that they seek to weaken the United States globally.”

But protecting media from Trump is not a part-time job; he can’t be given an exception here just this one time because of some carve-out for the Chinese menace. We can confidently assume that any excuse he’s allowed to shut down one outlet will be used against others; if TikTok can be squelched because it’s foreign-owned, why not the Guardian—or Al Jazeera, which unlike the video platform is owned outright by an authoritarian government?

Too close for comfort?

Pew (1/17/25) notes that nearly 2 in 5 adults under 29 regularly get news from TikTok.

The New York Times’ hostility toward TikTok might not just be ideological, but about business, as the social media app, thought to be mainly the stuff of funny videos for pure entertainment, is now part of the actual news industry. Pew Research (1/17/25) said:

TikTok has become an important news source for many Americans. About half of TikTok users (52%)—equivalent to 17% of all US adults—say they regularly get news on the site.

By comparison, Pew (6/10/25) finds that 19% of US adults regularly get news from the New York Times.

Regardless of the concerns about social media becoming a news source, the impulse to ban an outlet over anticipated problems is the stuff of authoritarianism, and institutions that want to retain their monopoly power—not of a healthy democracy.

In a way, the Times editorial board is simply too close ideologically to Trump on this score to maintain any credibility as a check on federal power. Trump’s failure to enforce the ban is a brief reprieve that comes with problems, as the Times notes. The answer is not for Trump to keep going like this, but for Congress to do the right thing, and repeal its censorious law.

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

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
August 20, 2025

‘It’s Really a Full-On Attack on the Voting Rights Act’: CounterSpin interview with Ari Berman on voting rights erasure

Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman about the erasure of the Voting Rights Act for the August 15, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Mother Jones (8/6/25)

Janine Jackson: Goings on in Texas, where Republicans are pushing to redraw congressional districts so as to give their party five new House seats, and Democrats have left the state to deny them the quorum to do it, have a lot of us looking for our eighth-grade civics books. How is this legal, and if it is, how does it comport with what we’ve been told is democracy, the reason we had to stand up and put our hands on our hearts and recite a pledge—the medicine, we’re told, the US should invade other countries to force them to take? The defining element of that story is voting: Everyone gets a voice. That’s what makes us different, special and better. Is that ideal being subverted, or have we misunderstood it all along?

Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of a number of books, including Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and, most recently, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He joins us now by phone; welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Hey Janine, thanks for having me back.

JJ: We’re on the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, often understood as a, or the, keystone civil rights law. We’ve seen the chipping away, the undermining, but this is my big question: How did we get here, such that in August 2025, we are in fear of losing it altogether?

NBC (8/1/25)

AB: Yeah, well, it was a pretty somber 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and there’s real questions about whether we’re going to be celebrating a 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, let alone anniversaries after that, because the law has been repeatedly gutted by the Supreme Court through a series of decisions.

They have ruled that states that have a long history of discrimination, like Texas, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That really opened up a floodgate to new voter suppression, new gerrymandering.

Then they’ve chipped away at the law in other respects. For example, they’ve made it much harder to strike down discriminatory voting laws. They’ve made it so that you can’t challenge partisan gerrymandering, no matter how blatant it is.

And now they are preparing to possibly strike down the ability to counteract racial gerrymandering as well, and that has given a green light to states like Texas to engage in voter suppression, to engage in new kinds of gerrymandering, and to not really feel like there’s going to be accountability from the courts or from the federal government, like there has in the past.

JJ: I would like to anchor us in the fact that the voting rights fight is not some sort of general, ephemeral thing: “Voting is good.” It’s really about Black people, and white supremacists’ unending attempts to keep Black people from being treated as people, including in our right to a political voice, right? That’s at the core of it.

Mother Jones (7/30/25)

AB: I mean, that’s certainly what it was about at the beginning. It was about the effort to end Jim Crow in the segregated South. It was about the effort to restore voting rights to people that have been disenfranchised for so many years. And in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it’s enfranchised millions of people—not just Black Americans, but other minority groups, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans.

They’ve all been protected, and the voting rights of millions of people have been expanded because of the Voting Rights Act. And that’s really what’s under threat now, is that states feel free to do the kind of discriminatory actions that they might have not have gotten away with in the past.

For example, Texas has violated the Voting Rights Act in every single redistricting cycle. Its current redistricting maps, the ones that predated Donald Trump’s push for five seats, those are already being challenged as discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act by Black and Hispanic plaintiffs.

And now they’re trying to pick up five more seats, largely by going after districts represented by Black or Latino Democrats, or places where Black and Latino voters have influence. And so it’s really a full-on attack on the Voting Rights Act. And they’re betting, and perhaps not incorrectly, that a very extreme Supreme Court is going to let them get away with it if they succeed.

JJ: Just to lay it out briefly, what we’re talking about, and I think folks may think they know it, but maybe they don’t. It’s often presented as “voters are supposed to elect officials, and this is officials trying to choose their voters.” When we talk about redistricting, how do you explain that to someone who maybe doesn’t understand it?

AB: Yeah, the idea is that voters elect representatives to represent them, but the way that redistricting works, often, when redistricting becomes gerrymandering, what’s happened is districts are represented to boost one party or one interest at the expense of another, and elections are pretty much predetermined.

And I think what’s happening in Texas is even worse, because, even if there is gerrymandering, it usually happens once a decade, after the census comes out. Now they’re trying to re-gerrymander the state, because Texas is already gerrymandered.

And they’re not just doing it to prevent Texans from holding their representatives accountable. They’re trying to do it to prevent voters from holding Donald Trump accountable, which is the whole reason he’s pushing for this redistricting.

He doesn’t care about taking up five new Republican seats in Texas. The only reason why he wants to pick up five Republican seats is so that Democrats don’t take back the House and hold his administration accountable.

So this is why it has national significance, because what’s happening in Texas is going to affect the entire US House race, and that is something where every state’s redistricting process has an impact. But this kind of gerrymandering mid-decade is extremely unusual, and it’s even more unusual for the White House to be the one that’s precipitating it.

JJ: So to put it boldly, I mean, you’ve indicated it, but what happens? What can we imagine happening if the Voting Rights Act is essentially eviscerated? What will it change? How will things be different?

Ari Berman: “It’s been the mission of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to roll back things like the Voting Rights Act for 30 or 40 years.”

AB: I think it’s going to be a lot easier for states to discriminate against voters of color, to pass voting laws and redistricting maps that roll back protections for all voters. And so you’re going to see states enact new restrictions on voting. You’re going to see them enact more egregious gerrymanders.

They could very well roll back districts that are represented by Blacks or Latinos, that have been protected for 50 or 60 years. And it’s going to be reminiscent of things that were done in the pre–Voting Rights Act era, when you had widespread disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. I don’t think we’re going to go back to those days, but we’re going to go back to days when the federal courts, the federal government, they really didn’t have any checks on what states could or couldn’t do. And that’s why you had poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses and all-white primaries and all of those things.

And I think it’s been the mission of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to roll back things like the Voting Rights Act for 30 or 40 years. John Roberts, for example, the chief justice, has been trying to weaken the Voting Rights Act since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department.

So this is not a new fight for them, and they’ve been aggressive in doing this, in a series of phases. Every time they strike down one part of the Voting Rights Act, they say, “Oh, well, this other part’s left,” and then they go after that part. “Well, this part’s left,” and now it’s becoming a situation where there’s almost nothing left, and the almost nothing is on the verge of becoming nothing. And I think it’s going to be a very sad day for American democracy, if and when that happens.

JJ: Well, yeah, because as you point out, it’s been John Roberts’ mission over years. And it’s always been, and this is part of a bigger picture of the public opinion argument, it’s always been, “Well, we have bans on racial discrimination. We have laws against that. We’re not touching them. We’re just greenlighting the discrimination that happens every day in every way by saying any measure you might introduce to fight that is prohibited.” And it’s part of this unspoken, or sometimes spoken, notion that fighting racism against people of color is somehow anti-white; it’s somehow discriminatory against white people to have equity.

Brennan Center (4/5/24)

AB: Exactly, and that’s what happened in the Louisiana redistricting case, which is the one where they could further gut the Voting Rights Act, and perhaps kill it once and for all, where they were going to decide this question of whether Louisiana should have drawn a second majority Black district. That seemed relatively uncontroversial, because the Supreme Court said Alabama should do that. So then Louisiana followed, and then a group of “non-African-American plaintiffs” challenged the map, and basically said it was discriminatory against white people, even though white people controlled every single district in Louisiana except for one.

And really what it is, it’s an effort to redefine the entire battle after the Civil War, and the entire battle of Reconstruction, which was meant to give rights to formerly enslaved people that had been denied for so many years. And now they’re arguing that violates the 14th and 15th amendments, that drawing districts that allow formerly enslaved people to elect the candidates of their choice violates the 14th and 50th amendments. It’s a totally ahistorical argument, but they have done this in a lot of different areas. Now they’re doing the Voting Rights Act.

And so it’s really an attempt, not just to take us back to the pre-Voting Rights era, but in many ways, it’s an attempt to rewrite Reconstruction, to take us back to the pre-Reconstruction era itself.

This is part of a larger project here, that has gone on in a lot of different ways, but the Voting Rights Act has remained a consistent target, because the Voting Rights Act has prevented states that want to discriminate, like Texas, that have tried to discriminate over a 60-year period. It has been very effective until recently at preventing them from doing so.

JJ: I wish folks would see it or understand it as part of that larger picture. If you’re used to superiority, then equity is a downgrade, right? And that’s a larger conversation that we have to have societally.

But on voting rights, I feel like everyone, including media, but everyone should understand that this is tied to every issue you care about. If you don’t want the US to fund genocide in Gaza, for example, well, you should be able to vote in politicians that reflect that view, particularly when it is a widely shared view. I do understand the exhaustion with electoral politics, but I think that’s because it doesn’t deliver, and I worry that some folks have abandoned the field.

AB: For sure, and I think this kind of thing, politicians predetermining election outcomes, is the very kind of thing that breeds more distrust in the political process, and distrust in institutions, and then they disconnect from the political process of institutions altogether.

I would totally understand why people say, “Hey, why should we vote if elections are predetermined. What’s the point?” I hope that people don’t take that away, but I certainly think that may be part of why they’re doing this.

As you said, this is part of the bigger fight, but what I worry about is that the fight over redistricting in Texas is thought of as, “Oh, this is just politics,” right? And then if Democrats respond, they’ll say, “Oh, the Democrats are just doing it too. This is just a political fight between Texas and California,” without acknowledging, first off, the Republicans started this fight, and they’ve been much more aggressive about gerrymandering than the Democrats.

But even leave that aside, this is about a bigger project to repeal 60 years of the Voting Rights Act, and an even bigger project than that, to repeal, essentially, what happened during Reconstruction, and the fact that equality was written into the Constitution. This is much bigger than just a political skirmish. And so I think that it’s important to have that context, because that context is often what’s missing when this conversation happens. And to understand this is part of a larger authoritarian playbook that is being used by the president, to essentially turn representative democracy into something that only benefits him or his party, and to weaponize every aspect of the federal government, and now, by extension, every aspect of state government, to try to protect Trump, or to try to protect the interests that protect Trump.

Guardian (8/15/25)

JJ: Let’s talk about fightback. Legislatively, I see this John Lewis Voting Rights Act. What else is afoot? Because, obviously, this is not going unnoticed, but the question is, what tools do we have in hand? So what do you see, first of all maybe at the legislative level, but what do you see in terms of resistance?

AB: The thing that worries me is that the resistance is basically Democrats saying, “Well, we’re going to gerrymander too.” And I totally understand why they’re doing it, because it’s unfair for one party to play by one set of rules and the other party to play by a different set of rules. But ultimately, a race to the bottom for gerrymandering, the people that are going to suffer are the voters themselves.

And so I think what has to happen is what happened previously, which is Democrats tried to pass federal legislation that would ban this kind of partisan gerrymandering. They almost succeeded in doing so in 2021, 2022, with the Freedom to Vote Act. Everyone but three Democrats supported it, every Republican opposed it.

And this is a case in point of why we need federal legislation, because right now, if one state does something, other states tend to follow along. You also have Florida and Ohio and Missouri and Indiana saying they might do this kind of gerrymandering, along with Texas, and you have other states, like California and New York and Illinois, saying, “Well, we’re going to fight back. We’re going to do our own kind of gerrymandering.” And that’s the exact situation that Democrats wanted to prevent from happening.

So I think we definitely need new federal legislation, but this is not going to be a short-term fix. I mean, no legislation is going to be passed as long as Trump is president. You’re going to have a conservative Supreme Court that will weigh in on the legality of whatever Congress does. So we need a broader, longer-term strategy here for how to pass legislation, how to change the course, and how to get public consciousness to rise on this issue.

I think one of the things that’s been good about Texas is it’s attracting a lot of attention from people who are angry about gerrymandering and saying, “What can we do about the problem?” But the solution can’t just be more gerrymandering to counteract gerrymandering. That is, ultimately, not going to be a long-term solution that is good for Democrats or good for democracy.

JJ: Big picture, I also worry that what people think we need to “get back to,” as though there were some halcyon days of democracy, is a fuzzy and flawed image. And then we really need the energy that it takes to think about what we can move forward to, what we can create, the idea that’s so liberating and inspiring to many of us, and then more of us who don’t have a choice, the present is just untenable.

But I worry that there’s a huge admixture of people who think, “Ugh, meetings? Can’t I just push a button and fix it?” But there’s no GoFundMe for democratic aspirations. We have to do more.

AB: For sure. Some of these things, there’s a short-term and a long-term component. And the short-term component is obviously organizing resistance elections. And the longer-term component is changing some of these institutional structures, whether it’s laws that are passed by Congress or the composition of the courts or things like that. And that’s a longer-term fight.

And I think sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in resisting whatever Trump does in a given day, which just can be so overwhelming, it’s easy to lose track of that longer-term picture. Which gets back to this original conversation of, how do we end up like this in the first place?

JJ: Right. Well, here’s my final, last question. What would you like to see news media do more of, or do less of, in their coverage of this set of issues?

AB: I think covering the larger context is really important. This fight over gerrymandering did not begin this summer; there’s much deeper roots to it. And then again, just not both-sidesing the issue, not making false equivalence that, “OK, well, Texas is doing it and now California is doing it. So this is just how politics works.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024)

And this is a deeply abnormal fight. It’s deeply abnormal to have mid-decade gerrymandering. It’s deeply abnormal to have the president push for that kind of gerrymandering. It’s deeply abnormal that the Supreme Court is on the verge of gutting the crowning achievement of the Voting Rights Act.

None of this is normal, and Democrats have been put in an unenviable position, which Trump often does to people, of having to play in the gutter. But, ultimately, this is part of the broader Republican authoritarian takeover. And I would like to see that larger, that bigger picture, present in more of the stories about this.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter and author Ari Berman. You can find his work at MotherJones.com. The latest book is Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. It’s out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thanks so much, Janine.

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

Media in Hiding From the Most Urgent Questions of the Day

Common Dreams (8/12/25) noted that “many Americans are persuaded by persistent claims that crime is rising, even when they are not.”

Trump has commandeered Washington, DC, putting National Guard and local police in the streets because DC is not a state, and so it’s the only place he could take over in this way. He’s brandishing a patently false pretense that the district is facing a crime crisis. The reality—and we do remember reality, right?—is that Washington, DC, has its lowest violent crime rate in 30 years.

Stephen Prager at Common Dreams (8/12/25) pulled more stats together: Los Angeles’s Police Department says violent crime of all sorts there is on the decline, with the city looking at the lowest number of killings in 60 years. Baltimore has a historically low homicide rate, down 28% from last year, violent crime down by 17%, property crime down by 13%. Chicago has fewer homicides than in any year in the past decade, a 30% decline in shootings and homicides from last year. And New York has experienced the lowest number of murders in recorded history.

So how do you explain this to people? Well, if you’re the Associated Press (8/12/25), you lead with dryly stating that Trump

has taken control of DC’s law enforcement and ordered National Guard troops to deploy onto the streets of the nation’s capital, arguing the extraordinary moves are necessary to curb an urgent public safety crisis.

Even while critiquing Trump’s rhetoric (“Conservatives have for generations used denigrating language to describe the condition of major cities”), AP (8/12/25) allows that rhetoric to frame the reality. (Trump says “the extraordinary moves are necessary to curb an urgent public safety crisis.”)

The very next sentence read:

Even as district officials questioned the claims underlying his emergency declaration, the Republican president promised a “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”

So you relegate reality to a dependent clause, and then recite the inflammatory hysteria word for word.

If you, like AP, are respectable corporate media, responsible for explaining the situation to people, you further note:

According to White House officials, troops will be deployed to protect federal assets and facilitate a safe environment for law enforcement to make arrests. The Trump administration believes the highly visible presence of law enforcement will deter violent crime. It is unclear how the administration defines providing a safe environment for law enforcement to conduct arrests, raising alarm bells for some advocates.

So you get that, independent reporters under fascism? Lead with White House officials, and recite the claim that they’re “facilitating a safe environment for law enforcement to make arrests.” That sounds very calm, very measured, and you’re not even asking, “What arrests?” The brown children snatched off the street by goons who won’t show their ID? Those are the arrests that need a safe environment?

And, OK, alarm bells are being raised for “some advocates”? Advocates of what? Democracy, due process, human decency? Why aren’t those alarmed advocates in the lead paragraph?

When Stephen Miller (X, 8/12/25) asserts that “the real rates of crime” in big cities are “orders of magnitude higher,” he’s claiming that rather than having 187 murders last year, DC really had more than 18,000.

Corporate media are calling this kind of thing reporting, but reporting would keep at least one foot on the facts. So when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (X, 8/12/25) tweets that “crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” would a press corps worth its salt say “some advocates dispute that,” or would they show all the actual real-world data?

Ideally, the blathering of a man who thinks that “the real rates of crime, chaos and dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher than that” might be met with questions about, for one thing, whether he knows what “orders of magnitude” means, but also, where is he looking for these official rates of “chaos and dysfunction”?

But the press corps we have are engaged, like the New York Times, in hiding from the most urgent questions of the day. Faced, for example, with Israel’s deliberate, acknowledged, intentional starvation of Palestinians and occupied territories, the Times musters itself to a story (7/20/25) about how the question of whether that’s happening at all is “dividing Jewish Americans.”

Nowhere does this news report say that international rights groups and statements from the Israeli leadership themselves say that, yes, starvation is happening, on purpose; for the paper’s readers, “yes” and “no” are equally credible alternatives. Elite journalists, faced with historically horrific crimes, seem to define their job as pretending not to know what’s going on. Reality evidently needs to be balanced with falsehoods.

What’s going on, as readers will know, is that, for example, the team of Al Jazeera reporters working from Gaza have all been killed. Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, along with cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, were all killed in an Israeli strike targeting their marked news media tent in Gaza City. All of which is simply to say, look up independent news sources for information, now more than ever.

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

Ari Berman on Voting Rights Erasure

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Mother Jones (8/6/25)

This week on CounterSpin: In July last year, CounterSpin recalled a statement from Donald Trump on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded—meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people—if voting were made more widely accessible, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Many of us wondered at the time why news media wouldn’t call that out as anti-democratic, and talk up the multivocal, multiregional, multiracial democracy we’ve always said we’re aspiring to.

But here we are, dealing with the fallout of, among many things, that news media failure—now including the possible erasure of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We talk about that with him this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Trump’s DC occupation and starvation in Gaza.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
August 14, 2025

Trump Occupying DC: WaPo Used to Be Disgusted

The Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher (8/12/25) envisions “a a scenario in which [Trump’s] dramatic takeover of the nation’s capital and his pronouncement that he will miraculously put an end to its crime might be greeted with more hope than skepticism or outrage.”
President Donald Trump has now put troops on the District of Columbia’s streets in both of his terms. This time around, the Washington Post is less alarmed.

In addition to calling up 800 DC National Guard troops—which Trump can do because DC isn’t a state—he also seized control of DC’s police force in the name of a “crime emergency,” despite the city experiencing its lowest violent crime rate in 30 years.

With DC’s self-governance under threat, the city’s paper of record is positioned to play a critical role. Right off the bat, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher sounded the alarm about Trump’s actions, telling the New Yorker (8/11/25), “This is troops-in-the-streets, shades-of-authoritarian-rule bad.”

The next day, however, Fisher sounded like a different person in his Post column (8/12/25). Trump was transformed from authoritarian to astute-but-flawed leader; despite his “uncanny knack for identifying the problems that really bother voters,” Trump rarely translates that “into helpful solutions.” Regarding DC crime—Trump’s justification for his power grab—Fisher wrote that Trump

instinctively understands that the city feels unsafe, that the now-common sight of teens riding presumably stolen ATVs down DC’s grand avenues, popping wheelies and taunting motorists; the ubiquity of shoplifters…and the horror stories about violent carjackings—all this makes residents feel disrespected and unprotected.

‘A major problem’

Megan McCardle (Washington Post, 8/12/25) said DC had “a massive 32% drop from the 273 people who were killed in 2023, but that probably wasn’t much comfort to those 187 people or their grieving families.”

In a matter of 24 hours, Fisher went from condemning Trump’s authoritarianism to almost welcoming it. The latter position puts him in good stead with fellow Washington Post columnists—who’ve been told to “communicate with optimism about this country” or take a generous buyout. (Unprecedented numbers have done the latter.)

“I’m afraid [Trump] is right that in DC, crime and disorder are a major problem,” Megan McArdle (8/12/25) wrote. “The problem isn’t as big as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, ‘somewhat less of a problem than it was’ is not really very good news.” McArdle concluded with a lecture for activists: “Those who are opposed to Trump’s recent moves should argue not that they constitute incipient fascism, but that they aren’t a real solution.”

Also weighing in was the Post editorial page, now headed by 33-year-old opinion editor Adam O’Neal, who has promised his section will be “unapologetically patriotic.”

“President Donald Trump is putting on quite the show,” read the opening of a Post editorial (8/11/25), which said Trump placing “armed troops on the streets of DC will probably have limited value.” So, some value.

The Post editorial seemed to provide Trump with precedent for militarizing DC, noting that while the US has historically had “clear distinctions between the police and the military,” many European countries haven’t. (Not always for the better, as I recall).

Regarding Trump’s false claim of a DC crime wave, the Post equivocated, saying, “Whether a genuine emergency exists is up for debate.”

This bothsidesism bled into the Post’s (8/13/25) reporting, which quoted Trump’s false attack on DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, then discounted her factual response about DC violent crime being at a 30-year low:

“She’s been here for many years and the numbers are worse than they ever were,”[Trump] said, dismissing data DC officials have been citing.

The Post’s August 11 editorial concluded by assuring District residents that Trump’s moves were just politics as usual: “However unpopular he might be in the deep-blue District, Trump is trying to deliver on the law-and-order message of his presidential campaign.”

‘A mouthpiece for Trump’

In a Washington Post op-ed (8/12/25), US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said the need for tougher laws was demonstrated by the case of a defendant given probation under the Youth Rehabilitation Act after shooting someone (nonfatally) on a bus. Pirro linked to a news report that described the shooting victim as “harassing” the defendant on video “in the minutes before the shooting, as the defendant appeared to try avoiding confrontation.”

On the heels of this editorial, O’Neal, the opinions editor, published and gave top billing to an op-ed (8/12/25) by Trump’s handpicked US attorney for DC, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. In portraying DC as crime-infested, Pirro offered justification for Trump’s takeover.

“While not quite as incendiary as Tom Cotton’s infamous New York Times op-ed calling to ‘send in the troops,’ [Pirro’s op-ed’s] timing and framing were jarring for a paper that still claims ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ wrote Status’s Oliver Darcy (8/13/25).

Under prior opinions chiefs, editorials like this wouldn’t have seen the light of day, according to a former Post opinion editor, who told Status, “They are turning the Post into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration.”

The Post’s subtle support for Trump’s DC crime narrative even extended into the Letters to the Editor (8/12/25), which were published under the Trump-echoing headline “Making DC Safe Again.”

Departure from first term

The Washington Post’s acquiescence to Trump’s power grab is just the latest favor the president has received from the Jeff Bezos–owned paper (FAIR.org, 2/28/25). In addition to spiking the paper’s intended endorsement of Trump opponent Kamala Harris and showing up as a guest of honor at his second inauguration, Bezos and the company he founded, Amazon, have lavished tens of millions of dollars on Trump and his family. Meanwhile, Amazon and Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, continue to rake in billions in federal contracts (Financial Times, 3/20/25).

The Washington Post editorial board (6/2/20) had a very different tone when Trump sent National Guard troops to DC in 2020: “In enabling his incitement, Mr. Trump’s aides are helping him to push the country closer not to order but to anarchy.”

The close partnership between Bezos and Trump marks a departure from Trump’s first term, when Bezos stood up to the president, as did his paper’s opinion page. When Trump put troops on DC’s streets in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, a Washington Post editorial headline (6/2/20) read, “Trump’s Threats to Deploy Troops Move America Closer to Anarchy.”

The next day, the Post’s Philip Kennicott (6/3/20) noted how the Guard “looked like outsiders, like a colonial force” on DC’s streets. A Post op-ed (6/8/20) by Benjamin Haas and Kori Schake read:

The image of soldiers controlling America’s streets and engaging in law enforcement activity is evocative of the conduct of authoritarian countries from whom the United States takes pride in maintaining a distinction.

Trump’s justification for his “palace guard” was nothing more than “cynical hyperbole,” stated a Post editorial (6/2/20).

Also, back in 2020, Post columnist Colbert King (6/7/20) found the nature of Trump’s actions clear:

Trump’s views of African Americans match the spirit of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s observation in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that the black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

A ‘federal coup’

National Urban League president Marc Morial (NBC, 8/12/25): “This is trying to…in effect, create a de facto police state in these cities.”

What’s happening today is no less authoritarian or racist.

At his 80-minute news conference in the White House briefing room Monday, Trump claimed DC had become a hellscape “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.” And he told law enforcement to “do whatever the hell they want” with suspected wrongdoers in DC, even “knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand.”

In addition to DC, Trump singled out as crime-ridden the cities of “Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Oakland—all of which have Black mayors and large minority populations that overwhelmingly voted against him in his three presidential runs,” Politico (8/12/25) reported.

Amid this backdrop, NAACP President Derrick Johnson (NBC News, 8/12/25) called what’s happening in DC a “federal coup.”

No such critique can be found in the Post, at least not this time around.

You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com (or via Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com).

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread on FAIR.org.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 14, 2025

‘People Don’t Know the Deep Inequities Baked Into the Tipped Wage’: CounterSpin interview with Raeghn Draper on tipped workers

Janine Jackson interviewed the CHAAD Project’s Raeghn Draper about tipped workers for the August 8, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin (11/27/15)

Janine Jackson: When CounterSpin spoke with Saru Jayaraman in 2015, she described the subminimum or tipped wage as something most people outside restaurant and hospitality work know almost nothing about, including legislators. The tipped wage at that time was $2.13 an hour. Now, 10 years later, the tipped wage is…$2.13 an hour.

But some things are changing, including increasing public understanding of the wrongness of a system that forces service workers to rely on customers’ whims and bosses’ greed, and the growing number of workers rising in resistance.

Our guest is part of that work. Raeghn Draper is co-founder and executive director of the CHAAD Project, created by and for hospitality workers in Chicago to advance accountability and end labor abuses in the industry. They join us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Raeghn Draper.

Raeghn Draper: Thanks for having me.

JJ: I feel as though almost everyone knows, or is, someone who has worked restaurant/hospitality, but if you don’t have that knowledge, you might be confused by the official description of the tipped wage, which says

an employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 cents per hour in direct wages if that amount, combined with the tips received, at least equals the federal minimum wage.

So for many people, that might sound like, “Well, at the end of the day, everyone ends up with the federal minimum wage,” whatever you think about that. But if it were just a minimum wage issue, which is of course an important fight, the resistance wouldn’t look the way that it does.

And so I wonder, what are some of the particulars that people, including people who eat at restaurants a lot, might not know about?

RD: I think what people don’t know about when they think of the tipped wage is the deep inequities that are baked into the tipped wage. So while the idea is that tips will bring those workers up to the minimum wage, it is far too common that that is not the case.

We find that places that have tipped workers are more likely to experience wage theft. There’s deep racial inequity in the tipping system, with white men getting tipped at higher rates than Black women, for example.

There’s higher rates of sexual harassment and sexual assault when the tipped wage is involved, because of the power dynamics, both with guests and with employers. So workers aren’t able to set boundaries that they might be able to in places where their wage doesn’t depend on their behavior and how well they perform.

So outside of how much money you make with the tipped wage wage, there’s still these deep inequities that come with it.

Jacobin (7/30/25)

JJ: I appreciate that. I would refer folks to the Saru Jayaraman conversation, which gets into some of the history, and the racial and gender inequities that you’re talking about, and it’s deep, and it’s a long story. But I really want to focus on the present and the future, as much as the past is involved there.

Your recent piece for Jacobin describes what happens when not just restaurant hospitality workers, but everybody who understands and objects to this two-tiered wage system, when they say, “OK, we want to abolish it”—so talk us through a little bit what happened in DC, because voters spoke, right?

RD: Yeah, voters spoke actually twice in DC, wanting to abolish the subminimum tipped wage. I’m based in Chicago, that’s where my labor work is. And I started looking into what’s happening in DC because in 2023, the Chicago City Council implemented the One Fair Wage ordinance, which will phase out the subminimum tipped wage, which we viewed as a victory for workers.

Axios (6/27/25)

There has been pushback, both from the National Restaurant Association and from our local chapter, the Illinois Restaurant Association and their partners, and from prominent restaurant owners, CEOs and large groups. We even had an alderperson of the 44th ward, Bennett Lawson, introduce a new ordinance that would pause the ordinance that was put in place in 2023.

All of this is very concerning to me, so I started digging into what is happening in other states. There are states who have implemented the One Fair Wage across the state, but what was happening in Chicago was, because of the fight in DC, the NRA, the Illinois Restaurant Association, the large restaurant groups and owners, were using DC as a talking point to show that the One Fair Wage is failing. They were pointing to the fight that has happened in city council there to show how it’s harming restaurants, and that the city doesn’t actually want this, and the restaurant community doesn’t actually want this, and so we need to reverse this harmful ordinance, otherwise our industry will collapse.

And so that’s why I started digging into what’s happening in DC, because it kept being used as an example. And as I dug deeper into the facts or the data points that were used, something that their local chapter, the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, was using was this 44% number. They kept saying, over and over, that 44% of full-service restaurants expect to close or are likely to close by the end of 2025.

And I went down this deep rabbit hole, very long Google doc of research and links and circling around the internet. But at the end of the day, what I found was they polled what looks to be their members—so restaurants who are bought into their organization—they polled those, and just put them on a scale of how likely do you think you’re going to remain open. The vast majority said somewhat likely, a smaller percentage said very likely. And they pulled this number together to be the 44% that they then used as their leading campaign number, to really spearhead their arguments.

They also threw around the number of closures that had happened in most recent years, specifically in 2024, I believe they were looking at, I think it was 53 closures that they said was the fault of raising the wages. But again, as I dug into the internet, and went through all these loopholes, I found that a very small percentage, probably about three to five of those 53 restaurants that closed last year, said part of their reasoning was because of wages. Some of them weren’t even using tipped labor. A large portion of them said that high rates of rent and disagreements with landlords was why they were closing, or even just moving locations.

Raeghn Draper: “All of the outlets that were covering this issue…they were quoting the Illinois Restaurant Association. They weren’t quoting workers.”

But still, this is the image that was painted in DC, and that narrative was coming over to Chicago. It also was really upsetting to me that, if you dig a little bit deeper, it isn’t so black and white as they painted it. Not only were the numbers that they were using faulty, DC produced their own independent report on the state of the DC restaurant industry, and they found it was doing relatively healthy, stable numbers, restaurants closed but also restaurants open. There was no dramatic loss in jobs. Pay was increasing, overall a pretty stable industry. But again, that wasn’t the story that these large restaurant groups were sharing, which is very disturbing to me, because these were the most vocal in all of the pieces that I read.

And all of the outlets that were covering this issue, they were quoting the RAMW, they were quoting the NRA, they were quoting the Illinois Restaurant Association. They weren’t quoting workers. They weren’t asking workers what they thought about the higher wages, which I thought was very disturbing, because who does this ordinance most impact? I feel like it’s workers, it’s our wages, it’s our paychecks, but they were effectively silenced. So that’s what kind of led me through writing this piece.

JJ: Absolutely. And one of the big beefs with corporate media is precisely this maneuver, where they indicate that there’s something that sounds good, you know, raising wages for workers, but then, “Oh, it’s not actually good, even for the people pushing it, even for the workers themselves, because they just don’t understand the bigger picture,” which is this mythology around, “They think they want higher wages, but then the restaurants are going to close, and they won’t get any wages.” And it’s this simplistic patronizing picture.

What I love is that fewer and fewer people are buying it, frankly. But I feel like that is what media are selling, is both a workers vs. consumers view, but also an idea that somehow there’s a way that getting higher wages for workers is going to be bad for workers. It should be a hard line to sell, but corporate media help them sell it.

RD: Absolutely. I think that is happening, not just in the restaurant industry, but across our country, pitting workers against what is actually going to benefit them. I think we saw that with the Big Beautiful Bill: absolutely detrimental to all working class and low-income folks across the nation, but presented as a win for workers with the tax on tips being slipped in there.

And I think we see that with a lot of these policies and legislation that are painted as a win for workers. We will give you this little carrot, but we’re actually going to strip autonomy and power away from you in the long term. And I do believe that people are waking up to it, and they’re tired of being fed crumbs.

JJ: Well, I should have ended there, but I do want to point out that in your Jacobin piece, you make clear that the storyline is not working out, in the sense that those places that do have the One Fair Wage, they’re not showing these horrible effects. So it’s not just a narrative, there’s also a reality that doesn’t match up to what they’re trying to warn people about.

RD: Absolutely. And it doesn’t exist in any of their arguments. When these groups want to talk about the harm that raising wages will do to the industry, they don’t want to look at states that have implemented One Fair Wage, and have abolished the two-tier tip system. They’re completely erased from the argument in the narrative, which just goes to show, they’re not about workers. They’re not really about the overall health of the restaurant industry. They’re about consolidating their power, and keeping themselves on top. And the two-tiered system works for them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Raeghn Draper, co-founder and executive director of the CHAAD Project. That’s Chad with two A’s, TheCHAADProject.org. Raeghn Draper, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RD: Thank you.

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

AI Job Loss Hype Could Serve as Smokescreen for Trump Recession
Layoffs are scary. They are also rampant. Over the last 25 years, somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2 million people lost their jobs in a typical month as a result of being laid off or fired.

Such a high level of layoffs means that there are literally always a stunning number of anecdotes about job losses. Even in a month of strong job growth and rising wages, the media could easily churn out hundreds of articles detailing the woes of recently let-go individuals.

As a result, when a major change threatens to reshape the jobs landscape, there’s no shortage of layoffs to point to as evidence for concern. Encouraged by such anecdotal data, corporate media outlets have at times let false or exaggerated narratives spiral out of control.

‘AI job apocalypse’

John Yang (PBS News Weekend, 6/7/25) said of the college class of 2025, “One of the challenges they’re facing is artificial intelligence, which is increasingly doing tasks that used to be assigned to entry level workers.”

Take the case of recent media coverage of artificial intelligence. Starting a few months back, corporate media picked up on a new narrative: AI is coming for the jobs of new college graduates.

The starting point for this narrative was the observation that the unemployment rate for new college graduates had jumped to an “unusually high” level of 5.8% in April (Atlantic, 4/30/25). This was odd, given that unemployment for all workers sat at about 4%, and historically—at least up until the last few years—new grads have faced lower unemployment than workers overall.

Over the next several months, corporate media outlets ran with the narrative that AI could be wrecking the job market for new grads:
- Will AI Wipe Out the First Rung of the Career Ladder? (Guardian, 6/3/25)
- AI Risks ‘Broken’ Career Ladder for College Graduates, Some Experts Say (ABC, 6/6/25)
- How AI May Be Robbing New College Graduates of Traditional Entry-Level Jobs (PBS, 6/7/25)
- College Grad Unemployment Surges as Employers Replace New Hires With AI (CBS, 7/5/25)
One particularly sensational headline came from the New York Times (5/30/25): “For Some Recent Graduates, the AI Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here.” In the midst of anecdotes and speculation, the piece relayed a prediction by a top AI CEO “that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.”

This claim originally appeared in an Axios article (5/28/25) published in May, which noted:

Even those who are optimistic AI will unleash unthinkable cures and unimaginable economic growth fear dangerous short-term pain—and a possible job bloodbath during Trump’s term.

The Axios piece devoted little space to criticism of this viewpoint, instead preferring to highlight reasons why it could be correct. Warning that massive job loss could be right around the corner, the piece observed that we are already “starting to see even big, profitable companies pull back,” citing layoffs at companies like Microsoft and Walmart.

Layoffs in the low thousands at specific companies are not proof of a jobs crisis, though. More importantly, they are not strong proof of an AI-driven jobs crisis: Even if jobs are being eliminated, the question remains, how much of a role has AI played?

Distracting from Trump effects

Noah Smith (Noahpinion, 7/20/25): “Americans…tend to jump at any shred of evidence that AI is killing jobs, or turning society into a feudal hellscape.”

As it turns out, probably not all that significant of a role. Noah Smith (Noahpinion, 7/20/25) catalogued the evolution of the evidence on this question in a useful article from mid-July. As he pointed out, the deterioration of the new grad unemployment rate relative to overall unemployment began before the introduction of ChatGPT. In fact, you can trace it back to the early 2010s.

Other complicating factors for the AI-driven jobs crisis narrative include:
- Unemployment has risen for male new college grads lately, but it has actually fallen for female new college grads (Financial Times, 7/18/25).
- Hiring for new college grads in the tech sector, a sector believed to be highly exposed to AI, has picked up since late 2024 (Financial Times, 7/18/25).
- New grad male unemployment is concentrated in construction, and it is down in “office and administrative support” jobs, which we would assume to be at higher risk of replacement by AI (Noahpinion, 7/20/25).
- More broadly, jobs that appear more vulnerable to AI takeover “have not been more likely to shed young workers since ChatGPT launched” than other jobs (Financial Times, 7/24/25).
- The unemployment rate for new grads has fallen back down to 4.8% as of June, whereas the overall unemployment rate has remained stable and the unemployment rate for all young workers has ticked up.
As Smith concluded:

Overall, the preponderance of evidence seems to be very strongly against the notion that AI is killing jobs for new college graduates, or for tech workers, or for…well, anyone, really…. And to be honest, this is a black mark for econ and tech journalists, who should have been far more skeptical of the story they were broadcasting to the world.

Now, Smith may be overstating his case against AI as a disruptive force in the labor market. It’s certainly plausible that AI may be having some impact—relatively high unemployment for recent grads who majored in computer science is not definitive proof of AI stealing jobs, but a pick-up in tech hiring is likewise not proof that AI has had no effect. And it would be wise to avoid sweeping statements about the lack of effect of AI on the labor market given the recent release of large revisions to jobs numbers for the past several months—such revisions could reveal an AI impact, though that’s far from guaranteed.

What’s clear is that corporate media outlets overplayed their hand on this story. Based on scant evidence, corporate outlets over the last few months spun a narrative about AI essentially single-handedly tanking the job market for new college grads. Other factors, such as tariff increases and federal jobs cuts, were downplayed in favor of a narrow story about AI. One consequence has been to distract from the negative effects of Trump administration policies, which top economists agree have been far more important than AI in driving down entry-level hiring.

‘Basic laws of economics’

Inc. (6/24/24) confidently declared that “the high-profile California restaurant shutdowns are the most visible consequence of a law that lifted the fast-food employee minimum wage to a $20 an hour.”

Artificial intelligence, though, is not the only, or the most significant, area in which the media has misleadingly fearmongered about job loss lately. Corporate outlets have also fanned the flames of fear about a recent minimum wage hike in California, a policy that has meaningfully improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers.

This policy change applied specifically to fast-food workers at chains with at least 60 locations nationally, and was implemented in April 2024. It raised the minimum wage from $16 to $20 for this set of workers, spurring massive wage gains; a recent paper estimates a wage bump in the range of 8% for California fast-food employees as a result of this policy.

Even prior to the implementation of the wage hike, corporate media outlets were prepping the public for catastrophe (FAIR.org, 1/19/24), offering news consumers headlines like “As New Minimum Wages Are Ushered In, Companies Fight Back With Fees and Layoffs” (CBS, 12/27/23). As the wage increase went into effect, corporate media continued their campaign of fear:
- California Just Hiked Minimum Wage for Fast Food Workers. Some Restaurants Are Replacing Them With Kiosks (CNN, 4/11/24)
- California Fast Food Restaurants Have Cut 10,000 Jobs Thanks to State’s $20 Minimum Wage: Trade Group (New York Post, 6/6/24)
- Fast-Food Wage Hike Laws Blamed for Closures and Job Cuts (Inc., 6/24/24)
More recently, the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have each run editorials blaming the minimum wage hike for significant job loss while smugly claiming victory for the basic laws of economics. At the Post (8/1/25), the board began its piece:

Demand curves slope downward. That is economist-speak for stating that when the price of something goes up, people buy less of it…. Nevertheless, voters and states keep trying to get away with defying the gravitational laws of supply and demand.

The Washington Post (8/1/25), whose billionaire owner Jeff Bezos recently decreed that its opinion pages would be monotonally lobbying for “free markets,” said that minimum wage increases “def[ied] the gravitational laws of supply and demand.”
The Journal (7/21/25) took a similar line:

There’s no such thing as a free fast-food lunch. Last year California super-sized its minimum wage to $20 an hour for employees at big quick-serve restaurant chains, and new research confirms that Sacramento did not repeal the basic laws of economics. According to the study, California only months later had 18,000 fewer fast-food jobs than if the law had never passed.

Each editorial rested its case on findings from a single study published in July. But that is not the only study that has been published on the topic. In fact, two other major studies looking at the effects of the California minimum wage increase have been published in recent months. One found a roughly neutral effect on employment, and the other found a small positive effect. As the progressive economist Ben Zipperer summarized, “The average estimate across studies suggests the policy had essentially no employment effect.”

These findings, contrary to the sermonizing of the Post and the Journal, are entirely compatible with basic economic theory of the sort taught in an introductory economics class. Under a simple model taught in Econ 101 in which employers have some market power to set wages, for example, a properly sized minimum wage increase would increase both wages and employment.

None of this context is provided by the editorial boards at the Post and the Journal, who, it appears, have little time for such things as nuance and accuracy—let alone empathy for workers trying to survive on either $16 or $20 an hour.

‘Not-so-happy meal’

“While the [higher minimum wage] policy has helped some in the workforce, some owners face a different picture,” CNN (5/2/25) reported, citing a “40-year-old family business”—which turns out to be a chain of 24 McDonald’s franchises.
Unfortunately, these boards have been matched in their shoddy handling of evidence by reporters at outlets like the New York Times and CNN.

Back in May, CNN (5/2/25) published an article headlined “One Year In, California’s Fast Food Wage Hike Brings Higher Pay, Debatable Job Numbers”:

One year later, the initial impact is a mixed bag. Economists are divided over the effect on employment. Workers do earn more, but many complain their hours have been cut. Fast food restaurant owners tell CNN they have been trimming employee hours and instituting hiring freezes to offset the cost of higher wages.

The article was peppered with anecdotes about the negative effects of the wage hike. It opened with a worker whose wage had increased as a result of the minimum wage change, but whose hours had been cut. The next worker quoted also saw a cut to his weekly hours, leading CNN to warn: “He’s not alone. Some workers tell CNN they now work fewer hours.”

The piece ended with a section titled “A not-so-happy meal,” which centered around the story of a woman struggling to keep her family business afloat—the family business being running a couple dozen McDonald’s locations. CNN reported:

Harper-Howie says sales growth has declined in every single McDonald’s location they own since the FAST Act went into effect—something that has never occurred in the family’s four decades in the industry.

As a result of lower sales, Harper-Howie says they’ve streamlined job duties for employees and cut about 170,000 labor hours. She hasn’t laid anyone off, but just lifted a hiring freeze that was in place for the past year.

In other words, in one anecdote about one family that runs 24 McDonald’s locations, CNN linked the minimum wage hike to lower sales, reduced hours and a hiring freeze. Scary!

Meanwhile, academic research looking at workers who were employed at fast-food restaurants prior to the policy change has found “that the mandated increase in hourly wages led to significantly lower turnover and no material reductions in hours worked per week.”

What little academic research CNN cited was framed in a “both sides” manner. Over the course of a few short paragraphs, research from one economist was pitted against research from another economist, with CNN leaving it up to readers to decide whose findings were more convincing.

‘Dueling economists’

The New York Times (8/4/25) debates whether it’s feasible for LA to have a minimum wage that wouldn’t be enough to raise a single-person household out of “low-income” status in LA County.

In a more recent piece, the New York Times (8/4/25) pitted the same two economists against each other, under a section titled “Dueling Economists.” Who are these economists? One is a co-author of one of the three major papers discussed earlier—specifically, the paper that found a roughly neutral effect of the wage hike on employment—while the other put out a short report in March linking the wage hike to job losses in California’s fast-food sector.

The evidence presented by these authors is, simply put, not on the same level. The paper by the first economist is a serious academic analysis of the policy change and its effects that employs modern econometric techniques and takes the problem of controlling for confounding variables seriously.

The other is an amateurish report that compares employment trends in California and the US as a whole, and holds up California’s weak performance relative to the national average as evidence that raising the minimum wage has killed jobs in California’s fast food sector. No attempt is made to control for differences between California and the US as a whole.

Unmentioned by the Times is the second report’s academic sponsor, the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, which is identified on the report’s second page as

one of America’s few graduate public policy schools rooted in the protection and promotion of America’s founding principles including free markets, limited and responsive government, and moral civic leadership.

Despite all these red flags surrounding the Pepperdine report, the Times gave equal space to it and the other paper, declining not only to adjudicate between the analyses, but to offer basic skepticism of either. The Times also failed to cite the two other major studies that have been published in recent months on the California wage hike, apparently preferring to boost the circulation of a relatively unserious analysis instead.

The more ‘possible job bloodbath’

The Commonwealth Fund (6/23/25) projected that “cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would…would result in the loss of 1.22 million jobs nationwide, equivalent to a 0.8-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate.”

Two important facts get obscured in this sort of coverage of the labor market impact of the minimum wage. First, the fact that every major study has shown that the overall wage increase for fast-food workers swamped any negative employment effect. The gloomiest study suggests that only around a third of the aggregate wage increase spurred by the minimum wage hike was offset by job losses.

And second, the fact that even if the minimum wage hike did lead to a loss of 18,000 jobs, that’s still a small effect. California has over 19 million jobs, and has seen layoffs on the order of 180,000 in recent months. A decline in the statewide unemployment rate of just 0.1 percentage points would entirely offset this high estimate of job loss induced by the rise in the minimum wage.

As in the case of AI coverage, corporate media outlets have essentially chosen to fret about a relatively insignificant factor affecting job availability in the US in their alarmist coverage of the minimum wage hike in California. What actually matters most to employment levels across the country are macroeconomic policies like tariffs and spending cuts. And what corporate outlets effectively do by hyper-fixating on fairly irrelevant factors is distract from these major drivers of job loss.

Unfortunately, it looks like unemployment could become a real issue during the Trump administration. But it seems like that will be because of the administration’s macroeconomic program—especially the tariff increases, whose effects are showing up with a lag—not because of AI or minimum wage increases.

Corporate outlets, however, are already seeding the ground for the Trump administration to blame external factors for poor labor market performance. The AI job loss story, in particular, has the potential to capture the favor of a public already inclined to distrust AI. Outlets like Axios (5/28/25) warning that AI could deliver “a possible job bloodbath during Trump’s term” will make it all the harder to convince people of the much more likely reality a year or two from now: that Trump’s economic policies have tanked the economy.

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

‘DC’s Not Making Money Here, DC Is Paying Billions’: CounterSpin interview with Pete Tucker on DC stadium deal

Janine Jackson interviewed reporter Pete Tucker about the DC stadium deal for the August 8, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Post (7/31/25)

Janine Jackson: As we record on August 4, longtime friend of FAIR and editor at FieldOfSchemes.com Neil deMause reports that the Washington, DC, City Council has voted, as expected, to approve the agreement for a new stadium for NFL team the Washington Commanders.

Yes, this is the deal that Donald Trump weirdly, though not relatively that weird for him, declared he would somehow forbid if the team didn’t change its name back to the Redskins. Well, that doesn’t seem to be happening, but that doesn’t mean typical power dynamics are not at work in securing vast and under-explored public outlays, based on vast and under-explored promises of public gain.

Does a Washington Post editorial opposing the deal mean that the tide is shifting against these sort of subsidies? Or, better said, what would actual public-serving news media, in the face of these “we are a for-profit company, give us your public dollars” deals, look like?

Pete Tucker is a DC area journalist who writes frequently for FAIR, as well as at his own Substack. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Pete Tucker.

Pete Tucker: Thanks so much, Janine.

JJ: Can you tell us, first, about the deal that appears to have been struck? It looks like the Commanders’ owner, Josh Harris, is going to get more than a billion dollars in cash, plus more than $5 billion in free rent and tax breaks. Maybe I am too ignorant to see why this is a special “get” that should make DC taxpayers proud. What happened here with this deal?

Field of Schemes (8/4/25)

PT: First, Janine, I would say that the way the deal is described is that more than a billion tax dollars have been used, I’m glad you mentioned Neil deMause’s Field of Schemes; it’s his website for folks who are dealing with stadium fights, and will be in the near future. It’s a highly readable, excellent breakdown.

And he is one of the few who has relied on economists to look at the deal more in detail. And he’s come up with $6.6 billion, which is an awful lot larger than the mere “more than $1 billion,” which is how the Washington Post is describing this deal.

So, for starters, this is a media story, in the sense that it’s the local publication, and there’s no—even in the sorry state that the Washington Post is, where people are fleeing in droves; there’s real turmoil there—even amid that, the Washington Post is still the big game in town. And at the 11th hour, it did write an editorial in which it said this was corporate welfare, but that was after it backed the deal with its reporting, crucially putting out a poll saying that the majority of residents support this deal, 55%.

But if you look at the poll, it was for an $850 million deal, and you had the mayor saying, “Oh, and we’re gonna make all this money back.” When you look at what Field of Schemes and others have put forward, DC’s not making money here, DC is paying billions to forfeit billions in the future. And we’re doing it for a billionaire, Josh Harris, co-founder of Apollo Management.

Pete Tucker: “All of these dollars are going to a stadium, as opposed to after-school programs, as opposed to shoring up an already hurt safety net.”

And what is so frustrating is that this is being done by an all-Democratic city council and mayor. You know, the Democratic Party is in crisis right now. It is at the lowest point that it’s been in 35 years. And there’s no evidence that the party actually wants to stop and assess where it is. But, my gosh, this certainly presents a good case study.

Democrats are in control here locally, and they have the ability to not be an opposition party, but to set the terms. And, you know, a block and a half away, at Pennsylvania Avenue, President Trump has funded this Big Beautiful Bill, which puts tax breaks that disproportionately go to the wealthy. And he’s funded that in no small part by taking healthcare, in the form of Medicaid, from millions. And Democrats are rightly outraged at that.

And then a block and a half away, at the John A. Wilson building, what is Mayor Muriel Bowser doing, and the DC Council, led by chairman Phil Mendelson, all Democrats? They are taking healthcare, Medicaid, away from thousands, tens of thousands, in order to free up money in a budget that devotes huge amounts to building a stadium for a billionaire.

And the media coverage has been woeful. The opposition party has been, it seems like, more copying what Trump is doing. And, lastly, I would say the media coverage also could say, OK, you want to say “more than a billion”? Or you want to get more into the weeds, and say more like $6.6 billion? But whatever it is, all of these dollars are going to a stadium, as opposed to after-school programs, as opposed to shoring up an already hurt safety net. And that also has been left out of the coverage. And I think if you had an honest poll that did a full accounting for the costs, and these dollars are precious and could be used in other ways, I think you’d have a very different response from District residents.

Politico (7/22/25)

JJ: Absolutely. And it involves—I mean, maybe I always look at media, because I’m a media critic—but the failure of journalists to connect those dots, as you say, that are just a couple of blocks apart from one another, I do think impedes public understanding.

And another thing is, if you oppose the stadium, and you also don’t like slurs against Native Americans, well then, here’s this Politico piece that wants you to know that you are part of the “culture-war intrusion that could upend the deal by prompting a distracting debate.”

So it’s as if there’s two shiny objects: Trump is a racist who wants people to think about something other than whatever horrific thing he’s just done. And then there are leftists or progressives who care about racist icons and trademarks, and, apparently confusingly, also care about the draining of public coffers for profiteering corporations. And it’s as though it’s too confusing a story for a reporter to do. And I guess I have a particular resentment for the idea of journalists who pretend they can’t parse out the way that you can not like the Redskins as a name, and not like Trump, and be opposed to a stadium deal.

Athletic (5/5/25)

PT: Yeah. And if you would’ve divided it into good guys and bad guys, where would Josh Harris fit in this? You know, I have read countless stories about this deal, but you had to go back to a much earlier article that Harris is a major donor, disproportionately Republican, and he’s tight with Trump. In fact, Trump wanted to name him his OMB director in his first term. And Harris’s firm, Apollo, gave a way-outsized loan, as opposed to their normal loan, to Jared Kushner. So he was in and out of the White House before, and indeed, he had a press conference with Trump and Muriel Bowser and Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, about, I think, draft day being in DC, but also talking about the stadium deal.

So if you’re going to bring Trump into the equation, fine. You got to have Josh Harris next to him. They’re friends. That’s what Trump said. Trump wanted him as his OMB director.

It’s amazing how, to get this deal through, suddenly something so basic as their longstanding relationship just goes completely unmentioned. The progressive side, somehow, is to call this the Commanders, not the Redskins, and get this deal done. And where is the opposition party? You know, giving billions to billionaires is, I thought, kind of the Republican thing. And that’s just what the Democrats are doing here in DC.

JJ: To bring it back finally, to journalists, because I have such a gripe on this coverage, with the coverage of the promises, which is copious. We hear what they say they’re going to do, what they say, and then years later, whether that happens, coverage of outcomes, hmm. Not a thing. Like whether it happens or whether it doesn’t, this promise of like, it’s going to bring all these benefits to the community, it’s going to bring all these jobs—it just seems like that follow-up coverage doesn’t happen.

And then the next deal comes up, and we get back to the promises again. And there’s this follow-up piece that doesn’t happen. So, finally, I would just ask you, and I know it would be a long story, but what would you be looking for from local and even national journalists, when they’re talking about this kind of deal?

Greater Greater Washington (7/29/25)

PT: I would ask for more skepticism. And maybe it’s that there’s a lack of expertise, although there really shouldn’t be. But that’s where Neil deMause and Field of Schemes comes in for me, which is just scathing, highly readable.

And there has been some local coverage, at sites like Greater Greater Washington, that have called this into question. Not so much City Paper, whose owner is also a minority owner of the Commanders.

So you have seen some of that, but more of that, just like, look at the numbers; even the DC council’s own budget analysis shows they would make more money, they would get more tax revenue, if they just built housing on the site. This is 180 acres along the river, the Anacostia River, it’s riverfront. It’s the last big parcel of land in the nation’s capital. It is an extraordinary development opportunity. The Commanders have said that this is their spiritual home. It’s where they used to play. It’s where the old RFK stadium is and will be taken down. I mean, just imagine someone with unlimited funds, he’s got over $10 billion, Josh Harris, that’s his net worth.

And the team said this is their spiritual home. You are in a strong bargaining position. You know, if someone came to buy your house, and they’re extremely rich and they say this is their spiritual home, you don’t then hand them bags and bags of money. And yet this is what DC is doing.

And there’s just too few journalists saying, this is not appropriate. This is not the way the government should be operating.

And I think it’s not just journalism, it’s the lack of a spine for the Democratic Party, to be like, this is not the role the government should play in our society. And then you look at why people are like, well, between Trump and these Democrats, we know what Trump thinks. He’s the unvarnished salesman of such an approach to governance.

So it’s really a failure of the media and the lack of an opposition party, and how many kids won’t get the after-school programs, and it’s on the banks of the Anacostia River, and how much could that be cleaned up? And the public good just seems to be such a thing that always gets constricted. And the public purse is just opened up for a billionaire to build a toy, a fancy stadium, in the nation’s capital. And we all should celebrate that.

JJ: I’m going to end on that appropriate note.

We’ve been speaking with reporter Pete Tucker. You can find his work on his Substack, and also some of his work on FAIR.org. Pete Tucker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PT: My pleasure, Janine. Thanks for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 8, 2025

Raeghn Draper on Tipped Workers, Pete Tucker on DC Stadium

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Jacobin, (7/30/25)

This week on CounterSpin: When the Washington, DC, city council voted to gut plans to raise wages for tipped workers, they weren’t just stiff-arming restaurant and hospitality workers; they were overturning the express will of the public, who had voted overwhelmingly, for the second time, to raise those wages. They were telling the electorate: You just don’t matter to us as much as the restaurant lobby. They say no, so we say no. It’s obviously a story about a rigged game that goes well beyond restaurant workers, but it’s also a story about restaurant workers, and how elite news media serve as frictionless transmitters for this weird worldview that it’s appropriate for overwhelmingly women and people of color to have to please and appease patrons in order to survive.

We’ll hear from worker advocate Raeghn Draper from the CHAAD Project; their recent piece about the rise-up of efforts for a better wage system for restaurant workers appears in Jacobin magazine.

ABC News, (7/21/25)

Also on the show: Media reported on how “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name.” and some, like ABC News, dutifully noted that there is no “deal” that Trump himself is involved in, and so it’s not clear what restriction he could actually put in place.

Would that these outlets showed equal interest in interrogating the threats and disinformation from other sources that led to the DC city council’s approval of a plan that exempts a profitable enterprise from property taxes and leases the land underneath the stadium for just $1 a year over some 30 years. Sales taxes from the stadium don’t even go to DC, but to a “reinvestment fund” for the stadium’s maintenance and upgrades.

The Commanders and their owner don’t need millions of dollars from a district where some 14% of the population live in poverty, and the people of the district said they didn’t want to give it to them. They got it anyway. That’s the story. But it’s a story that predates and will post-date Trump, so apparently it doesn’t rate.

Pete Tucker reports on government and media from the Washington, DC, area, including for FAIR.org and his own Substack. He joins us this week to talk about that.

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

‘The fact that it’s happening Shouldn’t Be a Surprise’: CounterSpin interview with Ari Paul on genocide in Gaza

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR contributor Ari Paul about genocide in Gaza for the August 1, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The International Rescue Committee, among other groups, is declaring that Israel’s starvation of Gaza has reached a “tipping point”: “The window to prevent mass death is rapidly closing, and for many, it’s already too late.” Famine historian Alex de Waal describes Israel’s food distribution sites as “not just death traps…[but] an alibi.”

New York Times, 7/24/25

Meanwhile, the New York Times describes Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians trying to access those food sites “a crude form of crowd control.” The epic horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been abetted at every turn by a US press corps too compromised, corrupt and complicit to mount a serious defense of basic human rights or international law. In the face of overwhelming public disapproval, and Senate Democrats trying and failing to block weapons sales to Israel, will anything in media coverage change? And will that matter? Joining us now is independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor, Ari Paul. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ari Paul.

Ari Paul: Thanks for having me.

JJ: We could start anywhere, but you have just written about the recent increase in the use of the word “genocide” in some elite outlets’ reporting. How meaningful is that in the scale of things in July 2025, do you think?

AP: I think it’s been very frustrating for people who have been sounding the alarm ever since October of 2023. It’s been very clear in a lot of Israel’s public statements, from public officials and army officials, military officials, in the press that there’s certainly genocidal intent, or an intent to commit horrific war crimes, throughout Gaza. And I think, seeing over the years, the destruction of hospitals, the destruction of educational facilities, the inability to function as a society, not just bombing sites, but making it an impossible place to live, the type of humanitarian crisis that isn’t just a humanitarian crisis; it reaches the level of worry that we’re reaching a genocidal moment.

And activists all over the world have been sounding the alarm about this. And so when it’s seen now, I think there is some sliver of hope, for people who care about what’s happening in Gaza, that this might bring about some sort of end to it, but given the horrific slaughter of people, the starvation, and just the fact that a once-functioning society has now been reduced to rubble, it feels a little too late for a lot of people watching this.

JJ: Right. And it’s kind of uncanny to hear media suggesting that now people are starting to say this might be a genocide. It is just a kind of blithe, rhetorical erasure of those people who’ve been saying this for a while, and who media have marginalized and worse, all along. But the idea is: now it’s real, because important people are saying it might be real.

AP: Yeah, I think one thing that a lot of people who have been worried about the Gaza situation have pointed out is that it’s very reminiscent of what Nigeria had done to Biafra several decades ago, that they had surrounded this area, that they had the military upper hand, but also kept food out of going into this area, which caused mass starvation. Now, this incident in Biafra had been, for the Western world, this moment where everyone kind of dropped what they were doing and said, ”Oh my gosh, this is just horrible. How could anything like this happen?”

And that, given the control that Israel has always had over Gaza, the potential for just shutting everything off and just letting it die, while raining missiles and conducting raids, was just always so obviously there, that from day one, when this started two years ago, it’s just been impossible to ignore the catastrophe that was waiting to happen, especially when you had people all throughout the Israeli government saying things like that they wanted another Nakba, that they wanted to destroy Gaza, that no one is innocent, things like this.

These are the things that were said in places like Rwanda or Bosnia before the worst things happened. And so I think there were a lot of people on the activist left, the pro-Palestine community, who were taunted as, at best, catastrophists or, at worst, they were derided as antisemitic, blood libel. But the fact of the matter is that these were predictions that were all too real, and now we’re looking at it.

New York Times, 7/28/25

JJ: I was struck by a line in a New York Times report from July 29 that was “Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Committing Genocide in Gaza.” First of all, I know a lot of listeners will know that you can get a lot more critical information about Israel in the Israeli media than you can here, on many occasions. But I was struck by a line in that piece that said that statements from these rights groups are “adding fuel to a passionately fought international debate over whether the death and destruction there have crossed a moral red line.”

So let’s just take a breath and acknowledge the idea that death and destruction can be ok…except up until some indeterminate point they cross a moral red line. I just found it such a weird construction.

And then it also doesn’t even say what happens once that line is crossed. It’s as though, for media, it’s all just shadows on the cave wall. It’s all just a story, and not a reality.

AP: Yeah, I think one of the problems is that Israel, and those who support what Israel, have been very successful in framing this all as, well, there’s a legitimate goal here to destroy Hamas, that Hamas started this all on October 7, that it’s a terrorist organization, and it’s authoritarian, and it must be eradicated in the same way that many wars are justified, that the Vietnam War kept being justified in the pursuit of destroying the Vietnamese insurgency. So that’s all there, as a kind of “this is the legitimate goal, and all these things are awful. All these things are happening, and they’re awful. But the goal is still important.” And this sort of legitimizes what Israel is doing in Gaza.

But by all accounts, the effort to destroy Hamas has been futile, the actual military gains that the Israelis have made are small or almost nonexistent, that for every fighter they kill, they recruit more. And there’s an obvious reason for that, when you really think about it, that if you see this Goliath army destroy everything in Palestinian society, Palestinians will eventually want to fight back. Whatever one might say about Hamas, all of this doesn’t make them less attractive to the people who want to fight what Israel is doing there.

So there’s a framing that Israel is on this legitimate path to eradicate Hamas when, even by its own standards, it’s not doing that. So the only thing people really can see out of all this, they don’t see any real military gains, any light at the end of the tunnel–that, again, a phrase that US military officials used about fighting the war in Vietnam–that they don’t see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in terms of military perspective. All they see is this carnage on the civilian population. And so I think one reason why you’re seeing more and more people talk about this in the mainstream press is it’s harder to ignore that.

JJ: I guess that might answer my question, because I think many people are wondering: Israel has restricted food into Palestinian lands for a long time now, but this obviously mass starvation, starvation on this grand scale, where it seems very clear what the intentionality is, this seems to be the thing that’s going to be a turning point for people.

And it goes back to what you just said isn’t the point, or shouldn’t it be, that Israel has the ability to starve Palestinians, rather than, “Hey, look, they’re actually doing it.” They have the tool, and that’s the problem in itself. And yet the conversation only seems to be shifting when people are literally looking at pictures of emaciated children. I don’t quite get why this is the moment for so many people.

AP: Yeah, I mean, again, I think it’s a success of Israel’s control of the narrative that sometimes it’s really not well understood that the occupation is central to all this, that this isn’t a conflict in the same way Russia and Ukraine is a war; I mean, sure, one side is bigger than the other, but these are two flagged nations that are sovereign, fighting with militaries that are fighting each other in trenches. It’s not a civil war, in the sense that there’s an insurgency in one part of the country fighting the government, say in Syria, until the regime collapsed there. This is a country that completely controls every aspect of life of this Arab population, the Palestinian Arab population: how they can move, how they can receive food, how their economy is structured. There’s curfews, things like that. All of this has always been heavily controlled by Israeli occupation. In a sense, they’re under martial law in perpetuity.

So I think sometimes when we read the media coverage of all this, it’s framed as a bit like, “Well, there’s a struggle between two sides, in which there’s a kind of balance,” and when in all these other cases of war that are going on in this world, there’s really very few other things like that in that sense that you just said, that Israel just has the ability to do this, and it always has. So therefore, the fact that it’s happening shouldn’t be a surprise. But, unfortunately, it is. And I think that speaks to the power of the narrative and the propaganda.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, what you think better coverage, and we know there is good reporting out there, often in independent media, of course, but what would be the elements of what better looking coverage, if journalists–we know that mainstream journalists are going to say, No. 1, “We were always against this.” They’re going to point to the critical articles that they did do, and they’re going to whitewash their coverage of this all along. But what would actual, genuine, critical coverage include? What would it look like?

The Guardian, 9/2/15

AP: I think it’s starting to come out, I mean, just the footage of the carnage that I think has the ability to change minds and move hearts. We’ve seen that in previous cases. One case I’m thinking of was, during the Syrian migrant crisis, there was a photograph, I believe, by a wire photographer, that was widely shared, of a small child’s body washing up on a beach in Turkey. And this captured the world’s attention to how bad the crisis, not just the situation in Syria, but the ability of migrants to get to where they needed to go, how bad the situation was. And I think it rattled people to its core.

I think that’s beginning to happen, just with the images and the descriptions, of not just the starvation, but the attacks on people at aid sites. I’m hoping that that isn’t continuing to happen, but again, it’s coming at a point where so much suffering and death has occurred, that even if there was some happiness that that might bring about a change, it almost seems like we’ve just reached a point of no return.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Ari Paul. You can find his work many places, but I would personally recommend FAIR.org. Ari Paul, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AP: Thank you.

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

‘Criminalizing Homelessness Only Perpetuates It’CounterSpin interview with Scout Katovich on criminalizing poverty

Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Scout Katovich about forced institutionalization of poor and disabled people for the August 1, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Poverty and homelessness—and their confluence with mental health challenges, including addiction—reflect societal and public health failures. But rather than take on rising rents and home prices, unlivably low wages and the retraction of social services and healthcare, the Trump White House has issued an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” that calls for involuntary institutionalization and the elimination of federal support for evidence-based lifesaving programs. Oh, and also increased “data collection” on unhoused people.

As Southern Legal Counsel puts it, the order is a “continuation of [this administration’s] strategy of depicting anyone whose rights they seek to take away as inherently dangerous.”

This White House is what it is, but this development also trades on years of media coverage that defines poverty, and the cascade of harms attendant to it, as a “crisis” not so much for the people who experience it, as for those made uncomfortable by being exposed to it.

Scout Katovich is senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Scout Katovich.

Scout Katovich: Thank you, I’m happy to be here.

JJ: There’s been some coverage of this July 24 executive order, but I know that many listeners won’t have heard about it. Could you just please tell us what this order says, and what it calls for?

SK: Absolutely. So this order came out last week, and it is somewhat wide-ranging in terms of the mechanisms that it puts in place, but the gist of it is that it’s taking aim at people who are at the intersection of homelessness, mental health disabilities and substance use. And what it does is it directs federal agencies to use the power they have over funding, as well as over technical assistance, to encourage states and local governments to criminalize people for living on the streets, to push people into involuntary treatment and civil commitment, including lowering standards to get there, and to destroy programs like housing first and harm reduction that we know save lives.

So the way that the Trump administration is trying to go about this remains a bit to be seen, because it’s directing agencies to take certain actions. And so we’ll see what those agencies do. But it is really troubling in terms of the entire framing of pushing for criminalization and institutionalization as a “solution” to homelessness. We know that’s not a solution. We know that that only makes homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse worse, and it’s really troubling to see this coming out from the federal government, though I can’t say it’s too much of a surprise.

JJ: The order basically says, “Let’s get them into treatment,” which sounds good as a phrase, if you are just blissfully ignorant of anything to do with unhoused people or the history of involuntary warehousing. But for a lot of folks, it sounds like, “Well, golly, just help them.” What do people who think “get them into treatment,” what do they need to understand?

SK: That’s a great point. And this is not the first time that compassion has been co-opted. We actually see this on the left as well, as Governor Newsom in California pushed for the CARE Courts as this compassionate solution, and, really, it was doing a lot of the same thing: targeting unhoused people perceived as having mental illness for forced treatment and institutionalization.

And what this kind of cloaking in care does is it obscures the fact that involuntary treatment is not effective. If you care about providing people who need help with help, the most effective way to do that is by providing accessible, voluntary services that match a person’s need. And it’s really disingenuous for the federal government to be saying this now, saying people need care, while at the same time blasting Medicaid, and stripping all the voluntary mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, that actually works.

The Register Citizen (7/29/25)

JJ: The University of New Haven journalism professor Susan Campbell, in one of the few media pieces that I’ve seen so far, describes this order as essentially “fact-free.” And she was noting some kind of baseline falsehoods, like it starts out saying the “overwhelming majority of individuals [who are unhoused] are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.” And it also says both federal and state governments “have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats,” which is another thing.

I know it’s a lot. But it seems like there are some undergirding ideas for this measure that are simply without foundation.

SK: That’s absolutely correct. The idea that homelessness is caused by individual failures or individual conditions is just absolutely false. We know that we have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and there are, in addition to the nearly 1 million people who are homeless on any given night, there are millions more Americans who are spending over half of their income on rent.

We can’t close our eyes and pretend that this is an issue that’s just about an individual’s inability to get treatment for themselves. We have a structural problem here that we need to address, and without addressing the underlying housing crisis, we are not going to solve homelessness.

JJ: Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi is no doubt speaking for many in saying, “Don’t law-abiding citizens have a right to live without

Boston Globe (7/30/25)

stepping over needles or encountering violence in front of their homes?” in an op-ed that is headlined, “Involuntary Commitment Should Be on the Table in the Opioid Crisis.”

Alright, I have thoughts. Not for nothing, but the words “Purdue” or “Sackler” appear nowhere in the piece. Still, it’s playing on this idea of public safety, and don’t we all deserve to feel safe? There’s something powerful at work in that narrative.

SK: Yeah. Look, I agree that we all deserve to feel safe, and that includes us all having a safe place to sleep. That includes us having a safe place where we can get treatment that’s appropriate for us. The pitting against each other of people who lack housing and people who have housing is so insidious and counterproductive. The goal is not to just have there never be enough housing, affordable housing, for people to be able to live inside, and to tolerate that. No, of course not. The idea is for everyone to have access to safe, affordable housing, and to services that allow them to be healthy, without it being something that’s pushing them into institutions or criminalizing them.

JJ: Yeah, we talk about ending homelessness, but if that’s genuinely your goal, then criminalizing unhoused people just doesn’t work. So I think we just have to accept the idea that some of the people who talk about ending homelessness, that’s not their goal. It has to do with something else, and we need to peel that apart, to understand the difference between punitive responses and responses that actually have been shown to be effective, if ending homelessness, or if helping folks with mental health conditions, if that is genuinely your goal.

SK: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. We know that criminalizing homelessness only perpetuates it, and it’s logical, if you think about it, if you have someone who doesn’t have housing, who’s trying to get into housing, and then you give them a criminal record, that’s only going to make it harder to get housing. So it’s really counterproductive.

But I think what is attractive about it to politicians is that it’s a quick way to push people out of sight. It isn’t something that’s going to take a long-term investment, which is what we need right now. It’s something that you’re going to be able to say to your constituents at the next election, “See, look at how clean our streets are.” And that’s because you’ve pushed people into institutions, oftentimes while violating their rights. So, yes, maybe someone is temporarily pushed out of sight, and you don’t have to confront the massive problems we have as a society with poverty and inequality, but that’s not a solution.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, what forward-looking media reporting would look like? What would it include that is maybe not included now? What might they toss out that they’ve been entertaining? What would you look for from journalists on this set of issues?

SK: I think it’s really important to understand the humanity of individuals who find themselves living on the street, and to show that this is not about needles, this is about human beings, and the devastating effects that a lot of these punitive policies can have on these human beings, that sets them back, that hurts all of us. I think it’s so important to lift that up.

I think in terms of this executive order, I also think there’s a need to encourage states and local governments not to feed in, and not to comply with the tenor of this executive order, and to do what they can to stay the course, or start on the course, of adopting policies that are actually effective: affordable housing, housing first, voluntary accessible services. There’s room for courage here, and I think states and local governments have the opportunity to take it.

JJ: All right, then. We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Scout Katovich from the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. Thank you so much, Scout Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SK: Thank you.

This post was originally published on FAIR.