Category: zSlider

November 20, 2025

WaPo Defends Data Centers—With Few Disclosures That Amazon Depends on Them

“AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring,” Bloomberg (9/29/25) reported—but that’s not the story the Washington Post wants to tell.

US electricity prices, you may have noticed, keep going up. And in some parts of the country, like here in the DC region, they’re soaring. In Virginia, for example, electricity rates are up 13% this year, an issue Democrats highlighted as they swept back into power in Richmond earlier this month.

Burgeoning electric bills also factored into Democrats’ November wins in New Jersey and Georgia. But let’s stick with Virginia for a moment, where energy-sucking data centers are so plentiful that if northern Virginia’s DC suburbs were to secede, the new country would have more data center capacity than China.

As a result of these data centers, this new country would likely suffer from crippling electric bills. “Wholesale electricity [now] costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers,” read a recent Bloomberg subhead.

The Bloomberg story (9/29/25)—headlined “AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring”—begins:

Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills. The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’”

Brewing outrage

Heatmap (11/6/25): “The techlash over data center development is becoming a potent political force that could shape elections for generations.”

If ever there was a story ripe for sustained coverage from the DC region’s paper of record, this is it. In the Washington Post’s own backyard, ratepayers like Stanley are being bilked out of billions of dollars to pay for electrical grid upgrades that disproportionately benefit trillion-dollar companies seeking to win the AI race by powering up their ever-expanding fleet of data centers.

Northern Virginia’s unmatched density of data centers has made it the backbone of the internet, through which 70% of global internet traffic flows. (Northern Virginia also happens to be home to the Pentagon and CIA.)

The upward transfer of wealth—from ratepayers to Big Tech—isn’t just happening in the DC region, but nationwide. And it has triggered an uprising that spans the country and crosses political boundaries.

“Nearly every week now across the US, from arid Tucson, Arizona, to the suburban sprawl of the DC area, Americans are protesting, rejecting, restricting or banning new data center development,” Heatmap (11/6/25) reported.

This month’s elections—in which ties to data centers were an albatross for Republican incumbents with ties to the data center industry—showed this.

But readers get little sense of the brewing outrage from the pages of the Washington Post—which just happens to be owned by the founder of Amazon, a company at the forefront of the data center buildout, with plans on doubling its capacity by 2027.

Failing journalistic basics

Amazon has invested massively in data centers (CNBC, 10/29/25), with 216 currently operating and more than 100 underway.

The Washington Post’s coverage isn’t just weak, it also often fails the most basic journalistic test by not disclosing Post owner Jeff Bezos’ ties to the company he founded three decades ago.

While Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, he remains the company’s executive chairman and its largest shareholder, with stock estimated to be worth over $200 billion. (Bezos purchased the Post in 2013 for $250 million, which is less than 1% of his Amazon holdings.)

And AI data centers are key to Amazon’s success. Meanwhile Bezos’s personal stake in AI extends even further, having invested in multiple AI companies, including the startup Project Prometheus, where Bezos recently named himself co-CEO after providing part of the company’s $6.2 billion in initial funding.

The sums of money being thrown at AI are eye-popping, and nerve-wracking. Citing analysts at Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street Journal (11/16/25) reported: “Big tech companies are expected to spend nearly $3 trillion on AI through 2028 but only generate enough cash to cover half that tab.”

‘Not showing their connections’

The Washington Post (10/15/25) paints a voter as jumping to conclusions for saying that data centers should pay for the new electrical infrastructure they need: “Studies reach conflicting conclusions over the role of those data centers in everyone else’s rates…. But [Maureen] Harrison has made up her mind.”
Ahead of this month’s elections, a Washington Post story (10/15/25) questioned whether data centers were raising electricity costs. “Studies reach conflicting conclusions,” the Post reported, adding, “the experts are hardly bringing voters clarity.” (The Virginia state study that the piece pointed to as defending the data center industry was quite clear that “data centers’ increased energy demand will likely increase system costs for all customers.”) The story didn’t name Bezos or Amazon (except in the photo captions).

That same day, a Post editorial (10/15/25) called the US military’s planned new generation of smaller nuclear reactors an “excellent idea…that can’t come fast enough.” Once again, neither Bezos or Amazon were named—even though, as David Folkenflik of NPR (10/28/25) reported:

A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.

The Post editorial page’s willingness to name Bezos and Amazon has “changed,” according to Miranda Spivack, a former Post reporter. Increasingly, “they’re not showing their connections to Amazon, and yet they’re opining on issues that directly effect Amazon,” Spivack told FAIR.

Well-trodden path

Instead of the hundreds of data centers its boss’s company is building, the Washington Post (10/25/25) suggested you should instead blame “policies aimed at boosting clean energy.”

Last month, the headline of another Washington Post story (10/25/25) blared: “There’s a Reason Electricity Prices Are Rising. And It’s Not Data Centers.” The catchy story begins, “Over the past few months, Americans have looked aghast at their rising electricity bills…and found one clear scapegoat: data centers.” Once again, the Post omitted mention of Bezos and Amazon.

The story insisted that “more electricity demand can actually lower prices”—which is true, as long as your electrical system has excess capacity to meet the new demand. Once new infrastructure has to be built to accommodate demand, however, costs will rise—and that cost will be split between homeowners and other existing users, as well as the data centers.

A week later, a Post editorial (10/31/25)—headlined “New Jersey’s Next Governor Misunderstands Energy Prices”—scolded Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, for calling for a one-year “freeze” on New Jersey utility rates, which have jumped an incredible 22% since last year. “It’s unclear,” wrote the Post, “why politicians would be better at running a business than the people who currently do it.” (New Jersey voters apparently felt differently, delivering Sherrill a landslide 14-point win.)

“Forcing lower prices could mean delaying needed upgrades to energy infrastructure,” the Post continued, once again failing to mention either its owner or Amazon, which have a vested interest in ensuring costly upgrades are shouldered by New Jersey ratepayers, not tech behemoths like Amazon.

After the election, the Post (11/8/25) noted that Democrats’ sweeping wins in northern Virginia came as “data centers seemed to be at the top of voters’ minds.” Yet a principal builder of those data centers, Amazon, went unnamed once again, as did Bezos.

The headline of another post-election analysis read, “Soaring electricity bills help flip state elections”; and the subhead read, “Data centers are spiking utility rates and angering voters.” But the Post column (11/19/25) failed to name Bezos or Amazon (except, once again, in the photo captions).

These recent examples are only the latest steps on an increasingly well-trodden path.

‘Part of something bigger’

Washington Post (7/27/25): “The most important question for the United States regarding artificial intelligence right now…is whether the US will maintain AI dominance.”

This summer, a Washington Post editorial (7/27/25) hailed President Trump’s investment in AI—without mentioning Bezos or Amazon.

In January, as Virginia state legislators weighed additional taxes and restrictions on data centers, the Post (1/18/25) quoted a director from the Data Center Coalition who threw cold water on the idea. Listed among the “Executive Level” members on the coalition’s website is AWS, the highly profitable cloud computing arm of Amazon. But the Post story doesn’t name Amazon or its founder.

A Post story (9/17/24) from last year also cited the Data Center Coalition without mentioning Amazon’s ties to the group. But any sins of omission in that story paled in comparison to sins of commission, as the Post spotlighted data center employees from across the country who found near religiosity in their work, giving the story the feel of a recruitment pitch, rather than journalism.

“It might sound nerdy, but I like completing the connections…. It gives me a sense of satisfaction,” a technician in San Jose told the Post. “What I’m working on is important,” said a worker in Phoenix. “You feel a part of something bigger.” Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a self-described tech nerd is said to have switched careers because of “the sheer excitement of stepping inside data centers.”

This last story at least disclosed the paper’s connection to Bezos and Amazon.

Whole-of-government gravy train

New Yorker (11/3/18): “In July [2018], Jeff Bezos became the richest man in modern history, when his net worth topped $150 billion dollars.” Seven years later, Bezos is the fourth-richest human, with $230 billion; his old fortune would put him 9th on the list.
The bigger story here may be how thoroughly tech giants like Amazon have corrupted our country—and nowhere has this played out more visibly than in the DC region, although you wouldn’t know it from reading the Washington Post.

Despite being the “poster child” of a tax cheat, in 2017 Amazon nevertheless requested states pony up public goodies if they wanted to land the company’s second headquarters (CounterSpin, 10/25/17; FAIR.org, 3/14/18). And states did just that, even though Amazon had long eyed DC, owing to its billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon, CIA and other federal agencies.

Another reason Amazon wanted to locate near the seat of power is because the federal government represents the greatest threat to the company’s continued dominance (at least it did until Trump reclaimed power and fired Lina Khan, the trust-busting Federal Trade Commission chair).

“The only thing in between Amazon and $1 trillion and $2 trillion in market cap is regulation,” economist Scott Galloway told the New Yorker back in 2018, when the company became the second one (after Apple) whose stock was worth a trillion dollars. “No one is going to regulate the gentleman throwing out the first pitch of the 2019 Washington Nationals season.” Amazon’s market cap today: $2.5 trillion.

While Virginia ponied up as much as $750 million to “win” the HQ2 contest—much to the Post’s delight—many of the promised high-paying jobs haven’t materialized (and may never, as Amazon is busy firing “thousands of corporate workers as it spends big on AI”—NPR, 10/28/25). This hasn’t meaningfully slowed Virginia’s whole-of-government gravy train, where everything from transportation to infrastructure to education is tailored to Amazon’s needs.

Meanwhile, when Amazon returns even a fraction of the public dollars it has gobbled up, the Post (6/16/21) celebrates the company’s generosity in headlines like “Amazon Will Help Fund 1,000 Affordable Housing Units Near Metro Stations.”

Less touted in the pages of the Post are Amazon’s strong-armed tactics. In its deals with Arlington County and the state of Virginia, Amazon not only gets millions of local tax dollars, but confidentiality clauses enable the company to weigh in on how officials respond to freedom of information requests regarding Amazon’s deals. The Post (3/15/19) covered this issue, but by the next day the paper had moved on.

‘Always only about business’

When Jeff Bezos purchased the Post over a decade ago, he said he was doing so out of a sense of civic duty. But that pretense died the moment Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election. In the year since, Bezos has only continued lavishing gifts on Trump, while also remaking the Post in Trump’s image.

This serves Bezos’ business interests, which are paramount for him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company Blue Origin told the Post (10/30/24) last year. “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

Bezos simply isn’t going to let his newspaper get in the way of his business—and the Washington Post’s coverage of data centers shows that.

ACTION ALERT: 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.
November 20, 2025

A Seattle Socialist’s Victory Gives Elite Media the Jitters

The Seattle Times (11/17/25) cast a jaundiced eye on “the civic adventure of having a new socialist mayor.”

New York City isn’t the only city to have elected a democratic socialist as mayor. Seattle voters ousted incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell for community organizer Katie Wilson, who had the endorsements of unions, Democratic clubs and the Stranger (7/2/25), the city’s alt-weekly.

She credited her win to a “volunteer-driven campaign among voters concerned about affordability and public safety in a city where the cost of living has soared as Amazon and other tech companies proliferated,” AP (11/13/25) reported. The wire service noted that “universal childcare, better mass transit, better public safety and stable, affordable housing are among her priorities”—similar to those of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Corporate media are not happy about her victory, priorities or rhetoric. The Seattle Times editorial board (11/17/25) said upon her victory that she “painted her opposition as big businesses content with keeping people down,” and countered that residents will “fear that no one will come when they call 911, that parks will be unusable, that small businesses will shutter because of crime and revenues that don’t keep up with expenses.”

‘Woke Republic of Seattle’

Wall Street Journal (11/13/25): “Lawbreakers may get a pass, but Ms. Wilson wants to get tougher on the productive parts of Seattle’s economy.”

The reliably right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/13/25) called Wilson “Mamdani West,” and described her as “soft on crime but tough on businesses.” The paper scoffed, “Maybe Ms. Wilson will moderate her views once she is confronted with the responsibilities of office, but the campaign had little evidence of that.” The board ended, sarcastically, “Good luck.”

In a smaller editorial, the Journal (11/17/25) mocked the “Woke Republic of Seattle,” quoting Wilson saying:

“I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and people of color communities, as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.”

The editorial board continued:

Now, that is some coalition. But what’s a 2SLGBTQIA+ community? We looked it up. It’s apparently an acronym for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, with the + covering anybody who feels left out.

With all of these groups to satisfy, we’re not sure there are enough jobs to go around. But may the Two-Spirit be with the mayor.

The New York Times (11/13/25) gave Wilson’s win tepid coverage, offering an unexciting news piece that failed to put her victory into context or contemplate the gravity of ousting a powerful incumbent. It also, bizarrely, quoted that defeated incumbent—and never quoted the actual winner of the race.

Childcare and other ‘goodies’

The only potential “silver lining” the Washington Post (11/16/25) sees in Katie Wilson being elected along with progressive allies is that “the country may be able to more quickly see the failures of their policies—which could prevent voters in other cities from falling for socialism.”

But it was the Washington Post editorial (11/16/25) about Wilson’s win that takes the cake here. And that makes sense: Socialist and left-wing activists in the Puget Sound point fingers at Amazon and other corporate giants as the main drivers of inequality.

The Post is owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration this year as president, the Post has vowed to become more right wing on the editorial page (NPR, 2/26/25). This fall the opinion page took a “massive stride in its turn to the right by hiring three new conservative writers after losing high-profile liberal columnists,” as the Daily Beast (10/2/25) noted.

First, the Post belittled Wilson’s proletarian life and went on to degrade her political priorities for being tied to her economic position. It said:

Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” childcare and other goodies.

“Goodies” in this case mean services that make life affordable for a working parent who doesn’t own much, like Wilson. This is in a town with feudal levels of inequality: “While one-third of residents are classified as low-income, one out of every 14 is a millionaire” (KCPQ, 6/12/24). Seattle’s housing rental costs are “among the highest in the nation, ranking 16th among the country’s 100 largest cities,” while the city’s “median rent is now also 47.4% higher than the U.S. average of $1,375, placing it on par with prices in Los Angeles and Oakland” (KCPQ, 3/7/25). An op-ed in the Seattle Times (3/18/25) noted that in the state generally “Hunger is on the rise” while “Food banks and meal programs are on the front lines of an unprecedented hunger crisis.”

This is truly a “let them eat cake” moment for the Bezos Post. The Post went on:

The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.

Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.

It’s bad enough that a paper owned by a Bond villain is mad that the next mayor of an expensive city has too much compassion for the homeless. But the dismissal of the grocery store idea isn’t based in fact, as Civil Eats (8/20/25) noted that “publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail.” Civil Eats said that “every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA),” with more than 200 stores around the world generating $5 billion in annual revenue. The outlet added, “If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”

‘Identifying class enemies’

“A new era of class warfare has begun in New York,” the Washington Post (11/8/25) opined, “and no one is more excited than Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani.”

The editorial was an echo of the Post’s earlier pearl-clutching (11/8/25) in response to Mamdani’s victory speech:

Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies—from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers—and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.

Bezos, as part of the billionaire class, finds himself as the target of this year’s leftward electoral swing. “Affordability” was Mamdani’s buzzword, an offense to the Bezos board, who wanted to hear “growth,” a catchphrase for the financial elite. Bezos’ position makes sense from his rarefied position, but that is precisely why billionaire-owned media, whether it’s the Ellison family’s consolidation of TikTok and CBS or the Murdoch empire of Fox News and the New York Post, are bad for democracy. These are media that are materially situated to side with landlords and bosses over tenants and workers, but there are no outlets in major media with editorial boards that consistently lean in the other direction.

Once again, these editorial boards are not afraid that Wilson and Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.

These media don’t grapple with why voters aren’t scared of socialism and want the rich to pay more for services. It is up to them to make a case that voters should choose a political platform of consolidating political power with the billionaire class.

Featured Image: The Wall Street Journal‘s depiction (11/13/25) of Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson–with correction of the underexposure traditionally applied by corporate media to official enemies to make them look sinister.

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

Corporate Media Parrot Dubious Drug Claims That Justify War on Venezuela

Since August, the US has been amassing military assets in the Caribbean. Warships, bombers and thousands of troops have been joined by the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, in the largest regional deployment in decades. Extrajudicial strikes against small vessels, which UN experts have decried as violations of international law, have killed at least 80 civilians (CNN, 11/14/25).

Many foreign policy analysts believe that regime change in Venezuela is the ultimate goal (Al Jazeera, 10/24/25; Left Chapter, 10/21/25), but the Trump administration instead claims it is fighting “narcoterrorism,” accusing Caracas of flooding the US with drugs via the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua, both designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

Over the years, Western media have endorsed Washington’s Venezuela regime-change efforts at every turn, from cheerleading coup attempts to whitewashing deadly sanctions (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 6/4/21, 1/22/20). Now, with a possible military operation that could have disastrous consequences, corporate outlets are making little effort to hold the US government accountable. Rather, they are unsurprisingly ceding the floor to the warmongers.

Fabricating ‘tensions’

ABC‘s report (11/18/25) presents at face value Trump’s claimed rationale for a possible attack on Venezuela: “to stop drug traffickers.”

Despite Washington ominously amassing naval assets and issuing overt threats against Caracas, Western journalists often talk of “tensions” between the two countries (Fox, 11/17/25; ABC, 11/18/25), or even a “showdown” (Wall Street Journal, 10/9/25; Washington Post, 10/25/25). This is conceptually similar to the framing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a “conflict” with Hamas (FAIR.org, 12/8/23), except in this case the media does not have an equivalent of October 7 to rationalize all the atrocities by the US and its allies.

Though the Trump administration has largely abandoned the traditional US exceptionalist discourse of promoting “freedom” and “democracy,” that has not stopped corporate journalists from relentlessly demonizing the Venezuelan government.

Journalists are quick to label Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently facing hundreds of Tomahawk missiles pointed at his country, an “authoritarian” (Guardian, 11/14/25; New York Times, 10/15/25😉 or an “autocrat” (Wall Street Journal, 11/5/25; Washington Post, 10/24/25). In contrast, the same pieces place no labels on the Trump administration despite its authoritarianism both at home and abroad (Guardian, 10/16/25; CNN, 8/13/25).

Articles in the Guardian (11/6/25, 10/22/25) describe US operations in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989) as success stories, fawning over special operations forces while ignoring the deadly impact. The Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo became known as “Little Hiroshima” after civilians were massacred there during the US invasion.

Very few outlets recall more recent US interventions, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, which according to Brown University’s Costs of War project have killed an estimated 4.5–4.7 million people over the past two decades. Such “accumulation by waste” has seen $8 trillion transferred to the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Hiding the evidence

The DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment says that Tren de Aragua’s “drug trafficking
activity occurs mainly at the street level.”

Washington’s steady escalation in the Caribbean has evoked memories of the buildup to the Iraq War, when Washington also counted on crucial support from the media establishment to manufacture consent for imperialist war (FAIR.org, 2/5/13, 3/22/23).

At that time, corporate media parroted White House claims about Iraq’s hidden arsenal, despite evidence that Iraq had destroyed its banned weapons arsenal, in contradiction to the White House’s case for war (FAIR.org, 2/27/03). Fast forward more than 20 years, and once more there is ample information undermining the administration narrative, this time about “narcoterrorism.”

Reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have consistently found Venezuela’s Eastern Caribbean corridor to be a marginal route for US-bound cocaine trafficking, with former UNODC director Pino Arlacchi estimating that only around 5% of Colombian-sourced drugs flow through Venezuela (L’Antidiplomatico, 8/27/25).

These findings have been corroborated by the DEA itself. For instance, the agency’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment report does not even include the word “Venezuela.” The 2025 report only has a small section on the gang Tren de Aragua, which dismisses any ties to the Venezuelan government and places its drug trafficking activities “mainly at the street level.”

Yet these glaring flaws in the Trump administration’s casus belli are often overlooked by Western media. Several outlets reporting on potentially imminent US strikes mention the White House’s declared anti-narcotics mission but conveniently omit the fact that, even according to US agencies, fewer drugs flow through this region than many others (Guardian, 11/11/25; Washington Post, 11/14/25; Bloomberg, 11/14/25; New York Times, 11/14/25).

Former UNODC director Arlacchi pointed out that “Guatemala is a drug corridor seven times more important than the Bolivarian ‘narco-state’ allegedly is.” He accused Washington of hypocritically driving the anti-Venezuela narrative due to interest in its massive oil reserves.

‘Maduro denies’

The Italian outlet L’Antidiplomatico (8/27/25) calls the “Cartel of the Suns “an entity as legendary as the Loch Ness monster, but suitable to justify sanctions, embargoes and threats of military intervention against a country that, coincidentally, sits on one of the largest oil reserves on the planet.”

With the “narcoterrorism” accusations against Maduro and associates, Western journalists absolve US officials of the burden of proof (New York Times, 11/4/25; Financial Times, 10/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 11/5/25). There has never been any public evidence about Maduro, or other high-ranking Venezuelan officials indicted by the US, being involved in drug trafficking via the Cartel of the Suns, while a leaked US intelligence memo rejected the notion of government ties to Tren de Aragua.

The Cartel of the Suns’ very existence is far from established, with subject experts contending that, while drug trafficking may be entwined with corruption in Venezuela’s military, there is no evidence of a centralized structure going all the way up to the president (InSight Crime, 11/3/25, 8/1/25; AFP, 8/29/25).

Instead of exposing the unfounded accusations and providing data from experts and specialized agencies, Western outlets either let Trump’s case for war go unchallenged, or merely present a dissenting opinion from Maduro, whom they have systematically demonized (New York Times, 10/06/25; DW, 11/14/25; NPR, 11/12/25; CBS, 10/15/25; CNN, 11/14/25).

This behavior is certainly not new, as Western outlets have consistently pushed the unfounded “narcoterrorism” narrative, going back to the first Trump administration (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). Similar unfounded accusations of drug trafficking were made against Nicaragua in the 1980s (Extra!, 10–11/87, 7–8/88; FAIR.org, 10/10/17), which served to justify US attempts to overthrow the Sandinista government through the CIA-backed Contras.

Warmongers to the stage

The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (11/17/25) says that the Maduro government’s “catastrophic misgovernance has generated a mass exodus of refugees”—a paragraph before writing that “economic sanctions against the regime in Trump’s first term” succeeded in “immiserating ordinary people.”

In his typical style, Trump has sent mixed signals over whether he wants to strike targets inside Venezuela, with contradictory on-record and unofficial statements going back and forth. When asked if the White House is seeking regime change in Venezuela, Trump has been noncommittal (Wall Street Journal, 11/4/25). It is worth recalling that in June, Trump similarly sent all sorts of inconsistent messages before ultimately attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

True to form (FAIR.org, 2/9/17, 4/13/18, 7/3/20), many liberal establishment outlets have been more bellicose than the US president they have occasionally chided for murdering scores of civilians in the Caribbean (The Hill, 10/30/25; Foreign Policy, 11/7/25). The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (1/14/25, 10/10/25, 11/17/25) has advocated for a regime-changing military intervention for months (FAIR.org, 2/12/25). Quite tellingly, Stephens does not regret supporting the Iraq War (New York Times, 3/21/23).

The Washington Post published an editorial (10/10/25) after the recent Nobel Peace Prize award to far-right Venezuelan leader María Corina Machado, arguing that US interests would be “better served” by someone like Machado, a firm endorser of US-led regime-change (FAIR.org, 10/23/25). But with the war drums beating louder, the Jeff Bezos–owned paper granted a column (11/12/25) to John Bolton, a former Trump adviser whose main criticism was that the administration is not being efficient enough in overthrowing Maduro.

Bolton, an architect of the Iraq War, and of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela during Trump’s first term, bemoaned the White House’s “inadequate” explanations about the ongoing lethal boat strikes and international quarrels as damaging the “laudable goal” of throwing Venezuela into chaos.

Bolton went on to urge the administration to create a better “strategy,” which includes “greater efforts to strangle Caracas economically.” The Washington Post is happy to platform a call for escalating measures that have already caused tens of thousands of deaths (CEPR, 4/25/19).

Finally, the former Trump official says that “we owe it to ourselves and Venezuela’s people” to violently oust the Maduro government, despite opinion polls showing that such a military intervention is widely rejected both in the US and in Venezuela.

Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas (11/4/25) went one step further by saying the quiet part out loud: “Venezuelan Regime Change May Open Oil’s Floodgates.” Blas rejoiced at the prospect of a “US-enforced change of ideology” that would install a “pro-Western and pro-business government,” which would do wonders for energy markets in the long run.

Unfazed by the human cost of a military intervention, the corporate pundit was only concerned about the possible impact of Venezuela’s current 1 million daily barrels of oil being wiped out. Who cares about millions of Venezuelans when a “brief military campaign” could drive oil prices down and secure a steady supply in the 2030s?

Complicity with war

Ranking House Intelligence Committee Democrat Jim Himes told NPR (11/5/25) that “the administration has finally shared their legal defense for the strikes at sea”—though NPR‘s listeners did not get to hear what it is.

The White House’s military build-up and illegal strikes have drawn widespread condemnation and opposition, even from within the US political establishment (NPR, 11/5/25; Intercept, 10/31/25). US politicians have also raised alarm bells about a potential military intervention in Venezuela without congressional approval (New York Times, 11/18/25; Politico, 11/6/25), but these voices feature much less prominently than the administration’s.

There is hope that a combination of Venezuelan defense deterrence with domestic and international pressure, coupled with Trump’s own unpredictability, might ultimately avoid yet another US regime-change military assault.

But should the worst come to pass, the media establishment will have once again done nothing to stop yet another deadly US foreign invasion. Over weeks of military buildup and threats, corporate outlets elected to ignore the evidence disproving Trump’s claims and to platform warmongers. They will not wash the Venezuelan people’s blood off their hands.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
November 17, 2025

For NYT, Trump’s Gulf Corruption Is the New Normal

“Jimmy Carter” (Onion, 1/25/17): “Did you worry I might be cutting deals in back rooms with the peanut butter lobby? Or that I might be too busy at harvest time to focus on the economy or the Middle East?”

If any Onion opinion piece fully captures the corruption and venality of Donald Trump’s administrations, it’s one “authored” by former President Jimmy Carter (1/25/17) headlined, “You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got to Be President.” To be accurate, the farm was put into a blind trust (USA Today, 2/24/23), but contrasting the urgency of the potential conflicts with Carter’s humble agricultural asset to the unrestrained wheeling and dealing of the Trump machine paints the whole scene.

Trump had barely started his first term when the Onion piece came out, but nearly a year into his second administration, the satirical piece truly illustrates the degree to which the Washington establishment has seemed to accept that there will always be conflicts of interest in the White House, and that Trump’s policies will always be intertwined with his family’s profiteering.

It is a hallmark of corrupt societies that institutions like the media simply accept that payoffs and the personal business interests of politicians supersede public service. A good example of this casual resignation to a corrupt regime came from the New York Times (11/15/25) under the headline “Trump Organization Is Said to Be in Talks on a Saudi Government Real Estate Deal.” The subhead: “The chief executive of a Saudi firm says a Trump-branded project is ‘just a matter of time.’ The Trump Organization’s major foreign partner is also signaling new Saudi deals.”

The front-page report by Vivian Nereim and Rebecca Ruiz focused on Trump’s relationship with Dar Global, his business’ “most important foreign business partner and a key conduit to Arab governments and Gulf companies.” The Times matter-of-factly said that Dar “paid the Trump Organization $21.9 million in license fees last year,” noting that “some of that money goes to the president himself.”

The entire piece, in fact, presented this development in Saudi Arabia with a lackadaisical editorial attitude toward the president using the federal government that he administers as a channel for his family’s businesses, without much commentary from experts about the conflicts of interest. “The Trump Organization is in talks that could bring a Trump-branded property to one of Saudi Arabia’s largest government-owned real estate developments,” it began. It went on to say that “the negotiations are the latest example of Mr. Trump blending governance and family business, particularly in Persian Gulf countries,” without ever raising a question how that “blending” might undermine the presidency.

‘Maybe a little bit clever’

The New Republic (5/13/25) writes that “what is happening now is unquestionably the biggest corruption scandal in American history”—which is not the impression you would get from reading the New York Times (11/15/25) about Trump’s “deal-making.”

Earlier this year, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut (5/13/25) said after Trump accepted the gift of a $400 million luxury plane from Qatar: “Usually, public corruption happens in secret.” But Trump “isn’t hiding it like other corrupt officials are,” Murphy noted, because “his corruption is wildly public, and his hope is that by doing it publicly, he can con the American people into thinking that it’s not corruption because he’s not hiding it.”

The New Republic (5/13/25) didn’t mince words on Trump’s business in the Gulf: “America Has Never Seen a President This Corrupt,” it announced in a headline, with the subhead, “Trump’s brazen use of the White House to advance his family businesses should be one of the biggest scandals in the country’s history.”

The New York Times reported:

“Nothing announced yet, but soon to be,” Jerry Inzerillo, chief executive of the Diriyah development and a longtime friend of President Trump, said in an interview. He said it was “just a matter of time” before the Trump Organization sealed a deal.

Saudi officials toured the Diriyah development with Mr. Trump during the president’s official state visit in May, with the goal of piquing his interest in the project, Mr. Inzerillo said.

“It turned out to be a good stroke of luck and maybe a little bit clever of us to say, ‘OK, let’s appeal to him as a developer’—and he loved it,” Mr. Inzerillo said.

Next week, Prince Mohammed is expected to make his first visit to the United States in seven years. He hopes to sign a mutual defense agreement with Washington and potentially advance a deal to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

This is friendly, pro-business portraiture that basically repurposes Trump family public relations for the news page. The report only faintly touched on the ethical, saying that the situation creates a “scenario in which Mr. Trump discusses matters of national security with a foreign leader who is also a key figure in a potential business deal with the president’s family.”

The Times perhaps believes that simply narrating these things, without highlighting their egregious nature, is pushback enough. But it’s well past time for the kind of journalism that raises a lazy eyebrow at blatant corruption.

‘Ordinary in the Gulf’

“Deal-making and diplomacy are increasingly intertwined for Mr. Trump and his family members,” the New York Times (11/15/25) writes, in a formulation Trump would likely embrace.

A related New York Times piece (11/15/25) published the same day by the same reporters carried the headline “A Mideast Development Firm Has Set Up Shop in Trump Tower,” with the subhead: “Dar Global bet big on the Trump name. It is now an essential foreign partner for the Trump Organization.” Ruiz and Nereim in passing admitted that Trump’s Gulf deals “have shattered American norms,” but offered no other commentary about the potential corruption. They gave the last word to the president’s son, Eric, who said, “We have the greatest partners in the world in Dar Global.”

The Times reporters used the same “shattered norms” expression in their other piece that day to indicate that some people in the democratic West might not approve of this kind of governance, but then reminded us that in the oil-rich Wahhabist monarchy, this is just how things are done. “The recent blending of business and politics has shattered American norms,” the article said, adding, “but is ordinary in the Gulf, where hereditary ruling families hold nearly absolute power and the phrase ‘conflict of interest’ carries little weight.”

It also wrote that “Dar would later call finalizing its first Trump collaboration ‘a straightforward but pivotal moment.’”

A keener editor would have seen the problem with nonchalantly passing off the corrupt practices of self-serving theocracy as normal. Saudi Arabia receives an abysmal score of 9/100 on the Freedom House index, and ranks 162 on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom list, behind Cambodia and Turkey.

No journalist can forget that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul (Guardian, 10/2/20). The country has a terrible record on workers rights (Human Rights Watch, 5/14/25) and free speech (UN News, 9/15/23). While it has lifted its notorious ban on women driving (BBC, 6/24/18), a coalition of rights groups last year highlighted the “targeting of women human rights defenders, use of the death penalty, lack of protection for women migrant domestic workers, the persistence of a de facto male guardianship system,” and other concerns (Amnesty International, 11/18/24).

‘Likely unconstitutional’

When the New York Times (11/15/25) reports on Trump’s self-enrichment as “blending governance and family business,” it is part of that “culture of corruption” (6/7/25).

The New York Times (3/27/24, 1/17/25, 2/17/25, 5/13/25) has reported on Trump’s potential conflicts of interest in the past. As the Times editorial board (6/7/25) said last spring, Trump

and his family have created several ways for people to enrich them—and government policy then changes in ways that benefit those who have helped the Trumps profit. Often Mr. Trump does not even try to hide the situation. As the historian Matthew Dallek recently put it, “Trump is the most brazenly corrupt national politician in modern times, and his openness about it is sui generis.” He is proud of his avarice, wearing it as a sign of success and savvy.

All of this might spark some curiosity at the Times about Trump’s objectives in the Gulf, and what consequences his policies and personal dealings could have for the broader region. Alas, nothing.

“The whole point of the piece is—or should be—that making multi-billion dollar real estate deals with the Saudis represents a huge conflict of interest that is likely unconstitutional,” said Craig Unger, author of several books on Republican presidents and their ties to corrupt regimes, including the Saudi monarchy. He told FAIR that Trump’s “family is raking in millions, if not billions, from a country that has played a huge role in fostering terrorism and has a history of extraordinary human rights abuses.”

He added, “It’s striking that the Times didn’t bother to interview Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, or a comparable figure to spell out precisely what those conflicts are.”

In Unger’s view, the Times has shrugged off a glaring crisis of legitimacy.

“Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution prohibits any US official from accepting titles, gifts, or payments from foreign monarchs or states without congressional approval,” he said. “How is it that they don’t mention the fact that the deal is likely unconstitutional?”

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

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
November 15, 2025

50-Year Mortgages: Trump’s ‘Bad Deal’ Gets Respectful Hearing From Press

Is a 50-year mortgage a good idea? CNN (11/11/25) tells readers—maybe!

Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte soft-launched the idea that housing mortgages should be for 50 years, rather than the standard 30 years. The palace intrigue (Politico, 11/10/25) that erupted after his announcement suggests the reveal was perhaps mistimed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reflective of the sort of policy the Trump White House is intent on.

And though the idea of extending payments over time under the guise of making home ownership more accessible seems to have landed poorly with economists right, left and center, much of corporate news media were willing to give it a reflexively respectful whirl.

Trump tried to walk back the importance of the 50-year mortgage plan he’d already promoted online, and that Pulte called a “complete game changer”—telling Fox (Yahoo News, 11/10/25) he just thought it might “help a little bit.” This was as some media were already pointing out that the scheme would mean nominally lower monthly costs, but also that it would take people much longer to actually own their homes—as in, so much longer that they’d be dead first.

Reuters (11/11/25), among others, noted that “conservative lawmakers, influencers in Trump’s Make America Great Again Movement, and economists were among those to dismiss the idea,” while the Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/11/25) went straight to “A 50-Year Mortgage Is a Bad Deal.”

Meanwhile, over at NPR (11/12/25), we got “Three Questions About Trump’s 50-Year Mortgage Plan” and at CNN (11/11/25), “Trump Just Floated a 50-Year Mortgage. Is That a Good Idea?”

‘Leveraged, exposed and beholden’

Stacey Patton (NewsBreak, 11/10/25): “A 50-year mortgage doesn’t just delay ownership, it transforms it into a lifelong lease…. You could spend your entire adult life paying for a house you never truly own.”

Author Stacey Patton broke it down for NewsBreak (11/10/25), writing that—along with the elimination of minimum credit score requirements, in favor of “holistic risk assessments”—the 50-year mortgage plan, while dressed up as “reform or a step toward inclusivity in a system that has long penalized Black and brown borrowers,” is in reality part of an effort to normalize permanent indebtedness.

“The promise of homeownership,” Patton wrote,

is being transformed into a subscription model for life that disproportionately ensnares young people of color already burdened by stagnant wages, student loans and rising living costs.

As important as the new mechanism is the old logic of extractive racial capitalism:

Instead of redlining them out, the new system pulls them in by offering entry points wrapped in the rhetoric of equality while ensuring they remain leveraged, exposed and beholden.

Shielding the propertied class

Eric Horowtiz (FAIR.org, 10/21/22): “Corporate media’s eagerness to peddle narratives favorable to the propertied class is to be expected, since many establishment outlets have a vested interest in the continued growth of housing prices.”

It’s not new for corporate media to have trouble finding the humane angle on housing. As Eric Horowitz wrote for FAIR (10/21/22) in 2022, much of Big Media’s coverage of the housing crisis

focuses on what are presented as three great evils: that landlords of supposedly modest means are being squeezed; that individuals and families living without homes destroy the aesthetics of cities; and that…people without homes pose a threat to the lives and property of law-abiding citizens.

These narratives aren’t just punching down; they’re misdirection, shielding the propertied class from scrutiny regarding a crisis of its own making—from which it derives immense profits—while blame is assigned to over-burdened renters and people who are unhoused.

And yes, it all has something if not everything to do with the fact that many corporate media outlets have deep financial stakes in real estate. You’ll never go wrong by following the money.

Featured Image: Donald Trump promoting the 50-year mortgage idea on Truth Social (11/8/25).

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

Emails Reveal Epstein’s Ties to Mossad—But Corporate Media Looked Away

For years, there have been whispers that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had ties to key officials in the US and foreign governments, was involved with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

However, the Epstein/Mossad ties were often labeled by US corporate media as “unfounded” (New York Times, 8/24/25), dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” (New York Times, 7/16/25), or said to have been “largely manufactured by paranoiacs and attention seekers and credulous believers” (New York Times, 9/9/25). Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has claimed that “Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel.”

It’s true that far-right antisemites like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted a conspiratorial version of the Epstein/Israel connection as part of their bigoted, attention-seeking narratives. But recent investigations by Drop Site News—the nonprofit investigative outlet founded in July 2024—into a major hack targeting Israel revealed that Epstein did play a significant role in brokering multiple deals for Israeli intelligence. Despite the hack’s significant revelations, US corporate media coverage remains scant.

‘Knack for steering the superpowers’

Drop Site (10/30/25): “Epstein was an invaluable resource for Israel’s former prime minister [Ehud Barak]…even advising him on how to engage with the Mossad.”
Since 2024, a hacking group called “Handala” with reported ties to the Iranian government (Committee to Protect Journalists, 7/9/25) has carried out a series of cyberattacks targeting Israeli government officials and facilities (Press TV, 12/1/24; CyberDaily, 6/16/25).

Aspects of the Handala hack were published on the website of nonprofit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), including hundreds of thousands of emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, one of Epstein’s closest connections.

Since the hacked information was released, numerous independent media outlets—including Reason (8/27/25), All-Source Intelligence (9/17/25, 9/29/25, 10/13/25), Grayzone (10/6/25, 10/9/25, 10/13/25), the (b)(7)(D) (10/16/25, 10/21/25) and DeClassified UK (9/1/25, 11/3/25)—have published investigations on its contents. Among the independent media outlets, Drop Site’s coverage stands out for its in-depth research and broad scope.

Drop Site’s investigations into the Handala hack have included six major stories since late September, four of which have centered around “Epstein’s work on behalf of Israeli military interests, particularly as it relates to his role in the development of Israel’s cyber warfare industry.”

Drop Site reporters Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim (9/28/25) detailed how Epstein wielded his influence to expand Israel’s cyber warfare industry into Mongolia. Drop Site wrote:

Jeffrey Epstein…exploited his network of political and financial elites to help Barak, and ultimately the Israeli government itself, to increase the penetration of Israel’s spy-tech firms into foreign countries.

In their next piece, Drop Site revealed (10/30/25) that Epstein created an Israel/Russia backchannel to attempt to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Hussain and Grim reported that Epstein also worked with Barak and Russian elites to pressure the Obama administration into approving strikes on Iran, demonstrating his “knack for steering the superpowers toward Israel’s interests by leveraging a social network that intersected the Israeli, American and Russian intelligence communities.”

In the same piece, Hussain and Grim quoted Epstein asking Barak to “wait until they could speak privately before Barak notified intelligence leaders of a deal” with Russian-Israeli oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, and to “not go to number 1 too quickly.” Number 1 has long been a nickname for the head of the Mossad, DropSite noted.

Another article (11/7/25) recounted that Epstein sold surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire: “Epstein helped Barak deliver a proposal for mass surveillance of Ivorian phone and internet communications, crafted by former Israeli intelligence officials.”

Most recently, Grim and Hussain (11/11/25) reported that an Israeli spy regularly stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment. The spy, Yoni Koren, “made his intelligence career working in covert operations alongside the Mossad.”

Failing to cover the Handala hack

The New York Post (8/31/25) had no problem using Handala info to document Epstein’s ties to a disgraced British royal.

Hacked information must be handled ethically by journalists—including by verifying the files, considering public interest, concealing identities when necessary, and noting its origins. This is what Drop Site has done. And its reporting has significant public interest, revealing the ways in which Epstein served Israel’s interests.

Yet in a search of ProQuest’s US Newsstream collection for “Handala,” as well as a supplementary Google search, the only US corporate media outlet found to have covered the Handala hack is the New York Post (8/31/25). Its single 700-word story, drawing from Reason (8/27/25) and the Times of London (8/30/25), focused on how Prince Andrew stayed in contact with Epstein for five years longer than previously stated—sidestepping the revelations from Drop Site about Epstein’s ties to Mossad.

Hussain, who had not seen the New York Post story, said US corporate media is “deliberately ignoring” the story:

It’s such a goldmine of stories. They’re not going through it, they don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s very difficult for them to conceive what these emails refer to because they’ve spent so much time talking about it as a conspiracy theory. And now contravening evidence is emerging, or well-substantiated evidence, showing that it’s really not a conspiracy theory.

Indeed, recent mentions of Epstein’s ties to Israeli government officials have continued to dismiss them as conspiracy theories, ignoring the hack and Drop Site‘s work. For instance, an LA Times op-ed (10/10/25) on antisemitism in the GOP listed Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that “Epstein was a Mossad agent” (and accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza) as evidence of “appalling behavior,” alongside things like “entertaining Hitler/Nazi apologia” and suggesting that “Jews had something to do with [Charlie] Kirk’s death.”

The New Yorker (10/10/25) suggested that drawing a connection between “the war in Gaza” and “fealty to Israel” is part of a “dark alternative view of the world.”

The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang (10/10/25) asserted in his weekly column:

On Planet Epstein, everything that happens—the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the war in Gaza, the suppression of speech by the Trump Administration—proves the country is run by blackmail, pedophilia and fealty to Israel.

While it is of course absurd to blame “everything” on Epstein or Israel—and right-wing conspiracy theories that incorporate antisemitism are very real and dangerous—is it really unreasonable to blame “the war in Gaza” on too much “fealty to Israel”? After all, from October 7, 2023 to September 2025, the US sent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project—more than a quarter of Israel’s total post–October 7 military expenditures. Epstein’s evident connections to Mossad do raise the question of whether there is more to that “fealty” than the $100 million the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC spent on both parties during the 2024 election cycle (Common Dreams, 8/28/24).

By using the “conspiracy theory” frame, Kang not only overlooked the recently revealed files from Drop Site, but also failed to convey the full scope of Epstein’s influence, leaving the actions of associates and key government officials unscrutinized.

Other Handala revelations

All Source Intelligence (9/17/25) published a story based on the Handala leak documenting a Canadian billionaire couple’s support for an Israeli program to sabotage critics online.

Other aspects of the Handala hack have also been well-covered by independent media, including reports of billionaires funding an Israeli cyber campaign against anti-apartheid activists (All-Source Intelligence, 9/17/25). Other stories describe Iran striking a secret Israeli military site near a Tel Aviv tower (All-Source Intelligence, 10/13/25; Grayzone, 10/13/25), and Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, meeting with a top Israeli general to plan spying on Americans (Grayzone, 10/6/25). The Grayzone (10/9/25) also reported that a former US ambassador secretly worked with a top Israeli diplomat to help Israel access several prestigious UN committees.

In Israeli media, Haaretz (3/9/25) reported that thousands of Israeli gun owners were exposed in an Iranian hack-and-leak operation. The paper (7/9/25) also revealed the leak of a database containing thousands of résumés belonging to Israelis who served in classified and sensitive positions within the Israel Defense Forces and other military and security agencies.

These details, like those about Epstein, have also been met with silence in US corporate media.

There has been wall-to-wall US corporate media coverage of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files and the battle over its release. So why has the hack largely been ignored by US corporate media? One possible reason is the hack’s likely origin. It has been reportedly attributed to Banished Kitten, a cyber unit within Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (Committee to Protect Journalists, 7/9/25). Hacks purportedly emanating from Iran are rarely covered in US corporate media—and when they are, the origin of the hack, not its content, becomes the focus.

Corporate media have long shown a double standard on when it is and is not permissible to publish information obtained through hacking (FAIR.org, 11/24/09, 9/30/24).

Look no further than media coverage of the 271-page official dossier of then–Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, which revealed that the Trump campaign believed Vance “embraced noninterventionism,” among other purported vulnerabilities (Ken Klippenstein, 9/26/24). The US government alleged the Vance dossier was leaked through Iranian hacking (FAIR.org, 9/30/24). While the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico possessed the Vance dossier for weeks, they declined to publish it (Popular Information, 9/9/24).

The contents of the Vance dossier were eventually revealed by independent reporter Ken Klippenstein, as well-documented by FAIR contributor Ari Paul (9/30/24). Paul noted that while Klippenstein’s reporting pushed the story into the legacy media, “most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself” (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24).

Today, despite Drop Site‘s thorough and revealing reporting, the Handala hack has been almost completely ignored by US corporate media. Said Drop Site‘s Hussain:

A lot of these [media] organizations, it’s kind of not a secret, they have sympathies or ties to Israel, so it’s not a story which is appealing to them, it’s not politically convenient for these organizations, for the most part.

I think when something’s in the public interest, you report on it, and you’re transparent about where it came from. But in this case, [US corporate] media chose not to.

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

Gene Slater (2022), Richard Rothstein (2015) and George Lipsitz (2024) on Housing and Media

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

CNN (11/11/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The palace intrigue around the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, soft-launching the idea of a 50-year mortgage suggests the reveal was perhaps mistimed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reflective of the sort of policy the Trump White House is intent on.

And though the idea of extending payments over time under the guise of making home ownership more accessible seems to have landed poorly with economists right, left and center, much of corporate news media were willing to give it a reflexively respectful whirl.

Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multi-racial democracy, and we’ve talked about that a lot on the show. This week we revisit relevant, informed conversations with veteran housing analysts and advocates: Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Donald Trump’s 50-year mortgage scheme.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
November 13, 2025

‘They Are Creating the Opportunity to Shrink Democracy More’: CounterSpin interview with Madiba Dennie on Supreme Court vs. voting rights

Janine Jackson interviewed Ball and Strikes‘ Madiba Dennie about the Supreme Court’s threat to the Voting Rights Act for the November 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Balls & Strikes (10/13/25)

Janine Jackson: For those not trying not to see it, it’s clear that the Trump administration is trying to use every political lever available to entrench white political supremacy: in governance, in foreign and domestic policymaking, in education, in culture, in public knowledge and public imagination. The heart, if you will, of that effort is the familiar hatred and fear, and one of the spines is voting rights. You can use the trappings of democracy as cover for your corrupt racist system if you can somehow make sure that wide swaths of the country’s people don’t actually have a voice in terms of who they choose to represent them in the halls of power.

Pushing non-white people out of the electoral process has been the glimmer in the eye of many a politician, and many techniques have been tried. But the conservative majority of today’s Supreme Court sees that goal in their sights, with Louisiana v. Callais looking like their chance to use their special power to achieve a long-desired end.

Of course, Black and brown people aren’t going gentle into that good night. There’s no way advocates of multiracial democracy will let this Supreme Court be the last word on our political voice or possibilities.

Helping us see what’s happening is Madiba Dennie; she’s the deputy editor and senior contributor at the legal analysis site Balls and Strikes. She’s also author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome to CounterSpin, Madiba Dennie.

Madiba Dennie: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Before we start on Louisiana v. Callais in particular, I wanted to say I appreciate the descriptor of Balls and Strikes as “premised on the reality that interpreting the law is an inherently political act with real-world consequences.” I think often the law is presented to us laypeople as something that exists in some pure form somewhere, and you dust it off and apply it, and then, wherever the chips fall, well, that’s “the law”. We would do better to get free of that understanding of how the law works, wouldn’t we?

MD: Yeah, it’s a very useful myth that obscures, as you were saying at the very start, that this is really a longstanding political project. This didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Pure application of law did not create this, either. These are things that conservative legal actors desired and sought out and are too often accomplishing.

JJ: So help us see what’s at work in this case: “packing and cracking,” conflated “Black” and “partisan.” What’s going on here in real-world terms?

Brennan Center (8/9/25)

MD: Well, Louisiana v. Callais, you really have a smorgasbord of political scheming. There’s a lot happening here.

So the case arises out of Louisiana’s redistricting in the wake of the 2020 census. The 2020 census showed that the population in the state had shifted; the Black population was growing. Roughly one in three Louisianans are Black. But when it came time to redraw the state’s electoral maps, the Republican legislature deliberately drew the maps in a way to limit Black people’s political influence to just one of its six congressional seats. So, again, Black people are a third of the population, but only in one of these six seats could they actually exercise any sort of political choice.

And the way that the legislature accomplished this is through what’s called “packing and cracking.” So they packed as many Black people as possible into this one district, said, “All right, Black folks, you can have that one, over there.” But as for the others, they cracked the Black population, putting just little bits of Black people in these five other districts, knowing fully well that politics are so racialized in the state, that there’s such a strong history of people voting on race lines, that no matter who these Black folks like, white people will vote as a bloc to overcome their vote. So it constrains the ability of Black people to make a political choice on equal terms with other voters.

This is very plainly unlawful. The 15th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees that citizens’ right to vote will not be diluted or infringed on the basis of race. But that’s what gerrymandering like this does. Because these voters are Black, they are being denied the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.

And so that’s why we have the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act is a landmark law enacted in the ’60s to finally implement the promises of the 15th Amendment, and the other amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, saying, “OK, we are going to really make sure that if some policy, whether it’s a voter requirement or whether it’s gerrymandering or what have you, whether there’s some law or regulation that results in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote because of race, that’s unlawful, that violates the Voting Rights Act.”

And so here’s where things start to get interesting in Louisiana v. Callais, because courts looked at the maps that the Republican legislature produced and said, “Yeah, this violates the Voting Rights Act. It’s discriminatory. Go back, do it again. You’ve got to make a new map.” So the Republicans begrudgingly go and make a new map that no longer discriminates against Black voters.

And then they get sued again, this time by a group of white voters. And this group of white voters says that the second map is actually also illegal, because fixing a racial gerrymander is also racial gerrymandering. So, yeah, their argument is that by taking race into account, they too are engaging in racial discrimination, because this is on the basis of race.

And so this is really a perversion of what the Voting Rights Act and what the Constitution are supposed to do. That’s very much not what that means. We’re trying to empower people of color and expand the political process with the Voting Right Act, and with the Reconstruction amendments, and here we’re seeing it really twisted on its head, saying that you can’t fix an injury that occurred on racial lines, because it also involves race.

So it creates this world where, if the court is to accept that, it just preserves the racist maps in the first place. So it leaves it untouched, because it deprives you of an opportunity to do something about it. It takes these critical tools away. So that is really what the court heard oral argument about recently.

I should also note that this was the second time they heard oral argument about these maps. They heard oral argument for the first time months ago, but they were dissatisfied with it, because under the law that exists, the map that the legislators made to fix the previous racist map, clearly that was legal. You are allowed to consider race insofar as your map before was racist and you’re fixing it. There’s a lot of law that supports that, as well as a lot of common sense.

And so the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court realized they weren’t quite happy with the way that case was going, and they wanted to switch things up a bit. So they invited the parties to submit some additional briefing, and they rescheduled the case for new arguments, which were heard recently.

And this time, the question was different. No longer were they asking about whether or not the maps complied with the Voting Rights Act or not. Now they’re asking if fixing a map under the Voting Rights Act, if that complies with the Constitution. And their argument here was, again, that there’s some sort of inherent tension between remedying racial gerrymandering and illegal racial discrimination.

JJ: I think that a lot of people are cottoning on now to the sheer weirdness, the idea that you can use race, or perceptions of race based on skin color, to wrestle people out of their homes and demand to see their papers. But colleges, for example, can’t acknowledge the race of applicants, because that’s unfair.

I understand that disinformation and confusion and chaos and fear are part of the point, but I think a lot of folks imagine that Supreme Court justices are somehow using a different kind of rationality than the bozo at the end of the bar. I just wonder, have the last couple of years, or decades, should they have changed our understanding of the actual role of the Supreme Court? Because it used to be, they have life term appointments, that means they’re above politics. I feel like that’s over, and we need to be in a place where we’re reimagining the role of the Court, period.

Madiba Dennie: “They are OK with using race to hurt people. They are not OK with using race to help people who are actual victims of racism.”

MD: Yeah, 100%. The life tenure doesn’t so much insulate the justices from the political happenings, but it rather empowers them to be able to carry out their political program forever, for the rest of their natural lives. Because these are, without any sort of unique insight, it’s really no different from the bozo at the end of the bar saying, “That seems racist to me, actually,” or “Where’s White History Month?” It’s the same kind of thing. “Where’s the Straight Pride parade?” It’s the same sort of nonsense.

It’s like, well, when you’ve been discriminated against, it’s a little bit different. Remedying a harm is different than inflicting harm. So if you want to go through Jim Crow, then we’ll talk about what kind of reparative measures are necessary.

But the conservative supermajority on the court is utterly disinterested in the idea that the Constitution has a role to play in actually addressing any of these historic and present injustices, even though, quite literally, that’s what the Reconstruction amendments were made for. But they don’t like that idea. And so they’re using this, really, overly formalistic notion about racial discrimination, where just any sort of consideration of race at all, even thinking about race, even if you’re fixing a racial injury, that too becomes off limits.

And yet, though, as you pointed out, apparently it’s fine to use race when you’re snatching people off the street; apparently that’s a fair thing to think about, for probable cause and making these stops. So what would be more accurate to say is that they are OK with using race to hurt people. They are not OK with using race to help people who are actual victims of racism.

JJ: And none of this is hypothetical. When the Supreme Court took out Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, we saw an immediate uptick in discriminatory voting practices, right? States were champing at the bit to do what they already wanted to do, and the court just unleashed them to do that. So this is not imaginary. This is not what might happen. This is what we can expect to happen.

MD: Yeah, we have evidence. We know what these states do when they’re left to their own devices. That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act, so that the federal government could create and enforce these national standards, to protect voters regardless of what state they’re in, by saying they shouldn’t be left to the whims of individual legislators.

And it’s really especially egregious when you think about it in the context of voting and gerrymandering, because people are supposed to be able to pick the elected officials who ostensibly represent them. But by keeping people away from the vote, and by making it harder, even if they do vote, for their votes to count the same as everybody else’s, by gerrymandering, what they’re saying is that the elected officials get to pick their voters, rather than the other way around.

It is just completely contradictory to the idea of a democratic government. And there’s really no good reason for this as a matter of law, as a matter of common sense, or good politics, like thinking about actually making a working democracy. It is unrelated to any of that, very much related to doing the opposite, and unwinding, reversing all the strides that the country has made over the past few decades to making democracy real for everyone.

JJ: And I guess what galls me, along with the reality, is the rhetoric that somehow this is about fairness, or somehow this is about equitable representation, or somehow it’s anti-discriminatory. They’re just employing this language that they know is going to tickle something in people’s brains, and think that it means what people understand it to mean, and they know they’re using it against its purposes.

And that’s why I’m so angry at news media, because I feel like they’re in a place to say, “Yes, they’re using these words. They don’t mean them in the way you understand them, in the way that history has presented them, and let’s actually unpack what they’re actually doing, rather than what they’re saying.”

So I just wonder, what would you ask folks to keep front in mind in terms of questions? What can we ask of news media? This is going to go forward. What should we keep in mind as we’re reading the reporting on Louisiana v. Callais, and all of the other assaults on voting rights?

SNCC

MD: Yeah. Well, I think that with Louisiana v. Callais in particular, I think it’s really important to remember that the court literally asked for this. There was no reason for them to take this extra step. This is just something they wanted to do. And I feel like this is another thing that gets lost. We think about, “Oh, this case just happened to get before the court, and I guess they’re taking the opportunity.” It’s like, no, it actually goes further than that. They are creating the opportunity to shrink democracy more. They are making chances for themselves, and I think that’s important to remember.

I also think it’s important, regardless of what they actually say, what they say their reason is: What are the facts? What is their actual reason? Does the reason they’re giving make any sense? Why would they pursue this?

Also, what would make this illegal? If they say that, “Oh, this is unconstitutional,” say “why?” And they say, “Oh, because of this amendment,” it’s like, OK, but explain how that would actually mean that is illegal, because it doesn’t really follow. It doesn’t make sense to say that constitutional provisions that were created to allow Black folks, and later other marginalized people, to participate in the political process, it doesn’t make sense to say that that actually means you have to allow Black voters to be disenfranchised. You can’t square that circle.

So I would love to see media and people, regular folks alike, just sort of really interrogate, “So what do you mean by that?” Take the next step. Ask the question: “When you say that this is illegal, why?” Or when you say that this is a problem, what makes it a problem?

And this is perhaps the most important thing: What is the consequence of your action? What are you actually doing here? What is the real-world effect? Because we aren’t talking about something in the abstract. We’re talking about people’s real ability to make themselves heard at the polls.

Brennan Center (6/21/23)

In the same way that we see what happens without the Voting Rights Act, we saw the surgical precision of racist laws that were passed as soon as the Supreme Court took away another chunk of the Voting Rights Act a decade ago, we also see what happens when we have the Voting Rights Act. When the Voting Rights Act was passed, the amount of Black people who were able to participate in democracy skyrocketed. Voter registration jumped super high. There were way more Black people elected to office, because Black voters were able to make those choices. More funding was allotted to infrastructure projects in Black communities, because Black people had people who actually represented them.

So this is not just a nice, feel-good “It’ll be nice to have.” This is something we have a right to, because it deeply affects how we are able to live, whether we have the same rights to representation as everybody else, whether our needs can be met, whether we can actually take part in self-governance. And so it is a deeply gross perversion of the ideals embedded in the Reconstruction amendments to say that somehow compels the court to bless racial discrimination instead. It doesn’t make any sense, and people should recognize it as racist nonsense.

JJ: Your colleague, Jay Willis, wrote about how Republican Congress members are already skating where the puck’s going to be, as they call it. They’re already planning their pro-Republican redistricting. And so what does that suggest–some of us are like, “What’s the Supreme Court going to say?” And other folks are like, “Well, we already know what they’re going to say, and we’re already acting on it.” What does that say to the rest of us?

MD: Yeah. Well, I think it would benefit folks to really look at how the Republican politicians who were elected to office and the Republican politicians on the bench are working together, how one political project furthers the other. We are seeing the judiciary, specifically the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, most egregiously, really change the rules of the game, allow legislators to go for it, to live out their racial discrimination dreams and craft new districts accordingly, think about how they can best maximize the political power of a dwindling white conservative minority, while artificially suppressing the political power of everyone else. Republican electives are actively already working on this, because they know that the Supreme Court is on their side.

So I think another thing that folks must think about when we look at all of the harm the Supreme Court is doing is remembering that they didn’t do it alone. This is a group project, although they’re more than carrying their weight, but it is a group project. And if we are serious about repairing our democracy–or perhaps making a new, real democracy–we also have to think very seriously about court reform.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Madiba Dennie, deputy editor and senior contributor at Balls and Strikes. They’re BallsAndStrikes.org. She’s also author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, which is out from Penguin Random House. Thank you so much, Madiba Dennie, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MD: Thank you.

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

‘The Trump Administration Needs to Be Isolated in Its Anti-Science Actions’: CounterSpin interview with Rachel Cleetus on climate complicity

Janine Jackson interviewed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Rachel Cleetus about climate complicity for the October 31, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Union of Concerned Scientists (10/28/25)

Janine Jackson: The scattered headlines we’re seeing on COP 30, the annual UN climate conference, this year to be held in Brazil, indicate a distressing lack of appropriately urgent US media attention to the galloping harms of climate disruption, but also, or even more so, their negligence in calling countries and corporations to account.

Nothing in the US political world at the moment encourages or inspires, but our guest says it’s not the time to give up or look away. Rachel Cleetus is the senior policy director with the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She joins us now by phone from Massachusetts. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rachel Cleetus.

Rachel Cleetus: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: What, first of all, is the meaning of these conferences, of the parties? Are they still as important as they once were deemed? And then, what’s the significance of this one being hosted in Brazil?

RC: Briefly, they couldn’t be more important, because now we know that climate change is here, it’s at our doorsteps. We can see these devastating impacts everywhere. Just in the last week, it’s been horrifying to watch this climate change–supercharged storm, Hurricane Melissa, hit so many Caribbean nations. This is what climate change looks like today, and we are running out of time to help limit some of the worst impacts of it.

Politico (10/7/25)

And meanwhile, we have an incredible opportunity in the transition to renewable energy, energy efficiency that can help lower electricity bills, that can clean up our air and water, that can help us address climate change, create jobs. This is what the future can hold if political leaders are brave enough to seize that opportunity.

And that’s why these annual talks matter. This is the moment to put pressure on our political leaders to do the right thing, to do what the world needs.

JJ: And having it in Brazil brings one of the crucial elements that is sometimes overlooked to the forefront, yeah?

RC: For sure. Brazil, in a way, encapsulates some of the deep challenges as well as the incredible promise of addressing climate change. This COP is happening on the edge of the Amazon forest, the “world’s lungs,” that help keep so many amazing, biodiverse ecosystems thriving, and which is now under such severe threat from climate change itself because of droughts and wildfires. So this is an opportunity in Brazil to recommit to the goals of the Paris Agreement, and raise ambition from countries across the world.

It’s no doubt a very fraught moment as well—geopolitics, climate realities, the destructive actions of the Trump administration—but, nevertheless, the science is clear, and what people need is equally clear.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to that, but I wanted to ask you a question about cost, and you mentioned renewables. We know how often news reporting allows cost, however that is decided, to sort of be the end of the sentence. There’s a sentiment of, “Oh, well, we would love to do this obviously beneficial, humane thing, but ooh, look at the price tag.” You’re an economist, and I wonder what crosses your mind when you see, not just Trump saying renewables are somehow more expensive, but then journalists honoring that in the conversation, the kind of “some say, others differ” conversation we’re having now about the cost of renewable energy vis-a-vis fossil fuels.

Rachel Cleetus: “The fossil fuel industry is trying to preserve its own profits at the expense of people on the planet, and they are spreading a lot of disinformation.”

RC: The facts of renewable energy are very clear. In most parts of the world, renewable electricity is the cheapest form of electricity to install, bar none. That’s why we’re seeing such extraordinary growth in solar and battery storage and wind. It’s happening all around the world, in the US, in Europe, in China, in India.

It’s just that we have to accelerate that momentum, and instead, the Trump administration is taking deeply harmful actions to claw back clean energy progress in the United States. This is progress that’s been delivering jobs around the country and economic benefits, keeping us on the cutting edge of innovation, and the administration wants to take that all back.

So those are the facts on renewable energy. The problem here is, of course, that the fossil fuel industry is trying to preserve its own profits at the expense of people on the planet, and they are spreading a lot of disinformation about fossil fuels, and want to fight back against this transition away from fossil fuels. Of course, it will take finance, it will take money, to make this transition happen quickly, on the scale that climate requires.

Unchecked climate change is costly. It’s costly on our health, on our economy. And the science and economics shows that those costs will only escalate if we fail to curtail climate change and keep track of emissions.

JJ: We hear, as much as we hear about these annual conferences, that they set goals, and one goal in particular, based on the Paris Agreement, that’s not happening, that’s not being met. And if some things I read are true, well, that just means feedback loops, game over, that’s all she wrote.

Among other things, that doesn’t tell us how to act, that doesn’t tell us how to behave going forward, does it? I mean, I’m not trying to say “look on the bright side,” but people do want to know that there is still something they can do.

Climate Reality Project (1/7/20)

RC: Absolutely. This is a problem that we have caused as humans. We still have agency about what happens next, and it’s really, really important to remember that, because it’s crucial for the kind of planet we leave to our children and grandchildren. We cannot give up.

Yes, it’s true that the goal of limiting global average temperature to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, that goal is very likely going to be overshot within the next decade. But how long that happens, and how much further temperatures increase, that’s up to us. That’s up to the emissions choices we make today. It’s up to us how much we invest in resilience and adaptation to help protect communities from impacts that are already locked in, even now, at 1.3°.

And we have to remember, as you said, that if temperatures continue to increase, we are going to set off some feedback loops in the Earth’s systems that we cannot put back in the box. I’m talking about things like further loss of land-based ice that can trigger even more multi-century sea-level rise increase. Those kinds of impacts, even if we bring temperatures back down, once they get unlocked, the inertia and the physical systems will cause them to continue.

So it’s up to us now, as it has always been, to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, to stand up to the political leaders who are trying to obstruct progress, and really understand what’s at stake now for people around the world, and for all of these precious ecosystems, all around the world, that are being threatened by climate change.

Guardian (10/30/25)

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally and briefly, I see today, former EPA Chief Gina McCarthy saying we could look to cities and states for climate action while we have this rocketing backwards into the past at the federal level. Is that something? Is it looking at different locations? Is that something you find meaningful?

RC: Yes, it’s absolutely an all-hands-on-deck moment to resist the harmful actions of this administration. And there are many states and subnational entities around the country. There are forward-looking businesses around the country that understand the reality of climate change, and are moving ahead regardless. Around the world, too, many countries remain very, very committed to climate action, because it’s in their own self-interest. They, too, are feeling the brunt of impacts right now, and want cheap, affordable, clean energy.

So this is a moment where the Trump administration needs to be isolated in its anti-science and destructive actions. This is the moment for the world to forge ahead regardless, because the stakes are too high. This is not a political partisan issue. This is about our planet, our children, future generations that are looking to us to make the right choices, right now.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rachel Cleetus from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Their work is online at UCS.org. Thank you so much, Rachel Cleetus, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RC: Thank you very much for having me.

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

Remembering Dick Cheney, ‘Polarizing’ War Criminal

Jacobin (11/5/25) offered an unsanitized review of Dick Cheney’s career.

The corporate media in the United States have rarely met a servant of empire who isn’t eligible for hagiography in death, whether or not they presided over mass murder worldwide. In the case of Dick Cheney, who died on November 4, media outlets have summoned everything in their power to sugarcoat the blood-drenched career of the most powerful US vice president in history, a position he notoriously occupied for the duration of the two-term administration of George W. Bush from 2001–09.

As VP, he was chief architect of the “Global War on Terror,” with a hands-on role in manufacturing the disinformation that manufactured consent for the Iraq invasion based on imaginary WMDs and fictional ties to 9/11. The hundreds of thousands of deaths from that war are Cheney’s most significant legacy.

His lengthy resume also includes stints as White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford and secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush; in the latter role, he oversaw the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, in both of which the US killed large numbers of civilians. From 1995 until 2000, Cheney served as the obscenely remunerated CEO of sketchy US oil and engineering firm Halliburton.

Chip Gibbons summed up Cheney’s career in Jacobin (11/5/25):

Cheney rose to vice president as the result of a stolen election. Once in power, his attacks on democracy only worsened. Exploiting the 9/11 tragedy, he broke nearly every democratic norm to enact a regime of authoritarian, murderous policies. He not only was perhaps the single most destructive figure for American democracy in the 21st century—he left behind human carnage and death around the world.

‘Towering and polarizing’

In the first six paragraphs of CNN‘s obituary (11/4/25), we’re told that Dick Cheney was a “noble giant of a man” who was “among the finest public servants of his generation.”

Needless to say, this was not how Cheney was remembered by corporate media. CNN’s obituary (11/4/25) begins:

Dick Cheney, America’s most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the “war on terror,” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family.

Rather than dwell from the get-go on the blatant lies—pardon, “faulty assumptions”—that Cheney propagated in order to pulverize Iraq, the obituary first devotes several paragraphs to honoring him by quoting from said family statement:

Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing…. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.

Love and fly fishing probably aren’t the first things that come to mind at the mention of Dick Cheney for most Iraqis, Afghans, Panamanians, Guantánamo Bay inmates tortured by the CIA, and other victims of Cheney’s “kindness.” But CNN doesn’t ask them. In fact, the only major news outlet FAIR could find that interviewed someone impacted by his deadly foreign campaigns was the Associated Press (11/4/25), which found exactly what you’d imagine:

On a busy street in Baghdad, Ahmad Jabar called former Cheney a “bloodthirsty person.”

“They destroyed us,” he said of the Bush administration, “and Dick Cheney specifically destroyed us. How are we supposed to remember him?”

In the fifth paragraph of its obituary, CNN informs us that Cheney was “for decades a towering and polarizing Washington power player.” In the sixth, we have a brief eulogy courtesy of George W. Bush, who praises his former second-in-command as a “decent, honorable man” who will be remembered by “history…as among the finest public servants of his generation.”

‘The truth was more complex’

New York Times (11/4/25): “Democrats portrayed Mr. Cheney…as one of the most polarizing figures in politics,” but “the truth…was more complex.”

Indeed, there appears to be a corporate media consensus that terms like “polarizing” and “controversial” constitute the outer limits of acceptable critique when remembering mass murderers who happened to be US statesmen. AP (11/4/25) went with the headline: “Dick Cheney, One of the Most Powerful and Polarizing Vice Presidents in US History, Dies at 84.” PBS NewsHour‘s (11/4/25) was: “A Look at Dick Cheney’s Influential and Polarizing Legacy.”

The Wall Street Journal’s lead paragraph (11/4/25) similarly specifies that Cheney’s “role as an architect of the post-9/11 war on terror made him one of the most powerful—and controversial—US vice presidents in history.” A subsection of the New York Times’ own unbearably long obit (11/4/25) is titled “Polarizing and Idolized.”

News outlets could hardly erase Cheney’s very public history of “controversy,” but they bent over backwards to paint it as simply a matter of perspective. In that Times subsection, the paper’s Robert McFadden explained that “Democrats” portrayed Cheney as “one of the most polarizing figures in politics, a manipulator who personified militarism, corporate corruption, government secrecy and environmental degradation.” It continued:

But to Republicans who idolized him, Mr. Cheney was a fundamentalist’s rock star—a cultural and political icon, the lifeblood of the conservative movement and the president’s firm right hand. To the faithful, he was also, like Mr. Bush, a man of God.

The truth lay somewhere in between and was more complex, according to White House associates, lawmakers and others familiar with Mr. Cheney’s activities, many of which were carried out behind the scenes. Only participants in those activities got glimpses of the nuances and the leverage at work.

First of all, the real “two sides” here are not “polarizing” and “idolized”; polarizing means dividing into two opposing sides, after all. And even among typically mealy-mouthed Democrats, there were those who called Cheney the war criminal he was, not just “personified militarism.”

What’s more, despite the New York Times‘ insistence that the truth must always lie between what Democrats and Republicans say, this case above possibly all others proves that article of faith to be false. That Cheney was a rock star to conservatives does not mean he was any less a bona fide war criminal.

But media regularly pit Cheney and his supporters’ views of his actions against those of “critics,” suggesting it’s simply a matter of opinion whether torture in the form of simulated drowning and rectal rehydration might be a war crime.

‘Helped resolve foreign problems’

CNN (11/4/25) included a photo of Cheney and his family applauding a statue of himself.

To return to CNN (11/4/25), for instance, we learn that the vice president’s “aggressive warnings” about such matters as Iraq’s—in reality nonexistent—weapons of mass destruction programs “played a huge role in laying the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003,” which along with the war on Afghanistan “led the US down a dark legal and moral path including ‘enhanced interrogations’ of terror suspects that critics blasted as torture.”

For his part, Cheney “insisted methods like waterboarding were perfectly acceptable.” He was

also an outspoken advocate for holding terror suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—a practice that critics at home and abroad branded an affront to core American values.

In response to the 2014 CIA torture report, Cheney stated: “I would do it again in a minute.”

While “critics” at least got to question what they “blasted as torture,” there was no room for caveats when other brutal aspects of Cheney’s brutal legacy were related. In CNN’s one-line summary of the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Cheney was credited with having shown “considerable skill in directing” both assaults as Pentagon chief under Bush the elder. No mention was made of the hundreds or possibly thousands of civilian casualties of the US decision to bomb the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo to such an extent that the area earned the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”

The attack on Panama is also briefly referenced in Cheney’s New York Times obituary (11/4/25), as one of the “several foreign problems” that the then–Defense secretary “helped resolve…for Mr. Bush.” The Times notes that Cheney “coordinated” the invasion of the country, “whose dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega, was whisked away to Miami, convicted of racketeering and imprisoned.”

Again, never mind the slaughter that attended the resolution of that particular “foreign problem”—or the fact that Noriega happened to be a longtime CIA asset who had remained on the agency’s payroll. Why would any corporate media outlet take advantage of Cheney’s decades-long political history to comment on the evolution of imperial hypocrisy?

‘Skillful operative’

Washington Post (11/4/25): “Mr. Cheney’s role as the Bush administration’s leading advocate of an expansive, aggressive war on terrorism reflected his conviction that the 9/11 attack was a grave threat to the United States.”

As the obituaries proliferate in the establishment press, it’s hard to find a single one that isn’t complicit in sanitizing—to the extent possible—Cheney’s trajectory of mass destruction. The Washington Post (11/4/25) marks the passing of this “powerful vice president” who utilized his role as “chief strategist” during the Bush II years to “approve the use of torture and steer US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq,” while also making significant headway in the field of domestic espionage. In the aftermath of September 11, the Post‘s Barton Gellman and Marc Fisher wrote, Cheney

conceived and supervised a wide-ranging new program of warrantless domestic surveillance…that circumvented legislative prohibitions and the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

But it was ultimately all in a day’s work, because “to Mr. Cheney, the war on terror was a new kind of conflict demanding new rules appropriate to what he called ‘the dark side.’” Who cares that, “time and again, events would prove Mr. Cheney wrong”—as in Iraq’s lack of WMD or ties to al-Qaeda—or that he voted

against a federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa.

He also “opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund program for toxic-waste cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.”

Despite all of this, Cheney remains immortalized by the Post as a “hometown hero” and “skillful operative.”

‘Hard-charging conservative’

AP (11/4/25) credited Cheney with “a life of power that he exercised to maximum effect from the shadows.”

Last but not least, AP ‘s Calvin Woodward (11/4/25) made up for his inclusion of an Iraqi voice by offering an almost endearing take on the legacy of the “hard-charging conservative,” even while reflecting on his sinister reputation:

He was the small man operating big levers as if from Oz. Machiavelli with a sardonic grin. “The Darth Vader of the administration,” as Bush described the public’s view.

No one seemed more amused at that perception than Cheney himself. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”

The force was with him.

Charming, indeed.

Once again, then, the US corporate media has shown its true colors by legitimizing and euphemizing the track record of someone who is responsible for an inconceivably massive quantity of suffering and death worldwide.

As Iraqi scholar and poet Sinan Antoon recently put it: “In a different world Dick Cheney would definitely be a war criminal and would be standing trial.”

But we’re stuck with the world we have—and the media aren’t doing anything to make it any better.

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

Madiba Dennie on Voting Rights Act in Danger

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

Balls & Strikes (10/13/25)

This week on CounterSpin: There is an argument evidently compelling to some: Yes, Black people have been enslaved and excluded and discriminated against for decades, such that today they are born in a hole in terms of wealth, of housing equity, of jobs. If we acknowledge that their discrimination was and is race-based, that would be saying race matters—but haha! Didn’t you all say you don’t want race to matter?

It’s an argument so specious a third grader could call it out. But if it comes from the Supreme Court majority, we are forced to consider it as serious, and enjoined to believe it is based in good faith. The history on these efforts helps us see a way forward.

Madiba Dennie is deputy editor and senior contributor at the legal analysis site Balls and Strikes, and author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recent press coverage of Zohran Mamdani.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
November 7, 2025

For Establishment Press, the Lesson of Mamdani’s Victory Is to Take No Lessons

In the first election since Donald Trump and the GOP have upended US democracy, Democrats won resoundingly in closely watched state and local races across the country. The biggest headline was the general election thumping of establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election, but Democrats also won big in Virginia, New Jersey, California and Pennsylvania, among other places.

Corporate media acknowledged the strong rebuke to the Trump regime, but pundits and reporters across the country’s major national newspapers quickly warned Democrats against reading too much into Mamdani’s victory or shifting too far to the left.

‘Pragmatism and compromise’

The New York Times (11/4/25) urges Zohran Mamdani to break his promises on buses and childcare.

The New York Times editorial board (11/4/25), which, as it acknowledged, opposed Mamdani in the New York City primary (and then kept quiet in the general), offered the victorious candidate congratulations and a heaping helping of advice.

“He should start by building a leadership team light on democratic socialists,” the board counseled, “and heavy on officials with records of accomplishment and proven management skills.” While of course a mayor should surround themself with experienced and skilled people, it’s also unrealistic to ask them to shun the political organization that propelled them to victory.

According to exit polling, 24% of New York voters described themselves, as Mamdani does, as democratic socialists—and they made up roughly 41% of Mamdani’s voters. To suggest that this broad swath of the city should be excluded from governing because of their ideology smacks of McCarthyism.

Mamdani will find success by “marrying his admirable ambition to pragmatism and compromise,” the board wrote. What does that look like? Well, one of Mamdani’s central and popular campaign promises was free and fast buses. The Times instructed him to abandon the “free” part of that promise: “A better idea” is to offer “a reduced fare” on just some routes. Because voters love a politician who breaks a promise!

No ‘talent for moderation’

The Wall Street Journal (11/4/25) warns against raising taxes on the wealthy, noting that “the top 1% of taxpayers contribute about 40% of the city’s income-tax revenue.” Not noted by the Journal: Personal income tax provides only about 22% of the city’s total revenues.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/4/25), generally well to the right of the board at the Times, similarly hoped to find “a pragmatic streak” in Mamdani. It predicted “a challenge” for Democrats if Mamdani “inspires more leftist candidates to challenge incumbent Democrats,” or “begins to define the Democratic Party in the public mind.” It concluded with little hope, writing that Mamdani “has never demonstrated a talent for moderation.”

It would seem that “pragmatism” in the minds of the country’s establishment punditocracy means not the dictionary definition of “dealing with a problem in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist,” but instead something more like “upholding the status quo.”

The facts are that half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened, and an estimated 350,000 are without homes; freezing rent, building affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and asking billionaires and corporations in an increasingly unequal society to hand a tiny fraction of their profits back to the city are actually quite pragmatic solutions to those problems—unless you’re the elite media.

‘Learn the lesson from last time’

The Washington Post (11/5/25) reported that Virginia’s Democrats “lurched too far left” after “big wins in 2017 and 2019.” In fact, Virginia Dems in 2019 were embroiled in scandal, with two statewide officials found to have worn blackface and a third facing sexual assault charges. The three statewide offices were swept by Republicans in 2021.

Such admonishments weren’t reserved only for Mamdani. In a piece on the results in Virginia—where centrist Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s race by a 15% margin amid a statewide sweep—the Washington Post (11/5/25) acknowledged that the results were “a resounding rejection” of Trump’s second term, but then turned to a source who said Democrats “need to learn the lesson from the last time this happened, which is don’t misread the mandate.”

You see, the party “lurched too far left, after its big wins in 2017 and 2019, ushering in a backlash” that led to a GOP sweep in Virginia in 2021. “Now, he said, the Democrats may have a more promising path forward if Spanberger can fulfill pledges to govern as a moderate.”

One wonders what that even means; the Post never got around to telling readers. But that 2021 loss was not by a progressive; it was centrist Democrat Terry McAuliffe who lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin in 2021. As I pointed out at the time (FAIR.org, 11/5/21):

McAuliffe has been outspoken about Democrats hewing to the center on things like healthcare and corporate tax cuts, and backed two major fracked gas pipeline projects in the state while raking in big money from pipeline developers.

To elite media, if a centrist Democrat wins, it’s on the strength of their “moderation.” If they lose? Well, that’s the fault of progressives.

‘Springboard to nowhere’

Ross Douthat’s podcast (11/5/25) is called Interesting Times, for reasons that are unclear.

“Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think,” insisted New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (11/5/25). Don’t believe those who would have you believe Mamdani can “remake the Democratic Party.” Why, you ask? Because “the media…tends to hype New York mayoral politics beyond its real significance,” and because “the office of mayor of New York City has tended to be a political springboard to nowhere.” It’s a very weird take for a columnist at a New York City newspaper.

Voters in any city would be pretty pissed if their mayor approached the job as little more than a springboard for national political ambitions. “There might be a future where Mamdani ends up getting elected as a governor or a senator,” Douthat allowed—which would seem to not leave out much but the presidency, which Mamdani as a naturalized citizen is ineligible for anyway.

But also, Mamdani doesn’t need to launch into national politics in order to impact them. What Douthat is really doing is pretending that a populist Democrat who rode a huge wave of enthusiasm despite—or even because of—holding positions the establishment strongly opposes can’t have a major impact on that party today.

‘Whichever winner fits their biases’

Michelle Cottle (New York Times, 11/6/25) seemed to suggest that one lesson Democrats should learn from New Jersey and Virginia is that there’s no need to “electrify the party’s base.”

Fellow Times columnist Michelle Cottle (11/6/25) advised readers to expect the “ideological tug of war between centrists and progressives” to “persist into next year’s midterms, as the competing wings brandish whichever winner from this week best fits their existing biases.”

She wrote this with an apparently straight face in a column arguing that while Mamdani “electrified much of the electorate with his rock-star persona and lefty politics,” centrist victories from Spanberger and New Jersey Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill “offer lessons that are more replicable for the party.”

What those lessons might be wasn’t entirely clear. In terms of campaign strategy, Cottle wrote, they did what Mamdani did: “leaned in hard on the economy and the issue of affordability.” The also won by “dragging Mr. Trump into their races and tying his excesses to their opponents”—but so did Mamdani.

Perhaps the difference was that they “largely steered clear of the culture-war issues”? And yet while their opponents tried culture-war attacks against both the centrists and Mamdani, all three candidates kept the focus on cost of living and Trump.

Cottle seemed to like that Spanberger and Sherrill had previously “staked out centrist positions and were known to buck their own leadership when the spirit moved them.” But those are the kinds of Democrats who—like former senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—block the party from taking the kind of actions they promise, leading to what a recent poll (Jacobin, 10/15/25) found to be the No. 1 voter complaint about Democrats: They don’t deliver.

At best ‘a big zero’

Republican claims that Mamdani is a “Soviet-style communist” go unrebutted in the Washington Post (11/5/25).

New York Times pundits were certainly not alone in desperately wanting Mamdani’s victory to have no impact on the ideological direction of the Democratic Party. At the Washington Post (11/5/25), Tuesday’s Democratic victories

kick off a year-long fight over who best personifies the Democratic Party as it heads toward crucial midterm elections: Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who will run New York City, or moderates like Abigail Spanberger, the centrist with a CIA background who was elected governor of Virginia.

What are the two sides of the debate here, according to the Post? If you’re thinking it’s pro-corporate centrists versus progressives, you aren’t thinking like a legacy political reporter. It’s actually “Republicans,” who say Mamdani’s victory “confirms that the party is in thrall to left-wing extremists,” and “Democratic leaders,” who are “eager to shed the ‘woke’ label that dogged their party in 2024.”

Early in the piece, reporters Naftali Bendavid and Yasmeen Abutaleb quote uber-centrist Rahm Emanuel and several GOP leaders, strategists and campaign ads. Finally, some 12 paragraphs in, the progressive perspective is given exactly two paragraphs:

Some progressives, however, say they welcome efforts to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, noting his ability to electrify an array of voters with an unapologetically liberal message.

A quote from Bernie Sanders constituted the second of the paragraphs, which was quickly followed by perspectives from “other Democrats” who sought to downplay the significance of Mamdani’s influence or role within the party. Every other source in the lengthy, quote-riddled piece was either a Republican or an establishment Democrat.

The piece closed with one of the latter. Former DCCC chair Steve Israel argued that Mamdani only impacts the midterms “if he overreaches as mayor of New York”:

If he governs too far to the left and there are daily headlines about his going too far, then yes, the narrative continues and could affect certain districts in the midterm election…. If he governs more reasonably, with less controversy over his views, it becomes a big zero in the midterm elections.

‘Bright spot’ for the GOP?

The Washington Post (11/5/25) said “some Democrats” are “worried about the socialist label sticking,” since their party has been framed as being “too concerned about special classes of Americans over others.” “Others” in this case presumably refers to billionaires.

Another Washington Post article (11/5/25) listed the “Winner and Losers from the 2025 Election.” The four winners included the obvious—like “Democrats”—and the much less obvious: “Republican attack ads for the next year.”

Reporter Amber Phillips explained: “In Mamdani, Trump and Republicans feel they’ve found the perfect foil for next year’s midterm elections.” In fact, Mamdani is “so far to the left that the top two Democrats in Congress, also from New York, hesitated to endorse him or just didn’t,” she wrote. She pointed to Trump’s social media claim that the “Radical Left…keep getting me, and other Republicans, elected!”

Politico (11/5/25), too, let the GOP frame Mamdani’s win as a victory for the right. “Republicans found their only bright spot in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral victory—one they believe will allow them to tie the national party to him at the hip.” Politico offered no reason to question this, only to support it:

Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs, the avowed socialist who sought the presidency from a prison cell, in the opening seconds of his victory speech only made Republicans’ case against him easier to prosecute.

No Dem playbook

Politico (11/5/25) suggests that Mamdani quoting Eugene V. Debs—who last ran for president in 1920—will help turn voters against Democrats in 2026.

Many outlets did seem to figure out that voters care a lot about the cost of living, which both the centrist and progressive candidates emphasized. Politico (11/5/25):

For as much as 2025 has dealt Democrats a series of intra-party proxy battles between progressives and centrists, on Tuesday night they coalesced around a message—affordability—that could bridge the divide ahead of the midterms.

The Washington Post (11/5/25) similarly found “one through line that connected all three winning campaigns: affordability.”

But the New York Times‘ Lisa Lerer (11/5/25) didn’t see it that way. Lerer managed to find weakness in the resounding nationwide victory:

Yet for all the invigoration that success brings, the Democratic Party still hasn’t coalesced around a coherent political identity or a clear electoral playbook that can win in swing states and safe states alike.

Corporate media will always push for that “coherent political identity” to be firmly centrist. But voters don’t just want promises of affordability; they want results. And a party beholden to corporate interests, that would rather tinker around the edges than push for real inroads against inequality, will have a tough time making good on those promises.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
November 6, 2025

‘Trump Clearly Has No Idea What He’s Doing When It Comes to the Economy’: CounterSpin interview with Dean Baker on Trumponomics

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about Donald Trump’s economic nonsense for the October 31, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Truth Social (4/7/25)

Janine Jackson: It’s long been clear to observers that corporate journalists have their own rules, which, push come to shove, seem to be grounded more solidly in the “corporate” part than the “journalism” part, with tacit reference to notions of objectivity and balance that never stood up to much examination, but are a useful excuse for platforming absurd and/or hateful ideas.

But what, or who, is harmed when corporate news media coddle Donald Trump by presenting his weird, all-caps blatherings as ideas that deserve respectful consideration as ideas, and not just as the blurtings of a sawdust Caesar? There’s a price to pretending the emperor has clothes, and it isn’t paid by the emperor.

Dean Baker is co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where Beat the Press, his commentary on economic reporting, appears. He’s the author of, among other titles, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He joins us now by phone from Oregon. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dean Baker.

Dean Baker: Thanks, Janine. Thanks for having me on.

Beat the Press (10/27/25)

JJ: Well, we know that Trump has a lot of farkakte ideas. When it comes to economics, there are some baseline–I feel like “fallacies” almost honors them too much, but there are some ideas that seem to be at work. What is the thrust of this piece that you just wrote, “The Economics of Crazy”? What do you think is important to say right now, not necessarily to MAGA, but to the rest of us?

DB: Well, Trump clearly has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to the economy. I mean, that might be true more generally, but I’m an economist; I could speak very well to what he says about the economy, and it literally makes no sense. He routinely says things that are absurd, impossible.

One of the ones, just because he repeats it again over months, is that he says he’s going to get drug prices down by 800, 900, even 1,500%, and he usefully throws in that “no one thought it was possible”—which is true. Just in case other people are confused here, you can’t reduce drug prices by more than a 100% unless you envision them paying people to use their drugs. So he’s saying something literally absurd, and he’s repeated it again and again and again, which both means confusion on his part, and also that apparently none of his aides has the courage to say, “Mr. Trump, that’s not how percents work.”

So that’s just one very clear example, but it happens all the time. He keeps raising the number that we’re bringing in, I think we’re up to $20 trillion now, and I’m sure no one has any idea what he’s talking about; that’s two-thirds of a year’s GDP. I don’t know where he could possibly think that’s coming from, or why, or how, but he just uses this number, and he says it again.

Anyhow, my point: He literally does not make any sense, but he’s treated like he’s got an economic agenda that he’s trying to carry through, and maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. Well, there is nothing there. This is literally crazy.

JJ: I think what people think, when they’re being smart, “Well, there’s puppeteers behind the scenes and they’re getting him to say (because obviously he doesn’t know what he’s saying) but they’re getting him to enact their agenda.” But if that’s an agenda, it’s not itself coherent, really.

Dean Baker: “There are people around him who want favors, want money, and they’re getting it…. He knows how to take bribes, basically.” (image: BillMoyers.com)

DB: Yeah, I think there’s two things worth distinguishing. There are people around him who want favors, want money, and they’re getting it. So he gives someone a big break on a tariff. He grants a merger that shouldn’t go through. There’s all sorts of things like that that you could point to that he has been doing, and will presumably continue to do. So those people have his ear, and he will grant them favors that will give them lots of money. That’s not particularly a coherent agenda; that’s just someone coming up to him, giving him a big contribution, whatever it might be, giving him a cut, whatever it is. And he knows how to take bribes, basically.

But the second issue is, is there actually something that makes sense as economic policy here? And it’s just absurd to pretend there is, because, again, whatever you might say he’s trying to do, he contradicts it again and again.

I’ll just mention again, another example I had in the piece, that he wants to reindustrialize America. That’s fine, you can make an argument for it. But he wants to do it with tariffs. OK, so figure out which industries you want to promote, this is what Biden did. I mean, not the exact same program, but he wanted to promote clean energy, he wanted to promote production on his computer chips. So he puts tariffs on those industries, has subsidies, incentives, etc.

Trump, saying, “OK, I want to promote industry.” So he wants to promote the auto industry, shipbuilding. What’s he do? He has a 50% tariff on imported steel. How does that help the auto industry?

So, again, I just mention that, but you could find any number of examples that whatever policy you say he is trying to pursue, he does policies that are 180 degrees at odds, just totally thwarting it. So someone looking for a coherent policy, they’re looking for something that’s not there.

C-SPAN (9/21/25)

JJ: And with tariffs in particular, I’ve been surprised, because it wasn’t a topic I knew anything about. I think it was something that a lot of folks didn’t really understand how tariffs worked, and our introduction to how they worked was Trump saying, ‘They’re going to pay us. We’re going to get rich off these tariffs.’ And then journalists saying, ‘That’s not quite how they work.’ It’s not exactly a robust debate, but there is an understanding of how tariffs work, and it’s just not the way that Trump says they do.

DB: Yeah, again, I can’t speak to what’s in his head, but he talks about it like he has countries sending us checks. So he says, “Oh, I put a big tariff on Canada, and that’s going to punish them. And I put a big tariff on India, and that’s going to….”

Well, the tariff isn’t on India. It’s a tax we pay on the imports we buy from India, so we’re paying the tariff. It can hurt India, to be clear, if you put a tax, we’ll buy less of their stuff, so it could hurt them, but we’re the ones paying it. So when he goes around boasting, “Oh, we got way more money from tariffs than anyone thought,” A, that’s not true, but that’s our money. He’s just boasting that he gave us a really big tax increase. Politicians usually don’t like to do that.

JJ: We would understand it better if journalists would piece it out a little bit better. And I just feel that news media are working against clarity. I mean, whatever policy prescription you might believe in, they’re working against our understanding of it when they talk about Trump, and don’t talk about the policy itself. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, he’s weird. I wonder where he’s getting his ideas from.” But we have to be onto the structures and the systems that are allowing him to do what he’s doing. Otherwise, how do we know what not to do in the future, if it’s a policy that just doesn’t happen to be attached to the name Donald Trump?

Raw Story (10/15/25)

DB: Yeah, it would be so helpful. I mean, something as simple, when they say Trump is imposing a tariff on China, it would be very helpful if they just said something as simple as he’s putting a tax, or if you like, tariff on imports from China, just so that people understand what the tax is. Because a lot of people don’t know what a tariff is. I don’t blame people, they aren’t economists, but I think a lot of people think it’s something other than a tax.

In fact, Trump’s administration has tried to encourage that. [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent was on some show, he’s probably done it more than once, and he got very angry. He goes, “A tariff is not a tax.” I’m sorry. It’s the definition. It is a tax. And in fact, it was the United States, when it was first formed, tariffs were the largest tax. So there’s really not an ambiguity there. It is a tax.

JJ: And that’s where I get so mad at news media, because telling the truth about whether tariffs are taxes is not a partisan issue. Why are you mad that somebody in the White House is going to be mad at you if you say what the dictionary says a tariff is? I feel that news media are letting us down in a way that is so deeply fundamental, in terms of just our understanding of these issues that affect all of our lives.

DB: Yeah, it is very frustrating. Of course, we all were alive through the Biden years, where everything he said was scrutinized and often torn to pieces. I remember, I don’t know how many times I saw pieces complaining about Biden being tone deaf when he would tout some positive development in the economy, which, in almost all cases, was true. I mean, not to say the guy didn’t exaggerate, politicians do that. But if he were to say, ‘Oh, we’ve had very strong real wage growth, wages growing faster than inflation at the bottom end of the income distribution,’ it’s a 100% true thing. If he were to say that, he would be attacked for being tone deaf, but that was a true statement.

CNN (9/12/25)

Instead, you have Trump saying things like, “Prices are falling, inflation has been licked.” These are just absurd statements. Inflation’s actually up, and almost no prices are falling. So this is just flat-out absurdity. So you get Biden being attacked for saying things that are true, and Trump, it’s just sort of, “Well, that’s Trump,” when he says things that are just totally absurd.

JJ: And that’s my concern, is that if we don’t separate Trump from these policy ideas, we’re not learning anything. We’re going through this horrible time, and we’re not actually learning anything from it, except, “Ooh Trump, he’s a weirdo, he’s a creep.” That’s not enough of a takeaway for me.

DB: Yeah, I would hope we can get better reporting, I mean, I’m not going to say it’s all bad, but a lot of these things are fairly straightforward, and when Trump says something that’s just absurd, it would be helpful to not just reprint it, but to point out it’s absurd. There’s no way drug prices could fall 1,500%. So that, literally, is just absurd.

JJ: Exactly. And mention it every time you mention it, not just the one time he said a funny thing, but every time you talk about him on drug prices, you should note that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

But I want to pivot you for the last question. It’s not really a pivot, because it’s all intertwined, but when we talked last, Trump was just about to come into office, and he was threatening to declare trade wars against China, as well as Mexico and Canada. And you were saying at the time that ignoring deals that the US has made with other countries, including deals that Trump himself had made, is going to make the US, let’s say it, a less appealing trade partner.

And you’ve been talking for a long time about how, given the size of China’s economy, the size of its research efforts, it makes a lot more sense to maintain access to China’s technology, rather than cutting the US off.

I just wonder, finally, now that Trump has basically declared a trade war on the whole world, they’re moving to increase trade among themselves at the expense, if you will, of the US. And so the US is losing out, in fact, by trying to wall off tech, in particular, from the “Chinese menace.”

AP (via Politico, 10/23/25)

DB: Yeah. Well, that certainly seems to be the case. In fact, Trump, I don’t know if, whatever you want to say, but they don’t have a written trade deal, at least not to my knowledge. But they did have some agreement after the meeting Trump had with Xi yesterday. And Trump seems to have backed away from his efforts to try and punish China with high tariffs, and then also restricting exports of computer chips.

And the rest of the world, exactly as you were saying, the rest of the world is looking to trade more with each other, Canada very explicitly. I mean, what else could they do? Trump’s making all sorts of absurd threats, threatening to take over the country, literally. So naturally they’re looking to have stronger trade relations with Latin America, with Europe, with China, Japan, Korea.

And the same is true with all the other countries; Korea, Japan and China are looking to have closer trade ties. We are seeing that, because they realize the United States under Trump is not a reliable trading partner. So no one wants to be in a position where they’re in effect subject to his whims.

JJ: And news media, in their Trump-centered reporting, are kind of like, “Trump’s trying to win. He’s trying to show power.” But for all of us who are not the elephants but the grass, this is not happy news for us.

CNN (10/10/25)

DB: He’s always backed down, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe he’ll continue to, in the face of the situation, but when he starts talking about tariffs of over 100% on China, which he has repeatedly, that’s almost an embargo. And we still buy a lot of stuff from China. So if we got to a situation where trade slowed to a crawl, we’d see a lot of stuff that we’re used to getting at low prices there, they would only be available at a much higher price, or in many cases not available at all. So people wouldn’t like that story. And again, thankfully he’s backed down, again and again and again. But wherever you see tariffs of the size he was talking about against China, or for that matter any other country, we would see the effects.

JJ: Any final thoughts, Dean Baker, about more responsible reporting on Donald Trump’s economic “policies”?

DB: I’d like to just see some simple things, just being clear that tariffs are a tax on us, and when Trump says things that are just blatantly not true, that should be pointed out. I mean, the reporters, I think, for the most part know that when you start saying prices are falling, which is clearly not true, and sometimes they do point out, but again, that should just be the norm.

We might know this, pPeople who are careful readers, obviously economists. But a lot of the people, who are very casual readers, they pick up the paper, they see, “Trump says prices are falling.” They might think that’s true, because it’s a rather blatant lie that most people– again, politicians all exaggerate, take that as a given – but they usually don’t try and tell you, “Night is day, up is down,” and that’s what Trump’s doing. And they should point that out, because people need to know that.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with economist Dean Baker. His column, Beat the Press, appears on CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Dean Baker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: Thanks for having me on.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
November 6, 2025

Conde Nast, Paramount Cut Jobs—and Political Dissent

Two major media brands announced layoffs and consolidation. Paramount, now under the control of the Ellison family, laid off 1,000 employees across its companies, including CBS News (Deadline, 10/27/25; Independent, 10/30/25). Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue’s website would be phased out and incorporated into its parent publication Vogue (New York Times, 11/3/25), leading to staff terminations.

The firings at both these media outlets have the character of political purges. They will have a tremendously negative impact on the already sorry state of political news in the United States.

‘Painful to think about’

Stories like this one from Teen Vogue (10/10/25) that discuss politics particularly as it impacts young people are very rare in corporate media.

Teen Vogue had made a name for itself beyond pop culture and fashion, becoming a rabble-rousing political site, recently covering the defense of immigrants under the Trump administration (3/6/25) and interviewing Zohran Mamdani (10/31/25). Teen Vogue’s now-former politics editor, Lex McMenamin, was recently on NPR’s It’s Been a Minute (11/3/25) to talk about the renewed American interest in socialist politics.

A joint statement by Condé United and the NewsGuild of New York condemned the consolidation. The Hollywood Reporter (11/3/25) said:

“Management plans to lay off six of our members, most of whom are BIPOC women or trans, including Teen Vogue’s politics editor—continuing the trend of layoffs at Condé disproportionately impacting marginalized employees,” the organizations stated. They added, “Teen Vogue now has no writers or editors explicitly covering politics.”

The groups continued, “As of today, only one woman of color remains on the editorial staff at Teen Vogue.”

Aiyana Ishmael (Bluesky, 11/3/25) said:

I was laid off from Teen Vogue this week, alongside multiple other phenomenal team members.

At our Summit, I was asked how it felt to be one of two Black women left, and what that meant for representation. Now there are no Black women at Teen Vogue, and that is incredibly painful to think about.

Pulling coverage to the right

Former CBS producer Trey Sherman (Daily Beast, 10/30/25): “It wasn’t until I went downstairs, thinking me and all of my colleagues had been laid off, that I found out it was only people of color.”

Paramount owns CBS, and when Paramount was taken over by the Ellison family, FAIR (7/24/25, 9/9/25, 9/19/25) voiced its worry that the new owners, and its new CBS News editorial content czar Bari Weiss, would pull news coverage to the right, especially on the issue of Israel/Palestine.

Now we can see how the news outlet is being remolded. The Daily Beast (10/30/25) reported:

A Black producer who worked for a CBS News show that was canceled on Wednesday said that every producer on his team who was laid off is a person of color, whereas the white producers are being reassigned within the company. Trey Sherman had worked since February as a full-time associate producer at the streaming show CBS Evening News Plus. He was fired Wednesday after the network’s new anti-woke editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, announced CBS was canceling several shows, axing its race and culture unit, and laying off dozens of staff members.

One journalist being let go was Israel/Palestine correspondent Debora Patta, whose work was described by colleagues (London Independent, 10/30/25) as “largely sticking to the facts on the ground while steering clear of any emotional investment.” The Independent reported that Patta’s name was added to the list of layoffs

after another male foreign correspondent apparently complained to Weiss—who is stridently pro-Israel and describes herself as a “Zionist fanatic”—that he wasn’t getting enough airtime, nor was deployed to cover the Gaza war because of his support for Israel.

Beyond CBS, Paramount is said to be compiling a blacklist of Hollywood personnel with unacceptable political views. Variety (11/4/25) reported that “Paramount maintains a list of talent it will not work with because they are deemed to be ‘overtly antisemitic.’” Those with “xenophobic” and “homophobic” attitudes were also said to make the list, but Variety noted pointedly that Paramount was

the first major studio to denounce a celebrity-driven open letter signed by A-listers like Emma Stone and Javier Bardem that called for a boycott of Israeli film institutions implicated in “genocide and apartheid” against Palestinians.

There is no evidence that the federal government pushed for any of these changes, although it’s clear the politicized FCC has influence over what happens at CBS. But this is a terrible step forward in media capitulation to the regime by reducing critical coverage of the government, carrying out the regime’s white nationalist, anti-DEI agenda and, in the case of Teen Vogue, neutralizing a feisty dissident outlet that had an audience beyond the usual politics-reading crowd.

This news is bad enough for the hardworking journalists who are now jobless. But it’s also another blow to democracy.

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

Both NYC Tabloids Fought Mamdani, But Each Did It Their Way

Scary people of color featured prominently in the New York Post‘s anti-Mamdani tirades (10/19/25).

If there’s one thing that the institutional opinion-makers of New York’s major local tabloids, the New York Post and the Daily News, agreed on during the recent mayoral campaign, it’s that Zohran Mamdani should not be the next mayor of New York. But the way their editorial boards approached the election over the past few months vastly differed, reflecting their contrasting methods of opposing progress in New York City.

The New York Post ran an intense, almost daily, increasingly negative stream of editorials against Mamdani, with headlines like “Get Out and Vote, New Yorkers—It’s the Only Way to Prevent the Zohran Mamdani Nightmare” (10/27/25), “NY ‘Justice’ Is Now a Revolving Door for Serial Violent Perps—and Mamdani Will Make It WORSE” (10/19/25) and “How a Mayor Mamdani’s Israel Hate Would Twist the Entire City” (10/16/25).

The Post’s editorials spanned the gamut of issues, from education (“Mamdani’s Pathetic Plans for NYC Schools”—10/18/25) and housing (his rent freeze will “make the housing crisis worse…as people in rent-controlled units…will refuse to move”—11/2/25) to Mamdani’s “socialist agenda” (9/18/25), the socio-economics of his inner circle (9/7/25) and NYC controller and Mamdani ally Brad Lander (“the very definition of an unprincipled political weasel”—6/25/25).

Mamdani was attacked for insufficient praise for Trump regarding the ceasefire in Palestine (10/9/25), for being in Uganda during the shooting of a police officer in New York (8/2/25), for Qatari funding of his mom’s filmmaking work (9/1/25), for his level of privilege in Uganda (8/1/25), for not talking to the Post (10/31/25), and for pretty much anything happening on an average day in New York (10/8/25).

Pro-police sentiment accompanied by anti-Black racism (9/22/25, 10/19/25) featured prominently in the unsigned editorials in the Post. For example, in the Post’s piece “20 Reasons to Vote Against NYC Mayoral Front-Runner Zohran Mamdani” (11/2/25), reasons 1, 2, and 3 to not vote for him were “He hates the police,” “He really hates the police” and “He hates the police—with a splash of antisemitism.”

‘Hates Israel and the West’

For the New York Post (10/24/25), Islamophobia is “a nonsensical category that was invented to quash legitimate concerns about the growth of jihadism.”

Mamdani more generally came under intense fire for “antisemitism” (11/2/25) and being “anti-Israel”—which mean the same thing at the Post. “Mamdani’s Perverse Need to Destroy the Jewish State Is Driving His Campaign,” the Post (9/30/25) opined in a typical headline over an editorial that asserted, “Mamdani’s focus on erasing Israel is the very definition of antisemitism.”

“It’s Not Islamophobic to Notice Mamdani Hates Israel and the West,” argued another Post headline (10/24/25). The Post did run one editorial (7/3/25—not available online) that cautioned against employing anti-Muslim hatred in criticism of Mamdani. Then it attacked Mamdani (10/26/25) for not denying that Islamophobia exists, saying, “No wave of anti-Muslim hate crimes followed 9/11, not in New York nor anywhere else.” (“The FBI reported that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes rose from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, a 17-fold increase”—Human Rights Watch, 11/02.)

It also excoriated him for associating with noted Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour (11/2/25), and for “palling around with a ‘terror co-conspirator,’” Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj (10/19/25). As Mamdani himself (Brooklyn Eagle, 10/20/25) said:

The same imam met with Mayor Bloomberg, met with Mayor De Blasio, campaigned alongside Eric Adams, and the only time it became an issue of national attention was when I met with him because of the fact of my faith and because I’m on the precipice of winning this election.

‘Cartoonish positions on the Mideast’

Daily News (10/7/25): Mamdani’s “stance that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state…smacks of antisemitism in its rejection of an article of faith held so dearly by so many.”

In contrast to the unhinged Post, the Daily News editorial board was less verbose and less, well, crazy. For example, it published one editorial (6/29/25) that defended Mamdani against national Republican efforts to strip him of citizenship, saying those were “un-American,” “contemptible” and “dangerous.”

However, in terms of the mayor’s race itself, its views were only marginally less critical of Mamdani; it penned 11 unsigned editorials between the primary election on June 24 and the day before the general election, November 5, that focused at least in part on criticizing Mamdani.

For example, the Daily News (7/2/25) acknowledged that Mamdani has repeatedly verbally denounced antisemitism, though it dismissed those statements because of the candidate’s criticism of Israel:

Mamdani can’t just say he’s not antisemitic and that he wants to protect all New Yorkers. Those are hollow words that he continues to undermine by his actions, by using and supporting language and positions that fuel the fires of hate. His candidacy and naïve, even cartoonish, positions on the Mideast have rightly sparked fear among Jewish New Yorkers.

This distinction was lost in headlines like “Mamdani’s Stance on Israel Isn’t an Attack on Netanyahu, It’s an Antisemitic Affront to Jews” (10/7/25). In that editorial, the Daily News used a crystal ball to predict that Mamdani would be supporting anti-Israel protests on October 7, the second anniversary of the Hamas breakout from Gaza, and went off from there. (For the record, he attended a vigil that day organized by Israelis for Peace that called for a ceasefire and a return of prisoners held by both Israel and Hamas.)

‘Trying to redefine himself’

The Daily News (8/10/25) attacked “Mamdani’s sudden 180-degree turn on defunding the police“—citing a tweet of his from 2020.

The Daily News (7/24/25) also attacked Mamdani for his lack of support from NYCHA residents in three projects in his district in the primary elections. While this is an interesting angle and an important issue, it seems like cherry-picking data to look at these housing projects alone in the entire city.

And there was no robust debate in the opinion pages of the Daily News on the issue of NYCHA housing. It was opportunistic, at a minimum, to hold up the votes of people from three specific housing projects for the sole purpose of saying a particular group of poor and working-class Black and Latino people don’t support Mamdani. This was particularly the case given that Mamdani was polling significantly better among people of color than among white people.

In August, the Daily News (8/10/25) criticized Mamdani for coming to agree with them more. “‘Changed’ Views on Cops and Israel Are Hollow,” it proclaimed:

At least the old anti-cop Mamdani was consistent, if wrong…. We’re not buying it. Mamdani is trying to redefine himself to appeal to a wider audience in the general election, and spinning it as if he all of a sudden learned something new from these conversations.

Can’t win with these people.

A couple of editorials (9/28/25, 10/20/25) then called for Republican Curtis Sliwa to withdraw from the race to clear a path for Andrew Cuomo to win. It’s not clear in what other race in the country a major party candidate would be urged to withdraw from candidacy simply to stop an ideological opponent of the paper.

‘Naïve and maddening’

The Daily News (10/29/25) assured us that “Andrew Cuomo has solutions.” The two it mentioned: He would “prioritize building more housing” and “boost the [NYPD’s] ranks by 5,000 new cops.”
In the closing days of the contest, the Daily News (10/26/25) made formal its endorsement of Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani was described as “dithering,” with a campaign that was “a house of cards built on soundbites and laced with antisemitism”:

He stumbles and dodges when asked to venture beyond his surface-level focus on affordability and his four, and only four, narrow planks: childcare, buses, rent and grocery stores. It is not only naïve and maddening, but dangerous for a future mayor, and points up how unfit he is for the office.

The News went point by point, attacking “the real Mamdani” on how he will secure funding for his ambitious plans, on education, housing and development, decriminalization, antisemitism and Israel.

But what the Daily News didn’t get—what New York’s voters did—was that no matter how much establishment institutions like the Post and the Daily News tried to grind away at Mamdani’s genuine charisma and likeability and laser-like focus on the issues that New Yorkers do care about the most, they weren’t going to win.

In the end, the Daily News (10/29/25) focused on experience : “Lined up, there is no comparison between the seasoned Cuomo and the inexperienced Mamdani,” the ed board said. “Frankly, Mamdani just isn’t ready for the second-toughest job in America.”

But after all its talk of NYCHA and Israel and antisemitism, the Daily News finally stated the obvious ideological differences between Mamdani and the plurality of New York voters on the one hand and Cuomo and the Daily News on the other:

A larger number of centrists will be participating, as opposed to the more ideological types who dominate primaries. And that has always been Cuomo’s strength, the center, when he was governor and how he would be as mayor.

Mamdani comes from the left extreme and appeals to those voters, not the middle.

Tuesday’s election results show that what the Daily News calls the “left extreme” is in fact much larger than the so-called “center.”

Disclosure: The author was one of the 100,000 volunteers in the Zohran Mamdani campaign.

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

Mamdani Beats Cuomo and the Press Hacks (Again)

New York City baseball legend Yogi Berra said it best: It’s déjà vu all over again.

When Zohran Mamdani, a then-33-year-old democratic socialist state assembly member, beat disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this year’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary, he also defeated establishment press attempts to scare the public away from a New Deal–like platform (FAIR.org, 6/27/25).

Cuomo, his billionaire backers and corporate media took a beating. But they picked themselves up, got back in the ring, and reverted to anti-Muslim fearmongering and law-and-order hysteria. They lost again.

Clearing road for ‘biggest liar’

What makes Zohran Mamdani a Communist, according to the New York Post (7/16/25)? He told New York business leaders of “his plan to raise their taxes, if elected.”

In the general election, the city’s two biggest tabloids, the New York Post and the Daily News, regularly attacked Mamdani, and called in both opinion pages and news sections for voters to coalesce around Cuomo, running as an independent.

The reliably right-wing New York Post editorial board clung to its preferred candidate, hopelessly corrupt incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, until he dropped out of the race at the end of September. Then the paper pivoted from ridiculing Cuomo’s return to politics—calling him the “biggest liar in New York” (3/1/25)—to becoming one of his biggest cheerleaders (e.g., 10/21/25, 10/22/25, 10/23/25, 10/23/25).

The Post‘s front page outdid itself with racebaiting (“The Price Is White” was the headline on a story about Mamdani’s proposal to shift property taxes away from poorer, majority people-of-color neighborhoods—6/28/25) and open redbaiting: “Sickle and Dimed,” complete with hammer and sickle, announced a story (7/16/25) about Mamdani wanting to raise taxes on the wealthy; “Trump to New York: Keep the Commie Out!” was the front-page headline on Election Day (11/4/25).

And in the eight days from October 16 to October 23, the paper featured Mamdani’s image or name on its front page six times (10/16/25, 10/17/25, 10/19/15, 10/20/25, 10/21/25, 10/23/25) in its effort to bring down his candidacy.

“Mam-Child: Beware, NYC Is No Toy to Hand to Nepo Baby like Zohran,” was the headline of the Post‘s October 27 front page—an odd criticism to advance when you’re trying to promote a rival who owes his career as a New York governor to the fact that he was the son of a three-term New York governor.

‘Entirely false and fabricated’

$New York Post: BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani's top cheerleader Bill de Blasio now says NYC mayoral front-runner's math 'doesn't add up' a week before election$
The New York Post (10/28/25) fell for a bogus story in the London Times—which had called a random person named Bill DeBlasio and printed his views as though they were the former mayor’s (Semafor, 10/30/25).

Despite the fact that the Post and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa symbiotically grew their gritty, street-level, law-and-order personalities together, the paper (10/21/25, 10/23/25) brought heat on the beret-wearing Republican in an effort to bolster the governor the paper once hated, demanding that Sliwa bow out and support the former Democratic governor (10/20/25). “Curtis Sliwa’s Checkered Past Catches Up to Him as Calls for Him to Ditch NYC Mayoral Campaign Hit Crescendo,” one headline (10/20/25) ran. “Just Walk Away, Beret!” screamed the paper’s front page the next day (10/21/25).

To show what depths of silliness the Post (10/27/25) sank to, it attacked Mamdani for his heartfelt speech about Islamophobia with this bombshell revelation: “The ‘aunt’ who Zohran Mamdani said was too afraid to wear her hijab on the subways after 9/11 is actually his dad’s cousin.” (It is very common in many cultures to refer to one’s parents’ cousins as “aunts” or “uncles,” including in South Asian communities.)

But wait, it gets funnier. The Post (10/28/25) quoted a London Times article (now deleted from its website, although some evidence of its existence still exists—X, 10/28/25; Semafor, 10/29/25) claiming, “Even Zohran Mamdani’s cheerleader Bill de Blasio now says the mayoral front-runner’s policy platform ‘doesn’t hold up,’” using most of the same words for a bold headline.

But online, the Post story (10/28/25) has been completely changed, even when you click the original link. The new piece carries the headline “Bill de Blasio Imposter Dupes Paper to Pan Protégé Zohran Mamdani’s Policy Platform: ‘Story Is Entirely False and Fabricated.’” The new story makes the British paper look stupid, but hides the fact that the Post also fell for the prank. (Both papers are owned by the Murdoch family.)

‘Uniquely unsuited’

The main “solution” that the Daily News (10/26/25) credits Andrew Cuomo with offering? Hiring more cops.

The Daily News, owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital but somewhat more centrist than the Murdoch empire’s Post, also threw its weight behind Cuomo in the hopes of bringing down Mamdani. “Cuomo Offers NYC a Path Forward While Mamdani Peddles Hollow Promises” ran the headline over its endorsement (10/26/25), calling his campaign “a house of cards built on sound bites and laced with antisemitism” and Mamdani himself “callow” and “mealy-mouthed.”

Like the Post, the Daily News (10/20/25) begged Sliwa to drop out “If [He] Cares About NYC and Not Just Himself,” in the hopes of thwarting Mamdani. “Cuomo would come to City Hall with more top-level government experience than any of his 110 predecessors going back four centuries,” it wrote (10/26/25), downplaying any concerns about the corruption and sexual harassment that come with that experience.

The paper even gave op-ed space (3/12/25) to a Cuomo administration health policy official to run a public relations piece sanitizing one of the administration’s biggest blemishes, its mishandling of the Covid pandemic (NPR, 1/18/21; STAT, 2/26/21; New York Times, 6/4/25).

The Daily News’ editorial page editor, Michael Aronson, said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show (10/31/25) that Cuomo has “achieved a lot more in Albany than probably anyone in the past 40 years.” Aronson’s recollection of Cuomo’s state-level record didn’t include his infamous scandals, such as charges that he impeded state anti-corruption efforts (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 7/24/14) or the bribery conviction of his associate Joseph Percoco (New York Times, 6/15/21).

Aronson, like Cuomo, also had difficulty saying Mamdani’s name correctly (New York Times, 10/22/25). “Help me make it easier to pronounce,” Aronson said, displaying the political and media classes’ out-of-touchness with the large role South Asians play in contemporary New York City. Some observers believe the mispronunciation of a fairly easy-to-say three-syllable name is intentional condescension.

The host helped Aronson: “Mamdani. Mom, like, everybody has a mom, right? We call her Mom…. Ronnie, Ronnie Reagan, Connie, Bonnie, those common girls’ names, that’s my little cheat sheet for anybody who’s still having trouble with it.” One wonders if the chattering classes have the same trouble with the names of someone like the Republican congressmember from Staten Island, Nicole Malliotakis.

The Daily News’ bias bled into its news section in a story (10/26/25) about Cuomo and Mamdani’s competing rallies the day after early voting began. Thirteen of the article’s first 14 paragraphs were devoted to the Cuomo rally, which attracted an audience of 300—before turning to the Mamdani event, which drew nearly 13,000 people to hear the candidate along with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

‘The stakes are high’

The New York Times (10/27/25) tries to help you pick a mayoral candidate.

The New York Times editorial board, which announced (8/12/24) it would no longer be making endorsements in local races, remained silent on the race in October. Yet the board did run an editorial (6/16/25) before the primary, opining that Cuomo had “the strongest policy record of the candidates,” while Mamdani was “running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.”

Two days before the general election, the Times (11/2/25) ran a piece parroting one of Cuomo’s central attacks on Mamdani, under the headline “Even for Some Mamdani Supporters, His Thin Résumé Is Cause for Concern.” The subhead read: “Many voters struggle with a fundamental question about Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy: Is a 34-year-old state assemblyman ready to lead the nation’s largest city?”

“The stakes are high,” the Times warned, reluctantly admitting 17 paragraphs in: “To be fair, there may be no perfect preparation to lead New York City, and the office of mayor is frequently won not on the strength of a résumé but on ideas.”

You certainly wouldn’t think the stakes were high from the approach the paper took to its mayoral election quiz (10/27/25), headlined “What Do You and the NYC Mayoral Candidates Agree On?” These types of quizzes can be a good way for readers to cut through horserace coverage and inflammatory rhetoric, and focus on important policy matters. But the Times chose to squander the opportunity by throwing in a bunch of entirely unserious questions about things like preferred bagel orders, movies, baseball caps and hobbies. “Pick one: Six cats; one dog; no pets,” read one question.

The paper of record did run a story (8/30/25) on the actual political preferences of a demographic it takes very seriously: “How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?” (It turns out they’re wondering “whether anyone…can beat the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.”)

‘Once again on the low road’

The New York Post (8/11/21) didn’t always see Andrew Cuomo as the savior of New York City.

It wasn’t that long ago that these very same papers were rallying for Cuomo’s ouster from executive power. “It’s time for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do one honorable thing: step down,” said the New York Post editorial board (8/3/21) in the midst of sexual harassment allegations. “If he refuses, lawmakers should remove him. Pronto.”

A headline from a Daily News editorial (8/4/21) at the time: “Even if Cuomo Was Just Clueless and Not Predatory, He Has Created a Workplace Rife With Sexual Harassment.” The Times editorial board (8/3/21) called for Cuomo’s resignation in the wake of a damning state attorney general’s report. “Mr. Cuomo has always had a self-serving streak and been known for his political bullying,” it wrote. “What this report lays out, however, are credible accusations that can’t be looked past.”

Cuomo has never admitted wrongdoing or apologized, yet New York media seem to have forgiven him simply because he was fighting an economic progressive. It took an upstate editorial board, Albany’s Times-Union (10/24/25), to deliver the clear message about Cuomo’s racist campaigning in the final weeks, and why he hasn’t been redeemed from his sordid past: “It is not surprising to once again find the ex-governor on the low road; the voters of New York City should ensure that he proceeds to the exit ramp.”

Failure to land punches

The New York Times (6/29/25) shows Mamdani on TikTok (1/1/25) explaining his rent freeze proposal while taking the polar bear plunge at Coney Island.

It says a lot about the city’s media oligopoly that they crawled back to a rejected, corrupt sleazeball as the one thing that can save the city from the fresh-faced progressive who vows to make life more affordable. And it is a positive sign that Mamdani was able to withstand this monied and organized onslaught.

Mamdani’s campaign and his supporters’ talent for creating captivating content for TikTok, Instagram and X is often credited for his success among younger voters (NBC News, 6/26/25; New York Times, 6/29/25). But Mamdani supporters point out that praising Mamdani’s social media game downplays the pro-affordability policy proposals and massive, enthusiastic door-to-door organizing that won the city over.

Still, the failure of the papers to land their punches can’t be ignored.

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

Mamdani Beats Cuomo and the Press Hacks (Again)

New York City baseball legend Yogi Berra said it best: It’s déjà vu all over again.

When Zohran Mamdani, a then-33-year-old democratic socialist state assembly member, beat disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this year’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary, he also defeated establishment press attempts to scare the public away from a New Deal–like platform (FAIR.org, 6/27/25).

Cuomo, his billionaire backers and corporate media took a beating. But they picked themselves up, got back in the ring, and reverted to anti-Muslim fearmongering and law-and-order hysteria. They lost again.

Clearing road for ‘biggest liar’

What makes Zohran Mamdani a Communist, according to the New York Post (7/16/25)? He told New York business leaders of “his plan to raise their taxes, if elected.”

In the general election, the city’s two biggest tabloids, the New York Post and the Daily News, regularly attacked Mamdani, and called in both opinion pages and news sections for voters to coalesce around Cuomo, running as an independent.

The reliably right-wing New York Post editorial board clung to its preferred candidate, hopelessly corrupt incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, until he dropped out of the race at the end of September. Then the paper pivoted from ridiculing Cuomo’s return to politics—calling him the “biggest liar in New York” (3/1/25)—to becoming one of his biggest cheerleaders (e.g., 10/21/25, 10/22/25, 10/23/25, 10/23/25).

The Post‘s front page outdid itself with racebaiting (“The Price Is White” was the headline on a story about Mamdani’s proposal to shift property taxes away from poorer, majority people-of-color neighborhoods—6/28/25) and open redbaiting: “Sickle and Dimed,” complete with hammer and sickle, announced a story (7/16/25) about Mamdani wanting to raise taxes on the wealthy; “Trump to New York: Keep the Commie Out!” was the front-page headline on Election Day (11/4/25).

And in the eight days from October 16 to October 23, the paper featured Mamdani’s image or name on its front page six times (10/16/25, 10/17/25, 10/19/15, 10/20/25, 10/21/25, 10/23/25) in its effort to bring down his candidacy.

“Mam-Child: Beware, NYC Is No Toy to Hand to Nepo Baby like Zohran,” was the headline of the Post‘s October 27 front page—an odd criticism to advance when you’re trying to promote a rival who owes his career as a New York governor to the fact that he was the son of a three-term New York governor.

‘Entirely false and fabricated’

$New York Post: BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani's top cheerleader Bill de Blasio now says NYC mayoral front-runner's math 'doesn't add up' a week before election$
The New York Post (10/28/25) fell for a bogus story in the London Times—which had called a random person named Bill DeBlasio and printed his views as though they were the former mayor’s (Semafor, 10/30/25).

Despite the fact that the Post and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa symbiotically grew their gritty, street-level, law-and-order personalities together, the paper (10/21/25, 10/23/25) brought heat on the beret-wearing Republican in an effort to bolster the governor the paper once hated, demanding that Sliwa bow out and support the former Democratic governor (10/20/25). “Curtis Sliwa’s Checkered Past Catches Up to Him as Calls for Him to Ditch NYC Mayoral Campaign Hit Crescendo,” one headline (10/20/25) ran. “Just Walk Away, Beret!” screamed the paper’s front page the next day (10/21/25).

To show what depths of silliness the Post (10/27/25) sank to, it attacked Mamdani for his heartfelt speech about Islamophobia with this bombshell revelation: “The ‘aunt’ who Zohran Mamdani said was too afraid to wear her hijab on the subways after 9/11 is actually his dad’s cousin.” (It is very common in many cultures to refer to one’s parents’ cousins as “aunts” or “uncles,” including in South Asian communities.)

But wait, it gets funnier. The Post (10/28/25) quoted a London Times article (now deleted from its website, although some evidence of its existence still exists—X, 10/28/25; Semafor, 10/29/25) claiming, “Even Zohran Mamdani’s cheerleader Bill de Blasio now says the mayoral front-runner’s policy platform ‘doesn’t hold up,’” using most of the same words for a bold headline.

But online, the Post story (10/28/25) has been completely changed, even when you click the original link. The new piece carries the headline “Bill de Blasio Imposter Dupes Paper to Pan Protégé Zohran Mamdani’s Policy Platform: ‘Story Is Entirely False and Fabricated.’” The new story makes the British paper look stupid, but hides the fact that the Post also fell for the prank. (Both papers are owned by the Murdoch family.)

‘Uniquely unsuited’

The main “solution” that the Daily News (10/26/25) credits Andrew Cuomo with offering? Hiring more cops.

The Daily News, owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital but somewhat more centrist than the Murdoch empire’s Post, also threw its weight behind Cuomo in the hopes of bringing down Mamdani. “Cuomo Offers NYC a Path Forward While Mamdani Peddles Hollow Promises” ran the headline over its endorsement (10/26/25), calling his campaign “a house of cards built on sound bites and laced with antisemitism” and Mamdani himself “callow” and “mealy-mouthed.”

Like the Post, the Daily News (10/20/25) begged Sliwa to drop out “If [He] Cares About NYC and Not Just Himself,” in the hopes of thwarting Mamdani. “Cuomo would come to City Hall with more top-level government experience than any of his 110 predecessors going back four centuries,” it wrote (10/26/25), downplaying any concerns about the corruption and sexual harassment that come with that experience.

The paper even gave op-ed space (3/12/25) to a Cuomo administration health policy official to run a public relations piece sanitizing one of the administration’s biggest blemishes, its mishandling of the Covid pandemic (NPR, 1/18/21; STAT, 2/26/21; New York Times, 6/4/25).

The Daily News’ editorial page editor, Michael Aronson, said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show (10/31/25) that Cuomo has “achieved a lot more in Albany than probably anyone in the past 40 years.” Aronson’s recollection of Cuomo’s state-level record didn’t include his infamous scandals, such as charges that he impeded state anti-corruption efforts (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 7/24/14) or the bribery conviction of his associate Joseph Percoco (New York Times, 6/15/21).

Aronson, like Cuomo, also had difficulty saying Mamdani’s name correctly (New York Times, 10/22/25). “Help me make it easier to pronounce,” Aronson said, displaying the political and media classes’ out-of-touchness with the large role South Asians play in contemporary New York City. Some observers believe the mispronunciation of a fairly easy-to-say three-syllable name is intentional condescension.

The host helped Aronson: “Mamdani. Mom, like, everybody has a mom, right? We call her Mom…. Ronnie, Ronnie Reagan, Connie, Bonnie, those common girls’ names, that’s my little cheat sheet for anybody who’s still having trouble with it.” One wonders if the chattering classes have the same trouble with the names of someone like the Republican congressmember from Staten Island, Nicole Malliotakis.

The Daily News’ bias bled into its news section in a story (10/26/25) about Cuomo and Mamdani’s competing rallies the day after early voting began. Thirteen of the article’s first 14 paragraphs were devoted to the Cuomo rally, which attracted an audience of 300—before turning to the Mamdani event, which drew nearly 13,000 people to hear the candidate along with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

‘The stakes are high’

The New York Times (10/27/25) tries to help you pick a mayoral candidate.

The New York Times editorial board, which announced (8/12/24) it would no longer be making endorsements in local races, remained silent on the race in October. Yet the board did run an editorial (6/16/25) before the primary, opining that Cuomo had “the strongest policy record of the candidates,” while Mamdani was “running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.”

Two days before the general election, the Times (11/2/25) ran a piece parroting one of Cuomo’s central attacks on Mamdani, under the headline “Even for Some Mamdani Supporters, His Thin Résumé Is Cause for Concern.” The subhead read: “Many voters struggle with a fundamental question about Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy: Is a 34-year-old state assemblyman ready to lead the nation’s largest city?”

“The stakes are high,” the Times warned, reluctantly admitting 17 paragraphs in: “To be fair, there may be no perfect preparation to lead New York City, and the office of mayor is frequently won not on the strength of a résumé but on ideas.”

You certainly wouldn’t think the stakes were high from the approach the paper took to its mayoral election quiz (10/27/25), headlined “What Do You and the NYC Mayoral Candidates Agree On?” These types of quizzes can be a good way for readers to cut through horserace coverage and inflammatory rhetoric, and focus on important policy matters. But the Times chose to squander the opportunity by throwing in a bunch of entirely unserious questions about things like preferred bagel orders, movies, baseball caps and hobbies. “Pick one: Six cats; one dog; no pets,” read one question.

The paper of record did run a story (8/30/25) on the actual political preferences of a demographic it takes very seriously: “How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?” (It turns out they’re wondering “whether anyone…can beat the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.”)

‘Once again on the low road’

The New York Post (8/11/21) didn’t always see Andrew Cuomo as the savior of New York City.

It wasn’t that long ago that these very same papers were rallying for Cuomo’s ouster from executive power. “It’s time for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do one honorable thing: step down,” said the New York Post editorial board (8/3/21) in the midst of sexual harassment allegations. “If he refuses, lawmakers should remove him. Pronto.”

A headline from a Daily News editorial (8/4/21) at the time: “Even if Cuomo Was Just Clueless and Not Predatory, He Has Created a Workplace Rife With Sexual Harassment.” The Times editorial board (8/3/21) called for Cuomo’s resignation in the wake of a damning state attorney general’s report. “Mr. Cuomo has always had a self-serving streak and been known for his political bullying,” it wrote. “What this report lays out, however, are credible accusations that can’t be looked past.”

Cuomo has never admitted wrongdoing or apologized, yet New York media seem to have forgiven him simply because he was fighting an economic progressive. It took an upstate editorial board, Albany’s Times-Union (10/24/25), to deliver the clear message about Cuomo’s racist campaigning in the final weeks, and why he hasn’t been redeemed from his sordid past: “It is not surprising to once again find the ex-governor on the low road; the voters of New York City should ensure that he proceeds to the exit ramp.”

Failure to land punches

The New York Times (6/29/25) shows Mamdani on TikTok (1/1/25) explaining his rent freeze proposal while taking the polar bear plunge at Coney Island.

It says a lot about the city’s media oligopoly that they crawled back to a rejected, corrupt sleazeball as the one thing that can save the city from the fresh-faced progressive who vows to make life more affordable. And it is a positive sign that Mamdani was able to withstand this monied and organized onslaught.

Mamdani’s campaign and his supporters’ talent for creating captivating content for TikTok, Instagram and X is often credited for his success among younger voters (NBC News, 6/26/25; New York Times, 6/29/25). But Mamdani supporters point out that praising Mamdani’s social media game downplays the pro-affordability policy proposals and massive, enthusiastic door-to-door organizing that won the city over.

Still, the failure of the papers to land their punches can’t be ignored.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 31, 2025

Don’t Worry, Wall Street Journal—Health Insurers Are Profitable!

On October 21, Elevance Health (the rebrand of for-profit health insurer Anthem) announced its third quarter results. Operating revenue went up 12% from the same three-month period last year, and profits as measured by normal accounting rules rose 17%. UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, went one better, raising its expectations for how much profit it will make this year, as it eased Wall Street’s worries by increasing the premiums it will charge for coverage in 2026.

Please let the anxious folks at the Wall Street Journal know. They’ve been so worried.

Over the past year, older Americans, low-income people who enroll in private Medicare and Medicaid insurance plans, and people covered by health insurance purchased from the Affordable Care Act exchanges have been doing something that private insurance companies and their Wall Street investors find disturbing: They’re actually going to the doctor and getting the healthcare they need.

The public’s desire to get medical treatment that they’ve already paid insurance companies for triggered a Wall Street meltdown earlier this year, with stock prices dropping sharply as investment analysts and business journalists fretted that private looting of the healthcare system might end.

Insurers in ‘rough shape’

The problem with being a “healthcare giant” is those lingering “medical costs” (AP, 1/16/25).

In January, the Associated Press (1/16/25) reported that insurer “UnitedHealth posted a better-than-expected profit in the final quarter of 2024, but a nagging rise in medical costs and care utilization surprised Wall Street.” The article noted that this “nagging rise” meant the company’s revenue only “climbed about 7% to $100.8 billion, which missed expectations.” This report came under a headline announcing, with no apparent sense of its own absurdity, that “Medical Costs Linger” for the company whose business it is to pay for people’s medical costs.

In February, Healthcare Dive (2/25/25) said health insurers had “wrapped up 2024 in rough shape, recording falling profits from insurance businesses and releasing guidance suggesting that medical costs could continue climbing this year.” What reporter Rebecca Pifer meant by “rising medical costs” was a decline in the portion of every dollar in premiums that insurers skim off the top.

According to Pifer, “major publicly traded insurers’ medical loss ratios”—a standard euphemism for what insurers spend on actual healthcare—“rose an average of 2.8 percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the fourth quarter of 2024.” The skim taken off the top of premium dollars by the top seven health insurers declined from 12.1% to 9.3%, a “massive change,” according to Pifer, because “even one-tenth of a percentage point can translate to significant changes in the profits companies rake in from offering insurance.”

In April, UnitedHealth announced that it had discovered “heightened care activity” by people enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans, and “changes in the profile” of patients treated by the company’s physician practice and pharmaceutical insurance subsidiary Optum. English translation: Our members are sicker than we thought, and getting more healthcare than we expected. United changed its “guidance” from anticipating profits of roughly $26 billion over the full year 2025 to just under $23 billion.

Over the next three months, Fortune 500 insurers Centene (7/1/25), Molina (7/7/25) and Elevance (7/17/25) reduced their profit predictions for 2025 based on their second-quarter (April–June) financial results. Each company said the skim was declining.

Panic over ‘medical costs’

New York Times (7/29/25): “UnitedHealth’s stumbles…shocked many of its investors who have come to rely on steady increases of profits from the conglomerate.”

Wall Street panicked. In June, Fitch Ratings (6/17/25), one of the three major US credit ratings agencies, downgraded its evaluation of the health insurance industry from “neutral” to “deteriorating.”

The panic-stricken Wall Street mood helped frame media reporting of the industry’s finances. In late July, United announced that its April–June profits fell from $7.9 billion in 2024 to a paltry $5.2 billion, an apparent catastrophe that led investors to drive the price of company stock down 22% in 24 hours. The New York Times (7/29/25) reported that United’s profits “fell sharply,” amid “rising medical costs and disappointing profits” across the industry, noting that Centene also blamed “rising expenses for poor financial results.”

As I reported in my newsletter Healing and Stealing (6/3/25, 7/16/25, 7/23/25), even though profits were down over 2024, not a single company said they would actually lose money, just that they expected their profits to be less for the year than they had predicted in January. For example, Elevance saw its stock drop 20% in two days when it announced that it only expected to earn $5.4 billion instead of $6.4 billion for 2025.

Public insurance more efficient

Healthcare Dive (2/25/25): “Major Medicare insurers said they’ve successfully lost members that were dragging down their margins.” (In other words, they’ve managed to get sick people to leave their plans.)

No matter how much their skim shrinks, private insurers can’t compete with Medicare for efficiency. Healthcare Dive’s reporting on the dire state of companies’ 2024 “medical loss ratios” in February included a chart showing that all but two of the major insurers were still skimming between 8% and 13% of every premium dollar in the fourth quarter of the year.

CVS, the drugstore chain that also owns Aetna, had the lowest skim in the fourth quarter last year, but at 5.2% still spent more than five times the 1.1% that Medicare did in overhead—the amount it takes from customers’ premiums to spend on things other than actual medical care (Medicare Trustees Report, Table II.B1, 2024).

The dynamic between healthcare media and their Wall Street analyst sources keeps readers focused on the insurance companies’ need to not spend the money they collect in premiums, rather than paying for what their customers think they paid for.

In AP‘s January report on United’s woes, the outlet reported:

In the recently concluded fourth quarter, more than 87% of the premiums UnitedHealth collected went back out the door to cover medical costs. That was “well above” what analysts expected, TD Cowen analyst Ryan Langston said in a research note.

The fact that Medicare manages to direct 99% of its premiums (in the form of taxes) to paying doctors, hospitals, labs, therapists, drug companies, technicians, aides and the insurers themselves was absent from the story, as it nearly invariably is. Missing, too, was how the privatization of Medicare has loaded up the program with unnecessary bureaucracy: When Medicare pays private insurers instead of covering people directly, the companies skim their 10%+ off the top, money that Medicare spends on patient care when they cover people directly.

Insurers’ deadly tools

Modern Healthcare (5/2/25)

The most important missing context of profit panic coverage is the fact that private insurers have plenty of market-based tools to return to profitability, and there’s no evidence that governments at any level will rein them in. Even as media hyped the impact on insurance profits of people getting healthcare, companies were quitting “markets” they didn’t like and jacking up premium prices, while fending off regulation of, and lawsuits against, their most powerful tools: denying payment for needed coverage and defrauding the government.

CVS/Aetna decided to get out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges because, as Modern Healthcare (5/2/25) explained, their “medical losses” on those policies had grown to 96% in states where they offered ACA plans, reducing the skim in that business line to 4%. Insurers get to pick and choose whether to keep selling plans in the various “markets” for ACA coverage and privatized Medicare Advantage plans without heed to the impact on patients, who are forced to switch plans and, often, providers.

Faced with somewhat lower profits, most insurers have simply raised prices through the roof. Recent coverage of Affordable Care Act premiums has focused on the impact of the potential end of the premium subsidies at the heart of the government shutdown, but large increases were already on the way. Last July, Centene told investors and reporters that it had already withdrawn its initial ACA rate proposals for 2026 and was preparing to submit new, even higher proposed rates in response to people getting healthcare.

UnitedHeatlh CEO Stephen Helmsley promises higher prices and more claim rejection (Reuters, 10/28/25).

Beyond the government programs, Wall Street consultant Mercer’s annual employer surveys (9/3/25) predict an average 6.5% premium increase, “the highest increase since 2010.” In the business context, reporters report those increases with a straight face, or even applaud them.

In its story on United’s recent upbeat profit projections, Reuters (10/28/25) quoted CEO Stephen Helmsley, “I am confident we will return to solid earnings growth next year given the operational rigor and more prudent pricing.” “Operational rigor” means avoiding sick patients and denying claims, while United’s pricing is only “prudent” for its investors.

For context, Reuters quoted a stock analyst and a healthcare stock portfolio manager, who were quite pleased with the company’s “prudent” pricing. “Overall, the results, the EPS guidance increase and management commentary were all highly encouraging,” Daniel Barasa of investment firm Gabelli Funds told the news agency.

Meanwhile, private health insurers also generate profits by denying care. Seventeen percent of all Medicare Advantage claims are denied initially, with 8% ultimately denied (Health Affairs, 6/25). The Reuters story clearly illustrates the dynamic between business coverage of healthcare and sources who demand wealth extraction.

During the panic, the Lever (6/6/25) made this point in a story headlined “Wall Street to Insurers: Keep Denying Care.” Reporter Katya Schwenk pointed out how beyond price increases, Wall Street’s preferred solution to “lingering” healthcare costs is to use bureaucracy to deny healthcare, and placed the profit panic in the context of five years of high profits.

Outright fraud

Outright fraud can also help boost profits. The irony in the entire Wall Street panic over sicker people enrolling in health plans is that health insurance companies have been under investigation for fraudulently claiming that patients are sicker than they are for years.

In September 2023, the Cigna Group settled three whistleblower lawsuits with the Justice Department for $172 million alleging that the company had sought higher reimbursements by adding diagnoses to patients’ records to boost their “risk scores,” which determine some forms of Medicare Advantage payments. The HHS inspector general concluded last year that these company-generated diagnoses resulted in $7.5 billion in payments to health plans as part of risk-based reimbursement.

On the one hand, the insurance industry can make money by claiming that patients are sicker than they really are, but whistleblowers also allege that the industry illegally tries to avoid patients who are likely to actually need treatment. In May, the Justice Department filed False Claims Act lawsuits against CVS/Aetna, Elevance and Humana, alleging they had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to brokers to steer patients into their plans. Aetna and Humana were also accused of having the brokers limit the number of disabled people steered to them. The federal government’s action was spurred by private lawsuits from industry whistleblowers; the allegations haven’t been decided in court.

Absolving insurers

The New York Times (7/28/25) tells the health insurance story from the point of view of the “leviathan.”

Media outlets cover fraud and claims denials episodically, but reporters and editors sometimes frame stories in a way that absolves the actors of responsibility. The day before her New York Times story on United’s falling profits, reporter Reed Abelson (7/28/25) wrote a detailed recap of UnitedHealth Group’s recent business history for the paper. Abelson used the passive voice to turn United from an accused agent of fraud and a failed custodian of patient data into a passive victim of “misfortunes” that mysteriously befell the company:

UnitedHealth Group emerged as a healthcare colossus over the past decade and a half, earning one of the highest stock market values in the nation. But in the last two years, it has been hit with just about every misfortune that can befall a company:

A gargantuan cyberattack. Federal investigations, including a criminal inquiry into one of its most important businesses. The killing of a top executive. A public relations crisis. Disappointing profits. A plummeting stock price.

The framing focuses attention on the misfortunes of United rather than on the problems of the patients who are denied care, or whose data was compromised in the massive ransomware attack on United’s Change Healthcare subsidiary. Nor did it highlight the providers who spend hours fighting for approval and payment from United bureaucrats—payments that, when approved, were delayed by the cyberattack.

Insurance companies wield all the industry’s profit-earning business tools actively. What they don’t do is address the core cost problems in US healthcare—extreme prices for hospital care, physician visits and prescription drugs (Healthcare Cost Institute, 1/14/25), and metastatic private bureaucracy that consumes more than a third of US healthcare spending (Annals of Internal Medicine, 1/21/20). Those systemic cost drivers tend to be absent when journalists focus on corporate financial results.

Peak Panic at WSJ

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) calls health insurers one of the worst names it can think of: “uninvestable.”

With these tools at their disposal, the health insurance industry is hardly in trouble as a long-term investment. As the panic built between April and June, legendary long-term investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway quietly purchased 5 million shares of UnitedHealth Group stock, worth more than $5 billion.Yet the Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) still sounded an alarm, slapping a headline declaring that “Health Insurers Are Becoming Chronically Uninvestable” on a column by David Wainer.

Perhaps unwittingly, Wainer’s piece summarized the core problem with entrusting access to healthcare to investor-based insurance. Investors not only expect health insurers to generate profits, but to produce ever-increasing profits and stock prices.

For many years, he wrote, health insurance stocks offered “steady, dependable returns, fueled by the expansion of government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Obamacare exchanges.” Recently, though, “Wall Street has a problem with America’s health insurers: They keep missing their numbers.“ It’s not that insurers are losing money, but that investors can’t expect constantly rising profits and, by extension, stock prices.

Indeed, the numbers that insurers were “missing” earlier this year are expectations set by predictions from the companies themselves. Profits alone aren’t enough for the hamster-wheel mindset on Wall Street:

With 2024 and 2025 already looking bad, 2026 is unlikely to be much better, as many insurers look to retrench. UnitedHealth might not grow earnings over its 2024 levels until 2027, according to analyst estimates on FactSet. Humana might not return to its 2023 profit peak until 2028.

The Wall Street Journal has done some outstanding healthcare reporting, as have other media organs. A year before Wainer’s meltdown, three Journal reporters (7/8/24) analyzed billions of Medicare claims for the year 2018 through 2021 and uncovered $50 billion in payments to various insurers based on diagnoses added to patient records by the insurers themselves, like those in the lawsuit settled by Cigna.

But in coverage of the business of health insurance, the Journal, like too many other media outlets, normalizes the idea that health insurers should be expected to constantly extract more and more wealth from patients.

Disclosure: FAIR buys health insurance through Elevance.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 31, 2025

Rachel Cleetus on Climate Culpability, Dean Baker on Trumponomics

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

Union of Concerned Scientists (10/28/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Responsible journalism would make clear that climate policy is not a backburner issue, just because many other terrible things are happening. Climate disruption is an active present—not just future—nightmare, intertwined with everything we care about: lives and livelihoods, human rights, health, governance. It’s as much of an “abstract issue” as the hurricane tearing Jamaica and Cuba apart right now.

Rachel Cleetus is senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. We hear from her about why acknowledging and addressing corporate and government failures doesn’t mean giving up on ourselves and our shared future. But it does require news media locate the fight—not just among dolphins and icebergs—but in the boardrooms of greedy people perversely trying to wring every last dime from our shared inheritance and future.

Beat the Press (10/27/25)

Also on the show: Isn’t Donald Trump a mean, stupid person? OK, sure. Isn’t this whole presidency so silly? No, not at all. Corporate news media’s notion that time-to-time winking about how Trump is weird somehow amounts to meaningful resistance to the myriad harms of his administration is a monumental failure—from which we have to take lessons, not just about the White House, but about the press corps.

We hear from Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, whose recent piece, “Trumponomics: The Economics of Crazy,” appears in his Beat the Press blog on their site CEPR.net.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 29, 2025

‘They Are Trying to Maximize the Amount of Money They Can Get Any Given Consumer to Pay’: CounterSpin interview with Katya Schwenk on AI surveillance pricing

Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Katya Schwenk about AI surveillance pricing for the October 24, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Lever (8/5/25)

Janine Jackson: You go to buy a ticket for a flight; you think the price is the price, but, in fact, the airline is using lots of available information about you to present the highest price they think you will pay. Yes, airlines have always tweaked prices based on status or frequency of flying, but this is different. This is companies using information you didn’t share with them, determining what they, openly among themselves, call your “pain point,” the maximum you will spend before you say, “OK, I just won’t see my mother this year.”

Some insist this is just the market at work, but what can we do if we decide it’s actually an instance of using technology to do something because it can, without adequate consideration of whether it should?

Journalist Katya Schwenk has written for the Intercept, the Baffler, the American Prospect, among others. Her piece on this issue, co-authored with Luke Goldstein, was for the Lever, online at LeverNews.com. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Katya Schwenk.

Katya Schwenk: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Daily Economy (9/26/25)

JJ: The current story on what is called “surveillance pricing” starts with airlines, but we understand that that’s not the beginning and certainly not the end. But maybe some basic information on what this practice is, and how it’s not quite the same, as one defender had it, as a restaurant offering senior citizens a discount on Sundays. It’s not quite that, yeah?

KS: No, no it’s not, although the airlines, and other people who use these kinds of pricing tools, would like consumers to think that everyone’s getting their own personalized discount. But, of course, we know that if there is no set rate or baseline set fare, there’s not really a way to get a discount on that fare.

And that brings us to the world of surveillance pricing, which I’ve been looking into, where we’re seeing more and more companies—and I think airlines are the best example of this—work with consultants and with technology firms that offer AI-driven data analytics to target and personalize prices on an ever-more granular level: so looking at your browsing patterns, your consumer spending history, maybe other kinds of personal data, we don’t quite know, to tailor what price the airfare you might see, the price you might be seeing for other kinds of consumer goods, to you specifically.

And, as you said, the idea behind this pricing strategy, and why it’s so popular among these companies, is because they are trying to maximize the amount of money they can get any given consumer to pay. And we don’t honestly know quite how widespread it is. We’re starting to sort of get the glimpse at this in the airline industry. But it is, I think, quite a concern.

Forbes (3/11/24)

JJ: You cite a Forbes study that says, for example, if we’re talking about how this pre-existed, just before a holiday weekend, when flights are filling up and people need to fly, airlines might use what used to be called, and is still called, “dynamic pricing” to raise ticket prices by five times what they might cost. So they’re looking and saying, “You need to fly right now, and so we’re going to charge you more for it.” And somehow that is presented as, like, building a better mousetrap, or capitalism at work, whereas for a lot of us, it feels like—something else. Something predatory.

KS: Yeah. And dynamic pricing goes actually back quite a long way—and, again, is something that began with the airlines that has spread across industries. The idea being that if there is some event, and suddenly this particular flight becomes very popular, the airlines will raise fares to adjust for that heightened demand, which is why airfare might be really expensive if you’re flying to go see the Olympics, or some big event like that.

But you can really see the rise of dynamic pricing as it happens now among tech platforms like Uber and Lyft, who have what they literally call on their consumer-facing apps “surge pricing,” where these fares are fluctuating constantly according to demand. And what that’s created is an environment where surveillance pricing is able to flourish, because people are really used to a situation where there is no base fare. You don’t know what your Uber is going to cost until you open the app. And when you’re in that kind of environment, it’s much easier for companies to tailor prices to consumers based on their personal data.

JJ: So this is, lo and behold, a profit-maximizing pricing system, but somehow there are folks who still insist that it’s really just a fair system, and then some others that, if you look at it, they say it’s really pro-consumer.

One particular table-thumper that I read said that any consumer concerns are just ignorant pearl-clutching, because “prices are a social language.” And so, if the price for a product or a service is too high, well, consumers will just reject it. And that’s the market at work.

And I’m trying to see a vision of someone saying, “Well, I’ll just find another way to get to my sister’s wedding. Ha ha, the consumer speaks! Now you must lower your prices.” That’s just not the way that we see the market working. And yet that’s kind of the narrative that we’re being told to justify this practice.

Katya Schwenk: “Consumers don’t actually have very much choice in many of these circumstances. So it’s not like they’re able to choose a lower fare from a competitor, often.”

KS: Even if you are a believer in the free market, the classical economics marketplace, as the best option for consumers, that’s not really what’s going on here. When you have dynamic pricing in the way it’s being used now, as you said, consumers don’t actually have very much choice in many of these circumstances. So it’s not like they’re able to choose a lower fare from a competitor, often. And then, at the same time, there’s also an absence of information, where, again, because consumers are unable to see the dynamic pricing at work, they’re not able to adjust their choices to adjust for that.

And then, furthermore, we’ve seen instances where tech platforms that advertise pricing services, such as the real estate–pricing platform RealPage, what it does is centralize pricing information across a particular industry. In this case, it’s rentals. And what that does is it leads to price collusion, where because you have the centralized tech platform setting personalized prices across an industry, it’s another way to set prices, basically, where you can see that RealPage and these pricing platforms in consolidated industries basically allow companies to collude and set prices much higher than they would in the traditional free market. So, yeah, I think much of the narrative around this is really mistaken.

JJ: The administration and profit-driven corporations benefit from a public ignorance, or just misunderstanding, on this. And we can understand that we’re going to be deluged with PR that tells us that this kind of pricing is a benefit to us, that this personalized pricing, we hear them saying it, “this is actually going to get you a cheaper rate.” That just means, a fortiori, we need transparency about what’s going on, along with a public interest pushback.

And we see it; a representative in Texas, Greg Casar, is calling for a pushback on AI pricing, citing not just the price-gouging that we’re talking about, with airlines and with rental cars, but also wage suppression. And I would refer folks to, we had a conversation with Hatim Rahman about that angle on it.

But we’re in a fight about whether this is a good, or something that should be questioned. And transparency would seem to be at the root of any conversation we’re going to have about that.

KS: Absolutely. And I think especially when, under this current administration, where we have the consumer protection authorities or antitrust regulators that may have been well-placed to take this on are not doing their jobs, or have been fired and basically prevented from doing their jobs, we’re going to need other avenues toward transparency. And I know some lawmakers we mentioned have been outspoken about this, but the reality is, it’s kind of a Wild West out there, where I think many of these companies and airlines and everyone using these different pricing tools, they know that they’re not going to see very much accountability. And that’s pretty scary.

Newsweek (7/22/25)

JJ: In the absence of that kind of accountability, which of course we should continue to fight for, what do we as individuals do? I mean, I guess increased awareness. If some AI is pushing a rate on you, you should compare and contrast as much as you can. What can we do as consumers?

KS: Yeah, I think even in the limited information environment we have, it’s good to remember that this is happening, and to always be looking out for it and keeping it in mind. But then I do think that public and consumer pressure is an important factor here. I mean, Delta, after announcing a few months ago that it was going to be using this AI, or implementing the next stage of this AI dynamic pricing, or surveillance pricing software, it faced massive backlash from the public, enough that the airline said, “We’re not going to implement this program fully. We’re not going to use this pricing software.”

Does that mean Delta isn’t using surveillance pricing? I mean, many of these airlines have been known to use these kinds of tools for years. So I don’t know that that’s true, but I think that, to the extent that consumers are able to use that kind of public scrutiny and public pressure to make sure companies are scared to influence these practices, I think that’s still a good thing.

JJ: And then, finally, journalists, we would hope, would be kind of an arm of the public in demanding that transparency and accountability.

Lever (10/21/25)

KS: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s something that we at the Lever have been writing quite a lot about is all of the different industries that use these various kinds of pricing tools. So something we’re keeping watch on, and we hope that others will be as well.

JJ: I’ve seen good reporting. I’ve seen reporting from a consumer angle. I guess what I’m looking for is the concerted pressure on the industry and on the government to what they’re going to do in response. It’s not that journalists are ignoring that this is impacting consumers, it’s just the next stage, where you talk about how do we change it, that I feel like maybe they’re falling down.

KS: Yeah, I mean there’s quite a lot happening right now, and we don’t have a particularly responsive federal government right now, but even so, it’s important not to let these stories fall by the wayside, and to continue asking questions about what is going to be done. And, yeah, that’s certainly something I’m thinking about.

JJ: All right, we’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Katya Schwenk. Her piece, “Airlines Are Using AI to Set Personalized Jacked Up Prices,” which is co-authored with Luke Goldstein, is still online at LeverNews.com. Katya Schwenk, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KS: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Janine.

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

‘The Government’s Own Disclosures Demonstrate These Strikes Are Not Lawful’: CounterSpin interview with Jeffrey Stein on Trump’s boat attacks

Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Jeffrey Stein about Trump’s boat attacks for the October 24, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Reuters (10/20/25)

Janine Jackson: So here’s the top of this October 20 Reuters piece:

When two alleged drug traffickers survived a US military strike last week in the Caribbean, they left the Trump administration with a decision to make: send them back home, or find a way to keep them detained.

There’s already a lot going on there: “Alleged drug traffickers,” so not tried or convicted, and they “survived,” which means that other people not tried or convicted of drug trafficking were killed, in a “military strike”—OK, even if they’re drug traffickers, why is the US military doing the thing? And then, “in the Caribbean”? So does the US control that region?

And after all that’s been transmitted without friction in a single clause, we as readers are to interest ourselves in the matter of how the Trump administration can figure out a way to sell the action, and the more like it we can presumably expect. The headline: “In Trump’s Drug War, Prisoners May Be Too Much of a Legal Headache, Experts Say.”

Now this, things as they are, is not even the worst kind of piece; it poses questions, anyway. But the questions are about how the administration might use the law more skillfully to address the “complex set of legal and political problems, experts say” accrue when you kill people your country is not at war with, and who have faced no judge or jury.

Not everyone is waiting on the White House to puzzle up a new line to sell about why the US military killing unconvicted foreign people on charges they will never see is not just OK, but, as JD Vance puts it, “The highest and best use of our military.”

ACLU (10/15/25)

Jeffrey Stein is staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project; along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, they’re pressing the administration for transparency on this. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jeffrey Stein.

Jeffrey Stein: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: Let’s leap right into the moment. What is your FOIA request aimed at, specifically, and then more broadly, in terms of public awareness and potential resistance to these—let’s call them “extra-legal”—Caribbean strikes?

JS: Sure. Yeah. So as you just mentioned, since early September, President Trump has ordered at least nine lethal strikes on private vessels in international waters, reportedly killing up to 37 people. President Trump has claimed, without providing any evidence at all, that the victims of these strikes are “terrorists.”

But the government’s own disclosures indicate that the victims were, as you were just saying, merely suspected of drug smuggling. So put another way, the government’s own disclosures demonstrate that these strikes are not lawful.

Just Security (9/10/25)

It’s flagrantly illegal, under both domestic and international law, to summarily kill civilians who are suspected of committing crimes. And for this reason, members of Congress from across the political spectrum, former government officials who served in presidential administrations of both parties, international bodies and numerous civil society organizations have all agreed that these strikes constitute murder, pure and simple.

Notwithstanding this broad bipartisan consensus, however, the Trump administration is claiming that these strikes are lawful. The president sent a notice to Congress earlier this month saying that he had unilaterally determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with certain gangs and drug cartels that he has also unilaterally designated as terrorist organizations. He’s also claimed, again without any evidence, that the victims of these lethal strikes are “affiliated with these organizations,” and are thus unlawful combatants against whom the United States may use lethal force.

The problem is that even if the victims of these strikes were affiliated with drug cartels—and, again, the government has not provided any evidence to support that claim—there’s simply no plausible argument that the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels, and, under international law, an armed conflict between a state and a non-state actor exists only if the non-state actor is an organized armed group that’s engaged in protracted armed violence against the state. And that’s simply not the case here.

Jeffrey Stein: “The public should be able to read the government’s legal justification right now, while there’s still an opportunity to stop these illegal and dangerous strikes.”

Nonetheless, according to some recent media reports, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, an office whose opinions are treated as binding within the executive branch, produced a memo that reportedly authorizes lethal strikes against a secret and wide-ranging list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, apparently including those who are not affiliated with an organization that’s been designated as a terrorist organization.

And even as the Trump administration has repeatedly asserted that these lethal strikes against suspected drug traffickers are on firm legal ground, they’ve kept OLC’s legal reasoning secret. And we think that’s a very serious problem, given the life-or-death stakes of the president’s use of force.

We think that the public really deserves to know how our government is justifying these strikes as lawful. And we think that it’s really imperative that this transparency comes immediately. The public should be able to read the government’s legal justification right now, while there’s still an opportunity to stop these illegal and dangerous strikes, and hold government officials accountable.

JJ: So why are you forced to put in a FOIA request? What’s the blockage there?

JS: The government has not disclosed its legal reasoning, even though members of Congress have asked various officials within the executive branch what they think the legal authority under which they are operating is. The Trump administration has not released this secret memo that we think the American people are entitled to read. And so that’s why we’ve submitted a FOIA request and are demanding that transparency, which we think is a necessary precondition to holding government officials accountable.

X (10/21/25)

JJ: Well, absolutely. And I’ll just ask you, finally—although it’s too big a question to ask finally—but we’ve talked a lot on this show about the use of the “war on terror” and terrorism, and the vagueness of that to greenlight any and everything. If we’re now going to talk about “narco terrorism.” and just allow that term into the language, it seems super meaningful that this is already an elision and an expansion, but then it seems super meaningful that when, for example, a guest on CNN brings up, Well, hey, in this context, let’s talk about NSPM-7, where now the White House is saying terrorism now means folks who are anti-capitalist, and folks who are anti-whatever we say they can’t be anti.

And now we know what it means to be designated a “terrorist.” So it’s very meaningful to focus on how they’re delineating that term.

NBC (10/23/25)

And I guess I just want to ask you, in the short time we have left, what would you ask journalists to be drilling down on and asking? Because in this case, a guest brought up, Hey, you’re talking about bombing boats in the Caribbean, but this could be used in Des Moines. And the media response was Ha ha, let’s go to commercial.

JS: I think that what you’ve said really gets to the heart of our FOIA request. We think that the public deserves insight into the full extent of the president’s asserted authority to summarily kill civilians. And that insight is especially necessary, given some of the recent statements that you’re alluding to by US government officials, saying that they may use lethal force against suspected drug smugglers or so-called “terrorists” in places other than on the high seas, including President Trump’s statement that future strikes may occur on land, and the very concerning statements from Attorney General Pamela Bondi, saying that the Trump administration intends to take the same approach with “Antifa,” which, as you’re saying, the administration has called a domestic terrorist organization. So given all of this rhetoric, we really think that it’s vitally important for the government to disclose its legal reasoning, and for the public to be able to interrogate that reasoning, given, really, the life-and-death stakes of these strikes.

JJ: All right, well, we’ll end it there for today. Jeffrey Stein is staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. Thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin, Jeffrey Stein.

JS: Thanks for having me.

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

‘These Changes Are Reducing Our Power to Effect Positive Change for Families’: CounterSpin interview with Cara Brumfield on erasing federal data

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Cara Brumfield about erasing federal data for the October 17, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CBPP (9/29/25)

Janine Jackson: Everywhere there is government, there is dispute about how government should work. How do we leverage the power of the state to support the people? The only thing you can say about such arguments in advance is that, wherever they land, they have to be grounded in information. We can disagree about outcomes or implications, but if we don’t start from the same data, we’re not actually in conversation.

That’s why our next guest has been raising the alarm bell on the Trump administration’s gutting of the accuracy and availability of federal data and official statistics.

Cara Brumfield is vice president for housing and income security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She reported, with Victoria Hunter Gibney, on the diversion from mission of federal statistical agencies under Trump. She joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Cara Brumfield.

Cara Brumfield: Thank you for having me.

JJ: It’s one thing to say, for example: People need food support, and we need to figure out how to address that. It’s entirely another thing to say: Well, we don’t know how many people need food support, so we’ll just say whatever we want to say, and other people can dispute it, and it’ll just come down to, I don’t know, who shouts the loudest? Who has the wealthiest donors and the most media space?

In terms of policymaking, there’s hardly a more keystone issue than data collection, but it’s the sort of thing where you don’t notice its absence. So just starting where the piece that the Center put out starts, one way you can eliminate that information-gathering, that data collection, is just to stop funding it, right? And that’s something that we’re seeing today.

NPR (9/22/25)

CB: Yeah, that’s exactly right. We’re seeing cuts to all sorts of federal data collections that we use to make informed policy decisions. And one of the most recent, of course, being the defunding of our annual survey on food security, which is happening at the same time that we’re seeing the largest-ever cuts to food assistance through SNAP.

So how will we be able to measure the impact of those cuts to SNAP, our country’s extremely successful food support program? How will we measure the impact of these cuts on families who rely on those benefits to be able to put food on the table? We won’t. We won’t be able to do that without reliable access to accurate and unbiased federal data—in this case, through our survey questions on food security, which have just been cut.

There are a variety of data collections that are being cut or that are facing proposed cuts. I’ll talk a little bit about the 2030 census. The Decennial underpins all of our federal data collection, because it’s the only time that we attempt to collect information about every person living in the country. And so without fully funding the Decennial Census, we’re putting the accuracy of that really important, fundamental, foundational, constitutionally mandated data collection at risk. And that has knock-on effects for all of the other federal surveys that we do.

And it’s not just these funding cuts, which are deeply problematic for a lot of reasons, but it’s also the politicization of the federal statistical system. In order for us to have a federal statistical system that works, that does what we need it to do, it has to be unbiased. It can’t be politicized, and it has to be sufficiently funded, because, like you say, we need to be able to make decisions based in facts, and not just based on who’s the loudest voice in the room, or who has the deepest pockets.

So when it comes to funding, a lot of things happen. One: We lose staff capacity. We have brilliant minds in the federal statistical system who have been innovating on how to collect information in the best ways, to serve all of the uses. And the Census Bureau, for example, is experiencing some brain drain; we’re losing some of those folks from those positions because of this administration’s actions. And further, if we want to keep up, improve, modernize, meet the evolving needs of our nation, we have to invest in the research that’s necessary to keep up.

Now, changes like this mean that not only can we not modernize and improve on the way that our federal statistical system collects these data, but we’re taking some huge steps backwards, and losing some fundamental, really core information that we’ve relied on for decades, in ways that are just completely unprecedented.

JJ: Please expand, because I think to some people, this sounds like a bland, bureaucratic issue, and it’s actually an issue with people at the sharp end. So when you talk about “we’re stopping to collect data,” there are impacts of that. And I would ask you to talk a little more about that.

CB: So for example, if the Survey of Income and Program Participation, or the SIPP, as it’s called, is cut, we’ll lose really important information about families’ experiences with benefits programs like Medicaid, SSI, WIC—which is the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children—SNAP, school breakfast, school lunch—just all kinds of programs that support the needs of families in this country. And we use that information to make decisions about how to change or improve the policies around these programs. And so if we want these programs to be effective in meeting people’s needs, and efficient in how they’re run, we need to have high-quality, reliable, unbiased data on how they’re working, what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to change.

It’s cliché, but it’s true, that knowledge is power. In this case, it’s very true, because by taking control of our access to accurate, unbiased information, these kinds of changes are reducing our power to effect meaningful, positive change for families in this country through evidence-based policymaking.

And what that means is, it’s reducing our ability to ensure that every family has the support they need to have food on the table, that they don’t have to make decisions between buying diapers and paying the rent or buying medicine. This is very real for people, and it can feel disconnected when we’re talking about data, and surveys, and there are so many acronyms. But at the end of the day, this is information that we use to make good decisions that have huge impacts on a huge number of people’s lives in this country, and can be the difference between having the support you need and facing real, avoidable hardship.

JJ: Thank you for that. And I just want to ask a final question about media, because I often try to avoid saying things have been “politicized,” only because I understand how, for some people, political means partisan, and partisan means “our guys versus them guys,” and then everything gets lost in this understanding of partisan grievances. So whatever is at hand, “Well, if Democrats want it, then I think I don’t want it.” And I blame media for a lot of that, for not disaggregating that kind of conversation, and talking about what people need and the place of power. And I have just a lot of concerns about the way particular issues are presented to the public through the news media, which I know is where a lot of people are getting their understanding of what’s going on. And so I just wonder if you have thoughts about how journalists could be helpful in terms of explaining what’s at stake, explaining what’s happening, and taking it outside of Democrat/Republican, and just making it about people.

CB: Yeah, I certainly agree. When it comes to facts, when it comes to understanding the reality of what’s going on in our country, it really shouldn’t matter which end of the political spectrum we fall on, because we should all share the value of wanting to make decisions that are based in evidence and based in reality. But, unfortunately, because information is so powerful, it gets manipulated for political gain.

And I think the role of the media is just what you said: presenting information about what’s going on, not because of which side of the aisle, so to speak, is raising the alarm, but because it’s something that affects all of us, and it’s something that is going to have repercussions that reverberate for years to come.

And I’ll add that it’s not just progressives who are worried about the federal statistical system. Conservatives as well have spoken out, and shared concerns about the reliability and the accuracy and our access to this really important information.

JJ: If we’re going to have a conversation, we have to start from a basis of information. That shouldn’t be—and I don’t want to say, like, “let’s be bipartisan,” because that language is very coded and weird to me now, but I really am just saying, for reporters, get the actual information, start from the actual information bed. That shouldn’t be too much to ask from journalists.

Cara Brumfield: “Manipulating the Decennial Census for political gain is so deeply undemocratic, and we need to talk about it in those terms.”

CB: Yeah, journalists are just so important to the functioning of our democracy, because, like you said, they’re the gatekeepers, in some ways, of information, and how we understand what’s going on in the world. And this is an issue of democracy. When you think about the Decennial Census, for example, it’s congressionally mandated because it’s used to determine apportionment and to draw voting districts. And so what that means is that it’s deeply tied to fairness and political representation and political power. So manipulating the Decennial Census for political gain is so deeply undemocratic, and we need to talk about it in those terms.

So a fair and accurate census is key to making sure that everyone has that political power that they’re entitled to. And, at the same time, journalism has an important role to play in our democracy, by making sure that people have access to the accurate, factual information that they need to be able to exert their political power, in ways that align with their own best interests.

JJ: Thank you so much, Cara Brumfield. We’ve been speaking with Cara Brumfield, vice president for housing and income security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Thank you so much, Cara, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: Thank you for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 25, 2025

As Millions March Against Fascism, NYT Warns Against Progressives
What does this political moment in our country call for? The MAGA president and right-wing Supreme Court are shredding the Constitution at lightning speed, with the full acquiescence of Trump’s merry band of sycophants in Congress. Masked men are kidnapping people off the streets, disappearing them to detention centers across the country, and deporting them to countries our State Department warns travelers not to visit. Meanwhile, protesters against this lawlessness are attacked by federal troops with “less-lethal” weapons.

An estimated 7 million peaceful protesters took to the streets on October 18, in the second-largest demonstration in US history (after the first Earth Day in 1970), demanding accountability and a return to democracy and the rule of law. In a system of government where citizens can only use the ballot box every two to six years to show how they feel about their electeds, that’s something you’d think would warrant journalistic attention.

Yet at the nation’s paper of record—whose headquarters sat literally a stone’s throw away from the New York City No Kings march route—the protest was deemed not important enough for a front-page story. Two small below-the-fold photos were offered instead (10/19/25), with the accompanying article buried on page 23.

The day after the largest protests in half a century, the New York Times‘ front page (10/19/25) featured two small photos of the demonstrations that gave no sense of their scale.

It’s true that the New York Times has a history of downplaying protests (FAIR.org, 9/24/25, 9/12/25, 1/25/24). But it’s also true that it’s only certain kinds of protests that they downplay. When right-wingers under the banner of the Tea Party movement held in 2009 what the Times (9/12/09) described as “the largest rally against President [Barack] Obama since he took office,” they drew a crowd two orders of magnitude smaller than No Kings, but its coverage got the same placement from the paper: front-page photo, article inside. Just one month after the Tea Party rally, a major LGBTQ march of equal or possibly even double the size was not noted on the paper’s front page at all (Extra!, 12/09).

The Times isn’t exactly an outlier in that respect; nearly all corporate media have a long history of downplaying major protests over women’s rights, war, genocide and the climate crisis, while offering much more ink and airtime to right-wing rallies like the Promise Keepers and the Tea Party.

But the Times deserves special attention—partly because it’s seen as the standard-bearing “liberal” newspaper in the country. And as the standard-bearer, it sees its role as establishing the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party, most notably by drawing the line in the sand on the left that the Democratic Party must not cross. And this in turn is why, two days after the massive pro-democracy marches, the New York Times editorial board published a forceful message of its own—not against fascism, but against progressivism.

‘The center is the way to win’

The New York Times (10/20/25) declares all the congressional candidates who won in districts where their party’s presidential nominee lost to be “moderates”—based solely on PAC support, ignoring other measures such as voter perceptions.

In both its news and opinion sections, year after year, the New York Times‘ mantra has been that for electoral success, Democrats have to move to the right, and any electoral losses must be caused by excessive progressivism (Extra!, 7–8/06; FAIR.org, 5/27/15, 7/6/17, 11/14/19, 7/16/21). In a sprawling new iteration of this “move to the center” motto, the paper’s editorial board (10/20/25) announced: “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.”

The piece frames itself as talking to “partisans,” but it makes only the faintest nods to Republicans, and the last 2,000 of its 3,000-odd words are directly targeting Democrats. It opens:

American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.

You could probably just stop right there, based on the absurdity of comparing the “extremes” of Trump’s unprecedented authoritarianism to democratic socialist Democrats. New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the highest-profile of the latter at the moment (and certainly top of mind for the city’s largest newspaper), has focused his campaign on freezing the rent, making city buses free and adding 2% to the tax bills of the wealthiest 1%.

But even if you make it past that to the paper’s evidence for its centrism argument, it’s full of holes. The main argument is that “candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left.”

The centerpiece of their evidence is an analysis of swing districts where a Democratic congressional candidate won and Harris lost. The Times looked at what PAC endorsements the winning candidate received, and came up with the result that all could be classified as moderates. “No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these,” the paper declared. It also says its analysis shows that “moderates” outperformed Harris, while “nonmoderates” underperformed. Ergo, moderation must be the key to success.

‘Zero additional seats’

The question of the impact of ideology on electoral outcomes is hotly debated among academics and pollsters. Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, who runs the site On Data and Democracy (10/20/25), ran the numbers and found that “even using the editorial’s own data, Democrats would have gained zero additional seats by running more moderates in competitive seats.”

Part of this is due to the fact that Democrats most often run right-leaning candidates in swing districts already. But there are other factors that are probably more important. Bonica’s own research has found that incumbency matters far more than “moderation” for election outcomes. Looking at a range of measures of ideology, rather than the Times‘ single indirect measure of PAC support, he found that

the electoral benefit of a major ideological shift to the center is either small or statistically insignificant. The advantage provided by simply being an incumbent, by contrast, is a reliable 2–3 percentage points.

Using the most straightforward measure of all—voter perception of ideology—he found the benefit of moderation was exactly zero.

Chart: On Data and Democracy (10/20/25)

Bonica then analyzed every competitive district race from 2016–24, using the composite measure of ideology. “If every progressive candidate on the list had been replaced by a moderate in 2024,” he found, “the expected net change in Democratic seats would have been zero.”

The Times also argues that progressives “cannot point to a single member of Congress or governor from swing districts or states” who has won by “quietly retaining their unpopular positions and emphasizing economic issues.” Meanwhile, they say, look at Wisconsin, for instance, where Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers “won by running to the middle.”

But Bonica points out that in surveys, Baldwin was actually perceived by voters as “progressive.” Wisconsin Capital Times associate editor John Nichols (10/21/25) agrees, writing that Baldwin, the first openly LGBTQ member of the Senate, hardly ran to the middle, as the Times claimed, but defended trans rights (an issue Democrats are “out of step” on, according to the Times) and “borrowed heavily from a progressive populist tradition.” Baldwin and Evers, he wrote, were portrayed by their opponents as “radical.” It’s an example that undermines, rather than supports, the Times‘ argument, and also shows that defining and measuring ideology is a tricky thing—which the editors acknowledge, right before proclaiming that they possess the “true picture.”

‘Too liberal, too judgmental’

Supporters of Bernie Sanders are “not nearly numerous enough,” the New York Times (10/20/25) claims—ignoring polling that finds Sanders is the most popular active politician in the country (photo: TMZ, 8/7/22).

But if the New York Times‘ evidence is hardly convincing, its diagnosis of why moderation wins is even less so. The piece insists that the main problem is that “many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it.”

The popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, the Times says, is simply too niche; their fans “are not nearly numerous enough to flip the places required to win the presidency and Congress.”

Legacy media regularly work to say this until people believe it; in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Sanders won many early states, and not just deep blue ones, despite concerted media efforts to downplay and diminish his campaign (FAIR.org, 8/15/19, 1/28/20, 1/30/20, 5/1/20). When Biden eventually overtook him, exit polls showed voters still preferred Sanders’ political position, suggesting they were responding not to Biden’s ideology, but to the incessant media narrative of his electability (FAIR.org, 3/16/20). According to a recent YouGov poll (4/16/25), Sanders is currently the most popular active politician in the country by a substantial margin.

NYT’s ideal platform

The New York Times (10/20/25) suggests the Democratic Party should adopt a pro-capitalist, anti-socialist message, even though socialism is 24 percentage points more popular than capitalism among Democrats (Gallup, 9/8/25).

Now, as then, the Times claims that moving to the center will make voters “see [Democrats] as credible.” What does that look like, concretely? The Times attempts to establish what moderation looks like in this crucial paragraph, which sets forth much of the paper’s own ideology in clear terms:

America still has a political center. Polls show that most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big—and also think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. Most voters oppose both the cruel immigration enforcement of the Trump administration and the lax Biden policies that led to a record immigration surge. Most favor robust policing to combat crime and recoil at police brutality. Most favor widespread abortion access and some restrictions late in pregnancy. Most oppose race-based affirmative action and support class-based affirmative action. Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports. Most want strong public schools and the flexibility to choose which school their children attend.

This is the ideal Democratic platform that Times envisions: an end to affirmative action, refusal to grant women full autonomy over their own bodies, policing trans kids’ participation in sports while their very existence is under attack. They want politicians who promise “robust policing” without the police brutality that accompanies it, who talk about curbs on corporate and billionaire power but won’t challenge capitalism, who express support for “strong public schools” while allowing private schools to siphon off the money needed to make those public schools strong.

In other words, they want Democrats to throw their core constituents under the bus while making vague, contradictory promises they can’t fulfill. This is the paper’s suggested path to credibility?

Captured by elites

Jared Abbott (Jacobin, 10/15/25): “Among Democratic and independent respondents [in Rust Belt states], the most common critique of the Democratic Party was its perceived inability to carry out policies that help ordinary people.”
The example the Times offers of how moving to the center will make Democrats more “credible” and “effective” in confronting Trump is that “most voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies—and nonetheless trust his party on the issue more than they trust Democrats.” A more “moderate” position on immigration would make Democrats better able to “combat” him on the issue.

But when the Times itself calls Biden’s immigration policies “lax”—when they were far more cruel and draconian than any recent president besides Trump—and frames them as the other side of the extremist coin to Trump’s “cruel immigration enforcement,” it shapes that public perception. It’s hardly a surprise that many voters think the Democrats are “too liberal,” when that’s what all of the country’s biggest news outlets have hammered into their heads for decades.

In fact, a recent poll shows that the Times‘ advice is fundamentally self-defeating. The paper is correct that Democrats’ approval ratings are abysmal, and also that some polls show voters say Democrats are “too left wing and too focused on niche issues.” But those polls give respondents prewritten choices, suggesting to them what the appropriate answer might be, which can skew responses. What happens if you ask voters directly what they think about the party, and let them fill in the blanks themselves? A recent poll of Rust Belt (read: swing state) voters did just that, and analyzed the unprompted answers. Here’s what they found (Jacobin, 10/15/25):

Contrary to many analyses that have blamed Democrats for holding extreme positions on social and cultural issues that alienated swing voters, the dominant theme we observed was voters’ anger at the Democratic Party for failing to deliver. Among Democratic and independent respondents, the most common critique of the Democratic Party was its perceived inability to carry out policies that help ordinary people.

“Wokeness” or ideological extremism was a concern for only small minorities, even among independents (11%) and Republicans (19%). “The evidence suggests,” they wrote, that

most voters who hold negative views of the Democratic Party are motivated less by the culture war than by a broader judgment that the party is captured by elites and not delivering tangible gains for working people.

And what happens when you ask them directly about progressive policies? Turns out that, on many issues, voters are much more progressive than the Times would have readers believe. Polls regularly show large majorities in favor of a wealth tax, a $15 or higher minimum wage, and Medicare for All, all key progressive demands that corporate media regularly lambaste.

Anti-democratic power grab

Brennan Center (8/3/25): “The Trump administration has launched a concerted drive to undermine American elections. These moves are unprecedented and in some cases illegal.”

Equally important, the Times‘ argument imagines that a Democratic push to the center can overcome the structural obstacles to competitive elections that this authoritarian movement is rapidly laying down. Trump and his allies are working furiously to undermine election integrity for their own benefit, using a variety of strategies that the Brennan Center for Justice (8/3/25) details:
- attempting to rewrite election rules to burden voters and usurp control of election systems;
- targeting or threatening to target election officials and others who keep elections free and fair;
- supporting people who undermine election administration; and
- retreating from the federal government’s role of protecting voters and the election process.
GOP-controlled states are ramming through new gerrymandered maps at Trump’s behest to generate more safe seats. And the Voting Rights Act is currently before a Supreme Court that seems eager to eviscerate what little remains of it, which would allow further gerrymandering to give the GOP up to 19 more House seats.

Will it be possible in 2026 for Democrats to win at the ballot box, regardless of ideology? That’s very much up for debate. It certainly appears to be Trump’s goal to make it impossible, no matter how popular Democratic candidates might be.

Yet nowhere in its lengthy tirade against progressives does the Times mention this anti-democratic electoral power grab. It’s a key omission, and it brings us back to the paper’s downplaying of the No Kings protests. The Times in its editorial laments that Trump “threatens American democracy,” but it imagines the ship can be righted by retaking Congress with centrist Democrats.

If the Democrats have shown us anything under Trump 2.0, it’s that seeking to moderate and accommodate—as they did in confirming his extremist cabinet nominees and failing to block his first continuing resolution in the spring—only gives Trump and his enablers more power. Stopping the authoritarian machine is going to require all the levers of democracy that can be pulled—not just at the ballot box, but also on the streets.

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.
October 24, 2025

‘Decades of National Security Policy Have Gotten Us to Where We Are’: CounterSpin interview with Chip Gibbons on Trump’s plan to crush the left

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights and Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about Trump’s plan to crush the left for the October 17, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

FAIR.org (10/3/25)

Janine Jackson: “They think Antifa is an organization with a leader who has a girlfriend. They’re so dumb….” Yes, threats from the Trump White House to, in Stephen Miller’s words, “identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy” what they call “a network of domestic terrorists” might sound vague unto nonsensical for people who understand that “Antifa” means “anti-fascist,” and think that being anti-fascist should not be controversial. Ah, but it is. And the weird vagueness of the descriptor? Not so much a bug as a feature.

When it comes to defending our baseline right to free expression and dissent—and that is where we’re at—we need to know what we’re fighting if we’re going to fight it, and that means looking, not just at the users, but at their tools.

Chip Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights and Dissent, where he edits the Gaza First Amendment Alert. He’s also the author of the forthcoming book The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance and the Rise of the US National Security State. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to be on CounterSpin. It’s a vital news resource.

Drop Site (10/23/25)

JJ: Well, thank you. And I want to start by saying: I think of this as dipping a cup in the river of the conversation that we need to have. But in your recent piece for Drop Site News, you indicate that, yes, something new is happening in this government’s crackdown on dissent to their authoritarianism, but it’s not resting on air. What do we need to understand as some of the precedents, historical or legal/political precedents that the Trump administration is relying on, in what feels like a wildly dystopian abuse of law? What steps got us here?

CG: Yeah. So let’s start with what Trump has done. Trump has issued an executive order portraying Antifa to be a domestic terrorist organization. As you mentioned in your intro, Antifa is not an organization; it is an idea or ideology. It stands for “anti-fascist,” and there is no statutory domestic terrorism organization designation. Of course, Trump can call anything anything he wants, but it doesn’t have the same effect as designating someone a foreign terrorist organization, which opens up a whole range of criminal penalties for providing material support, providing banking to them.

He also issued a memo called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which is basically building on the Antifa executive order to lay out Trump’s blueprint for crushing what he claims is an organized movement of left-wing political violence.

And the way they talk about Antifa is a lot the way in which counter-subversives used to talk about the Communist Party. If there was a protest against police brutality in Milwaukee, or an anti-war protest in Tampa, they are both part of the same sinister Communist plot that was centrally orchestrated, and not at all organic. That was the conspiratorial mindset, and that sort of mindset continued on, with the nonexistent Antifa replacing the phantom Communist Party.

The thing about the memorandum that’s really important to note is, for the most part, there are no new laws here. There are no new agencies. There are a couple of bureaucratic restructurings, giving Stephen Miller a greater role in national security policy, which should horrify everyone. But for the most part, Trump is building off of previously existing frameworks, previously existing bureaucracies and previously existing laws.

CounterSpin (10/20/17)

And we have to remember that decades, decades of national security policy have gotten us to where we are. I’ve had a couple people say to me, “Wow, this is unprecedented, using the FBI to go after domestic political groups!”

JJ: Hmm…

CG: Yeah, I know! And this was a left-wing journalist, too. It’s like, no, it’s not unprecedented. A lot of what he’s doing is building on what the FBI has already been doing.

Let me give you an example: In the executive order, he said, “Antifa is a militaristic anarchist enterprise.” I think they meant “militant,” but they said “militaristic” anarchist enterprise. Well, the FBI has a type of investigation it carries out called an enterprise investigation, and of its enterprise investigations into domestic terrorism, it has a subcategory of investigation called “Domestic Terrorism Terrorist Enterprise Investigation: Anarchist Extremist.”

What’s an anarchist extremist? It’s somebody who’s against capitalism or corporate globalization. Janine, the FBI has not updated their anarchist definition since the World Trade Organization protests. You can tell, by that one.

But then you look at what Trump does: In the memo, he lists all of these ideologies. What’s on there? Anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, “extremism on gender.” (I don’t know what that means.)

Rethinking Schools (Spring/16)

So they’re taking certain ideologies, very broad ones, whether it’s opposition to corporate globalization, then saying these ideologies are the ones that are engaged in violence, and we’re going to prevent and disrupt the violence before it occurs. A number of astute people have pointed out that the memo, by using the phrase “disruption,” very clearly monitors the old Hoover description of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program. And that’s absolutely correct.

But the FBI has repeatedly used that framing well after the counterintelligence program was officially disbanded. Ashcroft and Mueller, after 9/11, talked about preventing and disrupting terrorism. In 2009, the FBI released their terrorism strategy; it was a disruption strategy.

And since the “war on terror,” the FBI has adopted something called a “preventative approach to terrorism.” And they said, you know, we’re no longer going to be a law enforcement agency that prosecutes people for terrorism after the fact. We’re a national security agency. We use intelligence to prevent and disrupt terrorism before it happens.

And in order to achieve this transformation, they repeatedly lessened the rules on the FBI, to now the FBI can open a type of investigation called an “assessment” on someone who it has no evidence to believe threatens national security—which is a very broad term, but they don’t even need evidence of that—or will [commit] a federal crime.

So you have a model that says, “We’re going to prevent terrorism before it happens.” The FBI has to go out and find the terrorist. They don’t need evidence of wrongdoing of the person they’re going to investigate. We’re going to define terrorism by political ideology, and the threat today is anarchists, which are people who are anti-capitalist, anti-globes..

JJ: [laughs]

CG: …Anti-American, extremists on gender. What is the FBI agent reading these orders going to do? They’re going to go out and look for everyone in their area of responsibility that they think has anti-capitalist, “extremist on gender” views…I have no idea how the FBI…

And these are Joint Terrorism Task Force, too. These are the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. So a lot of them are staffed by local police, operating as FBI terrorism officers under FBI guidelines. So now you have someone who’s like the Boise police officer, he’s been deputized by the FBI to run the terrorism task force, and now he’s told he has to find all the terrorists in Boise who have extreme views on gender. It’s a nightmare situation.

Chip Gibbons on NSPM-7: “It’s not just that it’s written in such a way that it opens the door to political policing. That was the original intent.”

JJ: It sounds a lot like thought crime.

CG: It is thought crime. It is. So the logic of a lot of the preventative approach was this claim from groups like the Heritage Foundation and these right-wing congressional committees that political movements produced terrorism, so of course you had to preemptively surveil the political movements, even if you didn’t have specific threats of crimes, or people being agents of a foreign power, or anything like that.

Obviously, that was not applied equally. They want to go after particular left-wing movements they didn’t like. And so when we talk about the preventative approach being adopted after 9/11, and the preventative approach being the driving force of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo Number Seven, it’s not just that it’s written in such a way that it opens the door to political policing. That was the original intent.

And Ken Klippenstein, the independent reporter, has been monitoring which mainstream outlets are commenting and which ones aren’t, and very few are. It’s very much an under-the-radar story.

Part of the reason was this memo came out, and then three hours later they indicted James Comey. So Comey was the story of the day.

But also, they don’t like to cover the FBI as a political police force. I mean, part of the reason why J. Edgar Hoover was so successful was he had the media behind him.

And it’s still the same way. When you see stories in the media about spying on protesters or left-wing groups, it’s always like an isolated incident of, “Wow, can you believe this happened?” It’s like, yes, I can believe this happened, because I’ve read all of the other stories in your paper about this happening, which you somehow never connect the dots between, and present as a coherent overall narrative.

JJ: We’re going to put a pin in it just for today. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons from Defending Rights and Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. The piece we were talking about is on DropsiteNews.com. Both of those sites, not for nothing, could use your support right now. Thank you, Chip Gibbons, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me back.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 24, 2025

Pentagon Creates New Legion of PR Toadies

The professional organization Military Reporters & Editors (CNN, 10/15/25) called the new press restrictions “an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and on the American people, who deserve accurate reporting on how the world’s largest military is funded and managed with their tax dollars.”

When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.

The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey.

Many journalists, thankfully, displayed solidarity with each other and the idea of a free press when they resisted the state’s new censorship efforts. “Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon…rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work,” reported the AP (10/15/25).

CNN’s Brian Stelter (10/15/25) reported:

A flyer with the words “journalism is not a crime” appeared Tuesday on the wall outside the “Correspondents’ Corridor” where journalists operate at the Pentagon. It was a silent protest of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new policy that severely restricts press access.

Donald Trump (Reuters, 10/15/25) explained the new Pentagon press policy by saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace and maybe security for our nation.”

The policy criminalizes routine reporting, according to media lawyers and advocates, so news outlets are refusing to abide by it. Instead, they are giving up their access to the building, while vowing to continue thoroughly covering Hegseth and the military from outside the Pentagon’s five walls.

Reuters (10/15/25) noted that it and at least 30 other outlets refused to sign the pledge, citing the others:

Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, Axios, Politico, the Guardian, the Atlantic, The Hill, Newsmax, Breaking Defense and Task & Purpose.

Good on these outlets for showing some spine against an administration for whom anti-media bellicosity has been a central feature of its authoritarian impulse. It’s a sign that perhaps at least some of them can toughen up against the administration’s threats against democratic and constitutional order. Even some outlets on the right–Murdoch properties Fox News and Wall Street Journal, and Christopher Ruddy’s Newsmax–declined to be part of Hegseth’s captive news corps.

‘The new Pentagon press corps’

Malcolm Ferguson (New Republic, 10/22/25): “It should alarm every American that the defense secretary is making an effort to fill the press corps with people who will never hold him accountable.”

However, the Pentagon is touting the success of its draconian order. “Today, the Department of War is announcing the next generation of the Pentagon press corps,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced on X (10/22/25):

Over 60 journalists, representing a broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists, have signed the Pentagon’s media access policy and will be joining the new Pentagon press corps….

New media outlets and independent journalists have created the formula to circumvent the lies of the mainstream media and get real news directly to the American people. Their reach and impact collectively are far more effective and balanced than the self-righteous media who chose to self-deport from the Pentagon. Americans have largely abandoned digesting their news through the lens of activists who masquerade as journalists in the mainstream media. We look forward to beginning a fresh relationship with members of the new Pentagon press corps.

In fact, this “broad spectrum” of outlets represents the fringes of the right, including One America Network, Epoch Times, Gateway Pundit, Human Events, LindellTV, Frontlines and the National Pulse (New York Times, 10/22/25).

These outlets are old and new. Human Events shaped its worldview in early Cold War nationalism. Frontlines is a project of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. LindellTV is the brainchild of MyPillow CEO and 2020 election denialist Mike Lindell (Guardian, 5/4/25; BBC, 6/19/25).

The Times quoted LindellTV bragging about its elevation into the halls of power in twisted, Orwellian speak: “We are officially part of the new Pentagon press corps, this is a major win for free speech and real journalism.”

The Gateway Pundit blog has been around since 2004, long enough to have pushed birther conspiracy theories before it promoted 2020 stolen election theories. National Pulse (slogan: “radically independent”) is more recent, founded and edited by a former chief advisor to British far-right leader Nigel Farage.

One America Network, which FAIR founder Jeff Cohen observed “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!,” was founded in 2013 so that AT&T could add a second right-wing network to its DirecTV platform (FAIR.org, 10/15/21). Epoch Times is affiliated with China’s Falun Gong movement, and comes to its Trumpy politics through Chinese anti-Communism.

Conspiracy outlet InfoWars—famous for losing a $1.4 billion defamation judgement for falsely stating the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was faked (Reuters, 10/14/25), as well as something about chemicals turning frogs gay (InfoWars, 8/28/24)—is also reportedly in the revamped press pool. “Breanna Morello is responsible for covering the Pentagon on behalf of Infowars and will do so from outside of DC,” the Hill (10/23/25) reported.

‘Maximum lethality’

The Trump administration is throwing real reporters out of the Pentagon even as Trump is using the military in unprecedented ways (Bloomberg, 10/6/25).

This new directive didn’t come about in a vacuum; the Pentagon is closing its doors to the press, and by extension the rest of the public, at a time of ramping up violence off the coasts of South America (AP, 10/22/25) and elsewhere. Hegseth couldn’t have been clearer in his recent speech to the military’s top officers when he said the Pentagon’s only mission was “warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win, unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit,” highlighting a focus on “common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

President Donald Trump, despite his claims of ending wars (CNN, 10/17/25), is certainly acting like he wants more war in the future, a crucial development for the public. “Trump Beats the Drums of War for Direct Action in Venezuela,” rang a headline in the Washington Post (10/22/25), with the subhead:

The administration has surged warships, planes and troops to the Caribbean for drug interdiction. Some see the ultimate goal as toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The Trump administration has already carried out attacks on Iran (Axios, 6/22/25) and Yemen (BBC, 4/18/25). And the administration “continues to expand troop deployments to US cities, escalating a campaign to assert military power at home with little precedent in US history” (Bloomberg, 10/6/25).

The Economist (10/23/25) warned that the Trump administration, which has invoked cartel violence to justify the president’s lethal hostility toward Venezuela (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 10/3/25), was turning the War on Drugs into a full-scale, international military campaign with little restraint. The magazine said:

Past presidents have also stretched their powers to wage wars and even to start them. Indeed, Mr. Trump is gesturing at precedents they set. But “this administration is going further, and going further with less public, detailed defense of what they’re doing,” says Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University. “I think the biggest difference is that Congress is not holding this administration to account in the way that they did even to Trump 1.0, let alone to Biden and to Bush.”

Just because Mr. Trump has labeled some migrants and even leftist opponents as “terrorists” does not mean he will use the armed forces against them. But right now, it’s not clear what, besides his own inclinations, might prevent him.

This new loyalty pledge has now chipped away at another restraint: the press. It is true, as many FAIR readers know, that the Pentagon has sold wars to the public through the establishment media without these draconian credentialing pledges (Extra!, 1–2/90, 11–12/90, 7–8/99; FAIR.org, 3/19/07). However, what we are likely to see now is an army of meme-obsessed, MAGA sycophants posing as independent journalists obediently copy-and-pasting Pentagon press releases into articles, selling an imperialist agenda to the president’s right-wing, nationalist base. That’s chilling news for those of us living here, and for any country that might sit in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s imperial ambitions.

There is some hope that military reporters will continue to do their jobs and receive information from the inside via channels that exist outside the actual walls of the Pentagon. Atlantic correspondent Nancy Youseff (10/15/25), one of the recently departed from the official pool, said “mid-level troops have been reaching out to me, unsolicited, and promising that they would keep providing journalists with information” in order to “uphold the values embedded in the Constitution.”

If legacy publications are truly horrified by these developments, they will get more creative in their methods of reporting when it comes to the Pentagon’s advances. That can result in more critical and less obedient coverage of the war machine, which would be a good thing, for once.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 24, 2025

Jeffrey Stein on Trump’s Boat Attacks, Katya Schwenk on AI Surveillance Pricing

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

AP (via WTTW, 9/10/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Some outlets report that the White House’s designation of people in boats in the Caribbean, and now in the Pacific, as “drug smugglers,” therefore “unlawful combatants,” therefore targets in the “war on terror,” therefore undeserving of due process, “raises legal questions.”

That’s corporate mediaspeak for “We’re going to wait till the White House comes up with some language we can report as making some kinda sense, so we can pose it against everyone else who says, what the actual hell is going on here?”

Even the resignation of the head of US Southern Command, which oversees US military operations in Latin America, didn’t move corporate reporters beyond scratching their heads over how this bombing campaign might be legal, rather than discussing what tools we have to respond to wildly illegal actions by government officials. We talk with Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, about efforts for, minimally, transparency on these lethal actions that look to be expanding by the day.

Truthout (8/7/25)

Also on the show: When it comes to airlines and other companies mining your personal data to suss out how much you can possibly pay so they can charge you precisely that and no less, media have a choice. They can write, like USA Today, about how “AI might make airline pricing more complex”—an explainer that explains that, in answer to how airlines price tickets, “a shrugging emoticon is appropriate,” and ends with, no joke, “trust your gut.”

Or you can do what our guest is doing: ask why industries are talking about saving consumers money with AI surveillance pricing, while at the same time telling investors how they’re maximizing revenue by pushing consumers to their “pain point.” How does that square? And who’s standing up for consumers, since it doesn’t?

We hear from reporter Katya Schwenk on that story.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 23, 2025

Western Media Use ‘Peace’ Prize to Fuel War Propaganda

Venezuelanalysis (7/8/24): “Washington’s unswerving support for Machado may be related to her extreme version of neoliberalism, which includes the privatization of the oil industry.”

The awarding of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan far-right leader María Corina Machado took nearly everyone by surprise (with the exception of insiders who apparently used advance knowledge to profit on betting markets—New York Times, 10/10/25).

The Nobel Committee justified the award on the basis of Machado’s “tireless work promoting democratic rights” and “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” However, Machado’s track record paints a very different picture (Sovereign Media, 10/11/25; Venezuelanalysis, 7/8/24).

Rather than scrutinize the opposition politician’s credentials, the media establishment seized the opportunity to whitewash the most unpeaceful elements in her background in order to advance its cynical pro–regime change agenda targeting Venezuela’s socialist government (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 1/11/23, 6/13/22, 4/15/20). Not coincidentally, Machado’s award coincided with an escalation of US military threats against Venezuela, meaning that corporate pundits used a “peace” prize as a platform for war propaganda.

Whitewashed profiles

The New York Times (10/16/25) was one of the few outlets to acknowledge the tension between the Nobel Committee presenting Machado as a supporter of a “peaceful transition” in Venezuela and her “calls for a military insurrection and unconditional support for President Trump’s military strikes” against Venezuelan boats.

The Nobel Prize meant corporate outlets had to give their readers an idea of Machado’s political trajectory. And though some had profile pieces (Reuters, 10/10/25; New York Times, 10/10/25), there was a concerted effort to conceal the most unsavory elements. The Financial Times (10/10/25) euphemistically stated that Machado “enter[ed] politics in opposition to Hugo Chávez”—president of Venezuela from 1999 through 2013—while the Guardian (10/10/25) summed up that she has been “involved in politics for more than two decades.”

No establishment outlet mentioned Machado’s first relevant political action: supporting the short-lived April 2002 coup against the Chávez government, and signing the infamous “Carmona Decree.” In one fell swoop, this decree did away with all democratically elected institutions, annulled the 1999 Constitution, and established a de facto dictatorship headed by the leader of Venezuela’s corporate business lobby. Machado later denied signing the decree, though her name appeared on a list published by Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.

Looking past the undemocratic debut, establishment journalists instead started the story with the mid-2002 creation of Súmate, calling it an NGO dedicated to election monitoring or transparency (Bloomberg, 10/10/25; Washington Post, 10/10/25; Reuters, 10/10/25; New York Times, 10/10/25). Yet they did not mention that this alleged quest to safeguard democracy was funded by the US, or that the opposition made unfounded fraud claims after failing to unseat Chávez in a 2004 recall referendum (Venezuelanalysis, 8/21/04, 9/9/04).

Machado’s second act was also the antithesis of peace and democracy, as the opposition politician led the 2014 “La Salida” (“The Exit”) campaign of street violence to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro administration, leaving dozens dead. That same year, in order to denounce the Venezuelan government, she acted as an “alternate ambassador” for Panama at a meeting of the Organization of American States (BBC, 3/25/15). The stunt led to Machado losing her parliamentary seat.

Yet instead of scrutinizing the new laureate’s less-than-peaceful actions, corporate outlets chose to ignore or misrepresent them as “denouncing the regime’s abuses” (Washington Post, 10/10/25), “participating in anti-regime protests” (New York Times, 10/10/25) or “allegations she’d tried to foment a coup” (Bloomberg, 10/10/25). Only the Associated Press (10/10/25) offered a minimal concession that the Machado-led “anti-government protests…at times turned violent.”

Another key aspect of the opposition operator’s political career has been outspoken advocacy for US sanctions, which have caused economic devastation and led to tens of thousands of deaths (CEPR, 4/25/19). But Western media ignored Machado’s lobbying for collective punishment of the Venezuelan people—with the New York Times (10/16/25) a notable exception.

The US-backed figure has also made no secret of her plans to repress her political opponents. Machado is on the record making thinly veiled threats to “eradicate socialism,” and pledging to “neutralize” destabilizing groups should she eventually take power. Factoring in the Venezuelan far right’s history of racist violence (Venezuelanalysis, 3/28/14, 7/30/17), it is not unreasonable to predict a dirty war against Chavistas if Machado ever reached Miraflores.

The company you keep

Reuters (10/17/25) was the only major outlet to highlight Machado’s support for the genocidal Israeli government.

The reporting on the Nobel Peace Prize plainly described Machado as belonging to the Venezuelan opposition, but few outlets bothered to disclose her political views, apart from euphemistically labeling her a “conservative” (New York Times, 10/10/25; Guardian, 10/10/25) or a supporter of “economic liberalism” (New York Times, 10/16/25; Reuters, 10/10/25).

Machado has heaped praise on far-right former presidents Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, who was responsible for serious human rights violations, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to foment a coup.

In February, Machado sent a video message during a “Patriots for Europe” summit, calling for far-right leaders’ support and openly referring to them as “allies.” The high-profile gathering featured neo-fascist parties like Spain’s Vox, Italy’s Lega and France’s Rassemblement National (RN). The same media establishment that paints the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a threat to democracy (Guardian, 2/7/25; NPR, 4/22/25) chose to ignore Machado’s quite open alignment with his politics.

But more damning is the complete erasure of Machado’s outspoken support for Israel, even amidst the recent genocide. Venezuela’s far-right leader has repeatedly praised Israel’s defense of “Western values” and “freedom,” while her party established an alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in 2020. In 2018, Machado penned a letter to the Israeli prime minister, asking him to lead a foreign intervention to “dismantle the criminal Venezuelan regime.”

At a time when the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine has sparked outrage around the world, no corporate outlet found it relevant to mention that this year’s “peace” laureate did not utter a single word of condemnation. On the contrary, according to Netanyahu himself, Machado told the prime minister she “appreciates” his “resolute” actions in a recent congratulatory phone call. Unsurprisingly, only Reuters (10/17/25) briefly reported on the Nobel laureate’s war criminal ally.

Beating the war drums

Sovereign Media (10/11/25) noted Machado’s support for “sanctions that have caused tens of thousands of deaths since 2017” and “on-the-record requests for a foreign military intervention.”

The media establishment’s careful whitewashing of Machado’s undemocratic past and genocidal allies is particularly damning, given the present context of a US military buildup and overt threats against Venezuela. One of the US-backed politician’s most persistent habits has been calling for a foreign intervention against her country (Sovereign Media, 10/11/25).

In the wake of her peace prize, Machado has wasted no time in lobbying for violent regime change. In a BBC interview (10/11/25), she argued that Venezuela needs to be “liberated” via a “coordination of internal and external forces,” an expression she also used in an interview with El País (10/10/25).

Borrowing a page from US administration’s book of redefining concepts such as “imminent threat” or “civilian,” Machado bombastically claimed that the Maduro government “has declared a war” against the Venezuelan people, and urged Trump to help her side “win” this war (BBC, 10/11/25; Infobae, 10/11/25; CNN, 10/15/25). The opposition leader has latched onto the administration’s “narcoterrorism” fairy tale that has been debunked over the years (FAIR.org, 9/24/19; Venezuelanalysis, 9/2/25), just like she supported the White House’s Tren de Aragua narrative, even if it meant a gruesome crackdown against Venezuelan migrants.

Machado has gone as far as to cheerlead the Trump administration extrajudicially executing her fellow citizens, arguing that the lethal US strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 30 people, are “saving lives, not only Venezuelan lives, but also life of American people” (Daily Beast, 10/10/25).

But it is not just Machado using her new platform to promote US military intervention. The Washington Post editorial board (10/10/25) openly expressed that US interests would be “better served” with a “reliable American partner” like Machado. True to form, the Wall Street Journal (10/10/25, 10/12/25) also used Machado’s award to double down on calls for Trump to bomb Venezuela in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”

The warmonger lineup was complete with the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (10/10/25), who never needs excuses to endorse the murder of Venezuelans in the name of US interests (FAIR.org, 2/12/25). In this case, Stephens claimed that regime change is the only option to address the “catastrophe of Chavismo,” even if it means “full-scale military confrontation.”

The Nobel Peace Prize has long lost any credibility when it comes to upholding actual peace. With Machado’s award, it followed a recent tradition of aligning itself with Western foreign policy. And even more predictable was the corporate media seizing the opportunity to advance its war and regime-change propaganda against Venezuela.

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

To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. On October 17, for example, eleven members of the Abu Shaaban family, including seven children and three women, were blasted to bits in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood while attempting to reach their home. According to the Israelis, the family’s vehicle had trespassed over the so-called “yellow line,” the invisible boundary arbitrarily demarcating the more than 50 percent of Gazan territory still occupied by the genocidal army.

Then on October 19, Israel bombed the living daylights out of central and southern Gaza and killed dozens after alleging a ceasefire violation by Hamas—an allegation that not even Trump found convincing, but that enabled such impressively passive headlines as “Strikes Hit Gaza After Truce Violations Alleged” (Guardian, 10/19/25). Once the carnage was complete, the BBC (10/19/25) assured readers that “Israel Says It Will Return to Ceasefire After Gaza Strikes.” For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Knesset that the Israeli military had dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza during this particular, um, pause in the ceasefire.

NBC (10/20/2025) and others persist in describing the ceasefire as “in place” or “holding” despite Israel clearly not ceasing to fire.

While most media outlets consistently describe the ceasefire as “fragile” (NBC News, 10/20/25) and “delicate” (ABC News, 10/20/25), they somehow can’t bring themselves to state the obvious: If you don’t cease firing, it’s not a ceasefire. Of course, the refusal to call a spade a spade should perhaps come as no surprise from an industry that continues to peddle the narrative of a “ceasefire” in Lebanon despite acknowledging “near-daily strikes” (New York Times, 7/9/25) on the country by Israel and the killing of some 250 people in the first seven months following the truce declaration last November.

“Both sides have accused the other”

There is also the pernicious media tendency of allowing equal weight to ceasefire breach allegations by Israel and Hamas given the former’s mendacious—not to mention genocidal—track record. This mendaciousness has been on display for decades, most prominently in Israel’s eternal claim to be fighting “terrorists”—a fight that somehow never fails to kill thousands upon thousands of civilians; at least 20,000 of those killed in the latest two-year showdown were children, with a whole lot more presumed to be buried beneath the rubble. In the episode involving the Abu Shaaban family, the Israelis invoked a typical lie from their vast arsenal: a “suspicious vehicle” had approached Israeli troops “in a way that caused an imminent threat to them”—so they killed the family, and that was that.

And yet the media unceasingly grant Israel space to present deceitful arguments as credible, without ever emphasizing that Hamas is not the one that is dropping 153 tons of bombs in one day during a supposed “ceasefire.”

Case in point: an NBC News dispatch (10/19/25) titled “Israel and Hamas trade accusations of ceasefire violations,” in which we are told that “both sides have accused the other of violating the terms of the deal.” The next sentence outlines Israel’s primary ongoing gripe regarding Hamas’s alleged ceasefire transgressions: “Israel says Hamas is delaying the release of the bodies of hostages held inside Gaza, while Hamas says it will take time to search for and recover remains.”

In accordance with the ceasefire agreement, Hamas promptly returned all living hostages in its possession to Israel, and it has returned the remains of several more. But the group has said it is unable to recover the remaining bodies because they lie under formidable quantities of rubble, thanks to Israel’s recent pulverization of the enclave. Rather than allowing the necessary machinery into Gaza to assist with excavating the remains that Israel so urgently demands, Netanyahu has instead announced that the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will remain closed until Hamas “fulfills” its part of the deal.

Any logical observer might conclude that Israel is actively endeavoring to sabotage the “ceasefire.” But the corporate media are not in the business of logical observation. In its writeup, titled “Hamas Returns Bodies as Fragile Gaza Ceasefire Holds,” the Financial Times presents as entirely legitimate an arrangement in which “Israeli officials have accused Hamas of returning the bodies too slowly, and threatened to limit the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza in an effort to pressure the militant group to accelerate the returns” (10/19/25).

Anyway, nothing to see here: just some more casual enforced starvation and illegal aid deprivation in an already famine-stricken territory. It’s all in a day’s work during a “fragile ceasefire.”

Ceasefire “holding”?

In the aftermath of the Abu Shaaban family massacre, CNN reported (10/17/25) that the ceasefire was “holding”—albeit not without “coming under strain,” naming as the first culprit the “failure of Hamas to return all the bodies.” The question of the return of the bodies occupied the first 10 paragraphs of the piece, so that when CNN also named “the initially slow entry of aid” into Gaza and the “continued, if isolated, incidents of killings of Palestinians in Israeli strikes” as contributing to the “strain,” it had already been made clear to the reader which facet of the alleged violations was the most important.

The next day, NBC News employed a similarly diplomatic approach to Israel’s ongoing lethal operations, noting that “even as the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel holds, Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces” (10/18/25). Again, the media are apparently incapable of coming right out and stating that Israel has unequivocally violated the ceasefire, or that a ceasefire is not a ceasefire if one side is permitted to engage in continued slaughter.

According to the delusions of the Washington Post (10/15/25), meanwhile, Israel is “largely restrained from attacking Hamas under the ceasefire sponsored by Trump,” resulting in a situation in which “Hamas’s enduring grip has significant implications for the future of Gaza and President Donald Trump’s peace plan.” As usual, Israel is let off the hook for its campaign to literally annihilate Gaza’s future.

And yet this particular intervention by the Post is at least less batshit crazy than another one courtesy of columnist George F. Will (10/13/25), who has determined that “primary credit for the Gaza ceasefire” goes to the Israeli army and Netanyahu.

I would advise anyone with blood pressure problems to avoid so much as glancing at the column in question, but the gist of his argument is basically that genocide was a “necessary precondition for the cessation of warfare.” (Secondary credit goes to the US for “enabl[ing] Israel’s victory by not restraining its self-defense.”) It would seem, of course, that not launching a genocide in the first place might be an easier way to avoid warfare—a “cessation” of which has not been achieved in Gaza anyway.

“Greatest threat” to peace?

CNN (10/17/25) names Hamas as the “greatest threat” to Trump’s Gaza plan—a claim supported by a broader media environment that won’t acknowledge Israel’s genocide.

Indeed, while most corporate media commentary is not as transparently deranged as Will’s, there persists the notion that it is Hamas, not Israel, that is the greatest obstacle to peace—see, for instance, CNN‘s (10/17/25) “Why Hamas Remains the Greatest Threat to Trump’s Gaza Plan.” When Reuters (10/19/25) listed the “formidable obstacles to Trump’s plan to end the war,” it named “Hamas disarming, the governance of Gaza, the make-up of an international ‘stabilization force,’ and moves towards the creation of a Palestinian state” that have yet to be resolved. Notice which actor is missing.

A typical Associated Press dispatch (10/13/25) headlined “Despite Momentous Ceasefire, the Path for Lasting Peace and Rebuilding in Gaza Is Precipitous” explains that “how and when Hamas is to disarm, and where its arms will go, are unclear, as are plans for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.” Never do such articles find the need to point out that Israel is a state whose very existence is predicated on ethnic cleansing and perpetual war—or to cite such relevant findings as the determination by a United Nations commission of inquiry that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

The Genocide Convention defines the phenomenon as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Such acts include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The inconceivable bodily and mental devastation that Israel has deliberately inflicted on the people of Gaza clearly continues despite Trump’s announcement that the war in Gaza is “over.” And as Israel continues to violate the so-called “ceasefire” while attempting to redirect blame to justify its own unceasing aggression, the media’s lack of scrutiny only abets those violations.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 17, 2025

Chip Gibbons on Trump’s Blueprint to Crush the Left, Cara Brumfield on Erasing Federal Data

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

Drop Site (10/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Trump and his enablers have a plan: to officially define anyone who opposes an agenda of white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy—any dissenters—as “terrorists,” the “enemy within.” The question is no longer if that’s happening, but how we respond, and that response is enriched by understanding the history. We’re in a fight for our right to speak up, and out—but it’s not the first time. We’ll learn from Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, about the old in the new “counterterrorism” project.

CBPP (9/29/25)

Also on the show: The Department of Agriculture says they’re defunding the annual survey on food security, just as the largest-ever cuts to food assistance through SNAP hit families, and as food prices continue to rise. It doesn’t mean the predictable harms won’t happen, just that policymakers will have less information to use to respond to them. Is that the plan? We’ll hear about that from Cara Brumfield, vice president for housing and income security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 17, 2025

‘You Had US Media Carrying Out Incitement to Genocide, and Then Shifting to Genocide Denial’CounterSpin interview with Gregory Shupak on how to deny genocide

Janine Jackson interviewed academic and writer Gregory Shupak about how to deny Gaza genocide for the October 10, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Committee to Protect Journalists (2/15/25)

Janine Jackson: The Committee to Protect Journalists states that in the first 10 weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Israel had already killed more media workers in Gaza than had ever been killed in a year anywhere. Israel has systematically targeted journalists and their families for reporting the realities of genocide, famine and displacement, with the murders often followed by official PR efforts depicting the journalists as Hamas propagandists, or simply as “terrorists.”

Journalists are civilians; killing them is a war crime. One would hope that, minimally, the rest of the world’s journalists would acknowledge that, and decry the unlawful, targeted erasure of those trying to bear witness to what is widely acknowledged as genocide, trying to show the world what only they can show. US news media, with all the resources and platform to lift up that reality, are running away from the responsibility, and worse.

Our guest has been following it all. We’re joined now by academic and writer Gregory Shupak, author of, among other titles, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone from Toronto. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.

Gregory Shupak: Hi, thanks for having me.

JJ: In August, Israeli military openly killed six journalists sheltering in a tent. They then accused one of them, Al Jazeera‘s Anas Al-Sharif, of being a terrorist. They had harassed him for months with phone calls explicitly telling him to stop reporting, and then an airstrike killed his father. They didn’t bother justifying the murder of the other five journalists.

FAIR.org (10/9/25)

Just as it’s increasingly clear that Israel is carrying out a genocide, it’s clear that that includes a plan to silence those who would show that to the world. You just wrote for FAIR.org about one outlet, the Wall Street Journal, but it’s emblematic of techniques that many corporate news outlets are using to deny what we all can see with our own eyes. Talk, if you would, about some of the methods that you see—which, to be clear, they wouldn’t use if they weren’t effective to some degree.

GS: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s worth keeping in mind that this type of propaganda doesn’t have to necessarily convince the audience to completely accept the point of view being put forth. Rather, it can still be effective if it merely disorients and confuses the audience, because that renders readers without the kind of clarity required to take political action.

So, yeah, I’ve identified in this piece five tactics that the Wall Street Journal has used over the last few months in its explicitly genocide-denying commentary on Gaza. And I do think, as you suggested, that this is much more widespread than, well, certainly than just this one period in the Journal, but also in a much larger range of outlets over the last two years. And so the five tactics that I’ve identified are hand-waving, victim-blaming, inverting perpetrator and victim, obscurantism and repudiation. So let me just try to briefly define each one.

Democracy Now! (10/16/24)

So with hand-waving, you have the author just brushing aside the horrors that we’ve all, as you’ve said, seen with our own eyes, as just, “Oh well, this is the inevitable nature of war. What are you going to do? There’s no way this can be avoided,” as if it were a law of physics to burn people alive in their tents, or deliberately target children with snipers, as many doctors have observed has happened in Gaza.

Victim-blaming, another tactic I mentioned, is where the blame or responsibility for the mass murder of Palestinians is put on Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas. So you have here observers suggesting, “Well, it’s the Palestinians’ use of human shields that results in so many Palestinians being killed by Israel.” In fact, the record shows that there’s far, far, far more documented cases of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields than there are of Palestinians using each other as human shields. In fact, there’s effectively no evidence of that having happened, certainly not at any kind of large scale, or as a kind of consistent approach to war-fighting.

The third approach I point to is inverting perpetrator and victim. So this is where you see Palestinians portrayed as the genocidal ones, where the commentary suggests, Well, Palestinians, they would carry a genocide if they could, as one observer put it in the Journal, Israel can carry out a genocide and supposedly isn’t.

Of course, as with all of these forms of genocide denial, there is no actual factual record to support what these authors are saying. In fact, evidentiary record suggests exactly the opposite.

Wall Street Journal (9/16/25)

Obscurantism, the fourth type of genocide denial that I look at, is where the author offers questionable pieces of information, and presents them typically in a decontextualized way, as if Israel should be understood as actually going out of its way to pursue its goals in a humane fashion, consistent with international law. So you have authors spewing nonsense about “Oh, well, Israel allows in aid,” or “Israel warns people,” etc., etc., none of which stands up to scrutiny, as I explained in the piece.

And then, lastly, there’s repudiation, and here’s where the authors simply say X or Y isn’t true, and they just don’t really bother offering any counter evidence. So we have, of all people, Alan Dershowitz in the Journal recently saying that it’s preposterous for [New York City mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani to say that he would have [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu arrested for genocide if he were to come to New York and Mamdani were mayor. And so Dershowitz just dismisses it as outrageous to say that Israel has committed genocide, actually, as if there were not some mountain upon mountain upon mountain of evidence proving that it has carried out a genocide for two years.

JJ: Absolutely. I just saw a video of Tom Cotton simply stating, “There’s no famine in Gaza,” just declaratively. “There’s no famine in Gaza, and anyone who tells you there is lying.”

I saw a video of a history teacher talking about the new “slavery wasn’t that bad” line that we apparently are going to have to deal with in 2025. And she had a student who said, “Well, aren’t the terrible stories we hear coming from escaped slaves? We don’t hear from the ones who were happy, and maybe that would give us a different view.” And the teacher said, “Actually, our understandings of the horrors of slavery don’t come from enslaved people themselves, but from slave owners, who published, essentially, torture manuals.”

With Israel, we hear media apologists saying it’s ridiculous and terrible and unforgivable to accuse Israel of intentions and ideas that Israeli officials are on record stating openly. That is some peak denialism.

Wall Street Journal (9/3/25)

GS: Yeah, that’s a good point. And that’s one of the things that comes up in the piece is—OK, I can’t believe in one day I had to read Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual. That was like having a dentist appointment and then driving directly to have a prostate exam.

And so Lévy, he claims that, well, for there to be a genocide, there has to be a plan to destroy a people. And he says Israel does not have any such plan. I mean, it’s astonishing that people even can say such things, much less that they somehow get into print, and past whatever integrity-free people are editors at the Wall Street Journal, because anybody with a search engine can find one statement after another by Israeli political and military officials, especially political officials, saying quite explicitly that their plan is to carry out actions that are well within the definition of genocide, from the very start.

For example, we have the infamous statement from [then–Minister of Defense] Yoav Gallant about saying he’s going to implement a total siege of Gaza. We’ve had Netanyahu saying that Israel was going to only agree to cease hostilities if it were tied to Trump’s genocidal plan to make Gaza into a plaything for international tourists. Things like Gideon’s Chariots, which is a plot that Israel is seeking to implement as of May, which just involves destroying the remnants of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrating the Palestinians into, well, concentration camps. This was denounced as genocidal by Human Rights Watch.

So there’s one articulation after another of Israeli leaders saying, “Yes, we are going to do these genocidal things.” And yet you have a supposed intellectual, Lévy, just dismissing the idea that Israel has had genocidal plans. They themselves have told us very clearly over and over that they have such plans.

Middle East Eye (10/20/23)

JJ: And with statements saying “There are no innocents in Gaza,” and other statements that are declarations about the nature, the way that certain Israeli officials look on Gazans, that suggests that they are subhuman. And in October 2023, you were noting in Middle East Eye that outlets like the Washington Post were even then criticizing as “unacceptable equivocation” just the very idea that the Hamas attack should be seen in a historical and political context. Suggesting that Palestinian actions have no historical context, no political context, removing them from history—that seems to me like a key part of dehumanization.

GS: So the way that I would characterize it, and have across various things I’ve written in these past two years, is that in the early phases of the genocide, you had US media carrying out what I would call incitement to genocide, and then shifting later to genocide denial. So in those early days, you had the really rabid dehumanization of Palestinians, and indeed decontextualization of the actions of Hamas and other armed groups on October 7.

The New York Times editorial board, as I recall, said something along the lines of, the attack occurred without “any immediate provocation.” Again, I may be slightly off in the quote, but it was roughly that.

And first of all, just the mere fact that there has been a siege on Gaza since 2006, 2007, depending on how you define “siege” and when this one began, but the point is that it is an immediate, omnipresent provocation. As is the fact that most people who reside in Gaza are there because they’ve been expelled from other parts of Palestine. That is an omnipresent and therefore, on October 7, immediate provocation.

And then you had all kinds of violence being enacted throughout that year against Gaza, and other parts of Palestine in which Palestinians reside. So you had Palestinians being shot at the security wall through which they broke on October 7 in the days leading up to it. You had children killed at record levels in the West Bank by Israeli forces that year. You had Israeli forces bombing Gaza in the months leading up to October 7.

So there’s a very, very, very rich documentary record of provocation, to put it mildly. So for the Times to have said that there was no immediate provocation is really jaw-dropping.

Gregory Shupak: “It’s necessary…for this genocide to unfold, to have the American public either ginned up for the violence, or confused about it.”

And that kind of decontextualization makes it seem as if Palestinian violence, or Palestinian recourse to armed force, is just illegible. Just makes no sense, right? This is what Max Boot was writing in the Washington Post; he was saying you can’t even expect Hamas to operate according to any sort of political logic. They’re like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

It was to reduce Palestinians and their representatives and their fighters to just irrational, bloodthirsty savages. And the message behind that is not difficult to discern. It’s these people are violent animals and they cannot be negotiated with, they can only be killed. They do not deserve rights because they are not human. And so that was really widespread in the early days of the post–October 7 world.

And, eventually, as the scale of Israeli crimes became more and more visible, you had a lot of the propaganda organs adopt various forms of genocide denial, once the genocide that they helped ignite was already up and running. Because it’s important to underscore that, of course, Israel could not do what it’s done without US support. So it’s necessary, for these events to unfold, for this genocide to unfold, to have the American public either ginned up for the violence, or confused about it and thus unable to see what’s happening and try to oppose it. That’s just as important as it is to whip Israeli society into a frenzy, to enact this sort of barbarism that we’ve seen inflicted in Gaza.

JJ: I could talk to you much longer, and I’m sure I will in future, including about the so-called “peace plan,” where the New York Times is saying it’s such an integral part of that peace plan that it’s going to help develop Gaza into a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors, right? So we’re going to put a pin in that.

Gallup (3/6/25)

But I want to ask you, finally: We do see, against all of this, we still see opposition to the genocide increasing: Gallup has a poll, US sympathy for Israel is at an all-time low, below 50% for the first time in the 25 years that Gallup has been doing this polling. I feel like the question is becoming less “how do we convince people to oppose genocide” and more “how do we create the circumstances where that opposition becomes power?”

And so I just want to leave you with the question of, it’s amazing to me that people, in the face of this PR onslaught, are believing what they see with their own eyes, and they’re acting on that. But what else needs to happen, and just what are your thoughts about going forward, and turning what many folks understand into real change?

GS: To me, what I take from history is that it can only be accomplished through painstaking and often unglamorous political organizing. I think this is how, or a huge part of how the Israeli narrative, the US/Israeli narrative, has lost its grip is, yeah, sure, it’s that people can share videos that independent Palestinian journalists have taken. You can share that online. Absolutely. That’s a key part of it. Nevertheless, it is also a very key part of developing a counter narrative to have organized activists who do things like share information to debunk all the lies, who hold teach-ins, who distribute their own literature, electronically and the old-fashioned way.

So I think that the only way to stop the US/Israeli genocide machine is fundamentally not that different from asking how it was possible to get the Voting Rights Act in the United States, or how it was possible to end the Vietnam War in the United States, or perhaps, most aptly, how it was possible to bring apartheid South Africa to its knees. These things happen, I think, typically at a slower pace than any of us would like, because grassroots organizing doesn’t have the resources that the ruling class does, obviously. So it requires tremendous people power, but people just getting together and forming political organizations, and linking up with other political organizations, and strategizing according to local conditions—that’s the way that these kinds of emerging consensuses can be translated into real-world change.

OR Books (2018)

And I think that that’s the trajectory in which things seem to be headed. History doesn’t move in a linear way, so we don’t know what the future of Palestine will look like, but it does seem like Israel and its American backers have forever lost world public opinion on this issue. And there are large, large swaths of the populations around the world who have made resisting the oppression of the Palestinians as much a part of their daily lives as going to get the groceries or taking their dog for a walk.

So it does, of course, wear one down and cause excruciating pain to see just the relentlessness of US/Israeli cruelty in Gaza. But there is, at the same time, tremendous reason for hope and optimism, first and foremost, because of the resilience of the Palestinians themselves and their regional allies, but also because of just ordinary people around the world who don’t want to stand for this, and won’t take it lying down.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with academic and writer Gregory Shupak. The book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media is available from OR Books. Gregory Shupak, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GS: Ah, thank you!

This post was originally published on FAIR.