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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Washington Post (10/6/25): “Across Europe, and especially in France,the bill is coming due.”
The European welfare state has to die. At least, that’s what the Washington Post wants you to think.
In a recent news article (10/6/25) headlined “Europe’s High Quality of Life Is Getting Hard to Afford. Just Ask France,” the Post went on full offensive against European social spending. With the second sentence, the paper makes its message clear:
The cost of a signature brand of humanist economics—the so-called European way of life, offering healthcare, affordable education and a dignified retirement to all, through high social spending—is becoming unbearably high.
Could this be solved by raising taxes? No, of course not. The Post makes sure to remind us that Europe already has high taxes, and that hiking taxes “could drive away or kill businesses in a globalized world.” For good measure: “Some say Europe is already taxing its citizens and businesses too heavily.”
If taxes are not the solution, what is? Spending cuts! As we are told: “The hard math indicates that France’s uniquely generous social welfare system is part of the problem.”
In all, through the article, the reader gets a few stats meant to suggest the profligacy of European social spending, and a couple of vague gestures to the immense burden under which the over-taxed European rich are suffering. (We learn, for instance, of a crypto entrepreneur who “feels unwelcome, even unsafe, in a France clamoring for more resources from the rich.”)
Besides that, a few individuals are interviewed, and the Post uses these interviews to mischaracterize the political situation in France, saying that the main divide is “between those who want the country to change and those who insist it cannot.” The reality is quite different, with the split actually between those who want to cut social spending and those who want to raise taxes.
‘Confront mathematical reality’
Government revenue as a share of GDP in France (51%) is a bit lower than Finland (54%) and a bit higher than Belgium or Denmark (both 50%). Source: IMF.
The article—co-written by Annabelle Timsit, Anthony Faiola and Aaron Wiener—itself is confusing, somewhat lazily slapped together, and altogether not particularly interesting or compelling. And yet it is quite a useful piece to single out and respond to, because it is representative of precisely the sort of conventional wisdom that corporate media outlets have long liked to propagate (Extra!, 3–4/96, 9–10/05, 7/10; FAIR.org, 2/22/19, 7/5/23).
Even at outlets where number-crunching is more valued, there is a tendency to parrot tropes about reckless European spending and the mathematical impossibility of it continuing. A recent column at the Financial Times (9/13/25), for instance, urged European voters and politicians to “confront mathematical reality” on pensions and recognize the need for cuts.
To unpack just how wrong it is to argue that math, on some abstract level, dictates that European social spending must decrease, let’s look at France, which is the main country examined in the Post piece, and the highest spender on social protection in all of Europe.
Last year, France ran a budget deficit of close to 6% of GDP, a relatively high figure. Government revenue, from taxes and other receipts, came in at about 51% of GDP, also a relatively high figure. But not as high as in Norway, where government revenue sits at about 62% of GDP. If French government revenue jumped to around 57% of GDP, that would eliminate the deficit, while still leaving France short of Norway’s level of government revenue.
The point: The French government clearly has the capacity to plug the deficit through increased taxes.
‘This will mean cuts’
The Washington Post (10/6/25) contrasts “embarrassing” France with “humming” Spain—where the unemployment rate is 2.8 points higher than in France.
Yet the Washington Post, declining to cite any of these figures, tells its readers:
For France and Germany, long the pillars of the European Union, it is unclear that they can still afford to be the West’s guiding lights of economic justice.
This statement is blatantly false. As demonstrated, France has the capacity to afford its social spending through higher taxes, and it spends the most on social protection of any European country! Even with the aging of the population, that fact will not change.
Germany, for its part, has lower debt and lower government revenue, at around 46% of GDP, than France. It has plenty of room to raise taxes. The idea that these countries may not be able to afford their social spending is a fantasy the Post reporters are presenting to their readers as fact.
The Post goes on to quote the current German chancellor: “We simply can no longer afford the system we have today…. This will mean painful decisions. This will mean cuts.”
It follows this up with a description of how much income support a German family can receive from the government, calling it “an unthinkably high amount in the United States.” (For a family of four, the Post says, it’s “as much as” $70,475 per year, or about 60% of the median income for a similar US household.) Then, for balance, the Post quotes an opposition leader calling the chancellor’s claim “bullshit”—with dashes, of course, to protect readers with tender sensibilities. And the section ends with that.
But that’s not where you leave things, if you are a journalist in search of truth. The German chancellor made an empirical claim. It should be the role of a journalist to factcheck that claim. And if you do even the most basic research, you will see that the claim is objectively false. Instead, the Post takes a “both sides” approach: Let one party make a false claim and let the other say “bulls—-.” No need for further analysis.
Avoiding the antidote to far right
The Washington Post (10/6/25) portrays the conflict over social spending in France as an “intergenerational fight”—rather than a class struggle.
Beyond its decision to ignore data about government revenue in both France and Germany, the Post also fails to take into account what changes in other forms of spending mean for its claims about the unsustainability of European social spending. In particular, the commitment of NATO member states to increase military spending to 5% of GDP undercuts the claim that reductions to social spending are necessary. If other spending could increase, why does spending on the welfare state have to decline? Why not increase social spending rather than military spending?
Cuts to the welfare states of NATO members like France and Germany, therefore, would obviously reflect a political choice to build up military capacities rather than fund social spending.
Finally, a major backdrop to the discussion, which the Post briefly references, is the rise of the far right in Europe. It is important here to emphasize a simple fact: If European countries get economic policy wrong, neo-fascists could gain control of government. Previous austere policy measures, from extreme limits on spending in Germany that have left the country’s infrastructure crumbling to an increase in the retirement age in France that sparked mass protests, have already seeded the ground for the rise of the extreme right. Partly as a result of these policies, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) and National Rally (RN), the far-right parties of Germany and France, respectively, currently top parliamentary polls in each country.
Far-right parties thrive on the sort of social spending cuts that the Post is implicitly pushing for in its coverage. Protecting social spending while raising taxes on the well-off, on the other hand, could serve as an effective antidote to the rise of the far right—recent polling shows 85% in favor of budget adjustments “relying more heavily on the wealthy and large companies” in France, for example. The Post, however, seems to want to take this option off the table.
The effect of this journalistic approach is not hard to understand: The Post is heightening the prospects of a far-right takeover in Europe. The sort of lazy and misleading journalism, biased towards the interests of the wealthy, that it practices makes European fascism more likely. Journalists do not like to think of their work in these political terms. But that doesn’t make the political effects of their work any less real.
‘I’m the doting parent’
Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “doting parent” of the Washington Post (CNN, 1/7/25), has repeatedly laid off staff at the paper because he doesn’t want to spend any of his $228 billion fortune subsidizing journalism.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Post, must be more than pleased. After a testy relationship with Donald Trump during his first term, Bezos has cozied up to the far-right US president over the last year. In October 2024, shortly before the presidential vote, Bezos killed a planned endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by the Post’s editorial board. In February of 2025, he announced that the Post’s opinion section would now be writing daily “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” (FAIR.org, 2/28/25). Just hours later, he was dining with Trump.
It’s not like the Post was a beacon of progressivism before this point. It had long clamored for cuts to the US welfare state, particularly to Social Security (FAIR.org, 3/19/18, 2/24/23, 6/15/23). But for Bezos, even that wasn’t enough.
And he has the power to force the change. As he commented after his decision to spike the paper’s Harris endorsement (CNN, 1/7/25): “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available…. I’m the doting parent in that regard.”
As it turns out, Bezos’s further injection of pro-wealthy bias is not limited to the opinion pages. It is clearly present in the news section as well. Whether these reporters are taking direct orders from Bezos is besides the point. All that matters is that their message is directly in line with his interests: The European welfare state must die, even if that means a turn to the far right in Europe.
New York Times (10/10/25): “The repercussions of those dueling versions of reality became clear.”
As more and more US cities face the prospect of federal police and military patrolling their streets, the New York Times (10/10/25) began a recent article on the fight over sending National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with the following passage:
Democratic leaders in the city and state have pleaded with President Trump and the courts to trust law enforcement records, both local and federal, that describe the demonstrations as small and comparatively calm.
But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape.”
By “both-sidesing” its description of the protests in Portland, the Times fails to inform its readers that one of these descriptions is true and the other is simply fabricated. Instead, it tells readers the situation reflects “dueling versions of reality.”
Compare this to Michael Tomasky’s reporting in the New Republic (10/13/25), which aptly notes in the kicker that “the disturbances in Portland are basically limited to a single block about two miles from the city center.”
Or the snarky factcheck website Is Portland Burning? which shows images of the serene city and video of a calm, small protest.
Elsewhere, the Times (10/11/25) has written about the funny animal costumes worn by protesters in Portland, reporting that could have been used to debunk MAGA claims that the city is a “hellscape.”
‘Both officials disagree’
Taking a “closer look” at Trump’s claim that “in Portland, Oregon, antifa thugs have repeatedly attacked our offices and laid siege to federal property in an attempt to violently stop the execution of federal law,” AP (via Washington Post, 10/9/25) began its response, “There have been nightly protests outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland for months, peaking in June when police declared one demonstration a riot.”
In an Associated Press factchecking piece (reprinted in the Washington Post, 10/9/25), promising to take “a closer look at the facts” about Portland, only one of Trump’s claims (that in Portland, “you don’t even have sewers anymore”) is met with a forthright “this is false.” Other times, the AP struggles to find a kernel of truth in the Trump administration’s bizarre claims:
TRUMP: “The amazing thing is, you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy. And then you talk to the governor and she acts like everything is totally normal, there’s nothing wrong.”
THE FACTS: Fires outside the building have been seen on a handful of occasions.
Or, like the Times, it resorts to both-sidesing it:
KRISTI NOEM, Homeland Security Secretary: “I was in Portland yesterday and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon, and also the mayor there in town, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”
THE FACTS: Noem did visit Portland on Tuesday and met with Kotek and Mayor Keith Wilson. Both officials disagree with Noem’s narrative.
These failings by the media leave the reader or viewer at the mercy of what are posed as competing narratives, rather than with an understanding of what’s real and what’s fake. This is particularly important now, given that right-wing influencers and media are ginning up false claims for the administration to consume and rebroadcast, and even instigating real incidents (Oregon Public Broadcasting, 10/11/25).
When corporate media refuse to call a lie a lie, and to stand unequivocally on the side of reality, they enable the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism. If Trump can claim that a major US city is “burning to the ground,” what’s to stop him from asserting that the Constitution allows him to run for a third term—or that, once again, he’s won an election that he actually lost?
Featured Image: Detail from New York Times photo (10/11/25) of Portland protests (photo: Jordan Gale).
Late in the evening of October 1, the Israeli Navy intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), a fleet of more than 50 vessels that had set off in August and September from ports around the world. The flotilla carried humanitarian aid and hundreds of activists determined to break the illegal Israeli siege of Gaza. Video footage from that night shows armed soldiers climbing aboard the boats, confronting the unarmed activists who sat in a circle wearing life vests with their hands raised.
Despite having all the elements of a major news story—and a dramatic one—media coverage of Israel’s interception of the GSF has been patchy and notably lacking in key details. Establishment media omitted crucial context connecting this incident to earlier events, overlooked important legal conversations, both-sidesed the delivery of humanitarian aid during a famine, and largely ignored reports of mistreatment endured by detained activists and journalists.
‘Unclear origin’
The Washington Post (10/2/25) quoted activists saying the Israeli blockade was “illegal,” and Israel saying it was “lawful,” but gave readers no clue which was true.
In the coverage that followed the seizure (10/1/25–10/3/25), leading outlets failed to frame the seizure of the flotilla as part of Israel’s longstanding efforts to block similar missions (FAIR.org, 6/5/25, 7/1/10)—including its multiple drone strikes on the GSF throughout September.
Neither the New York Times (10/1/25) nor the Wall Street Journal (10/1/25) made any reference to the drone strikes. While both the BBC (10/2/25) and the Washington Post (10/2/25) briefly touched on them, they carefully avoided implicating Israel and leaned instead into vague language. For example, the BBC stated that the strikes were of “unclear origin,” omitting its own earlier reporting (9/10/25) in which a weapons expert noted that a device recovered after the second attack had features “common but not exclusive to some models of Israeli hand grenades.”
Even when news broke in early October that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the drone strikes, corporate media largely ignored it, with CBS (10/3/25) one of the few outlets to report the story.
Similarly, the New York Times article neglected to mention Israel’s longstanding history of obstructing humanitarian flotillas. Other outlets referenced past interceptions, but only in a sentence or two, failing to convey the full scope of the pattern. For example, the BBC report simply said that “Israel has already blocked two attempts by activists to deliver aid by ship to Gaza, in June and July,” overlooking the fact that such actions have been occurring for decades (Quds, 10/3/25).
‘Contempt for legally binding orders’
Mammad Ismayilov (Politics Today, 10/7/25): “Israel’s intervention cannot be justified under any recognized legal exception and therefore constitutes a clear violation of international law.”
By continuing to actively block vital aid to a population against whom Israel is committing genocide, including by inflicting famine, Israel is once again demonstrating its utter contempt for the legally binding orders of the International Court of Justice, and its own obligations as the occupying power to ensure Palestinians in Gaza have access to sufficient food and lifesaving humanitarian assistance.
This sentiment has been echoed by international law experts. In an article for Politics Today (10/7/25), legal scholar Mammad Ismayilov wrote that Israel’s naval blockade
must comply with International Humanitarian Law (IHL). A blockade that harms civilians and undermines their living conditions is a clear violation of IHL. The Gaza blockade deliberately subjects the Palestinian population to mass starvation, meeting the the criteria of Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, which prohibits deliberately inflicting conditions intended to destroy a group, either wholly or in part. Therefore, the Gaza blockade qualifies as genocide under international law.
Ismayilov also noted:
The Israeli Navy intercepted all of the vessels, seizing the ships and detaining hundreds of activists while they were still in international waters, approximately 70–75 nautical miles (130–139 km) off the coast of Gaza. This action, occurring so far from the coast, challenges the fundamental principle of international law that guarantees the freedom of navigation on the high seas.
Likewise, in an article for the Conversation (10/2/25), David Rothwell, professor of international law at the Australian National University, cited breaches of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, describing the interceptions as “a clear violation of international law.”
One of the few major media outlets to cover this extensive legal discourse in any depth was the Associated Press (10/2/25). The piece cited three experts on international law, all Israeli—two of whom defended the legality of seizing the flotilla, while the other condemned it. Another legal rights group based in Israel, qualified as “representing the activists,” called the interception “a brazen violation of international law.”
Ample space for Israeli justification
The Washington Post (10/2/25) included a tweet from the Israeli Foreign Ministry referring to more than 40 boats carrying some 440 humanitarian activists as “Greta and her friends.”
News outlets took care to balance the humanitarian activists trying to bring food to a starving population with defenders of a genocidal regime. For example, coverage in the New York Times (10/1/25) and the Washington Post (10/2/25) gave roughly equal space to the perspective of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the GSF. The Times dedicated four paragraphs each to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the GSF, while the Post allotted four paragraphs and a tweet to Israel, and six paragraphs to the GSF. This type of framing reflects a longstanding and well-documented tendency in corporate media to normalize and rationalize the most extreme Israeli actions (FAIR.org, 6/18/25).
As mentioned above, the Washington Post incorporated a tweet from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, featuring a video of a soldier handing Thunberg water and a coat, with the caption:
Already several vessels of the Hamas-Sumud flotilla have been safely stopped and their passengers are being transferred to an Israeli port. Greta and her friends are safe and healthy.
The New York Times, CNN (10/2/25), NBC (10/1/25) and BBC (10/2/25) included this and other similar quotes from Israeli officials, with the BBC noting that “Israel claims it is attempting to stop those supplies from falling into the hands of Hamas.” The Wall Street Journal (10/1/25) even seemed to justify the naval blockade itself, writing that “Israel has controlled the waters around Gaza since 2009, when it declared a naval blockade to stop what it said was a pipeline for weapons and extremists.”
Treated as ‘supporters of terrorism’
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (AP via PBS, 10/5/25) said flotilla detainees “should get a good feel for the conditions in Ketziot prison”—a facility notorious for torture.
Following their return from Israel, many GSF participants have alleged mistreatment and torture at the hands of Israeli forces during their detainment. Al Jazeera (10/4/25, 10/5/25, 10/7/25) extensively documented these claims across multiple articles, detailing incidents such as Thunberg reportedly being “dragged on the ground” and “forced to kiss the Israeli flag.” Other detainees were allegedly blindfolded, zip-tied, denied medication and access to legal representation, and subjected to intimidation with firearms and guard dogs, amongst other abuses.
Most corporate media have either ignored that story or, as in the case of the New York Times (10/6/25), offered limited coverage. The Times omitted specific claims entirely, instead quoting Thunberg—“I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment, trust me, but that is not the story”—and leaving it at that.
The Times also misleadingly framed the detainees as “on a hunger strike while in custody,” which, although true for some participants, according to an Instagram post from the GSF, obscured allegations from many activists that they were scarcely fed, and forced to drink toilet water during their imprisonment.
The Times conspicuously left out quotes from far-right Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir (AP via PBS, 10/5/25), who said that he was “proud that we treat the ‘flotilla activists’ as supporters of terrorism. Anyone who supports terrorism is a terrorist and deserves the conditions of terrorists.”
More accurate coverage appeared in a handful of other news outlets—including AP (10/5/25), CNN (10/6/25) and the Guardian (10/6/25)—although none offered reporting as thorough as Al Jazeera’s.
‘Targeting international journalists’
The Committee to Protect Journalists noted that Israel is “engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented” (Objective , 10/8/25).
Moreover, there has been limited reporting on the presence and treatment of journalists aboard the GSF and similar flotillas, with many outlets overlooking the reporters’ detainment and alleged torture. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was one of the only organizations to address the detainment of journalists during the interception of the GSF, noting that at least 20 journalists were imprisoned by Israeli authorities.
In a press release (10/8/25), RSF highlighted accounts of mistreatment endured by these journalists, and drew an important connection between this moment and Israel’s systematicattacks against the press:
The Israeli army has already killed over 210 journalists in Gaza and the authorities continue obstructing press freedom, now targeting international journalists, who are already barred from entering the territory. RSF calls for the protection of these reporters and all Palestinian journalists, and repeats its demand that the Gaza Strip be opened to foreign media.
No major US media outlets have published reports focusing on the detainment and mistreatment of journalists aboard the GSF. Even the October 8 internment by Israeli authorities of Emily Wilder, an American reporter for Jewish Currents who was aboard the Conscience with the Freedom Flotilla, hasn’t gotten any attention from major media. Only a handful of smaller publications, such as the Objective (10/8/25) and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (10/9/25), have covered the story. (Wilder was released on October 10.)
While this silence is perhaps unsurprising, given Wilder’s fraught history with corporate media (FAIR.org, 5/22/21), and the broader tendency of leading outlets to marginalize independent coverage of Palestine (FAIR.org, 3/28/25), it nonetheless underscores the disturbing pattern of bias and hypocrisy in media coverage related to Gaza.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge on free speech grounds to Colorado’s ban on LGBTQ “conversion therapy” for children under 18.
Kaley Chiles is a Colorado therapist and evangelical Christian who argues the state’s 2019 law that bans this discredited and dangerous treatment, which seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, is a violation of her First Amendment rights.
The fundamental question before the Court is whether talk therapy is protected speech or medical activity. Chiles argues that it’s speech, and that Colorado’s law unlawfully regulates the content of her speech; Colorado argues that it’s medical conduct, which is not protected by the First Amendment—states are permitted to regulate such conduct to protect patients from harmful or substandard care.
The Supreme Court’s decision will affect the fates of queer youth in more than two dozen states that ban or restrict this “therapy.” The Trump administration is backing Chiles, with lawyers from the far-right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) representing her.
Such a consequential case should be given careful framing and context from the media. Unfortunately, in their coverage previewing the October 7 hearing, the New York Times—and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Post and USA Today—failed in striking ways.
These three articles from three major papers were significant because they set the framework for readers to understand the case. They were also placed prominently in the papers, with the Times (10/6/25) and Post (10/7/25) articles both appearing on page A1, and the USA Today (10/7/25) piece on A4. (The stories appeared online a day or two earlier.)
The Times‘ framing skewed heavily toward Chiles’ perspective. While the Post and USA Today presented more thoroughly the experiences of LGBTQ people and the arguments of the respondents, all three pieces left out scientific and legal information that are necessary for a complete understanding of the case—and what’s at stake for LGBTQ youth.
‘Free speech test’
Who wants to lose a “free speech test”? The New York Times (10/5/25) put the emphasis on the rights of the therapist, rather on protecting at-risk youth from demonstrable harms.
Supreme Court reporter Ann E. Marimow previewed the hearing for the New York Times (10/5/25) under the headline, “Can Conversion Therapy Be Banned? Colorado Faces Speech Test at the Supreme Court.”
By describing the case as a “free speech test” that Colorado is facing, the Times headline frames the case exactly the way Chiles and the ADF are asking the Supreme Court to interpret it: as a question of speech, as opposed to a medical regulation issue.
The lead image is of Chiles gazing thoughtfully into the distance, and the article begins with a description of her “tranquil” Colorado Springs office and offerings of “loose leaf tea.” It paints Chiles as a well-meaning professional who, under Colorado’s ban, is unable to perform her job properly because her speech is limited:
Mrs. Chiles, an evangelical Christian with a master’s degree in clinical mental health from Denver Seminary, says the law violates her First Amendment rights, constraining what she is allowed to say in therapy sessions with young people who have sought out her care.
The article acknowledges that major medical groups disavow the conversion therapy as ineffective and potentially harmful, before returning to Chiles’ argument that “it seemed like an invasion for the state to kind of be peering into our private counseling sessions.”
Marimow goes on to lay out the legal arguments on both sides, but returns again to Chiles’ claim that these children are “voluntarily” seeking this treatment. The article notes that both sides cite last year’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which allows states to ban gender-affirming treatments for youth that they consider harmful. But it glides silently over the contradiction of anti-LGBTQ activists’ claims: On the one hand, youth under 18 are unable to consent to gender-affirming care—which has been shown to save lives—and therefore in need of protection from the state to avoid coercive pressure from medical professionals. At the same time, they are fully capable of “voluntarily” engaging in conversion therapy, which has been shown to put them at risk. (A 2024 Trevor Project survey found that 13% of LGBTQ youth report being threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy.)
The Times also lets the “free speech” perspective have the last word. The piece mentions a similar case brought in Washington State that the Court refused to hear two years ago, and quotes the objection from Justice Clarence Thomas, who said he would have heard the case “because it ‘silenced one side of this debate’ by restricting the First Amendment rights of medical professionals.”
Sidelining survivors
The New York Times only includes one quote from someone impacted by conversion therapy: Matthew Shurka, who is featured in only three short paragraphs in the nearly 2,000 word article. In contrast, Chiles, whose photo is featured at the top of the piece and whose argument weaves the narrative together, is directly quoted three times and mentioned by name in 15 paragraphs.
Shurka has testified about the trauma he experienced during five years of conversion therapy, and is an activist against the practice. “I knew I wasn’t changing and I blamed myself for my failures; it didn’t occur to me that the therapist was harming me,” Shurka is quoted as saying.
A beat later, the reader is back in Chiles’ office, with “a photo of a sunset with a biblical verse about the power of counsel and understanding,” while the Times lists her experience and credentials.
Marimow’s piece fits into the pattern that FAIR has long documented and quantified of the Times sidelining trans and queer perspectives on issues that impact their lives (FAIR.org, 7/14/25, 5/30/25, 5/28/24, 8/30/23, 5/19/23, 5/11/23).
Rather than leading with the therapist’s perspective, USA Today (10/5/25) opened with a gay man recalling that through conversion therapy, he “absorbed the therapist’s message that something was deeply wrong with him.”
In contrast, other major papers spent more time centering former conversion therapy patients. USA Today (10/5/25) began its preview of the case with the story of Matt R. Salmon, a gay survivor of conversion therapy, which he refers to as a form of “psychological abuse.” Salmon is now a psychiatrist and counselor himself.
“Licensed professionals don’t have free speech,” he argues. “You don’t just get to say whatever you want.”
USA Today also cited the testimony of Francis Lyon, a trans man who testified to the Colorado legislative committee in 2019 that conversion therapy blamed his parents for not instilling “femininity” by encouraging him to wear skirts, hose, heels and cosmetics.
Like the New York Times, the Washington Post (10/6/25) led its piece with a profile of Chiles. But unlike the Times’ Marimow, Post reporter Justin Jouvenal spent significant space on the testimony of a conversion therapy survivor. Silas Musick, a transgender man from Colorado Springs nearly ended his own life in 2010 as a result of the conversion therapy he underwent. He testified to the Colorado state legislature in 2019 to support the law that is now in question.
“There was no amount of thinking or praying or wishing or trying to change daily behaviors,” Musick told the Post. “It led to the deepest, darkest depression of my life.”
“Musick eventually concluded that he couldn’t live his life as his family and religion wanted, so he would end it,” Jouvenal wrote.
Not a mental illness
The Times also presents Chiles’ case as one of not being able to provide sufficient mental health care.
“If clients under 18 tell her that their same-sex attractions are causing them stress, as a licensed therapist, she is forbidden from counseling them to change their sexual orientation,” the piece explains.
The Washington Post (10/6/25) leads with Kaley Chiles’ claim that a ban on conversion therapy “silences her.”
The WashingtonPost further quotes Chiles’ argument that sexual orientation and gender are being “treated differently than literally every other topic in counseling…. It’s not the way we would operate with addictions and eating disorders and with depression.”
There’s a good reason for that that the Post should have pointed out: Same-sex attraction and transgender identities are not mental illnesses.
As the APA and other professional societies have made clear, this is the underlying problem with conversion therapy:
While many might identify as questioning, queer or a variety of other identities, “reparative” or conversion therapy is based on the a priori assumption that diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are mentally ill and should change.
The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, and “gender identity disorder” in 2013. Studies show real mental illnesses LGBTQ youth face are a result of social stigmatization—not their identities themselves (Trevor Project, 12/15/21).
Both pieces fail to make this critical point about mental illness and conversion therapy, allowing LGBTQ experiences to be quietly pathologized and stigmatized.
Meanwhile, there are treatments that are shown to improve the mental health outcomes of queer youth. A 2022 JAMA study found that gender-affirming care for trans youth cuts their suicide risk by 73%. And the Trevor Project’s 2024 survey of LGBTQ youth’s mental health found that queer-affirming schools, families and communities greatly reduce children’s suicide risk.
Misrepresented evidence
The Times also left readers uninformed on the evidence behind the harms and ineffectiveness of conversion therapy. “In her filings, Mrs. Chiles also rejected the state’s reliance on a medical consensus, saying there is insufficient evidence that voluntary talk therapy that seeks to change a minor’s gender identity or sexual orientation causes harm,” the Times piece stated, without offering any analysis of that evidence.
Those filings from Chiles and the ADF cite—in addition to such “evidence” as testimonials from “detransitioners” and people who profess to having successfully changed their sexual orientation, as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Daily Wire and a Reddit thread—a very small handful of studies that it claims show that conversion therapy is not actually harmful, and that people’s gender expression and sexual orientations can be changed.
A researcher whose work was cited by advocates for conversion therapy actually described such therapy as “not only ineffective in changing sexual orientation but … psychologically damaging, often resulting in elevated rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality” (Guardian, 10/6/25).
But as the Guardian (10/6/25) reported, two of the scholars cited said the ADF “profoundly” misrepresented their work in ways that threatened the safety of queer youth.
The ADF cites a study by Clifford Rosky and Dr. Lisa Diamond, claiming that their work suggests sexuality is subject to change. In reality, the study discusses the fluidity of sexuality for some people, independent of conversion therapy, and condemns the practice as potentially lethal.
“They claim our work supports conversion therapy when our work clearly and specifically condemns conversion therapy on the same page they’re citing,” Rosky told the Guardian.
The ADF and Chiles further cite a 2009 APA study in their argument that noted a lack of research on the effects of conversion therapy on youth specifically. USA Today points out that this is because of the ethical problem of subjecting children to conversion therapy, which the APA asserts in studies (2009, 2015, 2020), and reiterates in their brief to the Supreme Court, is ineffective and harmful.
The New York Times and Washington Post pieces do not mention the ADF’s misuse of these studies as “evidence,” even though they clearly undermine their support for conversion therapy. Nor do they cite or link to any of the peer-reviewed studies provided by Colorado to support its position.
In reality, lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have undergone conversion therapy are nearly twice as likely to attempt suicide. Transgender and nonbinary youth who have been subject to it are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide (NBC News, 9/11/19). That risk jumps to four times as likely if they’ve undergone conversion efforts before age 10.
Even though Chiles is framing her argument as one of free speech, the lack of scientific evidence for her claims as a health professional is critical, because Colorado’s argument centers on the state’s ban protecting children from substandard care.
False equivalence
Coverage that was centered around the mental health needs of LGBTQ youth, and not a therapist’s interest in self-expression, would look very different (Stanford Medicine, 9/30/25).
One of the few things the Times does point out (if late in the piece), that the Post and USA Today fail to, is that one of the main legal challenges that Chiles faces, and one of Colorado’s central arguments, is that the law has never actually been enforced in the state, and would not be applied to any therapy she has claimed to have engaged in. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in the hearing, the Court requires “credible threat of prosecution” for Chiles to have standing to even bring the case, and none is demonstrated.
But the Times‘ clarification is not made before the paper first paints a picture of the Colorado law constantly impacting Chiles’ practice, rather than simply being a hypothetical:
Under a 2019 Colorado law, if clients under 18 tell her that their same-sex attractions are causing them stress, as a licensed therapist, she is forbidden from counseling them to change their sexual orientation. If they want to talk about their gender identity, she cannot advise them to change it.
When the Times asked her if she has ever practiced conversion therapy, Chiles responded that she “has worked with young people struggling with gender dysphoria and unwanted sexual desires.”
“I’ll just have to let everyone else decide what that is as a label,” she said.
Meanwhile, queer people who have undergone conversion therapy face very real and well-documented risks.
The absurdity of pitting a hypothetical “chilling” effect on Chiles’ speech, versus the litany of studies and real lived experiences that prove conversion therapy is not only ineffective but dangerous for the mental health of LGBTQ people, is lost in all three of these pieces.
It is certainly journalists’ job to present both sides of important Supreme Court cases. But it is also their duty to clarify the medical consensus, the context, and the potential impacts of the case. While it’s true that the professional practice of Kaley Chiles and others like her might be impacted—despite her failure to demonstrate that—it’s hard to argue, given the evidence, that the people most impacted by this case will be anyone other than queer youth. It’s their lives and perspectives that therefore ought to be centered in the coverage.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023 that killed some 1,200 people, the Washington Post editorial board was warning that it was unacceptable to suggest that the attack “should be considered in context with previous actions by Israel”—those actions including decades of occupation, dispossession, deprivation, harassment and fatal violence.
Even now, two years on, as NBC News’ “What to Know” feature includes the information that Israel’s actions, denoted as “in retaliation” for October 7, have killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza—with many more wounded and maimed—US corporate media still twist themselves in knots trying to say that, yes, something very wrong is happening in Gaza—but somehow trying to stop it is worse than enabling and prolonging it. They do this in part by saving respectful space for someone like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton to flatly declare there is “no famine in Gaza,” that “Palestine is a made-up fiction,” and that there is an “international media and political chorus…try[ing] to bully Israel into submission.”
Academic and writer Gregory Shupak, author of The Wrong Story:Palestine, Israel and the Media, has been looking at the tactics major media deploy to suggest that we use something other than our own eyes and judgment and humanity to assess the situation, and how to act in the face of it. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at CBS‘s coverage of the Supreme Court’s Amy Coney Barrett.
President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in law Jared Kushner and the United States’ Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Egypt last weekend to sort out the remaining details of the president’s so-called “peace plan” for the Gaza Strip, much of which territory has been obliterated over the past two years of Israel’s US-backed genocide. The official Palestinian fatality count has surpassed 67,000, although some scholars suggest the real death toll may be more in the vicinity of 680,000.
Kushner’s inclusion in the Egyptian expedition may have come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following the news—and perhaps to many of those who have, given the dearth of reporting on the continuing Middle Eastern machinations of nepotism’s favorite poster boy.
‘Focus on my firm’
Stories like NBC‘s (2/13/24) that stressed Jared Kushner distancing himself from his father-in-law’s White House helped Kushner avoid scrutiny of his many conflicts of interest.
A senior adviser in the first Trump White House, Kushner was a driving force behind the Abraham Accords, the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. He was also the brains behind the 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” plan that was meant to resolve the pesky seven-decades-long Israeli/Palestinian conflict—an undertaking for which Kushner famously felt qualified on account of having read 25 whole books on the subject.
The current “peace” that the US is now endeavoring to inflict on Gaza sounds suspiciously similar to Kushner’s 2019 plan, which was basically structured around the idea that all the Palestinians really need in order to prosper is “foreign direct investment,” “private-sector growth,” “free trade agreements” and other exciting neoliberal solutions that magically excise Israel’s key role in annihilating any prospect for peace. The new plan promises “many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas [that] have been crafted by well-meaning international groups” and a “special economic zone… with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”
In his first administration, Trump had additionally tasked his son-in-law with dealing with an assortment of other crises, including the coronavirus pandemic, prompting even the New York Times to go so far as to run an op-ed (4/2/20) originally headlined “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed”—although it was subsequently revised to “Putting Jared Kushner in Charge Is Utter Madness.”
Fast forward to February 2024 and the NBC News headline “Jared Kushner Says He Would Not Join a Second Trump Administration” (2/13/24), which quoted him: “I’ve been very clear that my desire at this phase of my life is to focus on my firm…. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity as a family to be out of the spotlight.”
‘Significant backing in the Gulf’
Noting that the Saudis poured billions into Kushner’s firm against their financial advisors’ advice, the New York Times (4/10/22) reported that “ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House.”
Now that the second Trump administration is in full swing, the Western corporate media appear largely content to allow him to remain “out of the spotlight,” even as he remains up to no good—and as his investment firm Affinity Partners remains a beneficiary of US diplomatic initiatives shepherded by Kushner himself. For example, Affinity has used backing from Gulf investors to acquire a roughly 10% stake in Israel’s largest insurer, Phoenix.
Of the sporadic reporting on Kushner’s activities that has taken place since Trump resumed office, much of it has focused on just how out of the spotlight he is. In May, for example, a CNN article (5/9/25) announced that Kushner was “quietly advising” the administration ahead of the president’s big Middle East trip that month, “informally advising administration officials on negotiations with Arab leaders.”
Underlining that Kushner “does not have, nor want, a formal role in Trump’s second term,” CNN cited sources affirming that he “has continued to be a crucial player behind the scenes on Middle East talks.” Crucially, he had been “heavily involved in discussions with Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, about signing agreements that would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel”—an expansion of the Abraham Accords that would both effectively legitimize genocide and bulldoze remaining obstacles to investment.
Of course, like other corporate media outlets, CNN is not in the business of connecting the dots, and the article offered only the rather noncommittal observation that “Trump critics and some former diplomats have noted that Kushner has business interests in the region, which complicates his involvement.” There followed a brief mention of the fact that Affinity Partners has “received significant backing from sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf,” and that Kushner enjoys a “close personal relationship” with homicidal Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Indeed, part of that “significant backing” was a $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners from a fund led by bin Salman, which, as the New York Times (4/10/22) reported, was secured by Kushner, despite his lack of “experience or track record in private equity,” shortly after leaving the White House. Kushner did, however, have experience in brokering $110 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and in helping “protect those and other weapons deals from congressional outrage over the murder of [Saudi journalist Jamal] Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe created by the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen,” as the Times put it.
As Forbes magazine reported (9/15/25), Kushner is now a billionaire, thanks in part to his “knack for raising funds from high-profile Middle Eastern backers.” Translated into non-euphemism, Kushner has literally been utilizing US foreign policy as a vehicle for his own personal enrichment. In addition to his dealings with Saudi Arabia, Kushner also raised $1.5 billion for Affinity just last year from backers affiliated with the royal families of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
At an October 1 White House press briefing on the Gaza peace plan, one journalist posed the rare question to Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “How did the White House decide that it is appropriate for Jared Kushner to be working on matters that involve Qatar and the UAE, Saudi Arabia, three countries that combined have given him more than $2.5 billion for his investment firm?” Leavitt snapped that “I think it’s frankly despicable that you’re trying to suggest that it’s inappropriate” for someone to be so nobly “donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace.” And that was that.
Meanwhile, in August 2025, CNN (8/27/25) was back with an update on the man who has still “quietly advised administration officials on Middle East issues,” and who reportedly attended a meeting at the White House, along with war criminal and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “about a plan for post-war Gaza.” This time, CNN decided not to mention Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest, and ended its intervention with a nonjudgmental nod to Kushner’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ringleader of the present genocide, “with whom he has close family ties dating back decades.” (As Time (6/1/17) magazine revealed in 2017, Netanyahu even “once spent the night” at the Kushner family home in New Jersey.)
‘Move the people out’
Kushner (Reuters, 2/5/25) once described the Arab/Israeli conflict as “”nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”
In short, there are so many conflicts of interest swirling around the figure of Kushner that it should be nearly impossible for journalists to avoid covering them—and yet they manage to do so remarkably well. The New York Times writeup (8/27/25) of the same August meeting at the White House remarked that, while Kushner has “never been fully gone from Mr. Trump’s orbit,” he had taken a “behind-the-scenes role in recent years.” Its brief mention of Kushner’s entanglements seemed to present them as a qualification rather than a problem:
During the first Trump administration, he led the way on Mr. Trump’s biggest diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and three Arab states, and has his own business and other ties to the region.
In its own writeup, Reuters (8/27/25) alluded to Trump’s previous “re-development idea to turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East,’” a plan that “echoed an idea that Kushner floated a year earlier to clear Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants and turn it into a waterfront property.” It’s not just any highly influential person who can casually advocate for unrestrained ethnic cleansing and hardly be taken to task for it. But such is the beauty of being “out of the spotlight.”
An earlier Reuters dispatch (2/5/25) headlined “Trump’s Gaza ‘Riviera’ Echoes Kushner Waterfront Property Dreams” went as far as to quote Kushner’s dreams of ethnic cleansing in genocide-stricken Gaza: “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Instead of underscoring the inherently diabolical content of said pronouncement, the news agency offered the following semi-justification: “Kushner was himself a property developer in New York prior to Trump’s first term.”
‘What regulator is going to say no?’
As Kushner now strives to be the unaccountable architect of the Palestinians’ definitive demise, one would have expected a bit more noise from the media as he simultaneously met with Netanyahu in Washington and presided over the biggest-ever leveraged buyout in history—in partnership with Saudi Arabia—of the videogame giant Electronic Arts.
The Financial Times (9/30/25), never one to speak truth to plutocracy, immortalized the momentous events with the headline “Jared Kushner’s Art of the Deal.” The article detailed how, while Crown Prince bin Salman “is a keen gamer, and he’s put aside $38 billion for investments in videogame companies as part of the kingdom’s Savvy Games unit,” it was really “Kushner who opened the doors to this week’s takeover.”
The FT went on to warn that “it’s the kind of deal—with a large foreign buyer—that could attract scrutiny from regulators in Washington.” But at the end of the day, all’s well in the land of democracy, because as one “person close to the inner workings of the White House put it: ‘What regulator is going to say no to the president’s son-in-law?’”
As more and morescholars, and one rights groupafteranother, confirm that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, it’s becoming ever more obvious that those who deny the genocide are the intellectual and moral equivalents of people who deny other genocides, such as the ones inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the Holocaust, or the Armenian Genocide.
Yet the Wall Street Journal persists in running genocide denial. Looking at how the paper does so enables us to not only refute their falsehoods, but also to gain insight into the tactics Gaza genocide denialists, and genocide deniers in general, employ. These include:
Hand-waving: brushing off the cataclysmic damage Israel and the US have done to Palestinians as merely the unavoidable byproducts of war;
Victim-blaming: saying that Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas are to blame for the suffering in Gaza;
Inverting perpetrator and victim: presenting Palestinians, and not Israelis, as genocidal, with Israelis, rather than Palestinians, cast as the targets;
Obscurantism: offering dubious pieces of information, usually in a decontextualized manner, as if they showed that Israel has pursued its military objectives humanely;
Repudiation: flatly rejecting well-documented facts while offering little or no counter-evidence.
‘Justifiable, even necessary’
Avi Shafran (Wall Street Journal, 7/22/25): “When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters.”
Ami Magazine columnist Avi Shafran’s Journal piece (7/22/25) utilized both hand-waving and victim-blaming. He asserted:
When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters…. Civilians suffer and die in the prosecution of justifiable, even necessary, wars. That tragedy is intensified when you are fighting an enemy who hides behind human shields. Eradicating the engines of terror in Gaza requires attacking the places from which they operate: hospitals, schools and mosques.
Israel’s supposedly “justifiable, even necessary” war has entailed such policies (as Human Rights Watch—12/19/24—notes) as
intentionally depriv[ing] Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.
Rather than offering a reasoned, evidence-based defense of such Israeli conduct, Shafran blithely wrote as if consciously withholding drinking water from a civilian population were as natural and inevitable as water boiling at a hundred degrees Celsius.
The author’s next move was to blame Palestinians for Israel killing Palestinians. Shafran, of course, didn’t offer a scintilla of proof for his claim that Palestinian fighters force their own people to be human shields, probably because it’s Israel—not Hamas—that routinely uses Palestinians as shields (FAIR.org, 5/13/25).
‘Systematically and deliberately devastated’
From the health workers’ open letter (Common Dreams, 10/2/24): “The human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”
Equally weak is Shafran’s suggestion that it’s Palestinians’ fault that Israel attacks Palestinian hospitals, schools and mosques. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said that Israel damaged and destroyed more than 90% of the school and university buildings in Gaza, and found just one case where Hamas had also used a school for military purposes. The commission also said that Israeli attacks have damaged more than half of all religious and cultural sites in Gaza, and noted that
all ten religious and cultural sites in Gaza investigated by the Commission constituted civilian objects at the time of attack, and suffered devastating destruction for which the Commission could not identify a legitimate military need.
Similarly, the UN Human Rights Commission published a report late last year examining 136 Israeli strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, and said that Israel did not substantiate its claims that Palestinian armed groups were using the structures for military purposes. In some cases, the report pointed out, Israel’s “vague” allegations “appear contradicted by publicly available information.”
Moreover, 99 American healthcare professionals who volunteered in the Gaza Strip in the months following October 7, 2023, published a letter saying that the signatories
spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.
We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance and murder.
Shafran pretended such evidence doesn’t exist, perhaps hoping that his audience is racist enough to believe his diatribes about wily Arabs who use places of healing, learning, worship and sanctuary to conceal “engines of terror.”
‘That side isn’t Israel’
Israel blockades food going into the Gaza Strip, and the Wall Street Journal (8/5/25) blames Hamas.
Former Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker wrote a Journal piece (8/5/25) that inverted victim and perpetrator in Gaza. He asserted that, in the war between Israel “and its enemies in Gaza,” one side “would, if it could, conduct a genocide against the other, wiping every last remnant off the face of the planet. That side isn’t Israel.”
Baker’s strategy is to focus on what he claims Palestinian fighters “would” do in imaginary circumstances, rather than on the genocide that is actually taking place. Such speculation is pointless, because by definition it’s not possible to know what would happen in made-up scenarios. Since Baker doesn’t even bother to explain the reasons for his view that Palestinians “would” commit genocide if they could, his make-believe does not merit serious consideration.
While it is by definition impossible to decisively prove what might happen under nonexistent conditions, there is zero doubt that Israel has—in the really existing world—carried out a genocide and engaged in a pattern of conduct consistent with trying to “wip[e] every last remnant [of Palestinian life in Gaza] off the face of the planet.” Days before the Journal ran Baker’s screed, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report (7/25) documenting the Israeli genocide in Gaza:
Israel’s conduct of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which has included—among other things—massive, indiscriminate bombardment of population centers; starvation of more than 2 million people as a method of warfare; attempts at ethnic cleansing and formally including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s residents in the war aims; systematic destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities, which are entitled to special protection under international law, along with the vast majority of civilian infrastructure there; and the unprecedented killing of medical personnel, aid workers, persons in charge of maintaining public order, and journalists. Israel’s claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, often made without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction.
Baker’s inversion of victim and perpetrator depends on ignoring the voluminous proof that Israel is carrying out a genocide, focusing instead on fantasies based on nothing more than orientalist depictions of Arabs as bloodthirsty savages.
‘Every martyr is a trophy’
Bernard-Henri Lévy (Wall Street Journal, 9/3/25): “To speak of genocide in Gaza is an offense to common sense, a maneuver to demonize Israel, and an insult to the victims of genocides past and present.”
The notorious French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published an op-ed in the Journal (9/3/25) headlined “Three Big Lies About the Israel/Hamas War.” In his view, one such lie is that “Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.” He explained: “To say ‘genocide’ means a plan—a deliberate, targeted initiative to destroy a people. That isn’t what the Israeli army is doing.”
Here Lévy engaged in the repudiation approach to genocide denial, writing as if a well-established body of Israeli intent weren’t readily available to anyone with access to the internet. Just six days into the US/Israeli onslaught, Israeli historian Raz Segal wrote (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23) that what Israel had undertaken was “a textbook case of genocide.”
One piece of evidence Segal pointed to was Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s announcement that the state was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
For Segal, Gallant’s use of the phrase
“complete siege”…explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
Similarly, in February, US President Trump put forth a genocidal plan (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2/5/25; Truthout, 2/9/25) to empty Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants so that the US could annex the territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by saying he was “committed to US President Trump’s plan for the creation of a different Gaza.” Subsequently, Netanyahu suggested that implementing Trump’s scheme was a condition for ending the conflict.
More recently, Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) commented that an Israeli government plan codenamed “Gideon’s Chariot” was designed “to demolish what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrate the Palestinian population into a tiny area,” and that this “would amount to an abhorrent escalation of its ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide.”
Thus Lévy’s denialism depends on repudiating the extensive record of Israeli leaders articulating “a plan” to “destroy a people.”
Lévy’s next move was to victim-blame: “Perhaps [Israel] is waging the war badly,” he wrote, but wondering, “who would do better in an asymmetric conflict when the enemy’s goal isn’t to minimize casualties on its own side but to maximize them, so that every martyr is a trophy?” Here Lévy traded on the racist myth that Palestinians are fanatical barbarians indifferent to the suffering of their own people.
His language is vague, so it’s hard to know for sure what he’s talking about, but it sounds like he might be invoking, as Shafran did, what Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), calls the “double lie of ‘human shields’” (Mondoweiss, 9/21/24).
‘A genocidal army doesn’t take two years’
Al Jazeera (9/14/25): “Fifteen out of 17 doctors described encountering children under 15 with single bullet wounds to the head or chest. Together, they identified 114 such cases during their missions in Gaza.”
Lévy then engaged in obscurantism, denying the genocide by selecting questionable tidbits that he seems to think cast Israel in a positive light:
A genocidal army doesn’t take two years to win a war in a territory the size of Las Vegas. A genocidal army doesn’t send SMS warnings before firing or facilitate the passage of those trying to escape the strikes. A genocidal army wouldn’t evacuate, every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer, sending them to hospitals in Abu Dhabi as part of a medical airlift set up right after October 7.
That Israel hasn’t conquered Gaza to this point is a non sequitur. What Israel’s inability to subjugate Gaza shows is that Israel isn’t omnipotent, and that Palestinian fighters and their allies have mounted an effective resistance to the attempt to exterminate Gaza-based Palestinians (FAIR.org, 1/24/25). That tells us nothing about Israel’s intent or the severity of the devastation it has inflicted. (It’s worth recalling that the Warsaw Ghetto survived more than two and a half years under siege from genocidal Nazi forces.)
The SMS warnings that Lévy hails add to the “confusion, chaos and mass displacement” characterizing life in Gaza for the last two years (NPR, 12/7/23). More to the point, any “warnings before firing” that Israel has sent out aren’t going to save many Gaza residents when these messages are disseminated in the context of Israel leveling much of the Strip (BBC, 7/18/25; Guardian, 1/18/25) by bombing it with the “equivalent to six Hiroshimas,” leaving the population with effectively nowhere safe to go.
Approximately 70,000 Palestinians—the overwhelming majority of them civilians—are known to be dead, or are presumed dead under the rubble (to say nothing of the many more dead due to starvation, disease, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to clean water), so it’s as absurd as it is obscene for Lévy to suggest that Israel is making a sincere effort to reduce Palestinian casualties. That’s what Lévy’s paragraph seems to be suggesting, irrespective of all data to the contrary.
For instance, a group of 45 American physicians and nurses who volunteered in Gaza wrote a letter to the Biden/Harris administration describing treating children whose injuries the medical professionals were sure had been intentionally inflicted; “specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter said (CNN, 7/26/24). Deliberately sniping children every day is, to paraphrase Lévy, something a genocidal army does.
‘Delayed or denied’
Bragging about the IDF evacuating “hundreds of Palestinian children” is actually an admission of the inadequacy of Israeli relief efforts (MSF, 7/17/25).
Nor was Lévy on solid ground when he denied that Israel policies are genocidal by claiming that it “evacuate[s], every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer.” Compare that to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières report (7/17/25) that
an estimated 11,000–13,000 people—including more than 4,500 children—require medical evacuation to access care unavailable in the Strip. Yet Israeli authorities have allowed only a few of those requesting medical evacuation to do so, with many critical cases being delayed or denied regardless of medical urgency….
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has only managed to medically evacuate 22 patients, including 13 children to our reconstructive surgery hospital in Amman, Jordan, for comprehensive rehabilitative care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) told a similar story (4/14/25):
Far too few patients have been able to leave Gaza for the urgent care they so desperately need. We estimate that up to 12,000 patients need medical evacuation but, since [Israel intensified its blockade of aid in March] we have only been able to evacuate 121 people, including 73 children.
The number of people allowed to leave Gaza for healthcare has been a minuscule portion of those who need it—never mind that the reason Palestinians need to leave Gaza for medical treatment could have something to do with destroying the Strip’s health system by “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care” in the territory. Because that’s the reality of Israel’s assaults on Palestinian healthcare, and because Lévy’s project is genocide denial, he has no choice but to obscure what Israel has done and is continuing to do.
‘Charges are a travesty’
Alan Dershowitz (9/16/25) combines two of the Wall Street Journal‘s favorite causes: defending genocide and demonizing New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (FAIR.org, 7/30/25).
Attorney Alan Dershowitz—himself rathernotorious—also engaged in genocide denial on the Journal’s op-ed page (9/16/25), selecting obscurantism and repudiation as his rhetorical weapons. Dershowitz mocked New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that, if elected, he will enforce the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu, should the prime minister visit the city:
The ICC’s charges against Mr. Netanyahu are a travesty. Its arrest warrant accuses him of intentionally starving civilians in Gaza—never mind that Israel has facilitated the delivery of more than a million tons of food to the strip. Mr. Mamdani also accuses the Jewish state of “genocide,” a charge that not even the ICC levies.
Dershowitz wrote as though it is self-evidently absurd for Mamdani to say that Israel is carrying out genocide, pointing to the fact that the ICC has not charged Israel with doing so. Yet the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide, and is working toward a definitive ruling (Guardian, 7/27/25). This is to say nothing of the many scholars and rights groups, already cited in this piece, who have concluded that the term aptly characterizes Israel’s actions. Dershowitz simply pretended this evidence doesn’t exist.
Dershowitz obfuscated Israeli policies by celebrating the volume of food allowed into Gaza, as though it were sufficient. A “million tons of food” sounds like a lot, but divided among 2 million people over two years, it amounts to a little more than one and a third pounds of food per day. (A pound and a third of rice has about 800 calories,while “the standard humanitarian ration is 2,100 calories per person per day”—London Review of Books, 5/14/25.)
It’s uncontroversial that Israel is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. The UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that “half a million people—a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza—are suffering from famine,” a catastrophe resulting from Israeli policies, including what aid groups describe as its “systematic obstruction” of food entering the Strip (BBC, 8/22/25).
Even more contemptible
As I’ve argued previously (Electronic Intifada, 7/15/24), denying an unfolding genocide like the one in Palestine is even more contemptible than denying genocides that happened in the past, because an ongoing genocide can be stopped before even more people in the targeted population are killed, maimed and bereaved. That’s why every genocide denial is at the same time pro-genocide propaganda: Fewer people with an accurate grasp of the US/Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a people means fewer people to try and stop it from happening.
Fortunately, despite all the lies from outlets like the Journal, millions of people around the world have made Palestine solidarity activism a regular part of their lives. The more widely genocide-enabling mendacities can be exposed, the more likely to succeed will be the movements to stop the crime of crimes—and to achieve peace through liberation across the Middle East.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s crucial Dobbs vote “let each state decide whether to allow abortion or not,” wrote CBS‘s Jan Crawford (10/6/25). “But the decision also unleashed something much darker”—referring not to women dying because they were denied access to reproductive healthcare, but to threats against judges.
A softball interview (10/6/25) with Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—headlined “As Justices Confront Harassment, Death Threats and an Assassination Attempt, Barrett Declares ‘I’m Not Afraid’”—provides a glimpse of the kind of journalism we can expect from CBS News now that it’s controlled by MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison, and anti-“woke” ideologue Bari Weiss has been named its editor-in-chief (Defector, 10/6/25).
The interview, by CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford, praises Barrett’s “mental discipline and self control” because she dismisses protesters who object to her having provided the fifth vote to strip women of bodily autonomy in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision: “It doesn’t matter to me,” she told CBS. “It doesn’t disrupt my emotions.”
The only breath of criticism of the justice comes in reference to dissents written by Biden-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, Crawford sniffed, “impugned the conservatives’ motives” when she wrote that the right-wing majority had “no fixed rules” in its so-called “emergency docket” rulings, except “this administration always wins.”
Barrett “pointed out,” Crawford wrote, that this was “obviously false.” The journalist explained:
Just one high-profile example: The Court ruled against the administration’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and ordered it to work toward his return to the US.
Crawford could not have offered many other examples, high-profile or otherwise: The Trump administration has won 21 of 23 cases it asked to be placed on the emergency docket. And in Abrego Garcia’s case, the Court did not in fact order Trump to “work toward his return to the US”; it said the administration should “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
But where the lower court said the government should “effectuate” his return, the justices said that that order “may exceed the District Court’s authority,” and the judge should “clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
‘The people’s preferred policy’
The point of the interview, aside from Barrett being a swell person, is that the Supreme Court is not in the tank for Trump, but is wisely deciding each case on its merits. Crawford refers in her own voice to “public misperceptions that the Supreme Court is driven by politics or outcomes or is loyal to Mr. Trump.”
Towards the end, there’s an extended discussion of the emergency docket, highlighting Barrett’s explanation that the Supreme Court is again and again overturning injunctions against draconian Trump administration moves out of concern for “the harm caused when unelected judges reflexively block policies enacted by popularly elected representatives.”
Chart: New York Times, 9/14/25. (The Trump success rate has increased to 91% since then.)
“It was the people’s preferred policy,” she says of all the Trump programs the Court unblocked. “The president is the one that they elected.”
Crawford doesn’t raise any of the obvious objections to this. First of all, the Supreme Court’s job is to say whether the policies of the elected branches accord with the Constitution. That’s what they’re there for.
And the Trump policies the Court has allowed to stand are often in direct contradiction to laws passed by Congress—also an elected branch of government, and one more directly accountable to the people than the presidency.
Crawford does not challenge Barrett’s contention that the Court naturally defers to the policies of the elected president by pointing out that her colleagues had no trouble using the emergency docket to strike down Biden policies that prevented pollution of US waters, reduced cross-border air pollution, mandated vaccination or Covid testing for employees of large businesses, and paused evictions during the pandemic. Altogether, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration only 53% of the time in emergency cases (New York Times, 9/14/25), vs. with Trump 91% of the time so far during his second term.
Is this one-sided apologetics for the MAGA Supreme Court a direct result of CBS‘s takeover by a Trump-boosting billionaire? It’s hard to say; Crawford has a history of boosting Republican spin (Extra!, 11–12/08; FAIR.org, 10/19/12, 5/6/22). But you’d be wise to expect more of this sort of propaganda under the ownership of the Ellisons, the editorial supervision of Bari Weiss and the surveillance of official CBS commissar Kenneth Weinstein (FAIR.org, 9/9/25).
Jeff Cohen (Salon, 9/20/25) traces media’s censorship problem to “the 1980s and 1990s, when presidents of both parties and Congress decided to put the nation’s media system in the hands of a small number of ever-larger corporations.”
When Jimmy Kimmel made his dramatic return to ABC’s airwaves on September 23, I was eager to be one of the over 6 million who tuned in. Only I couldn’t, at least not on TV.
That’s because the local ABC station in the DC area, WJLA, is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Network. And the right-wing network refused to air the Jimmy Kimmel Show! on any of its 38ABC affiliates.
Every few years, a controversy like Kimmel’s suspension erupts and Sinclair is briefly in the headlines. (The last big one was in 2018, when Sinclair made its anchors across the country read from the same Trumpian script, which looked like a “proof-of-life hostage video.”) Then the news cycle moves on, and Sinclair slinks out of sight…where it seems to only grow stronger.
In the wake of Kimmel’s (innocuous) comments following right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death, Sinclair wasn’t the first ABC affiliate owner to suspend his show. That honor goes to Texas-based Nexstar, which made the move earlier the same day on September 17.
Nexstar’s announcement came only hours after Trump FCC chair Brendan Carr publicly threatened ABC stations if they didn’t yank Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr famously said.
Nexstar had financial incentive to accede to Carr’s demand. Already the largest network of local TV stations—with 200 nationwide—Nexstar is looking to grow even bigger by gobbling up a competitor, Tegna, for $6.2 billion. But there’s a problem with this deal: It’s illegal.
Prior to 1996, when President Bill Clinton teamed up with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to pass the “corrupt” Telecommunications Act, “a company could own only 12 TV stations nationwide—not 200,” wrote FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Salon, 9/20/25).
Today, a company can’t own stations reaching more than 39% of US households. This law prevents a company from directly accessing most American homes via TV—which seems like a reasonable safeguard against, say, an authoritarian putsch.
But this sort of media consolidation is precisely what Trump is aiming for, so long as his friends are in charge, as they increasingly are.
‘100% MAGA-related’
Lili Loofbourow (Washington Post, 9/18/25): “Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics.”
In July, Trump’s FCC approved the $8.4 billion sale of Paramount, which owns CBS, to Skydance Media, which is owned by the son of Trump confidant Larry Ellison, the co-founder of software giant Oracle and second-richest person alive.
Shortly before the sale, Paramount announced it was canceling the Late Show With Stephen Colbert beginning in May. “Many suspected that Colbert’s head was a gift to Trump by the company’s new owner, David Ellison,” the Financial Times (9/27/25) reported.
Trump celebrated the announcement, then quickly pivoted to another late-night host who regularly poked fun at him. “Jimmy Kimmel is next,” Trump tweeted.
Presently, Trump is steering another major media property into the maw of his cronies. While specifics on the forced sale of TikTok are hard to come by, investor Ashwin Binwani told Bloomberg (9/26/25) it “could be the most undervalued tech acquisition of the decade.”
TikTok’s Trump-approved owners likely include Larry Ellison, as well as Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, owners of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
When asked if TikTok will now bend the knee to him, Trump said the expected thing: “Every group…will be treated very fairly.” But that was only after he said the quiet part out loud: “I always like MAGA-related. If I could, I’d make it 100% MAGA-related.”
To be clear, such media consolidation has been a problem long before Trump came on the scene. But Trump has hastened this consolidation, while making no secret that he’s doing so in service of his own interests. Which brings us back to Nexstar.
If it buys Tegna, Nexstar will surpass the 39% ownership limit by a country mile, creating a company with direct television access to 80% of US homes, more than double what’s legally allowed at present.
From Trump’s point of view, what’s not to like? Nexstar is led by a conservative, Perry Sook, and the company has shown it is willing to play ball by suspending Kimmel on a moment’s notice. In light of this, the only surprise would be if Trump’s FCC doesn’t OK the merger.
‘Always in deal mode’
James Surowiecki (Atlantic, 9/27/25): “Whatever the benefits of appeasing the FCC and Donald Trump, the costs of rejecting Kimmel were soon going to be dwarfed by the costs of losing viewers.”
Like Nexstar, Sinclair also had financial incentive to jump when the FCC chair said to, since the company is “always in deal mode and in need of regulatory OKs,” the New York Post (9/25/25) noted.
Indeed, if the Nexstar/Tegna merger falls through, Sinclair is ready to scoop upTegna’s 64 stations for itself, which would make it larger than Nexstar. Of course, that deal would also make a mockery of the TV ownership limit, and would therefore also need the FCC’s blessing.
But even without the financial incentive, I think Sinclair might still have suspended Kimmel. That would certainly be consistent with the network’s long and partisan track record (FAIR.org, 8/1/24).
With that history in mind, when I saw reports on September 17 that Nexstar had suspended Kimmel, I knew Sinclair couldn’t be far behind.
True to form, Sinclair not only followed suit, but one-upped Nexstar by demanding Kimmel “make a meaningful personal donation” to both Charlie Kirk’s family and his far-right organization Turning Point USA. (David Smith, Sinclair’s longtime leader, personally donated $250,000 to the group last year.)
Nexstar and Sinclair were flexing in once unimaginable ways in part because they have grown unimaginably big over the past two decades. Today, Nexstar and Sinclair together own around 25% of all ABC affiliates. And combined with Gray, the third-largest station group, they own around 40% of all local stations nationwide.
“That consolidation has given them more leverage over the networks than local stations once had,” wrote James Surowiecki (Atlantic, 9/27/25). When Nexstar and Sinclair suspended Kimmel’s show, “they effectively chose to play a game of chicken with ABC.”
But the station groups blinked first. Three days after ABC returned Kimmel to air, Sinclair and Nexstar relented and did the same. It was “a striking about-face,” the New York Times (9/26/25) reported.
In Trump’s good graces
Todd Spangler (Variety, 9/24/25): “Disney was faced with the choice of bringing Kimmel back (angering those on the right who felt the host crossed a red line) or showing him the door (pissing off those on the left who felt it was failing to support free speech)—and the company decided that supporting Kimmel was the better option.”
To grow bigger, Sinclair and Nexstar need to stay in Trump’s good graces to ensure FCC approvals. To survive, however, their ABC affiliates need national programming, especially live sports, the NFL in particular.
Along with political advertising, live sports are one of the only things keeping the TV industry from flatlining amid widespread cord-cutting. And the national broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox—all have major contracts to broadcast pro sports, which their affiliates rely on to attract viewers and sell ads.
If Sinclair and Nexstar had continued to suspend Kimmel’s show, ABC could have retaliated by withholding other national programming from their affiliates, including Monday Night Football, which would have severely hurt their bottom lines.
ABC’s financial exposure from an extended standoff, on the other hand, wasn’t as great, since Nexstar’s and Sinclair’s ABC affiliates are all outside the top 20 markets, with the exception of WJLA in DC and KOMO in Seattle. ABC was also buffered by owning and operating its own stations in four of the top five markets—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Philadelphia (Variety, 9/24/25).
Even if Sinclair and Nexstar could hold out for a year, an analyst told Variety, Disney, which owns ABC, “would be out only a few million dollars.”
That’s nothing compared to the $4 billion in valuation Disney lost over the six days it suspended Kimmel. During that time, “Disney saw more than 1.7 million paid streaming cancellations” across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN, Marisa Kabas (Bluesky, 9/29/25; Handbasket, 9/23/25) reported.
Disney, for its part, is also doing a careful dance, as it too wants to stay on Trump’s good side—in part to ensure its merger with the sports streaming service FUBO goes through. This helps explain Disney’s willingness to hand Trump $16 million in December to settle his frivolous defamation case against ABC, as well as its suspending Kimmel after Nexstar and Sinclair forced its hand.
“Kimmel is the beginning,” Danilo Yanich, a professor of public policy at the University of Delaware, told FAIR. Now that Nexstar and Sinclair have established a precedent for pushing a network around, “Kimmel is not the end.”
Janine Jackson interviewed incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal about media and power for the October 3, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When our guest turned 71 in April, his organized advocates acknowledged the day with mobilizations around how US constitutional law is “weaponized to repress dissent and create political prisoners,” with public discussion about activism on campuses around Palestine, and about the importance of public protest and brave speech.
The 1982 conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal for the killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner followed a trial marked by prosecutorial and police misconduct, purported witness testimony that was shifting and suborned, discriminatory jury selection, and irresponsible and frankly biased media coverage, which hasn’t changed much over years of court appeals and continued revelations. It was and continues to be clear that, for powers that be, including in the elite press, it is important not only to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal behind bars, but to keep him quiet.
It hasn’t worked. Despite more than four decades in prison, our guest has not ceased to speak up and speak out, on a range of concerns well beyond his own story, with the support of advocates around the world. He joins us now. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Thank you for inviting me.
JJ: Well, you never know what folks are learning for the first time. So I just wanted to start with noting that you are a journalist. Mumia, listeners should know, was a radio reporter at various Philly stations. He was head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.
I sometimes think, once you’re a witness and a storyteller, you can’t turn that off, even if you become the subject of the story. Certainly you have never really stopped doing what you started out to do, have you?
JJ: So you’ve continued to listen and report and to speak from whatever position you’re in, because a journalist is what you are, yeah?
MA: Yeah. But in a cultural sense, I think of myself as a griot, probably a progressive griot, but a griot nonetheless. In African culture, griots were the people who remembered the history of the tribe, and, really, they served the prince in power, but they served the tribe as well. And there’s an old tradition that’s talked about in Senegal that when a griot dies, you don’t lay him in the ground. You bury him vertically in a tree, so that he and his stories are remembered.
I think about telling the stories of a different kind of tribe here in America, a tribe of rebels, a tribe of people who struggle, a tribe of the poor and the oppressed, because those are the stories that rarely get heard and get reported in much of the world.
JJ: That leads me directly to what I just saw on Wikipedia, which said:
From 1979 to 1981, he worked at National Public Radio affiliate WHYY. The management asked him to resign, saying that he did not maintain a sufficiently objective approach in his presentation of news.
And, yeah, it gives me a giggle. And I think that while news media has, in important and life-altering ways, gotten much worse since then, there is, in some places, anyway, a growing recognition that objectivity is a myth, and a harmful one, and that we are all enriched by reporters who can bring their whole selves to the job.
Howard Zinn
MA: If you’re not bringing your whole self to the job, you’re not doing the job. And I think that this whole objectivity myth began when the art of journalism—I won’t call it a science—but the art of journalism was professionalized.
And before that, of course, the media was a very political entity. I remember reading in a history book, it might’ve been Howard Zinn or something like that, a New York newspaper called the New York Caucasian. I mean, think about that. Papers were printed by unions and churches and other kinds of groups, and it was reflective of the people who printed it, not the people who paid them, because journalism was more of a work that people loved doing than a quote unquote “profession.”
Howard Zinn warned us about the dangers of professional distance in many fields. As an historian, of course, Howard Zinn learned history, not when he earned his PhD at Columbia, but when he was teaching at a Black college during the civil rights years, and he was teaching pre-law, something like that, and he was telling people at the school about how the Constitution protected them, and they had certain rights. They said, “Excuse me, Professor Zinn, what are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you have the right to do this and do that.” They said, “We don’t have the right to vote down here.” He said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “We go to the voting office, they will beat us up.” He said, “Who will beat you up?” They said, “The cops and everybody else.”
So Howard Zinn followed his students to the voting place, and he sat and he just looked, and he learned something that he had never learned in college—and this was Atlanta, of all places—that when people tried to register to vote, they were refused. They had these ridiculous tests they gave them, and if they did not walk away, they would be beaten and locked up.
And so Howard Zinn learned that which the profession did not teach him, that history isn’t always written in these documents or in books. They’re lived by people, and we have to pay attention to how people live in the real world to tell their stories.
JJ: What I get from that story is that an article can tell you the law says this, and that’s not the same thing as telling you how the law is lived out in various people’s lives.
And we have a journalist right now, there are many, but I will just say Mario Guevara, who apparently has an Emmy award, but it’s not enough to prevent his having been detained for over a hundred days now, for the work of live streaming law enforcement activity, including ICE raids. So we have a journalist doing what a lot of other journalists would say is what they’re supposed to do, and he’s been detained.
So when people hear generically about “journalism is under attack,” well, no, it isn’t all journalism that’s under attack. It’s a particular kind of witnessing.
MA: That’s actually true, but also think about, in this era, in this time, and I’m speaking right now about the, shall we call it the Kimmel affair, and how everybody is talking about First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. The case you described is the unfreedom of the press, where a journalist is captured and caged for telling stories and streaming stories about government repression. Who do you think gives a damn about the Constitution, the government or the people?
JJ: Let me ask you, continuing with media, I think people read the data point, “Oh, 2 million people incarcerated in the US,” more and more every day being put in detention centers, and they’re shut away from families and friends, by procedure, by distance, but also shut out of public debate and conversation.
And I think there’s a feeling that this is a cost to those people who are imprisoned, but there’s less recognition that there’s a cost for everyone when we don’t get to hear from this ever-expanding and various group of voices. And I think journalists who buy into, wittingly or not, the idea of “out of sight, out of mind”—they’re serving someone, they’re serving something, by excluding the voices of the incarcerated in our public conversation.
MA: Well, yeah, they’re excluding not just the imprisoned, who, as you said, are in the millions in the United States, but also they’re excluded from thinking about what it means to be truly American, because this is part of that. There is no space in the American landscape where the shadow of the prison doesn’t fall.
And that’s because it is so huge. It is so vast that it impacts those within and without, because everybody in prison has someone on the outside of prison that loves them or they love: their children, their mates, their parents, you name it. And that shadow falls on all of those people. There are stories that can enrich our understanding of what it means to be human by allowing people in this condition to be heard as full human beings.
JJ: And I blame media a lot. I mean, I’m a media critic, but I also, as a media reader—media disappear people, as well as the state disappears them. Suddenly they move into another column, and are no longer worth hearing from. And I don’t know that people understand how much we lose when that happens, and how much media are feeding into this oppressive regime by underscoring the idea that once people go behind bars, we don’t even need to think about them at all anymore.
MA: We call the media the fourth estate, don’t we? But it’s an estate of what?
JJ: Right? For whom?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: “You can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power.”
MA: The estate is part of the state. It’s not part of the people. And as long as people think in those terms, those elevated and false terms, then it’s difficult for them to relate in a human way to people who are in a distressed situation.
And you can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power. I am reminded of, I think it was in the book Into the Buzzsaw that I read years ago; it was about forbidden stories that reporters got fired for, all around the spectrum. I mean, Fox News stations, all kinds of newspapers and whatnot. But the real key is that when people began telling stories that their editors and their bosses didn’t like, well, they got disappeared. By that I mean, of course, they got fired or threatened with firing.
But one of the things that really touched me in this context was that a reporter was talking about how journalists could never say that the president, for example, was lying. And they said, “Well, why not?” And people from the audience were like, “Why don’t you say that?” “Well, we are taught and we’re trained never to say that.” Well, then what if you hear him, and he’s lying, you just act like you don’t hear him? You’re just carrying his lies. That’s the relationship between the media and power. I think that began to crack around the time of the Bush years. But look where we’re at right now. We’re in a whole new world.
JJ: Just rocketing into the past, just rocketing backwards past so many gains that we thought we had made. And I remember that conversation well, and when the audience started saying, “What do you mean you can’t say the president’s lying?” the reporters said, “Well, we think it’s more powerful to say the president’s statements did not comport with information as we have it…” They had this kind of painful, tortured thing that they told themselves was somehow more impactful. So there’s a culture inside newsrooms that gives them, like, 12 degrees of difference between themselves and the truth.
But we know that other folks know what we know, are as irritated and disgusted and seeing through the emperor and his no clothes as we have. And so we have independent media growing up. And I just wonder, when you see the media landscape, do you see hope in these independent journalistic outfits that are coming up? Do you see Black-owned, some of them Black-centered, journalistic organizations sprouting up? Is that a source of hope?
MA: I think it can be. But the real question is, how will the sandwich taste once everything comes together? And when I think of a great journalist, I think of somebody like Chris Hedges, who was asked to join the New York Times. He didn’t go the regular route, where most reporters kind of prayed for an opportunity to write for a paper like the Times. He was in seminary, and he began hearing about El Salvador, and he went down there and he saw things and he began writing about it, and people were reading his stuff, and the Times came and said, “Boy, you’re a great writer. Can you write some articles for us?” And he was like, “OK, yeah, why not?”
Of course, all of that changed around the time of, I think it was 9/11 and the Iraq War. And Chris did a speech, and he got up and he talked with people and he was telling them, saying, “Listen, do not let these politicians use your fear to get you involved in a war.” And people began singing “God Bless America” and yelling at him, because they didn’t want to hear it. And it was almost like Chris was seeing which way the wind would blow.
And he got threatened by his editors, like, “Oh, that’s one strike against you, buddy.” I mean, he could care less. Again, he didn’t, like, run and get the job. They ran after him, because of the clarity and power of his writing.
JJ: But then that clarity and power was just what they didn’t want, actually, to hear.
MA: Exactly. Well, I think the scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò hit the mark when he said it’s “elite capture.” He had been captured by the Times, and they had a tiger by the tail. And Chris really could care less because, in the new media world, he writes online, and probably is more read today than he was when he was at the Times.
JJ: Absolutely, and that’s kind of where we’re at, where folks who want to do reporting, who want to witness, but who are not willing to accept the constraints of corporate news media, we haven’t quite built the structures for those folks to have a platform, for those folks to be heard from. So we’re kind of in transition, in terms of media structures. But I do believe that, in terms of audience, more people are recognizing the failures and the flaws and the constraints of the major news media, and are at least looking for something else.
MA: I think they’re hungry for something else, because here’s the real deal: People who are young people, they don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch TV, because that media is alien to them. So, unfortunately, they might read news updates that someone has assembled, used media sources to assemble, but they don’t go to those original media sources, because they have no trust in those media sources. So they find out using other means.
But we’re, I think, on the cusp of creating citizen journalists, where, given the technology that now exists, everybody is a journalist. Because they have the potential to use their phones and broadcast to, really, uncounted numbers of people, to tell their stories and to get their word out, and to contact them and to give them insight into the world that they see, and not the world that the media want to project.
You remember George Floyd; it was a 17-year-old girl who was witnessing that, and when she livestreamed it, the world tuned in, and was transformed by that moment. So that’s just a taste of what journalism can do, when it’s at the right place at the right time.
JJ: And I thank you for that, and I think the corollary to the citizen journalism, and to people understanding that they can create their own news and witness and share, I think there is also an understanding that folks, when they’re watching the TV news, or they’re reading the paper, they also maybe are bringing more critical thinking to that, and recognizing that they don’t need to just swallow everything that’s in the New York Times. Am I being over-hopeful there?
MA: No, I think you’re absolutely correct. I think that’s part of that youthful vibration that turns kids off the newspaper or the local broadcast or even the national broadcast. I mean, I know quite a few young people who simply don’t watch TV. That’s an alien communications device to them.
JJ:Well, I could talk to you a lot, but I don’t want to take too much of your time. I want to ask you, certainly, before we close, to say anything that you want to say to a listenership of media critical folks. But I would ask—I read a quote from you recently that you said you’ve never felt alone. And I think that is gratifying, and probably surprising for people to hear, because many people, many people walking freely through the streets, are feeling very alone right now, really oppressively alone, for all kinds of reasons. And it might seem a weird question, but in September 2025, where are you finding hope? What are you looking to?
MA: I do find it in young people who are more open and more receptive, not just to stories, but to struggles. And I think that the gift of repression is that it wakes people up. I mean, people are seeing things that haven’t been seen in this country for years, and it’s waking people up. And so once you’re awake, it’s kind of hard to go back to sleep. And think about this: To the right wing, the worst thing you can be is woke. So that suggests that they want everybody to go to sleep. So wake up, be woke.
In a videotaped statement (AP, 9/10/25), Trump said that comparing people like Charlie Kirk to Nazis is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
After the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump (9/10/25) escalated his war on free speech, calling for criminalizing criticism of himself:
It’s a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.
To spell it out: “Demonizing”—which is to say, criticizing—people with whom you disagree is “directly responsible” for Kirk’s death. Note that this is about criticizing people that you disagree with—”you” presumably being one of “those on the radical left”—as Trump has built a wildly lucrative political career out of demonizing those he disagrees with, and he’s not about to stop now. It’s the “wonderful Americans” like Kirk whom you aren’t supposed to criticize.
Trump promises “this kind of rhetoric”—the “radical left” kind—will “stop,” because the government will “find each and every one who contributed to this atrocity.” This includes all those who used their speech to “go after our judges,” cops and “everyone else who brings order.”
This is, in short, a declaration that the idea of free speech is over—despite Trump going on to list “free speech” first among “the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.” Where once you had the right to criticize those who “bring order,” now such reckless rhetoric is punishable as direct support for “terrorism”—a word that under the US legal system authorizes draconian police powers.
‘Violent rhetoric has consequences’
A response (X, 9/24/25) to Homeland Security’s complaint that people were comparing ICE to the Gestapo, secret police and slave patrols.
Interestingly, the particular strain of criticism that Trump singles out—though not exclusively—is when “wonderful Americans” like Kirk are compared to “Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”
The Department of Homeland Security made a similar complaint on X (9/24/25) after sniper Joshua Jahn reportedly shot at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees:
This vile attack was motivated by hatred for ICE. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call that violent rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police and slave patrols has consequences.
Which historical precedents are we allowed to compare such an organization to?
‘Our lineage’ vs. ‘wickedness’
Stephen Miller charged that “leftist groups and nonprofits had created ‘terrorist networks’ that led to Kirk’s murder” (New Republic, 9/15/25).
Speaking of Nazi comparisons, people heard similarities between the eulogy given by chief Trump advisor Stephen Miller at Kirk’s funeral and the rhetoric of Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels (National, 9/22/25; Snopes, 9/25/25). Miller’s speech drew a heavy-handed contrast between “what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble,” and the “forces of wickedness and evil.” The “good,” the forces of “the light,” were seemingly genetically defined, with “ancestors” and a “lineage”:
Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry…. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.
And the other side was so dehumanized, they were erased from reality:
And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.
Note again the emphasis on the speech of the enemy: They “incite,” they “foment.” This was not a throwaway line; speaking to Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast (New Republic, 9/15/25), Miller said that he was on a mission to shut up the left: “The last message that Charlie sent me,” he claimed, “was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-leaning organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” Calling the left “a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller vowed:
With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.
‘Targeted intimidation’
Analyzing the White House’s “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” memo (9/25/25), Jeff Sharlet (Scenes From a Slow Civil War, 9/26/25) notes that it “provides authorities with potential cause to prosecute not everyone but anyone.”
Those words seemed to become legal action in the form of an “executive memo” (9/25/25; Scenes From a Slow Civil War, 9/26/25) about the new war on anti-fascism signed by Trump, but lacking the ranting digressions characteristic of words actually written by the president. The memo includes this chilling passage:
This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources and predicate actions behind them—is required.
“Political violence” is defined here as not just actual “violence,” but also “targeted intimidation, radicalization [and] threats”; in other words, speech. This speech is “designed to silence opposing speech,” which only makes sense if it’s understood that the speech that deserves protection and the speech that needs to be investigated by law enforcement are spoken by two different kinds of people; free speech is a right that only belongs to the right people (FAIR.org, 3/4/25). If you’re the wrong sort of person, using your speech to “silence” the good kind of speech—which is to say, to criticize it—well, then, we have to kill free speech in order to save it.
Another thing these “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” need to be criminally investigated for is using speech to “change or direct policy outcomes.” This is said to “prevent the functioning of a democratic society”—when it’s actually key to the functioning of a democratic society.
The ability to use your freedom of expression to try to change what the government does is, in fact, why the First Amendment was put in the Constitution in the first place. But clearly we are in an era where the executive branch no longer sees the First Amendment as any kind of meaningful constraint.
This week on CounterSpin: With some 2 million people in prison, jail or detention centers, the US is a world leader in incarceration. Ever more people disappear behind bars every day, many for highly contestable and contested reasons. But despite age-old rhetoric about prison as “rehabilitation,” US journalists say—through their work—that if any of the criminal legal systems in this country decide to punish you, that’s proof enough that you should never be heard from again. With some exceptions for celebrity, corporate journalists seem absolutely OK with silencing the huge numbers of disproportionately Black and brown people in prison. It’s a choice that impoverishes conversation about prison policy, about public safety, and about shared humanity.
There are reporters and outlets paying attention—and willing to navigate the serious barriers the prison system presents. One such outlet is Prison Radio, actually a multimedia production studio, that works to include the voices of incarcerated people in public debate.
It’s thanks to them that we have the opportunity to speak with journalist, author and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 conviction for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer showcased failures in the legal system, yes, but also exposed flagrant flaws in corporate media’s storytelling around crime and punishment and race and power.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the Washington Post‘s firing of Karen Attiah.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Planet Moneypromises, “See the world through the lens of an economist and you’ll start to feel a little less overwhelmed when making financial decisions.”
For six seasons now, NPR’s Planet Money, the network’s economics and finance program, has aired a Summer School miniseries that offers its audience a “crash course in economics for your ears.”
Presenting listeners the opportunity to “see the world through the lens of an economist,” the program has spent summers covering topics including microeconomics, investing, macroeconomics, business administration and economic history.
This year, Summer School is covering political economy, the interdisciplinary social science that examines the state’s part in shaping the economy. Though NPR claims that its programming is “diving deep into the waters” of the discipline (NPR, 7/15/25), its shallow coverage offers just one answer to the question, “What role can or should the government play in shaping the economy?”
Under the guise of general education programming, Summer School sidelines critical perspectives and represents neoliberalism as consensus to teach its audience that privatization, austerity and deregulation are pivotal to freedom and prosperity.
‘Why are countries rich and poor?’
Planet Money (7/15/25) asks the question, “What role can or should the government play in shaping the economy?”
In episode 1, Summer School 2025 host Robert Smith set the stage by asking his guest, MIT professor and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, “Why are some countries rich and some countries poor?”
It’s a question that Johnson is well-equipped to answer, having just recently won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for analyzing the long-term outcomes of what he and his co-authors, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, have termed “extractive” and “inclusive” colonial institutions. “Extractive” institutions politically and economically disenfranchised colonial subjects, they argued, while “inclusive” institutions offered the population greater political representation and a larger share of accumulated profits.
The difference highlights the importance of democratic access to resources, like capital and land, to economic development—but in his NPR feature (7/9/25), Johnson was instead quick to point the finger at “expropriation”: “We don’t think enough about expropriation and extraction, which means somebody can steal your stuff.”
Treating it as a virtual synonym of “extraction,” Johnson characterized expropriation—the process in which the state takes private property for public benefit—as an inherently negative act in which “powerful people…come and take our stuff away.”
‘Somebody can steal your stuff’
Planet Money‘s answer (7/9/25) to the question of the proper role of government: “I need to know that if my business is successful, it’s not going to be suddenly taken away from me.”
Johnson’s framing—“your stuff” and “our stuff”—encouraged his audience to identify with a successful capitalist having his business taken away; it assumed that listeners have more in common with an expropriated capitalist or landlord than with the landless beneficiaries of redistribution. Expropriation as a barrier to prosperity was framed as common sense: As Smith explained in his introduction, “I need to know that if my business is successful, it’s not going to suddenly be taken away from me.”
In broadening the definition of extractive institutions to when the authorities can “steal your stuff” and “take what they want,” the difference between “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions is no longer democratic access: Expropriation has been used in various places to democratize access to land and capital.
Land reform and state-driven development also played key roles in the “East Asian Miracle”—the rapid evolution of the “East Asian tiger” economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—from underdeveloped colonies to high-income states. Of particular relevance is the case of Singapore, a state that maintains majority stakes in key capital industries to invest in education, maintains ownership of most land to reinvest rents and develop quality public housing, and forces capital to share amenities with the public—all contributing to a high standard of living and an urban-renewal success story.
NPR centered the plight of entrepreneurs over those with no access to capital, and wholly reframed redistribution as theft—a stance that explicitly favors protecting private property over democratizing access to resources.
‘In a place like North Korea’
North Korea’s actual record of decades of rapid growth followed by crisis (Monthly Review, 3/24) presents a more complicated picture than Planet Money‘s caricature of a country where when “somebody tries to build something, if the ruling elite wants it, they just take it.”
Johnson went on to list expropriation in North Korea as a case study of extraction, observing that while the North Korean ruling class lives “reasonably well,” “most people in that country are immensely poor and sometimes actually starving.” He explained that this is because
anytime…something good happens to an entrepreneur…if the ruling elite wants it, they just take it. The ruling elite in a place like North Korea extracts all the value from the people.
But expropriation alone cannot account for poverty or hunger in North Korea. In the decades following decolonization, expropriation allowed North Korea to effectively urbanize and industrialize, producing enough grain to feed its population and even export some grain in 1985, despite a rugged, mountainous terrain inhospitable to farming. As John Jay College economics professor Zhun Xu wrote for Monthly Review (3/24):
By economic measures, North Korea had an impressive first three decades or so. Its GDP per capita grew at 4.5% annually between 1950 and 1980…. Thirty years after the civil war, North Korea had achieved a high level of urbanization and industrialization…. North Korean agriculture was also successful, at least for a while…. Between 1961 and 1980, its cereal output increased by 4.8% annually.
An honest analysis of North Korea’s political economy would account for a number of factors prior to and following the famine in the 1990s: Rapid agricultural automation leaving North Korea reliant on foreign petroleum, rapid urbanization depleting the reserve of agriculture workers, low export competitiveness in the face of neoliberal globalization, and, perhaps most critically, the deadly US sanctions regime.
But by pinning blame for poverty in North Korea solely on expropriation, Johnson builds an undue association between redistribution and failure, wherein poverty exists because of a lack of private property protections.
‘Help poorer people help themselves’
Planet Money (1/28/15) brought on economist Hernando de Soto to present a glowing picture of his austerity program for Peru.
Smith then introduced a counter-example: Neoliberal reforms instituted in Peru in the 1990s under CIA-backed dictator Alberto Fujimori, under the guidance of economist Hernando de Soto, who “saw these extractive institutions we’ve been talking about and decided to do something about it.”
Referencing a 2015 Planet Money profile (1/28/15) of de Soto, Smith and Johnson argued that reforms aimed at building the middle class worked by cutting red tape to expand access to credit and capital—making it easier to have a title to a home or business, allowing “a lot of poorer people” to “help themselves.”
The reality of these reforms, however, is more nuanced. While Fujimori’s reforms did curb inflation and promote growth by attracting investment (CNN, 4/28/99), property-titling reforms did not improve poor Peruvians’ access to credit, nor did they increase mortgage lending. (Mortgage lending only increased when the state began subsidizing low-income mortgages in the 2000s.)
Instead of democratizing access to credit and capital, the de Soto program eroded the power of organized labor: Under the Fujimori regime, labor leaders and unionists were arbitrarily detained and tortured, unions shrank by a third, and Peruvians began to work longer hours. Privatization of large swaths of federal functions successfully attracted foreign investment, particularly in mining, but multinational corporations made little contribution to the local economy, extracting natural resources while degrading the environment.
While formalization of private property protections did promote economic growth overall, it did not actually empower people by giving them access to capital: As an austerity program, it pushed Peruvians to work harder while their resources were plundered, their public services were gutted and their unions were crushed.
‘Who are regulations protecting?’
The original Planet Money report (6/22/12)—unlike the Summer School excerpt—acknowledged that Clayton v. Steinagel was brought to the Supreme Court by the libertarian Institute for Justice.
Though not every episode of the series was as explicit in calling expropriation theft or glorifying austerity as democracy, later episodes similarly used a small-business framing to make arguments against state intervention. For instance, episode 4, “Who Are All These Regulations Protecting?” (7/30/25), presented an anti-regulation argument through a case study of a small-business owner who couldn’t afford licensing.
Smith introduced the story with a short clip from a 2012 Planet Money profile (6/22/12) of Jestina Clayton, a Sierra Leonean–American braider who shut down her business after learning that all aestheticians in Utah must be licensed. Her case was presented as a social justice issue—a traditional African braider who couldn’t afford $16,000-plus tuition to go to cosmetology school.
Dismissing a trade group spokesperson’s concerns that unlicensed aestheticians can harm consumers, Smith and his guest, political scientist Joan Ricart-Huguet, discussed Clayton’s case as one in which industry has captured regulation, leveraging its moneyed interests to prevent competition. They framed deregulation as the equitable solution, leveling the playing field for small businesses like Clayton’s.
But Smith failed to mention the interests behind Clayton’s case.
Clayton v. Steinagel was taken up by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a Koch-backed libertarian law firm and partner of the State Policy Network, a right-wing, anti-union, libertarian coalition that also includes the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Among IJ’s largest donors are billionaires and corporate money managers, who have vested interests in the various deregulation causes that the IJ takes up, most prominently successful advocacy for weakening campaign financing laws—which contributes to the revolving door that gives industry greater sway in the regulatory process.
Deregulation is not the opposite of regulatory capture, as presented in the episode: They’re both consequences of moneyed interests undermining state oversight. Yet listeners are presented with the impression that deregulation is capture’s just alternative.
‘Temporarily embarrassed millionaires’
FAIR’s Peter Hart (8/17/12): “Even if you’re not an expert in media ethics, you’d probably agree that a show about finance and business exclusively sponsored by one giant bank has an obvious conflict.”
Planet Money Summer School 2025 wasn’t all bad, including very instructive breakdowns of progressive taxation (7/16/25) and US federal budgeting (7/23/25), and case studies of tariffs (8/20/25) and industrial policy (8/6/25), but nonetheless, programming had a blatant neoliberal bias.
This much is unsurprising: FAIR has previously covered Planet Money’s proclivity for austerity (6/1/13) and NPR’s beholdenness to corporate interests (6/27/15, 7/2/15). Of particular note is the conflict-of-interest controversy Planet Money faced during the Great Recession, when the program was less than a year old: Planet Money’s sole corporate sponsor was Ally Bank, a subsidiary of the bank holding company formerly called GMAC, which was heavily implicated in the subprime mortgage crisis (FAIR.org, 8/17/12).
Paraphrasing novelist John Steinbeck, Ronald Wright noted in A Short History of Progress that the American poor “see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”—and it’s this attitude that Planet Money capitalizes on to glorify austerity and deregulation.
Instead of framing the state as an institution that can do good for most people, Summer School spent this season convincing its audience that the most good that a state can do is to protect the accumulation of private property—and that any alternative is tantamount to theft and a barrier to our collective prosperity.
Janine Jackson interviewed MediaJustice’s Jai Dulani and Vivek Bharathan of the No Desert Data Center Coalition about data center opposition for the September 26, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Many people still think vaguely of digital technology as something that happens inside your phone, or your computer. It seems divorced from physical nature; it’s in the ether. In reality, technology requires massive environmental and economic resources localized in real communities.
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South is a new report from the group MediaJustice that explores with research and case studies how tech corporations are, as it says, “quietly draining the South,” while media coverage talks in terms of growth and progress toward an inevitable future.
We’re joined now by Jai Dulani from Media Justice, and with Vivek Bharathan from the No Desert Data Center Coalition in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome, both of you, to CounterSpin.
Jai Dulani: Great to be here.
Vivek Bharathan: Thank you for having us.
JJ: I saw this quote from an Oklahoma representative:
I think if you ask your average person on the street, “How much water does a data center use to operate every day,” or “every year,” the vast majority of people would say, “What’s a data center?”
And she added, “I think that this industry is so far ahead of where the knowledge that Oklahomans currently have [is] that we’ve got to catch up.”
Now, she’s talking about Oklahoma, of course, but this is a key idea, that something is already well-launched, and packaged up very shiny and futuristic, before the general public understands, not just the costs, but even what’s happening—much less why it’s happening where it’s happening.
So in simply connecting the airy talk about AI, for example, to real earth and water, this report is filling a void, but it’s also very much about whose earth and water we’re talking about. So what would you say, in general terms, this report is trying to do? What’s it trying to say?
JD: Absolutely. So this report is uplifting how Black, brown and working-class communities in the South are bearing the brunt of the environmental and economic costs behind data centers. We look at how Big Tech is draining the South, even in drought-prone areas; how the South is paying more for electricity; and how the South is getting locked into decades of fossil fuel infrastructure, because of the energy demands of data centers.
JJ: And I think it’s important that the report grounds this data center boom in the history of the South, and regions in the South, being used as testing grounds or dumping grounds in the past. Talk a little bit more, if you could, about the political and historical context here.
JD: Absolutely. So this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and that was a devastating example of climate crisis and structural racism. And it showed state abandonment, combined with criminalization, that essentially led to so much preventable death and displacement.
And also Big Oil has been decimating the South for decades, and the South has been facing so much industrial pollution in water and air for decades. And so Big Tech is essentially following these footsteps, and compounding so much environmental racism that the South has been disproportionately facing for a long time.
And that context and history is so important when we look at how Big Tech is coming into towns and cities that have higher rates of asthma and cancer already, and now are being faced with even more air pollution that compounds these harms.
JJ: All right. Well, Vivek, for many people, this is a new connection of dots, but it’s not new for you. You’ve been working on this locally. Tell us about the state of resistance, because we’re talking about informational voids, but obviously many communities perforce actually do understand what’s going on here. What have you learned from your experience in Tucson?
Vivek Bharathan: “It’s kind of like they came back with a redesigned and crappier Death Star, and we have to fight it for a second time.”
VB: What we’ve learned from this is that, essentially, these giant data centers come in, brought in by multi-billion-dollar corporations that are really here to extract resources, and they find cooperation from local representatives who have administrations in support of economic development. But this local economic development often looks like taking these big projects that chase big money, but also come with a lot of blood.
And what we found was that our local representatives were only listening to these corporations. They were put in a position by their administrations at both the county and city levels to really only hear the pro side. And the counter-arguments only came from the public at these meetings. So they just weren’t equipped to make an informed decision about whether or not these data centers are good for us. And they went ahead and voted on them anyway.
So what we had to do, really, was mobilize as a community, and this was really a multiracial, multigenerational effort to come together and say no to this data center. And, fortunately for us, even though the county sale went through, the city council also had to approve a portion of it, and they said no to that. Unfortunately for us, it’s back in the county’s hands, because the corporation still owns the property, they still own the land, and they’re planning to go ahead with this project anyway, despite this overwhelming community turnout against it.
So we’re still in the fight. It’s back to round two. It’s kind of like they came back with a redesigned and crappier Death Star, and we have to fight it for a second time.
JJ: I know that MediaJustice, in general, is about centering the voices of communities who are most harmed by inequities in media and technology, and who share the idea that those people should be in leadership in the resistance. And there is, as Vivek is just telling us, plenty of resistance. But, Jai Dulani, there’s plenty of resistance across the South as well, isn’t there?
JD: Absolutely. Wanda Mosley, who is founder of My Vote Matter, has been organizing in Atlanta, where Atlanta has seen a 211% increase in data centers’ development since 2023. And that’s the fastest rate of growth in the country.
And Atlanta’s water supply is among the smallest of any major US metro area. So water supplies are really vulnerable to drought there. And Meta‘s data center in Newton County, Georgia, is taking up 10% of the county’s total water use on a daily basis, which is putting Newton County on track to be in a water deficit by 2030.
And so Wanda has been going to town hall meetings, and has been saying that what she’s seeing is only the companies and developers are getting airtime at these town halls. And so it’s been really hard to be given a voice at these town halls, but she and others are organizing across the South.
Jai Dulani: “This is because of community pushback, communities that are saying, this is not worth the environmental threat that these data centers pose.”
And that is making a difference, by being relentless, by demystifying the economic development propaganda, and talking about the reality that these data centers don’t create jobs, and, actually, through tax breaks, they are taking money away from states. Georgia is projected to give up $296 million in tax revenue this year because of data centers.
And so in terms of wins, we’re seeing in Bessemer, Alabama, communities have successfully paused a $14.5 billion proposed data center, so we have to keep paying attention to that site, and supporting it. In Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out all town council members who were supporting an Amazon data center, and now they newly elected a town council that voted to ban data centers for Warrenton.
And in Georgia, we’re seeing a lot of moratoriums being passed in different counties. The Monroe County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to deny a data center proposal that was going to rezone 900 acres of land. And this is because of community pushback, communities that are saying, this is not worth the environmental threat that these data centers pose.
JJ: Well, thank you. And Vivek, just to kick it back to you for a second, you talked about, in the Tucson example, a kind of fight between various levels of government, which is just encouragement, if we needed it, that if you might “lose at one front,” it does not mean that there might not be another point of intervention.
But what I’m hearing from both of you is that one of the key points of resistance is information. So if I could ask you, Vivek, what were the kind of myths that organizers needed to address in order to push back on this data center? What was the big information that was coming through that needed to be interrogated and challenged?
VB: There was one term, “water positivity,” the idea that you could reclaim water, push it through this thing, and that somehow you’d end up with more water at the end of it. And the myth of water positivity is two things. One is, there’s this absurd terminology, “wet water” versus “paper water,” where wet water is what we think of as water, which is what’s sitting in this water bottle next to me, and paper water is the right to water.
And so, essentially, what they’re trying to say is that they can be “water positive” by generating paper water, and that can look like anything from incentives to communicate with communities to reduce water consumption, which is absurd, to essentially getting water from other places. And that just means stealing other communities’ water to replenish ours. And we weren’t having any of that.
I do want to go back to one thing that Dulani said earlier about just the processes, and how these town halls did propaganda sessions. That was our experience as well. At the city level, the city manager basically set up what they were calling, I forget the term, but it was essentially town halls, but they really were just propaganda sessions for these projects.
And what ended up happening is once we saw that the only people who had seats at the table were proponents of the project, including our private electric company, GEP, the corporation itself, and our public water utility, all speaking for the project. And once we realized that these sessions were going to be just like that, we got loud and we got disruptive.
And if anyone’s listening to this and wondering how to resist these sessions—just don’t accept the term of the argument. Don’t accept the term that they set forward, even in the process. Make sure that everyone in your community is there, as many people as you can turn out, and really just make it clear that you oppose it, and that you even oppose the terms in which the case is being presented.
JJ: I love that, because the questions of who gets to speak extend from the town halls, of course, to the journalism around these questions. And so I would like to ask you, finally, if you have thoughts on media.
I will say, I’m starting to see stories take a frame of “developers are saying this is going to be great, but communities have questions.” And we’re kind of at the “can communities put in some studies in advance, and can we get some more information?” And I’m seeing local leaders and state level leaders saying, “Wait, wait, hold on a second.”
But I wonder, still, the community leaders are not the lead in the story: They’re kind of below the fold; they’re critics. I just wonder, from either of you, what would you look for media coverage that would actually fill a void here, and what would you like them to stop doing? And that might be too long a list, but in the time we have left, what would you hope for from reporters? Dulani, you can start, whichever of you.
JD: Yeah, I think what you mentioned is so important. When a story is simply regurgitating the press release from a big tech company or developer, that’s not helpful. There is research out there that says for every permanent full-time job at an operational data center, that’s amounting to more than $2 million in terms of a tax break for every job. And so it’s not worth it. It’s a wealth transfer from taxpayers to shareholders of these companies. Communities are losing out. And so it is important to look at the lies around economic development and prosperity, and to really look at the environmental costs.
We’re really being put in a position to compete with corporations around water. Farmland is being rezoned for these data centers. So you can’t eat AI, you can’t drink AI. This is the future that is being built before our eyes. And so media need to report on the reality of what the real cost of data centers is, and not just say communities have questions, but there’s more and more data out there about the negative impact of data centers. So that has to be amplified.
JJ: Vivek, if you have something you’d like to add about what you’d hope to see at local or national level from media, please.
VB: I’ve found that when we’re interviewed by local media, especially TV, there’s a common framing where it’ll kind of start with the electeds, and then they’ll interview us for maybe five minutes, and we’ll get maybe a sentence or two in about our position. And they really treat us like any, I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, but basically….
JJ: It’s like “color,” like person on the street, is how I think of it.
VB: Exactly. And our coalition does actually have a lot of experts in it, and we have informed opinions, and we have information that really should be out there more. And I feel like we’re never treated—like, there’s the experts, there’s the electeds, and then there’s us, and we get zero, close to zero time. They just kind of show our faces to say we’re there.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, I’m going to end there. We’ve been speaking with Vivek Bharathan and Jai Dulani. Thank you both very much for being with us today on CounterSpin.
Twenty-three-year-old Robin Westman on August 27 opened fire through the windows of a church where children were attending mass to celebrate their first week at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shooter carried a rifle, pistol and shotgun, and she shot more than 100 rounds. Westman fatally shot two children, ages 8 and 10, and injured 18 more people, before dying at the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
By the metrics of the K–12 School Shooting Database, this tragedy marked the 146th incidence of school gun violence in 2025. Firearms remain the leading cause of death for minors in the US, with 2,526 people under 18 killed by guns in 2022.
Yet most media outlets focused on profiling the shooter—who was transgender—and identifying her motives, treating the shooting as an isolated case rather than a symptom of a larger, systemic issue.
FAIR surveyed coverage from both centrist (CNN, NPR, New York Times, PBS, Washington Post, ABC and NBC) and right-wing (New York Post,Newsmax and Breitbart) news outlets on the day of and the day after the shooting. The survey was limited to written articles and Google searches of the keywords “Minnesota school shooting.” While right-wing media took the opportunity to misgender and villainize trans people and pretend Westman was a leftist, centrist media did little to curb transphobic backlash. Neither group gave the broader epidemic of gun violence the kind of focused attention it demands in the wake of any school shooting.
‘Transgender mass shooter’
Many right-wing media, like Breitbart (8/27/25), made sure to include “trans” in their headlines, and to cherry-pick quotes to suggest trans people are brainwashed.
Right-wing media coverage focused more heavily on Westman’s gender identity than on the attack itself. A handful of articles in the sample (New York Post, 8/27/25, 8/28/25; Newsmax, 8/28/25; Breitbart, 8/28/25) substantially detailed the shooter’s transition and alleged detransition, creating a false narrative where Westman’s identity significantly informed her access to and discharge of guns. Most articles in the sample included “trans” in their headlines, and many also included suggestions of detransition (and of an “anti-Trump” ideology); all used male pronouns:
“Minneapolis School Shooter ID’d as Trans Woman Robin Westman—as Apparent Manifesto Included ‘Kill Trump’” (New York Post, 8/27/25)
“Minneapolis School Shooter Robin Westman Confessed He Was ‘Tired of Being Trans’: ‘I Wish I Never Brain-Washed Myself’” (New York Post, 8/28/25)
“Report: Minneapolis Shooter Was ‘Tired of Being Trans’” (Newsmax, 8/28/25)
“Trans Minnesota Catholic School Shooter’s YouTube Manifesto Included Vile Anti-Trump Messages Written on Guns” (Breitbart, 8/27/25)
“Report: Attacker Who Opened Fire During Catholic School Mass Said He Was ‘Tired of Being Trans’” (Breitbart, 8/28/25)
The New York Post (8/28/25) opened one article: “Transgender mass shooter Robin Westman confessed that he ‘was tired of being trans’ and wished he ‘never brainwashed’ himself.” While the framing suggested that Westman was renouncing her trans identity, other Westman quotes from the same Post article contradicted that idea and indicated something more complex:
I regret being trans…. I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that.
This line suggests that, in fact, Westman’s gender identity was female, and what she “regretted” and was “tired of” was having a body that was perceived as transgender rather than as cisgender female. By skewing her words, the Post echoed a broader right-wing narrative that paints trans identity as artificial and delusional, suggesting that anyone who transitions is a “brainwashed” victim of a dangerous trans movement. This rhetoric not only misrepresents one individual’s distress, but also works to delegitimize all trans experiences and the movement for trans rights.
The piece quoted “lefty [Minneapolis] Mayor” Jacob Frey’s calls to avoid scapegoating the trans community, but countered his warnings by referencing a 2023 school shooting by someone who identified as transgender: “The Annunciation attack was the second elementary school shooting perpetrated by a trans person in the last two years.”
This fact was presented and framed as an alarming, rising trend. A responsible media outlet would provide the context that, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 0.11% of the known suspects in mass shootings over the past decade were transgender (NBC, 12/20/24)—far less than the trans share of the general public.
‘Transgenderism and mental illness’
The New York Post (8/28/25) quoted a Minnesota lawmaker who said “we got to understand that we’ve got some serious mental health issues that are being exacerbated” by messages like “we got to respect everyone” and “we got to have compassion for everyone.”
The Post followed this discussion with RFK Jr.’s suggestion that the “drugs Westman was taking during his transition could have played a ‘role’ in his depraved violence.”
This all feeds into an even larger false narrative that portrays being trans as a mental illness, one that supposedly predisposes individuals to violence. The New York Post explicitly pushed this narrative by claiming that “numerous studies point to a link between transgenderism and mental illness.” (“Transgenderism” is a coded right-wing term used to falsely imply that trans identity is an ideology.) Citing a 2024 Trevor Project national survey of the mental health of young LGBTQ people, the article reported that “39% of LGBTQ+ young people ‘seriously considered’ suicide in the last year—including a whopping 46% of ‘transgender and nonbinary’ youths.”
The Post falsely suggested that the positive association lies between trans identity and mental illness, when the Trevor Project clearly states that it lies instead between “anti-LGBTQ+ victimization and disproportionately high rates of suicide risk.” It is prejudice and bigotry exhibited by the likes of the New York Post that is significantly associated with deteriorating mental health in queer youths, not their identity itself.
When reporting on the violent messaging Westman wrote on rifle magazines and smoke grenades used in her attack, right-wing outlets only covered those that were threats against President Donald Trump and anti-Israel, painting Westman as a leftist. One New York Post (8/27/25) article reported that Westman wrote “‘kill Donald Trump’” and “‘for the children’” on her gun magazines, among other extremist sentiments, “hinting at an angry melange of far-left politics and antisemitism.” Both Newsmax articles (8/28/25, 8/27/25) quoted the same two messages.
All of them avoided mentioning the copious far-right messaging Westman left behind, including writing racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs and references, like
“kick a spic,” “fart n****,” “McVeigh” and “Waco.” Westman also had smoke grenades with “Jew Gas” written on them and the antisemitic, pro-Holocaust slogan “6 million wasn’t enough” written on their gear.
Westman also exhibited an obsession with past mass shooters, specifically Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011.
Lending credence to incendiary claims
This New York Times piece (8/27/25) noted that conservative activists “broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill”—but didn’t present any information countering these smears.
Centrist outlets were not immune to similar distortions. A New York Times piece (8/27/25) on the shooter highlighted that “some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill,” appearing to set up a critique of such transphobic generalizations. Instead, the outlet lent credence to the inflammatory claims.
When reporting on the contents of Westman’s “seemingly stream-of-consciousness” videos that would perhaps illuminate a motive, the Times observed that the shooter’s “extensive social media history was a contradictory catalog of anger and grievance.” But the paper picked and chose which of her messages to fully quote. A sticker in her diary that had “LGBTQ and transgender flags with a gun and the slogan ‘Defend Equality’” was directly quoted, yet the “antisemitic and racist language” scrawled onto her weapons was left unspecified.
Further down the relatively brief article, the Times revisited the “right-wing uproar.” This time, reporters Talya Minsberg, Amy Harmon and Aric Toler balanced it with a statement from Mayor Frey warning against “scapegoating transgender people in the wake of the tragedy.” While such a message is crucial in the midst of such widespread scapegoating, the media’s role ought to be to provide the context to dispel transphobic myths and backlash fomented by the right—for instance, by pointing out the rarity of trans shooters—rather than simply offer the two sides as competing visions.
Two days later—8/29/25—a Times piece by Harmon did examine and debunk the right-wing narrative around trans shooters. It’s a welcome intervention, but one that should have been included in the paper’s most prominent articles about the shooting.
No counter to right-wing narratives
Among the “red flags” that NBC‘s report (8/28/25) suggests authorities missed: “Her mother expressed conflicted feelings about her child’s gender identity.”
Many centrist reports didn’t even include Frey’s statement. The Washington Post (8/28/25), CNN (8/27/25, 8/28/25), NPR (8/28/25) and NBC (8/28/25) all mentioned the shooter’s trans identity or described her transition, yet none offered any counter to the right-wing trans narratives.
NBC (8/28/25) published an article that opened with details of a past welfare check on Westman. Near the end of the article, the outlet interlaced records of her turbulent family dynamics and “behavioral and social issues” with records of her transition:
While Westman’s parents signed off on the name change, her mother expressed conflicted feelings about her child’s gender identity, said a former school employee…. The ex-employee also remembered that Westman was often sent to the principal’s office for disruptive behavior and did not seem to have any friends. Westman’s mother expressed concern about her child’s behavioral and social issues, the ex-employee said. Faced with punishment from school administrators, Westman appeared alternately nervous and nonchalant, the former employee said.
This interlacing implicitly pathologized her gender identity, grouping trans identity into other “missed warning signs” and bolstering far-right narratives that trans people are dangerous and inherently troubled. Meanwhile, despite the fact that 96% of US mass shooters since 1966 have been cisgender males, media virtually never pathologize cisgender male gender identity in the context of mass shootings (FAIR.org, 6/30/22).
ABC (8/28/25) took a page from right-wing media and erased Westman’s far-right references, and emphasized material that reflected a far-left or anti-religious framing. The two that the outlet selected were a sticker in a notebook “that says ‘defend equality’ with an LGBTQIA flag,” and a gun that “has writings against Israel.”
PBS (8/28/25) only highlighted messages that read “‘kill Donald Trump’” and ‘“Where is your God,’” aligning with Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel’s claim that the shooting was a hate crime against Catholics. NPR (8/28/25), on the other hand, did not elaborate on the writings, instead relegating them to a description of “other details” and failing to challenge the selective left vs. right framing that dominated coverage elsewhere.
Sidelining gun reform discussion
A recent study found that, after a 2010 Supreme Court ruling led to a loosening of state gun laws, pediatric gun deaths increased much more in those states with the most permissive laws (Scientific American, 6/11/25)—the kind of information connecting gun laws to gun deaths that coverage of gun violence too often lacks.
Mayor Frey, a long-standing advocate for stricter gun laws, clearly and strongly restated his position in the wake of the murders, as was quoted by the New York Times (8/27/25) and PBS (8/28/25):
People who say that this is not about guns. You got to be kidding me. This is about guns. We do need to take action.
Several articles quoted some part of Frey’s calls for reform, but very few went any further, to offer context such as the state of Minnesota’s gun laws or the frequency of school shootings in the United States.
In fact, only three out of the 16 articles in the survey substantively discussed gun control. NPR (8/28/25) quoted three sources making explicit calls for gun control, including Frey highlighting the availability of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison talking about recent gun control measures passed in Minnesota and more that could help prevent future violence.
The Washington Post (8/28/25) reported that while “Minnesota is home to some of the toughest firearm laws in the country, and the state has ‘relatively low firearm violence,’” citing Everytown for Gun Safety statistics, “advocates said more must be done to prevent both high-profile mass shootings and the gun violence that unfolds every day.” Just a day before the shooting at Annunciation, the paper reported, a shooter armed with a high-velocity rifle opened fire across the street from another Minneapolis school, killing one and injuring six.
Under the headline “Democrats Renew Calls for Gun Control After Minnesota School Shooting,” CNN (8/27/25) reported that those Democratic “calls for greater action may soon meet political reality,” explaining that Republican lawmakers have “shown no signs of opening a push for new gun measures.” The article put the school shooting in the context of the assassination of state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and the targeted attack of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife on the same night.
Minnesota does not prohibit the purchase of assault-style weapons designed for military use, nor does it prohibit high-capacity magazines. Editorial choices to sideline discussion of gun reform only serve to obscure accountability and normalize a cycle of inaction and violence.
As a proportion of GDP, US spending on public media was already minuscule compared to that of many other countries. (Chart: Media Inequality & Change.)
Federal funding for public broadcasting officially ends today, the beginning of the new federal fiscal year. With the Republican-directed rescission of already-allocated funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Project 2025 dream of pulling the plug on PBS and NPR has been realized. As a percentage of GDP, the United States already spent dramatically less on public media than nearly every other democracy; now it joins the authoritarian and hybrid regimes that keep a tighter grip on media content.
It’s a major blow, but public broadcasting won’t just disappear. As FAIR (5/11/24) and many others have noted, the CPB provided a fairly small—if not insignificant—percentage of the budgets at PBS and NPR. Those most immediately and deeply impacted are the small, mostly rural stations that serve as some of the last sources of local news and information in the country’s quickly expanding news deserts. Public media journalist Alex Curley (Semipublic, 6/13/25) estimates that more than 30% of public TV and radio stations won’t last another year unless budget holes from federal funding are plugged in some other way.
Some major foundations have stepped in to offer at least temporary life support to those stations and the public broadcasting network as a whole. The Public Media Company, with funding from longtime media funders like the Knight, Ford and MacArthur foundations, is creating a bridge fund to funnel as much as $50 million to at-risk stations this year (New York Times, 8/19/25). Individual donations to public media also surged this year, increasing by roughly $70 million as of July. But together, that’s still only a fraction of $535 million a year that had been allocated to the CPB. The harsh reality is that the country’s public media won’t be the same, and many under-resourced communities will lose their only local news outlet.
‘Poisoning America for 60 years’
The New York Post (7/18/25) wrote that “liberal to far-left opinions ran through all public media-sponsored news, documentaries, commentary and even featured programming”—something decades of FAIR studies have looked for and failed to find.
Right-wing media are mostly tickled. The New York Post editorial board (7/18/25) celebrated: “Taxpayers will no longer have to pay for the toxic, biased propaganda that federally funded media have been poisoning America with for the last 60 years.” It added:
We live in a free country. People can produce and consume all kinds of programming for their enjoyment. And if it’s good, it will find a paying audience. But there’s simply no reason for our taxes to support it. Audiences that want that programming can fund it themselves.
“Freedom of the press should mean freedom from government control that comes via funding,” wrote Andy Kessler in the Wall Street Journal (7/27/25). “The First Amendment’s press freedoms should be absolute, including freedom from government-funded outlets.”
Howard Husock (Wall Street Journal, 9/23/25), a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a Republican member of the CPB board from 2013 to 2017, was less delighted. He correctly noted the need for local news, but worried that the skeletal remains of public broadcasting will become bastions of left-wing ideas.
“Conservatives must resist the temptation to declare victory and walk away from this fight over local news coverage,” Husock wrote. “Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting wasn’t the end of it. The local news landscape is too important to leave to donors seeking to promote their own left-wing ideology.”
“Every community in the country needs nonpartisan shoe-leather news coverage of city halls, public schools, police departments and high school sports. No neighborhoods or points of view should be overlooked,” Husock continued. His concern is public broadcasting’s “story selection that is veiled advocacy,” citing coverage of “national progressive agenda items like income inequality, abortion and climate change.” His solution? Get right-wing foundations into the local news funding game, to “promote true journalism, not activism.”
‘Help us see America whole’
The Wall Street Journal‘s Howard Husock (9/23/25) seemed rather more worried that the right would lose control of public broadcasting.
Husock is right that every community needs local news reporting. The fundamental purpose of journalism in a democracy is to hold the powerful to account; without journalistic scrutiny at the local level, corruption increases and democratic participation decreases. It’s no surprise that Murdoch-owned papers would largely pretend the free market can provide all the reporting that’s needed, but the billionairification of US news, and its accompanying kowtowing to the Trump regime, show how crucial it is that journalism not simply be controlled by the highest bidder.
Even beyond the inevitable problems with the corruption of corporate or billionaire-owned news media, in a highly unequal society, journalism at the local level simply can’t be consistently produced by the free market: It’s precisely the most under-resourced communities that face the greatest news deserts, and relied most heavily on CPB funding for their local media.
Husock is also right that the retreat of the federal government from public media is likely to shift public media journalism to the left. FAIR has always held public broadcasting up to the highest scrutiny (Extra!, 3–4/95, 11/10; FAIR.org, 6/1/99, 10/19/10, 2/18/11), and showed how it frequently failed to live up to the standard set for it by the 1967 Carnegie Commission Report that served as its founding document: to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”
While the CPB was ostensibly an independent institution (though its board was presidentially appointed and Senate approved), it never got enough federal funds to free NPR or PBS from the pressure to also lean heavily on corporate underwriting. Public broadcasting’s real bias isn’t toward the left; it is the same bias toward corporate and political elites—and away from true challenges to entrenched power—that plagues corporate media. And the constant Republican threats to its funding (FAIR.org, 6/8/06, 5/11/24) have ensured that NPR and PBS were always bending over backwards to offer a platform for the right (FAIR.org, 10/24/24).
‘Journalism, not activism’
Mother Jones (9–10/25): The Informing America Foundation “boasts of funding a network of thousands of platforms that have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories.”
Where Husock misleads is in his suggestion that the right is absent from local journalism—and that more right-wing funding would “promote true journalism, not activism.” For decades now, the right has dominated talk radio; today, this is often the only local news option in many rural areas.
And as genuine local newspapers are squeezed out across the country, pro-GOP content masquerading as local news is taking over. Right-wing funders have produced a sprawling network of thousands of hyper-local sites that publish primarily identical national stories with a clear ideological bent, but purporting to be local outlets, which gives them a sheen of credibility (Mother Jones, 9–10/25). The right has also funded a free wire service that helps resource-starved local news outlets fill out their coverage—with right-wing misinformation that local readers take to be legitimate news (Media Matters, 6/20/23).
The Jimmy Kimmel controversy highlighted the reach of conservative media that often fly under the radar. Even after ABC, under massive public pressure, brought back the Trump-targeted late night show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, viewers in over 60 local markets still couldn’t watch the show. Nexstar and Sinclair, two conservative media companies that control local television stations around the country, continued the blackout for several days more (Variety, 9/24/25, 9/26/25).
It also highlighted the importance—and vulnerability—of media that aren’t in the tank for Trump. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr had threatened ABC’s license after Kimmel made critical comments about the MAGA reaction to the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk (Deadline, 9/22/25), and the comedian’s brief exile from screens became the talk of the nation (USA Today, 9/22/25). The New York Times (9/24/25) reported that Carr “has promised to continue his campaign against what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.”
It’s clear, as FAIR (2/26/25) predicted from Carr’s stated policy goals in the conservative policy document Project 2025, that the job of the FCC under the Trump administration is to police the airwaves, like any loyal censor in an authoritarian regime, and flush out any words, stories or opinions not approved by the state. “President Donald Trump has suggested his administration should revoke the licenses of broadcast TV stations that he said are ‘against’ him,” said CNBC (9/19/25). That means that any public broadcasting outlets that survive the death of the CPB may still be in the administration’s gunsights.
Eliminating the CPB, then, could be both a loss and a gain for public media. There’s no sugarcoating the lost journalism jobs, station closures and programming cuts. And yet public media will also be freed from the ideological leash that always kept it from serving as the true public watchdog it was meant to be. It will continue to have a target on its back—and we will need public media now more than ever.
This Herblock cartoon (Washington Post, 3/29/50) is the first recorded use of the word “McCarthyism.”
The political cartoon is of vast importance to the history of the United States. Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” made the case for unity to colonists wanting independence from Great Britain. Thomas Nast exposed the corruption of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall; when Tweed attempted to escape justice, he was identified from a Nast cartoon. It was political cartoonist Herblock who coined the term “McCarthyism” in a 1950 piece attacking the Republican Party platform.
At a time of widespread corruption, official mendacity and general dirty dealings, it would behoove publishers and artists to aim as many satirical barbs as they can at the powerful. Yet the record of the first year of the new presidential administration shows that publishers are, for a variety of reasons, encouraging their artists to approach the president on bended knee.
‘Craven censorship’
The Ann Telnaes cartoon censored by Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.
In January, the Washington Post spiked a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize–winning Ann Telnaes that criticized the supplicant attitude displayed by the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, towards Donald Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25). (Telnaes has been a longtime Trump critic, as shown by her 2018 book Trump’s ABCs.)
She promptly resigned after the incident, the first time one of her pieces had been rejected over its subject. She had worked at the Post since 2008. In a Substack post (1/3/25), Telnaes characterized the paper’s decision as reflecting a desire to “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”
The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists (1/4/25) condemned the Post’s decision as “political cowardice” and “craven censorship in bowing to a wannabe tyrant.” Led by Steve Brodner, other editorial cartoonists began posting their own versions of the suppressed piece in solidarity (Greater Quiet, 1/4/25, 1/7/25; FAIR.org, 1/15/25).
‘The paper’s got this ultra-liberal cartoonist’
A KAL cartoon (7/19/25) of the sort that got him dropped by the Baltimore Sun.
While Telnaes provides the most famous example of this trend, she is not the only one.
Kevin Kallaugher (pen name KAL) was a casualty of right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Group‘s increasing control over US media. For 31 years, KAL contributed his award-winning cartoons to the Baltimore Sun. In 2024, David Smith of Sinclair—a frequent KAL target—purchased the paper. Sinclair has used its ownership of hundreds of local news stations to broadcast naked right-wing propaganda to millions of households. Smith himself (Guardian, 4/10/18) told Donald Trump in a 2016 meeting, “We’re here to deliver your message.” Smith transformed the Sun into yet another forum for that message.
KAL, on the other hand, felt no such obligation to deliver Trump’s message. He continued his regular mockery of the president and his administration. In December 2024, KAL was called in for a meeting with Smith. KAL claims Smith explained to him, “The problem is the paper’s got this ultra-liberal cartoonist.” He was told to restrict his satire to local issues or face termination. He refused, and was out at the Sun by the end of June (Baltimore Brew, 7/1/25). KAL’s cartoons can still be found in the Economist and on Substack.
Spurious claims of antisemitism
This got cartoonist Bob Whitmore temporarily pulled from Creative Loafing Tampa.
Florida cartoonist Bob Whitmore was the victim of spurious claims of antisemitism, the same kind that led to the firing of editor Tony Doris of the Palm Beach Post (FAIR.org, 3/25/25), and of cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) from his 11-year teaching post at the University of Pennsylvania (FAIR.org, 7/9/25). On July 31, Tampa’s alternative weekly Creative Loafing ran a cartoon by Whitmore showing a starving Gazan child. He faces a high wall, topped with barbed wire. An Israeli flag flutters. “Pleease give me fooooood!” the child shouts. The caption reads “The Wailing Wall.”
After a mere two readers wrote in to complain that Whitmore’s cartoon was antisemitic, he was fired by Creative Loafing’s corporate owners. Whitmore maintained that “dissent against Israel’s actions in Gaza should not be considered antisemitism” (WMNF, 8/15/25). He encouraged readers dissatisfied with the decision to complain to the local and corporate publishers. Enough readers protested the circumstances of Whitmore’s firing that he was reinstated within a few days (Daily Cartoonist, 8/18/25). As of August 22, his work can once again be found in Creative Loafing.
While Whitmore’s rehiring is certainly good news, that he was fired in the first place is evidence of a distinct lack of support publishers and editors extend to any cartoons deemed controversial, particularly if they sympathize with the Palestinian people (FAIR.org, 3/27/25).
‘To better the community, not divide it’
A Lee Judge cartoon (Latrobe Bulletin, 1/16/25) made the Bulletin swear off political cartoons altogether.
Smaller newspapers have decided they can do without the controversy brought about by running political cartoons. In January, Pennsylvania’s Latrobe Bulletin (1/16/25) ran a syndicated cartoon by Lee Judge showing an upside down American flag flying above the White House, with the caption “The Proper Way to Fly a Flag on Trump’s Inauguration Day.” The US flag flown upside down is considered a universal sign of distress, one that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house flew in apparent solidarity with January 6 rioters (New York Times, 5/16/24).
Judge’s cartoons upset enough Bulletin readers that publisher Dave Cuddihy put out a statement announcing that no further political cartoons would run in the paper. Cuddihy (Latrobe Bulletin, 1/18/25) declared:
While political cartoons have run in newspapers, including the Latrobe Bulletin, for many years; this is a final example of how we feel they have run their course…. We will no longer be publishing political cartoons because we strive to better the community, not divide it.
‘The day the laughter died’
An Art Young cartoon (Masses, 12/1915).
Vermont’s family owned Caledonian Record (8/21/25) likewise announced a cessation of all editorial cartoons in August. Publisher Todd Smith opined that “syndicated cartoons that can be perceived as partisan” are “a distraction from our core mission.” Eliminating the editorial page and syndicated cartoons were described as “keeping with [the paper’s] tradition.”
Under the headline “The Day the Laughter Died,” David Roth (Caledonian Record, 8/21/25) was given the opportunity to present an alternative view defending the political cartoon and explaining its history. The decision to stop publishing political cartoons
is a loss for readers and a troubling manifestation of the disintegration of our civic conversation…. Political cartoons exist to provoke, to exaggerate and to question. They are not soft commentary; they are pointed caricatures.
When anti-war cartoonist Art Young inveighed against World War I, the federal government charged him with sedition and forced him through two criminal trials. Both trials failed, although the magazine Young worked for ceased publication. Now it appears that such crude methods of shaping the opinions expressed through speech balloons and caricature are no longer necessary. The barons of the press seem to be perfectly capable of censoring themselves.
Upon being rehired, Bob Whitmore explained the importance of his stance. He told an interviewer (Daily Cartoonist, 8/18/25): “I feel good about it. And standing up for ourselves as cartoonists. The power of the cartoon is phenomenal. And I’m proud to be a part of that.” Whitmore provides an example of how political cartoonists can stand up to power, rather than quaking in fear of it, so long as they are supported by editors and publishers.
Janine Jackson interviewed writer and researcher Matthew Cunningham-Cook about criminalizing witness for the September 19, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, nominally a public official in what is nominally a democracy, has declared that recording the actions of ICE agents, nominally public officials in what is nominally a democracy, constitutes violence. And the department seeks to “prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.”
Suggesting respect for the “extent of the law” is perhaps the funniest part of that statement, as the White House is clearly scrambling to present masked men attacking people on the street, and disappearing them with no legal process, as somehow fitting within the law as any reasonable person would recognize it.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook is a writer and researcher working with the Center for Media and Democracy. He joins us now by phone from Costa Rica. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matthew Cunningham-Cook.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Thanks for having me on, Janine. I appreciate it.
JJ: Noem says videotaping ICE agents is “illegally doxxing” them, even as JD Vance is saying everyone should call the employer of anybody who posts anything short of praise for Charlie Kirk online.
It’s not good for the brain to try to parse the rhetoric of this administration, to try to make their language make what we understand as sense. As with Charlie Kirk, language for them is not a shared understanding; it’s just another tool to push the actions they seek to carry out. And, frankly, to make people think they’re stupid, that they don’t understand what rights they have, much less how to defend them.
But as we record in September 2025, we do have rights, and as courts have affirmed, and legal scholars you spoke with explained, that includes people having the right to publicly record law enforcement, does it not?
Exposed by CMD (9/9/25)
MCC: Yeah, it’s a foundational right. The Supreme Court has upheld it time and time again. But it makes law enforcement very uncomfortable. For an administration that is deeply committed to crafting its own narrative of what they’re doing, it’s very threatening. And so they’re interested in crafting a legal argument that states that it’s actually “doxxing” to videotape DHS officers, or to find out who they are. And, again, this is just so wildly against basic understandings of what our Constitution means.
JJ: We keep hearing that it’s “interfering” in their actions, that you can record as long as you don’t interfere in their actions. But then, as you report, some states are sort of suggesting, well, if you get anywhere near them, that’s interfering. And at a certain point, it means you really don’t have the ability to witness their actions at all.
MCC: Yeah. And to be clear, yeah, that’s for state and local law enforcement, that they’re just saying, “Oh, you need to step away.” Kristi Noem is actually claiming, identifying DHS officers and videotaping them is violent. It’s illegal. You should be prosecuted for it.
And one of the most positive things that’s happening these days is grand juries are not indicting people on these ridiculous charges. So the most extreme Trump-appointed federal prosecutors are really having a difficult time getting indictments, when the history is a grand jury will “indict a ham sandwich.” So that’s a step forward. But I think the administration is still deploying arguments that are exceedingly dangerous, for sure.
Trash dumped on an ICE agent’s lawn. “Prominent politicians are actively encouraging these attacks by demonizing federal law enforcement,” a DHS press release (7/11/25) complained.
JJ: One point that you have noted is that once you hear this top-down definition that just recording ICE agents—and I appreciate the distinction between state and local law enforcement, and what Noem is saying—but once you accept that videotaping ICE agents is violence, then maybe you need to look again at the DHS’s claims that there’s “escalating violence” against agents, right? We ought to reinterpret that in light of that.
MCC: Yeah, the numbers are constantly shifting. They’re refusing to provide basic information about what this supposed increase in violence against DHS officers means or represents, or is actually true. And then the kind of examples they’ve given are an ICE officer had a bunch of trash dumped on their lawn, with a sign that said “F__ this ICE officer” by name. That might be littering or trespassing, but that’s not violence. So it’s a very different thing.
So, again, I think if those are the concrete examples that the administration is pointing to, then I think that we have a lot of reasons to be very skeptical of their claims that there’s some kind of dramatic uptick in violence against ICE and DHS officers.
JJ: It’s kind of like looking in a funhouse mirror, because our lyin’ eyes, evidently, are telling us that there actually is violence happening, and it’s against reporters, and other witnesses. We do have knowledge of that, right?
MCC: Yep, absolutely. And against the people they’re going after.
JJ: Yeah.
MCC: And putting people in four-point restraints, or forcing people to be in detention camps where there’s no access to clean water or sanitation, how is that not violence? But, again, the administration doesn’t see people who are on the receiving end of immigration enforcement as possibly being impacted by their violent actions; they think that people deserve it.
JJ: So it’s not even violence if it’s aimed in the right direction.
I’m going to ask you about media in a second, but you did just refer to grand juries refusing to indict, and we have seen other developments, like you wrote about the LA District Court judge who offered an injunction barring DHS officers from dispersing and threatening or assaulting journalists and legal observers. So there is pushback, there is resistance, to this oppressive effort from the White House, right?
MCC: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s definitely a step forward that the judge decided to issue a preliminary injunction. But I think there’s real risks. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has historically been the least right-wing federal appeals court, has really made some terrible decisions, clearly just trying to kowtow to the right-wing Supreme Court. So I think that there’s a real risk that that injunction will either be overturned, or not be able to be meaningfully enforced, because appeals court judges and the Supreme Court are so deferential to the administration.
JJ: And I just saw some information about, and I won’t have the specifics, but a person who was charged with writing pro-Palestinian graffiti, and the jury said, “This is vandalism. He should get probation.” But the judge said, “You know what? I’m going to put him in jail. I’m going to overrule what you’ve said and put him in jail.” So the law has many points of entry, and we can’t relax just because one judge says something that seems supportive.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: “It’s an extremely dangerous time for the free press, and it’s critically important that journalists not be kowtowing to this administration.”
Let me ask you, finally, you’ve been a reporter for many years. This is a story where language matters so much, where if you just accept someone like Noem’s statement that recording an ICE agent is violence, and we know that “violence” is going to slip into “terrorism” tomorrow, if it hasn’t already, and then all of that legal weight will be brought to bear, and it matters very much who you believe, and what you think the law actually is, and who your sources are. So I would just ask you, finally, what you generally make of news media coverage, what it is doing, what it could do and should do on this set of critically, crucially important issues?
MCC: Yeah, I’d start with saying every journalist and member of the public should listen to Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, where she says language is agency. It’s an act with consequences. And that’s one of my first things that comes to mind, with the funhouse mirror world that we’re living in with this administration.
But I think, yeah, it’s an extremely dangerous time for the free press, and it’s critically important that journalists not be kowtowing to this administration, not prostrate themselves, even if that’s what their bosses want them to. CBS: Now is the time to put up or shut up, keep doing your job until they have to fire you. And then if they fire you, fight back and go on strike. This administration needs reporters to step up and actually report on what’s going on.
JJ: Leave it all on the field, if you will. I appreciate that.
We’ve been speaking with investigative journalist Matthew Cunningham-Cook. His work on this issue is up at ExposedByCMD.org, as well as at the American Prospect and Rolling Stone, and no doubt other outlets. Matthew Cunningham-Cook, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Ahmed Saeed Tazaz’a, 20, died in Israel’s Megiddo prison in August 2025. He was never charged or tried—and his death was never covered by US corporate media.
The different treatment accorded to the plights of Palestinian and Israeli prisoners by US corporate media illustrates a persistent double standard that treats some people as more human than others.
Take 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ahmed Saeed Tazaz’a, whodied in Israel’s Megiddo Prison after nearly three months of illegal detention, according to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs (CDA), an agency of the Palestinian Authority (8/3/25).
Tazaz’a, who was from Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank, was imprisoned on May 6 of this year without a charge or a trial. He was held under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention,” which locks up Palestinians indefinitely “on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future,” according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Tazaz’a did not suffer from prior health problems before his arrest, according to his family (WAFA, 8/7/25).
There are currently some 3,613 Palestinians under administrative detention in Israeli prisons, according to the July 2025 CDA report, and more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli custody (not including those held in military camps) in total. Even Israel’s own military intelligence only identifies a quarter of its detainees from Gaza as “fighters,” while human rights groups and Israeli soldiers have reported even fewer—roughly 15%—as Hamas members (Guardian, 9/4/25).
The CDA reports that Tazaz’a was the 76th identified Palestinian to die in Israeli custody since October 7, 2023.
And yet, while the fates of Israelis held captive by Hamas regularly make front-page news, US corporate media have not reported on Tazaz’a’s death—much less investigated it. Among the few news outlets to report his death were the Palestine News & Information Agency (WAFA, 8/7/25), Yemen News Agency (8/3/25), Haaretz (8/6/25), DropSite (8/3/25), Middle East Monitor (8/4/25) and Middle East Eye (8/19/25).
“There is no value for life”
Since January 1, 2025, the CDA and foreign media have recorded at least 13 deaths of Palestinians held captive by Israel:
Musab Al-Ayadeh, age 20, at Ofer Prison (died on 8/25/25);
Ahmed Saeed Tazaz’a, 20, at Megiddo Prison (reported 8/3/25);
Ibrahim Adnan Ashour, 25 (6/23/24, revealed on 1/29/25);
Mohammad Sharif al-Asali, 35 (5/17/24, revealed on 1/29/25).
The Associated Press (4/1/25) interviewed the family of Walid Ahmad, 17, reportedly the youngest Palestinian prisoner to die in an Israeli prison since October 7.
Of these 13 deaths, only one—that of 17-year-old Brazilian-Palestinian Walid Ahmad—prompted any coverage in US corporate news outlets, according to a FAIR search of the US Newsstream Collection on ProQuest and supplemental Nexis and Google searches. Ahmad died in Megiddo Prison on March 22, reportedly the youngest Palestinian to die in an Israeli prison since October 7. The Associated Press ran two original reports about Ahmad’s death (4/1/25, 4/6/25, plus a brief followup at the end of another piece—4/11/25) that a few other outlets republished, and CNN (4/6/25) ran one original report .
On April 1, the AP published a detailed report by Julia Frankel headlined “A Palestinian From the West Bank Is First Detainee Under 18 to Die in Israeli Prison, Officials Say.” The article reported that Ahmad “was held in an Israeli prison for six months without being charged [and] died after collapsing in unclear circumstances.” It noted that his father said Ahmad “was a lively teen who enjoyed playing soccer before he was taken from his home in the occupied West Bank during a predawn arrest raid”; his family said he was arrested “for allegedly throwing stones at soldiers.” (Stone-throwing is an all-too-common charge levied against Palestinian children by Israeli forces, according to a July 2024 Save the Children report.)
The piece offered the context that “rights groups have documented widespread abuse in Israeli detention facilities,” that Megiddo prison “has previously been accused of abusing Palestinian inmates,” and that “conditions in Israeli prisons have worsened since the start of the war,” in all three cases linking to its own previous reporting. In its conclusion, the article reported that “an autopsy is needed to determine the cause of death. Israel has agreed to perform one but a date has not been set.”
AP correspondent Sam Mednick followed up on April 6 with a shorter article on the outcome of that autopsy, headlined “Palestinian Teenager Who Died in Israeli Prison Showed Signs of Starvation, Medical Report Says.” Mednick cited a report from Dr. Daniel Solomon—a gastrointestinal surgeon who was “granted permission to observe the autopsy by an Israeli civil court”—which confirmed that Ahmad “likely suffered from inflammation of the large intestine, a condition known as colitis that can cause frequent diarrhea and can in some cases contribute to death.” Solomon’s report “did not conclude a cause of death, but said Ahmad was in a state of extreme weight loss and muscle-wasting.”
Mednick also quoted Dr. Lina Qasem Hassan, the head of the board for Physicians for Human Rights Israel, saying that Ahmad
suffered from starvation that led to severe malnutrition and in combination with untreated colitis that caused dehydration and electrolyte levels disturbances in his blood which can cause heart rate abnormalities and death.
“We will demand our son’s body for burial,” the piece quoted Walid’s father Khalid Ahmad as saying. “What is happening in Israeli prisons is a real tragedy, as there is no value for life.”
Palestinian prisoners: not newsworthy?
By all measures, the AP’s stories were well-sourced, humanizing and put into appropriate context—yet few other US outlets picked them up. The Boston Globe (4/1/25) ran the first piece on its website, as did PBS (4/1/25); the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (4/2/25) ran a two-paragraph version in a news roundup. The Los Angeles Times didn’t run the first piece, but it was the only US newspaper we found to publish a full-length version of the followup that we could find on either ProQuest or Nexis.
The Wall Street Journal (4/2/25, 4/7/25) ran brief, digest-style versions of the two stories. The Washington Post (4/7/25) ran a similarly short version of only the second story, while the New York Times seemed to have not picked up either at all.
CNN (4/6/25) is the only other US corporate news outlet to publish original reporting on Ahmad’s cause of death. The network obtained a copy of the autopsy report, which
described signs of severe weight and muscle loss, including loss of muscle mass at the temples, a sunken appearance at the abdomen and “almost absent muscle mass or subcutaneous fat on trunk and extremities.”
“Autopsy findings suggest that Walid suffered from extreme, likely prolonged malnutrition as observed by his deeply cachectic state and complaints of inadequate food intake since at least December 2024,” it said. “It needs to be noted that malnutrition increases the risk of infectious complications including severe sepsis,” it added.
International and independent accounts
Independent outlet Drop Site (6/1/25) published an in-depth look at the abuses of Palestinian prisoners rampant across Israeli prisons.
It’s not particularly difficult for US journalists to find details about these deaths—including the unlawful conditions and/or abuse causing or coinciding with them—as the details are extensively documented by their overseas counterparts (mainly in the Middle East). Some independent US media, such as DropSite (6/1/25) and Infinite Jaz (8/10/25), have also reported in recent months on deaths within Israeli prisons beyond that of Ahmad.
Among the disturbing allegations found in international and independent press accounts, and human rights reports:
WAFA (5/4/25), Arab News (5/4/25) and Middle East Eye (5/4/25) reported that Najem “suffered from chronic illnesses and was denied proper medical care during his incarceration,” which were accusations made by the CDA and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society. Qods International Agency (5/5/25) reported similar abuses.
Yemen News Agency (5/8/25) reported that Fanouneh, al-Batsh, Haniya, al-Asali and Ashour “were civilians with no affiliation with resistance factions, and died as a result of torture in Israeli slaughterhouses and deliberate medical neglect.”
Yemen News Agency (7/30/25) also reported Nasr “died under harsh and degrading detention conditions,” citing a Hamas statement.
The CDA (1/14/25), citing a conversation with a “recently released detainee,” reported Znaid “was suffering from an advanced stage of scabies, during which occupation authorities deprived him of life-saving medical care, leading to his killing.” Citing a Hamas statement, Iran’s Press TV (1/13/25) reported Znaid was killed due to ‘“torture and brutal measures.”’
WAFA (7/17/25) reported al-Rifai “suffered from heart problems before his detention and required intensive medical follow-up,” according to medical reports provided by his family.
London-based Reuters (2/17/25) quoted Palestinian medic and ambulance worker Tarek Rabie Safi on Mussab Haniya: “This young man was strong, but due to lack of food, lack of drinks and frequent torture, he was martyred before our eyes.”
And these deaths are only the latest chapter in a long, well-documented history of abuse in Israeli prisons. From Israel’sillegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 to 2006 (the most recent data available), Israel had imprisoned more than 800,000 Palestinians (OHCHR, 6/9/23); an updated figure would likely be much higher. Of these prisoners, 314 have died in Israeli custody (CDA, 8/25/25).
In 2024, at least a few deaths of Palestinian prisoners were covered by US corporate media outlets, including those of Dr. Adnan Ahmad Albursh, chief of orthopedics at Al-Shifa hospital (New York Times, 5/3/24) and Iyad al-Rantisi, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia (Washington Post, 7/1/24). The Journal notably published an article (more than 2,500 words) about how the deaths of Albursh and other imprisoned Palestinians “fuel allegations of abuse” (8/8/24).
The abuses within Israel’s Sde Teiman military detention center were also highlighted in US corporate media outlets, including the Post (6/5/24), Journal (7/30/24), BusinessInsider (5/11/24), and, most thoroughly, CNN (5/11/24) and the Times (6/6/24).
In 2025, meanwhile, the Post and Times sometimes placed details about Israeli prison conditions below Palestinian prisoners’ alleged ties to terrorism and/or terrorist acts (Washington Post, 1/25/25) (New York Times, 3/7/25).
In 2025, the Times also published an article (2/19/25) about Sde Teiman headlined “Israeli Military Prosecutor Charges Five Reservists With Abuse of Detainee.” It failed to name the detainee, writing that he “was identified only by his initials.”
The lack of US media attention in 2025 cannot be attributed to a lack of either abuses or available leads. In July, an exposé by Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/6/25) showed Megiddo Prison to be one of the more brutal of Israeli prisons. The report revealed “medical neglect,” including the “rampant spread” of scabies and a “high probability of an outbreak of a contagious intestinal disease” leading to diarrhea and weight loss, which was also caused in part by reduced food rations. Routine violence at Megiddo Prison is also prevalent, including gas spray in the prisoners’ faces, baton beatings, kicking and the assault of inmates with fists or clubs.
Haaretz described the deaths of two Palestinian prisoners, one of whom suffered “broken ribs and a broken sternum” and was “severely beaten in the head before his death” and another of whom suffered from “broken ribs, a damaged spleen and severe inflammation in both of his lungs.” Such conditions had previously been documented repeatedly by the CDA (4/13/25, 4/13/25, 5/28/25) and Addameer (3/14/25, 5/12/25).
The Haaretz article expanded on the death of Ahmad, including that he “collapsed in the prison yard and died.” Haaretz included the doctor’s finding that Ahmad “had almost no fatty tissue left in his body, suffered from colon inflammation and was infected with scabies.”
Haaretz also reported that, when asked whether the autopsy “led to any action,” the Health Ministry “refused to provide details.” The article included input from a 16-year-old inmate, identified by Haaretz under the pseudonym “Ibrahim,” who said that after Ahmad’s death, “the violence decreased but didn’t stop.”
No corporate US news outlet has covered or followed up on Haaretz‘s report.
By comparison, the US corporate press has put far greater focus on Israeli prisoners held by Hamas—highlighting along-documented double-standard.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groupsabducted at least 252 people from Israel to the Gaza Strip—a little more than 2% of the reported current Palestinian prisoner total. About 20 were “members of Israeli Security Forces, many of whom have since been killed in captivity” (United Nations, 6/10/24). Since then, 148 Israeli prisoners have been returned alive to Israel, along with the remains of more than 50 others. As of July 31, 50 more Israelisremain held by Hamas, though the IDF believes 28 of these are dead (Times of Israel, 7/31/25).
Since January 1, 2025, we found that the remains of 21 Israelis captured on October 7, 2023, have been returned to or recovered by Israel (CNN, 9/15/25). Every one of these Israeli prisoners was mentioned in news coverage in US corporate newspapers in 2025, according to our ProQuest analysis. At least seven of these Israeli prisoners were mentioned or featured in front-page news stories in 2025:
A photo captioned “Hamas with a coffin bearing the photo of Kfir Bibas, an Israeli infant who was taken hostage with his parents and brother” appeared on A1 of the February 21 New York Times print edition (2/21/25). The next day, a “news analysis” article (2/22/25) about the deaths of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons appeared onA1 of the print edition. The Bibas family was also mentioned on A1 of the February 23 Washington Post print edition (2/23/25).
Gad and Judi Haggai were mentioned on A1 of the March 19 USA Today print edition (3/19/25).
Yousef and Hamza Alziadana were featured on A1 of the January 12 Washington Post print edition (1/12/25).
To be clear, media should be reporting on Israeli captives—not just on their deaths, but when they are released as well, detailing their experiences.
It only serves the interests of the Israeli government, however, for US corporate media to foreground the plight of Israelis held by Hamas while failing to do so for Palestinians in Israeli captivity—especially when the latter are a part of what many nations, politicians, scholars, experts and others deem a “genocide.”
Israel “shot at and killed civilians, some of whom (including children) were holding makeshift white flags,” according to the UN report (CNN, 9/17/25). “Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.”
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a report on September 16 that charged Israeli authorities and security forces with having committed, and continuing to commit, acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The 72-page report, replete with 495 footnotes, was compiled by senior independent rights investigators appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Specifically, the report concludes that Israel is responsible for committing four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely:
(i) killing members of the group;
(ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
(iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
This report brings the UN into line with leading human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Oxfam, all of whom have explicitly labeled Israel’s crimes in Gaza genocidal. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) also recently passed a resolution stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.
The corporate press relayed the IAGS resolution to its readers and viewers with varying degrees of emphasis and efficacy. Writing for FAIR (9/4/25), Saurav Sarkar highlighted the fact that the New York Times (9/1/25) “buried the news in the 31st paragraph of a story headlined ‘Israel’s Push for a Permanent Gaza Deal May Mean a Longer War, Experts Say.’”
Fox News (9/17/25) spun the UN report on Israeli genocide as an anti-UN story.
Corporate coverage of the United Nation’s latest report was also of varying seriousness. The New YorkTimes (9/17/25) decided that it was appropriate to relegate the headline that “Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, UN Inquiry Says” to page A8 of its print edition. Granted, the UN finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was mentioned on the front page, only under the heading “Israeli Ground Forces Push Into Gaza City, Forcing Many to Flee: Assault Deepens a Humanitarian Crisis.”
ABC (9/16/25) similarly treated the UN report as a footnote, referring to it in the final moments of a minute-and-15-second report on the assault on Gaza. Fox News (9/17/25) covered the news in the course of rebuking the UN, going so far as to put the label of “genocide” in quotes. While the Wall Street Journal (9/16/25) included the most recent genocide allegations as a subhead, the only mention we could find on MSNBC‘s website (9/18/25) came in an opinion piece headlined “The New Gaza City Offensive Is a Disaster. Trump Is Shrugging.”
The Washington Post (9/16/25) ran a piece on its website about the UN declaration, but did not find it worth a spot in its print edition.
Some corporate outlets, such as CNN (9/17/25) and Time (9/16/25), have given more appropriate emphasis to the news that the world’s preeminent governing body has officially labeled what is happening in Gaza genocide, offering dedicated articles.
‘Help spread the Israeli narrative’
Jerusalem Post (9/15/25): “At a time when Israel faces growing isolation around the world, the largest-ever delegation of US lawmakers, representing all 50 states, arrived in Israel.”
On the same day the UN released its report, approximately 250 US state legislators, representing all 50 states and both parties, were in Israel for a “50 States, One Israel” conference sponsored by the Israeli government. The Jerusalem Post (9/15/25) characterized it as “the largest-ever delegation of US lawmakers” to Israel.
According to ethics disclosures reported in the Boston Herald (9/14/25), Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Alan Silvia’s trip to Israel for the conference cost $6,500. The Herald said Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would “reimburse, waive or pay for travel expenses, though it was unclear what portion of the costs the government planned to cover.”
Quoting Rep. Ilana Rubel (D-Idaho), Boise State Public Radio (9/17/25) reported that no Idaho taxpayer funds were used to send any of five Idaho state legislatures to the conference.
The Oregon Capital Insider (9/18/25) reported that Rep. Emily McIntire (R-Ore.) “said in an email from Israel that traveling to the country has always been a dream for her, and the trip has only solidified her support for Israel.”
In this connection, the Times of Israel (9/7/25) was open about the purposes of the conference:
The ministry stresses the [“50 States, One Israel”] delegation’s strategic importance, noting that state legislators often influence anti-Israel bills, such as those supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Israel hopes the visitors will help block hostile legislation at the state level and promote initiatives combating antisemitism and strengthening US/Israel ties.
The visit was previously announced as part of a broader campaign launched last month to host some 400 delegations involving over 5,000 participants by year’s end, “to help spread the Israeli narrative in international media,” according to the ministry.
Mondoweiss (9/25/25): “’50 States, One Israel’ occurred amid growing international solidarity against the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Israel’s further isolation on the world stage.”
Alert readers may have noticed that this article has only cited local, independent and Israeli sources about the “50 States, One Israel” conference. (See also Columbus Dispatch, 9/17/25; Georgia Public Broadcasting, 9/15/25; Mondoweiss, 9/25/25.)
At the time of this writing, the “50 States, One Israel” conference is conspicuously absent from all existing reporting on Israel in the national US corporate media. Not one major US outlet has covered the largest delegation of US state legislators to Israel. This is a startling act of omission on the part of the corporate media in the United States, and it speaks to the indispensability of local, not-for-profit, independent news.
Given that half of US voters believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 8/25/25), it is surely in the interest of the public to know if, when, why and that their local representatives were in Israel networking with parties to what the UN has labeled a genocide.
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Tim Karr about media capitulation for the September 19, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Even listeners who don’t track the business part of the media business will know that Disney‘s ABC has suspended, in their language “indefinitely,” the late-night talk show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, declaring the comedian’s comments about MAGA responses to the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk so unacceptable as to warrant silencing.
A search for the reasons a journalistic outlet would make such a decision could start with the response to it. Donald Trump said, “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” And new FCC chair Brendan Carr thanked Nexstar Media Group, which owns and operates many ABC stations, and had promised to preempt Kimmel, for “doing the right thing.”
So Trump and the head of a media conglomerate and the head of the federal agency charged with advancing the public interest in media just happened to share a very specific understanding of what the “right thing” is when it comes to censoring political views. But that’s not quite the whole story.
Joining us now to talk about what is neither starting nor ending with Jimmy Kimmel is Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tim Karr.
Tim Karr: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
JJ: Jimmy Kimmel talked about right wingers trying to “characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” and doing everything they can to “score political points from it.” FCC chair Brendan Carr called that the “sickest conduct possible.”
So right there, we can just sit with that for a second. A Fox host called for unhoused people to be given lethal injections—“just kill ‘em,” Brian Kilmeade said—but that didn’t amount to actionably “sick” conduct. So what does is failing to praise a person who said—well, actually, you’re not supposed to say what Charlie Kirk actually said, because that in itself is somehow unfair to his legacy, and in fact will put a target on you.
We’re obviously in the topsy-turvy here, rhetorically, where recounting someone’s hateful speech is hateful speech, because when he said it, it was God’s merciful love, or a hyper-intelligent debating technique, or whatever it is they come up with tomorrow. But it’s all the more reason to keep our own heads on straight, and to address what’s happening, which clearly this is just one piece of.
So what, concretely, has happened here? How should we understand it?
TK: All of the headlines of the past week have dealt with the death of Charlie Kirk, and—at least for the part of the story that you and I are particularly interested in—the media’s response to that. And there has been a concerted effort, across mainstream media outlets, to kind of canonize, to literally whitewash Charlie Kirk’s history, so that some of the horrible things that he has said, and he has said many horrible things, are no longer referenced.
And obviously, we have this incident, we have this response. We have now the story of ABC deciding to let Jimmy Kimmel go, or at least to suspend his programming. And what it is, is part of a larger pattern. What we’ve been doing at Free Press, through the Media Capitulation Index, is looking at the largest media companies, 35 large media companies, and measuring the degree to which they have capitulated to President Trump.
And this is all part of a project by the Trump administration to basically control the message, to control the media. And they have been more effective in this administration than he was in his first administration, of figuring out where those pressure points are.
And those pressure points are often with massive media corporations that have business before government. They’re seeking approval of a merger, as is the case with Nexstar and TEGNA, as was the case for Paramount.
And in order to get onto the government’s good side, they have to capitulate. They have to do whatever the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, tells them to do, and whatever the White House tells them to do.
So while what we’re seeing is one outrageous incident, I think people need to understand it’s part of a pattern, an extortionate pattern, where the government, the White House, is shaking down media owners in order to get them to follow the Trump agenda.
JJ: Some folks might think “extortion” is a heavy word, but FCC chair Carr said:
We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
This is not several steps away from extortion. “You are looking for a merger, you’re looking for beneficial federal policy, and we as a federal agency want you to change your tune. So, you know, what’s gonna happen?”
That’s not how policy and lawmaking are meant to work.
TK: Well, no, Carr’s language feels like it comes straight out of The Godfather, right? It’s like, you can either work with us, or you can work against us. And while he has been taking a victory lap—this is Chairman Carr at the FCC—every time one of these companies capitulates, there are bigger questions about whether the FCC should be in the business of doing this. Obviously, there are First Amendment restrictions against government interference in editorial content.
Tim Karr: “Unfortunately, the companies that have the freedom to report on it aren’t willing to take up their constitutional right, and speak truth to power.”
It’s a First Amendment story. And, unfortunately, the companies that have the freedom to report on it aren’t willing to take up their constitutional right, and speak truth to power—in this case, speak out against this extortion that’s happening at the hands of Brendan Carr and the Trump White House.
JJ: It’s so dispiriting, and not to stay at the level of language, but the twisting of language, and elite media’s resistance to untwisting it, rather than just saying, “Well, some say, others differ,” is just galling. I mean, Carr said:
We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. If there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their license in to the FCC.
It’s a very—you could say “creative,” you could say “weaponized”—use of the term “public interest,” isn’t it?
TK: Yes. The public interest, as far as the Federal Communications Commission is concerned, is largely that the agency, when it’s doling out broadcast licenses—we all own the public airwaves, and the agency hands out licenses—is to promote—this is one of the founding principles of the FCC—is to promote diversity (and that’s become a loaded term), localism and competition.
And what they’ve done, claiming it to be in the public interest, is they’ve rooted out diversity within these companies. And already media companies are largely owned by wealthy white male individuals. But they’ve also, through the approval of mergers, they’ve gotten rid of competition.
And they turned their back on localism. As you merge local news companies, local television stations, local radio stations, you get these economies of scale, where they use syndicated content, rather than local reporting, to cover the news program for these many stations that they now own.
JJ: So it’s important to understand how structure affects content. Sometimes when we talk about “ownership,” it sounds abstract, because people are thinking about what they saw on the television last night. But this is where these things connect. And this is why an understanding of media concentration, media consolidation—this is where it meets the idea of, if you don’t want to see folks fired for not appropriately eulogizing Charlie Kirk, this is why you need to understand who owns your local station.
TK: Yes. And the problem is that many of these owners are billionaires who have massive corporate empires. You look at the owner of the Washington Post, for example: Jeff Bezos also has a company called Blue Origin, which is in space exploration. And they have bids in for billions of dollars worth of government contracts, contracts from NASA, essentially, to help put US spaceships into orbit.
So when you have these massive corporations, you also have massive conflicts of interest. And someone like Jeff Bezos has clearly demonstrated he’s more interested in the bottom line, in his profits, than he is in the principles behind the First Amendment. So he has manipulated the Washington Post in ways that allow him to wrest editorial control from a lot of the journalists who work there.
JJ: It matters, again, very much how the news media that we still rely on cast this fight that we’re in, and cast this situation that we’re in, and we don’t really see an independent press fighting valiantly against moneyed interests and state power. And if we don’t cast the fight in the way that the fight really is, then people get confused about what’s happening, and what meaningful intervention might look like. So I just want to ask you, what would good journalism—and I know it’s out there, I know it’s happening—what does it include, what does it exclude, that we need?
TK: So as I mentioned earlier, when we did the Media Capitulation Index at Free Press, we looked at the 35 largest media companies, and judged their level of independence versus compliance, and in the worst case, acting as pure propagandists. What we found is that size does matter, but in the wrong ways.
These companies are too big not to fail. That is, when you get to a certain size, a media company like Paramount or Disney becomes so entangled with government, because they have so many competing interests, that they fail in their mission to act as the Fourth Estate, as a check against the powerful, and speaking truth to abuses by politicians and billionaires and others.
But as you get smaller, you’re finding more and more local, independent, many times noncommercial outlets that are doing good journalism, because they don’t have these corporate overlords who are making decisions based on their bank accounts.
JJ: Right. And folks should look out for those, and find ways to contribute at that level.
Also, I know that Free Press is saying, “Call your ABC affiliate about…”—if we come back to the Kimmel firing, and I understand that people might think that that’s not so meaningful, but talking back to big media is still a muscle that we need to exercise to get it strong.
TK: Yeah. I think, one, you need to shame these media outlets that are doing such a poor job of protecting our democracy. But there are also other things you can do in public policy.
The FCC, which is unfortunately under Chairman Carr at the moment, makes a number of important decisions about the shape of our media, about how much consolidation they will allow. Members of Congress, obviously, are very involved in these policies as well. So in addition to going directly to the source—the media company—I think it’s incumbent on people to be aware of these structures, the policies that have created the media system that we have today, and also for people to understand that they have some agency in changing those policies.
That’s the work that we’ve done here at Free Press, is we’ve brought a public voice. We brought the real public interest back into these debates over the future of our media, and now, more than ever, is an opportunity for people to speak out.
JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Tim Karr. He’s senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net. Tim Karr, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This same headline the BBC (9/18/25) used could run nearly every day.
The Israeli military unleashed a large wave of air strikes on densely populated towns in South Lebanon on Thursday, September 18—although you’d never know it from the Western corporate media, who have increasingly lost interest in reporting on Israel’s unceasing war on its northern neighbor. This proceeds unabated in spite of a ceasefire, brokered by the United States and France, that ostensibly took hold last November. Prior to Thursday’s strikes, area residents were given an hour to evacuate.
The BBC (9/18/25) was one of the few corporate outlets that managed to find a bit of space for these events, under the headline, “Israeli Air Strikes Hit Southern Lebanon.” The outlet noted that
an Israeli military spokesman said the targets were infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah and in response to the group’s attempts to re-establish activities in the area. He provided no evidence.
The piece also explained that Israel “has carried out air strikes on people and places it says are linked to Hezbollah almost every day, despite a deal that ended the war with the group in November.”
Reuters (9/18/25) managed an even shorter writeup—and took Israel’s word for it in the headline: “Israel Attacks Hezbollah Targets in South Lebanon.”
No casualties were reported in these particular attacks, but the fiery spectacle naturally sent a whole lot of people fleeing in terrorized panic. The fact that such terrorism by the state of Israel transpires “almost every day” is perhaps part of the reason the media have largely relegated it to the realm of non-news.
Another part of the reason might be that outlets are too busy serving as apologists (FAIR.org,4/11/25, 4/25/25, 6/6/25) for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the nearby Gaza Strip, which Israel launched in October 2023, and which has thus far officially killed more than 65,000 Palestinians, including 20,000 children—although this is likely a grave underestimate.
‘Along the border’
US Ambassador Elizabeth Richard (Baffler, 8/19/25) said the new embassy sends a “strong message” to Lebanon that “we intend to continue the spirit of cooperation and partnership that has defined our journey together for 200 years.”
It was the momentum of this very genocide—and the accompanying astronomical increase in America’s already-astronomical financial and military assistance to Israel—that spurred Israel to once again go after Lebanon (pardon, “Hezbollah infrastructure”). Between October 2023 and November 2024, Israel killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon and injured nearly 17,000 (Al Jazeera, 8/7/25).
In the seven months following the “ceasefire” agreement, another 250 people were killed, as the New York Times (7/9/25) acknowledged in one of its sporadic reports on Israel’s “near-daily strikes,” while also acknowledging that the Israelis had “held onto five positions along the border in violation of the agreement.” Had the paper wanted to be precise, it might have specified that these five positions are not simply “along the border,” but rather entirely within Lebanese territory.
Speaking of occupying Lebanese territory, it bears mentioning that the US is currently wrapping up construction of a gigantic fortress in the hills overlooking Beirut, which will soon serve as the country’s new embassy. It “dwarfs any government facility in Lebanon,” as observed by Lebanese journalist Habib Battah in an article for MERIP (4/10/24).
Boasting a trapezoidal swimming pool and buffed marble courtyard, the “19-structure ziggurat” also comprises a “labyrinth of megalithic blast walls emerging from deep excavation pits.” In other words, it’s the perfect setting for the US to continue strong-arming Lebanon into disarming Hezbollah, which, in addition to being one of Israel’s pet nemeses, has long been a thorn in the side of US empire, complicating America’s pursuit of regional hegemony.
And while Lebanese President Joseph Aoun is fully on board with the disarmament plan and the handing over of Hezbollah’s weapons to the Lebanese army, he warned in the aftermath of Thursday’s air strikes that the “silence of the states sponsoring the ceasefire agreement is a dangerous failure that encourages these attacks.” It is hardly a stretch to add that media silence similarly encourages such aggression, adding an extra layer to the impunity Israel already knows so well.
Given that Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanese history that has proved capable of defending the country from Israeli predations, pretending that Israel isn’t continuously bombing Lebanon during a “ceasefire” also seems like a pretty good way of denying that there is any further need for Hezbollah. The Lebanese army, for its part, has not once managed to protect the nation from its bellicose neighbor to the south—a failure directly related to the US’s longtime “security cooperation” with Lebanon’s armed forces.
When corporate media outlets do find themselves obliged to document Israeli strikes on Lebanon, this is done in typically decontextualized fashion. Hezbollah are generally understood to be the “bad guys”; rarely is it mentioned that the group owes its very existence to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, greenlit by the US, that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, and occurred in the context of a brutal 22-year Israeli occupation of South Lebanon.
‘Governments have been largely silent’
Given the scant coverage of Israeli attacks in the region, following the IDF’s X account can be informative—if you understand that when it says “military targets…responsible for distributing propaganda messages in the media and psychological terror,” it means “journalists” (CPJ, 9/19/25).
On Sunday, September 21, there was a relative flurry of corporate media activity after reports emerged that four of the five people killed in an Israeli drone strike on the South Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil—three of whom were children—were US citizens. The four got top billing, for example, in the CNN headline “Four US Citizens Killed, Including Three Children, in Israeli Strike on Lebanon, Says Lebanese Government,” with the fifth, non-American victim banished to the text of the article (9/21/25). CNN has now updated the headline as follows: “Five Killed in Israeli Strike on Lebanon, But Claim Some Were US Citizens Is Being Disputed.”
Indeed, the frequent selectivity of media coverage means it is sometimes easier to keep up with Israel’s activities in Lebanon by checking the Israeli military’s English-language X account—although the content must first be translated from Israel-speak about “terrorists,” “precision strikes” and so forth.
On Thursday, the same day as the underreported attacks on South Lebanon—and one year and one day after Israel detonated personal electronic devices across the country in an unprecedented terrorist attack, killing 12 and wounding thousands—the army’s X account broadcast another attack on eastern Lebanon that was unreported by the corporate media.
The next day, Friday, there was so much news out of Lebanon that the Xpost required bullet points, including one registering that “a Hezbollah ‘Radwan Force’ terrorist was eliminated in Tebnine, southern Lebanon.”
Bullet points were incidentally also necessitated the previous week when Israel slaughtered 31 journalists in air strikes on Yemen—another of the no fewer than six countries that Israel managed to attack in the span of 72 hours. The Xversion of this particular event began by claiming that the Israelis had “struck military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime in the areas of Sanaa and Al Jawf in Yemen.”
As the Washington Post (9/19/25) noted, the Israeli army “did not respond to a request for evidence of military activity at the site” where the journalists were struck. But why bother presenting evidence when you are never, ever held accountable? Even the Post found it worth remarking that “governments have been largely silent on the Israeli strike.”
‘Raising fears for truce’
The New York Times (7/9/25) expresses “fear for truce” that it reports has been violated by Israel on a “near-daily” basis—but puts the onus on Hezbollah to disarm “amid fears of a wider war.”
As for intermittent media silence on Lebanon, one effect of this is to normalize Israel’s unending war on the country. And yet sometimes it does have to be talked about at length, as in the aforementioned New York Times article (7/9/25) acknowledging Israel’s “near-daily strikes” that ran under the headline “Israel Launches New Ground Incursion in Lebanon, Raising Fears for Truce.” No kidding.
This article was occasioned by the visit to Beirut of US special envoy Tom Barrack, who was set to receive the Lebanese government’s response to the “road map” to Hezbollah’s disarmament. The Times reported: “Just hours before Mr. Barrack’s visit, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon,” while the “announcement of renewed Israeli ground operations came shortly after” his arrival. Following his meeting with President Aoun, Barrack nonetheless declared himself “unbelievably satisfied” with Lebanon’s response to the disarmament plan.
Fast forward to September 18 and the Reuters (9/18/25) nod to the South Lebanon air strikes, which includes this detail:
The Lebanese army warned on Thursday that Israeli attacks and violations risked hampering its deployment in the south, and could block the implementation of its plan to end Hezbollah’s armed presence south of the Litani River.
Which makes one wonder if perhaps an end to the war on Lebanon isn’t what Israel wants at all.
This week on CounterSpin: The St. Louis Post-Dispatchreports new rules from St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer about building data centers in the city, basically calling on builders to address their impact: “Will they support artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency mining? How much energy and water will they consume? How many permanent jobs will they provide? How will they limit pollution and noise?”
The questions might sound weird to people who don’t understand that something so vaguely named as a “data center” is actually a physical thing in real neighborhoods affecting real people. Mayor Spencer says, “We want to be open for business…. But we do want to be thoughtful in the regulation that we’re putting forward.”
That’s a rule we could use reporters to follow, but it’s a safe bet that many people relying solely on the press don’t understand what’s involved materially, much less what’s at stake, with what the Post-Dispatch describes as “an industry that is at once driving development and prompting backlash across the country.”
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, is a new report from the group MediaJustice. They keep an eye on developments in media and technology, and try to center conversations about the inequities around them in the voices of communities most harmed. We spoke with Jai Dulani from Media Justice, and with Vivek Bharathan from the No Desert Data Center Coalition in Tucson, Arizona.
Also on the show: While media were seeing who to fire for their insufficient worship of a racist, a Fox host called for killing homeless people, said oopsie, and went right back to his job.
News media are comfortable talking about killing unhoused people, in large part because they never talk with them as human beings, or about homelessness as something that could happen to anyone. We learned from Keith McHenry last summer; he’s an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. We’ll hear part of our conversation with him this week on CounterSpin.
New York Times headline writers (9/22/25) localized a nationwide protest, and got to use one of their favorite verbs—“clash.”
Marching through streets and blocking access to trains, highways and docks, tens of thousands of Italians called for solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza on Monday during a one-day general strike marked by dozens of demonstrations.
So read the first line of a New York Times item (9/22/25) on massive protests in Italy.
Given a lead like that, you might think that the Times’ online item on the protests and strikes in Italy would deserve a prominent place on its website. But if you’ve followed their coverage of Palestine, and action like strikes more broadly, you’d be unsurprised to learn that this story about grassroots opposition to genocide was buried in a stream of updates on high-level diplomatic negotiations around Palestinian statehood (New York Times, 9/22/25).
By way of contrast, at the same time, the Times home page was promoting threeseparatestories on the Trump administration’s attempt to link autism to Tylenol, and a feature on whether reptiles have moods—no doubt important stories, but perhaps less so than tens of thousands of people going on strike and in protest against genocide.
At least the Times did cover the Italian mass mobilization; there was only a smattering of online coverage among US corporate media outlets. While much of the rest of the world treated it as a significant story (Al Jazeera, 9/22/25; Reuters, 9/22/25; Guardian, 9/22/25), CNN (9/22/25) ran a 43-second video segment. NBC News (9/22/25) similarly had a 27-second video segment online. The Associated Press (9/22/25) ran a roughly 500-word story.
Common Dreams‘ Brett Wilkins (9/22/25): “Italian labor unions led a massive 24-hour general strike on Monday to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in dozens of cities across Italy.”
With most major corporate sources in the US abdicating their responsibility to cover this story, that AP story was carried in small outlets in the US that either don’t have the budget or the inclination to have a reporter based in Italy (Washington Times, 9/22/25; Times West-Virginian, 9/22/25; Daily Corinthian, 9/22/25).
The other major source for small outlets was a story by the Agence France-Presse (Yahoo, 9/22/25), which was carried in outlets like the High Point (N.C.) Enterprise (9/22/25), El Paso Inc. (9/22/25) and Redwood (Calif.) News (9/22/25).
That’s all US readers who relied on corporate media would have to go on to learn about the tens of thousands on strike and in protest in Italy. (Followers of independent US media would be better informed—Middle East Eye, 9/22/24; Common Dreams, 9/22/24; Drop Site via X, 9/22/24.) Perhaps it’s not surprising that the story got so little coverage, given that it combined two of corporate media’s least-favorite subjects: solidarity with Palestine and ordinary people working together to try to change the world.
NBC News (9/20/25): “Journalists who cover the Defense Department at the Pentagon can no longer gather or report information, even if it is unclassified, unless it’s been authorized for release by the government.”
The Trump administration has said it will require Pentagon reporters to “pledge they won’t gather any information—even unclassified—that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey,” the Washington Post (9/19/25) reported. It added that even being in possession of “confidential or unauthorized information, under the new rules, would be grounds for a journalist’s press pass to be revoked.”
The National Press Club (NBC, 9/20/25) called the rules “a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the US military.’” Even right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe (The Hill, 9/20/25) came out against the restrictions, saying the US government “should not be asking us to obey.”
Other Trump loyalists stood with the government decision. “For too long, the halls of the Pentagon have been treated like a playground for journalists hungry for gossip, leaks and half-truths,” long-time Republican activist Ken Blackwell said on Facebook (9/20/25). He added that “reporters have strutted around the building like they owned it.”
The authoritarian impulse
James Risen (Intercept, 1/3/18): ” The Obama administration used my case to destroy the legal underpinnings of the reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit…. That will make it easier for Donald Trump and the presidents who come after him to conduct an even more draconian assault on press freedom in the United States.”
The US government has always been aggressive when it comes to undermining the press’s ability to obtain government information, especially when it pertains to national security. The pooling system for frontline correspondents in the first US war against Iraq in 1990–91 has long been considered one of the most draconian acts of wartime censorship in recent US imperial memory. The US under the elder President George Bush regularly detained press who dared to report on the war independently and without the restraint of government minders (New York Times,2/12/91; Human Rights Watch, 2/27/91).
This authoritarian impulse only accelerated in the post-9/11 age (Extra!, 9/11). The Justice Department under then-President Barack Obama obtained “two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press,” AP (5/13/13) reported, in an apparent “investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.”
Former New York Times journalist James Risen (Intercept, 1/3/18) documented his ordeal with the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, which took legal action against him to force him to release sources:
My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.
Full-throttle attack
Donald Trump (USA Today, 9/18/25): “They give me only bad publicity or press…. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
The new Trump directive transcends this already anti-democratic tradition of suppressing national security and military information, and takes the nation into new authoritarian and absurd territory.
For one thing, telling Pentagon reporters to avoid unreleased information is like telling a fish to avoid water. Recall that top Trump administration officials accidentally includedAtlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal chat about an attack on Yemen. To quote Mark Wahlberg from The Departed, “Unfortunately, this shithole has more fuckin’ leaks than the Iraqi navy.”
Now the Pentagon is saying it will only credential reporters if they promise to be stenographers for the department’s press team, regurgitating press releases and spokesperson talking points, and avoid independent interviews and investigations. This is happening as the White House has iced out reporters from the AP for not relabeling an international body of water at the president’s directive (FAIR.org, 2/18/25), while bringing administration sycophants like Brian Glenn and Tim Pool into the presidential press herd.
Journalist access is only one piece of the Trump administration’s full-throttle attack on the free press. The president “said overwhelming negative coverage of him by television networks should be grounds for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke broadcast licenses” (USA Today, 9/18/25). He threatened ABC’s Jon Karl, saying the attorney general will “probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly” (Deadline, 9/16/25). More television and online new outlets are coming under the ownership umbrella of Trump allies (FAIR.org, 9/19/25).
Imperial bellicosity
Independent (7/15/25): “Trump’s airstrikes in Yemen have reportedly killed as many civilians within the eight-week bombing campaign as in the previous two decades of US attacks targeting militants in the country.”
It is especially chilling that this directive came from the Pentagon. The US has the most powerful military in the world, and it is the taxpayer’s largest expense after Social Security. Despite assurances from right-wing media that Trump would be a peace president (Compact, 4/7/23), he is in fact delivering a ferocious brand of imperial bellicosity.
Trump carried out nearly as many airstrikes in the first six months of his second term as the hawkish Joe Biden did in four years (Independent, 7/15/25). Almost as many civilians were killed in his attacks on Yemen as were previously killed in two decades of strikes against that nation (Airwars, 6/17/25).
Trump dropped 14 of the world’s biggest non-nuclear bombs on Iran, weapons that had never been used against an enemy before. He boasted of using the military to murder supposed Venezuelan drug smugglers, hundreds of miles from US shores. He resumed shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, even as he encouraged Tel Aviv to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza (Guardian, 1/26/25).
Meanwhile, he’s deployed the military domestically, vowing to use it to carry out mass deportations , renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War, firing top officers who disagree with him.
If there’s ever been a time when we need an independent press keeping a close eye on the military, and listening to dissenting voices, it’s now.
Resisting Pentagon dictates
Reuters (9/21/25): “Any effort by the US government to limit journalists’ ability to cover the news undermines fundamental First Amendment protections and constrains the free flow of information that is critical to informed public debate.”
Thankfully, some news organizations are speaking out against the Pentagon’s new edict (Reuters, 9/21/25; CNN, 9/22/25). The New York Times called it an “attempt to throttle the public’s right to understand what their government is doing”; the Washington Post said that “any attempt to control messaging and curb access by the government is counter to the First Amendment and against the public interest.”
All major news organizations can and should fight this, in the public and in court; a ban on reporting any unauthorized information clearly violates the First Amendment, and any prior restraint is regarded as constitutionally suspicious.
News outlets should also bear in mind that reporting on the military does not necessarily require being physically present in the Pentagon. As the brave correspondents showed who defied the US military’s patronizing pooling system in the Gulf War, some of the best reporting is done outside official channels. An independent press corps with no physical access to the Pentagon is infinitely more valuable to democracy than a press corps that has pledged to only report officially sanctioned news.
With the firing of Karen Attiah, the Washington Post no longer has any full-time Black columnists.
For many years, the nation’s capital was known as Chocolate City, owing to its sizable Black population, which in the 1970s topped 70%. These days that moniker is less used, as DC’s Black population is now a little over 40%.
This dramatic fall is due to runaway gentrification, which has made an already unequal city all the more so. One study from 2016 found that DC’s white families have an astonishing 81 times the wealth of Black families. At what point, I wonder, does a city pass from unequal to apartheid-like?
That’s a question probably best tackled by a Black columnist. But as of September 11, when Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post, DC’s paper of record has none who are full-time. They’ve all fallen by the wayside, as the paper is remade in the image of Donald Trump.
This is being done so that Jeff Bezos, the Post‘s owner since 2013, doesn’t see his companies lose out on multi-billion dollar federal contracts, as happened during Trump’s first term, when the president became enraged at the Post’s coverage of him.
“He’s prioritizing his other businesses over the Post,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25) in February. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and his space company Blue Origin in 2000. Baron pointed out:
Amazon has a big cloud computing business. Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government. Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is he going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.
“The way Bezos is undermining a major institution that he owns is crazy and tragic,” former Post columnist Joe Davidson told FAIR in an email. “His public coziness with President Trump is unworthy of the owner of the Washington Post.”
Devoted to dear leader
Washington Post opinion editor Adam O’Neal, brought in to make the Washington Post more like the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
To carry out the Washington Post’s MAGA makeover, Bezos tapped two men, who make an interesting pair. At the top is Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis, a hopefully sober and definitely scandal-plagued Brit who cut his teeth doing Rupert Murdoch’s dirty work in London, and now wishes that chapter of his life would stop resurfacing. With Lewis apparently in “a state of hiding,” however, we’ll focus on the other guy.
That’d be Adam O’Neal, a 33-year-old former Wall Street Journal editorial writer whom Bezos and Lewis tapped to helm the Post’s vaunted opinion page.
Right out of the gate, O’Neal decreed that the Post will be “unapologetically patriotic,” parroting Bezos and Lewis. In practice, this has resulted in an opinion page devoted less to the country than to its dear leader.
Just three of many examples:
On the first day of Trump’s military occupation of DC—the Post’s own hometown—the paper welcomed the putsch with an editorial (8/11/25) that began, “President Donald Trump is putting on quite the show to project strength on crime.”
The next month, when Trump called for corporations to no longer issue quarterly reports—an effort to hide the negative effects of his tariff regime—a Post editorial (9/17/25) called it “a daring suggestion.”
And when Trump called for once again putting US troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the Post (9/20/25) said it “isn’t a bad idea.”
If Trump turns on a dime tomorrow and says the opposite, expect the Post opinion page to do likewise. If anyone under O’Neal has a problem with that, they can resign—as record numbers have, Black columnists in particular.
“The Post has long struggled with diversity issues, like most of America, but now diversity among columnists is another casualty of Bezos’s leadership,” said Davidson, the former Post columnist, who was a founding board member of the National Association of Black Journalists.
“Nearly all of the left-leaning writers, myself included, accepted buyouts, as it became clear that the Post would not want our content,” Perry Bacon, another of the Post’s recently departed Black columnists, wrote in the New Republic (9/15/25). “Attiah opted to stay. I was worried that her time at the Post would not be long, and it was not.”
“Black journalists, like Black activists and politicians, are often the people in their profession most willing to discuss America’s shortcomings forthrightly and urge the country to do better,” Bacon continued. “For example, Attiah and [former MSNBC host Joy] Reid were two of the most prominent voices at their organizations calling for the United States to change its policies toward Israel to prevent the mass deaths of Palestinian civilians.”
But in a tense meeting this summer, O’Neal encouraged Attiah to do like many of her colleagues and take a buyout, according to Status (8/13/25). Attiah should do this, O’Neal explained, since her work no longer aligned with the Post’s new direction.
Attiah, however, decided to stay.
‘Right out of Goodfellas‘
Sen. Ted Cruz: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threat to ABC was “dangerous as hell” (New York Times, 9/19/25).
In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s shooting on September 10, getting rid of troublesome voices has become easier. The most prominent example has been at ABC.
Trump had called without success for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be taken off air in July, but after Kirk’s death, Trump’s FCC commissioner Brendan Carr made it happen for his boss. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr publicly threatenedABC and its affiliates over carrying Kimmel’s show. Within hours, the Disney-owned ABC caved.
“I’ve got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, an ally of Carr, said in response. “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
“Who is hiring these goons?” asked David Letterman, the former late-night host. “We all see where this is going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good.”
Kimmel was purportedly yanked over his benign comments about Kirk’s death. But his real offense may have been showing how Trump couldn’t be bothered to mourn his friend’s death, even as he insisted the rest of the country do so.
When asked how he was holding up in the wake of Kirk’s death, Trump breezily offered four words—“I think very good”—before turning unprompted to more important matters, namely the White House ballroom he’s building. “It’s going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure,” Trump rambled on. “It’ll get done very nicely, and it’ll one of the best anywhere in the world, actually.”
It’s an extraordinary clip of Trump, one Kimmel played to great effect just before his suspension (clip via the New York Post):
Trump was quick to gloat over Kimmel’s sacking, and then he pivoted to his next targets —late-night hosts Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon, who have also mocked Trump, as has Stephen Colbert, who in July had his show cancelled for next year, much to Trump’s delight.
Trump’s wheels were now turning. If he can cancel critical late-night hosts, what’s to stop him from doing the same to journalists on those same networks?
“The newscasts are against me,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.” The networks, Trump continued, are “getting free airwaves from the United States government” and should therefore show more deference to him.
Decrying corporate cowardice
John Oliver (Last Week Tonight, 9/22/25), noted that Jimmy Kimmel pointed out “that many on the right seem desperate to weaponize Kirk’s death, an argument that’s aged pretty well, given, you know, everything that’s happened to Kimmel since.”
As Trump ratcheted up his censorship, civil society roared back.
“In the days since ABC’s decision, at least five Hollywood unions, collectively representing more than 400,000 workers, publicly condemned the company,” the New York Times reported (9/22/25):
The screenwriters’ union decried what they called “corporate cowardice,” and organized a protest last week outside the main gate at Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. Damon Lindelof, a creator of ABC’s Lost, said that if Mr. Kimmel’s program did not return from suspension, he couldn’t “in good conscience work for the company that imposed it.” Michael Eisner, a former chief executive of Disney, issued a rare rebuke on social media on Friday, as well. Some conservatives expressed misgivings, too.
Elsewhere, over 400 entertainers joined Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Meryl Streep in signing an open letter organized by the ACLU. The Trump administration’s moves against Kimmel mark “a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation,” the letter read.
Many canceled their Disney+ subscriptions in protest, including talk radio host Howard Stern, who said on his show Monday, “Someone’s gotta step up and be fucking saying, ‘Hey, enough, we’re not gonna bow.” And Tatiana Maslany, who starred in a series that aired on Disney+, called on her Instagram followers to hit the company where it hurts, writing, “cancel your @disneyplus@hulu@espn subscriptions!”
Comedians also used their platforms to stand with Kimmel and lampoon Trump. “The Epstein list won’t be released but Jimmy Kimmel will be?” Sam Morril asked on Instagram.
Kimmel’s fellow late-night hosts went hard in the paint. On Last Week Tonight (9/22/25), his HBO show, John Oliver took the opportunity to speak directly to Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“Giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time,” Oliver said, before referencing the $15 million Disney paid Trump back in December to make his weak defamation lawsuit go away:
Instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school?… The only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away, and that is “Fuck you. Make me.”
The collective pressure worked, and ABC agreed to put Kimmel back on air beginning Tuesday night.
Still, many cities, including DC, won’t be able to watch the show on TV, because Nextstar and Sinclair, the two largest owners of ABC affiliates, still refuse to air the program.
‘Refusing to tear my clothes’
The kind of opinion you’re not likely to see in the Washington Post (10/13/23) anymore.
Also joining in the defense of Kimmel was a former president mostly known for staying out of the fray. “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level,” former President Barack Obama wrote (Bluesky, 9/18/25). Obama tied the silencing of Kimmel to that of Attiah, writing of her firing:
This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent—and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.
Like Kimmel, Attiah had also commented on Kirk’s killing, questioning how America can decry gun violence but not guns, or the white men who frequently wield them to such deadly effect.
“Political violence has no place in this country,” Attiah wrote on Bluesky (9/10/25) in the hours after Kirk’s murder. “But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence…. America is sick and there is no cure in sight.”
Attiah also quoted Kirk’s racist comments about Black women, and wrote, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is…not the same as violence.”
The scourge of political violence is not new to Attiah. As the Washington Post’s founding global opinions editor, she recruited and edited Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote critically about his home country of Saudi Arabia in the pages of the Post until October 2018. That’s when Khashoggi was dismembered in Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate by operatives working at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to a US intelligence report.
As a Post columnist herself, Attiah carried Khashoggi’s torch forward. In the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack, she presciently warned of Israel’s coming genocide on Gaza.
“The United States cannot stand by and allow Israel to carry out the collective punishment it has declared it will exact,” Attiah (10/13/23) wrote six days after October 7. “It cannot stand by as Israeli officials engage in genocidal language and describe genocidal intent against Palestinians for the actions of Hamas.”
Attiah also called out the coordinated effort to silence anti-war voices in the US. In a column (6/11/24) headlined “No one should be surprised a Black politician is the canary in AIPAC’s coal mine,” Attiah wrote:
“Shut up or else” is the message a pro-Israel lobby is sending to Black lawmakers in America who are critical of what’s happening in Gaza. The front line is New York’s 16th Congressional District, where Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) is facing one of the most expensive primary challenges in history.
‘The integrity of our organization’
Karen Attiah (Golden Hour, 9/15/25): “Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will still carry on the light.”
Despite 11 years at the Washington Post, and multiple journalism awards, Attiah was fired the day after Kirk’s killing “without even a conversation,” she wrote on Substack (9/15/25). The letter from Post HR chief Wayne Connell accused her of “gross misconduct” and “poor judgment” by making comments that “disparage people based on their race, gender or other protected characteristics.” He charged that Attiah’s posts “harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.”
Attiah’s termination letter is “ironic,” said Joe Davidson, because “it is Karen who is endangered by the death threats she received in the wake of her firing.” He added:
It is the actions of Jeff Bezos that have harmed the integrity and credibility of his own company, as evidenced by the thousands of cancelled subscriptions and the many resignations of fine journalists.
In firing Attiah, the Post “flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes,” according to the Washington Post Guild, which said the paper has “also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech.”
This summer, when Adam O’Neal told Attiah that her work didn’t align with the paper’s new direction, he was right. It was a damning indictment— not of Attiah, but of the Washington Post.
When readers asked Snopes, the popular urban legend–dispelling website, to look at a claim about Charlie Kirk’s take on stoning gays, the site’s headline (9/16/25) was definitive: “Charlie Kirk Didn’t Say Gay People Should Be Stoned to Death.”
The claim originated when a clip from Kirk’s podcast was circulated in which the right-wing organizer criticized children’s musical performer Ms. Rachel for supporting Pride month. Ms. Rachel had explained her support by quoting Matthew 22 from the Bible—which, Ms. Rachel correctly summarized, says that when questioned about the “greatest commandment,” Jesus replied that it is “to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
The clip showed Kirk, opening in mid-sentence, saying:
…is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death, just saying. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.
Snopes‘s Nur Ibrahim reprints this quote and writes:
The above clip does not show the full context of Kirk’s comments. Kirk did not directly advocate for stoning gay people to death. We searched through footage and clips of him discussing LGBTQ+ issues and did not find evidence of him stating outright that gay people should be stoned to death; rather, he quoted the Bible as part of an argument about how others selectively choose quotations. As such, we rate this claim as false.
It then offers that “full context” from the show, quoting Kirk at length:
She’s not totally wrong…. The first part is Deuteronomy 6:3–5. The second part is Leviticus 19. So you love God, so you must love his law. How do you love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth, not by confirming or affirming their sin. And it says, by the way, Ms. Rachel, might want to crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser reference—part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters. Now, so how do you best love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth. Don’t be cruel…. I would love for Ms. Rachel to respond to this: Is pride a Christian value? She thinks it is. Happy Pride Month everybody!… In fact the Scriptures tell us the opposite. “Pride goeth before the fall.”
Snopes concludes its analysis:
Kirk was not saying that gay people should be stoned to death; rather, he was quoting the Bible in an effort to show how Ms. Rachel was being selective in her interpretation of the Scripture. However, we should note that in the same comment, Kirk called the section about stoning, “The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
Reuters (9/13/25) noted that some of the people on a website doxxing “Charlie’s Murderers” were “critical of the far-right figure while explicitly denouncing violence.”
Well, gee, why should you note that, Snopes? Ibrahim doesn’t explain.
Set aside Kirk’s own straw man argument that pretends Ms. Rachel quotes Leviticus rather than Matthew. It is true, as Ibrahim writes, that Kirk did not “directly advocate for stoning gay people to death.” And yet the straightforward way to read a self-professed Christian—and biblical literalist—characterizing a chapter of the Bible as “affirm[ing] God’s perfect law” is as an endorsement of the laws in that chapter—in this case, condoning the stoning to death of non-celibate gay people.
Snopes offers no reason for us to doubt Kirk’s sincerity about his belief in the scripture he quoted—whether or not he was trying (speciously) to paint Ms. Rachel as cherry picking—and therefore no justification for its definitive “false” rating. At a time when intense state and right-wing cultural pressure (Al Jazeera, 9/13/25; CBS,9/16/25; Reuters, 9/13/25, 9/16/25) seeks to sanitize and censor accurate recountings of Kirk’s beliefs, it is all the more important for those claiming to set the record straight not to bend over backwards to accommodate that pressure.
ACTION ALERT: Please ask Snopes to reevaluate its finding that Charlie Kirk was not endorsing the stoning of gays when he called the practice “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
One of the “Trumpy billionaires” (Daily Beast, 9/17/25) taking over TikTok is Oracle‘s Larry Ellison (above right).
Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, is the second-richest billionaire in both the US and the world, and for a brief moment was No. 1 in the world (AP, 9/11/25). But for a long time, unlike many of his peers, he was unable to boast that he controlled a chunk of the news and opinion reaching the American public.
On Forbes‘ US list, he is sandwiched between Elon Musk, No. 1, who bought the social media network Twitter and rebranded it as X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos, at No. 4, has the Washington Post. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Nos. 5 and 6, operate the leading search engine as well as one of the most important news aggregators, Google News. Michael Bloomberg, at No. 13, the former New York City mayor, has Bloomberg and its various outlets.
Ellison seems to have joined the club, as TikTok, under US government coercion (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), is selling 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, along with investment firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz (Reuters, 9/16/25).
Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections (Washington Post, 5/20/22). Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.
‘CBS shifts to appease right’
David Ellison is CBS‘s new owner of record, but his father who bankrolled him may be more responsible for the shift to the right (NPR, 9/12/25).
But owning a big chunk of the US’s leading short-form video platform is not Ellison’s only claim to being a media mogul. Eyeing the corporate media throne, you can almost hear Ellison channeling Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza, confronted with the daunting prospect of competing in computer sales against IBM and Microsoft, declaring: “I’ve got a secret weapon. My son.”
Enter Larry’s son David Ellison, who was born into the kind of riches most can barely dream of. As I wrote for FAIR (7/24/25), the younger Ellison is the CEO of Skydance, which recently merged with Paramount, giving him control over CBS. David’s campaign contributions trend more to the Democratic establishment, but it’s his father’s politics that seem to be reshaping the newly bought network: “CBS Shifts to Appease the Right Under New Owner,” as an NPR headline (9/12/25) put it.
Anti-woke zealot Bari Weiss is nearing “a top role at CBS News,” which “left-leaning staffers at the network fret could amount to ‘dropping a grenade’ in the newsroom,” the New York Post (9/10/25) reported. It added that the network “is weighing naming Weiss editor in chief or co-president of the network,” and that Ellison is looking to buy her “news site, the Free Press, in a deal valued at upwards of $100 million.” According to Reuters (9/15/25), it was David Ellison who “installed Kenneth Weinstein—a supporter of President Donald Trump and the former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute—as ombudsman of CBS News.” (See FAIR.org, 9/9/25.)
‘Pretty hard to be optimistic’
With some hyperbole, the New York Post (9/11/25) says that a $40 billion–plus deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery would be “a rounding error on the Oracle co-founder’s balance sheet.”
The New York Post (9/11/25) reports that Ellison father and son are now looking to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which carries with it CNN, creating an unprecedented level of media consolidation. While the Post said such a purchase could be difficult, because Warner Brothers “has a market cap of around $38 billion,” that might not matter, as “Larry Ellison’s net worth leaped by $100 billion following Oracle’s latest blowout earnings report.” He is “closing in on being the richest dude in the world, with a net worth…of more than $370 billion.”
CNN reports 1.8 million viewers, and CBS reports an average total audience of 1.4 million viewers, for a combined 3.2 million, which eclipses ABC’s 2.3 million, NBC’s 1.4 million and MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers (Forbes, 7/24/25).
The CNN/CBS combo would reach far more Americans through online news, with CNN.com‘s 276 million visits per month already making it the nation’s second-biggest news site. Add CBSNews.com‘s 63 million visits and you’ll have an entity that edges closer to the heretofore undisputed leader, NYTimes.com, with its 425 million visits a month.
Former CBS Evening News star Dan Rather (Hollywood Reporter, 9/15/25) said Americans “have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets.” Rather added, “It’s pretty hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of the Ellisons buying CNN.”
‘Not a sign of a healthy democracy’
Fast Company (9/16/25) notes that Paramount and Warner Bros. would become “the biggest studio in the world.”
Fast Company (9/16/25) summarized the dangerous nature of the deal this way:
If the Warner Bros. Discovery deal were to go through, Ellison would control streaming services with a combined 200 million–plus subscribers, says Barclays (though there will be overlap between the Paramount+, HBO Max and Pluto services). It’s something Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned against on X on September 11. The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, she wrote, “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.” Add TikTok’s 170 million–plus users and one of the hottest properties in the social space, and you get to a position of dominance in the media….
“It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption,” says Steven Buckley, lecturer in media and digital sociology at City St George’s, University of London. Others have pointed out that the potential playbook, if this were to go ahead, draws comparisons with Elon Musk’s takeover of a social platform to dominate public discourse. Musk has previously taken credit for helping Trump secure the White House in 2024 through his positioning of X as a supportive social network….
“It is naive to think that over time [Ellison’s] business and political philosophy, combined with the external political pressures from this and future administrations, wouldn’t have an impact on how the American public experience TikTok,” Buckley says.
Conservative media capture
Even before the Ellisons bought them, the Hollywood Reporter (9/15/25) noted, CBS and 60 Minutes were under pressure from the previous owner: “The program needed to back off Trump.”
The United States has seen a tremendous amount of conservative media capture since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Bezos has moved to cull viewpoints at the Washington Post that might offend Trump (BBC, 2/26/25), Zuckerberg has taken steps to make Facebook friendlier to MAGA (NBC, 1/8/25) and Musk has turned X into a vehicle for his far-right politics (AP, 8/13/24; NBC, 2/16/25). All three men sat together at Trump’s inauguration.
The Los Angeles Times under billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has also made strenuous efforts to be more Trump-friendly (FAIR.org, 10/24/24; Independent, 12/17/24; NPR, 2/3/25; Guardian, 3/5/25).
Both Ellisons, the Hollywood Reporter (9/15/25) said, “have shown support for Trump in the past,” and they certainly buck the rising outrage against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “Paramount, under its new owner, David Ellison, has become the first major Hollywood studio to condemn a boycott of Israeli film institutions that more than 4,000 actors and directors now support,” the New York Times (9/13/25) said.
With the Trump regime shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; NPR, 8/1/25), the space for semi-skeptical media is shrinking as the space for regime-friendly broadcasters (Fox News still beats out both CNN and CBS in terms of viewers) is growing.
As for social media, given that Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founders are also Trump supporters, it seems that, along with Ellison, these oligarchs could steer TikTok in the same direction as Facebook and X (TechCrunch, 7/16/24).
Worse, critics of TikTok’s Chinese ownership fretted that data collection of American users eventually led to surveillance by the Chinese government. Data collection is a given with social media generally, but now that power rests partly with Ellison, who has gotten rich off such technology. Fortune (9/17/24) reported, “Oracle founder Larry Ellison…sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.” And funnily enough, an AP investigation (9/9/25) showed that Oracle was among the many Silicon Valley firms whose technologies have supported Chinese surveillance systems.
Just imagine what he could do with a large social media network like TikTok.
Rather and others are right that the Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy. And given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.
