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January 14, 2025

‘Right Beneath the Surface Is This Level of Fury at the Way Things Are, and a Willingness to Act’: CounterSpin interview with Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on independent media and the year ahead

Janine Jackson interviewed Rising Up!‘s Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders and Friends‘ Laura Flanders about independent media and the year ahead for the January 3, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent reporting, that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us that believe that US society needs to change.

New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a metaphorical fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much-needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism?

We’ll talk about that today with two people who are and have been doing—not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it, and the role it can play.

***

FAIR.org (11/14/24)

Between Donald Trump’s overt threats to use his power to go after his media critics, and many corporate news media’s evident eagerness to preemptively submit, we are in dark days for journalism, and the public’s right to know, and debate, and decide, that good journalism feeds.

The notion that the Chinese character for crisis combines that of danger and opportunity is not really precise etymology, but you can see why that concept has resonance. If we don’t use this time, both to do hard-hitting, smart, independent reporting, and to think deeply about the keystone place independent reporting occupies in a society with democratic aspirations, well, what are we up to? And how do we engage audiences in the collaborative work of that independent, even dissident, reporting?

Sonali Kolhatkar is a journalist, activist and artist. She’s host and executive producer of the radio show Rising Up! With Sonali, author of the book Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine, among myriad other things.

Laura Flanders is also many things, including the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders and Friends, formerly the Laura Flanders Show, airing on PBS stations around the country. She’s author of books, including Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Change in America, and Real Majority, Media Minority: The High Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting. And she is the founding host and producer of CounterSpin.

They both somehow found time to join me now by phone from various parts of the country. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Thank you.

Laura Flanders: It’s great to be with you.

JJ: I think we can start by saying we’re staggered. I think that’s fair to say. It isn’t that we didn’t anticipate the possibility of another emboldened Trump administration, but that doesn’t mean we had our heads around it.

And I just want to ask you both, how do you, first, address questions of, “Well, you’re the media expert, so what now?” Are we allowed to say, “I don’t know”? How do you see your responsibilities to audience, many of them keenly vulnerable and underserved right now? Do you feel like there’s something you’re supposed to be saying or doing in this moment? Sonali, I’ll ask you first.

Rising Up (11/13/24)

SK: Sure. For me, I am looking at it in the way that I think many Americans are looking at it, but aren’t seeing articulated in the mainstream media, which is that this election was not as much a win for Donald Trump and the Republican Party as much as it was a loss for the Democratic Party. It is, over and over again, the Democratic Party—which claims to uphold the ideals that most Americans adhere to, which is the politics of compassion—[that] let us down, and let us down so badly that people are just alienated from the political system.

And so for me, as a journalist, I tend to want to try to go to where young people are. We are playing with their future, right, so what are young people thinking about these days? And I also try to understand the cultural moments that we’re living in, and how we shape culture.

I write about narrative, I think about narrative a lot. So young people are, for example, really, really cheering on the alleged shooter of a health insurance CEO, which you would think might be a bizarre turn of events. But if you look at the situation they’re living in, it makes sense. And young people are culturally in a different place than, certainly, the old guard, and they are hungry for a shift in politics.

And so, for me, I see myself as a journalist thinking about how we win that cultural change, how we start overwhelming the pro-billionaire culture that comes both from politicians, both Democrats and Republicans alike, and our mainstream media. How do we overwhelm that with a narrative that’s centered on collective liberation, which is where a lot of young people are, with a narrative that’s centered on: We are all free when we pool our resources together and fight for one another, and really center justice in our work, whether it comes to fair wages, union representation, healthcare, good jobs, solving the climate crisis, and so on. And so my job as a journalist, is to be part of that cultural conversation that I think we desperately need.

Laura Flanders: “What is important…is that we report on those stories in a way that also gives people some sense of what can be done and is being done.”

LF: I would simply add that I think part of our responsibility, or a large part of what I seek to do, is to provide a contrast to the commercial, corporate, for-profit media. So where, for example, we see our mainstream (so-called) media emphasize people over policy, and love breaks rather than continuities, and situations rather than systems. I think our job is to look at the policies that are playing out in our political system, not just the people, the players, who’s up and who’s down, what’s the success of this candidate versus that one, but which policies are working in which ways, what systems are in place that are leading us to this moment, not just this crisis or that one, prompted by this or that in the last two cycles, perhaps, but ongoing systems, particularly of inequality.

And I think in this last election, we had a lot of discussion of the economy, and you had the sort of pro–Democratic Party media berating American voters for not understanding that the economy was better than they thought it was. You had American politicians doing the same thing. Whereas the reality is, you’re looking at a half century of barely any movement when it comes to most people’s wages. And I think what is important about that is that we report on those stories in a way that also gives people some sense of what can be done and is being done, which is not to make up things, but to report on the ground.

NPR (12/24/24)

In the end of the last year, we saw extraordinary strike action by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers, right during the holiday season. And, again, kind of like that sympathy for Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the healthcare CEO, right beneath the surface is this level of fury at the way things are, and a willingness, even, to act, not always the most well-guided, but willingness and interest in acting.

And if those stories don’t get covered, and we’re only covering what’s happening in Washington, then I think we’re always in this kind of, I don’t know, forward/back, high/low, mood-shift, personality-driven news cycle that doesn’t leave much of a place for real-life people’s engagement. And I think our job is to try to keep people engaged.

JJ: I’m just going to draw you out on that a little bit, because I’ve asked Laura this before: What’s so funny about peace, love and solutions journalism? When you show groups that are, for instance, winning workplace victories, blocking supermarket mergers, increasing minimum wages, they’re developing mutual aid networks that are working around dominant institutions, I don’t understand why some smart leftists think that that’s unserious, or that that’s Pollyanna as news coverage. I just don’t get it.

Truthout (10/20/24)

LF: Well, one of the problems with our human brain chemistry, which apparently responds much better to negative news than to positive, it just has a bigger endorphin rush response to the negative, because we believe we have to act, the fight or flight. So we have biology to deal with. But we also have corporate bias.

And I think it is up to us to figure out how to make some of those good news stories, or at least those engaged activists, democracy stories, as exciting and as inspiring as the rest. And I think we have seen that. I mean, let’s face it, the Amazon warehouse organizers became, for a moment at least, kind of popular heroes. We’ve seen an excitement around the revitalization of the labor movement, which isn’t only personality-based.

Part of the problem, though, is that our media structures, our most influential media institutions, are in the hands of those who are threatened by exactly that kind of organizing. So are the best marketing and media manipulation minds going to be brought to those stories? That’s our struggle.

At the end of the day, we are in a competition for attention, an attention economy, and people like us, Sonali and I, for all of our good intentions, simply don’t have the same kind of resources for bells and whistles that the networks have.

So I don’t want to plead, it’s not a cop out, but we need to exercise special creativity, I think. And you’ve put your finger on exactly the problem: The algorithms don’t work for us, and we have to figure out how to address that.

JJ: Sonali?

Sonali Kolhatkar: “It’s not as much about likes and clicks and algorithms, as much as it is about actually solving the problem.”

SK: I have a bit of a controversial take on this as well. I mean, definitely in full agreement with what Laura said, but let me go a little bit further, and I feel like I’m in the right environment to say this right now with you, which is I think that we have a failure on the left, in left media, because we’ve witnessed this kind of bro-ification of left media that whips up anger. We have the sort of Joe Rogans of the left, too. A lot of dudes, many white dudes, some brown dudes, who will whip up the anger, will feed and fuel the cynicism, because it gets them the clicks, and gets them the follows, and feeds their ego. It doesn’t actually emphasize the solutions, because the solution would mean that maybe they aren’t as necessary anymore.

And I find a huge difference in the way in which communities of color and journalists of color and women journalists are covering solutions, and covering the problems of our world through a solutions lens, because the urgency for us is so real. We’re on the front lines. It’s not as much about likes and clicks and algorithms, as much as it is about actually solving the problem. And I really do feel like we have a reckoning that needs to happen even in the left media.

LF: I love that. And I just want to add that it is nothing controversial to say there’s still some white patriarchy out there that’s holding us back. Totally agree.

JJ: Absolutely. I want to ask you both, were there particular conversations or things or groups or work that you engaged in 2024 that surprised you, or that fortified you for the road forward, or that made you feel like, here’s some sustenance, and just what inspired you in the last year that you think is good to talk about and think about now?

LF: I have to say, and maybe this is controversial, but I have been moved by the determination and insistence of the anti-Zionist movement in this country to continue to raise their voice, to continue to protest genocide in their name, to continue to take to the streets, and to take the media to task, against all the odds, and in spite of the ocean of negative coverage and negative policing that they’ve been subject to.

So I will say I’ve been inspired, I won’t say excited and made happy by, because not enough has changed at the level of policy, and the killing and dying continues at an absolutely unacceptable rate. But I think for a conversation that has been so slow and coming, that fury around the war against all things and places Palestinian, it seems, has been persistent, determined and, as I said, kind of against the odds. So it gives me both courage and determination. If they can do it, I can do it too.

SK: Ditto. One hundred percent. Especially seeing young folks on campuses.

Democracy Now! (3/5/21)

I have really felt inspired by an abolitionist framework that so many, mostly Black women, have led our country into, but it is not getting enough attention. And an abolitionist framework has really helped me see and apply a lens to the world that I feel like we need to shift towards.

So the conversations that I’ve had, which will be interviews published in this book coming out next year, were with people who are doing very, very critical frontline work, and are connecting the dots between racial capitalism and how law enforcement are basically enforcers of racial capitalism, and how in order to achieve collective liberation, we need to address policing and prisons, and move all that money out of the enforcement of racial capitalism into a just world, into collective solidarity, into having an equity economy–and that’s really what an abolition framework is. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that when activists have said “defund the police,” that’s the tip of the iceberg, and there’s 90% of the iceberg below water that involves moving money out of the architecture of death-making institutions, as Mariame Kaba says, and into the public education we desperately need, and public healthcare, publicly funded healthcare, and higher minimum wages and good jobs and all of those things that Americans want.

And having that abolitionist framework has opened my mind up, and I feel like the time has more than come. We need to take this lens and apply it to everything, to defund the military and fund the things that make us safe, which applies to Palestine, right? Defund the police and prisons and apply it to healthcare, the whole conversation around corporate CEOs and how they’re enriching themselves off of people’s misery. An abolitionist framework can apply to everything.

So I’m really inspired by that. That’s my resolution for 2025, is to really start talking in those terms. Because I think when we have the holistic view of the world and how the economy works, we address systemic racial injustice, we address gender injustice, we address corporate CEO billionaires making off with all of our money. So that’s the thing that inspires me now.

JJ: That leads me onto a question that’s kind of a behind-the-scenes question, for listeners. But between us as producers, so much of what we want to do is to bring different people into conversation, to say that the folks, the talking heads, you see on TV are not the only folks you need to hear from. There are a lot of other folks doing important work who have things to say. But we know that those folks aren’t the folks who are waiting by the phone to get on the media, and there’s more work involved in getting those voices into the conversation.

I just wonder, is there anything that either of you would like to say to listeners, like, this goes on behind the scenes, this is part of the work of doing independent reporting. Are there gears and switches that you’d like to just let folks in on, in terms of this work that, obviously we are thrilled to do, but it’s different than just showing up somewhere with a microphone.

FAIR.org (12/16/24)

LF: I’ve been thinking a lot about how the future looks, and how this moment looks, and my next season of the show, and all the rest. And you mentioned at the very beginning, you referred to the kind of preemptive submission of some of the most powerful media in our world, the Disneys of the world, to the oligarchs of the Trump administration. And that kind of anticipatory obedience by the most powerful has been chilling to observe. It’s been chilling, in part, because I think the way that I do my work is to plug into a lot of the networks that I’ve been lucky to be part of over the years.

I mean, none of us does this work alone. Media, as I’ve constantly said, is a plural noun, and if the commercial media’s job is to deliver eyeballs and ears to the advertisers, then ours is to deliver people to each other.

So it’s all about relationship-building, it’s about showing up, it’s about not being in the studio, it’s about being in relationship both to the audience and to the issues, and increasingly to the ever-expanding ecosystem of independent media makers, who are out there. They may not be the bros sounding off behind their computers, but in almost every community these days, there are independent grassroots media who are making their voices heard, who are covering what is happening regionally and locally.

And I think our unique position, Sonali’s and mine and yours, Janine, is that we exist in that middle space between the grassroots and local and the national discussion. So I think that my job is very much, how do we bring those stories that are percolating at the local and regional level into the national debate, into the national discussion, or just to a national audience, and not so as simply to sort of show how great we are, but to showcase the extraordinary wealth of talent and intelligence that exists just about everywhere.

And I raised that in relation to the anticipatory obedience of the powerful, because I have my fears for those journalists who are operating as independent agents at the local level, independently, perhaps, as solo “content creators,” trying their best to create their own brand, which is what so many of them now think is their future, standing alone against the tide. That’s a scary place to be in this moment.

So I’m not answering perhaps the “how” question as much as the “what I think is important” question, and that is for all of us to share the word, as widely as we can, that everybody needs to support their local media creators and the media that they consume, that they benefit from. Whoever it is, pay your pledge, pay your subscription.

The other way we spend most of our time is trying to raise money. I’m not going to complain, but it’s part of the package, and it’s how we survive. So I’m hoping the audience will look around and say, “Who do I want to really support?” If only by sharing, if only by liking, if only by spreading the word.

JJ: One thing that both of you do that not everyone does, including in independent media, is look around the world. We often hear about Americans this and the US that, when we know that so many of us were born elsewhere, have family elsewhere, are connected to people outside these shores. It seems like it’s only US corporate media who don’t acknowledge that we are one interconnected world, and I feel like that’s an important thing that independent journalism contributes, right, is that beyond-the-US worldview. How important is that?

LF: Very. I used the word sanctuary before, and I think as much as we have to think about sanctuary for others who want to come to the United States, I think often of the sanctuary that I find reading the media of other places, covering stories elsewhere. At the same time, though, I will say, in these times, it’s not just sanctuary. It’s kind of solidarity, as we communicate with journalists in Brazil or Hungary or India, and get their experience of what they’ve been through, dealing with their own version of this kind of concentration of power, these oligarchs, this sense of authoritarianism rising.

We all do need to understand that we are in the same boat, and there are things we can learn from one another, and there’s sanctuary we can give to one another. But, yeah, we are not alone on this bus, and that is both a comfort and concern at times. But it would be insane of us, and we would be ignoring a lot of important intelligence and creativity, to focus only on one little bit of this planet, even though our corporate media would have us believe we’re the most powerful and important piece of the planet ever to be born.

SK: It’s weird. I think I used to feel that way more so than I do now, because I feel like our country has become a bunch of mini-countries. For example, just the whole conversation on healthcare in America: If you go on TikTok, and you see the celebrations of Luigi Mangione, there’s a whole bunch of people from other countries, including in the Global South, who are posting comments being sorry for us as Americans, being sorry for us and going, “Oh, you poor things. I’m happy to pay 25% taxes, because I know that my healthcare and everybody’s healthcare is getting covered.”

And I do feel that there are huge swaths of this country that are utterly ignored by mainstream media, by left media. We have an incarcerated population of 1.2 million Americans that are just written off, and we forget to cover them. We have populations of immigrants who are undocumented, and that’s where, first, the globalist view also comes in, that are just written off. We have populations of very, very poor people who are just barely getting by, who never make the consideration.

And so I feel like some on the left I feel aren’t paying enough attention to everything that’s happening in the United States, and we’re focused sometimes even more on the horrible impact that our weapons are having in other countries, as rightfully we should be paying attention, but we’re not also effectively enough linking the dots, to how the money for those weapons is devastating our cities, because we’re just not spending money on them. Actually, I want to see more US coverage in a way that compares us to other nations, and points out how terribly off we are.

Laura Flanders & Friends (10/21/20)

LF: To echo what Sonali said before, in 2016, last time in the first Trump administration, I went off and started reporting on cooperative economics as a model of resistance to fascism in Spain, in Greece, you name it. This time, I’m staying right here. There are a lot of models to report on right here in the US, and we’re going to be doing a lot of that. So I’d be excited to check in with you all, maybe, I don’t know, 12 months from now, what do you think?

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders. You can find their work, their shows, their books—existing and forthcoming—online, as well as on radio and public TV, and I will be putting up links to everything on FAIR.org. Sonali Kolhatkar, Laura Flanders, thank you so much for helping us look into the new year and for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SK: Thank you so much, Laura and Janine, and thanks, Janine, especially for having us on.

LF: Thank you so much, Janine—and Sonali, what a pleasure to be on with you.

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

Remember When Howard Dean Yelling Made Him Unfit to Be President?

Remember when the exuberant yelling of Gov. Howard Dean was enough for corporate media to declare him unfit for the presidency (Extra!, 3–4/04)?

Remember January 2004, when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean yelled in a pep talk to supporters after the Iowa caucus, and elite media declared that his “growling and defiant” “emotional outburst” was patent evidence of unacceptability? Having already declared Dean too excitable—“Yelling and hollering is not an endearing quality in the leader of the free world,” said the Washington Post (8/2/03)—media found verification in the “Dean scream,” which was played on TV news some 700 times, enough to finish off his candidacy (Extra!, 3–4/04). As Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin Group (1/23/04) scoffed: “Is this the guy who ought to be in control of our nuclear arsenal?”

Fast forward to the present day, when Donald Trump states, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

And today’s journalistic response looks like a CBS News explainer (1/8/25), headed “Why Would Trump Want Greenland and the Panama Canal? Here’s What’s Behind US interest.” It’s simple, you see, and not at all weird. “Greenland has oil, natural gas and highly sought after mineral resources.” And you know what? “Western powers have already voiced concern about Russia and China using it to boost their presence in the North Atlantic.”

In an effort to make Trump’s proposal seem rational, CBS (1/8/25) offered a map that made Greenland look like a chokepoint on the all-important Dalian/Rotterdam sea route. In fact, Greenland is more than 1,500 miles from Eurasia—greater than the distance between Boston and New Orleans.

CBS tells us Trump is “falsely alleging” that the Panama Canal is being “operated by China,” but then adds in their own, awkward, words, “China has also denied trying to claim any control over the canal.” Takeaway: who knows, really? Believe what you want. PS—you’re Americun, right?

The New York Times (1/2/25) assured us that,” Trump’s Falsehoods Aside, China’s Influence Over Global Ports Raises Concerns.” The story made it obvious that Chinese companies in charge of shipping ports is inherently scary—what might they do?—in a way that the US having 750 military bases around the world never is.

The message isn’t that no one country should have that much power; it’s that no country except the US should have that much power. That assumption suffuses corporate news reporting; and China threatens it. So whatever China does or doesn’t do, look for that lens to color any news you get.

Featured image: MSNBC (12/23/24)

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

Three Holiday Car Attacks—With Two Different Frames

Three vehicular attacks in public areas shocked the world this past holiday season. First was the attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, which killed six people and injured dozens (Reuters, 1/6/25). Then there was the New Year’s attack in New Orleans’ French Quarter, killing at least 14 people and injuring more (CNN, 1/2/25). A suicide car explosion outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day only killed the attacker, but injured bystanders (NBC, 1/1/25).

In the German case, the Saudi-born suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, had a history of dark social media posts, including a declaration of far-right, anti-Islamic positions. In New Orleans, the killer, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who did not survive the attack, declared his support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In Las Vegas, the suspected suicide bomber, former Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, left behind chaotic anti-government, pro-Trump rants.

Corporate media framed these attacks differently, focusing on Jabbar’s Islamist beliefs but downplaying Abdulmohsen and Livelsberger’s political stances. The right-wing press, predictably, did this to an extreme.

‘The US homeland isn’t safe’

Washington Post (1/3/24): “Islamic State…is still a potent source of radicalization.”

In the New Orleans case, the New York Times (e.g., 1/2/25, 1/4/25) focused on Jabbar’s Islamic radicalization and support for ISIS, using these facts in the leads and sometimes headlines. “New Orleans Attacker Was ‘Inspired’ by ISIS, Biden Says,” read the headline of an early Times report (1/1/25).

The Washington Post did the same, in articles like “Attacker With ISIS Flag Drives Truck Into New Orleans Crowd, Killing 15” (1/2/24) and “Inspired by ISIS: From a Taylor Swift Plot in Vienna to Carnage in New Orleans” (1/3/24).

Jabbar is believed to have acted alone (Wall Street Journal, 1/2/25), although he was clearly inspired by the notorious entity. Because both he and the Las Vegas attacker had served many years in the US military, the incidents raised questions about mental health for active service members and veterans (The Hill, 1/4/25). Jabbar’s brother speculated that mental health issues could have been at play (ABC, 1/2/25).

Yet the acronym ISIS still loomed large in the news stories and headlines, and it is clearly one that can spark fear in the hearts of news consumers.

‘Puzzled over the motive’

Reporting on the Germany attack, CBS (12/30/24) highlighted the possibility of mental illness, not the suspect’s far-right views.

Just as the “Islamic radicalism” framing can whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, where a notorious Islamophobe is set to become president, the Magdeburg suspect’s Saudi origin has explosive potential in Germany’s polarized political moment. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has used the situation to advance its anti-immigrant agenda (Al Jazeera, 12/23/24; Le Monde, 12/24/24). But there’s a twist: Abdulmohsen held and voiced similar political views to the AfD’s.

The New York Times (12/22/24) and the Washington Post (12/21/24), to their credit, did put this fact up top in their coverage. But elsewhere, the coverage was more muddled, focusing more on the possibility of mental illness rather than Abdulmohsen’s professed extremism.

CBS (12/30/24) coverage of the attack placed suspected mental illness in its headline and lead; it wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that we learned that the suspect “has in the past voiced strongly anti-Islam views and sympathies with the far right in his social media posts,” and showed “anger at Germany for allowing in too many Muslim war refugees and other asylum-seekers.”

NPR’s All Things Considered (12/23/24) began by talking about how the far-right AfD is using the attack to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the country’s snap election. It wasn’t until about halfway through that the story acknowledged that police “say, if anything, the suspect claimed, especially on social media, to be an anti-Islamist.”

In other words, coverage of the New Orleans attack centered Jabbar’s professed devotion to ISIS, while coverage of the German attack downplayed Abdulmohsen’s politics, treating them as part of a constellation of factors, including possible mental illness, that could have contributed to the bloodshed.

‘No ill will toward Trump’

A Newsweek headline (1/4/25) declared the Las Vegas attack “not politically motivated”—despite the suspect’s expressed hope that his actions would inspire “military and vets [to] move on DC starting now…to get the Dems out of the fed government.”

The same journalistic approach used in the Magdeburg case was taken when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. While that juxtaposition might make it easy to assume that this was some kind of anti-Republican terrorism, that would be incorrect, according to Talking Points Memo (1/4/25): Documents left by Livelsberger, the truck’s driver who died in the blast,

denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

TPM lamented that news headlines “report only that [Livelsberger] warned of national decline and bore ‘no ill will toward Mr. Trump,’ in the words of one of the investigators,” rendering his political motives vague and outside of the central framing.

For example, an AP article (1/3/25) said only that Livelsberger’s “letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, societal problems and both domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine,” and that he believed the US was “‘terminally ill and headed toward collapse.’”

ABC‘s report (1/4/25) addressed Livelsberger’s support for the president-elect seven paragraphs in. CNN (1/4/25) gave one line in passing to Livelsberger’s support for Trump, Musk and Kennedy. Using a quote from one former Department of Homeland Security official, Newsweek (1/4/25) declared that the attack in Las Vegas was “not politically motivated.” A piece in The Hill (1/2/25) on “extremism in the military” started by citing Jabbar and Livelsberger as examples, but while it described Jabbar’s Islamacist views, it said only that “less is known about the motivation of Livelsberger.”

Fox News (1/2/25) did acknowledge that Livelsberger’s uncle said of him, “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” but it is buried after many other details. Interestingly, it was the New York Post (1/2/25) who directly framed Livelsberger as a super-macho Trump lover, while a long Wall Street Journal piece (1/2/25) on Livelsberger published the same day detailed the man’s personal life with hardly a mention of his political beliefs.

‘War on Christmas’

The Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) tied the German attack into the “war on Christmas” the Murdoch empire has been pushing for two decades.

The US right-wing press was far worse. After the New Orleans attack, Fox News (1/2/25) featured guests who warned that more Islamic terrorism could be on the way, because the attack “could embolden the terrorist organization to radicalize more Americans.”

“It occurred just days after a pro-ISIS outlet called on Muslims to wage Islamic jihad in the US, Europe and Russia,” the right-wing network (1/1/25) reported.

“One obvious message is that the forces of Islamic radicalism haven’t gone away,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/1/25) wrote. “They are still looking for security weaknesses to exploit for mass murder, and the US homeland isn’t safe from foreign-influenced or -planned attacks.”

Meanwhile, Abdulmohsen’s right-wing, anti-Islamic politics didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) from giving column space to neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes, who cited the incident in a piece titled “Why Jihadists Wage War on Christmas (and Other Holidays),” with the subhead, “They despise celebrations not sanctioned by Islam, and see Christmas as a crime against Allah.”

The New York Post (1/2/25) did something similar, allowing Douglas Murray—a younger, British version of Pipes—to cite the German attack in a piece called “From College Campuses to Afghanistan, We Let Islamic Terrorism Rise Again.”

It simply didn’t matter to these Murdoch outlets that Abdulmohsen shared Pipes’ and Murray’s politics. He is Saudi and he committed a crime in Europe, therefore he must be the second coming of Osama bin Laden.

Right-wing terror on the rise

Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to chide Democrats for talking about right-wing terrorism—ignoring the Las Vegas attack the next day that aimed to get Americans to “rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy.”

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to say that the Biden administration had focused too much on right-wing extremism over ISIS threats:

Democrats and liberal media outlets were focused on hyping up terror threats linked to white supremacy while downplaying threats from jihadist terrorist groups like ISIS prior to the New Orleans terrorist attack.

There’s a reason right-wing violence has been in the spotlight, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (6/17/20) noted a few years ago:

Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57%—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25% committed by left-wing terrorists, 15% by religious terrorists, 3% by ethnonationalists, and 0.7% by terrorists with other motives.

The Anti-Defamation League (1/15/23) reported that “right-wing extremist terror incidents in the US have been increasing since the mid-2000s, but the past six years have seen their sharpest rise yet.” The ADL noted that “right-wing terror attacks during this period also resulted in more deaths (58) from such attacks than any of the previous six-year periods since the time of the Oklahoma City bombing,” the white supremacist attack that remains the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history.

A report from the National Institute of Justice (1/4/24) said the “number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

Clearly right-wing political violence remains a threat that requires attention. The handling of the recent vehicle attacks illustrates, however, that corporate media’s instinct is to look away.

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

Dean Baker on China Trade Policy

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

New York Times (12/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like: “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.” (Later followed quaintly by: “A lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”)

But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who a source says “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, “we will be toast.”

The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts”—i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.

OK, it’s Thomas Friedman, but how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally? We’ll talk about China trade policy with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Luigi Mangione.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
January 9, 2025

Media Downplay Israeli Violations of Hezbollah Ceasefire

AP (12/1/24) declares that “a tense ceasefire holds,” following the corporate media rule that violence only counts when it’s directed against Israelis.

Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement at the end of November that required both sides to refrain from attacks on each other. The terms also included a mutual pullback from southern Lebanon after 60 days.

Despite the deal, Israel has subsequently launched repeated strikes on Lebanon against targets it claimed were Hezbollah, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians. The violations began immediately, with Israel attacking journalists and vehicles mere hours after the deal was signed.

Within a week of signing the deal, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israel had violated the ceasefire around 100 times, killing 15 people. Shortly after these initial strikes, Hezbollah launched two strikes into the disputed border zone that it called an “initial defensive and warning response” to Israel against continued ceasefire violations. These strikes did not kill or injure any Israelis. Despite this, Israel responded by continuing its ceasefire violations, killing more and more, bringing the post-ceasefire death toll to more than 30.

Despite the overwhelming number of Israeli attacks in the post-ceasefire period, news audiences have heard that a “tense ceasefire holds” (AP, 12/1/24). Media repeatedly reported on these violations as both sides “trading” or “exchanging” fire (New York Times, 12/2/24; AP, 12/3/24; NBC, 12/3/24; Semafor, 12/4/24; Financial Times, 12/3/24; Wall Street Journal, 12/3/24). While technically accurate, such reporting frames both sides as equally culpable in violating the ceasefire, allowing media to avoid acknowledging that Israel that Israel is by far the primary and more consistent violator.

Defending violations

CBS‘s featured guest (12/3/24) insisted that attacks on Lebanon were just Israel “do[ing] what has to get done.”

Other media went further, fully defending rather than just downplaying Israel’s ceasefire violations. CBS (12/3/24) uncritically reported Israel’s justification for its part of the “back-and-forth violence,” telling audiences that the strikes were on “sites that had been used to smuggle weapons from Syria into Lebanon after the ceasefire agreement.” CBS said Israel’s claims about weapon smuggling “rais[ed] questions about whether the reprieve is really an opportunity for Hezbollah and its allies to regroup,” implying that Israel was justified in preventing such a possibility.

CBS‘s guest was Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the hawkish, pro-Israel Washington Institute. He framed the ceasefire as entirely one-sided, suggesting that Hezbollah was unlikely to abide by the ceasefire agreement and that therefore Israel “would enforce this in their own way,” again implying that that would be justified, rather than being itself a violation of the ceasefire.

“This is the post–October 7 world for Israel,” Matthew Levitt told CBS. “They’re not waiting for anybody else to do what has to get done.”

The New York Times (12/3/24) explained away the one-sided violations in a story headlined “Why Israel and Hezbollah Are Still Firing Amid a Ceasefire.” The subtitle read:

Some violations of the truce, and some amount of violence, are to be expected, analysts say, and do not necessarily mean the deal will collapse and war will resume anytime soon.

The Times stumbled over itself to justify Israel’s attacks, writing that “the Israeli military said it had carried out strikes to enforce ceasefire violations.” It did not attempt to explain what it means to “enforce” a “violation.”

‘Exchanged strikes and accusations’

“A Tenuous Ceasefire Holds” is how the New York Times (12/27/24) described Israeli attacks that have killed 30 Lebanese people.

Since these initial reports, the “both sides” framing has continued. A month into the truce, the subhead of a New York Times article (12/27/24) read, “Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged strikes and accusations of breaches,” despite the body of the text overwhelmingly detailing Israeli, not Hezbollah, attacks. The Times described Israel’s “series of strikes” and “extensive operations in dozens of villages.”

The Times implicitly justified the airstrikes by saying that “most of them” were on “Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Lebanon.” As FAIR (11/9/24) has written, referring to urban neighborhoods as “strongholds” is an effective way to prepare audiences for attacks on civilians.

The Times also justified Israeli attacks on Lebanese villages during the ceasefire by uncritically repeating Israel’s stated justification that the IDF “was dismantling tunnels, confiscating weapons and surveillance systems and demolishing a Hezbollah command center.”

‘Cover for continued aggression’

Drop Site (12/4/24): “The framing of the deal…essentially allow[s] for Israel to continue its military assaults while demanding Hezbollah cease all its operations.”

Israel’s continued aggression despite the ceasefire is not surprising. The country has a long history of violating ceasefires while playing the victim. In this conflict, Israel’s violation was anticipated by all sides. Before the deal was inked, Israel signaled its intention to violate the ceasefire by demanding the “right to strike” freedom of action in the event of a ceasefire. The Jerusalem Post (12/1/24) reported that “sources hinted that under certain conditions, the IDF’s presence in southern Lebanon might extend beyond 60 days.” The US assured Israel that they would support Israel in this scenario (Antiwar.com, 11/27/24).

Maryam Jamishidi, an international law expert at Colorado Law School, told Drop Site (12/4/24):

It basically gives Israel very wide latitude to do what it wants, while completely restricting Hezbollah’s ability to act…. Israel likes to use negotiations, likes to use diplomacy, as cover for continued aggression and continued violations of law. And I think this is probably one of the most egregious, because it is framed as a ceasefire agreement.

The media silence makes it easier for US officials to deny reality while continuing to pay for Israel’s military aggression. Despite Israel’s continued violations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed that the ceasefire is holding. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself under the ceasefire, but when asked about that same right for Lebanon, he demurred, saying he would not go “down a slippery slope of hypotheticals,” and that “these situations are not totally comparable.”

‘We have to conquer and destroy’

“We have to fight the taboo of the border that was established by France and England 100 years ago,” a settler leader told +972 (12/12/24). “We have to settle everywhere.”

Israelis are exploiting the lopsided ceasefire to create facts on the ground that will be difficult to reverse. As the IDF continues to raze villages and advance into the buffer zone, Israelis are setting up camps in preparation for future settlement.

Israeli Magazine +972 (12/12/24) reviewed the Whatsapp chats of an Israeli group founded to advocate settlement in Southern Lebanon. One member of the group made their goals clear: “We have to conquer and destroy. As much as possible, and as quickly as possible.”

A member of the Israeli settler movement for Lebanon explained to Haaretz (1/2/25) that this has been a longstanding goal for the movement: “Everything we know now we also knew before the war—that this is our land…. We don’t need to apologize.” Such sentiments rarely appear in media aimed at US audiences.

The “both sides” framing is allowing Israel to muddy the waters, and justify its presence in southern Lebanon. Israel is now openly threatening to stay past its 60-day deadline, claiming that Israel will be “forced to act” against Hezbollah for supposedly not fulfilling the ceasefire’s requirements. Despite overwhelming Israeli violations, the pro-Israel media bias obscures who is responsible for continued fighting.

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

Why the Right Calls Mangione the ‘Ivy League’ Killer

Fox News (12/11/24) labels Luigi Mangione as a “CEO murder suspect and Ivy League graduate.”

How do murder suspects get their media nicknames? Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been called the “CEO killer” or some variation by ABC (12/24/24) and some of its affiliates (KABC, 12/20/24; KGO, 12/24/24). The name makes sense, as the victim’s stature and the place of his murder—a hotel where a company-related meeting was to take place—was the aspect of the crime that made it sensational news. This is similar to how Theodore Kaczynski became the “Unabomber,” because his targets were universities and airlines.

Yet right-wing media are using a seemingly mundane feature of Mangione’s life—his college degree from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania—to call him some variation of the “Ivy League killer.”

This label serves a few purposes for Republican-aligned media. Clearly, it is meant to deflate the sympathy for Mangione. Coding Mangione as an Ivy Leaguer also codes him as a leftist, occluding what appear to be his much more politically heterodox views; it paints him as an out-of-touch rich kid, rather than an anti-establishment renegade with whom Americans of all walks of economic life might relate.

It would appear that the right-wing press are taken aback by the growing sympathy the American public has with Mangione (Forbes, 12/12/24; Washington Post, 12/18/24; Newsweek, 12/21/24), a result of widespread anger against health insurance companies who inflate their profits through denial of care, high premiums and delaying medical services with cumbersome administrative bloat (AP, 9/12/22; KFF, 3/1/24; Gallup, 12/9/24; Marketplace, 12/13/24).

Focusing on Mangione’s education rather than the target of his attack, the “Ivy League” angle also seeks to turn the resulting policy discussion from one about the broken healthcare system to one about the education system. It promotes the right-wing narrative that academia is full of Marxist professors who indoctrinate vulnerable youngsters with revolutionary ideas, that Mangione is responding not to the objective reality about America’s healthcare crisis but to rhetoric that’s been wrongly instilled in him and many others—and that, therefore, the lesson of this shooting is that the US education system must be reformed by the incoming Trump administration.

‘Morally perverse positions’

New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino (12/14/24) argues for using the IRS to punish private schools that tolerate views he disapproves of.

Numerous articles in the New York Post (12/9/24, 12/10/24, 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/18/24, 12/23/24) make mention of Mangione’s “Ivy League” education. Columnist Charles Gasparino lamented in the Post (12/14/24) that a Penn professor posted on social media support of Mangione. Gasparino wrote that while students there pay “$85,000 a year to be brainwashed with leftism,” big school endowments are the primary “funding source of the progressive indoctrination we have in the college classroom.” The solution, then, is that Trump should go after university endowments’ tax breaks, so that they’re forced to lay off indoctrinating professors.

Princeton undergraduate and pro-Israel activist Maximillian Meyer (New York Post, 12/19/24), who wrote that Thompson’s killing was “rationalized as resistance by a privileged young person with two Ivy League degrees,” likened the attacks on the health insurance industry on his campus to student sympathy with Gazans: “To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed,” he wrote.

“The students who are celebrated as our nation’s most brilliant are often adopting the most morally perverse positions,” Meyer continued. He blamed the “moral equivocation” of educational institutions, and warned that “the reckoning, from elementary school on up, must begin now.”

‘Protect vulnerable young minds’

Scott Walker (Washington Times, 12/12/24): Mangione “sadly personifies the problems in our country’s education system these days…an ardent anticapitalist, a hate-filled opponent of corporations and private healthcare and a proponent of climate change alarmism.”

At the Washington Times (12/12/24), former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made the same point under the headline “College Grad’s Arrest Shows Elite Education Breeds Hate, Not Tolerance”:

The situation on most college campuses since the Covid-19 pandemic has gone from liberal bias to outright indoctrination. Students are not taught how to think critically, but to hate America and abhor those with views that are not 100% aligned with their left-wing agenda… We must hold educators and institutions accountable for pushing these dangerous ideologies on our children and grandchildren. We must also protect vulnerable young minds from anti-American narratives and teach them to respect the values that have made our nation great.

UnHerd (12/10/24), a relative newcomer to Britain’s oversized world of pearl-clutching Tory media (Guardian, 10/28/23; Bloomberg, 9/10/24), attempted to situate Mangione in history, saying “members of the murderous Red Army Faction in Seventies Germany were almost all university graduates”; Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers “was the son of a CEO and graduate of the University of Michigan, a so-called ‘public Ivy.’”

Fox News similarly hyped up Mangione’s “Ivy League” pedigree, regularly applying the label to him in its headlines (e.g., 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/16/24, 12/23/24). “Ivy League Murder Suspect Acted Superior, Did Not Expect to Be Caught: Body Language Expert” read one Fox headline (12/13/24), desperately signaling to its audience that Mangione is not a real man of the masses.

‘Spoiled rich kid’

Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told Newsweek (12/16/24) Mangione showed his “true colors” by hiring a lawyer. It’s not clear who Coffindaffer thinks Mangione should have used as a role model; Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Daniel Ellsberg all had private lawyers.

This theme occasionally bled outside right-wing media borders. Newsweek (12/16/24) made an entire article out of a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) by a former FBI agent, Jennifer Coffindaffer, who called Mangione a “spoiled rich kid” because he hired a high-priced defense attorney. “If Luigi truly believed his rhetoric, he would have gone with the public defender,” Coffindaffer avered, and therefore he’s “a hypocrite, not a hero.”

As FAIR (12/11/24, 12/17/24) has noted, centrist establishment papers like the Washington Post and New York Times, along with Murdoch outlets like the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Fox News, have all used space to shame those with grievances against health insurance companies. They’ve told readers and viewers that, contrary to available evidence and a mountain of lived experience, the situation isn’t that bad, and we should simply accept the system for what it is.

But the right-wing media’s focus on Mangione’s education and family background is an irrelevant ad hominem attack that is meant not only to distract their audience from the well-founded reasons why so many sympathize with the shooter, but to redirect their anger toward the country’s education system, which has for so long been in the right’s crosshairs.

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

‘Media Institutions Have Played a Direct Role in Undermining Democracy’: Transcript of The Best of CounterSpin 2024

Janine Jackson: Welcome to The Best of CounterSpin 2024. I’m Janine Jackson.

This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us, in part, by showing how elite news media are clouding them. It’s not to say big media always get the facts wrong, but that what facts they point us toward day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners and sponsors, at the expense of the rest of our lives and our futures.

An important part of the work we do as producers and as listeners is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and to stay in conversation. As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the mediawatch group FAIR.

***

2024 included many reasons for public protest, which our guest reminded is both a fundamental right and a core tool for achieving other rights. Journalist and activist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent.

Chip Gibbons: “There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech.”

Chip Gibbons: And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.

There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.

It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.

But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.

In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.

So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.

And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that, even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.

And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.

***

JJ: Svante Myrick is president of People for the American Way, and former mayor of Ithaca, New York. We spoke with him about voting rights and roadblocks.

Svante Myrick: “They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote.”

Svante Myrick: Especially after the 2020 election, led by Donald Trump, state legislators—people who are not household names, folks that you won’t often see on CNN or MSNBC—state legislators are taking their cues from Donald Trump and passing dozens and dozens…. I just came from Utah, where yet another law was passed that makes it harder to vote.

Utah used to have very good voting laws. Everybody got a ballot in the mail. You could just fill it out, send it back in. You had weeks and weeks to do it. They just repealed that. Why? Is it because Donald Trump lost Utah? No, it’s because the state legislators are trying to curry favor with a president that just, frankly, does not want everyone’s vote to count.

And if it’s OK, if I just say what probably is obvious to many of your listeners, but I think it deserves to be said: They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote. I’m a Black American, and I just know for a fact that this Trump-led faction of the Republican Party would love for Black Americans’ votes not to be counted. And I know that because they are moving with almost surgical precision to disenfranchise people like me and my family.

JJ: I am surprised when people are surprised that people don’t vote. While I lament it, I see the fact that some people just don’t see a connection between this lever they pull, and the policies and laws governing their lives. I see that as an indictment of the system, and not of the people.

And so I wanted to ask you to talk about what we’ve seen labeled “low-propensity voters,” and different responses, like what People For is talking about, responses that are better than saying, “These people are so dumb, they don’t even know how to vote their own interests.”

SM: And that’s so well said. Certainly our system has failed in many ways. But extreme right-wingers have also been waging an 80-year war, maybe longer, to convince Americans that government does nothing for them, that their representatives don’t improve their lives. And so when they do things like starve schools and school budgets, starve road budgets so that there are potholes in the street, and try to shrink government down to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub, they make sure it is dysfunctional, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, they break the system, and then say, “Hey, see, government, it can’t work at all. Why bother? Why bother to vote at all?”

***

JJ: Though it’s dropped from many outlets’ radar, police violence continued in 2024, but so did efforts to reimagine public safety without cops at the center. Monifa Bandele is an activist with Movement for Black Lives, as well as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She talked about a new report mapping police violence.

Monifa Bandele: “We actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”

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

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

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

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

***

JJ: Immigration stayed critical in 2024, but we didn’t hear much from folks particularly on the US southern border who don’t support aggressive unto lethal state responses. Aron Thorn joined us from the Rio Grande Valley. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Aron Thorn: “The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection.”

Aron Thorn: I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.

The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.

And so something that does not often show up in these stories, that is particularly pertinent right now, is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.

And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.

What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?

As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.

***

JJ: Media Matters took a look at coverage of climate disruption, finding that, where there were some improvements, they just didn’t match the severity of the crisis. Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters.

Evlondo Cooper: “Even the best coverage we see…there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis.”

Evlondo Cooper: We look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.

So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”

EC: Totally.

JJ: And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”

EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”

But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.

***

JJ: The oft-heard phrase “crisis of journalism” means different things to different people. This year, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ran an article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm.” It was co-authored by our guests, Collette Watson, co-founder of the group Black River Life, and Joe Torres, senior advisor at the group Free Press. The two are co-founders of the Media 2070 project.

Colette Watson: “What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm.”

Collette Watson: What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.

When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.

We know that from that earliest root, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.

Joseph Torres: “We’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy?”

Joseph Torres: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.

At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.

And in recent years, we have the Los Angeles Times apologizing for it being the paper of white supremacy for at least its first 80-plus years. We have the Oregonian saying that it was a paper, when it began, to try to ensure that Oregon remained a white state. The Baltimore Sun apologizing for its role in upholding the housing segregation in its editorials in the newspaper in support of it in Baltimore; and the Kansas City Star did much the same. The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized.

These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized. What are we creating that’s different?

***

JJ: Throughout the year, more and more entities declared Israel’s violent assaults on Palestinians a genocide. But how did elite US media talk about it? Greg Shupak of the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and author of The Wrong Story: Palestine Israel and the Media, talked with CounterSpin.

Gregory Shupak: “Genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like.”

Gregory Shupak: First of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: Yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story. But there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.

In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savage barbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.

***

JJ: As we all reeled from the presidential election results, I talked with FAIR’s own editor, Jim Naureckas, and senior analyst Julie Hollar, for some thoughts about how we got here.

Jim Naureckas: “Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of.”

Jim Naureckas: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”

And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.

Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.

And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done—or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.

And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.

Julie Hollar: “Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward.”

Julie Hollar: I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority—although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them—but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.

So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.

And by not doing that at all—and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.

But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around—well, I’m getting ahead of myself—and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.

Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.

And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.

***

JJ: That was FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas. Before them, you heard Greg Shupak, Collette Watson and Joe Torres, Evlondo Cooper, Aron Thorn, Monifa Bandele, Svante Myrick and Chip Gibbons, just some of the voices it’s been our pleasure to bring you this past year.

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

WaPo Kills Cartoon That Mocked the Boss—and Trump

The cartoon that was rejected by the Washington Post, definitely not because it portrayed Post owner Jeff Bezos in an unflattering light.

When Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist, submitted a draft sketch shortly before Christmas, she must have known she was stirring the pot.

But after watching a parade of Big Tech CEOs jet down to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage—and millions of dollars—to Trump, a cartoon depicting these groveling billionaires must have seemed natural, even if it included her own boss, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Post since 2013.

“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote in a Substack post (1/3/25) announcing her resignation from the Post, where she’s worked since 2008. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”

Telnaes’ post went further, criticizing media owners like Bezos for abandoning their responsibility to safeguard the free press “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”

In addition to Bezos, the other billionaires Telnaes depicted bowing before Trump were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

And lying prostrate beneath these men was Mickey Mouse, Telnaes’ apparent nod to the cowardly $16 million settlement Disney-owned ABC recently offered Trump (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

‘Bias against repetition’

Somehow the Washington Post running a column by Adam Lashinsky (12/30/24) about MAGA’s internecine battles over H-1B visas didn’t prevent it from publishing a cartoon on the same theme the next day (12/31/24)—or another one the next week (1/4/25).

The unenviable job of ensuring a thin-skinned Bezos wasn’t embarrassed by a cartoon in his own newspaper fell to Post opinions editor David Shipley. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in a statement justifying his killing of Telnaes’ cartoon:

My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

It’s bizarre to argue that a regular cartoonist’s work should be killed because the paper published a column—or even two!—with similar content. Even so, we can only find one recent Post opinion column addressing Bezos’ efforts to curry favor with the president-elect (12/18/24).

What’s more, a search of the Post’s “latest cartoons” shows the paper has no problem publishing cartoons on the same topic as opinion pieces. Recent examples include Republicans’ difficulties finding a speaker (1/2/25, 1/4/25), Republican infighting over H-1B visas (12/30/24, 12/31/24, 1/4/25) and controversy over Biden’s death penalty commutations (12/23/24, 12/26/24).

Outside of opinions, the Post has run a few recent stories on the efforts of Big Tech executives, including Bezos, to mollify Trump (12/13/24, 12/19/24, 12/31/24).

Aside from repetitiveness, deputy opinions editor David Von Drehle offered another reason for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon. “I didn’t think it was a very good cartoon. It seemed pretty ham-handed to me,” Von Drehle told Post media critic Erik Wemple (1/6/25).

Wemple’s blog post also disclosed that Post executive editor Matt Murray wants the paper to stop covering its own problems. “I did set a policy that broadly we should not cover ourselves,” said Murray, who claimed his change was made weeks ago and wasn’t “specifically tied to the cartoon.”

Von Drehle’s denigrating comment about Telnaes’ cartoon only appeared in Wemple’s blog, not in a Post news story. In fact, amid the swirling controversy, the Post hasn’t written a single original news story on the spiked cartoon, only running an AP story (1/4/25) on the topic.

Exodus of talent

“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility,” wrote Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) in a column that did just that.

Following the rejection of her cartoon, Telnaes resigned, marking just the latest departure from the storied paper.

“The Post is shedding talent at an unprecedented rate,” observed media journalist Oliver Darcy (Status, 1/6/25), who earlier noted (1/2/25): “Eventually treating employees with little respect has consequences.”

The growing exodus comes in the wake of Bezos spiking the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in late October—a move he took to curry favor with Trump (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

Amid the ensuing backlash—in which 300,000 Post readers reportedly canceled their subscriptions—Bezos scapegoated Post reporters for his craven action, claiming their untrustworthiness had forced him to abandon the paper’s longstanding practice of issuing presidential endorsements. “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” was the headline accompanying Bezos’ self-serving op-ed (Washington Post, 10/28/24).

Ingratiation ratcheted up

Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 12/4/24) said he hopes to persuade Donald Trump that the press is “not the enemy”—in part by giving him a $1 million donation.

After Trump’s win, Bezos ratcheted up his ingratiation, saying Trump has “grown in the past eight years” and is now “calmer.” Bezos also told the New York Times’ Dealbook conference he’s “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, and hopes to work with him (Washington Post, 12/4/24).

“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”

Bezos also trekked down to Mar-a-Lago, gifts in hand—just as Telnaes depicted. In addition to ponying up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund, Amazon is also broadcasting the inauguration live on Amazon Prime, an in-kind donation worth another $1 million (BBC, 1/4/25). Meanwhile, Amazon will release a new documentary on Melania Trump, who’s an executive producer of the film; Bezos’ company reportedly paid $40 million for the rights (Puck, 1/7/25).

Bezos didn’t become the second-richest person alive by prioritizing civic responsibility. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

Meanwhile at the Post, the paper today “started laying off roughly 4% of its work force” (New York Times, 1/7/25).

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

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

Baltimore Media ‘Create a False Impression That Youth Are Responsible for a Lot of Very Dangerous Crime’: CounterSpin interview with Richard Mendel on youth crime coverage

Janine Jackson interviewed the Sentencing Project’s Richard Mendel about coverage of youth crime for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Sentencing Project (12/11/24)

Janine Jackson: Some listeners may know the Sentencing Project for their work calling out racial disparities in sentencing associated with crack versus powder cocaine, and mandatory minimums. A recent project involves looking into another factor shaping public understanding and public policy around criminal justice—the news media. In this case, the focus is young people.

“The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’: How Misinformation Is Undermining Youth Justice Policy in Baltimore” has just been released. We’re joined now by the report’s author. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us now by phone from Prague. Welcome to CounterSpin, Richard Mendel.

Richard Mendel: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Before we get into findings, what, first of all, is the scope of this study? What did you look at, and then, what were you looking to learn, or to illuminate?

RM: We’ve been seeing, just anecdotally, a big increase in fearful reporting, sensational reporting, about youth crime over the last few years. And we, luckily, in this country had a very long period of almost continually declining youth crime rates, from the mid-’90s to 2010 or so, and continuing positive trends.

And then we saw some increase nationally in the murder rate, and young people took part in that, in 2020 and 2021. But there’s really been an epidemic of scary and problematic reporting, we saw across the country.

We decided to look in depth at how media is covering youth crime, and we decided to pick one jurisdiction, and we looked in Baltimore, but I think that a lot of the findings would probably be seen in other places, too. And what we did was we looked at many of the major outlets, the four main local TV news stations, as well as the Baltimore Sun, and an online paper, a prominent one in Baltimore, called the Baltimore Banner.

We just looked at all their crime coverage to see, first of all, what share of crime coverage is focusing on young people. And then, of the crime, what are they saying about the trends in youth crime, and how are they presenting their information? And that’s what we did, and we found really alarming results.

JJ: Let’s get into it. What were some of the key things revealed by the research?

Richard Mendel: “Young people in Baltimore…are 5% of arrests..and yet almost 30% of the stories that identified the age of the offenders focused on young people.”

RM: What we found is that young people in Baltimore, according to the Baltimore Police Department, are 5% of arrests in the Baltimore area, and yet almost 30% of the stories that identified the age of the offenders focused on young people. One station, more than a half of them focused on young people, and really creating a misimpression in the public that the young people are responsible for most of the crime, or a huge portion of it, when it’s really just not true.

Also, a lot of the coverage indicated a spike in youth crime, which really is not supported by the data; the trends are mixed. Some of the findings, in some areas, there are areas of concern, but overall, things are still trending downward, mostly. And just a lot of the rhetoric around young people, really using the sensationalistic, fear-inducing rhetoric to describe their role in crime.

So it was really creating a false impression among the public, presumably, that youth are responsible for a lot of very dangerous crime, and creating a crisis atmosphere in the legislature this year in Maryland to do something about this perceived problem, which is really a creation of the media rather than the fact.

JJ: Before we talk about impacts, I would just note that part of the way that media can just paint a picture about crime rates rising when they are not, or that doesn’t match the reality, is they don’t use numbers. They don’t use statistics, they just kind of tell stories. That was part of what you found, is that they didn’t use data to back up these claims.

RM: In many cases they didn’t. And in other cases, they cherry picked them—there’s overall arrest, there’s arrest for this, there’s arrest for that. And they, in many cases, just focused on the couple of crime categories where the crime rates were going up, and made a huge deal out of that, while ignoring all the other crime categories where youth offending was down. It’s a combination of not reporting, not using data, or not using data in responsible ways.

JJ: Well, of course the point is not just to say that this is inadequate and bad journalism, which it is, but these media problems and the story that they tell have effects.

Fox45 (12/28/22)

RM: For certain. And I think that the Baltimore example is an extreme example. One of the stations in the area made a crusade out of highlighting as much as they can, and in as fearful ways as they can, almost every instance of youth offending. And more than half of the stories on that station were about youth. Many of them were long. And each incident was then followed by going back to show frightening video of previous incidents, and just over and over again, and many assertions that youth crime is out of control. And a banner headline behind the anchors on that station, “City in Crisis,” whenever they were looking at youth crime stories. So it was really just a fearmongering approach.

And it really affected the legislature this year. At the beginning of the Maryland legislative session, the Senate president, at a news conference, said that we need to do something about youth crime this year, because of a “perception problem.” And he even acknowledged that youth are responsible for less than 10% of the crimes, and that they’ve addressed it two years previously, in a comprehensive bill to update their approach to youth justice, that was a two-year study commission, and they really followed the evidence.

And this time, they created a policy environment that was very much crisis-driven, and there were no hearings, there was no expert testimony, there was no process, other than backroom discussion, and come up with something to solve the perception problem created by the media, not to address real problems in the real world.

JJ: I just want to draw you out just on precisely that point, because corporate media frame questions of crime, or of court-involved people, as a problem, a scandal, a controversy. And it has to be a perennial, unsolvable problem, or that boilerplate story goes away. But the reality is, we do know what works to reduce youth crime and to promote public safety. So please talk a bit more about that.

Sentencing Project (3/1/23)

RM: Yes, all of the evidence shows that detention and incarceration lead to bad outcomes. Comparable young people, if they’re based in detention, versus allowed to remain free pending their trial, and if they’re incarcerated following their trial, they do worse than young people who remain in the community.

And it just makes sense. Disconnecting young people from school, disconnecting them from their family, and instead surrounding them by other troubled young people, and disrupting their natural adolescent development, it’s not a good approach. And the results show it, that the recidivism is much higher if you’re punitive towards them. And just involving them in the system, arresting them, disrupting their educations and getting a record like that, really leads to worse outcomes for young people. And the kids who were diverted from the system, again, do much better.

JJ: And so that diversion, what can that look like? It’s not just, don’t do what you’ve been doing, but there are things that have been tried and that have shown success, right, in terms of diverting young people?

RM: Some of diversion programs just connect young people to positive mentors in the community, and there’s a very promising approach of restorative justice, in which the young person meets with the persons that they’ve harmed, and makes apologies, and together craft a solution for the young person to have restored some of the harm that they’ve caused. That leads to much, much higher victim satisfaction, which is an important goal of the justice system, which the traditional system does terrible at, and also leads to better outcomes for the young people.

JJ: Finally, I’m not sure how much media coverage you can expect on the report, though media do love to talk about themselves. But I wonder what audiences you do hope to get this work in front of, and what are just some of the recommendations or things that you would hope folks would take away?

Sentencing Project (12/11/24)

RM: We had three goals in terms of the report, and first is to influence media themselves, just to help them see the impact of their current practices. And I think that most reporters are well-intentioned, but I think that they maybe don’t understand the impact of their current approach. And we’re trying to show them there’s some better ways to cover this issue, in terms of the proportion of coverage focused on young people, in terms of presenting trends in fair and accurate ways, in terms of showing the impacts of not having the knee-jerk “more punishment is safer,” because the actual research shows the opposite. So that’s one audience.

Another audience are political leaders that have a responsibility to pursue policies that really do produce the best long-term safety, and not to succumb to pressure created by media narratives like the ones that we’ve seen in Baltimore and around the country.

And the third is to provide a tool for advocates around the country, people who care about this, that there’s ways of pushing back against irresponsible or misleading or imbalanced coverage in the media. And to do studies like this and show, “Hey, the picture that’s being presented is not accurate.” And make sure that the people in the community know and that the political leaders in that community know and that the media in that community know the negative, scary picture that you’re painting isn’t the reality. And the punitive solutions that are being suggested in response to this made-up problem are going to make things worse rather than better.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Richard Mendel, senior research fellow at the Sentencing Project. You can find the report, “The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’” on their website, SentencingProject.org. Richard Mendel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RM: Thank you. Great to be with you.

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

Why Didn’t NYT Tell Us What Ben Smith Stood to Gain From His Media Reporting?

Announcing their hiring of Ben Smith, New York Times editors (1/28/20) declared, “Ben not only understands the seismic changes remaking media, he has lived them — and in some cases, led them.”

In a time of downsizing and consolidation, Ben Smith has had a journalistic career many would envy. He became famous as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, a rising media giant that raised $19 million last year. (This “replac[ed] the money it had received from the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried,” the New York Times reported—5/24/23).

These two adventures bookend his two-year stint as the “Media Equation” columnist at the New York Times, from March 2020 through January 2022. During his entire tenure there, Smith held an undisclosed amount of stock options in BuzzFeed, creating a conflict of interest for him and the Times, which both consistently waved away (Slate, 10/15/21). “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company,” Smith explained on several occasions (here 9/26/21).

But from his influential perch, Smith did, of necessity, cover BuzzFeed’s competitors, frequently critically, putting his investment’s rivals and potential rivals in a bad light. Buzzfeed started out as pure internet culture, a website offering entertainment and quizzes. But it expanded into hard news, thus competing with others in that new media mold, like the nodes of the Gawker empire.

Smith’s stake in BuzzFeed exceeded $7 million, according to FAIR’s sources—a strikingly large material interest in a company whose competitors Smith regularly covered, underscoring the ethical concerns about both Smith’s coverage and the Times’ willingness to ignore its own ethical guidelines.

‘Well above my Times salary’

With a considerable financial stake in online media, Ben Smith could have different reasons from the rest of us for freaking out about Substack (New York Times, 4/11/21).

Smith (New York Times, 10/17/21) covered sexual harassment allegations at Axel Springer as the Berlin-based multimedia company was looking to grow its footprint in the US media market—making it a potential competitor to BuzzFeed.

In a critical piece (New York Times, 4/11/21) about the self-publishing platform Substack, which includes heavy investment from venture capitalist and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, Smith wrote:

Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform the Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back—media types often overvalue media writers.

Smith appears to be putting his cards on the table here, but readers have no way of knowing that his financial interest in BuzzFeed far eclipsed the salary he was getting from the Times or was offered by Substack, a new media product that competed against the very company, BuzzFeed, he was invested in.

Smith (New York Times, 4/18/21) also pooh-poohed Bustle’s growth with Mic and Nylon, and its eye on restarting Gawker, in part because Bustle bet on advertising revenue, which Smith maintained was destined to flow overwhelmingly to Google and Facebook (later rebranded as Meta).

A month later, Bustle rebranded in preparation for its IPO (Axios, 5/11/21)—an initial public offering to investors. A month after that, Hollywood Reporter (6/30/21) noted that BuzzFeed was one of a number of media companies, including Bustle, that were looking to go public in order to shore up investments. Once again, readers should have had a clear understanding that Smith was writing about an entity that was competing for venture capital with the outlet he had major holdings in.

Downfall of a high-flying startup

A story by Smith in the New York Times (9/26/21) contributed to the downfall of the media startup Ozy—a company that Buzzfeed under Smith’s leadership considered buying.

The most interesting example of Smith’s conflict of interest is the case of Ozy Media. Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC and CNN anchor, attracted lots of attention when he launched Ozy, raising $5.3 million in its early days (Venture Capital Post, 12/28/13), reaching up to an enormous $20 million investment from Axel Springer (USA Today, 10/6/24). Watson and his media child were riding high—for a time.

Smith (New York Times, 9/26/21) was the first journalist to raise questions about the veracity of Ozy’s claims to investors. Less than two years later, Watson was arrested for fraud (Wall Street Journal, 2/23/23), and the operation was no more (Variety, 3/1/23). He and the company were ultimately found guilty in a New York City federal court earlier this year, “in a case accusing them of lying to investors about the now-defunct startup’s finances and sham deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey” (Reuters, 7/16/24). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison (AP, 12/16/24).

Smith’s reporting on Ozy was considered momentous, leading to the downfall of a high-flying media startup. But Smith was not a disinterested journalist when he went after Watson and Ozy. Late last year, Ozy sued Smith, BuzzFeed and Semafor for allegedly stealing Ozy’s trade secrets (Reuters, 12/21/23); in the initial complaint, Ozy’s legal team said that Smith was interested in BuzzFeed acquiring Ozy as early as 2019.

‘Sizable material stake’

It is also through this case that we have a better understanding of Smith’s financial interest in BuzzFeed during his time as a Times media columnist. According to FAIR’s sources, the prosecution obtained financial records from BuzzFeed in discovery that document how much stake Smith has had in the company over time. FAIR has not seen this sealed document; however, David Robinson, a business scholar at Duke University who served as an expert witness for the defense, did see it.

In an April filing in the case, Robinson noted that in Smith’s original report about Ozy, he disclosed that “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.” But, Robinson noted:

Columnist Benjamin Smith had, at the time of that article’s writing, an ownership stake in BuzzFeed in the form of stock options. Those options would become valuable if BuzzFeed went public later in 2021 in an initial public offering (IPO). In an IPO, options holders, such as Smith, are able to convert their options at the then-anticipated IPO price of $10 per share.

Analyzing BuzzFeed’s capital table, I calculated the number of Ben Smith’s outstanding split-adjusted shares. I then computed, for each option grant, the stock price minus the option exercise price multiplied by the number of options for each option grant, to arrive at the proceeds that Ben Smith would net upon selling his options. I estimate that Ben Smith’s options had an expected value of approximately $23,468,268.64.

On January 4, 2022, the New York Times announced that Smith had left the paper to start a new media company, one [that] “would aim to break news and offer nuance to complex stories, without falling into familiar partisan tropes.”

In a phone interview with FAIR, Robinson clarified that, since he issued this testimony, he revised his calculations based on BuzzFeed’s capitalization table. This reduced his estimate of Smith’s stake to $7.4 million, still a princely sum—and a valuation that he said, to his knowledge, hasn’t been challenged.

“I think he had a clear sizable material stake in BuzzFeed in the time when other corporations’ decisions were immediately impacting the value of BuzzFeed,” Robinson told FAIR. “I’m simply trying to bring to light the bias that seems to be apparent.”

A flexible deadline

The New York Times‘ rules about financial conflicts cite as an example, “a reporter responsible for any segment of media coverage may not own any media stock”—and make clear that that includes options.

That Smith had a conflict of interest does not mean that all or indeed any of the reporting he published about BuzzFeed‘s rivals was untrue or unjustified. (Some of the outlets he criticized, like Substack and German media giant Axel Springer, are ones I’ve also critiqued at FAIR—3/4/21, 11/5/21). The problem with Smith’s conflict of interest is that it gave him a financial incentive to encourage the decline of these particular outlets. Times readers can’t know whether, or how much, this incentive factored into his journalistic decisions—especially as the scale of the conflict was not made clear to those readers.

Moreover, the Times has clear rules about stock ownership. Its ethics guidelines say:

No staff member may own stock or have any other financial interest in a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage that he or she provides, edits, packages or supervises regularly.

In several early columns, Smith included disclaimers about the conflict. In a column (5/3/20) on union organizing in newsrooms that mentioned his experience at BuzzFeed, for instance, Smith included this disclosure:

I agreed with the Times when I was hired that I wouldn’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column, beyond leaning on what I learned during my time there, because I retain stock options in the company, which could bring me into conflict with the Times’ ethics standards. I also agreed to divest those options as quickly as I could, and certainly by the end of the year.

But this deadline was quietly extended—and BuzzFeed went public right before he left the Times (Vox, 12/6/21). It appears that he never wrote directly about BuzzFeed, but Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) noted that as the end-of-year deadline came and went, Smith’s columns stopped mentioning any sort of deadline by which he would divest. When Peters inquired with the Times, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said Smith’s deadline was extended until February 2022—two years after he was hired.

BuzzFeed went public in December 2021. Smith left the Times to start Semafor in January 2022.

Rhoades Ha told FAIR that Smith’s deadline was extended “due to the pandemic,” and that he “disclosed the options when relevant in that period.”

Smith and the media desk at Semafor did not respond to requests for comment.

A really big deal

Pointing out that it’s “bad for readers to have a media columnist whose motives they cannot absolutely trust to be disinterested,” Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) wrote that Smith “probably shouldn’t be writing about such a broad swath of digital media.”

Peters (Slate, 10/15/21) reported that neither Smith nor the Times explained why Smith stopped putting a divestment deadline on the investment disclosures in his columns. Further, he said:

Neither Smith nor Rhoades Ha responded to separate questions about why, exactly, the Times extended Smith’s divestment deadline, or whether the shifting deadline had anything to do with BuzzFeed’s plans to go public. But an SEC filing from July pertaining to BuzzFeed’s proposed SPAC merger—and an amended filing dated October 1—describes a 180-day post-merger lockup period during which certain stockholders and options holders are prohibited from transferring their shares.

The Times is not offering a sufficient answer. For one thing, it ignores the scope of Smith’s reported stake. Had he stood to gain a few thousand dollars from his former media employer while working on the media beat, big deal (sarcasm). But millions? Big deal (not sarcasm).

And there seems to be a betrayal of the spirit of the Times’ own codes about conflicts of interest when the deadline was extended for him; if the paper can bend the rules on the media beat, where else could it bend the rules? When FAIR told Robinson that the Times confirmed that the Smith’s deadline to divest had been extended, he countered, “What good is a stop sign if you tell people they’re free to run through it?”

“Given that he was a senior executive, it stands to reason he’d have a significant stake in the company,” Robinson said of Smith and BuzzFeed. “I just think it’s not appropriate for him to be writing about the company’s competitors.”

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

‘There’s No Public Evidence of the Kind of Manipulation TikTok Is Accused Of’: CounterSpin interview with Yanni Chen on TikTok ruling

Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Yanni Chen about the appellate court TikTok ruling for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (12/16/24)

Janine Jackson: As we record on December 18, we’ve heard that the Supreme Court will address TikTok’s challenge to the federal law that was set to ban the platform in the US on January 19, unless they divest from Chinese ownership. The New York Times yesterday noted:

Lawmakers said the app’s ownership represented a risk because the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies would allow it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans, or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred.

A DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an earlier challenge from TikTok, ruling that the measure was justified by what were called “grave national security threats.” The judges, the Times reported, were united in accepting the US government’s arguments that “the Chinese government could exploit the site to gain access to users’ data to spread covert disinformation.”

Well, one can practically hear the buzzing in the heads of anyone who has used social media, ever: “Access to our data? No way! Disinformation? You don’t say.” We are in medias res, but what’s at stake, not even so much for TikTok as a company, as for its 170 million US users’—and really everyone’s—ability to access information we want and need, and our rights within those spheres?

Yanni Chen is policy counsel at the group Free Press, who’ve been working on this. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Yanni Chen.

Yanni Chen: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.

JJ: The fact that the rhetoric around the TikTok ban relies on phrases like “foreign adversary nation” doesn’t make it sound very 21st century, for a start, but the statement that we aren’t offered evidence that the thing being charged is happening, shouldn’t that at least raise questions about this move, and what else might be going on?

NPR (5/14/24)

YC: I think absolutely, and that’s one thing that we found pretty troubling about the opinion in general. The court goes through and says that either intermediate or strict scrutiny, which are the higher of the two levels of constitutional analysis that is afforded to constitutional claims, applies here. And they say the highest scrutiny that the court applies, strict scrutiny, this law passes that, and then they don’t cite any evidence that the government didn’t provide publicly. They don’t substantiate it.

And so I think one thing that we have trouble with is the idea that the court can find that a law passes strict scrutiny with a clearly viewpoint-based angle, and not provide even a shred of evidence. And this opens up the door for further precedent, for further laws to be put on the books without that kind of substantiation either.

JJ: I’m going to ask you about that viewpoint angle, but I just want to say it early, in case it gets missed: We lose by making this a solely Trump thing. It’s not that he’s not as weird and dangerous as he is, but this TikTok ban, this proposed ban, doesn’t just map neatly onto a Trump agenda, does it?

YC: No, this is a bipartisan bill that passed overwhelmingly on both sides, by both the House and the Senate. I think it was justified mostly by national security concerns, but the committee hearings were closed doors. So the public doesn’t really know exactly what there is.

And as we’ve discussed before, there isn’t much public information to substantiate anything that we’re talking about. There’s no public evidence of the kind of content manipulation that TikTok is being accused of participating in.

NBC (11/1/23)

JJ: I would just draw you out on that, because the Times report tells me that Judge Sri Srinivasan said, yes, Americans might lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community and even a means of income, but national security threats, blah blah blah. But then also:

Because the record reflects that Congress’s decision was considered consistent with longstanding regulatory practice and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas, [therefore] we are not in a position to set it aside.

And I wanted to hear how you respond to the idea that this has nothing to do with suppressing viewpoints, and it’s consistent with longstanding practice.

YC: Yeah, I’ll take the last one first. What Judge Srinivasan was alluding to with longstanding regulatory history on foreign control in communications, he’s talking about the broadcast space and the FCC. But broadcast and the FCC is kind of a special realm within the First Amendment, justified by bandwidth scarcity, or the amount of waves that are available to be used. So it receives, actually, a different level of First Amendment protection than other fora. So that’s one distinction.

And then also, certainly, the government and regulators can put in place restrictions for foreign control, but that doesn’t mean that they can do it in any way possible. So just because the government has that power with respect to some broadcasting does not mean that they have the power here. Remind me of the first part of that question, too.

FAIR.org (12/6/24)

JJ: What do we make of Judge Srinivasan’s contention that this conclusion, this ruling, has nothing to do with an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas? Now I think we can all say that it will, in effect, suppress particular messages or ideas, but this is trying to say, well, that’s not what it’s trying to do, so we shouldn’t address it in that way.

YC: Yeah, I think that position requires ignoring a lot of the statements that lawmakers said themselves. You have lawmakers on the record making statements about the type of content that not only TikTok is pushing, but US users are creating, that they take issue with. So you have to ignore all of the statements of the people who wrote the law themselves to get to that position. It’s hard to really swallow.

JJ: The statement that we’re not being offered evidence, actually, that what is being charged is happening—that should raise questions. But also in this context of where, US listeners, we hear all about the free market, the market responds to what people want, so banning an outlet isn’t a thing that should go down easy, generally speaking. And wouldn’t the government need to show that its stated goals could not be achieved any other way, other than banning this outlet? Shouldn’t they have to show that?

Yanni Chen: “It singles out a single app without really providing any justification why, and then they just say, ‘Congress picked this one.’”

YC: Yeah. So that’s actually the exact requirement of strict scrutiny, is that it needs to be the most tailored, or the narrowest restriction possible, to achieve the need that the government wishes to accomplish. So, yes, I think, formally and on the books, that is the requirement. And I think the application is where you see some problems.

And I think what you’re seeing, also, between the majority opinion’s application of strict scrutiny and Judge Srinivasan’s intermediate scrutiny dialogue, is that I think it is relatively clear that strict scrutiny does apply, because it is clearly a viewpoint-based restriction. It singles out a single app without really providing any justification why, and then they just say, “Congress picked this one.” That’s the definition of speaker discrimination. So you have that, but then you kind of have to do a backend to make it fit strict scrutiny and pass strict scrutiny. So you’re seeing some mental gymnastics happen in that logic.

And then, the other side of that, you have Judge Srinivasan, who says, “No, no, no, this is intermediate scrutiny.” And I think one reason, at least, motivating this is that strict scrutiny is a very high bar to meet, and most laws should not really pass it, just by definition of what that test is. And so having a law on the books that passed strict scrutiny does create risk of that precedent I talked about earlier, of creating bad law, where a flimsy application of strict scrutiny could lead to more laws passing strict scrutiny where they shouldn’t.

So that is one justification for applying intermediate scrutiny, but then making the law fit such that intermediate scrutiny is the right application, or the right test, then it strikes people as odd too, because it doesn’t actually do that. It is a law that requires a strict scrutiny test.

JJ: And I think it’s just weird, as a layperson, to hear, “Oh, we’re not trying to ban TikTok, Tiktok’s fine, we just need them to sell to a buyer that the US approves of.” I just feel like that lands weird, in terms of common sense, to folks.

YC: And that is something that was brought up in the litigation too. TikTok did raise the issue that, functionally, this divestment requirement would be a ban, and it’s kind of dealt with relatively, in a flip manner, in the decision itself. So you have Judge Ginsburg saying, “270 days, there’s plenty of time to meet a divestment requirement.” We just bypass the idea that it is something that you can’t do.

And the court does say, “Well, we can’t let the Chinese government set the standards for our requirements as the US government.” But what we’re talking about is the First Amendment. And the First Amendment applies to what the US government can do to US entities, and its citizens and Americans more broadly.

Free Press (11/2/23)

JJ: It just lands so weird to folks who are accustomed, at this point in 2024, to consuming news from around the world, from not unfettered, but relatively open access to media outlets from different countries, from different perspectives. It just sounds strange.

But part of the reason that this maybe has more legs than it might is that people do see a problem with platforms collecting their data, with using algorithms to push certain messages and to hold back others. And the question has to do with whether a wholesale ban of one platform is really the way to address that, or really how should we address that? If we were really concerned about privacy and targeted disinformation, what are some other responses that we might be looking at?

YC: Yeah, so TikTok is, as you recognize, not the only platform that collects too much data. Meta, certainly Google, other companies track data; they use it, they sell it, they sell it abroad, they sell it here and they sell it to governments. So TikTok is not a unique case.

So I think one thing at Free Press that we advocate for is wholesale data privacy protection, across the market, rather than targeting a single platform, and not only targeting a single platform, but taking it off the market. Because even if your concern is data collection by the Chinese government, in TikTok’s case, the Chinese government can still buy US user data through other intermediaries. So it doesn’t really make sense to cut people off from access from this single source—particularly, as you mentioned, people’s livelihoods depend on this platform, people really generate a sense of community through it—instead of addressing that larger issue. So I think there have been plenty of advocates for federal privacy law that is broadsweeping, but we can’t seem to get congressional momentum on that, where we can on a law that is, in at least some part, rooted in xenophobia.

JJ: And sinophobia, absolutely, which I think we’re going to be dealing with, anti-China—not “going to be dealing with,” we already are. Everything China is bad. It has a very musty feel about it, and I feel we’re in for a lot more of it.

YC: Yeah.

JJ: Finally, it feels a little bit like flailing. It feels a little bit like closing the barn door after the horses are out.

I mean, technology allows us to find news sources. Humanity makes us care about people, even if they are designated “official enemies.” Curiosity impels us to learn about what’s going on beyond our shores, and judgment helps us see what is weird disinformation, and what is news we can use. So the moment feels like people are far out in front of corporations and politicians. And I just want to ask you, finally, what hopeful thoughts you have about this.

Free Press (YouTube, 12/17/24)

YC: Hopeful thoughts? I mean, I do think that what you mentioned about, from a layman’s standpoint, that this strikes as odd. I do have a lot of hope that it seems like people are understanding that there’s something not right with this decision, and not right with this law. There was something not transparent about it in the first place. This is targeting a specific company, and how it affects our dialogue and our community, so that gives me a lot of hope that people aren’t taking what the court has said here as a wholesale endorsement of the law, and taking it for what it’s worth.

I think that that’s been something that’s really heartening, and I think that it puts the power in the people, and that will be even more important moving forward, where, as you mentioned, information like this is important, and it has a democratic value. And in closing that off here, we put ourselves in line with some of the more repressive governments that do this, and we legitimize that further, as the United States doing this as an example for other countries. So having the civilians, and people who aren’t in government necessarily, sense that there’s something wrong here is definitely heartening.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Yanni Chen; she’s policy counsel at Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net, and they also have a YouTube channel where you can find their recent webinar on this, breaking down the TikTok ban. Yanni Chen, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

YC: Thank you for having me.

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

Sonali Kolhatkar & Laura Flanders on Independent Media and the Year Ahead

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

Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Laura Flanders and Friends (10/20/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism—that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us who believe that US society needs to change.

New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism?

We talk about that this week with two people who are and have been doing not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it: Sonali Kolhatkar, from Rising Up! With Sonali, and Laura Flanders from Laura Flanders and Friends.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 29, 2024

20 Years After His Death, Gary Webb’s Truth Is Still Dangerous

Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.

Journalist Gary Webb (1955–2004)

In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.

But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed

as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.

Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.

Decade-long suppression of evidence

Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97): “Besides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper’s specific pieces of evidence.”

And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”

As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post

ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).

As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”

‘Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors’

In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/96) declared pompously that “a piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths—the one about the CIA and crack being just one.” Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery—where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.

Furthermore, much of the CIA’s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency’s mind-control program MKUltra comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, described in an interview with NPR (11/20/20) how MKUltra

was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

In 2012, NBC News reported on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the “sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.” In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?

Connecting the dots

Peter Hart (FAIR.org, 5/20/13): “If accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that US media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated.”

The question remains, however, as to why Webb underwent such a vicious assault when, at the end of the day, Contra drug-running was no more nefarious than anything else Washington was up to in the Americas. Objectively speaking, reports of the infliction of “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaraguan civilians should have raised the same alarms, and prompted as extreme an establishment backlash, as narco-activity by CIA mercenaries. Plus, the whole Iran/Contra scandal should have already alerted Americans to their government’s propensity for lying—not to mention violating its own laws.

Around the same time that the US was enabling Contra crimes, of course, it was also backing genocide in Guatemala, facilitating mass slaughter by the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups, and nurturing Battalion 316, “a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun (6/13/95) put it. In December 1989, the US went about bombing the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, killing up to several thousand civilians and earning the area the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”

While Contra drug-running thus cohered just fine with imperial foreign policy, it seems that Webb’s fundamental crime was connecting the dots between US-backed wars on civilians abroad and the US war on its own domestic population, which continues to disproportionately target Black communities. After all, under capitalism, all men are not created equal, and the institutionalized overlap of racial and socioeconomic inequality partially explains why African Americans have a lower life expectancy than whites—and how we’ve ended up in a situation in which white police officers regularly shoot unarmed Black people.

But there we go again with those “bizarre” conspiracy theories.

Now, two decades after Webb’s death, the US government obviously hasn’t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad—including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power’s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 27, 2024

‘That Amnesty Is Claiming This Is Genocide Is Profound and Necessary’: CounterSpin interview with Iman Abid on Israeli genocide

Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ Iman Abid about Israeli genocide for the December 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CBS News (12/5/24)

Janine Jackson: “Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.” So says Agnès Callamard, secretary general of that human rights group. She says research shows that “Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting.”

Amnesty’s statement invokes an “international community” that will hopefully be roused to action. But there are questions about what levers of power that community has access to, and what it means that many or most of that community receive our understanding from elite news media—not just about what’s happening, but about possible responses, and about what the law even means in this context.

Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Iman Abid.

Iman Abid: Thank you so much.

JJ: Genocide isn’t a slur, or an accusation that you just throw at people that you don’t like. There are definitions, and what Amnesty is saying is that those criteria are being met. So can you talk us through how this report—and it’s not the first report—but how and why does it arrive at the conclusion of genocide?

International Federation for Human Rights (12/12/23)

IA: Yeah, I want to acknowledge the fact that we are 14 months into this genocide, and have heard the word genocide being used to describe the situation in Gaza, not just by human rights organizations but the people themselves in Palestine, and many elected officials and different international institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, that have been using the word genocide to help describe the situation. So the fact that we are at this position now, where this internationally renowned human rights organization like Amnesty International is also now joining the ranks, and claiming this as genocide, is hugely profound and necessary.

I think one of the things that they do a profound job at in this report, particularly is highlighting the fact that this thing that’s going on right now is something that meets the entire set of criteria to describe genocide within the Genocide Convention, whether it be genocidal intent, whether it be the deliberate killing of a certain ethnic and cultural population, whether it be the prevention of placement of children. Whatever it is that’s going on, is happening here in Gaza. And the report does a profound job in helping construct just why they are making this claim, and that this is [not] a one-time sort of thing, but rather this has been continuing. This has continued for 14 months, and will continue if no one chooses to stop it.

Throughout the entire report, they do a beautiful job to help folks understand just why this is happening, what specific intent is behind the Israeli government and this military plan that they have on Gaza, as well as the personal harm that has been committed against thousands and thousands of Palestinians over the course of these last 14 months.

Reuters (10/21/24)

And it goes so detailed into describing the personal and bodily harm to people, the amount of deaths that have been committed, the destruction of the infrastructure that people use to stay alive, the prevention of aid, and specifically lifesaving aid to keep people alive. Israel is doing everything in its ability to prevent people from actually living in Gaza.

And Amnesty is trying to build a case that because of those things, and because of the criteria it meets within the Genocide Convention, this is in fact genocide, and it is not disputable, but rather it is time to acknowledge what is going on, look at the facts and the findings of what we’ve seen—and in many cases, actually, Israel has almost presented to the public itself—and to look at everything that’s been livestreamed over the course of these last 14 months, and do everything in our power to try to stop it.

So I think, again, 200 pages of findings and documentation that I think many folks can actually look back on and say, “My God, I actually saw this on social media at one point or another,” or, “I heard this specifically come from the Israeli government’s testaments and testimonials,” and recognize that this is, in fact, something that we have been undergoing now for the last 14 months.

JJ: And the ongoing commission of the crime is part of what’s being talked about. Often when we think of crime, and the way that crime is covered in the media, it’s a one-time act, and so you can think, “Well, the perpetrator, what was in their mind when this one-time act occurred?”

This is not that. This is a different kind of conversation, and I think that’s an important distinction for folks who are just reading about it in the paper as, like, a bad thing that’s happening.

IA: Exactly. I think that’s something that Amnesty has been trying to do, and I want to acknowledge as well, many other human rights experts have been trying to do in this moment. It’s to show that this isn’t something that just happened after October 7, but this has deliberately been extended to happen, and continue to happen, until all Palestinians are annihilated across Gaza.

JJ: And the report, it answers a lot of questions that you might just have in a conversation, you know, with your uncle or with a stranger: Is this just callous disregard? Israel has a goal, they want to destroy Hamas, and they’re not paying enough attention to civilians that are harmed in their carrying out of that process. And this engages that and says, no, this is genocidal intent. It’s not just recklessness.

Iman Abid: They’re trying to do everything in their ability to try to legitimize these killings, and dehumanize Palestinians, as though they are military targets, not actually dignified as everyday people.
(photo: Thomas Morrisey, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle)

IA: Exactly. I think that’s the thing, is that what we’ve seen happen is that Israel is trying to prove to the rest of the world that this is, in fact, not genocide, that this is out of self-defense. But the reality is that so many of the comments have been outlined here in the report and, again, have been available to us just on an everyday basis, the reality is that Israel itself has actually built the case for us in arguing that this is, in fact, genocide. They have used statements to try to dehumanize Palestinians—and all Palestinians, not just those that have been involved in anything—but the fact that all Palestinians, in some way or another, just due to who they are, should be dehumanized. And I think that that is an argument that they’ve been trying to make to help legitimize the mass killings of Palestinians.

There are statements that have been made to completely disregard all human life in Palestine, all across Gaza and even the West Bank, to be able to, again, legitimize this forcible displacement, to legitimize the prevention of lifesaving aid, to legitimize the bombings of residential buildings, to legitimize why they’re bombing hospitals, and claiming that Hamas, for instance, has tunneled underneath hospital grounds.

They’re trying to do everything in their ability to try to legitimize these killings, and dehumanize Palestinians, as though they are military targets, not actually dignified as everyday people, just so that the rest of the world is convinced of why Israel has the right to do this.

And, again, going back to the Amnesty report, it highlights just how this is beyond a military operation, it’s been intentionalized to try to use this moment, and leverage this moment, as a way to continue killing as many Palestinians as possible.

JJ: Well, and I wish it didn’t need saying, but I’ll say it. This report, as with other reports, acknowledges crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. To say that those crimes are being ignored or being devalued is simply false. It’s just about the conversation of whether they justify what came after, and whether they should be seen in a context of what came before.

When media talk about the US and Israel and their “mutually beneficial relationship,” I always think, well, which US citizens, which even Israeli people are you telling me are individually benefiting?

Media treat nations like kaiju, like Godzilla, like there are monsters that represent countries and fight one another. And to me, that’s a big failing, in terms of representing what the US people believe and want and are capable of, and also what Israeli people want and are capable of. And that’s before we talk about ignoring the voice of Palestinians. There’s just a crudeness of the media coverage that is harmful, I think.

Intercept (2/7/24)

IA: Absolutely. Again, the fact is that for the last 14 months, we as Palestinians, even as a Palestinian-led organization here at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, have been trying to do our best to ensure that people do hold to account the Palestinian narrative, and the framing around what is happening.

Israel’s propaganda system is enormous, and it’s very effective. And I think we’ve seen just how media outlets go around saying the same exact thing that has now been used to legitimize this genocide. Rather than arguing the fact that it is genocide, we’re now trying to defend ourselves against the thought that this isn’t genocide, defend ourselves against the people who are saying this isn’t genocide.

And I think that it’s because of the fact that media has done such an incredible job at passing along statements that this is warranted, because of the October 7 attacks, that it’s as if the Palestinian people deserve this because of the October 7 attacks. But in reality, it’s long before October 7, and continues to happen after October 7, that this level of detriment to Palestinian civil society has existed, and Israel has done everything in its power to make these things happen.

I acknowledge the fact that in this moment, we, I think, are seeing a shift in the way that people are actually talking about this. I think that Western news outlets have been forced now to at least acknowledge that there is this mass atrocity happening. Whether or not they choose to use the word “genocide” is still a question, to some degree. But I think that when reports like this get publicized, going back to the Amnesty International report, the hope is here, we can then acknowledge the fact that this report has used, that has even the word “genocide” in its title, to the point that it has to be referenced, it has to be acknowledged.

Now, we know that there are people who go so far as still choosing to refute the 200 pages of evidence and documentation, but we know that that can only go so far.

Al Jazeera (8/20/24)

So I think that 14 months in, we’re starting to see a small shift, but I think the reality is there’s lots more work to do around it. And my hope is that reports like this can be used as a way to justify why we’re calling it as it is, and choosing not to actually try to continue using statements or saying statements that can continue legitimizing just what’s happening. Because the rhetoric we use, and especially that journalists use here in the West, is extremely harmful.

And it’s not just dehumanizing to the people in Gaza; it’s actually dehumanizing the Palestinians here in the West as well, so much so that a lot of what’s been heard on media has been used as a way to warrant hate crimes against Palestinians here in the US. And I think we saw that happen over the course of the last year. A young 6-year-old boy killed in the Chicago area, a young girl was slashed in the throat. That language is extremely violent, and can be used to justify this level of hate against a certain group of people. Again, not just in Palestine, but here across the West, for Palestinians as well.

JJ: Israel’s official response, as I see it so far in US media, is really not to address the substance, but to say Amnesty International is “deplorable and fanatical.” So then the way that we know that media choose to use a binary framing—us versus them, he said, she said—so it’s not even, “Let’s look at the substance here.” It’s just, “Oh, consider the source. Some people think Amnesty is a fanatical organization.” But I hear you saying that there are hopeful spaces in terms of media coverage, and in terms of this report pushing through in the narrative.

IA: Absolutely. I mean, even trying to debate whether or not Amnesty is legitimate or not still forces the conversation on genocide to happen. What Israel is doing right now is forcing this conversation, and even using the word “genocide,” and creating this battle out of it, that starts to make more people start to question, “Well, just why is it that this international human rights organization has put out such a report right at this moment?”

And it’s been used as a vehicle to try to prevent these things from continuing to Gaza, right? Amnesty is trying to do, in their best ability, to try to actually put something out there that can be used as a way to help us stop sending weapons to Israel, to stop sending military funding to Israel, to stop us from being complicit in this genocide here in the US, and to encourage even more elected officials to take that stance, as well as to use this as a vehicle to help explain to the American public audience, for those that are still on the fence around what is happening, that there is clear documentation, evidence, proof, whatever you want to call it, to help describe the situation, that they can then use to convince more people.

CNN (2/2/22)

I think the American public has actually been shifted dramatically over the course of this last year. We saw 70% of American voters are in agreement with the fact that this genocide does need to end, and the fact is that we know that that number continues to grow, as people have seen things escalate. And I think we want to continue seeing that happen. We want to continue educating people, and doing all of that.

This is not the first time Israel has tried to delegitimize a human rights organization. Let’s not forget the fact that there are a number of other organizations. Amnesty has already been counteracted by the Israeli government in the past. And I think that the reality is, every time Israel sees this level of documentation and evidence being put out there, they’re going to refute it.

And so, for me, it’s like if Israel has to go out of its way, especially if the Israeli government has to go out of its way, to try to delegitimize a report like this—recognize the legitimacy of the actual reporting at this point, and use that as a way to encourage yourself to learn more about the situation, and see just why these organizations are really putting this information out there.

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, we know that the political system in this country, the corporate media, atomize us and tell us that, really, there isn’t anything that we can do. We can just watch the horror on TV.

You have a Stop Gaza Genocide toolkit. You have information on your site to help folks actually go beyond being horrified and depressed, and get engaged. And I just wonder what—you’ve started to say it—but what would you say to folks who want to take a next step?

Al Jazeera (12/11/24)

IA: Yeah, and thank you for these types of questions. I want to first acknowledge the fact that, even as we were speaking today, only a couple of hours ago, a residential building in Beit Lahiya was struck, and over 30 people were killed, right? And this is right next to a hospital that has already been deprived of receiving lifesaving aid to keep people alive. It doesn’t have enough units in the hospital to keep newborn babies alive.

The reality is that this report and everything we’ve just spoken of on the segment today isn’t a part of the past. It’s a part of what is continuing. It’s also a reminder to us that this matter is urgent, and needs to be addressed immediately. And I think that folks, as we’re entering the holidays, as we’re entering the end of the year, people just want to turn a blind eye and forget the fact that this is continuing. But it is continuing, and it will intensify the more we look away.

And so for anyone, recognize the fact that even your US tax dollars are being paid to invest in this genocide. So what are you going to do about it? We have toolkits and resources to help make people more aware as to how that money is being invested in this genocide. And there are opportunities and avenues to actually divest from this money, from continuing to fund this genocide. There are avenues out there, and I really hope folks can check out our website to figure out ways in which you can get involved in that divestment piece.

If you are someone who cares enough about changing the stance the US Congress has on this, as we know that they have continued to send military aid, even as President Biden closes his legacy out, he is choosing to still send weapons and funding to Israel, to continue committing the genocide. What are you going to do about it?

Middle East Eye (9/9/24)

So we ask both people that are part of the civil society here in the US to ask their elected officials to stop sending weapons, and to be public around choosing not to continue sending weapons. Even into the Trump administration, we ask folks to continue doing that.

There are so many avenues in which we can actually play a role as to stopping this from happening, whether it’s even putting this report out in front of your families across the holidays. We really encourage folks to use this as an opportunity to convince even more people in their surroundings to acknowledge just what’s going on, and to remind ourselves that Gaza in particular, right now in this moment, really does need the help to stop this from continuing to happen. And we in the US play a huge role in making sure that we’re not complicit in the genocide.

So people have a positionality that they can take, and there’s a moral choice here still. And we really hope that folks can continue doing everything that they can to get this to stop, because there is an opportunity for us to really make this stop.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Iman Abid from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. You can find their work and their resources online at USCPR.org.

Thank you so much, Iman Abid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin. Thank you so much.

IA: Thank you.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 27, 2024

Most-Read FAIR Posts of 2024
Here’s the ten posts from 2024 that got the most views on FAIR.org:
1. ‘It’s Time to Take Medicare Advantage Off the Market’ (David Himmelstein interviewed by Janine Jackson, 7/2/24)
2. Sanders Convention Speech Attacked by NYT for Advocating Popular Policies (Elsie Carson-Holt, 8/22/24)
3. Shielding US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7 (Bryce Greene, 2/23/24)
4. Exposing Bias Against Palestinians, Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Predictably Accused of Bias by CBS (Elsie Carson-Holt, 10/4/24)
5. US Media and Factcheckers Fail to Note Israel’s Refutation of Beheaded Babies Stories (David Knox, 3/8/24)
6. It’s the Economic Reporting, Stupid (Conor Smyth, 11/20/24)
7. NYT Can’t Forgive Donahue for Being Right on Iraq (Jon Schwarz, 8/23/24)
8. Media Boosted Anti-Trans Movement With Credulous Coverage of Cass Review (Lexi Koren, 7/19/24)
9. Prepping Readers to Accept Mass Slaughter in Lebanese ‘Strongholds’ (Belén Fernández, 11/9/24)
10. As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies (Julie Hollar, 5/3/24)
This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 27, 2024

The Best of CounterSpin 2024

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

CounterSpin host Janine Jackson

CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them.

It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do—as producers and as listeners—is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation.

Guests featured on this year’s Best of CounterSpin include Chip Gibbons, Svante Myrick, Monifa Bandele, Aron Thorn, Evlondo Cooper, Joe Torres, Colette Watson, Greg Shupak and FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas.

As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
December 20, 2024

As Pakistan Murders Protesters, Leading US Papers Play Down Washington’s Role

Reporting on political killings in Pakistan, the Guardian (11/27/24) makes clear who is accused of violence and who the victims are said to be.

Islamabad was roiled by a days-long protest in the last week of November. Supporters of political prisoner and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and of his Pakistan Movement for Justice party, marched into the city, demanding Khan’s release and the resignation of the military-backed Sharif government of Shehbaz Sharif.

Pakistan’s political crisis has Washington’s fingerprints all over it. However, readers of the New York Times and the Washington Post would be forgiven if they thought the protests were a purely domestic issue. Missing from the protest coverage in leading US papers was the ongoing support the Pakistani government has received from the Biden administration, continuing a pattern of obscuring US actions and interests in Pakistani political affairs.

Khan is a former celebrity cricketer who turned to politics in the 1990s. The PTI (as the party is known by its Urdu acronym) grew in power, culminating in Khan’s 2018 election as prime minister on a platform of change and anti-corruption (BBC, 7/26/18). Since August 2023, he has been continuously locked up on over 180 charges levied by the current Pakistani government (Al Jazeera, 10/24/24), accused of crimes ranging from unlawful marriage to treason (New York Times, 7/13/24).

As protesters descended upon Islamabad’s Democracy Chowk, a public square often used for political rallies, Pakistani security forces unleashed brutal repression on the movement (BBC, 11/26/24). Some protesters were shot with live ammunition, with one doctor telling BBC Urdu (11/29/24) “he had never done so many surgeries for gunshot wounds in a single night.” A man’s prayers were interrupted when paramilitary forces pushed him off a three-story stack of shipping containers (BBC, 11/27/24).

The Guardian (11/27/24) witnessed “at least five patients with bullet wounds in one hospital,” and reported that, per anonymous officials, army and paramilitary forces shot and killed 17 protesters. Independent Urdu (11/30/24) spoke to doctors and officials at two Islamabad hospitals, where over 100 protesters with gunshot wounds were admitted. Geo Fact Check (11/30/24) and Al Jazeera (12/4/24) have independently confirmed some of the deaths.

A source within the Pakistan Army later exposed to Drop Site (12/10/24) that the crackdown was premeditated by the government, and included orders to fire at a deliberately disoriented crowd.

Running cover

The New York Times (11/26/24) framed violence as a “clash” between protesters and police, and depicted the shooting of demonstrators as an effort “to defend government buildings with gunfire if needed.”

To the New York Times, the journalistic responsibility to investigate the repression of protesters by a US-supported regime went only as far as reprinting government denials. The first story (11/26/24), published 13 hours after the government crackdown, initially made no mention of murdered protesters, before later being stealth-edited to reflect that “hospital officials told local news media that at least four civilians had died from bullet wounds.” (The original version is archived here.) The possibility of government violence was framed as a defensive necessity: “Soldiers were ordered to defend government buildings with gunfire if needed,” the subhead read.

The next story (11/27/24) used similarly passive, obfuscatory language, writing that local media reported “four civilians were killed by gunfire in the unrest.” Further down, the Times reported that PTI “accused security forces of killing dozens of protesters, a claim that could not be independently verified and was repeatedly denied by officials.”

In neither story did the Times attribute the bullets to any actor; meanwhile, it did reprint comment from Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar and Islamabad top cop Ali Nasir Rizvi, in addition to twice citing unnamed “officials,” all of whom claimed that security forces did not shoot protesters.

A third Times report (11/27/24) on the protests said that PTI “claimed that several of its workers were killed or injured during the protest…by the authorities,” without mentioning that protesters had in fact died; it quickly followed up that the Information Minister Tarar denied officers shot at protesters. Besides that brief mention, the story bizarrely focused on the inconvenience that protests have created for residents of Islamabad.

The headline of Washington Post’s only story (11/27/24) on the affair mentions “violent clashes,” but the outlet failed to report that anyone had died, much less been killed by security forces. Whenever “alleged” abuses were mentioned in the story, they were followed with government denials.

In all, the Times and the Post responded to brutal government repression of a mass protest by relaying government denials and reporting on bullet wounds with no apparent source.

What’s perhaps more troubling is the failure of either outlet to report that the government carrying out this repression is one well-supported by the Biden administration, even over the objection of his own party’s congresspeople. The omission of Biden’s support for the ruling government, led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) is glaring, but not new.

‘All will be forgiven’

The document that has the Biden State Department telling Pakistan that “all will be forgiven in Washington” if it removed its prime minister (Intercept, 8/9/23) was not quoted by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Corporate media also did their best to obscure the circumstances of Khan’s fall from power and PTI’s recent election loss. Imran Khan lost power in 2022 in the form of a no-confidence vote orchestrated by the military establishment (Foreign Affairs, 6/16/23; Dawn, 2/15/24). That move came after a March 2022 meeting between US State Department officials and the Pakistani ambassador to the United States.

Under Khan, Pakistan had increasingly charted a foreign policy course independent from US interests (Nation, 7/5/21; BBC, 6/21/21). The Biden administration’s appetite for Khan’s leadership had begun to wane, especially with regards to Afghanistan and Russia.

According to a leaked Pakistani diplomatic cable (Intercept, 8/9/23), President Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu informed the ambassador that “if the no-confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington”—a reference to Pakistan’s posture on the Russia/Ukraine war, which Lu reportedly termed “aggressively neutral.” If not, Khan and his government would be further isolated. One month later, Khan was removed in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.

Despite maintaining that the cable does not entail US meddling in Pakistan’s domestic affairs, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has confirmed its authenticity (Intercept, 8/16/23). US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated the cable’s description of the meeting with Lu were “close-ish” in accuracy (News International, 8/10/23).

Only after Khan’s removal of power did the United States intervene to help Pakistan secure a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Fund (Intercept, 9/17/23). The conditions of the loan included forcing austerity measures on the Pakistani population and, notably, a weapons sale to Ukraine (via Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer).

While the Times and the Post did report on Khan’s allegation of US interference in his ouster, even reporting Khan’s claim of a secret diplomatic communique (e.g., New York Times, 4/2/22, 4/9/22; Washington Post, 4/10/22, 4/13/22), they were silent when the Intercept published the cable itself in August 2023.

Slow-walking a rigged election

A confession to vote fraud was treated by the New York Times (2/18/24) as “appear[ing] to lend weight to accusations” of vote fraud.
The next popular election took place in February 2024. (The elections were scheduled for 2023, but the military managed to delay them for another year.) It was clear that the PMLN-led government and the military were conspiring to undermine PTI at every turn, including by jailing Khan and tampering with the military-controlled national election software (Intercept, 2/7/24).

PTI candidates who were winning their elections during live vote-counting were shocked when the official results showed their constituencies had been lost by tens of thousands of votes. Far from Trumpesque fraud claims that attempt to stop vote counting while a candidate holds a tenuous lead, PTI candidates saw tens of thousands of votes erased from their vote totals between live counting and official results (Intercept, 2/9/24). The election was clearly rigged, foreign media observers concurred (Le Monde, 3/1/24; Economist, 3/14/24).

For two outlets that are ostensibly so anxious about the state of democracy in the United States, the New York Times and Washington Post were more staid in their concerns for Pakistani democracy. The Times (2/18/24), reporting on a confession by a senior Pakistani official of rigging votes, only went as far as to say that the admission “appeared to lend weight to accusations” by PTI of election-rigging.

The Post, while initially entertaining the possibility of a rigged election (e.g., 2/11/24), fell short of actually reporting that PMLN and the military stole the election. The Post didn’t report on the Pakistani official’s confession of election-rigging.

The tone struck was highly conservative compared to, say, the Times and Post coverage of the 2018 elections in Bolivia (FAIR.org, 3/5/20, 7/8/20). In that instance, US media didn’t hesitate to pounce on allegations of electoral fraud against left-wing president Evo Morales, even though the election was later found to be fair (only after a right-wing interim government was able to take power). Could it be that US media treats electoral fraud claims more seriously when they’re against official enemies?

Congressional dissent

“A growing chorus of voices in the US government is demanding accountability for Pakistan’s military junta over its attacks on political dissent, imprisonment of opponents, and the rigging of an election earlier this year,” Drop Site (10/23/24) reported—but readers of the leading US papers aren’t hearing about it.

Once it was clear that PTI didn’t have enough seats to form a governing bloc (despite the surprising popular surge behind the party and against the political-military establishment), 31 US lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Casar (D.–Texas) demanded the Biden administration withhold recognition of the Pakistani ruling government until a “thorough, transparent and credible” investigation of the election could be carried out (Intercept, 2/28/24). This letter is part of a pattern of objections by congressmembers to Biden’s acceptance of an authoritarian Pakistani government—so long as they align with US foreign policy interests (Intercept, 11/17/23).

A State Department press release (2/9/24) immediately after the election condemned abrogations of the rights of Pakistani citizens, and further said “claims of interference or fraud should be fully investigated.” The same statement, however, assured that “the United States is prepared to work with the next Pakistani government, regardless of political party.”

Less than two months later, Biden sent a letter (Times of India, 3/30/24) to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the PMLN, “assuring him that his administration will fully back his government in addressing critical global and regional challenges.”

As recently as the past few months, two more letters have been submitted by US lawmakers urging the Biden administration to reevaluate its relationship with Pakistan’s government, which lawmakers say has been violating the human rights of the Pakistani people (Drop Site, 10/23/24; Dawn, 10/24/24; Times of India, 11/17/24).

Coverage of congressional dissent from Biden’s Pakistan policy has been absent from both the Times and the Post. Absent from the pages of leading papers were any stories about lawmaker concerns over human rights, free elections and authoritarian governance.

Continuing omissions

This New York Times article (11/27/24) presented protests against political repression in Pakistan as a big nuisance.

These trends continued in recent reporting. Two of the New York Times stories (11/25/24, 11/26/24) on the protests mentioned the rigged election only as an allegation by Khan and his supporters, countered with government denials and offering readers no sense of which side might be telling the truth. The other three stories (11/26/24, 11/27/24, 11/27/24) don’t discuss election-rigging at all. None of the stories touched on the US involvement in Khan’s fall from power, nor the Biden administration’s continued support of an authoritarian ruling government.

The Washington Post’s single story (11/27/24) also limited itself to critiquing the ruling government, without mentioning the rigged election, US intervention in Khan’s expulsion, or continuing US support for a government that is killing its own citizens.

Reporting on protests in Pakistan without mentioning US involvement in domestic politics creates a perception that Pakistani chaos is a concern mostly for Pakistani people, and readers in the United States need not examine the role of their own government in a national political crisis.

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

Yanni Chen on TikTok Ban, Richard Mandel on Youth and Crime

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Free Press (12/6/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Writing for a DC court of appeals, Douglas Ginsburg said yes, banning the wildly popular platform TikTok does raise concerns about First Amendment freedoms; but it’s still good, because in pushing for the ban, the US government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.” If that’s clear as mud to you, join the club. We’ll get an update on the proposed ban on TikTok—in the service of free speech, doncha know—from Yanni Chen, policy counsel at the group Free Press.

Sentencing Project (12/11/24)

Also on the show: We’re all familiar with the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo of, especially but not only, local TV news. But just because we’re aware of it, doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t still impacting our lives in negative ways. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us to talk about new research showing how news media coverage actively harms young people of color, yes, but also all of our understanding and policy-making around youth and crime.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
December 20, 2024

Press Downplays Danger of Supreme Court Case That Threatens Trans Rights—Among Others

After Republicans turned transgender people into a central target in the 2024 election, trans issues returned to the spotlight less than a month later, when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for youth.

In what is widely considered one of the most consequential cases of the current court term, trans youth in Tennessee (joined by the Biden government) challenged their state’s law prohibiting puberty blockers, hormone treatments and surgery as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Many rights advocates fear that a decision upholding Tennessee’s ban—which seems likely—will quickly erode trans rights across the board, and more broadly undermine equal protection rights.

But voices in the corporate media’s opinion pages were quick to downplay the dangers of the case, leaning on false and misleading anti-trans narratives that have become all too common in US media.

‘Bedrock equal protection’

The ACLU’s Chase Strangio (New York Times, 12/3/24) notes that Tennessee’s case suggests that “somehow medical regulations are sort of exempt from heightened scrutiny when it comes to sex.”

In US v. Skrmetti, the plaintiffs argue that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth must be subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If a state is accused of treating people differently under a law, but it can offer a rational justification for that differential treatment, the courts generally let the law stand. But if a law discriminates based on certain classifications, including sex, gender, race and religion, the state has to prove it’s not based on prejudice—a much higher bar to clear. The Skrmetti case asks the justices to decide whether the Tennessee law discriminates based on sex and should therefore be subject to that higher bar (specifically, that the law serves an “important state interest”), which it would be unlikely to meet.

Though Tennessee’s argument rests largely on the idea that its law discriminates based on “age” and “purpose,” Tennessee solicitor general, Matthew Rice, admitted under questioning that the law does classify based on sex. As trans ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio (New York Times, 12/3/24) explained it:

If a 14-year-old goes to the doctor’s office and says, “I want to have a puberty consistent with my male friends,” the doctor can say yes to the person assigned male who’s just developing later than his peers, but not to the person assigned female who’s transgender.

So it would seem to be a fairly clear-cut decision in favor of the plaintiffs. And yet the conservative justices’ line of questioning suggested they are looking for a way to rule in favor of Tennessee—most likely by justifying an exception to heightened scrutiny, based on the fact that the case involves “medical judgments.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (Newsweek, 12/4/24) expressed serious concern over this line of thinking, arguing that creating any kind of exceptions to heightened scrutiny “undermin[es] the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.” Observers pointed out that doing so could open the door to other medical carveouts for sex discrimination (such as abortion or birth control), as well as exceptions for other forms of discrimination (such as racial discrimination) (e.g., Vox, 12/4/24).

Denialist game plan

The Wall Street Journal (12/3/24) affects incredulity—”believe it or not”—at the argument that it’s sex discrimination to restrict particular forms of healthcare based on the patient’s sex.

But many media pontificators obscured the important legal questions and implications, repeating spurious narratives about transition and its alleged risks in order to justify a rights-restricting ruling.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/3/24) jumped out of the gates to defend the ban before oral arguments even began, arguing that the ban “is focused on diagnoses” and therefore isn’t sex discrimination. The Journal editors have returned to the issue twice since then, once (12/13/24) to hold up a lawsuit by a detransitioner as providing “context” for the case, and again (12/15/24) to incorrectly announce that Britain had “permanently banned” puberty blockers for youth, and to argue that “lawmakers in Tennessee are within their rights to insist their state’s children get the same quality of care that’s becoming standard in Britain.”

Citing healthcare, or lack thereof, across the Atlantic is (somewhat ironically) a favorite argument of trans rights opponents, who regularly point to the British Cass Review, a report conducted by people with no expertise in pediatric transgender care in the midst of a rising anti-trans panic in the UK (FAIR.org, 7/19/24). In response to the Cass Review, the British health system has not “permanently banned” puberty blockers; rather, they have made new prescriptions for puberty blockers unavailable for trans patients not already taking them, for an indefinite period of time while they conduct further studies, but to be reviewed again in 2027.

These arguments don’t like to admit that the European restrictions that they cite are far from the blanket bans that Tennessee and other US states have (FAIR.org, 6/22/23). And they are political decisions that do not represent expert medical consensus. All the relevant medical associations in the US; those in a variety of other countries, including Canada, New Zealand and France; the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other prominent groups of medical experts on trans healthcare have rejected the Cass Review’s methods and conclusions, and support gender-affirming care for youth.

Moreover, while cases of detransition are likewise a centerpiece of arguments for banning trans healthcare, those arguments virtually never—the Journal being no exception here—acknowledge that rates of regret after such care are astonishingly low (PRS Global Open, 3/19/21). Even the Cass Review, for instance, was unable to dig up even 10 cases of detransition out of 3,306 patient records, which would translate to a rate of less than one-third of 1%.

As Joanna Wuest (The Nation, 12/4/24) pointed out, those driving the narrative of trans medical care being “risky” or “uncertain” are following the same game plan as fossil fuel, tobacco and Covid science denialists, exploiting real but marginal scientific uncertainties or outliers to promote public misunderstandings of the scientific consensus and advance their own political agenda.

The other major Murdoch paper in the US, the New York Post (12/5/24), also predictably came out swinging for Tennessee, calling youth transition “insane,” and centrally citing detransitioners and European restrictions.

‘Evidence too thin’

The Washington Post (12/15/24) demands “new research of maximum possible rigor” for gender-affirming care, “overseen by scientists who are not gender medicine practitioners”—which is just like demanding research of cancer treatment conducted by doctors who aren’t cancer specialists.

It’s no surprise that Murdoch’s mouthpieces would parrot the right-wing line against transgender rights. But the more centrist Washington Post took a line nearly as strident and misinformed. More than a week after the oral arguments, the paper published an editorial (12/15/24) taking Tennessee’s side.

The Post editors claimed the “crux of the debate” is

whether, as the plaintiffs argued, the treatments can be lifesaving or, as some global health authorities have determined, the evidence is too thin to conclude that they are beneficial and the risks are not well-understood.

From the start, then, the Post framed it in a wildly misleading way as a scientific debate between, on the one side, the Biden administration and a handful of trans youth and, on the other side, global health experts. It’s obvious who readers are meant to believe has the weight of authority here.

The Post continued:

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions—and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality.

The Post‘s argument illustrates why many are so concerned about the broader repercussions of the Skrmetti case. Anti-abortion and religious activists already argue that birth control is harmful, and failure rates of oral contraceptives are much higher than rates of dissatisfaction with gender-affirming care (which is presumably what the Post means by “ineffective,” since the treatments are not ineffective in their impact on a person’s sex characteristics). So if the Post wants to make the argument that medical arguments ought to trump arguments of sex discrimination, it ought to at least clue readers into the implications of that argument.

Just as importantly, while both gender-affirming care and birth control carry some side effects and risks, there’s not a legitimate medical debate about either being, on balance, “ineffective” or “harmful.” And there is plenty of evidence that they both improve patient lives.

However, the Post editorial’s readers couldn’t possibly imagine that, because the Post only presented evidence that supported their claim. In case anyone was unsure at this point about their stance, the editors’ conclusion clarified which side the Post wants you believe has greater scientific legitimacy: “The failure to adequately assess these treatments gives Tennessee reason to worry about them—and legal room to restrict them.”

The Post also ran a piece by columnist Megan McArdle (12/6/24) that essentially adopted the medical carveout position, writing that a civil rights framework is trumped by “biology.” Similar arguments could be found on op-ed pages across corporate media, from the New York Times (12/8/24) to USA Today (12/4/24) to the Hill (12/4/24).

‘Ripple effects’

Casey Parks (Washington Post, 12/5/24) reported a rare news story about trans youth that is actually from the perspective of trans youth.

Such voices did not entirely monopolize the op-ed pages, and some strong trans advocates were published as well. The New York Times, whose publisher has vehemently defended the paper’s influential role in spreading misleading anti-trans narratives (FAIR.org, 5/19/23), published trans ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio (12/3/24) arguing from both a legal and personal perspective for the right to gender-affirming care. Trans nonbinary Times columnist M. Gessen, who joined the paper in May, also published a column (12/6/24) and was interviewed by fellow Times columnist Lydia Polgreen for the Times‘ Opinions podcast (12/9/24).

At the Boston Globe, columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr (12/4/24) drew comparisons to the Dobbs ruling and its own “ripple effects,” and called on states to enact shield laws to protect “the ability of doctors, their patients, and patients’ families to act according to their needs, wishes and the proper standard of medical care.” And the Los Angeles Times published a piece by ACLU head Anthony D. Romero (12/3/24) that also linked the Skrmetti case to the Dobbs case, and criticized “the recent retrenchment on the political left and center [that] may set back the cause of trans equality — and equal protection more broadly.”

The Post news section, meanwhile, produced some careful and sensitive reporting its editorial board ought to read, such as an FAQ (12/3/24) on the basics of gender affirming care for minors, “including what puberty blockers are and whether cross-sex hormones impact fertility.” Reporter Casey Parks relied on actual medical experts to answer the questions, rather than allowing it to be framed as a “culture war” or relaying “both sides,” as media reports too often do (FAIR.org, 11/23/22).

Parks also wrote an account (12/5/24) of the Supreme Court oral arguments through the eyes of one of the young trans plaintiffs, who ingenuously wanted to talk to the Tennessee governor and the anti-trans protesters because she believed they were “unaware of the consequences” of their actions, and she wanted to tell them how her life was “immeasurably better than it had been before she started blockers and hormones.”

Scapegoats for Democratic losses

Pamela Paul (New York Times, 11/14/24) says Democrats should embrace a “common sense” approach to trans issues—which appears to mean believing that “gender is based on sex at birth.”

In the 2024 election, Republicans spent more on anti-trans advertising than any other issue (Truthout, 11/5/24; Erin in the Morning, 11/13/24). Rather than fiercely defend trans people from the vicious attacks, several “liberal” pundits accused the Democratic party of going too far on trans rights, scapegoating trans people and their defenders for the party’s losses. That included the New York Times‘ Pamela Paul (11/14/24) and Maureen Dowd (11/9/24), and the Atlantic‘s Helen Lewis (11/10/24), all of whom approvingly quoted Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who said, “I have two little girls; I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Moulton later walked back his comments, saying his point was that Democrats should be leading the conversation on trans rights rather than running away from it, and that he promised “unwavering” commitment to LGBTQ rights—something the aforementioned pundits expressed little interest in.

There’s no reason to doubt the incoming Republican government will continue its attacks on trans people and their rights, only now with much more power at its disposal. We need news media now more than ever to hold those in power accountable for their attacks on minority groups, but the coverage of the Skrmetti case suggests that many in the press corps will instead happily join in on the attacks.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 19, 2024

Syria Is Free, Say Media—But That Shouldn’t Mean Free of US Occupation

Since the overthrow of the Syrian government, corporate media analysts have offered advice as to how the US should approach Syria going forward. These observers consistently opted not to call on the US and Israel to end their occupations of and violence toward Syria.

The Washington Post (12/8/24) calls for “engaged diplomacy” from the incoming Trump administration to “help write a brighter next chapter for this strategically located, and long-suffering, country.”

A Washington Post editorial (12/8/24), headlined “Why the US Needs to Help Build a New Syria,” said:

Syria might seem far removed from US interests. Before Mr. Assad’s fall, President-elect Donald Trump posted: “DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But America is involved. Some 900 US troops and an undisclosed number of military contractors are operating in northeastern Syria near Iraq, battling the Islamic State and backing Kurdish forces fighting the Assad regime.

Estimates suggest that the US-led coalition that bombed Syria, ostensibly to defeat ISIS (Jacobin, 3/29/16), has killed at least 3,000 Syrian civilians and possibly more than 15,000. The Post misses a rather obvious point: The US can “help” Syria by withdrawing the forces that have slaughtered thousands of Syrian noncombatants.

The Post also published a piece by columnist Josh Rogin (12/8/24), “For the First Time in Decades, Syria Is Free. Now It’s Time to Help.” Set aside that Syria is not “free”; it is under foreign occupation (CBC, 12/10/24). The article provided virtually no details about the forms he thinks that “help” should take. Rogin said that “for those in Washington who have long wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, [the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s government] might offer a path forward.”

That falls short of saying that the US should withdraw its 900 troops and unknown number of contractors from the country, and Rogin said nothing about the US military bases in Syria, of which there are at least five, plus a minimum of two smaller sites (Stars and Stripes, 12/6/24). Through such mechanisms, the US has long exercised control over a quarter of Syrian territory, including its breadbasket and oil reserves (FAIR.org, 3/7/18; Responsible Statecraft, 7/28/24). Surely ending the US military occupation and returning sovereign control over the country’s vital resources are essential ways to “help” Syria, yet Rogin declined to call for these steps.

‘Promote stability and democracy’

Boston Globe (12/12/24): “A US military presence, however small, can make a difference.“

The Boston Globe’s editorial board (12/12/24) said that the fall of the Syrian government

represents an opportunity for the United States and the international community to reach out, to engage, and to help free Syria from the more cynical ambitions of Assad’s patrons in Iran and Russia.

Yet the paper endorsed the US occupation of Syria, writing that “a US military presence, however small, can make a difference.” It also advocated continued US meddling in Syrian affairs, asserting that “American diplomats can help promote stability and democracy in the country while sidelining extremist groups.”

Writing such a thing requires extraordinary cynicism, a goldfish’s memory, or both. The US teamed up with Al Qaeda in an effort to bring down the Assad government (Harper’s, 1/16). Weapons that America and its Saudi allies supplied to groups fighting the Syrian government “fell into” ISIS’ hands, significantly improving the quality of ISIS’ armaments, in quantities “far beyond those that would have been available through battle capture alone” (Al Jazeera, 12/14/17).

‘Cautious about removing sanctions’

“The US should be cautious about removing sanctions,” advised the LA Times (12/13/24).

In the Los Angeles Times (12/13/24), Matthew Levitt said Syria’s “people need and deserve American support now.” His definition of “support” includes the US “maintain[ing] its small but influential US military presence in Syria,” in part to enable America’s junior partners in northeast Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to “continue maintaining detention camps holding Islamic State fighters.”

The conditions in these camps are abhorrent. An April report from Amnesty International concluded that the SDF and its local partners

—with the support of the US government and other members of the coalition to defeat the Islamic State (IS) armed group—are engaged in the large-scale and systematic violation of the rights of more than 56,000 men, women and children in their custody. Most of these people were detained during the final battles with IS in 2019. They are now held in at least 27 detention facilities and two detention camps and face arbitrary and indefinite detention, enforced disappearance, grossly inhumane conditions, and other serious violations. Many of those detained are victims of IS atrocity crimes or trafficking in persons.

Keeping Syrians in dungeons is a rather odd way to “support” them.

Levitt also wrote that “the US should be cautious about removing sanctions against the Syrian state.” Maintaining sanctions is the opposite of “support[ing]” Syrians. In July, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia reported that the sanctions are negatively “impact[ing] large sectors of the population and the economy, including basic services (education, health, [water, sanitation, and hygiene]) and productive sectors (manufacturing and agriculture), as well as the work of humanitarian organizations.”

The cruelty of the sanctions is such that during the war in Syria, according to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, Western sanctions have “severely restrict[ed] pharmaceutical imports,” undermining pediatric cancer treatment (Reuters, 3/15/17). Yet Levitt thinks the US shouldn’t hurry to lift such measures, even as doing so is a straightforward way to “support” Syrians.

Meanwhile, neither the editorial board of the Post nor that of the Globe includes sanctions removal on its list of ways to “help” Syria.

Furthermore, Levitt points out that, between the Assad government’s last hours and the first days after its overthrow, “the Israeli air force and navy have hit more than 350 strategic targets across the country, destroying an estimated 70% of Syria’s military capabilities.” Whatever Levitt’s definition is for “support,” it apparently includes the US allowing its Israeli surrogate to destroy Syria’s capacity to defend itself from foreign aggression. That won’t help Syria regain the sovereignty it has lost in the 13 years of international proxy war that have taken place on its soil, particularly when the party destroying Syrian military capacity is Israel, which maintains a decades-long regime of illegal occupation, colonization and annexation in Syria’s Golan Heights.

‘Suck Israel into Syria’

Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 12/13/24): “Middle Eastern countries…come in just two varieties: countries that implode and countries that explode.”

Similarly, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (12/13/24) argued that the incoming Trump administration should “help with—dare I say it—nation-building in Syria.” He went on to say “it would cost the United States and its allies little money and few troops to try to help” Syria. Friedman subsequently claimed that “without American help and leadership,” Syria could devolve into a “forever war” that would “suck Israel into Syria.”

Prior to Friedman’s article going to print, Israel had carried out 420 airstrikes in Syria in a week, hitting targets in 13 Syrian provinces. Israel had also set up shop on Mount Hermon, which is strategically located on the Syria/Lebanon border, in violation of 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria (BBC, 12/13/24).

Setting aside that Friedman bizarrely cast Israeli involvement in Syria as a hypothetical rather than a long-running reality—Israel bombed Syria hundreds of times in the 13 years of war that led to the Syrian government’s demise—the author’s notion of America “help[ing]” with “nation-building” does not exclude its underwriting Israel’s nation-destroying and nation-stealing in Syria.

In the same vein, the Globe’s editorial board says they want the US to “help free Syria,” but the Israeli violence that the US underwrites appears exempt, since it blandly describes some of what Israel has been doing, but doesn’t say it should stop:

Israel continues to launch bombing raids of Assad’s chemical weapons plants, naval vessels and Russian-made bombers, which the Israeli government says it is doing to prevent those military assets from falling into the wrong hands amid the chaos.

Thus, the authors seem to think the US can “help free Syria” without compelling its Israeli client to ends its relentless assault on the state. Meanwhile, stopping Israel’s bombing and conquest of Syria is not enumerated among the ways that Rogin or the Post’s editors think the US can “help” Syria have a brighter future.

If these commentators genuinely wanted Syria to flourish, they’d insist that the US and its allies finally end their long campaign of intervening in Syria, with quite harmful effects on the country’s population (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17), and allow the nation to chart its own course.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 17, 2024

NYT Panics Over Outrage at Insurance Companies

In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of alleged shooter Luigi Mangione, I wrote (FAIR.org, 12/11/24) about how Murdoch outlets like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post editorial board, not only decried the widespread support for Mangione but fought back against legitimate criticism of the health insurance industry.

Now the New York Times is in full-scale panic mode over the widespread boiling anger against the health insurance industry the killing has laid bare (CNN, 12/6/24; PBS, 12/7/24; Reuters, 12/9/24).

‘Working-class hero’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 12/12/24): Brian Thompson is “a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life.”

Times columnist Bret Stephens (12/12/24) wrote that because Thompson came from small-town beginnings, whereas Mangione was from a privileged background, it was in fact the slain CEO who was the real “working-class hero.” This shows that Stephens doesn’t understand class as a relationship of power, where people like Thompson have economic power, regardless of their cultural background.

(As music critic Kurt Gottschalk noted, it also shows that Stephens doesn’t understand the John Lennon song he’s quoting from, whose lyrics advise the would-be working-class hero: “There’s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill/If you want to be like the folks on the hill.”)

Stephens said that the idea that health insurance “companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.” The aforementioned FAIR piece contains plenty of evidence that contradicts Stephens’ weak claim that Americans are perfectly fine with the status quo, noting that medical bankruptcies are exploding, that polling shows growing dissatisfaction with the American healthcare system, and that studies show the American system lags behind those of peer nations. But, really, the best evidence that many customers are dissatisfied with the health insurance system is that so many of them found the murder of a health insurance CEO perfectly understandable.

Stephens, one of the Times’ several right-wing columnists, has said (2/28/20) that socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the best-known lawmakers supporting Medicare-for-All, “scares” him, because he is “now the old man who rails compulsively against ‘the billionaire class’ and wants to nationalize the health insurance industry.” Stephens (1/31/20) complained that for Sanders’ supporters, “ordinary civility isn’t a virtue,” but rather a “ruse by which those with power manipulate and marginalize those without”; if so, they offer a pretty good critique of the way Stephens himself deploys “civility” to silence dissent.

‘Tiptoe toward justifying assassination’

Ross Douthat (New York Times, 12/13/24) : Criticism of the insurance industry in the wake of Thompson’s murder “illustrates how easily toxic elements can slip into mainstream politics right now.”

Another right-wing Times columnist, Ross Douthat (12/13/24) specifically addressed the “manifestly illiberal conceit that murder is wrong, but public enthusiasm for the murder of an executive in a deplorable industry reflects the understandable anger of people pushed too far”—a position he insisted “seems to tiptoe toward justifying assassination even if you insist that you’re disavowing violence.” He dismissed the “idea that the American model of private insurance is uniquely evil and engaged in acts of social violence because it denies people too much treatment,” maintaining that all insurance systems, public or private, ration care.

But as I noted in the earlier FAIR article, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the US system does, in fact, stand out among other peer nations, ranking “as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare.” Those areas the US falls short in include “preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.” The rest of the world is doing better than us on these scores, contrary to Douthat.

Americans see the systems working in the rest of the world and know that the United States could have a better healthcare regime, but that corporate and government leaders simply choose not to.

‘We let a murderer manipulate us’

As people shared their health insurance horror stories of denied treatments and mounting bills as ways of understanding the shooter’s outburst, bioethicist Travis Rieder (New York Times, 12/13/24) shook his finger at the masses as if they were rowdy kindergarteners:

The supposed motives assigned to the shooter may well be understandable. But not everything understandable is justifiable. This tragic situation should motivate us to change the institutions and structures that have failed so many people. But not to give murder a pass, and especially not to glorify it.

Peter Coy (New York Times, 12/13/24)suggested that UnitedHealth’s vertical monopolization of healthcare is “something like a private version of a single-payer national healthcare system.”

The paper produced an audio op-ed by political scientist Robert Pape (New York Times, 12/12/24), who urged listeners to see the public reaction as part of “the growing normalization of political violence in America,” rather than as part of the growing outrage over the broken healthcare system in America. Bypassing the latter issue, he simply likened it to the attack against the Pelosis and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, incidents that did not spark a national outcry against an unjust policy or system. “It is terribly important right now that national political leaders at all levels condemn political violence and the murder of the healthcare CEO and condemn the outpouring of support for the murder,” Pape said.

Times opinion contributor Peter Coy (12/13/24) investigated the complexities of for-profit healthcare and offered some band-aid solutions, while avoiding any real exploration of a more social democratic approach to healthcare, despite the popularity of publicly financed universal care (Common Dreams, 12/9/24). Coy wrote:

Tragically, Thompson’s shooting wasn’t a solution to anything. “The way we let a murderer manipulate us into having the conversation he wanted is grotesque,” Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, who favors a free-market approach, told me.

Coy, Pape and Rieder all pay lip service to problems with the healthcare system and suggest changing it through politics—as if people haven’t been fighting for that for decades. They offer the diagnosis that public celebrations over Thompson’s death are the result of some weakness of public character, which means that the answer is reminding people that murder is wrong.

The more honest diagnosis would be that the responses are the result of a broken political system that offers no real way for people to have their healthcare grievances addressed—but that would call not for scolding screwed-over patients, but rather demanding political reform that challenges entrenched political and corporate interests that the Times has little interest in challenging.

‘To help make it work better’

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty (New York Times, 12/13/24) : “We understand and share the desire to build a health care system that works better for everyone. That is the purpose of our organization.” The $23 billion in profits the conglomerate made last year was apparently just a fortuitous happenstance.

But the most banal piece of all came from Andrew Witty (New York Times, 12/13/24), the CEO of UnitedHealth Group—the parent company of Thompson’s division—who said, offering no details and no real agenda for change:

We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone, as we always have—healthcare providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments and others—to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs.

While this piece offered almost nothing other than PR for a company in desperate need for positive spin, its placement on the Times op-ed page did help demonstrate why the shooter got so much sympathy in this case. People like Witty, with access to highly compensated crisis management consultants, can have their polished messaging featured in the highest perches of American media. With all of these pieces on the opinion page lambasting the public for voicing anger against executives like Thompson, there is no voice from anyone on the opinion pages explaining why they are taking part in this national movement of solidarity against insurance profiteering.

That’s a telling omission, because those stories could easily be told, especially as more news about the hideousness of this insurance Goliath emerges. Minnesota doctors have sued UnitedHealthcare, alleging it “deliberately engages in the pattern of ‘deny, delay and underpay,’” resulting in over $900,000 in unpaid independent dispute resolution awards (KMSP, 12/12/24).

ProPublica (12/13/24) investigated how the company is limiting treatment for autistic children. Earlier this year, New York’s attorney general announced that the company was forced to pay “a $1 million penalty for failing to provide birth control coverage, a violation of New York state law” (Gothamist, 6/20/24). Senate Democrats accused the company of “denying claims to a growing number of patients as it tried to leverage artificial intelligence to automate the process,” a kind of capitalist nightmare with a sci-fi twist (Fox Business, 12/6/24).

The cancer patient being denied life-saving treatment, or the mom missing meals and working two jobs to afford their child’s medicine, don’t have PR teams like Witty does to reach the Times. That is why people are expressing such vitriol right now.

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 16, 2024

ABC Settles With Trump in a Case It Could Have Won

Content warning: This article discusses the details of sexual assault.

The interview (This Week, 3/10/24) that cost ABC $15 million.

ABC has agreed to pay $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library and $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees “to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll” (AP, 12/14/24).

Fox News (12/15/24) gloated that “Stephanopoulos and ABC News also had to issue statements of ‘regret’ as an editor’s note” on the online version of the offending piece (This Week, 3/10/24). The note reads:

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.

This settlement is a dangerous omen for press freedom, given Trump’s threats to use his power to go after his media critics (NPR, 10/23/24; CNN, 11/7/24; PEN America, 11/15/24; New York Times, 12/15/24; Deadline, 12/16/24).

‘Common modern parlance’

Washington Post (7/19/23): Judge Lewis Kaplan “says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.”

Trump has been found liable for defaming and sexually abusing Carroll in two cases, both of which he is appealing (Politico, 9/6/24). “Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury,” Stephanopoulos said (ABC, 3/10/24). “Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury. It’s been affirmed by a judge.”

However, there is a legal difference between “sexual abuse” and “rape” under New York law. The jury found that Trump had violated Carroll with his fingers, not with his penis, and thus the incident was legally classified as sexual abuse, not rape (USA Today, 1/29/24).

However, as the Washington Post (7/19/23) reported:

The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts.

Kaplan roundly rejected Trump’s motion Tuesday, calling that argument “entirely unpersuasive.”

The Post continued:

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.

He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

In other words, Stephanopoulos’ initial description was not legally accurate, but was instead relying on the popular understanding of the word, according to the judge overseeing the case.

Legally perplexing

Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid (Newsweek, 12/15/24): “This is the cowardice of legacy media out to make profit, rather than uphold principle.”

For most journalists, such an offense isn’t nothing: Journalists should always be as accurate as possible, and when they do slip up, they should issue corrections. He should have used the most accurate terminology the court used.

But should this mistake cost the network $16 million, most of which will be used to prop up the legacy of the person who made the complaint, a former president on his way back to power?

Newsweek (12/15/24) noted that it was legally perplexing for ABC to settle so early: “Legal experts also criticized the broadcaster for settling the lawsuit before depositions were due to take place,” it explained. The piece quoted former prosecutor Joyce Vance:

I’m old enough to remember—and to have worked on—cases where newspapers vigorously defended themselves against defamation cases instead of folding before the defendant was even deposed.

Because this case never went to trial, we will never know if there was any evidence of actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth in this misreporting, as would be required to secure a defamation reward under New York Times v. Sullivan (Knight First Amendment Institute, 3/18/24). And while correcting the record seems reasonable for ABC, forking over millions in cash that could be otherwise used to employ teams of working journalists seems excessive.

Newsweek (12/15/24) also covered some of the backlash to the deal:

Democratic attorney Marc Elias wrote: “Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”

Reporter Oliver Willis also chimed in, writing on Threads: “This is actually how democracy dies.”

Tech reporter Matt Novak said: “Not good for the rest of us when you do this shit, ABC.”

“But that’s probably half the point from management’s perspective,” he added Saturday.

A warning to other media

“The First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation,” attorney Floyd Abrams told CNN (11/1/24). “Mr. Trump may disagree with this or that coverage of him, but the First Amendment permits the press to decide how to cover elections, not the candidates seeking public office.”

The fact that the network is coughing up money as a result of Trump’s case sends a warning to other media that no media will be safe under a Trump regime. Trump has also sued CBS, “demanding $10 billion in damages over the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.” His suit alleges that the Harris interview and “the associated programming were ‘partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference’ intended to ‘mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales’ of the presidential election in her favor” (CNN, 11/1/24).

If continuing the CBS lawsuit sounds petty in light of the fact that Trump won the election, that’s because it is petty. But protracted litigation could inflict real damage on the network. Fox News (12/13/24) bragged that the “CBS suit could potentially impact an enormous media merger.” As we know, Trump hates journalists, and is vowing to go after them when he gets back into power (FAIR.org, 11/14/24).

To be fair, this strategy, which is meant to create a chilling effect on speech, can backfire on Trump, as when he was ordered to “pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees to the New York Times and three investigative reporters after he sued them unsuccessfully over a Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices” (AP, 1/2/24). That’s all the more reason why ABC should be fighting this dubious claim by Trump.

The New York Post editorial board (12/15/24) saw this as a big win for Trump, noting that Stephanopoulos had used the R-word several times in the segment:

The law gives even public figures some rights against such smears; if the case had proceeded, Trump’s legal team would’ve been able to access ABC News’ internal communications in order to prove the network’s reckless attitude toward the truth.

Trump was actually quite magnanimous in not making ABC pay him the settlement, even if the deal makes the company by far the largest donor to the Trump library.

Conservative legal commentator Jonathan Turley (Fox News, 12/16/24) speculated that ABC’s owner, Disney, likely wanted to start off on a better foot with a new Trump administration. “Disney is trying to adopt a more neutral stance after years of opposition to its stances on political issues and accusations of ultra-woke products,” he said. With “networks like MSNBC and CNN in a ratings and revenue free fall after the election, Disney clearly wants to start fresh with the new administration.”

In reality, ABC’s capitulation may have less to do with ratings and more to do with the GOP takeover of all three branches of federal power. Trump’s avowed plan to reward his friends and punish his enemies could force so-called “liberal” media into being more cheerleaders than a check on political power.

Even before the election, FAIR (10/25/24, 10/30/24) noted how the owners of the LA Times and Washington Post stepped in to keep their editorial boards neutral in the presidential race. In the case of the LA Times, owner Patrick Dr. Soon-Shiong has reportedly continued after the election to soften the paper’s editorial voice, a move that has “concerned many staff members who fear he is trying to be deferential to the incoming Trump administration” (New York Times, 12/12/24).

Now that Trump and his legal army see that at least one network will simply pay to have a legal complaint go away, they may feel emboldened to go after others. That could put a damper on critical coverage of the federal government when Americans need it the most.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 13, 2024

Corporate Fearmongering Over Fast Food Wage Hike Aged Like Cold French Fries

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”

In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.

Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.

Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”

Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”

In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).

Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)

The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).

As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.

The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?

And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?

The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?

That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”

The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 13, 2024

Iman Abid on Israeli Genocide

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

New York Times (12/5/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition.

The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.

The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.

Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.

A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support.

There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.

While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
December 13, 2024

Iman Abid on Israeli Genocide

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

New York Times (12/5/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition.

The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.

The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.

Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.

A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support.

There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.

While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 12, 2024

What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Genocide

Amnesty International (12/5/24) found that “Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza.”

Imagine for a moment that a magnitude 8 earthquake occurred somewhere in the world, and the Western corporate media refused to use the word “earthquake” in reporting it, instead talking ambiguously of a “tectonic incident” that had caused buildings to collapse and people to die.

Obviously, reporters would be called out for deliberate linguistic ineptness and a bizarre obfuscation of truth. And yet just such a verbal sleight of hand has been on display for more than 14 months in the Gaza Strip, where corporate media outlets continue to dance around the word “genocide” while the Israeli military carries out the systematic mass killing of Palestinians.

Since October 2023, nearly 45,000 people have officially been killed in Gaza—although as a letter to the Lancet medical journal (7/20/24) pointed out back in July, the true death toll at that time was likely to exceed 186,000. A new report (BBC, 11/8/24) from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights indicates that almost 70% of the over 8,000 Palestinian fatalities verified by the UN over a six-month period were women and children; a survey of medical volunteers in Gaza found that “44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza” (New York Times, 10/9/24).

Nearly the entire population of Gaza has been displaced, and most of the territory has been reduced to rubble.

‘Committed with intent’

From the beginning of the Israeli assault, officials like President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23) made it clear that they saw themselves as being at war with a population.

As per Article II of the Genocide Convention, “genocide means…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israeli leaders again and again have effectively admitted genocidal intent. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23), at the beginning of Israel’s assault, declared:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23) likewise insisted, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible…. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mother Jones, 11/3/23) invoked a biblical justification for genocide: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” The Bible (1 Samuel 15:3) says of the Amalekites: “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants.”

And Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi couldn’t have been more clear (X, 10/7/23), posting the following comment to X at the outset of hostilities in October 2023: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”

In other words, Gaza is a pretty textbook case of genocide. But the term “genocide” is ostracized by the corporate media world because it violates the political line of the United States, the global superpower that is currently enabling Israel’s genocidal behavior—to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in aid and weaponry. And the media’s refusal to call a spade a spade has produced all manner of linguistic gymnastics.

‘Blistering retaliatory offensive’

A New York Times memo (Intercept, 4/15/24) said of the word “genocide,” “We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not.” The same memo declared, “It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7.”

In the eyes of the Associated Press (12/4/24), for example, the genocide in Gaza is merely “Israel’s blistering retaliatory offensive,” while Fox News (11/3/24) detects a “fight against terrorists” and the Washington Post (12/3/24) sees “one of the most deadly and destructive wars in recent memory.”

Or take the New York Times, where a memo (Intercept, 4/15/24) leaked earlier this year explicitly instructed journalists to avoid using words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” when discussing “Palestine”—another word whose use was highly discouraged. On October 7, the one-year anniversary of Israel’s ongoing assault, the US newspaper of record headlined the affair as “The War That Won’t End,” with the G-word appearing only in a fleeting reference to “accusations of genocide and war crimes.”

This particular Times dispatch begins with Yaniv Hegyi, an Israeli who “fled his home last October 7, after terrorists from Gaza overran his village in southern Israel.” As ever, the selectivity with which US media deploys the T-word safely obliterates the chance that domestic audiences will be confronted with the fact that the state of Israel has literally been terrorizing Palestinians since the moment of its foundation on Palestinian land in 1948—or that Zionist terrorism preceded even that moment.

Only after we’ve been introduced to Hegyi, victim of “terrorists,” do we meet Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian who “fled his home on October 12, after the Israeli Air Force responded by striking his city in northern Gaza.” Which brings us to another tactic that has been institutionalized in the US political and media establishment alike: the perennial Israeli monopoly on “responding,” “retaliating” and generally engaging in “self-defense” no matter what it does—including genocide.

Never mind that Israel would have nothing to “retaliate” against if it hadn’t up and invented itself on other people’s land, and then spent the next 76 years (and counting) occupying, forcibly displacing and slaughtering Palestinians en masse. Fortuitously for Israel, the corporate media are ever standing by to set the record askew.

‘Propaganda war never stops’

The Wall Street Journal (12/5/24) calls for ethnic cleansing as an alternative to genocide: “Not one of the groups yelling genocide calls on Egypt to let women and children escape to safety by opening its border with Gaza.”

That said, the media have been increasingly unable to abide by a de facto blanket ban on the word “genocide,” given, inter alia, Amnesty International’s recent determination (12/5/24) that Israel is committing just that in the Gaza Strip. In such cases, then, the term inevitably finds its way into news reports—but only as an allegation.

CNN (12/5/24), for instance, reported that Amnesty had “said that it had gathered ‘sufficient evidence to believe’ that Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people—a charge the Israeli government has vehemently denied.” The rest of the article similarly alternates between Amnesty’s charges and Israel’s vehement rebuttals.

This template was also followed by AP (via ABC, 12/4/24), NBC News (12/5/24) and the other usual suspects. Significantly, this sort of rebuttal option is never extended to Palestinians; you’d never see Yaniv Hegyi fleeing his home from “conduct by Gazans that the Israeli government says amounts to terrorism—a charge the government of Gaza has vehemently denied.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/5/24) took it upon themselves to pen a diatribe against the organization that had chosen to “lend…its once-good name to the genocide lie,” and thereby “assure… its good standing in the anti-Israel herd.” Bearing the headline “The Propaganda War on Israel Never Stops,” the rant came accompanied by an entirely irrelevant 23-minute documentary on “the worst antisemitic riot in American history” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which took place in 1991.

According to the Journal, Amnesty has committed an “inversion of reality”: It’s actually Hamas that is the “genocidal” actor—and, by the way, there are “terrorist headquarters in hospitals” in Gaza. This is just about the most unabashed apology for war crimes you can ask for. Israel has pulverized the bulk of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, and an October UN press release noted that

Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles, while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.

By converting Israel into the victim not only of “terrorists” but also of a “propaganda war,” the Journal is engaging in its own criminal “inversion of reality.” But for a corporate media committed to complicity in genocide by linguistic omission, it’s all in a day’s work.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 11, 2024

Murdoch Outlets and Bezos’ WaPo Demand More Sympathy for Health Insurance Execs

Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 12/6/24) “can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.”

The early morning murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met on social media with a “torrent of hate” for health insurance executives (New York Times, 12/5/24). Memes mocking the insurance companies and their callous disregard for human life abound on various platforms (AFP, 12/6/24).

Internet users are declaring that the man police believe to be the shooter, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, is certifiably hot (Rolling Stone, 12/9/24; KFOX, 12/10/24). A lookalike contest for the shooter was held in lower Manhattan (New York Times, 12/7/24).

If so many people are unsympathetic at best in response to such a killing, that might be a reason to revisit why health insurance companies are so loathed. The rage “was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum, and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters,” the New York Times (12/6/24) noted. Mangione was reportedly found with an anti-insurance manifesto that stated “these parasites had it coming” (Newsweek, 12/9/24), echoing a resentment largely felt by a lot of Americans, and targeted fury at UnitedHealthcare specifically.

UnitedHealthcare has always stood out for exceptionally high rate of claims denial generally in the industry (Boston Globe, 12/5/24; Forbes, 12/5/24). For example, a Senate committee found that “UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization denial rate for post-acute care jumped from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022” (WNYW, 12/7/24).

The Times (12/5/24) reported that the Senate committee found that “three major companies—UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna—were intentionally denying claims” related to falls and strokes in order to boost profits. UnitedHealthcare “denied requests for such nursing stays three times more often than it did for other services.”

Increasing dissatisfaction

The perception of the quality of US healthcare has been on the decline since 2012 (Gallup, 12/6/24).

On top of that, Americans generally believe their insurance-centered system is a mess. Gallup (12/6/24) reported that “Americans’ positive rating of the quality of healthcare in the US is now at its lowest point in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001.”

It continued:

The current 44% of US adults who say the quality of healthcare is excellent (11%) or good (33%) is down by a total of 10 percentage points since 2020 after steadily eroding each year. Between 2001 and 2020, majorities ranging from 52% to 62% rated US healthcare quality positively; now, 54% say it is only fair (38%) or poor (16%).

As has been the case throughout the 24-year trend, Americans rate healthcare coverage in the US even more negatively than they rate quality. Just 28% say coverage is excellent or good, four points lower than the average since 2001 and well below the 41% high point in 2012.

Ipsos (2/27/24) likewise found:

Most Americans are unsatisfied with the healthcare system, say the health insurance system is confusing and opaque, and many have skipped or delayed care because of a bad experience or the lack of timely appointments. A small, but not insignificant number, of Americans believe they have had a negative health outcome as result of their experiences within the healthcare system.

When this inefficient system doesn’t literally kill Americans, it can still kill them financially. “Almost a third of all working adults in the United States are carrying some kind of medical debt—that’s about 15% of all US households,” Marketplace (3/27/24) reported. It added: “This debt is also the leading cause of bankruptcies in the country.”

Many news outlets’ pontificators, however, were incensed that anyone would voice frustration with health insurance when an industry CEO has fallen.

‘Not the time to offer criticism’

After Brian Thompson’s killing, the New York Post (12/5/24) condemned those on social media who “swooned over his killer, speculated on his motives, and wondered if Timothée Chalamet would play him in the movie.”

Responding to the memes and the jokes, many of which were more about the unjust health insurance system than support for vigilante murder, the New York Post editorial board (12/5/24) asked:

Do the jokes point to a society that has become so desensitized by the coarseness of online discussion, so disassociated from kindness, that a baying mob cheers a man’s murder and cries out for more?

And upon Mangione’s arrest, the Post (12/9/24) complained that on social media, “tasteless trolls showered praise on the Ivy League grad.” The Post (12/11/24) also fretted about fake “Wanted” posters for insurance company executives that the paper considered a “a fear-mongering social media stunt to incite hysteria,” adding that the “murder has also spawned a stream of merchandise sympathetic towards the 26-year-old being sold by online retailers, forcing Amazon to pull them from its website.”

Fox News (12/6/24) quoted one of its own contributors, Joe Concha, saying, “I think this encapsulates the far left’s worldview: If you run a company that isn’t to their liking, you deserve to die.” The network (12/7/24) praised Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania for “tearing into” a New York article (12/7/24) that the outlet characterized as saying “resentment over denied insurance claims made…Thompson’s murder inevitable.”

The dismay was felt in other corners of right-wing media. At the Free Press (12/5/24), the brainchild of anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss, Kat Rosenfield wrote:

The people celebrating Brian Thompson’s murder by turning him into an avatar for everything wrong with the American healthcare system remind me of nothing so much as Hollywood screenwriters, cunningly manipulating an audience into cheering on unforgivable acts of fictional violence.

The National Review (12/4/24) huffed:

This is not the time to offer your criticisms of the health-insurance industry. And there is never a time to believe that corporate executives are, by their very nature, evil people who deserve to be killed. Yet that is what you’ll see if you go on social media right now and look at comments on news stories about this assassination.

Yet all of these outlets at the same time have run support for Daniel Penny, the man recently acquitted for killing a Black homeless man on the New York City subway (National Review, 6/17/23; Free Press, 10/20/24; New York Post, 12/4/24; Fox News, 12/6/24). These outlets likewise expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse after he gunned down Black Lives Matter protesters (National Review, 11/19/21; Free Press, 11/17/21; New York Post, 11/19/21; Fox News cited by Media Matters, 11/11/21), and for George Zimmerman when he shot Trayvon Martin (National Review, 6/22/20; New York Post, 7/15/13; Fox News, 7/18/12). In other words, it’s fine to defend vigilantes when they kill unarmed Black people or anti-racist activists, but when a CEO’s life is taken, we must solemnly stay silent on the reasons why such a person might be targeted or why bystanders might not be crying.

Piers Morgan (New York Post, 12/10/24) made this clear when he said “I cheered when I heard” Penny’s acquittal, and felt “shocked and saddened when I saw the footage” of the Thompson shooting. “Those two reactions would surely be the correct and appropriate ones for anyone with an ounce of fairness and humanity in their heart,” he said—because Thompson was “a non-violent, non-threatening, non-criminal man in the street,” whereas Penny’s victim was “a dangerous, mentally ill, homeless man.”

Blame it on Medicare

The Wall Street Journal (12/6/24) made the absurd claim that a medical system based on private insurance is better than any other kind of healthcare system.

It was the Wall Street Journal, the more erudite of Murdoch’s media properties, that really addressed the question of why people might hate health insurance companies. The anger was misdirected, the editorial board (12/6/24) said. Rather, we should look to federally funded healthcare if we want to get mad: “Medicare and Medicaid, two government programs, cover about 36% of Americans,” the paper observed; because they “pay doctors and hospitals below the cost of providing care…many providers won’t see Medicaid patients, resulting in delayed care.”

It’s an odd argument, given that people who receive Medicaid report being happier with their health insurance than people who get it through their employers or pay for it themselves—and people with Medicare are the happiest of all (KFF, 6/15/23). If the federal programs are underpaying healthcare providers, the obvious solution would be to increase funding for them—an initiative the Journal would be unlikely to support.

The board (Journal, 10/10/24) later dismissed critiques of the health insurance industry and passed off Mangione as a “disturbed individual” radicalized by the Internet and said it is “a dreadful sign of the times that Mr. Mangione is being celebrated.”

Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (12/8/24) followed up by placing the blame on the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”). “Having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior,” she wrote, but does “cause them to use more care.” The situation, she said, “has gotten worse since Obamacare expanded eligibility” for Medicaid. This portrait of US patients overusing healthcare like sweet-toothed children let loose in a candy store is belied by (among other things) the fact that Americans live 4.7 fewer years than the average of comparable countries (KFF, 1/30/24).

The Journal editorial went on to complain that “some providers prescribe treatments and tests that may be medically unnecessary,” and so “insurers have tried to clamp down on such abuse by requiring prior authorization.” While this “can result in delayed care that is medically necessary…it’s also how insurers control costs.”

In reality, doctors are complaining that insurance bureaucrats are impeding their ability to deliver needed healthcare because of this cost-slashing system (Forbes, 3/13/23). The American Medical Association found “94% of doctors say prior authorization leads to delays in patient care” (Chief Medical Executive, 3/14/23); “one in three doctors (33%) say prior authorization has led to serious adverse events with their patients.”

Journal editorialists appear to believe that doctors are jauntily giving away expensive blood pressure medicine and signing up patients for brain surgery for no particular reason, and the only thing that can stop this carnival of care is some bureaucrat who is trained to say “no.” The reality is that the private insurance system “saves insurance companies money by reflexively denying medical care that has been determined necessary by a physician,” as pediatrician William E. Bennett Jr. (Washington Post, 10/22/19) wrote. This is why people are so unsympathetic to Thompson, who was paid an estimated $10 million annually for imposing medical austerity on patients and providers (PBS, 12/7/24).

Pity the insurance giants

The Washington Post (12/7/24) criticized those who tried to use Thompson’s killing “as an occasion for policy debate about claim denial rates by health insurance companies.” (Note that both the Post and the Wall Street Journal used the same photo of flags at half-mast.)

Right-wing media weren’t the only engaging in scolding. At the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post, the editorial board (12/7/24) criticized those “who excuse or celebrate the killing,” as well as those “who do not countenance the killing itself” but “have nevertheless tried to treat it as an occasion for policy debate about claim denial rates by health insurance companies, an admittedly legitimate issue.” The Post added that debate was “fine in principle, but we’re skeptical that this particular moment lends itself to nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry.”

The editors nevertheless spent a lengthy paragraph explaining to readers that “controlling healthcare costs requires difficult trade-offs,” and that “even the most generous state-run health systems in other countries also have to face” these trade-offs. The editorial attempted to summon sympathy for

insurers, whose profits are capped by federal law, [and] must contend with consumer demand for ready access to high-priced specialists and prescription drugs—and, at the same time, premiums low enough that people can afford coverage.

Note that insurance company profits are “capped” by requiring them to spend at least 80% of premiums on claims, a percentage known as their loss ratio—but those claims can be paid to providers that are owned by the insurers themselves, “a loophole that makes loss ratio requirements meaningless” (Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, 7/16/21). United Healthcare has been particularly aggressive at this, which is part of the reason its “capped” profits soared to $22.4 billion in 2023.

As for the Post’s assertion that insurance providers should keep “premiums low enough that people can afford coverage,” KFF (10/9/24) found that “Family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 7% this year to reach an average of $25,572 annually, marking the “second year in a row that premiums are up 7%.” The Center for American Progress (11/29/22) found that employer sponsored insurance “premiums have risen above the rate of inflation and have outpaced wage growth” over the course of a decade. “Escalating grocery bills and car prices have cooled, but price relief for Americans does not extend to health care,” USA Today (10/9/24) reported.

The Post added that all this talk about how Americans are being tortured by the insurance system should wait until next year, “when Congress is to consider whether to keep temporary Obamacare enhancements that have boosted enrollment.”

It is easy to see the material interests of the Washington Post‘s owner at work. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon does not run a health insurance company, but it is fully entrenched in the for-profit medical system. It offers a health insurance marketplace through AmazonFlex, acquired the healthcare provider One Medical last year (NPR, 11/12/23; Forbes, 4/5/24), and offers a pharmacy and other health services.

As one of the world’s richest people, Bezos might have another reason to be worried about people cheering on the murder of CEOs: Amazon is often hated for its monopoly-like grip on online retail (FTC, 9/26/23), as well as charges of price-gouging (Seattle Times, 8/14/24) and union-busting (Guardian, 4/3/24).

‘Last or near last’

The failure of the US healthcare system in one chart: life expectancy plotted against healthcare spending.

The Washington Post‘s line about the comparable ills of “generous state-run health systems” echoed a similar argument from the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial, which concluded:

Government healthcare is a recipe for more care delays and denials. Witness the fiasco in the United Kingdom, where the Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment. To adapt a famous Winston Churchill phrase, private insurance is the worst form of healthcare, except for all others.

The statement that the British or European health systems are worse for people than the US private insurer–dominated system is simply false. Just months ago, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the United States

ranks as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare, including preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.

The US “ranked last or near last in every category except one,” precisely because

the complex labyrinth of hospital bills, insurance disputes and out-of-pocket requirements that patients and doctors are forced to navigate put the US second to last in administrative efficiency.

The Commonwealth Fund (CNN, 1/31/23) also found that

the United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, but still has the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases.

Healthcare providers in Mexico and Costa Rica are huge draws for Americans in need of care who can’t make it through America’s Kafkaesque system (NPR, 3/8/23). Spain and Portugal are attracting American retirees, and good low-cost health care is one incentive (Travel + Leisure, 6/20/24).

Retreat to the castle

Apparently the CEOs that Fox News (11/13/24) is so concerned about don’t qualify as “professional elites.”

While the Washington Post’s position clearly falls in line with its material allegiance to a system where its owner sits at the apex, the positions from Murdoch are more interesting. As the Democratic Party has lost support among the working class (NPR, 11/14/24; USA Today, 11/30/24), Murdoch’s outlets have touted Donald Trump and the Republican Party as alternatives for working-class voters.

Murdoch and other purveyors of Republican propaganda have promoted the idea that Democrats serve only financial elites and Hollywood producers, and that protectionist policies under Trump will help US workers (New York Post, 7/16/24; Fox News, 11/13/24). Republicans were able to woo voters by complaining about the high price of gasoline and groceries under the Biden administration (CNBC, 8/7/24).

Now Murdoch outlets are fully retreating into their elite castle and telling the rabble to stop complaining about the lack of access to healthcare. The Republicans and their news outlets have worked hard to recharacterize themselves as something more populist, but the Thompson killing has brought back the old narrative that they are, proudly, the champions of the 1 Percent.

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

‘Regulatory Agencies Need to Make Sure Amazon Is Broken Up or Contained’CounterSpin interview with Arlene Martinez on Amazon misconduct

Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Arlene Martinez about Amazon‘s subsidized misconduct for the December 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Jeff Bezos (CC photo: Daniel Oberhaus)

Janine Jackson: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” So wrote Upton Sinclair in 1934. It’s hard not to think about that as we see corporate news media report on Amazon, whose leader is, of course, the owner of the Washington Post, but whose influence as retailer, landowner, policy shaper is multi-tentacled in ways you and I probably don’t even know.

That outsized, multi-front power is behind the resistance to Amazon, the urgent need to illuminate what a private company on this scale can do in the country and the world’s political, consumer, regulatory, labor ecosphere, and what needs to happen to address that power.

Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Arlene Martinez.

Arlene Martinez: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Good Jobs First (11/29/24)

JJ: You wrote recently, with colleagues, that the #MakeAmazonPay campaign was about calling attention to Amazon‘s

mistreatment of workers, disregard for consumers whose data it misuses, bullying of small local businesses and accelerating climate destruction, especially during the holiday shopping season.

That’s before we get to how we the people enable all of that through government subsidies, which we will talk about.

But first, let’s talk about some of the documented complaints and concerns about Amazon‘s day-to-day practices, the way they operate. Because it’s not about “hating them because they’re beautiful.” It’s not about jealousy because they built a better mousetrap. This is concern about things that just shouldn’t happen, period, right?

The Nation (5/2/24)

AM: That’s right. And I really liked the way that you opened up our conversation here, because it’s really hard to overstate just how powerful Jeff Bezos is, and how many areas Amazon is in, and the way that they run their business across all the different areas that they touch, how harmful it is, whether you’re talking about the environment, and all the data centers that they’re building as they capitalize on AI, artificial intelligence. Or the way that they are so punishing to workers that the injury rate is several times that of any other warehouse company. How they drive down wages wherever they locate. How they squeeze small businesses; a report from the Institute of Local Self-Reliance found that 45 cents of every dollar that a business made selling on the Amazon platform went to Amazon.

So I could just go on and on, but there are so many ways that Amazon harms the entire ecosystem of business worldwide. And one of the worst parts about it, and there are a lot of bad parts about it, is that we are subsidizing that, because communities are giving Amazon billions of dollars in direct cash payments. They don’t have to pay their taxes, or they’re given straight cash, or reduced land, whatever the case may be. And that doesn’t even begin to include the procurement and other public contracting money that they received. I’ll open there.

JJ: Well, and I want to get into that. I think for many folks, maybe they’ve heard about workers being cheated out of wages, but that is so crucial to the subsidy conversation. But let’s start with the fact that we do have evidence that Amazon is under-serving their workers, not just in terms of wages, but also in terms of health and safety, and what do we know about that?

Good Jobs First: Violation Tracker

AM: We run a database called Violation Tracker, where we look at over 450 regulatory agencies that we get data from, so we can begin to see part of Amazon‘s behavior toward its workers. We capture how much money Amazon has stolen from its workers, in the form of wages, and we also look at some health and safety violations.

One of the reasons that Amazon‘s dollar total is so much lower than, for example, Bank of America, which has billions and billions and billions of dollars in penalties and fines—Amazon‘s comparative total is so much lower because the federal agencies that are in charge of protecting workers only have the authority to give thousands of dollars in fines, versus a regulatory agency that oversees banks that can give billion dollars in fines in one single case. So what we see is, as bad as Amazon‘s record is, and it is bad, it would be worse if we treated workers with the same care and with the same concern that we do as investors who got cheated on an investment.

JJ: That’s so deep, because it speaks to, like, folks might want to get mad at a corporation, like Amazon, but then you also have to understand the weakening of the regulatory agencies that are meant to be addressing that. It’s not as simple as one might hope it would be. And folks have heard, for example, on this show, talking about the IRS saying, “We understand that rich people cheat more on their taxes than poor people, but it’s easier for us to go after poor people, because it’s much simpler.” And so a company like Amazon can just make things so complex, in a regulatory framework, that it’s very hard to address the harm that they’re doing. It’s kind of a big-picture problem.

Arlene Martinez: “So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big.”

AM: Yeah, that’s right. So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big. If, for example, some of the antitrust legislation had been implemented and upheld, Amazon never might have been able to grow to this size. That’s why it’s been so promising in recent years to see the FTC and Lina Khan really take on corporate giants like Amazon, which have essentially become monopolies and dominate entire spaces. So it really is a big structural issue.

I get asked a lot about, should people just not shop on Amazon? Well, that would be nice. I mean, I don’t shop on Amazon, but that isn’t the answer. Like I said, it would be nice, but the answer is really these structural problems that enabled Amazon to get so big in the first place. And these regulatory agencies need to flex their muscle to make sure that Amazon is broken up, or contained, or not allowed to dominate entire industries and sectors the way that it is.

And you’ve probably seen it’s moving into even more areas. Now it’s going into chips, and now it’s going into pharmacies and healthcare. And its goal is to dominate the world, and it’s headed there without some proper agency there flexing their muscle to rein it in.

JJ: I wanted to pull you out on one question, which is data centers, which is, we hear, and folks at the local media level may hear, Amazon‘s coming in, and they’re going to locate here, and that’s going to provide jobs. And sometimes what they’re talking about is data centers. Why don’t data centers equal jobs? Can you talk a little bit about that?

ProPublica (8/4/24)

AM: Data centers are essentially huge warehouses that just store big, basically, server farms. They’re just running data all the time, and there’s very few people that are needed to actually staff these facilities. So they don’t create many jobs, because there aren’t many functions that are required as part of these data centers. I mean, there’s the construction phase, and then a few dozen people that are needed to staff them.

And yet they’re getting what’s often several million dollars per job. We did a study in 2016 that looked at the average for the Apples, the Googles, the Amazons, the Metas, was about $2 million per job. But we’ve seen a lot of cases now where it’s a lot higher per job, and a community can never make that money back.

But I think the other question, too, and I think what gets missing from a lot of stories that I see about data centers, is why data centers are getting subsidized in the first place. When you think about what an incentive was supposed to even do in the first place, it was to spur something to happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

We know that AI is the future. These companies are racing to build data centers, because they have to, to remain competitive. So there is absolutely no business case to be subsidizing companies to build a data center, especially considering the low job return.

Nonprofit Quarterly (8/7/24)

JJ: In this deep piece about corporate government giveaways, you cite Neil deMause, who is a FAIR favorite, who, with Joanna Cagan, wrote Field of Schemes about subsidizing sports teams’ building of new arenas, and it’s kind of a familiar template, where folks say we’re going to bring in profit, and yet it’s something that would happen anyway. There’s kind of a—it’s not even a bait and switch, it’s just misinformation that is put forward to cities, when something like a sports team, or something like an Amazon, says, “We’re going to bring a lot of stuff to your community, and therefore you should subsidize our taxes.”

And some of us are like: “Well, wait, you’re a business. You’re going to make a profit here. Why would we subsidize it?” There’s kind of a big-picture misunderstanding here.

AM: Yeah, and part of it is that it just becomes irresistible for a lot of politicians to have the opportunity to stand next to a Jeff Bezos, or some other high-ranking official, or a billionaire owner of a sports team. And then you have access to these box-level seats that you couldn’t afford on your own. And all of that is really irresistible. So there’s really a very human element to giving subsidies that are proven to not drive economic development, like a stadium, which study after study has shown does nothing to improve the lives of residents in that community, but it just becomes very irresistible.

And I think on a local level, too, with someone—I was a reporter for many years, covering a lot of city council meetings and school board meetings, and knowing that these council members, most of them who are part-time, get a few hundred dollars a month in pay, they want to do good for their community, and they think bringing in an Amazon is a good move for their community, without realizing what they’re really doing is bringing in a company that hurts their workers, pays them very little and damages their existing small businesses in their community. But they’re thinking they’re doing a good thing.

JJ: Well, and part of it is a kind of numerical thing where media talk about, “Well, these folks will pay this money in taxes,” and that makes it sound like it’s a profit. There’s kind of a basic math problem that sometimes happens here. When you talk about tax breaks to be given to whatever entity, media can sometimes present that as though that’s money that’s going into the tax coffers, which is not what’s happening.

Nonprofit Quarterly (8/3/22)

AM: That’s right. I mean, there’s a lot of companies that really profit based on the size of the incentive. There are a lot of site location consultants, for example. The bigger the subsidy, the more their percentages. So their drive is to get the biggest subsidy possible, even though it isn’t in the best interest of their community.

JJ: Subsidies are sold to communities as profit, as though it’s going to be money, somehow, that’s going to go right into the community, when that’s not the way it plays out.

AM: Yes, and this is a big issue in our space, in terms of the media coverage that we often see. It’s because you get what are called “economic impact reports,” and I say “economic impact” in quotes because it isn’t actual economic impact, and it’s nowhere close to being a cost/benefit analysis. What it does is it takes this big, big smorgasbord of everything, every dollar that’s spent on construction phase, or supply chain, or the entire salary sometimes of a worker is included in this economic impact report. And a lot of times you have no idea what’s actually in there, because the people who produced it say it’s proprietary, and they won’t give it to the public.

And a lot of times, those people that are hired to produce the economic impact report, and we see this a lot in the stadium space, are people who are working for the team owners, or who are working for Amazon, they will be the ones producing these economic impact reports. So you have a real conflict of interest that I think is missed sometimes in the reporting, and just makes these studies bogus.

When I talk to reporters about how to cover and report on economic development incentives, I tell them to ask for everything that went into that economic impact report. And if they don’t release it, then don’t include their numbers, and say that they won’t give it to you.

JJ: That gets right to the point of transparency, which I just wanted to ask you about. I think that, whether you understand an issue or don’t, transparency about what’s happening ought to be ground zero. And yet that is difficult to get from some corporations, and also from some government agencies. But journalists should have that as a basic fundamental.

AM: Yes. And we also run these databases called Amazon Tracker and Subsidy Tracker, and both of them look at companies that have received subsidies. And you’ll see, among Amazon subsidies, and also Subsidy Tracker, which is broader, you’ll see a lot of entries that say “undisclosed,” because even though a company is getting public money, they’re not releasing the value of that subsidy. Reporters should insist on that, and make it really clear in stories when they’re not getting it.

Real News Network (7/22/23)

JJ: And I’ll end on that. But I will say that, obviously, I’m angry about media for my job, but it’s not that they don’t do critical stories sometimes; it’s this connecting of the dots. So when I see a storyline that says that Amazon or Walmart is a “successful business,” and then I see another story that says, oh yeah, a lot of their workers still need to rely on public assistance to not starve. But then on the other page, I’m still reading Amazon as a “successful business.” So I feel like at a certain point, it’s not about there’s never any good stories or critical stories. It’s about a failure to connect the dots, to say, “What does it mean for a company to be ‘successful’ right now, and what harm is required to get to that?”

AM: Those are all such great points, and it’s true that we have seen a lot of really amazing reporting around Amazon, and Bloomberg is the outlet that reported about how Amazon was driving down wages in the warehouse sector, because they took an industry-wide look, and were able to see that anytime Amazon entered a community, wages dropped for the entire sector, including non-Amazon workers.

And the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, wrote one of the first stories, 12 years ago, to report on ambulances being placed outside of Amazon warehouses, rather than Amazon investing in air conditioning and heating for their workers. So they were getting ill from heat exhaustion.

So there has been a lot of amazing reporting, but I think you’re right in connecting all those dots, it’s very hard to see. And when Amazon releases a press release about how they gave a $500,000 loan, reporters repeat that as if it’s some gift, even though it might not include the fact that Amazon got a billion dollars in that same community as a subsidy. So it is a mixed bag.

JJ: I appreciate the bright critical spots. I’m upset about the fact that it doesn’t seem to get stirred into an understanding of what we, as a democratic society, should ask from corporations, and why do we call a company “successful” whose workers need to rely on public assistance? There’s some kind of connected story that’s not happening there.

ProMarket (5/30/17)

AM: I’ll just add, I remember as a reporter—and I was a reporter for many years—I was very fixated on holding government accountable. Really felt like that was a big role of mine, and I spent a lot less energy thinking about holding corporations accountable. And now that I’ve left the space, and I’m in this nonprofit watchdog space, and a lot of my work involves corporate governance, and overseeing their practices, I really see those gaps even more stark, and how, in general, I think journalists don’t do the best job about covering companies, and we could do a lot better, which is why I think shows like yours are so helpful, why I hope organizations like ours are useful, so that we start putting the same kind of scrutiny on corporations that we have long done on governments.

JJ: I will just add, we hope for journalists to look to see critically powerful actors, and those powerful actors are in corporations, and they’re in government. And then here’s us, we the people, and that’s where we would look for journalists to look out for the public interest, however that is affected by whatever forces are in power, and that’s why I appreciate your work.

AM: Thank you so much.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Arlene Martinez. She’s deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. You can find their extensive work on Amazon and other corporate and government accountability on GoodJobsFirst.org. Arlene Martinez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AM: Thanks for having me, and thanks for your work.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 6, 2024

Appeals Court Upholding TikTok Ban Is a Grim Sign for Press Freedom

An Appeals Court panel upheld banning TikTok in the name of “protect[ing] free speech in the United States…from a foreign adversary nation” (AP, 12/6/24).

Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).

But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A US District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).

All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.

Censorship for freedom

Judge Douglas Ginsburg: “People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire.”

Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” (Reuters, 12/6/24).

In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”

Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:

The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”

He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”

Two-fifths of the nation

But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”

An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.

Al Jazeera (11/12/24): “Advocates warned the legislation could empower the incoming administration with an incredibly dangerous tool to crack down on dissent with few checks and balances.”

This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state (Intercept, 11/21/24).

With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media…pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.

For example, the New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.

In order to advance Beijing’s “goal…to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.

But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica and the Intercept.

Flimsy security concerns

President Donald Trump tried to unilaterally ban TikTok in 2020 (NPR, 8/6/20).

Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.

And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off US airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).

It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.

The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok

accurately pointed out that the US hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the US.

To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around US user data.”

But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 6, 2024

With Bolsonaro Facing Prosecution, NYT Renews Attacks on Brazil’s Courts

Brazil’s Federal Police released an 884-page report on November 26, laying out the evidence used for its November 21 indictments of former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 of his cronies. Among the revelations are evidence showing that Bolsonaro knew about a plot carried out by army special forces officers to assassinate President Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, and proof that Bolsonaro oversaw a complex plan with six working groups to enact a military coup after losing the election in 2022.

This news was covered in media outlets around the world, from the Washington Post, Reuters and AP to the Guardian and Le Monde. Curiously enough, the New York Times, which has given ample coverage to Brazilian politics and the ongoing investigations against Bolsonaro, remained silent.

When former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was accused of trying to overthrow the government, the New York Times (11/21/24) reported that “the police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions”—but when the Federal Police released 884 pages of specifics days later, the Times was silent.

Five days earlier, in an article about the indictments, Times reporter Ana Ionova (11/21/24) misleadingly wrote, “The police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions that led to their recommendations.” So why, five days later, when a mountain of material evidence and plea bargain testimony transcripts were released, demonstrating exactly why the police recommended that the attorney general file three criminal charges against Bolsonaro, would the Times not join in with the other media outlets to add clarification?

As I’ve written before (FAIR.org, 7/7/23), the Times has aligned itself with a toxic narrative pushed by Bolsonaro, along with international allies like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, to discredit Brazil’s court system. Most of their efforts have focused on Moraes, the former Electoral Court president and current Supreme Court minister. As the police report shows, delegitimizing Moraes was one of the strategies used to build public support for the 2023 coup attempt.

Furthermore, since the failure of that attempt, the attacks on Moraes have been used by conservatives to build public sympathy for amnesty for Bolsonaro, in a move to pressure Congress to restore his political rights so that he can run for election in 2026.

Moraes’ central position as a target in the strategy is demonstrated in intercepted WhatsApp conversations between members of the group who were indicted in the coup investigation. A review of Times articles covering Moraes over the last two years shows that, at the least, the newspaper has acted as an unwilling accomplice, or “useful idiot” by perpetuating the coup plotters’ judicial overreach narrative.

‘Knowingly false allegations’

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spreading doubts about his country’s electoral system (New York Times, 7/19/22).

On July 19, 2022, Bolsonaro held an event in the Presidential Palace for dozens of foreign diplomats. There he spent over an hour railing against Brazil’s renowned electronic voting system. Without providing any evidence to back up his statements, he announced that if he lost the October 2 presidential election, it would be a sign of voter fraud.

The entire event was broadcast live on TV Brazil, Brazil’s national public television station, in violation of Brazil’s election laws against abuse of power for electoral purposes. It was this event which, months later, caused the Superior Electoral Court to bar Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years.

Thirteen days earlier, according to the Federal Police report (p. 7), the president held a meeting with high-ranking military officers and cabinet ministers. There, he

presented a narrative which had been built to spread knowingly false allegations, without any concrete evidence, suggesting that there would be fraud and manipulation of votes in the Brazilian elections. [He] used the meeting to spread attacks and make insinuations of crimes he said would be committed by current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and, primarily, Supreme and Superior Electoral Court ministers Luis Roberto Barroso, Edson Faschin and Alexandre de Moraes.

Intercepted communications between the people indicted show that, in the ensuing months, Moraes would become the primary target or, as they proclaimed in military jargon, the “center of gravity” of the coup (p. 14).

‘Going too far?’

The New York Times (9/26/22) attacked the Brazilian Supreme Court’s efforts to rein in the country’s authoritarian far right: “According to experts in law and government, the court has taken its own repressive turn.”

Weeks after Bolsonaro’s event, and six days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, the New York Times published a hit piece (9/26/22) on Brazil’s judiciary, called “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?”

As I later wrote for FAIR (5/14/24), the primary target of the article, written by the Times‘ Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, was Moraes. One of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court ministers, Moraes at the time was also serving a four-year term as Superior Electoral Court president. Clearly basing its analysis on US law, the Times described in alarming terms activities that were completely legal in Brazil:

The power grab by the nation’s highest court, legal experts say, has undermined a key democratic institution in Latin America’s biggest country as voters prepare to pick a president on October 2.

This wasn’t original analysis by the Times. As the Federal Police report (p. 11) stated:

The dissemination of false narratives through digital influencers and some members of the traditional media, with strong penetration among a segment of the population aligned with the right-wing of the political spectrum, maintained the discourse of an illicit action by the Judiciary, especially the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, claiming that they overstepped their constitutional limits in order to prevent the re-election of then-President Jair Bolsonaro.

The narrative of Supreme Court overreach continues to be the key pillar of the amnesty movement. As this campaign picked up momentum, the Times spread doubt regarding the judiciary as it oversaw investigations into anti-democratic behavior by the far right. In an article explaining why Bolsonaro had been barred from running for office, the Times‘ Nicas (7/1/23) wrote that the judiciary’s “hands on” approach to investigating election fraud “has also put what some analysts say is too much power in the hands of the electoral court’s seven judges, instead of voters.”

‘Crisis of democracy?’

As time passed, an investigation into illegal use of social media during the 2022 election season, an inquiry ordered by the Supreme Court due to death threats made against its justices and their families, began to draw the attention of the international far right. This was thanks in part to the efforts of Glenn Greenwald, who ridiculously claimed, to his Rumble audience of millions, that Moraes was the de facto ruler of Brazil.

In May 2024, a group of GOP lawmakers held a congressional subcommittee hearing called “Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy, Freedom and the Rule of Law?” As I documented for FAIR (5/14/24), the most-cited source in the GOP’s supporting document for the hearing was the Times‘ 2022 election-season article (9/26/22) about judicial overreach.

For an expert on “free expression,” the New York Times (9/21/24) turned to a far-right influencer under investigation for electoral disinformation.

One of the panelists at the hearing was Paulo Figueiredo. Introduced as an “investigative journalist,” Figueiredo—grandson of Brazil’s last military dictator, Gen. João Figueiredo—is a far-right influencer who relocated to Florida to flee a fraud investigation into the fleecing of Brazilian investors in a failed real estate deal with Donald Trump in 2019. On November 21, Figueiredo was indicted as one of the coup plotters in the Federal Police report (p. 15), which describes how military leaders who refused to join the operation were targeted with disinformation campaigns. The coup plotters

made use of the modus operandi developed by the digital militia, selecting targets to insert into a machine for amplifying personal attacks, using multiple channels and influencers in positions of authority over their “audience.” Economist and digital influencer Paulo Renato de Oliveira Figueiredo Filho was integrated into the core group responsible for inciting military personnel to join the coup, due to his ability to penetrate the military sphere because he is the grandson of former president of the republic, Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo.

In February, 2024, the Federal Police announced that Figueiredo was under investigation for spreading electoral disinformation during the lead-up to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. Many journalists at the time remembered the fact that, before becoming military dictator, his grandfather served as National Intelligence Service chief during the most repressive phase of the government’s death squad and torture operations.

In an article by Jack Nicas and Ana Ionova on Musk’s losing battle with the Brazilian Supreme Court, the Times (9/21/24) turned to Figueiredo for analysis:

Mr. Musk “has bowed down,” Paulo Figueiredo, a right-wing pundit who had his X account blocked in Brazil, wrote in a post on Thursday, when X first hired new lawyers in Brazil, signaling a shift in stance. “It’s a very sad day for freedom of expression.”

The Times failed to mention why Figueiredo was blocked, or his family ties—a connection it had made before, in the 2019 article “Investors in Former Trump-Branded Hotel in Brazil Charged With Corruption” (1/31/19):

Mr. Figueiredo, the grandson of the last military dictator in the authoritarian government that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985, displayed a picture of himself with Mr. Trump at the Trump Tower in New York, both men flashing a thumbs-up sign.

The different framing illustrates the Times‘ double standard: When it’s useful to attack Trump, Figueiredo is identified as the grandson of an authoritarian. When used to criticize a left-wing Brazilian government as authoritarian, he’s introduced merely as a “right-wing pundit.”

‘I’ll say what I want’

The New York Times (10/16/24) declared that Brazil’s Supreme Court may be “a threat to democracy itself” because it prosecutes violent threats against judges.

The Times‘ Nicas (10/16/24) continued to platform far-right figures with suspect backgrounds while using the story of X‘s ban and reinstatement in Brazil to undermine Brazil’s judiciary in “Is Elon Musk’s Brazilian Nemesis Saving Democracy or Hurting it?” The article opened with:

Daniel Silveira, a policeman turned far-right Brazilian congressman, was furious. He believed Brazil’s Supreme Court was persecuting conservatives and silencing them on social media, and he wanted to do something about it.

So he sat on his couch and began recording. “How many times have I imagined you getting beat up on the street,” he said in a 19-minute diatribe against the court’s justices, muscles bulging through his tight T-shirt. He posted the video on YouTube in February 2021, adding, “I’ll say what I want on here.”

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice immediately ordered his arrest. A year later, 10 of the court’s 11 justices convicted and sentenced him to nearly nine years in prison for threatening them.

While the Times notes Silveira’s YouTube rant against the Supreme Court, it failed to explain the context of his arrest. Silveira, who was kicked out of Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police after 60 disciplinary procedures, had been publicly inciting violence against the Supreme Court and its ministers for months, even after receiving warnings.

In one YouTube video, quoted in the Supreme Court case, he says: “When a soldier or a corporal knocks on your door, locking it won’t help. It will be ripped down. Yes, the armed forces will intervene and this is what we want.”

In the US, federal judges can investigate threats against them through the judiciary’s own police forces, such as the US Marshals and US Supreme Court Police. Yet the Times described the Brazilian Supreme Court’s investigation as a “highly unusual move,” while citing Moraes, central target in Brazil’s failed coup attempt, 22 times.

A target omitted

Another target was Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, whom the New York Times has frequently criticized—but the Times (11/19/24) couldn’t bring itself to report his name.

A series of events that unfolded in November have put a halt to the amnesty movement and attempts to prepare Bolsonaro for a Trump-like return in the 2026 elections.

On November 13, a member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) detonated bombs in Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza. Security footage shows him setting off a car bomb, attacking the Supreme Court with fireworks, and accidentally blowing himself up when his backpack bomb ricocheted off a statue. Several PL officials immediately called him a lone suicide bomber, a narrative echoed by the Times in a piece by Ionova (11/13/24). However, due in part to his links to the PL party, whose president was indicted along with Bolsonaro on November 21, the police are investigating the case as a terrorist act.

On November 19, Federal Police arrested a police agent and four army officers from the “Kids Pretos,” an army special forces division, for plotting to assassinate President-elect Lula, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin and Moraes in December 2022. Planning reportedly occurred at the home of Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and VP candidate, General Walter Braga Netto. Police said a hit man had been stationed near Moraes’ home on the planned assassination night, but the attempt was aborted due to a scheduling change at the Supreme Court.

Despite outlets like AP (11/19/24) and CNN (11/19/24) naming Moraes as a target, the Times‘ Ionova (11/19/24) omitted his name, stating only that “authorities did not divulge the name of the justice.” Brazil’s largest news outlet, Globo (11/19/24), broke the story hours earlier, listing Lula, Alckmin and Moraes as targets.

Although the Times ignored it, the news that Justice Moraes was an assassination target has undermined the far right’s narrative portraying him as overreaching in his oversight of federal police investigations into threats against Supreme Court justices and their families.

Just three days after the indictments, a November 24 Times article by Nicas and Ionova, headlined “A Corruption Case That Spilled Across Latin America Is Coming Undone,” targeted another Supreme Court minister, Dias Toffoli. It dusted off the discredited Car Wash investigation, an ostensible anti-corruption probe that ended in February 2021 (FAIR.org, 11/14/19, 12/20/23), to further undermine Brazil’s judiciary. The article blamed Toffoli, who discarded tampered evidence and reversed convictions based on new proof from leaked Telegram chats showing collusion between Car Wash Judge Sergio Moro and the prosecution team, for causing an investigation that ended four years ago to “unravel.”

On the same day, the article was published verbatim in Portuguese in Brazil’s third-largest newspaper, the conservative Estado de S. Paulo (11/24/24).

Historic window

The November 21 indictments have opened a historic window of opportunity in Brazil. For the first time since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, the judiciary is poised to hold high-ranking military officials—including those, like Bolsonaro security advisor Gen. Augusto Heleno, who were actors in Brazil’s bloody military dictatorship—accountable for breaking the law. Furthermore, there is a real possibility that Brazil will avoid suffering from the same system failure that led to Trump’s return to the White House, by jailing former President Bolsonaro for crimes that are more serious than anything Trump was indicted for.

Why, at a moment like this, would the Times continue to bolster Brazil’s Trump-aligned far right by delegitimizing one of Brazil’s three branches of government? Could it simply be another, regrettable chapter in the Times’ long history of smear campaigns against leftist governments in Latin America?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated Glenn Greenwald’s platform; it is Rumble.

This post was originally published on FAIR.