Sen. Dick Durbin (Verge, 3/21/25): “I hope that for the sake of our nation’s kids, Congress finally acts.”
In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.
According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.
Section 230 grants platforms the ability to moderate without shouldering legal liability, a power that has historically had the effect of encouraging judicious content management (Techdirt, 6/23/20). Additionally, it indemnifies ordinary internet users against most civil suits for actions like forwarding email, sharing photos or videos, or hosting online reviews.
Dissolving the provision would reassign legal responsibility to websites and third parties, empowering a Trump-helmed federal government to force online platforms to stifle, or promote, certain speech. While the ostensible purpose of the repeal, according to Durbin, is to “protect kids online,” it’s far more likely to give the Trump White House carte blanche to advance its ultra-reactionary political agenda.
More power for MAGA
Mike Masnick (Techdirt, 3/21/25): “These senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does—or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve.”
The effort to repeal Section 230 isn’t the first of its kind. Lawmakers, namely Republicans Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former Florida senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been making attempts to restrict or remove 230 for years, sometimes with explicitly censorial aims. But with a White House so hostile to dissent as to target and abductanti-genocide activists (FAIR.org, 3/28/25; Zeteo, 3/29/25), abusing immigration law and violating constitutional rights in the process, the timing of the latest bill—complete with Democratic backing—is particularly alarming.
To imagine what could become of a Section 230 repeal under the Trump administration, consider an example from July 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic remained severe enough to be classified as a public-health emergency. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)—now a co-sponsor of Durbin and Graham’s 2025 bill—introduced an amendment to 230 that would authorize the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation.” The label would require websites to remove the content in question.
News sources heralded the bill as a way to stem the “proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health-related claims on their sites” (NPR, 7/22/21) and to “fight bogus medical claims online” (Politico, 7/22/21). While potentially true at the time, Klobuchar’s bill would now, by most indications, have the opposite effect. As Mike Masnick of Techdirt (3/21/25) explained:
Today’s Health & Human Services secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet.
‘Save the Children’
ACLU (6/27/22): The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking. Instead, it has chilled speech, shut down online spaces, and made sex work more dangerous.”
Since Klobuchar’s bill, Congress has drafted multiple pieces of bipartisan child “safety” legislation resembling Durbin and Graham’s bill, offering another glimpse into the perils of a Trump-era repeal.
Consider 2023’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which the New York Times (2/17/22) welcomed as “sweeping legislation” that would “require online platforms to refrain from promoting harmful behavior.” KOSA enjoys robust bipartisan support, with three dozen Republican co-sponsors and nearly as many Democrats, as well as an endorsement from Joe Biden.
Though KOSA doesn’t expressly call for the removal of 230, it would effectively create a carve-out that could easily be weaponized. MAGA-boosting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a lead sponsor, insinuated in 2023 that KOSA could be used to “protect” children “from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence” on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram (Techdirt, 9/6/23). In other words, lawmakers could invoke KOSA to throttle or eliminate content related to trans advocacy, should they deem it “harmful” to children.
KOSA has drawn criticism from more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU and numerous LGBTQ groups, who fear that the bill masquerades as a child-safeguarding initiative while facilitating far-right censorship (CounterSpin, 6/9/23). This comes as little surprise, considering the decades-long history of “Save the Children” rhetoric as an anti-LGBTQ bludgeon, as well as the fact that these campaigns have been shown to harm children rather than protect them.
Some outlets have rightfully included the bill’s opponents in their reportage (AP, 7/31/24), even if only to characterize it as “divisive” and “controversial” (NBC News, 7/31/24). Others, however, have expressed more confidence in the legislation. The New York Times (2/1/24), for instance, described KOSA as a means to “safeguard the internet’s youngest users.” Neither Blackburn’s publicly-broadcast intentions nor the protests against the bill seemed to capture the paper’s attention.
Instead, the Times went on to cite the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a 2018 law that amended Section 230, in part to allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites and online platforms, as a regulatory success. What the Times didn’t note is that, according to the ACLU, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which is included in SESTA, “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking,” and could be interpreted by courts as justification to “censor more online speech—especially materials about sex, youth health, LGBTQ identity and other important concerns.”
False anti-corporate appeals
A bipartisan pair of lawmakers argue in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/24) that repealing Section 230 would mean tech companies couldn’t “manipulate and profit from Americans’ free-speech protections”—which is true only in the sense that platforms would be forced to assume that their users do not have free-speech protections.
Protecting kids isn’t the only promise made by 230 repeal proponents. In a statement made earlier this year, Durbin vowed to “make the tech industry legally accountable for the damage they cause.” It’s a popular refrain for government officials. The Senate Judiciary Democrats pledged to “remove Big Tech’s legal immunity,” and Trump himself has called 230 a “liability shielding gift from the US to ‘Big Tech’”—a point echoed by one of his many acolytes, Josh Hawley.
And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/24) headlined “Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand,” former Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Democrat, argued:
We must act because Big Tech is profiting from children, developing algorithms that push harmful content on to our kids’ feeds and refusing to strengthen their platforms’ protections against predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies.
These soft anti-corporate appeals might resonate with an audience who believes Big Tech wields too much power and influence. But there’s no guarantee that dismantling Section 230 would rein in Big Tech.
In fact, Section 230 actually confers an advantage upon the largest tech companies—which at least one of them has recognized. In 2021, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proposed reforms to 230 that would increase and intensify legal requirements for content moderation (NBC News, 3/24/21). The apparent logic: monopolistic giants like Facebook and Google can more easily fund expensive content-moderation systems and legal battles than can smaller platforms, lending the major players far more long-term viability.
But regardless of Meta’s machinations, the fundamental problem would remain: Democrats have embraced the MAGA vision for online governance, creating the conditions not for a safer internet, but a more dangerous one.
Surveillance footage of Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk being taken away by Homeland Security agents (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/27/25).
The journalism world has been reeling from news that a BBC correspondent was deported from Turkey, after he was “covering the antigovernment protests in the country” and was “detained and labeled ‘a threat to public order’” (New York Times, 3/27/25). Turkey has an abysmal reputation for press freedom (CPJ, 2/13/24; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, 10/5/23), placing 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index, so as distressing as this news is, it’s in character for a country many think of as illiberal and authoritarian (Guardian, 6/9/13; HRW, 1/29/15). Journalists have been arrested in the latest unrest in Turkey (AP, 3/24/25).
Meanwhile, a Turkish citizen is going through a similar kind of hell for expressing political ideas a government dislikes. Except in her case, the government doing the repression isn’t Turkey, it’s the United States. In chilling video footage (New York Times, 3/26/25) obtained by several news outlets, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University outside of Boston, can be seen being abducted by plainclothes agents.
‘Relishes the killing of Americans’
“It looked like a kidnapping,” software engineer Michael Mathis, whose camera recorded Ozturk’s abduction, told AP (3/26/25). “They approach her and start grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”
Her crime was reportedly being part of recent student protests against the genocide in Gaza. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson (AP, 3/26/25) declared:
DHS and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans…. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.
The group StopAntisemitism bragged about the arrest on X (3/26/25), saying Ozturk led “pro-Hamas, violent antisemitic and anti-American events” during her time at Tufts, which has led her to deportation proceedings. The group snarkily added, “Shalom, Rumeysa.” (“Shalom” can mean peace, hello or goodbye in Hebrew.)
Ozturk is now part of a growing list of foreign students who have been abducted by secret police and are facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine speech, which the government is labeling support of Hamas, which is designated by the US as a terrorist group (FAIR.org, 3/19/25). As I recently said on the Santita Jackson Show (3/27/25), reporting these things as “arrests” by federal agents—rather than abductions by secret police—understates the authoritarian moment Americans are witnessing. (DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar treated “supporting Hamas” as synonymous with “pro-Palestinian activity” in an interview with NPR—3/13/25.)
‘Fundamentally at odds with our values’
The op-ed (Tufts Daily, 3/26/24) that may get Rumeysa Ozturk deported.
Ozturk, however, might be the first of the bunch to be targeted specifically for engaging in journalism deemed offensive by the state. Many of the reports of her arrest (e.g., New York Times, 3/26/25; CNN, 3/27/25; Forbes, 3/27/25) cite that she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily (3/26/24) calling on the university administration to accept Tufts Community Union Senate resolutions “demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” The op-ed also “affirm[s] the equal dignity and humanity of all people.”
If this is truly a part of the government’s rationale for targeting Ozturk, then we as the American press have to assume that the US law enforcement regime will consider any article in a newspaper that advocates for Palestinian rights or harshly criticizes Israel as some kind of suspicious or unacceptable speech.
Said Seth Stern, director of advocacy of Freedom of the Press Foundation (3/26/25):
If reports that Ozturk’s arrest was over an op-ed are accurate, it is absolutely appalling. No one would have ever believed, even during President Donald Trump’s first term, that masked federal agents would abduct students from American universities for criticizing US allies in student newspapers. Anyone with any regard whatsoever for the Constitution should recognize how fundamentally at odds this is with our values and should be deeply repulsed as an American, regardless of political leanings. Canary Mission is aptly named—it may serve as the canary in the coal mine for the First Amendment.
The Canary Mission named by Stern is a pro-Israel group that operates as a doxxing operation against pro-Palestine campus activists (The Nation, 12/22/23). The FPF said of Ozturk, “The sole ‘offense’ that Canary Mission flagged was an op-ed Ozturk cowrote criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.”
A crime against journalism
Donald Trump (CNN, 3/14/25): “I believe that CNN and MSDNC [sic], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.”
Of course, the government has now used its authority to strip a lawful resident of her visa, putting her in the opaque gulag system of the US immigration system. That has a terrible chilling effect on any legal resident in the US who might make a living putting pen to paper. Their next article could get them shipped home at a moment’s notice without legal recourse.
That is inhumane treatment of the rights of legal residents, but it is also a crime against journalism. How will this motivation be used against writers who are citizens, natural-born and otherwise? Will outlets that publish pieces like the one in Tufts Daily be harassed in other ways? (One should not assume that when Trump at the Justice Department accused major news outlets of “illegal” reporting that he meant it as a figure of speech—CNN, 3/14/25.)
FAIR (11/14/24, 12/16/24, 2/26/25) has been among the many groups who have warned that a second Trump administration could see a severe attack against the free press and free speech generally. Ozturk’s arrest is a warning that the Trump administration takes all levels of speech and journalism seriously, and will do whatever they can to terrorize the public into keeping quiet.
This week on CounterSpin: Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar among others reminds, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat, but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.”
We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted, but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: Hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.
The genocide of Palestinians is a human rights emergency, and also a journalism emergency. US reporters who don’t treat it as such are showing their allegiance to something other than journalism. A key part of their disservice is their ignoring, obscuring, marginalizing, demeaning and endangering the many people who are standing up and speaking out. Pretending protest isn’t happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it’s telling lies about who we are and what we can do. We build action by telling the stories powerful media don’t want told.
We’ll talk about that with reporter Michael Arria, US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.”
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia, and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
“Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).
After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).
That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.
For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”
Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).
This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).
The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.
Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion” (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).
Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).
Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.
Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”
Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”
At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.
Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”
In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.
Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).
After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics,2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.
No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.
The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.
One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.
Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.
Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.
Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.
Robert W. McChesney was a leading voice and a precious colleague in the battle for a more democratic media system, and a more democratic society. Bob passed away on Tuesday, March 24, at the age of 72. No one did more to analyze the negative and censorial impacts of our media and information systems being controlled by giant, amoral corporations.
Bob was a scholar—the Gutgsell endowed professor of communications at University of Illinois—and a prolific author. Each and every book taught us more about corporate control of information. (I helped edit some of his works.)
Particularly enlightening was his 2014 book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy—in which McChesney explained in step-by-step detail how the internet that held so much promise for journalism and democracy was being strangled by corporate greed, and by government policy that put greed in the driver’s seat.
That was a key point for Bob in all his work: He detested the easy phrase “media deregulation,” when in fact government policy was actively and heavily regulating the media system (and so many other systems) toward corporate control.
Robert McChesney speaking at the Berkeley School of Journalism (CC photo: Steve Rhodes).
For media activists like those of us at FAIR—whose board McChesney has served on for many years—it was a revelation to read his pioneering 1993 book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935. It examined the broad-based movement in the 1920s and ’30s that sought to democratize radio, which was then in the hands of commercial hucksters and snake-oil salesmen.
From radio to the internet, a reading of his body of work offers a grand and inglorious tour of media history, and how we got to the horrific era of disinfotainment we’re in today.
Bob McChesney was not just a scholar. He was an activist. He co-founded the media reform group Free Press, with his close friend and frequent co-author John Nichols. Bob told me how glad he was to go door to door canvassing for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. (Bernie wrote the intro to one of McChesney and Nichols’ books.)
Bob was a proud socialist, and a proud journalist—and he saw no conflict between the two. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, a renowned publication covering the music scene in Seattle. For years, while he taught classes, he hosted an excellent Illinois public radio show, Media Matters.
In 2011, he and Victor Pickard edited the book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done. One of Bob’s favorite proposals to begin to address the problem of US media (developed with economist Dean Baker) was to provide any willing taxpayer a voucher, so they could steer $200 or so of their tax money to the nonprofit news outlet of their choosing, possibly injecting billions of non-corporate dollars into journalism.
Bob was a beloved figure in the media reform/media activist movement. We need more scholar/activists like him today. He will be sorely missed.
Hossam Shabat (Al Jazeera, 3/24/25): ““If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces.”
The Israeli military killed Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist and correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, on Monday, March 24. The deadly targeting of Shabat’s vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip was in fact Israel’s second journalist assassination for the day; hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.
And yet it was all in a day’s work for Israel, which according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has now killed at least 170 Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, when Israel’s armed forces kicked off an all-out genocide in the besieged enclave. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the number of fatalities is actually 208.
No doubt many journalists would be expected to perish in an onslaught as indiscriminate and massive as Israel’s in Gaza, where in February the death toll for the past 16 months was raised to nearly 62,000 to account for the thousands of Palestinians presumed to be dead beneath the rubble. Shockingly, that’s one out of every 35 Gaza residents—but for Gaza journalists, the International Federation of Journalists estimates that Israel has killed one out of every ten.
Meanwhile, in the face of such egregious assaults on the press, US media remain shamefully silent.
‘He bore witness’
Hossam Shabat (CPJ, 11/8/24): “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”
In October 2024, one year into the extermination campaign, Israel accused Shabat and five other Gaza journalists with Al Jazeera—where I myself am an opinion columnist—of being militants in the service of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. CPJ, which has repeatedly excoriated Israel for “accusing journalists of being terrorists without producing credible evidence to substantiate their claims,” condemned the accusations as a “smear campaign” that endangered the lives of journalists.
Yesterday, the Israeli army took to the platform X to celebrate the fact that it had “eliminated” Shabat, offering the charming obituary: “Don’t let the press vest confuse you, Hossam was a terrorist.” This from the people who just killed 200 Palestinian children in a matter of days.
Responding to the initial terror allegation last year, Shabat remarked to CPJ: “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.” And convey the truth he did. As Egyptian-American journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who translated Shabat’s last article for US outlet Drop Site News just after he was killed, wrote in the preface to the translation:
He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for 17 months. He was displaced over 20 times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense.
Shabat’s article—penned as Israel resumed apocalyptic killing on March 18 and thereby annihilated the truce with Hamas that had ostensibly taken hold in January—is a testament to the young man’s enduring humanity in the face of utter barbarism. Conveying the post-ceasefire landscape in his hometown of Beit Hanoun, Shabat despaired:
Screams filled the air while everyone stood helpless. My tears didn’t stop. The scenes were more than any human being could bear. The ambulances were filled with corpses, their bodies and limbs piled on top and intertwined with one another. We could no longer distinguish between children and men, between the injured and the dead.
Shabat was well aware that he could join the dead at any moment, and, to that end, he had prepared a statement for posthumous publication, in which he noted that, “when this all began, I was only 21 years old—a college student with dreams like anyone else.” For the past year and a half, however, he had “dedicated every moment of my life to my people,” documenting the “horrors” in Gaza in order to “show the world the truth they tried to bury.”
Deafening silence
Ahmad Ibsais (Mondoweiss, 3/25/25) on Western journalists: “Their failure to accurately report on the targeting of their colleagues, their reluctance to challenge Israeli narratives, and their tendency to frame these killings as unfortunate byproducts of conflict rather than deliberate acts—these journalistic failures have real consequences.”
Indeed, like so many of his Palestinian media colleagues, Shabat risked his life to speak truth to genocidal power until his final moment. But following his demise, the corporate media in the United States haven’t managed to say much at all—just google “Hossam Shabat” and you’ll see what I mean. His death was covered in leading international outlets like the Guardian (3/25/25), Le Monde (3/25/25) and the Sydney Morning Herald (3/25/25), and independent US outlets like Truthout (3/24/25), Democracy Now! (3/25/25) and Mondoweiss (3/25/25), among others—but virtually no establishment US news organizations.
The otherwise deafening silence has been punctuated by just a couple of corporate media interventions, including a Washington Post report (3/25/25) that made sure to mention in the first paragraph that Israel had accused Shabat of Hamas membership.
Meanwhile, Trey Yingst, a correspondent for Fox News—an outlet by no means known for pro-Palestinian sympathies—has rankled others in right-wing media by having the audacity to observe that Israel had just killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza and that, of the 124 journalists killed globally in 2024, “around two-thirds of them were Palestinian.” In response to Yingst’s treachery, the Washington Free Beacon (3/24/25) made it clear that the real crime was Fox News’ failure to refer to the dead Palestinian journalists as terrorists.
‘With no one to hear us’
Robin Andersen (FAIR.org, 5/20/22): “Because journalists document the actions of Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinians, they jeopardize the military’s continued ability to act with impunity.”
The scant US corporate media attention elicited by the assassination of Shabat regrettably comes as no surprise. After all, it would make little sense for the US establishment to pump Israel full of billions of dollars in weaponry and then complain about the casualties of those weapons. When asked on Monday about the killing of Shabat and Mansour, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declared that Hamas was to blame for “every single thing that’s happening” in the Gaza Strip.
In a dispatch for FAIR (10/19/23) published less than two weeks after the launch of US-fueled genocide in October 2023, Ari Paul emphasized that “Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists”—including Palestinian-American ones like 51-year-old Shireen Abu Akleh, murdered in 2022 by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank—”as well as harassing foreign journalists and human rights activists entering the country.” Such attacks, he concluded, “act as filters through which the truth is diluted.”
And dilution has only become turbo-charged since then. By December 2023, CPJ had determined that “more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel/Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” Of the at least 68 journalists and media workers killed between October 7 and December 20, CPJ reported that 61 were Palestinian, four were Israeli and three were Lebanese.
On November 20 of that year, for example, Palestinian journalist Ayat Khadura was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home, just weeks after she had shared her “last message to the world,” which included the line: “We had big dreams but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”
On November 7, Mohamed Abu Hassira, a journalist for the Palestinian Wafa news agency, was killed along with no fewer than 42 family members in a strike on his own home. And on December 15, Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abudaqa was killed in southern Gaza, where he eventually bled to death after Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching him for more than five hours. Needless to say, Israeli impunity for all of these crimes remains the name of the game.
Considering all the lethal obstacles Palestinian journalists must contend with to do their jobs—not to mention the psychological toll of having to report genocide day in and day out while essentially serving as moving targets for the Israelis—it seems the least their international media colleagues might do is acknowledge them in death. Alas, mum’s the word.
And on that note, it’s worth recalling some of Shabat’s own words: “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”
Janine Jackson interviewed Social Security Works’ Nancy Altman about attacks on Social Security for the March 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Social Security has been overwhelmingly popular, and under vehement attack from some quarters, since it began. And for decades, elite news media have generated a standard assessment: It’s the most popular program, hence the “third rail” of politicking, and also, based on willful misreading of how it works, it’s about to be insolvent any minute—the latter notion sitting alongside corporate media’s constant refrain that private is always better than public, just because, like, efficiency and all that.
Now, in this frankly wild, “Only losers care about caring for one another” and “Shouldn’t the richest just control everything?” moment, Social Security is on the chopping block for real. Still, as ever, the attack is rooted in disinformation, but with a truly critical press corps largely missing in action, myth-busting might not be enough.
We are joined now by veteran Social Security explainer and defender Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and author of, among other titles, The Truth About Social Security:The Founder’s Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies and Common Misunderstandings. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.
JJ: A lot of us are in a kind of blurry, “holy heck, is this really happening?” mode, but titrating out what is actually happening today is important—set aside from whether courts will eventually rule against it, or how it might play out. In “what is happening” news, I’m reading in Truthout via Bloomberg that three individuals representing private equity concerns have shown up at the Social Security Administration. How weird is that? What can that possibly mean?
NA: It’s horrible. And if you can believe it, it is even worse. As soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, the DOGE guys—the DOGE boys, as young as 19—were swarming all over the Social Security Administration. As you said in your introduction, there has been a small group of people, completely out of touch, who wanted to do away with Social Security from the beginning. They’ve always been defeated, but unfortunately, they now are in control of the White House.
It’s Donald Trump. Despite all his lies in the campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security, he proposed cuts in every one of his budgets in his first term. It’s Elon Musk, who unbelievably called it “the biggest Ponzi scheme” in history, which is such a slander. And it’s Russell Vought, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who’s architect of Project 2025. And what we’re seeing is Project 2025 on steroids. So you’ve got private venture people there, you have DOGE guys stealing our data, all in an effort to undermine our Social Security system.
JJ: The line is that, “Oh no, they’re not attacking Social Security itself, just fraud within it.” Now, the bad faith is palpable, but what is your response to that notion, that it’s really just the fraud that’s under attack?
NA: As you said, I wrote a book called The Truth About Social Security, and one of the zombie lies is one of the ones you mentioned. They all say, “Oh, this private sector is so much more efficient and so much better and blah, blah, blah.”
Actually, Social Security is extremely efficiently run. Less than about a half a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. The other more than 99 cents comes back in benefits. That’s so much more efficient than you find with 401k for private sector insurance, where you can get 15, 20% administrative costs and hidden fees and so forth.
And that’s also with improper payments— there are a lot of overpayments, underpayments, which were done because Congress has made it so difficult to administer, and some of it’s just impossible to avoid. But 99.7% of Social Security benefits are paid accurately to the right people, on time in full, and about 0.3%—and again, there’s much more improper payments in the private sector—but of that 0.3%, the overwhelming amount of what are called improper payments are overpayments and underpayments.
So, for example, Social Security requires, to get your benefit, you have to have been alive every day of the month before. Now I think that’s wrong, and I think you should get a proportion of payments, but that’s not how the law works. So if you die on the last day of the month, and you get your payment on the third day of the following month, and the money is put in your account, that’s an overpayment.
Now, it doesn’t just sit there. As soon as the federal government realizes that the person has died the last day, they go in immediately, usually within a day or two, and take that money back. But that is mainly overpayments, underpayments.
Fraud is vanishingly small, and the way that fraud is caught is, first we have an inspector general. Donald Trump fired the Social Security Administration inspector general as soon as he got into office. And front-line workers, and they’ve been firing and inducing all kinds of workers out who are the ones who would catch the fraud.
So although they say they’re going after fraud, waste and abuse, they are creating so much waste. They are abusing the workforce, and through that, the American people. And they are opening the door to fraud, unfortunately.
JJ: I have seen leftists take issue with the “It’s my money” idea on Social Security, because actually it’s an intergenerational program. Now choosing that as a point of emphasis in the current context is a choice that I have thoughts about. But do you see meaningful confusion about whose money is at stake here, and whether workers paying into it today are truly entitled to it?
NA: Here’s where the confusion is. I don’t think there’s confusion on that point. I think most Americans—which is why the program is so wildly popular—recognize that these are benefits they earned. It is deferred compensation. It is part of your earnings.
So you have your current cash compensation, you have deferred compensation in the form of pensions—whether it’s a pension sponsored by the employer or 401k or a defined benefit plan—and you have Social Security. You also have what are called contingent benefits, which are disability insurance, survivors benefits, and those are all earned.
What is the misunderstanding, and this is, again, people like Elon Musk and others who are just spreading lies about this program, are, “Oh, there are all these immigrants who are undocumented people stealing our money.” That is a lie. Those people who are undocumented are unable to receive Social Security, and even if they become documented, and can show that they had made contributions, they still don’t, and I think this is wrong, but they still don’t get the benefits they have earned.
But Americans who are here paying in, it is an earned benefit. And when Elon Musk and Donald Trump say, “Oh, there’s fraud, and we’re going to cut the benefits,” they are cutting your benefits, and people should keep hold of their wallets.
JJ: The fact that it’s just about fraud is one lie. And another one is that the things that are happening are just kind of tweaks. And now the latest, maybe not the latest when this airs, but we hear that people who file for benefits, or who want to change the banks that their benefits go to, now they can’t do it by phone. They have to do it online, through one of those easy-breezy government interfaces, or go into a field office. And that might sound like a minor thing, unless you actually think about it with human beings in mind.
NA: It is outrageous. And when you connect the dots, Donald Trump said he wasn’t going to cut our benefits. He said that before when he ran in 2016, and every one of his budgets in the first term cut our benefits.
He said it again in 2024. But now that he’s there, I think they’re trying to figure out ways to do it. And what they are doing is they are throwing the program in complete chaos.
People who receive benefits are disproportionately seniors, people with disabilities. Interestingly, it’s the largest children’s program, too, because it’s survivor’s benefits, but it often covers people who have difficulty with mobility.
The internet, as you said, is very hard to use. And, by the way, some of the people that got fired were the people who maintained the website. So I think it’s going to get harder to use, and that’s where the fraud tends to—there is vanishingly small amounts of fraud, but when it occurs, it tends to be online.
Phones are very secure. There’s been no evidence put forward that there’s any fraud that’s being committed through the phone service.
Requiring everybody to go into field offices, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk have told the General Services Administration to terminate all the leases, so they’re going to be fewer and fewer field offices. They are terribly understaffed, and the staff that’s there is very overworked.
So you’re asking millions of additional Americans to waste time, when they could have gotten on the phone and done what they had to do over the phone. Although they need to hire people for the phone, too, because that’s another place with long wait times, and they’re going to get longer, given what they’re doing.
Trump and DOGE and the others who Republican President Dwight Eisenhower called a “tiny splinter group” who hate Social Security, but they tried to privatize it. They were unsuccessful in that. And now what they’re doing is they’re trying to destroy it from within. And we will see pretty soon as it collapses, they’ll say, “Oh, the private sector should run it.” That will be horrible. It will undermine all of our economic security.
JJ: Consistent majorities support Social Security. As we’ve said, some recent polls find people saying we spend too little on it. And that’s why people, like Republican congressperson Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, are saying, “Nobody is touching Social Security” in town halls.
But it’s also why Liza Featherstone, for example, is reminding us that cutting popular programs isn’t a mistake, it’s a conscious effort, and this is what you’re just getting at, it’s a conscious effort to make the government actually useless, so that people will stop thinking of it as a source of anything good. And, one supposes, they will then look to beneficent billionaires. But this is not a mistake, this chaos that Social Security is being thrown into.
NA: Not at all. This is Project 2025 on steroids. The architects of Project 2025 really started this crusade back in the 1970s, actually when I started working on the program. It’s been 50 years. They’ve tried undermining confidence in the program, because it is too popular; even the most conservative-minded Republicans love Social Security, do not want to see it cut, and correctly think that it should be expanded. So they can’t directly confront Social Security, because they’ll all get voted out of office.
So the question is, how can they undermine it while looking like they’re protecting it? And the old standby is this vague “fraud, waste and abuse.” Nobody wants fraud, waste or abuse. But the reality is, they are creating waste and abuse. They are opening the door to possible fraudulent actors. And they’re all doing it, as you say, so that people just give up on government and give more and more money, upward redistribution of our earned benefits, into the pockets of Elon Musk and other billionaires.
JJ: Finally, I think the way that news media talk is meaningful. When they say, “They’re saying these things about Social Security, and they’re untrue,” to me, that lands different than, “They’re saying these things although they’re untrue.” One is narrating a nightmare, and the other is noting a disruption that calls for some intervention.
TheHill.com says that Elon Musk’s false rhetoric on Social Security is “confounding experts and worrying advocates.” Doesn’t say advocates of what. I just personally can’t forgive this demonstrative earnestness of elite media, when they can get emotional, you know, about welfare reform and “we need to cut food stamps.” But now they’re trying to be high and dry about cutting lifelines for seniors and disabled people.
And I’m not talking about all media. There are exceptions. But I want to ask you, finally, what would responsible, people-first journalism be doing right now, do you think?
Nancy Altman: “Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them.”
NA: You so put your finger on it. I mean, it is outrageous, when you think about it, that Donald Trump will be spewing lies about Social Security in a nationwide, televised joint session of Congress, went on for minutes and minutes, talking about all these dead people are getting benefits, and that is a complete lie. It has been debunked a zillion times, including by his own acting commissioner, and yet he went before the nation and said it.
So there is a method to the madness. This is not confounding at all. It’s an effort to convince everybody that the government is full of corruption and fraud, so when they destroy it, they have their cover.
So I think, first of all, what mainstream media should do is call a lie a lie when it happens, and they should try to call it out in real time, and there should be some solidarity. I still can’t believe that the AP was banned from the White House, and all the mainstream media just didn’t all walk out.
So this is a time our institutions, all our institutions, are under a threat. This is the Steve Bannon “Flood the Zone.” So there are so many outrages at once. All of our institutions are being attacked, including the media.
My concern is Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them. I think everybody’s got to be vigilant. I think they’ve got to make their voices heard, and I know there’s going to be protest on April 5. People should turn out for that. And the media should wake up and realize that everything is under assault, including them.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nancy Altman from Social Security Works. They’re online at SocialSecurityWorks.org. Nancy Altman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (3/21/25) reports the resumption of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as “pressure…to free more hostages.”
The New York Times produced an article on Friday, March 21, bearing the headline “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.” In the first paragraph, readers were informed that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had undertaken to “turn up the pressure” by warning that Israel was “preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.”
This was no doubt a rather bland way of describing mass slaughter and illegal territorial conquest—not to mention a convenient distraction from the fact that Hamas is not the party that is currently guilty of a failure to cooperate. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Israel annihilated the ceasefire agreement that came into effect in January following 15 months of genocide by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.
Over those months, Israel officially killed at least 48,577 Palestinians in Gaza; in February, the death toll was bumped up to almost 62,000, to account for missing persons presumed to be dead beneath the rubble.
The first phase of the ceasefire ended at the beginning of March, and was scheduled to give way to a second phase, in which a permanent cessation of hostilities would be negotiated, along with the exchange of remaining hostages. Rather than “cooperate,” however, Israel and its BFF, the United States, opted to move the goalposts and insist on an extension of phase one—since, at the end of the day, an actual end to the war is the last thing Israel or the US wants.
After all, how will Donald Trump’s fantasy of converting Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” ever come to fruition if the territory is not thoroughly pulverized and depopulated first?
Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide on Tuesday killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat—but, hey, that’s just how Israel “turns up the pressure on Hamas.”
Committed to the deployment of euphemism
What the New York Times (3/3/25) calls “pressure,” Amnesty International calls “a crime against humanity and a violation of international law.”
Were the US newspaper of record not so firmly committed to the deployment of grotesque euphemism on behalf of the Israeli war effort, perhaps the discussion of “pressure” might have included a mention of such statistics as that, between Tuesday and Friday alone, at least 200 children were among those massacred. But this, alas, would have required a humanization of Palestinians, and a dangerous encouragement of empathy fundamentally at odds with US/Israeli policy in the Middle East.
Instead, the Times simply noted that “Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages” in its possession, estimated to consist of “as many as 24 living captives—and the remains of more than 30 others.” No reference was made to the thousands of Palestinian captives held in mind-bogglingly inhumane conditions in Israel, though the Times did manage the—judgment-free—observation that,
even before the ceasefire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.
As Amnesty International (3/3/25) pointed out, that particular Israeli maneuver amounted to a crime against humanity and a violation of international law. But the Western corporate media wouldn’t be the Western corporate media if they reported straight facts.
‘To pressure Hamas on hostages’
Death by bombing and starvation is euphemized by the Wall Street Journal (3/8/25) as “gradually increasing pressure on Hamas.”
For its part, Reuters (3/21/25) explained on Friday that Israel had “intensified a military onslaught to press the Palestinian militant group [Hamas] to free remaining Israeli hostages.” The Wall Street Journal has, meanwhile, spent weeks preparing for the onslaught of “pressure” via such headlines as “Israel Draws Up New War Plans to Pressure Hamas” (3/8/25) and “Israel Chokes Electricity Supply to Gaza to Pressure Hamas on Hostages” (3/9/25).
A BBC article (3/21/25) on Katz’s orders to the military to “seize additional areas in Gaza” in the absence of a comprehensive hostage release is illustrative of the corporate media approach to round two of genocide. Specifying that “Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire,” the BBC quoted Katz as warning that “the more Hamas continues its refusal, the more territory it will lose to Israel.” The article did allow Hamas a line of space in which to respond that it is “engaging with the mediators with full responsibility and seriousness,” but the sandwiching of this quote in between US/Israeli accusations intentionally implied its disingenuousness.
Of course, the unmutilated truth does intermittently seep into media output, as in CNN’s Friday dispatch (3/21/25) containing these two sentences that lay out, in straightforward fashion, who is cooperating and who is not:
Hamas has insisted on sticking to a timeline previously agreed with Israel and the US that would move the warring parties into a second phase of the truce, in which Israel would commit to ending the war. But Israel has refused, saying it wants to extend the first phase instead.
Overall, however, the function of the corporate media is to endow demonstrably false US/Israeli accusations with a veneer of solid credibility, and to portray Hamas as the perennial saboteurs. Ultimately, unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire is about the equivalent, in terms of journalistic integrity, as unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of manufacturing nuclear jelly beans.
By implicitly blaming Hamas for renewed hostilities and legitimizing Israeli “pressure,” media outlets have offered themselves up as platforms for the de facto justification of mass slaughter.
A Thursday Fox News intervention (3/20/25) on Israel’s decision to “expand… activities in Gaza” noted approvingly that “the Israeli air force has continued to target and dismantle terrorists and terrorist infrastructure throughout” the coastal enclave. The article naturally came equipped with the assertion that Israel had resumed operations “following a short-lived ceasefire after it said the terror group repeatedly rebuffed offers to release the remaining hostages.”
To be sure, “activities” is as good a euphemism for genocide as any. And as the corporate media carry on with their own militant activities, one wishes some sort of pressure could stop the truth from being held hostage.
Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”
President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.
Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).
And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”
But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.
‘Incessant valorization of victimhood’
The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”
I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.
Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:
How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?
They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.
In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:
Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.
Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).
‘Fervor that borders on the oppressive’
The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.
The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).
The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.
The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”
‘Belligerent elite college students’
Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”
The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:
I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.
The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.
Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:
It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.
‘Death knell for a Jewish state’
While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.
Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:
The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.
Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”
Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?
The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.
Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.
David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.
David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.
JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?
DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.
If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.
JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?
DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.
There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.
It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.
But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.
And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.
None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.
And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.
JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.
DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.
But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.
And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.
JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.
DP: Yeah.
JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.
So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.
David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”
DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.
And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.
I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.
JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.
And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.
DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.
Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….
DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”
JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”
And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.
DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.
JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.
Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”
DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.
JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.
DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”
Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.
‘If nothing changes’
The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.
An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”
Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.
These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.
It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.
As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.
In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.
Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:
There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.
The easy and popular option is not an option
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.
There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficithawks at the Post.
But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.
In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.
To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”
Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.
Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-ownedPost.
Useful misinformation
Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):
Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.
Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.
Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.
This week on CounterSpin: News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” – unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations.
Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless, ” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House.
Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing…measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans,” go on to ask earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.”
In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people, but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.
We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.
Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.
Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”
The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.
Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.
Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.
Government spending ‘skyrocketed’
The New York Times (1/30/25) claims “even progressives now worry about the federal debt”—though an extensive recent analysis (PERI, 4/20) of the impact of debt by progressive economists found that “the relationship between government debt and economic growth is essentially zero.”
Corporate media’s ever-present fearmongering about spending is well-illustrated by the New York Times, which, within a week and a half of Trump’s inauguration, had already run the headline: “Even Progressives Now Worry About the Federal Debt” (1/30/25). The next day, the paper ran a separate article (1/31/25) by Michael Shear, which stated:
The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.
The paragraph at least avoided the classic tactic of throwing out raw numbers without giving any sort of metric, like GDP, to measure them against. But it nonetheless gave far from the full picture, not even offering numbers for spending as a percentage of GDP, which showed a minor increase of 3 percentage points over this period, to 23%—the same percentage that was spent in 2011.
Even more useful to include than this data, however, would have been international data showing how much the US spends in comparison to other rich countries. As it turns out, the answer is: quite little. And the US taxes even less.
Readers might also be interested to learn that tax cuts, not spending increases, have been primarily responsible for increases in the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio in recent decades, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (3/27/23). The group emphasized: “Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.” Given that reality, CAP concluded:
If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.
Federal outlays as a percentage of GDP have been nearly constant for the past 75 years (FRED).
‘The big areas of the budget’
The New York Times‘ Michael Shear (1/31/25) wrote that Trump was attempting “to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”
If corporate media like the New YorkTimes were serious about informing readers about the causes of and answers to high government debt, they would, like CAP, debunk right-wing deficit hawk propaganda, rather than reinforce it.
Instead, the Times‘ Shear (1/31/25) decided to provide his readers with extensive quotation from Maya MacGuineas, an extreme deficit hawk who got an early boost in her career “from the patronage of billionaire investment banker and arch-austerian Pete Peterson,” as the New Republic (3/4/21) recounted in a 2021 piece. Shear merely described her as “the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”
MacGuineas is the only expert Shear cites in the piece, and the article closes with her warning that Musk’s cuts “would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.” “To make a real impact on the debt,” MacGuineas said:
We are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings—Social Security, healthcare and revenues—the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.
The decision to include only an austerity advocate, and to allow her proclamation about the need for cuts to Social Security to end the piece, inevitably grants legitimacy to her claims. These claims are at the very least meant to be taken seriously, even more so since they come from a supposedly independent expert rather than a politician or government official. The decision to include no left-wing expert has a similar effect in reverse.
Meanwhile, in the paper’s piece (1/30/25) from the previous day about “progressive worry,” reporter Lydia DePillis managed to bury the key point in the 21st paragraph:
But mostly, Democrats say, the government simply needs more revenue to support the increasing number of people who are becoming eligible for retirement benefits.
Debt-scolding reporting
The Washington Post (10/8/24) sounds the alarm over the United States having a debt-to-GDP ratio similar to that of Britain, France and Canada—and much lower than Japan’s.
The Times is hardly the only outlet to legitimize alarmism about government spending. In a debt-scolding piece of reporting from last fall, the WashingtonPost (10/8/24) hammered on the point that runaway spending should be a major concern.
The choice of headline, “US Deficit Hits $1.8 Trillion as Interest Costs Rise,” immediately linked debt concerns to spending, not taxes. The first paragraph described the $1.8 trillion figure as “an enormous sum”—probably equally applicable to any sum over a billion dollars in the average American’s mind—while the fourth paragraph warned:
The nation’s debt compared with the size of the overall economy, a key metric of fiscal stability, is projected to exceed its all-time high of 106% by 2027.
Once again, international comparison would have been helpful here. It could be noted that the US, in fact, has a rather typical amount of debt compared to many other rich countries these days, with Britain, Canada, Spain, France and Italy all posting similar debt-to-GDP numbers. Greece, meanwhile, has a debt-to-GDP ratio close to 170%, while Japan boasts a ratio of around 250%. As Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has noted:
If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.
The Post, evidently, had no interest in providing such context. No international figures were cited. Instead, the next lines were a quote from a conservative economist:
A [nearly] $2 trillion deficit is bad news during a recession and war, but completely unprecedented during peace and prosperity…. The danger is the deficit will only get bigger over the next decade due to retiring baby boomers and interest on the debt.
Notice once more the linking of the increase in debt to spending rather than tax cuts.
The ‘soaring’ debt that wasn’t
The federal debt the Wall Street Journal (9/16/24) claimed was “soaring” was a smaller percentage of GDP in 2024 than in 2020.
The piece continued on to cite deficit hawk MacGuineas—described as the president of “a top Washington fiscal watchdog”—denouncing the “patchwork of targeted fiscal bribes” being offered to voters by the presidential candidates. And it ended with a quote from “president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former CBO director” Doug Holtz-Eakin, reminding us that debt servicing costs will have to be paid and will crowd out other spending priorities.
Unmentioned by the Post is that Holtz-Eakin held high posts in the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain presidential campaign. He also oversaw the creation of an infamous bogus cost estimate for the Green New Deal. Yet the Post portrays him as just an expert who leans a bit to the right.
Though the Post consulted three right-wing sources, they failed to include a single left-leaning independent expert. It’s not hard to understand how that fails readers, or how it legitimizes a certain set of priorities, while suggesting other views lack credibility.
The Wall Street Journal, for its part, has been more than happy to join the general fretting in corporate media about government spending. Back in the fall, for instance, a piece in its news section (9/16/24) complained that the presidential race was not focusing sufficiently on the issue of rising government debt, and flagged Social Security and Medicare as “the biggest drivers of rising spending.” The headline read: “Federal Debt Is Soaring. Here’s Why Trump and Harris Aren’t Talking About It.”
The problem with that headline? In the fall of 2024, federal debt was decidedly not soaring. This holds whether you look at federal debt in nominal dollar terms or as a percentage of GDP. Federal debt had “soared” briefly in 2020, when the Covid recession hit and the government rapidly expanded its spending to deal with the downturn. But for most of 2024, the quarterly percentage increase in the federal debt in dollar terms was actually below the historical average going back to 1970. And the debt-to-GDP ratio was at roughly the same spot as it had been three-and-a-half years earlier, at the start of Biden’s presidency.
‘Shutting off the lights’
For the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25), refusing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is like saying you want to go on a diet except for the beer, chips and ice cream sundaes.”
Even more concerning than corporate media’s penchant for running articles in the news section fearmongering about government spending, though, is what has been going on in corporate outlets’ opinion sections, specifically with the output of their editorial boards. Here, the legitimization of DOGE has reached its highest heights.
Unsurprisingly, the unabashedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board has been the prime offender. Most recently, it published an editorial (3/14/25) with the headline “Don’t Cry for the Education Department,” applauding the unconstitutional DOGE-led attack on the Education Department, which the Journal chastened for “harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”
The final paragraph began: “The closer Mr. Trump can get to shutting off the lights at the Education Department, the better.”
This was just one of numerous Journal editorials in recent weeks cheering on the DOGE project. A sampling of other editorials:
“Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic” (2/4/25) argued that Musk should be contained, but that he is “also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the US Agency for International Development.”
“The Federal Spending Boom Rolls On” (2/10/25) declared that “DOGE is a good idea,” and claimed that it had not gone far enough: “But for all of Mr. Musk’s frenetic tweeting, and the Beltway cries of Apocalypse Now, so far DOGE is only nibbling at the edges of Washington’s spending problem.”
“Judge Wants DOGE Facts, Not Fears” (2/19/25) ended, “Democrats hunting for a constitutional crisis might want to show evidence before they cry ‘dictator.’”
In short, then, the Journal editorial board not only approves of a rogue pseudo-agency operating with no transparency or oversight, but has become a crusader in defense of DOGE’s attacks on constitutional checks and balances—which grant Congress, not a right-wing ideologue from the PayPal Mafia, the power of the purse.
Of course, you can expect little else from the Journal than salivation over cuts to federal spending—it has long been the lapdog of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But it is jarring to witness exactly how rabid the Journal editorial board can be.
Not ‘audacious’ enough
The Washington Post says it’s “true that the $36 trillion national debt is unsustainable and there’s plenty of bloat in government.”
For its part, the Washington Post editorial board, while describing DOGE as a “circus” (2/24/25), has substantially legitimized DOGE’s mission.
An editorial (2/7/25) from early February is case in point. Headlined “Trump Needs to Erect Guardrails for DOGE,” the piece offered five ways for Trump to “be clear about who is boss,” effectively endorsing the mission of slashing government spending while expressing concern over some of Musk’s tactics.
The first four proposed guardrails in the piece, which include “Vet Musk’s operatives” and “Limit Musk’s access to sensitive files,” are all reasonable, but the fifth proposal reveals the board’s substantive concerns about the spending cuts being executed by DOGE. These concerns are not about whether cuts should be made—it is taken for granted that government spending should be reduced. Rather, they have to do with which spending is cut, aligning with the concerns raised by the Wall Street Journal about DOGE not going far enough.
This proposal, labeled “Focus on the biggest drivers of the national debt,” read:
To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts, Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent. Other sensitive areas of the balance sheet, including the Pentagon budget and veterans’ benefits, cannot stay off the table forever.
For the Post, then, the focus on programs such as USAID is simply too limited. We must put Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits on the table!
‘Embrace the same thinking’
The “DOGE ethos,” according to the Washington Post (3/3/25), means making “governments leaner and more efficient.”
The Washington Post’s preference for substantial cuts to federal government is further illustrated by an editorial (3/3/25) published in early March, following Jeff Bezos’s rebranding of the Post as Wall Street Journal–lite.
The editorial, titled “The DOGE Ethos Comes to State Governments,” showered praise on state governments that are capitalizing on DOGE branding while pursuing a more “thoughtful” approach to reducing government spending.
The piece favorably cited Washington state Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson’s insistence that “I’m not here to defend government…. I’m here to reform it.” The board elaborated:
Democrats in DC ought to embrace the same thinking. It’s foolish to defend a status quo that most voters think doesn’t work well. By fighting Trump and Musk tooth and nail, at the expense of presenting an alternative vision, the opposition risks appearing overly keen to protect hidebound institutions even as the world changes rapidly.
The Post’s take on DOGE? Let’s not center its blatant illegality. Let’s instead focus on what we can learn from it. After all, with a few minor tweaks, it’s exactly what we as a country need.
‘A great American success story’
New York Times says of Elon Musk, “he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.” But he’s going about it the wrong way.
The appallingly low bar set by the competition leaves the New York Times to assume the role of the major national newspaper that will seriously attack DOGE. It takes to this role…poorly.
The Times editorial board’s pushback against DOGE has been embarrassingly feeble. Its most direct assessment of DOGE thus far (3/8/25), for instance, began with an uncomfortably obsequious description of Musk:
Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries.
The board quickly conceded a major point to Musk:
Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.
The editorial went on to make a number of criticisms of DOGE, but its critique was undermined by this odd willingness to bend over backwards to appease Musk and his supporters.
Meanwhile, though sharply critical of DOGE’s disregard for the Constitution, the editorial made no attempt at presenting a counter-vision of government. It lamented cuts to a hodgepodge of specific government programs, but it had nothing to say in defense of current levels of government spending, let alone in favor of even higher levels of spending. One would hardly know that many wealthy countries have significantly higher levels of government spending and happier populations—in fact, at least 16 OECD countries register both higher spending and higher happiness than the US.
A gaping hole
This, then, is the state of American corporate media at the start of the Trump presidency. Across arguably the three most important national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—there is broad agreement that government spending is out of control and that something, perhaps something drastic, needs to be done about it.
Even at the leftmost of these organizations, the New York Times, the editorial board appears incapable of mounting a case for social democratic levels of government spending in the face of extreme attacks on spending by the Trump administration. The Times, instead, finds itself caught between bowing before the titans of American capitalism and confronting their disregard for the US Constitution.
The Washington Post has been able to adopt a somewhat less tortured position, occupying the center/center-right in a way reminiscent of 1990s Democrats, supporting cuts to government, but in a “thoughtful” way.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is having the time of its life. Finding itself once again in an era when greed and meanness animate the daily actions of government, it must feel freer than it has in years to bare its teeth at the true enemies of the American republic: teachers’ unions and recipients of government aid.
News consumers have no major paper espousing a truly progressive perspective. On the topic of government spending, at least, the window of acceptable thought appears to span from the center to the far right. There is no direct marketing reason for this—there’s a sizeable audience in the US that would welcome a progressive outlet, the same way there’s a sizeable audience for right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.
Who doesn’t want such an outlet to appear? Ultra-wealthy right-wing Americans of the sort that own and sponsor much of the media landscape. If wealthy people aren’t willing to finance a progressive media outlet that can compete with major papers, it seems that such an outlet simply won’t exist. Crowdfunding could help progressive media overcome this issue, but the playing field is not level.
As it stands, a major progressive outlet that can compete with the existing dominant players does not exist, and does not seem to be coming anytime soon. The gaping hole left as a result is becoming only more apparent as we speed into Trump administration 2.0.
Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.
As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”
In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”
Alarms raised
The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”
Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-panderingWashington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.
There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has
the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.
Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.
‘Inimical to the US’
The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”
The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”
Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.
While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”
The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.
Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).
Not ‘really about speech’
Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.
The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”
Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.
Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:
“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”
These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”
‘War on Terror’ playbook
Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”
Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.
As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.
Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).
So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.
To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.
“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
Helping to crush dissent
The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”
Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),
becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.
Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.
Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.
Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.
As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”
In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”
Alarms raised
The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”
Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-panderingWashington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.
There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has
the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.
Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.
‘Inimical to the US’
The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”
The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”
Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.
While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”
The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.
Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).
Not ‘really about speech’
Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.
The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”
Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.
Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:
“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”
These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”
‘War on Terror’ playbook
Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”
Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.
As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.
Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).
So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.
To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.
“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
Helping to crush dissent
The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”
Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),
becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.
Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.
Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.
This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.
Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.
The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.
Also on the show: You wouldn’t know it from what comes out of the mouths of today’s “leaders,” but there has long been a widely shared view in this country that people with disabilities deserve full human rights, but don’t have them. July 2023 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, as happens every year, a dismaying amount of the anniversary coverage was about buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA—as though complying with a decades-old law was a feel-good story, and despite the relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance.
CounterSpinspoke at the time with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of New Disabled South, about what’s lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around abiding by a baseline law, rather than a bigger vision of a world we can all live in. We revisit that conversation this week on CounterSpin.
Featured Image: A protester at a disability rights protest in May 2022 in new York City. Credit: FollowingNYC from Pexels
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Owned (Hachette, 2025), by Eoin Higgins, traces the relationship between tech industry barons and two former left-wing journalists.
Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised. Putting his Occupy Wall Street days behind him, Taibbi has fallen into the embrace of the reactionary Young America’s Foundation. He recently shared a bill with other right-wing pundits like Jordan Peterson, Eric Bolling and Lara Logan. Channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon, he frets about “bullying campus Marxism” (Substack, 6/12/20). Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who helped expose National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13; New York Times, 10/23/14), has buddied up with extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, notorious for falsely claiming that the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. That’s in addition to Greenwald’s closeness to Tucker Carlson, the ex–Fox News host who has platformed the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust revisionism. This is just a taste of what has caused many former friends, colleagues and admirers to ask what happened to make these one-time heroes of left media sink into the online cultural crusade against the trans rights movement (Substack, 6/8/22), social media content moderation (C-SPAN, 3/9/23) and legal accountability for Donald Trump (Twitter, 4/5/23). Both writers gave up coveted posts at established media outlets for a new and evolving mediasphere that allows individual writers to promote their work independently. Both have had columns at the self-publishing platform Substack, which relies on investment from conservative tech magnate Marc Andreessen (Reuters, 3/30/21; CJR, 4/1/21). Greenwald hosts System Update on Rumble, a conservative-friendly version of YouTube underwritten by Peter Thiel (Wall Street Journal, 5/19/21; New York Times, 12/13/24), the anti-woke crusader known for taking downGawker.
High-tech platforms
Some wonder if their political conversion is related to their departure from traditional journalism to new, high-tech platforms for self-publishing and self-production. In Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices of the Left (2025), Eoin Higgins focuses on the machinations of the reactionary tech industry barons, who live by a Randian philosophy where they are the hard-working doers of society, while the nattering nabobs of negativism speak only for the ungrateful and undeserving masses. Higgins’ book devotes about a chapter and a half to Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, but Musk is refreshingly not the centerpiece. (Higgins has been a FAIR contributor, and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas is quoted in the book.) The tech billionaire class’s desire to crush critical reporting and create new boss-friendly media isn’t just ideological. Higgins’ story documents how these capitalists have always wanted to create a media environment that enables them to do one thing: make as much money as possible. And what stands in their way? Liberal Democrats and their desire to regulate industry (Guardian, 6/26/24).
In Higgins’ narrative, these billionaires originally saw Greenwald as a dangerous member of the fourth estate, largely because their tech companies depended greatly on a relationship with the US security state. But as both Greenwald and Taibbi drifted rightward in their politics, these new media capitalists were able to entice them over to their side on their new platforms. Capitalists buying and creating media outfits to influence policy is not new—think of Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post (8/5/13; Extra!, 3/14). But Higgins sees a marriage of convenience between these two former stars of the left and a set of reactionary bosses who cultivated their hatred for establishment media for the industry’s political ends.
Less ideological than material
Matt Taibbi (X, 2/15/24) learned the hard way that cozying up to Musk and “repeatedly declining to criticize” him was not enough not avoid Musk’s censorship on X.
Higgins is not suggesting that Thiel and Andreesen are handing Taibbi and Greenwald a check along with a set of right-wing talking points. Instead, Higgins has applied Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda model, which they used to explain US corporate media in Manufacturing Consent,to the new media ecosystem of the alt-right.
Higgins even shows us that the alliance between these journalists and the lords of tech is shaky, and the relationship can be damaged when these tech lords are competing with each other. For example, right-wing multibillionaire Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X. Taibbi, who boosted Musk’s takeover and the ouster of the old Twitter regime, chose to overlook the fact that Musk’s new regime, despite a promise of ushering in an era of free speech, censored a significant amount of Twitter content. Taibbi finally spoke up when Musk instituted a “blanket search ban” of Substack links, thus hurting Taibbi’s bottom line. In other words, Taibbi’s allegiance to Musk was less ideological as it was material.
Greenwald and Taibbi have created a world where they are angry at “Big Tech,” except not the tech lords on whom their careers depend.
Lured to the tech lords
Owned addresses the record of these two enigmatic journalists, and their relationship to tech bosses, in splendid detail. In what is perhaps the most interesting part, Higgins explains how these Big Tech tycoons originally distrusted Greenwald, because of his work on the Snowden case. Over time, though, their political aims began to align, forging a new quasi-partnership. As the writer Alex Gendler (Point, 2/3/25) explained, these capitalists are “libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves.” Taibbi and Greenwald, meanwhile, became disaffected with liberalism’s social justice politics. And thus a common ground was found. In summarizing these men’s careers, Higgins finds that early on, both exhibited anger management problems and an inflated sense of self-importance. What we learn along the way is that there has always been conflict between their commitment to journalism and their own self-obsession. We see the latter win, and lure our protagonists closer to the tech lords. Higgins charts Greenwald’s career, from a lawyer who ducked away from his duties to argue with conservatives on Town Hall forums, to his blogging years, to his break from the Intercept, the outlet he helped create.
We see a man who has always had idiosyncratic politics, with leftism less a description of his career and more an outside branding by fans during the Snowden story. Higgins shows how Greenwald, like so many, fell into a trap at an early age of finding the soul of his journalism in online fighting, rather than working the street, a flaw that has forever warped his worldview.
Right-wing spirals
As the lawyer for a white supremacist accused by the Center for Constitutional Rights of conspiring in a shooting spree that left two dead and nine wounded, Glenn Greenwald said, “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me” (Orcinus, 5/20/19).
The book is welcome, as it comes after many left-wing journalists offered each other explanations for Taibbi and Greenwald’s right-wing spirals. Some have wondered if Greenwald simply reverted to his early days of being an attorney and errand boy for white supremacist Matt Hale (New York Times, 3/9/05; Orcinus, 5/20/19), when he used to rant against undocumented immigration because “unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate” makes “impossible the preservation of any national identity” (Unclaimed Territory, 12/3/05).
Higgins gives us both sides of Greenwald. In one heartbreaking passage, he reports that Greenwald’s late husband had even tried to hide Greenwald’s phone to wean him off social media for his own well-being.
In a less sympathetic passage, we see that of all the corporate journalists in the world, it is tech writer Taylor Lorenz who has become the object of his obsessive, explosive Twitter ire. Her first offense was running afoul of Andreessen, one of Substack’s primary financers. Her second was investigating the woman behind the anti-trans Twitter account, Libs of TikTok (Washington Post, 4/19/22). In Taibbi, we find a hungry and aggressive writer with little ideological grounding—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it leaves one vulnerable to manipulative forces. Higgins shows us a son of a journalist who had a lot of advantages in life, and yet still feels aggrieved, largely because details of his libidinous proclivities in post-Soviet Russia made him vulnerable to the MeToo campaign (Washington Post, 12/15/17). It’s not hard to see how the sting of organized feminist retribution would inspire the surly enfant terribleto abandon a mission to afflict the comfortable and become the Joker.
Right-wing for other reasons
Naturally, Owned doesn’t tell the whole story. While Musk’s Twitter has become a right-wing vehicle (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Al Jazeera, 8/13/24; PBS, 8/13/24), a great many left and liberal writers and new outlets still find audiences on Substack. At the same time, many of the platform’s users threatened to boycott Substack (Fast Company, 12/14/23) after it was revealed how much Nazi content it promoted (Atlantic, 11/28/23). And while Substack and Rumble certainly harnessed Taibbi and Greenwald’s realignment, many other left journalists have gone right for other reasons. Big Tech doesn’t explain why Max Blumenthal, the son of Clinton family consigliere Sidney Blumenthal, gave up his investigations of the extreme right (Democracy Now!, 9/4/09) for Covid denialism (World Socialist Web Site, 4/13/22) and a brief stint as an Assadist version of Jerry Seinfeld (Twitter, 4/16/23). Christian Parenti, a former Nation correspondent covering conflict and climate change (Grist, 7/29/11) and the son of Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, has made a similar transition (Grayzone, 3/31/22; Compact, 12/31/24), and he is notoriously offline.
Higgins’ book, nevertheless, is a cautionary tale of how reactionary tech lords are exploiting a dying media sector, where readers are hungry for content, and laid off writers are even hungrier for paid work. They are working tirelessly to remake a new media world under their auspices.
To remake the media environment
Taibbi, who once upon a time spoke at Occupy Wall Street, has lazily morphed into a puppet for oligarchic state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) to literally repost Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich.
Thiel, Andreessen and Musk have the upper hand. While X is performing poorly (Washington Post, 9/1/24) and Tesla is battered by Musk’s plummeting public reputation, Musk’s political capital has skyrocketed, to the point that media outlets are calling him a shadow president in the new Trump administration (MSNBC, 12/20/24; Al Jazeera, 12/22/24). Substack is boasting growth (Axios, 2/22/24), as is Rumble (Motley Fool, 8/13/24). Meanwhile, 2024 was a brutal year for journalism layoffs (Politico, 2/1/24). It saw an increase in newspaper closings that “has left more than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties—or 55 million people—with just one or no local news sources where they live” (Axios, 10/24/24). A year before that, Gallup (10/19/23) found that
The future of the Intercept, which Greenwald helped birth, remains in doubt (Daily Beast, 4/15/24), as several of its star journalists have left to start Drop Site News (Democracy Now!, 7/9/24), which is hosted on—you guessed it—Substack. Rather than provide an opening for more democratic media, this space is red meat for predatory capital. The lesson we should draw from Higgins’ book is that unless we build up an alternative, democratic media to fill this void, an ideologically driven cohort of rich industrialists want to monopolize the communication space, manufacturing consent for an economic order that, surprise, puts them at the top. And if Taibbi and Greenwald can find fame and fortune pumping alt-right vitriol on these platforms, many others will line up to be like them. What Higgins implies is that Andreessen and Thiel’s quest to remake the media environment as mainstream sources flounder isn’t necessarily turning self-publishing journalists into right-wingers, but that the system rewards commentary—the more incendiary the better—rather than local journalists doing on-the-ground, public-service reporting in Anytown USA, where it’s needed the most. Greenwald and Taibbi’s stature in the world of journalism, on the other hand, is waning as they further dig themselves into the right-wing holes, and the years pass on from their days as scoop-seeking investigative reporters. Both ended their reputations as members of the Fourth Estate in favor of endearing themselves to MAGA government.
Taibbi has lazily morphed into a puppet for state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) space to literally rerun Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich. Greenwald cheered Trump and Musk’s destructive first month in power, saying the president should be “celebrated” (System Update, 2/22/25). Neither so-called “free speech” warrior seems much concerned about the enthusiastic censorship of the current administration (GLAAD, 1/21/25; Gizmodo, 2/5/25; American Library Association, 2/14/25; ABC News, 2/14/25, Poynter, 2/18/25; FIRE, 3/4/25; EFF, 3/5/25).
Past their sell-by date
And there’s a quality to Greenwald and Taibbi that limits their shelf life, a quality that even critics like Higgins have overlooked. As opposed to other left-to-right flipping contrarians of yore, the contemporary prose of Taibbi, Greenwald and their band of wannabes is simply too pedestrian to last beyond the authors’ lifetimes. They value quantity over quality. There is no humor, narrative, love of language or worldly curiosity in their work. And they have few interests beyond this niche political genre.
Christopher Hitchens, who broke with the left to support the “War on Terror” (The Nation, 9/26/02), could write engagingly about literature, travel and religion. Village Voice civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose politics flew all over the spectrum, had a whole other career covering jazz. This made them not only digestible writers for readers who might disagree with them, but also extended their relevance in the literary profession.
By contrast, Taibbi’s attempts to write about the greatness of Thanksgiving (Substack, 11/25/21) and how much he liked the new Top Gun movie (Substack, 8/3/22) feel like perfunctory exercises in convincing readers that he’s a warm-blooded mammal. A Greenwaldian inquiry into art or music sounds as useful as sex advice from the pope. This tunnel vision increased their usefulness to the moguls of the right-wing media evolution–for a while.
Taibbi and Greenwald are not the true enemy of Owned; they are fun for journalists to criticize, but have slid off into the margins, as neither has published a meaningful investigation in years. The good news is that for every Greenwald or Taibbi, there’s a Tana Ganeva, Maximillian Alvarez, Talia Jane, George Joseph, Michelle Chen or A.C. Thompson in the trenches, doing real, necessary reporting. What is truly more urgent is the fact that a dangerous media class is taking advantage of this media vacuum, at the expense of regular people.
Janine Jackson interviewed Rutgers University’s Eric Blanc about worker-to-worker organizing as a key force of resistance for the March 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The difficult and disturbing political moment is throwing some underlying fissures in US society into relief. Along with which side some folks turn out to be on, we’re learning what levers of power regular people actually have and how we can use them. And we’re reminded that the antidote to fear and confusion is one another, is community, including the particularly powerful form of community that is a labor union. Indeed, workers can wield power even shy of a union, though that’s not a story you will often read about in major media.
EB: It’s hard to exaggerate the stakes of the fight right now around federal workers. There’s a reason that Musk and Trump have started by trying to decimate federal services and decimate federal unions, and that’s because they understand that these are blockages on their attempt to have sort of full authoritarian control over the government and to be able to just impose their reactionary agenda irrespective of the law. And they know that they need to not just fire the heads of these agencies, but they need to be able to have a workforce that is so terrified of the administration that they’ll comply even when the law is being broken.
And so they have to go out after these unions and break them. And in turn, the stakes for, really, all progressive, all working people, anybody who has a stake in democracy, are very high because this is the first major battle of the new administration. And if they’re able to mass fire federal workers despite their legal protections to have job protections, despite the reality that millions of Americans depend on these services—Social Security, Medicaid, just basic environmental health and safety protections—if they’re able to destroy these services upon which so many people depend, this is going to set a basis for them to then go even harder on the rest of society. So think about immigrants and trans people and all of that. So the implications of this battle are very high. It is the case, fortunately, that federal workers are starting to resist, but there’s going to need to be a lot more to be able to push back.
JJ: Well, I grew up outside of DC. Both my parents worked at federal agencies. All of my summer jobs were at federal agencies, and anyone with direct experience knows that, with 0.0 illusions about perfection—but we understand that there are widespread misunderstandings and myths about government, generally, and about federal workers, specifically. Trump says, “We’re bloated, we’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.” How do we push back against that narrative?
EB: Yeah, I think the basic response is straightforward, which is to highlight just how important these services are and to note that, far from having a massively expanded bureaucracy, the federal services, like most public services, have actually been starved over the last 50 years. The percentage of the workforce that works for the federal government has continued to decline for the last four decades. And so it’s just not the case that there’s this massively expanding bureaucracy. And if anything, many of the inefficiencies and the problems in the sector are due to a lack of resources and then the lack of ability to really make these the robust programs that they can and should be, and oftentimes in the past were.
So it’s just not the case that either there’s a massively expanded bureaucracy or that these services are somehow not important. The reality is that the American people, in some ways, don’t see all of these services. They take them for granted. They’re somewhat invisible. So the fact that, up until recently, planes weren’t crashing, well, that’s because you have federal regulators and have well-trained federal air traffic controllers. And so when you start to destroy these services, then all of a sudden it becomes more visible. What will happen if you stop regulating companies on pollution, for instance? Well, companies can go back and do what they did a hundred years ago, which is to systematically dump toxins into the soil, into water, and all of these other things that we almost take for granted now that are unacceptable. Well, if there’s no checks and balances on corporations, who’s going to prevent them from doing all of this?
And so I do think that there’s just a lot of basic education that needs to be put out there to counter these lies, essentially, of the Trump administration. For instance, the vast majority of federal workers don’t live in DC. This idea that this is all sort of rich bureaucrats in DC—over 80% of federal workers live all across the country, outside of DC. And just monetarily, it’s not the case these are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars, they’re making decent working class wages. Overwhelmingly, you can look at the data.
So we need to, I think, be really clear both of the importance of these services, but then also just to say it’s a complete myth that the reason that ordinary working class people are suffering is due to federal workers. It’s a tiny part of the federal budget, first of all, the payroll of federal workers. And if you just compare the amount of money that goes to federal workers to, say, the wealth of Elon Musk, there’s no comparison. Elon Musk, richest man on earth, has over $400 billion net worth. That’s almost double what federal workers, 2.3 million federal workers as a whole, make every year. So you just see the actual inequality is not coming from federal workers, it’s coming from the richest in our country and the world.
JJ: Well, an arm we have, a lever we have, is worker organizing to push back against this, besides us at home being angry and throwing our shoes at the TV. We can work together and we have historical models, we have contemporary models and examples of how that can work and how that can play out.
I want to ask you to talk about the 2018 teacher strikes, because I see that you have lifted that up as a kind of analog, that there are lessons to be learned about places like West Virginia and Oklahoma, red states that in 2018 had this strike by teachers that, against all odds, one would say, were popular, connected with community, and were, in their measure, successful. I wonder what you think some of the tactical lessons were learned there. What did we learn from those strikes?
EB: That’s a good question, and I think it’s important to start by just noting that these strikes are a good example of why we shouldn’t just succumb to despair now. There’s an overall sense of doom and gloom that nothing can be done because Trump’s in power, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s accurate that nothing can be done. And the example of the red state strikes are a prime indicator that even when you have very conservative people in power, in government, workers have an ability to use their workplace leverage and their community leverage to win.
And so in 2018, hundreds of thousands of teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond went on strike. Even though those strikes were illegal, even though these were states in which the unions are very weak, right-to-work states, and even though the electorates in all of these states had voted for Donald Trump, nevertheless they got overwhelming support from the population because they had very simple, resonant demands, like more funding for schools, decent pay for teachers, make sure that there’s enough money so that students can get a decent education.
These things cut across partisan lines in a way that, similarly, I think that the defense of basic services like Social Security and Medicaid today really does cut across party lines. And the tactics, then, that they used were, well, first they had to get over the fear factor, because these were illegal strikes, so they had to find ways to start generating momentum amongst teachers. They did things like really basic escalating actions like asking people to wear red on one day. So they didn’t start by saying, “Let’s go on strike.” They said, “Can you do this one simple action together? Can we all wear the same color on a given day?” And then they asked the community to come in. They said, “Community members, can you meet us after school on this day? We’re going to talk about our issues together. We’re going to hold up some signs. We’re going to provide some information.”
So they built with escalating action towards eventually a mass strike. And they used a lot of social media because they couldn’t rely on the unions as much. Social media was very important for connecting workers across these states, for generating momentum. And eventually they were able to have extremely successful walkouts that, despite being illegal, nobody got retaliated against. They won, they forced the government to back down and to meet their demands. And so I do think that that is more or less the game plan for how we’re going to win around Musk and Trump. You have to essentially create enough of a backlash of working people, but then in conjunction with the community, that the politicians are forced to back down.
JJ: Well in worker-to-worker organizing, it seems like what you’re talking about here, I think a lot of us who have worked with organized labor or have that memory think of it as a top-down enterprise. And so worker-to-worker organizing is not just like a bright spot, something to look at, but a way forward, something that can be replicated. You direct something called the Worker to Worker Collaborative. Can you maybe just tell us a little bit about what worker-to-worker organizing is or how it’s different from a model that some folks may hold in their head?
EB: Yeah. The basic problem with more traditional, staff-intensive unionism is that it’s just too expensive. It’s too costly, both in terms of money and time, to win big, to organize millions of workers. And whether it’s on offensive battles like unionizing Starbucks or Amazon, or whether it’s defensive battles right now, like defending federal workers, if you’re going to organize enough workers to fight back, there’s just not enough staff to be able to do that. And so part of the problem with the traditional method is that you just can’t win widely enough. You can’t win big enough.
Worker-to-worker organizing is essentially the form of organizing in which the types of roles that staff normally do are taken on by workers themselves. So strategizing, training and coaching other workers, initiating campaigns—these are things that then become the task and responsibility of workers themselves with coaching and with support, and oftentimes in conjunction with bigger unions. But workers just take on a higher degree of responsibility, and that has been shown to work. The biggest successes we’ve had in the labor movement in recent years, from the teacher strikes, which we talked about, to Starbucks, which has organized now over 560 stores, forced one of the biggest companies in the world to the bargaining table. We’ve seen that it works.
And it’s just a question now of the rest of the labor movement really investing in this type of bottom-up organizing. And frankly, there is no alternative. The idea that so many in the labor leadership have, that we’re just going to elect Democrats and then they’ll turn it around—well, Democrats are sort of missing in action, and who knows when they’re going to come back into power. And so it’s really incumbent on the labor movement to stop looking from above and start looking, really, to its own rank and say, “Okay, if we’re going to save ourselves, that’s the only possible way. No one’s going to come save us from above.”
JJ: And it seems that it develops also with just a more organic, if I could say, understanding of what the issues are because it’s workers themselves formulating that message rather than leadership saying, “We think this is what will sell, or we think this is what we can get across.” It seems more likely to actually reflect workers’ real concerns.
EB: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, workers are best placed to understand each other’s issues. They’re also the best placed to convince other workers to get on board. One of the things bosses always say whenever there’s a union drive or union fight is, “Oh, the union is this outside third party.” And sometimes there’s a little bit of truth to that. I don’t want to exaggerate the point, but there could be an aspect of the labor movement that can feel a little bit divorced from the direct ownership and experiences of workers. But when workers themselves are organizing, oftentimes in conjunction with unions, but if they really are the people in the lead, then it becomes much harder for the bosses to third-party the union because it’s clear the union is the workers.
JJ: Right, right. Well, how much does it matter, for this kind of bottom-up organizing, whatever it is that’s happening at the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]? What role—I don’t even actually know what’s happening, it’s in flux as is everything. But you think that maybe not that we shouldn’t worry about it, not that we shouldn’t think about it, but we shouldn’t over-worry about machinations at the NLRB, yeah?
EB: Well, I do think that the Biden NLRB was very good and it helped workers unionize. So the fact that we don’t have that NLRB anymore is a blow to the labor movement. I think we just have to acknowledge that. That being said, it’s still possible to unionize. You don’t need the NLRB to unionize. The labor movement grew and fought for many years before labor law was passed. And even today it’s very ambiguous. The NLRB is sort of paralyzed on a national level, but on a local level you can still run elections. And so it’s not even completely defunct. And I think it’s probably still possible to use it to a certain extent.
But the reality is that the legal terrain is harder than it was. On the other hand, the urgency is even higher, and you still see workers fighting back and organizing in record numbers. I’ve been really heartened by, despite the fact that the legal regime is harder, you’ve had some major union victories just in the last few weeks under Trump. For instance, in Philadelphia, Whole Foods workers unionized despite Trump, despite an intense union busting campaign coming straight on down from Jeff Bezos. This was only the second time Amazon—because Amazon’s the owner of Whole Foods now—has lost a union election, and that was just a few weeks ago in Philadelphia.
And so it shows that there is this real anger from below. And I think that there’s something, actually, about the Trump administration, that because it’s so fused to some of the richest people on earth with the administration in an oligarchic manner, but then unionization itself becomes almost a direct way to challenge the Trump regime. Because you’re going up against both their destruction of labor rights, and then also, frankly, it’s just the same people are up top. The bosses and the administration are almost indistinguishable at this point.
JJ: And I feel like entities like Amazon, like Whole Foods, have presented themselves as sort of the future of business, the future of the way we do things. And so I think labor actions, first of all, recognizing that it’s still workers doing this and it’s not happening in a lab somewhere, they just seem like especially important places to call attention to in terms of labor activity.
Eric Blanc: “ I think that the Achilles heel of Trump and his whole movement is that it claims to be populist and it appeals to working class people, but in reality is beholden to the richest people on the planet. So the best way to expose that is by waging battles around economic dignity.”
EB: Yeah. And I think that the Achilles heel of Trump and his whole movement is that it claims to be populist and it appeals to working class people, but in reality is beholden to the richest people on the planet. So the best way to expose that is by waging battles around economic dignity, right? And the labor movement is the number one force that can do that, and force the politicians to show which side they’re on. Are you on the side of Jeff Bezos or are you on the side of low wage workers who are fighting back? Waging more and more of those battles, even if it’s harder because of the legal regime, I think is going to be one of the most crucial ways we have to undermine the support of MAGA amongst working people of all backgrounds.
JJ: Well, and we need one another for that support as we go forward. Well, finally, unless you’re living in a hole or unless you actually like what’s happening, it’s very clear that business as usual isn’t going to do, kind of wherever you’re walking in life, we need to be doing something bigger, bolder. But we know that there are people, to put it crudely, who are more afraid of disruption than they are of suffering. Disruption sounds very scary, doing things the way they haven’t been done yesterday, even though we do have history that we can point to, is scary.
And I think that makes the stories we tell one another and the stories we tell ourselves so important, the coherence of the vision of the future that we’re able to put out there is so crucial. And of course, that brings me back to media. You mentioned the importance of social media, independent media, just the stories that we tell, the stories that we lift up, the people that we lift up. It seems so important to this fight. It’s not meta phenomena. So I just wonder, finally, what you see as a role for different kinds of media going forward?
EB: Okay. I think it’s absolutely crucial. One of the reasons why the right has made the inroads it has is that it’s been better at getting its story out there and waging the battles of ideas through the media, through social media, and through more mainstream media. And frankly, our side has trailed. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the same resources, but I think it’s also there’s an underestimation of how important it is to explain what is going on in the world, to name who the real enemies are, and to provide an explanation for people’s real anger and their real anxiety about what’s happening. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely crucial. And I think we need to, as a labor movement, as progressives, as left, really push back and provide an alternative explanation that all of these problems are rooted in the power of billionaires. It’s not rooted because of the immigrants, not because of the federal workers, not because of trans kids.
And I’ll just say that one of the things I find to be hopeful is that social media is being used pretty effectively now by this new federal workers movement, and I’ll give you one plug, which is that they have a new website, go.savepublicservices.com, through which anybody can sign up to get involved in the local actions happening nearby. It’s going to be a rapid response network to stop all of the layoffs that happen locally, wherever you live, and to save the services on which we depend. So people can go to that website, go.savepublicservices.com, and take advantage of that media opportunity to get involved locally.
Donald Trump’s second presidential term has been underway for almost two months now, and every day brings headlines testifying to his determination to fulfil his promise of mass deportation of immigrants. Senate Republicans are moving forward with a bill allocating an additional $175 billion towards border militarization efforts—including deportations and border-wall construction.
Deportees have been shipped to remote camps and militarized hotels in Panama and Costa Rica, facing horrifically unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, and denied access to aid, lawyers and press. Venezuelan deportees detained at Guantánamo Bay—who have since been deported to Venezuela via Honduras—had been similarly mistreated by US immigration officials.
All of this, of course, comes after four years of US media and political classes working in lock-step to manufacture consent for such a catastrophic displacement event (FAIR.org, 8/31/23, 5/24/21). Both conservative and centrist media outlets associated immigrants with drugs, crime and human waste. During her bid for president, Vice President Kamala Harris supported hardening our borders, calling Trump’s border wall—which she once called a “medieval vanity project“—a “good idea.”
We’ve been here before many, many times. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself— but it often rhymes.
Media of all kinds—from tabloids to legacy outlets—have repeatedly sensationalized the immigrant “other,” constructing an all-encompassing threat to native-born US labor and culture that can always be neutralized through a targeted act of mass displacement or incarceration. The resulting violence addresses none of the structural problems that cause the immiseration of angry workers in the first place.
From Chinese exclusion to Japanese internment to Operation Wetback, this characterization of the foreigner has had catastrophic consequences for millions of human lives.
‘The Chinese question in hand’
The Seattle Daily Intelligencer (12/18/1877) argued that “Chinese should be restricted to one particular locality” so as not to “endanger” white property.
Chinese labor began to cement itself by the 1850s as a crucial element of westward expansion. American companies employed a steady trickle of cheap immigrant labor to extract precious minerals, construct railroads and perform agricultural work. For their willingness to work long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions, Chinese workers were scorned by their fellow workers—including minority workers—helped along by an unforgiving and vitriolic media ecosystem.
Juan González and Joseph Torres’ News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (Verso, 2011) documents how sensationalistic media coverage of Chinese immigrant workers contributed to creating the social-political conditions necessary for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In 1852, prominent broadsheet Daily Alta California argued that Chinese people should be classified as nonwhite, a decision eventually cemented a year later in a murder trial that rendered Chinese testimony against white defendants inadmissible, under racist rules of evidence that also targeted Black, Indigenous and mixed-race witnesses. Sinophobic violence against Chinese mine workers from whites, Native Americans and Mexicans subsequently became much more commonplace.
Meanwhile, instead of condemning the xenophobic violence faced by these workers, Bayard Taylor at the pro-labor, progressive-leaning New York Tribune(9/29/1854) called the Chinese “uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond conception,” and described them as lacking the “virtues of honesty, integrity [and] good-faith.”
Into the 1870s and ’80s, “The Chinese Must Go” became a rallying cry of California’s labor movement. A San Francisco Chronicle piece (7/21/1878) from 1878 described a “Mongolian octopus” growing to engulf the coast. Headline after headline described Chinese-Americans as “Mongolian hordes” and “thieves.”
Simultaneously, violent incidents targeting Chinese mineworkers became massive union-led anti-Chinese pogroms. Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (University of California Press, 2008) specifically details a late October 1871 pogrom in Los Angeles during which more than a dozen Chinese men and women were killed, with numerous Chinese homes looted for tens of thousands of dollars. At trial, members of the crowd testified to the jury that “Los Angeles Star reporter H.M. Mitchell had urged them to hang all the Chinese.”
Lynchings and pogroms were often accompanied by expulsions. In her The Chinese Must Go (Harvard University Press, 2018), Beth Lew-Williams details how Chinese laborer Hing Kee’s December 1877 murder was immediately followed by a driving-out of the two dozen other Chinese workers in Port Madison, Washington. Hing’s murder was reported by the Seattle Daily Intelligencer (12/18/1877) as merely an act of personal violence. Yet, in a different story on the same page, readers were encouraged to take the “Chinese question in hand” in a call to action to “restrict” Chinese workers from “endanger[ing]” white property by opening businesses outside of small ghettoized communities.
Finally, in 1882, the mania reached its boiling point. The populist groundswell, bolstered by media sensationalism, culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first major immigration restriction passed in US history and, for a very long time, the only one that specifically named a group for exclusion.
But the US economy still depended on cheap immigrant labor. Media had successfully diverted labor’s attention from the underlying systems that necessitated low-wage agricultural work—but without such a precarious class, who would take on such a thankless job?
Undisclosed numbers of ‘suspicious aliens’
The Los Angeles Times (12/8/1941) announced the “hunting down” of Japanese “subversives.”
As the Japanese took on the role of an exploitable immigrant labor class, similar nativist sentiment burgeoned, demanding an amendment to the Chinese Exclusion Act. After 1900, the Japanese had replaced the Chinese as the most sensationalized immigrant labor pool in California—while still making up a tiny proportion of the state’s total workforce.
Not White Enough, by Lawrence Goldstone (University Press of Kansas, 2023), catalogues the role that media outlets, among other political actors, played in setting the stage for Japanese internment during World War II. Into the late 1910s, politically ambitious media tycoon William Randolph Hearst ran headline after headline in the San Francisco Examiner warning of a Japanese invasion, and accusing Japanese workers of being disguised soldiers smuggling ammunition.
In the 1930s, as the Japanese empire expanded throughout Asia and the Pacific, anti-Japanese sentiment in the US grew with it. The FBI created watch lists of potential Japanese-American subversives, including Shinto and Buddhist priests, and the heads of Japanese-American culture and language associations.
In the early 1940s, Texas Rep. Martin Dies, chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, regularly leaked updates to journalists of baseless “findings” of Japanese-American subversion. In a July 1941 report, the committee declared it had found that “no Japanese can ever be loyal to any other nation other than Japan,” and that even generationally US-born Japanese-Americans “cannot become thoroughly Americanized.”
What Dies failed to mention was that every agent on the West Coast discovered to hold loyalty to Imperial Japan was white.
The rare examples of sympathetic coverage of Japanese Americans in local papers in San Francisco and Los Angeles evaporated after Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. As the FBI and ONI began rounding up the thousands of Japanese immigrants placed on watchlists, the Los Angeles Times (12/8/1941) ran a front-page story announcing the apprehension of hundreds of “suspicious” Japanese “subversives.” On the same morning, the San Francisco Examiner (12/8/1941) described these unlawful detentions as “taking into custody undisclosed numbers of ‘suspicious aliens,’ considered as potential saboteurs.”
Media clamored in a race to the bottom to produce the most provocative anti-Japanese headlines. While supportively covering raids on Japanese-American communities, they also published piece after piece detailing Japanese attacks on US soil and Japanese-American infiltrations that never occurred. In one particularly egregious instance, the Alabama Journal (12/8/1941) ran a piece headlined “How Jap Could Easily Poison City’s Water Supply.”
Though detentions began with the December 1941 round-ups, Roosevelt officially passed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942.
As shameless as the fabrications that led to and justified internment was media’s coverage of internment itself: FAIR has previously reported on the New York Times’ 1942 coverage (3/24/1942) of the concentration camps, describing the “trek” to a “new reception center rising as if by magic” as characterized by a “spirit of adventure.”
The role of media in demonizing Japanese Americans, ultimately resulting in internment, is undeniable. Newspapers worked dually as mouthpieces for unfounded FBI claims of subversion and as launching-pads for fantasies generated to maximize outrage at the perceived Japanese “other.” Then, once the “other” was contained, media went to work framing internment as a privilege.
Never mind that Japanese Americans produced 40% of agricultural output in California, that they had lived in and contributed to their communities for decades at this point— they were all double-agents, and they were neutralized.
A perfunctory disguise
The New York Times (3/26/1951) warned that “‘wetbacks’ filter into every occupation from culinary work to the building trades” and promised that “tomorrow’s article will discuss how the ‘wetback’ influx creates an atmosphere of amorality.”
Though undocumented Mexican labor had always been an instrumental part of agricultural production, especially in the US Southwest, it hadn’t actually garnered large-scale attention until the 1950s; even, in fact, with a mass-deportation event during the Great Depression. But just a few short years after the internment camps closed, the US undertook the high-profile mass deportation of Mexican laborers in Operation Wetback.
During World War II, with a shortage of agricultural workers, the United States came to an agreement with Mexico known as the Bracero Program. In exchange for tightening border security and returning undocumented immigrants to Mexico (on Mexico’s demands), the US would receive Mexican agricultural contract workers. On paper, the deal was a win/win for the US and Mexico: The US would receive workers, and Mexico would stop hemorrhaging its working population.
In practice, however, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, the predecessor of ICE) acted on the interests of big agriculture. The INS selectively enforced border security: It was common for INS to hold off on carrying out deportation orders until after the growing season. Farmers also preferred using undocumented labor to braceros, as undocumented workers could be acquired with less red tape and, usually, lower wages. Thus the INS worked specifically to uphold the precarity of Mexican labor, rather than to restrict its numbers.
Then undocumented Mexican labor became the center of a bizarre red-scare media sensation. Avi Aster (Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback; Latino Studies, 2009) pieces together the peculiar relationship between red-baiting and illegal immigration, and how it would ultimately lead to popular consent for Operation Wetback.
It began with a New York Times five-part story (3/25–29/1951) published in March 1951, detailing “the economic and sociological problem of the ‘wetbacks’—illegal Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern United States.” Times journalist Gladwin Hill took a dual interest in the horrible conditions under which Mexican migrant workers toiled, and in the imagined threat that these workers posed to US society. He also insisted that it was possible for Communist spies to cross the Rio Grande with Mexican migrant workers—that although it had never happened before, “in cold fact Joseph Stalin might adopt a perfunctory disguise and walk into the country this way.”
The media and political classes ran with these claims and never looked back. In 1954, the Times ran such headlines as “’Invasion’ of Aliens Is Declared a Peril” (2/8/1954) and “Reds Slip Into US, Congress Warned” (2/10/1954), while the Los Angeles Times (2/10/1954) announced a “Heavy Influx of Reds Into US Reported.” These marked a shift in rhetoric from warning about supposed Communist infiltrators amongst Mexicans to warning about Mexicans themselves.
In June 1954, Operation Wetback was put into effect. Hundreds of thousands were deported in the first year of the program, in a partnership between the US and Mexico. What was once a fringe issue for nativist labor leaders in the Southwest became celebrated policy. A day short of the one-year anniversary of the operation, the Los Angeles Times (6/17/1955) declared, “Problem solved: For the first time in the controversial history of the wetback problem, there is hardly any problem left.”
Again, nothing changed for workers—rather, the state’s security apparatus bolstered its budget, labor was sufficiently distracted, and the vague specter of Communism was kept at bay for another day.
Manufacturing consent
The International Teamsters (March 1954) joined in the media red-baiting, repeating the US government’s absurd propaganda that “more than 100 Communists a day are coming across the sparsely patrolled border.”
In every case of xenophobic hysteria, media have a critical role in sensationalizing the perceived “other” and establishing the political and social circumstances necessary to justify violent acts of mass displacement and incarceration.
Though these causes are often championed by right-wing populists, sensational, nativist narratives have not been confined to right-wing media. All kinds of sources, from penny papers to union publications to legacy outlets, lie about immigrants constantly and with reckless abandon. If media aren’t lying to sell more papers and accommodate the political ambitions or xenophobic tendencies of their financiers, they’re parroting the lies of the political class.
Whether framing them as an amorphous security hazard or merely as a danger to “native” labor, media are happy to play into the scapegoating of individual immigrant groups, leading to acts of mass violence, because, ultimately, nothing changes for labor.
“Native” labor champions the anti-immigrant cause, but ultimately, our capitalist system demands that when one low-wage immigrant group disappears, another must take its place. Our economy, especially in an increasingly globalized labor market, is built around the input of low-wage immigrant labor (particularly in the agricultural sector).
As long as organized labor scapegoats the perceived “other,” and as long as solidarity doesn’t develop between “native” and “foreign” labor, all workers are worse-off. This is the social and political ecosystem that corporate media work to maintain.
Better media are possible
Independent outlet Capital & Main (3/11/25) reported on conditions in immigration detention facilities: “A few who had spent time in state prison before being transferred to ICE custody said they received much better treatment in prison than in ICE custody.”
Responsible, ethical journalism would challenge rather than parrot false claims about immigrant and migrant workers promoted by the US political class—and not just when they’re at their most egregious, as when the right claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. Journalists should seek to examine the differences in treatment of foreign-born and native-born labor, run human interest stories, and highlight the violence and human catastrophe involved in mass displacement and incarceration, instead of downplaying them or running stories about how these events are an “adventure.”
And instead of advancing scare-mongering narratives about how immigrant workers pose a threat to native-born labor, journalists ought to be investigating who stands to gain from pitting the TV-watching and newspaper-reading public against an easy outgroup. However, as long as corporate media exist to advance the interests of wealthy financiers and the political class, the solution lies beyond individual journalists working towards reform within their institutions.
It’s important to note that as long as nativist mainstream media narratives have existed, they’ve faced alternative media resistance, especially from within targeted communities. Prior to Chinese exclusion, for example, Chinese-American advocate Wong Chin Foo established the Chinese American, a weekly Chinese-language paper that he used as a platform to organize the first Chinese-American voters association. During internment, Japanese-Americans published papers such as the Topaz Times to promote internal education about community-led schooling, recreation and other initiatives, as well as updates about relocation.
Today, there are journalists working outside the corporate media who are producing good, humane, hard-hitting coverage of immigration. Small independent outlets like the Border Chronicle, Documented and Capital & Main offer on-the-ground news that centers people rather than national security and xenophobia.
And the democratization of alternative media channels has also allowed for mass direct resistance to immigration authorities—much to the chagrin of border czar Tom Homan, for instance, who on CNN (1/27/25) frustratedly described sanctuary city residents as “making it very difficult to arrest the criminals” because of mass education. One outlet doing this work is NYC ICE Watch—an activist group that follows in copwatch tradition by using their Spanish/English bilingual Instagram account as a platform to provide real-time updates on ICE activity and raids, organize community training and call for mutual aid requests around New York City.
Beyond the grassroots level, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is using a different approach, utilizing public Chicago Transit Authority adspace to promote public education in a partnership with the Resurrection Project, National Immigrant Justice Center, and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on the Know Your Rights ad campaign.
In the absence of a corporate media ecosystem willing to lend its platform to this kind of work, independent media are more important than ever in resisting the ostentatious barbarism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
As long as establishment outlets derive material benefits from collaborating with the political and capital classes, cruelty towards the “other” can never truly be a mistake to be learned from: It’s merely a means to an end, another performance seeking to prevent US-born workers from developing consciousness of all that they have to gain by standing with their immigrant counterparts.
When No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, corporate media outlets didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.
Several outlets have covered No Other Land accurately and candidly. The Guardian (3/2/25) said it focuses on “the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.”
The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to survive in the occupied West Bank, as settlers and Israeli soldiers steal their land, destroy their homes and attack them with impunity. It’s also a moving exploration of the friendship between two of the filmmakers, one free and one living under occupation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking itself. Palestinian activist Basel Adra made the film with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, co-directing along with Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal and Israeli filmmaker Rachel Szor. Adra and Ballal are the first Palestinians ever to win an Oscar.
Avoiding detail
Several outlets have covered No Other Land accurately and candidly. Al Jazeera (3/3/25) wrote that it “chronicles settler violence and the Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.” The Guardian (3/2/25) said it focuses on “the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.” A Nation story (11/4/24) published months before the film won an Oscar was headlined, “No Other Land and the Brutal Truth of Israel’s Occupation.”
But in reporting on its historic Oscar win, many publications avoided describing the film in detail, or even by title. Politico (3/2/25) rewrote an AP story, substituting different quotes from the filmmakers’ acceptance speeches, and initially ran it under the headline “Controversial Middle East Documentary Wins Academy Award.” In addition to revealing nothing about its content, the headline erased the film’s name and deemed it “controversial” merely because US companies lack the artistic commitment and political courage to distribute it (Washington Post, 3/4/25).
Politico later updated its headline to match the AP’s (3/2/25), which emphasizes that the film was not made by Palestinians alone: “‘No Other Land,’ an Israeli/Palestinian Collaboration, Wins Oscar for Best Documentary.”
Politico (3/2/25) rewrote an AP story and initially ran it under the headline “Controversial Middle East Documentary Wins Academy Award,” revealing nothing about its content, erasing the film’s name and deeming it “controversial.”
Other outlets relied on the passive voice to obscure the specifics of the film’s subject. NBC (3/2/25) wrote that Adra used his acceptance speech to describe the “issues faced by his village,” such as “home demolitions and displacement”—a neat way to avoid saying who was demolishing whose homes and why. In writing that Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham “called for an end to the violence that has consumed the Middle East for decades and worsened after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza,” NBC left readers with the impression that Abraham was primarily condemning the violence that has taken place after October 7. While the filmmakers are horrified by that as well, most of the violent acts they documented in No Other Land preceded the October 7 attack.
Israelis may have felt safer before October 7, but as the movie—which was shot mostly between 2019 and 2023, and wrapped before October 7—makes clear, Palestinians did not. Even before the genocide, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. At least 208 people, including 42 children, were killed there between January 1 and October 6, 2023 (Al Jazeera, 12/12/23). Israeli military and settler violence certainly intensified after October 7, but Palestinians were in serious danger beforehand.
Erasing context
ABC‘s (3/2/25) headline and subhead left out any mention of “Israel” or “Palestine,” offering simply that the film “details the struggle of a small community in the West Bank.” What community? What struggle? Readers would have to go far past the bland headline to find out. The article itself stated that “tens of thousands of people, including scores of noncombatant women and children in Gaza, were killed in the first year of fighting between Hamas and Israel following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack”—blaming “fighting” between a guerilla group and a nuclear-armed, US-backed military power for deaths caused almost exclusively by the Israeli military.
ABC‘s (3/2/25) headline and subhead left out any mention of “Israel” or “Palestine,” offering simply that the film “details the struggle of a small community in the West Bank.” What community? What struggle?
NPR (3/2/25) gave its story a surprisingly straightforward headline—“At Oscars, No Other Land Co-Directors Call for National Rights for Palestinians”—but added that the film’s directors “called on the world to end what they described as the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.’” It failed to note that the filmmakers are hardly alone in calling Israeli attacks on Palestinians “ethnic cleansing”—they are joined by UN human rights experts, former US intelligence officers, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, to name a few.
An MSNBC piece (3/3/25) highlighted the discomfort in the room and acknowledged the rarity of the perspectives the filmmakers voiced:
Even if for just a few moments, Adra and Abahams accomplished a remarkable feat: They forced attendees and viewers at home to confront a reality that so many Palestinians continue to face. Some in attendance may have chosen not to clap, but those who watched couldn’t escape acknowledging a reality so many have attempted to belittle or deny.
And yet in its descriptions of the film, it consistently failed to name a perpetrator—writing, for instance, that the film tells
the story of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in Hebron, being violently and systematically expelled through intimidation, from destroying water sources and other threats to assassinations.
The piece never said precisely who was expelling, threatening and assassinating these Palestinians, or why.
Despite a string of honors and rave reviews, no distributor would pick up this film in the United States, making it nearly impossible for American filmgoers to see it in theaters or to stream it.
The paper added that this “made No Other Land part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.” Distributors were, the paper declared in its headline, “deterred” by the film’s “politics.”
The New York Times (12/18/24) noted that No Other Land’s lack of distribution “made [the film] part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.”
But as the Times’ linked-to article (12/18/24) on this “broader trend” pointed out, it’s not “topical” documentaries that struggle to find distributors, but specifically films with progressive viewpoints (e.g., pro-Palestinian or pro-labor), while “conservative documentaries are a partial exception.” It’s clear that No Other Land has no US distributors, not because it is a “topical documentary,” but because its topic is Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
The Times (3/2/25) further noted that the No Other Land filmmakers used their acceptance speeches to call for “serious actions to stop the injustice.” Which injustice is unclear, though the article does mention “Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes” and the filmmakers’ desire to “chart a more equitable path forward for Palestinians.”
The Times described the film as “often brutal, featuring disturbing images of razed houses, crying children, bereft mothers and even on-camera shootings.” But it implied that, as unpleasant as it is to watch, the actions that spur violence and bereave mothers are perfectly legal, because “Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the government has the right to clear the area depicted in the film.” An Israeli overseeing the demolition of Palestinian homes makes this point in the film: The Supreme Court ruling, he tells the people whose homes he is destroying, means that what they are doing is legal.
Blaming Trump, not US
Despite the fact that No Other Land was filmed almost entirely during Joe Biden’s presidency, several outlets sought to tie the filmmakers’ critique of US foreign policy to the administration of Donald Trump. AP (3/2/25) wrote that Abraham said, “United States foreign policy under President Donald Trump is ‘helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’” Variety (3/2/25), using almost the same words, wrote that Abraham said, “US foreign policy under the administration of President Donald Trump ‘is helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’”
AP (3/2/25) wrote that Abraham said, “United States foreign policy under President Donald Trump is ‘helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’” Abraham did criticize US policy, but none of the filmmakers mentioned Trump.
Abraham did criticize US policy, but none of the filmmakers mentioned Trump or the current administration. In its piece on the film, Reuters (3/3/25) noted that
US President Donald Trump’s call last month for Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza…has been widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond as deeply destabilizing.
No Other Land deserves a wider audience, and Americans ought to be able to see and assess it for themselves. Press summaries of documentaries that would-be censors don’t want us to see are flawed at best, and deliberately misleading at worst. We cannot begin to combat injustice unless or until we understand what it is, and have the courage to face it head on.
This week on CounterSpin: A NASA official warned workers to maybe think about not wearing their badges in public, to protect themselves from harassment against people identifiable as federal workers by MAGA randos who feel deputized by Trump and Musk to do…well, whatever it is Trump and Musk suggest.
It’s early days of the Trump/Musk federal smash and grab, and the harms are already piling up. But so too is the resistance. And federal workers, presumed to be easy targets—based in part on years of corporate media coverage telling us government is fat and lazy and the private sector does everything better—are also on the front lines of the fightback.
Dave Zirin (The Nation, 2/28/25): “MSNBC’s programming is now politically monochromatic—and moving as far to the right as the Democratic Party will allow.”
At a time when the Democratic Party’s opposition to the ongoing right-wing authoritarian assault on US government is failing miserably (FAIR.org, 2/27/25), MSNBC’s recent purge means it is all the more unlikely that the cable news network will have any role in holding Democrats’ feet to the fire.
The news channel has nixed or demoted their most progressive anchors, all of whom are people of color. These are the hosts who have drawn the most ire from Donald Trump’s online warriors, according to Dave Zirin of The Nation (2/28/25). They are also some of the few who were willing to air the network’s rare criticism of Israel. In their stead, MSNBC has elevated Democratic Party apparatchiks and a center-right never-Trumper. This rightward shift reflects the reality that the channel’s corporate ownership has never cared for its left-of-center brand.
The network’s overhaul, led by its new president Rebecca Kutler, cancels Joy Reid’s ReidOut, Alex Wagner’s nighttime spot and Ayman Mohyeldin’s weekend evening show, with Reid fired, Wagner demoted and Mohyeldin’s voice diluted into a co-anchor position.
The ReidOut is getting replaced by a panel show consisting of Symone Sanders-Townsend, the former Biden and Harris advisor; Alicia Menendez, the daughter of disgraced ex-Sen. Bob Menendez; and Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairperson, now a Democrat whose politics symbolize the Democratic Party’s disastrous fetish for centrist triangulation. Wagner’s 9 pm slot will now be anchored by Jen Psaki, another Biden alum.
As an indication of just how disruptive Kutler’s new vision for MSNBC is, even Rachel Maddow—the network’s biggest star with the most popular show—is getting a staff downsizing. The move seemed almost retaliatory, as it came after Maddow aired her grievances during one of her nightly shows (2/24/25). “Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let [Reid] walk out the door,” Maddow said. “It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think.” She added:
It is also unnerving to see that, on a network where we’ve got two, count ’em, two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.
Bucking the trend
Alana Wise (NPR, 2/25/25): “Reid’s firing takes one of the most high-profile Black women off the network at a time when the Trump administration has made attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.”
Joy Reid has had her disagreements with the left. Her ardent defense of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid veered frequently into baseless accusations, online scolding of Bernie Sanders and promotion of the Russiagate conspiracy theory (FAIR.org, 9/3/16, 6/30/17, 8/24/16). Altogether, that contributed to Democrats’ refusal to conduct a true postmortem of the Clinton loss, the ramifications of which still aid Donald Trump’s dominance.
But during Joe Biden’s presidential tenure, Reid proved to be progressive, relative not just to MSNBC’s other anchors, but many in the corporate media writ large. As New York’s skies turned orange amid historic Canadian wildfires in the summer of 2023, for instance, Reid was one of the few who called out the role of fossil fuels (FAIR.org, 7/18/23).
While other outlets were overemphasizing the inflationary impact of President Biden’s paradigm-shifting economic stimulus in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Reid bucked the trend, drawing the ire of right-wing media (FAIR.org, 7/13/23).
Perhaps most notably, Reid was an outlier in her coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and its backlash in the US. A FAIR study (8/15/24) found that Reid’s show was the only weekday news program studied to feature students expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment during coverage of the student Gaza solidarity encampments that cropped up at college campuses across the country last spring. The same study found that her show was the only one studied to have mentioned the words “divestment” and “police violence” more than “antisemitism” in relation to the encampments.
Similarly, as outlets like the New York Times provided Israel cover for its bombing of the densely-populated Jabalia refugee camp that killed and wounded 400 Palestinians, Reid questioned how Israel could justify such a disproportionate attack (FAIR.org, 11/15/23).
The panel of Sanders-Townsend, Menendez and Steele promises none of that nonconformity. Instead, they represent MSNBC’s decision to represent an even smaller sliver of the Democratic elite. By elevating the former Biden and Harris advisor Sanders-Townsend, MSNBC has empowered someone with an interest in defending the current Democratic guard’s rule.
The Lincoln Project–affiliated Steele similarly owes his ascendancy to the sort of Democratic group-think that spurred Kamala Harris’s ruinous gun-touting, Cheney-approved centrist presidential bid. Expect Hakeem Jeffries praise.
Pointing out hypocrisy
MSNBC‘s Ayman Mohyeldin (1/13/25) declared that “the US’s head-in-the-sand attitude toward Israel is not only inconsistent with its treatment of other countries, but it’s also a clear act of moral cowardice.”
Though not fired, Mohyeldin and Wagner are two more MSNBC figures who have elevated criticism of Israel and are now facing a demotion. Following ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s finding that Sudanese military forces had committed genocide against the Sudanese people, Mohyeldin (MSNBC, 1/13/25) took to the airwaves to point out Blinken’s hypocrisy:
The horrific atrocities committed against the Sudanese should be labeled as genocide. But Blinken’s declaration begs the question: Why is the US unable to apply that same standard to Israel?
If the Biden administration is calling out the famine in Sudan, why not also address the ongoing famine in Gaza, which has been condemned by independent experts from the United Nations?
After New York Mayor Eric Adams sicced the NYPD on Columbia and CUNY students who had erected Gaza solidarity encampments, Wagner (5/1/24) brought on Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and CUNY journalism professor (and MSNBC contributor) Peter Beinart, a well-known critic of Israel. During the show, Wagner said she agreed with Beinart that it’s “probably a good thing for our national discourse” if the encampment movement is remembered in history as a turning point for debate about US support for Israel. She also suggested that common misrepresentations of the student protestors as treasonous were a “cudgel” to distract from the issue of US foreign policy towards Israel.
Mouthpiece for elite interests
Julia Rock (Jacobin, 5/13/22): “Apparently, serving as press secretary to a Democratic president is great training to run interference for corporations.”
Wagner’s replacement is Jen Psaki. No one is more qualified to execute MSNBC’s crusade to become nothing more than a mouthpiece for elite Democratic interests. As Julia Rock wrote in Jacobin (5/13/22) when Biden’s former press secretary left the administration for her first MSNBC gig:
The skills required to act as a press secretary in corporate Democratic presidencies—saying little of substance, committing to nothing, dispensing snark and scoffs, and never even accidentally challenging power—appear to carry over well to playing pundit on MSNBC, the corporate network that serves as the Democratic Party’s de facto propaganda outfit.
As press secretary, Psaki was known for insensitive and condescending quips in response to the public’s desire for good things. After the Democrats’ John R. Lewis Act, which would have enacted broad voting rights reforms, failed to pass the Senate in January 2022, Psaki suggested the public “go to a kickboxing class” or “have a margarita” to rejuvenate their spirits (Business Insider, 1/21/22).
Then there was the time when Psaki got short with NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson in response to her question asking why the United States, unlike other wealthy nations, couldn’t distribute free Covid-19 test kits to every US household (Jacobin, 12/8/21). Psaki, suggesting the best way to provide tests was Biden’s convoluted plan for reimbursements through private insurance, asked Liasson, “Should we just send one to every American?” Feigning ignorance, she continued, “Then what happens if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?”
Psaki’s knack for subduing the electorate’s impulse for government to meet their needs will serve MSNBC’s priorities well. Add to that her gig as a “crisis consultant” (Jacobin, 3/20/21) for the Israeli AI facial recognition startup formerly known as AnyVision, whose services were used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank (NBC, 10/28/19), as well as her consultancy for the ride sharing giant Lyft (Business Insider, 4/1/22), and it’s no wonder she got the primetime 9pm slot.
Ideological thrashing
Other right-wing hosts featured on MSNBC before it accepted its leftish branding included Don Imus, Oliver North and Alan Keyes (FAIR.org, 8/28/21).
MSNBC’s rightward tack may come as a surprise to those who think it was born fully formed as Fox News’ liberal opposite. But its ideological thrashing over the years—oscillating between right-wing pundits like Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Michael Savage, and liberals like Phil Donahue and Keith Olbermann—before donning its current liberal identity in 2008, with the hiring of Rachel Maddow, shows the network is more akin to a cable news version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (FAIR.org, 8/28/21).
The owners of MSNBC—once Microsoft and General Electric, then GE alone, now the cable giant Comcast—have never held a commitment to its center-left brand beyond its capacity to capture as large a fraction of the market as possible. Now, as other mainstream corporate outlets like CNN are making similar adjustments (FAIR.org, 2/17/22), MSNBC seems to believe its best path to profit is shirking progressives.
The Democratic Party is facing an unprecedented—and justified—crisis in confidence among the public. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Democrats with just a 31% approval rating, the lowest since the school began measuring party approval. Meanwhile, a poll by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project found that “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was a top issue for voters who supported Biden in 2020, but cast their ballots for someone other than Harris in the 2024 election.
MSNBC’s firing and demotion of its most progressive ranks, the ones who aired criticism of Israel, means that the Democratic Party—currently America’s sole opposition party in Congress—is all the less likely to be held accountable as the authoritarian right attempts to steamroll through our democracy.
Janine Jackson interviewed EarthRights International’s Kirk Herbertson about Big Oil’s lawsuit against Greenpeace for the February 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Energy Transfer is the fossil fuel corporation that built the Dakota Access Pipeline to carry fracked oil from the Bakken Fields more than a thousand miles into Illinois, cutting through unceded Indigenous land, and crossing and recrossing the Missouri River that is a life source for the Standing Rock tribe and others in the region.
CounterSpin listeners know that protests launched by the Indigenous community drew international attention and participation, as well as the deployment, by Energy Transfer’s private security forces, of unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray, among other things, against peaceful protestors.
Now Energy Transfer saysit was harmed, and someone must pay, and that someone is Greenpeace, who the company is suing for $300 million, more than 10 times their annual budget. No one would have showed up to Standing Rock, is the company’s story and they’re sticking to it, without the misinformed incitement of the veteran environmental group.
Legalese aside, what’s actually happening here, and what would appropriate reporting look like? We’re joined by Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. He joins us now by phone from the DC area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kirk Herbertson.
Kirk Herbertson: Thanks so much, Janine.
JJ: Let me ask you, first, to take a minute to talk about what SLAPP lawsuits are, and then why this case fits the criteria.
KH: Sure. So this case is one of the most extraordinary examples of abuse of the US legal system that we have encountered in at least the last decade. And anyone who is concerned about protecting free speech rights, or is concerned about large corporations abusing their power to silence their critics, should be paying attention to this case, even though it’s happening in North Dakota state court.
As you mentioned, there’s a kind of wonky term for this type of tactic that the company Energy Transfer is using. It’s called a SLAPP lawsuit. It stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” But what it really means is, it’s a tactic in which wealthy and powerful individuals or corporations try to silence their critics’ constitutional rights to free speech or freedom of assembly by dragging them through expensive, stressful and very lengthy litigation. In many SLAPP lawsuits, the intention is to try to silence your critic by intimidating them so much, by having them be sued by a multimillion, multibillion dollar corporation, that they give up their advocacy and stop criticizing the corporation.
JJ: Well, it’s a lot about using the legal system for purposes that most of us just don’t think is the purpose of the legal system; it’s kind of like the joke is on us, and in this case, there just isn’t evidence to make their case. I mean, let’s talk about their specific case: Greenpeace incited Standing Rock. If you’re going to look at it in terms of evidence in a legal case, there’s just no there there.
KH: That’s right. This case, it was first filed in federal court. Right now, it’s in state court, but if you read the original complaint that was put together by Energy Transfer, they referred to Greenpeace as “rogue eco-terrorists,” essentially. They were really struggling to try to find some reason for bringing this lawsuit. It seemed like the goal was more to silence the organization and send a message. And, in fact, the executive of the company said as much in media interviews.
Civil litigation plays a very important role in the US system. It’s a way where, if someone is harmed by someone else, they can go to court and seek compensation for the damages from that person or company or organization, for the portion of the damages that they contributed to. So it’s a very fair and mostly effective way of making sure that people are not harmed, and that their rights are respected by others. But because the litigation process is so expensive, and takes so many years, it’s really open to abuse, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
JJ: Folks won’t think of Greenpeace as being a less powerful organization, but if you’re going to bring millions and millions of dollars to bear, and all the time in the world and all of your legal team, you can break a group down, and that seems to be the point of this.
KH: Absolutely. And one of the big signs here is, the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline were not led by Greenpeace, and Greenpeace did not play any sort of prominent role in the protests.
These were protests that were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who was directly affected by the pipeline traveling through its primary water source, and also traveling a way where they alleged that it was violating their treaty rights as an Indigenous nation. So they started to protest and take action to ask for this pipeline not to be approved. And then it inspired many other Indigenous tribes around the country, many activists, and soon it grew into a movement of thousands of people, with hundreds of organizations supporting it both in the US and internationally. Greenpeace was one of hundreds.
So even in the case where Energy Transfer’s “damaged” and wants to seek compensation for it, it’s really a telltale sign of this abusive tactic that they’re going after Greenpeace. They have chosen to go after a high-profile, renowned environmental organization that played a very secondary role in this whole protest.
JJ: So it’s clear that it’s symbolic, and yet we don’t think of our legal system as being used in that way. But the fact that this is not really about the particulars of the case, an actual harm being done to Energy Transfer by Greenpeace, that’s also made clear when you look at the process. For example, and there’s a lot, the judge allowed Energy Transfer to seal evidence on their pipeline safety history. There are problems in the process of the way this case has unfolded that also should raise some questions.
KH: That’s right. So when the case was first filed–I won’t go through the full timeline of the protests and everything that happened. It’s very in-depth, and it’s well-covered online. But the pipeline became operational in June 2017, and a little over one month later, that’s when the first lawsuit was filed against Greenpeace and others.
And that first lawsuit was filed in federal court. Energy Transfer brought it into federal court, and they tried to claim at that point that Greenpeace was essentially involved in Mafia-like racketeering; they used the RICO statute, which was created to fight against the Mafia. That’s when they first alleged harm, and tried to bring this lawsuit.
The federal court did not accept that argument, and, in fact, they wrote in their decision when they eventually dismissed it, that they gave Energy Transfer several opportunities to actually allege that Greenpeace had harmed them in some way, and they couldn’t.
So it was dismissed in federal court, and then one month later, they refiled in North Dakota state court, where there are not these protections in place. And they filed in a local area, very strategically; they picked an area close to where there was a lot of information flowing around the protest at the time. So it was already a situation where there’d already been a lot of negative media coverage bombarding the local population about what had happened.
So going forward, six years later, we’ve now started a jury trial, just in the last week of February. We’ll see what happens. It’s going to be very difficult for this trial to proceed in a purely objective way.
JJ: And we’re going to add links to deep, informative articles when we put this show up, because there is history here. But I want to ask you just to speak to the import of it. Folks may not have seen anything about this story.
First of all, Standing Rock sounds like it happened in the past. It’s not in the past, it’s in the present. But this is so important: Yesterday I got word that groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, they’re filing to dismiss a SLAPP suit against them for a peaceful demonstration at O’Hare Airport. This is meaningful and important. I want to ask you to say, what should we be thinking about right now?
Kirk Herbertson: “This is a free speech issue that in normal times would be a no-brainer.”
KH: There’s a lot of potential implications of this case, even though it’s happening out in North Dakota state court, where you wouldn’t think it would have nationwide implications.
One, as you mentioned, this has become an emblematic example of a SLAPP lawsuit, but this is not the first SLAPP lawsuit. For years, SLAPPs have been used by the wealthy and powerful to silence the critics. I could name some very high-profile political actors and others who have used these tactics quite a bit. SLAPPs are a First Amendment issue, and there has been bipartisan concern with the use of SLAPPS to begin with. So there are a number of other states, when there have been anti-SLAPP laws that have passed, they have passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.
So just to say, this is a free speech issue that in normal times would be a no-brainer. This should be something that there should be bipartisan support around, protecting free speech, because it’s not just about environmental organizations here.
I think one of the big implications of this trial going forward at this time, in this current environment, is that if Energy Transfer prevails, this could really embolden other corporations and powerful actors to bring copycat lawsuits, as well as use other related tactics to try to weaponize the law, in order to punish free speech that they do not agree with.
And we’ve seen this happen with other aspects of the fossil fuel industry. If something is successful in one place, it gets picked up, and used again and again all over the country.
JJ: Well, yes, this is a thing. And you, I know, have a particular focus on protecting activists who are threatened based on their human rights advocacy, and also trying to shore up access to justice for people, and I want to underscore this, who are victims of human rights abuses perpetrated by economic actors, such as corporations and financial institutions. So I’m thinking about Berta Caceres, I’m thinking of Tortuguita.
I don’t love corporate media’s crime template. It’s kind of simplistic and one side, two sides, and it’s kind of about revenge. And yet I still note that the media can’t tell certain stories when they’re about corporate crimes as crimes. Somehow the framework doesn’t apply when it comes to a big, nameless, faceless corporation that might be killing hundreds of people. And I feel like that framing harms public understanding and societal response. And I just wonder what you think about media’s role in all of this.
KH: Yes, I think that’s right, and I could give you a whole dissertation answer on this, but for my work, I work both internationally and in the US to support people who are speaking up about environmental issues. So this is a trend globally. If you’re a community member or an environmental activist who speaks up about environmental issues, that’s actually one of the most dangerous activities you can do in the world right now. Every year, hundreds of people are killed and assassinated for speaking up about environmental issues, and many of them are Indigenous people. It happened here.
In the United States, we fortunately don’t see as many direct assassinations of people who are speaking up. But what we do see is a phenomenon that we call criminalization, which includes SLAPP lawsuits, and that really exploits gray areas in the legal system, that allows the wealthy and powerful to weaponize the legal system and turn it into a vehicle for silencing their critics.
Often it’s not, as you say, written in the law that this is illegal. In a lot of cases, there are more and more anti-SLAPP laws in place, but not in North Dakota. And so that really makes it challenging to explain what’s happening. And I think, as you say, that’s also the challenge for journalists and media organizations that are reporting on these types of attacks.
JJ: Let me bring you back to the legal picture, because I know, as a lot of us know, that what we’re seeing right now is not new. It’s brazen, but it’s not new. It’s working from a template, or like a vision board, that folks have had for a while. And I know that a couple years back, you were working with Jamie Raskin, among others, on a legislative response to this tactic. Is that still a place to look? What do you think?
KH: Yes. So there’s several efforts underway, because there’s different types of tactics that are being used at different levels. But there is an effort in Congress, and it’s being led by congressman Jamie Raskin, most recently, congressman Kevin Kiley, who’s a Republican from California, and Sen. Ron Wyden. So they have most recently introduced bipartisan bills in the House, just Senator Wyden for now in the Senate. But that’s to add protections at the federal level to try to stop the use of SLAPP lawsuits. And that effort is continuing, and will hopefully continue on bipartisan support.
JJ: Let’s maybe close with Deepa Padmanabha, who is Greenpeace’s legal advisor. She said that this lawsuit, Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace, is trying to divide people. It’s not about the law, it’s about public information and public understanding. And she said:
Energy Transfer and the fossil fuel industry do not understand the difference between entities and movements. You can’t bankrupt the movement. You can’t silence the movement.
I find that powerful. We’re in a very scary time. Folks are looking to the law to save us in a place where the law can’t necessarily do that. But what are your thoughts, finally, about the importance of this case, and what you would hope journalism would do about it?
KH: I think this case is important for Greenpeace, obviously, but as Deepa said, this is important for environmental justice movements, and social justice movements more broadly. And I agree with what she said very strongly. Both Greenpeace and EarthRights, where I work, are part of a nationwide coalition called Protect the Protest that was created to help respond to these types of threats that are emerging all over the country. And our mantra is, if you come after one of us, you come after all of us.
I think, no matter the outcome of this trial, one of the results will be that there will be a movement that is responding to what happens, continuing to work to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and also to put a spotlight on Energy Transfer and its record, and how it’s relating and engaging with the communities where it tries to operate.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kirk Herbertson. He’s US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. They’re online at EarthRights.org. Thank you so much, Kirk Herbertson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow note that the Western notion of freedom derives from the Roman legal tradition, in which freedom was conceived as “the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.”
Because of this, “freedom was always defined—at least potentially—as something exercised to the cost of others.”
You have to understand this notion of freedom—that to be free, you have to make someone else less free—to make sense of the idea that Donald Trump is a champion of “free speech.”
Ezra Klein (New York Times, 2/25/25) thought Martin Gurri’s argument that “maybe Trump is building something more stable, creating a positive agenda that might endure….was worth hearing out.”
This is, unfortunately, not a fringe idea. Last week, the New York Times (2/25/25) ran a long interview Ezra Klein did with Trump-supporting intellectual (and former CIA officer) Martin Gurri, who said his main reason for voting for Trump was that “I felt like he was for free speech.” “Free speech is a right-wing cause,” Gurri claimed.
Trump is the “free speech” champion who said of a protester at one of his rallies during the 2016 campaign (Washington Post, 2/23/16): “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that…? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
Trump sues news outlets when he doesn’t like how they edit interviews, or their polling results (New York Times, 2/7/25). Before the election, future Trump FBI Director Kash Patel (FAIR.org, 11/14/24) promised to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s FCC chair is considering yanking broadcast licenses from networks for “news distortion,” or for letting Kamala Harris have a cameo on Saturday Night Live (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).
Nonetheless, Trump is still seen by many as a defender of free speech, because he sticks up for the free speech of people whose speech is supposed to matter—like right-wingers who weren’t allowed to post content that was deemed hate speech, disinformation or incitement to violence on social media platforms. As the headline of a FAIR.org piece (11/4/22) by Ari Paul put it, “The Right Thinks Publishers Have No Right Not to Publish the Right.” Another key “free speech” issue for the right, and much of the center: people who have been “canceled” by being criticized too harshly on Twitter (FAIR.org, 8/1/20, 10/23/20).
Now Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25) has come out with a diktat threatening sanctions against any educational institution that tolerates forbidden demonstrations:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!
The reference to banning masks is a reminder that, for the right, freedom is a commodity that belongs to some people and not to others. You have an inalienable right to defy mask mandates, not despite but mainly because you could potentially harm someone by spreading a contagious disease—just as you supposedly have a right to carry an AR-15 rifle. Whereas if you want to wear a mask to protect yourself from a deadly illness—or from police surveillance—sorry, there’s no right to do that.
But more critically, what’s an “illegal protest”? The context, of course, is the wave of campus protests against the genocidal violence unleashed by Israel against Palestinians following the October 7, 2023, attacks (though Trump’s repressive approach to protests certainly is not limited to pro-Palestinian ones).
On January 30, Trump promised to deport all international students who “joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” and to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” He ordered the Justice Department to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”
A federal task force convened by Trump (CNN, 3/3/25) is threatening to pull $50 million in government contracts from New York’s Columbia University because of its (imaginary) “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” which has been facilitated, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, by “the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.”
So the expression of ideas—Palestinian solidarity, US criticism, generic “radicalism”—has to be suppressed, because they lead to, if they do not themselves constitute, “harassment of Jewish students” (by which is meant pro-Israel students; Jewish student supporters of Palestinian rights are frequently targets of this suppression). Those ideas constitute “censorship,” and the way to combat this censorship is to ban those ideas.
No one is talking about cracking down on students who proclaim “I Stand With Israel,” on the grounds that they may intimidate Palestinian students—even though they are endorsing an actual, ongoing genocide (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). That’s because—in the longstanding Western tradition that Trump epitomizes—free speech is the possession of some, meant to be used against others.
Featured Image: Demonstration in London in support of a free Palestine (Creative Commons photo: Kyle Taylor).
Elon Musk (X, 2/26/25) gives his seal of approval to the new univocal Washington Post.
“Bravo, Jeff Bezos!”
That was the congratulatory message Elon Musk posted on X, the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and subsequently turned into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Musk’s “bravo” was in response to Bezos’ shocking announcement that he was taking his media outlet, the Washington Post, in a Trumpian direction as well.
The Post’s opinion section will now advance Bezos’ “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Anyone not on board with this “significant shift” can take a hike, Bezos seemed to tell Post employees, in a note he also shared on X (2/26/25).
That was Wednesday morning. By evening, Bezos was dining with President Trump.
‘Those who think as he does’
Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25): “The audacity of claiming that free market ideas are ‘underserved’ in American media is staggering. Has Bezos somehow missed the existence of the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC and countless other outlets that have spent decades championing free-market capitalism?”
Bezos doesn’t give any detail on what he means by “personal liberties,” but in the context of the billionaire appearing behind Trump at the inauguration, and Amazoncontributing $1 million to the inaugural festivities—on top of paying Melania Trump $40 million for her biopic—it’s doubtful that his paper will be talking much about the myriad liberties under attack by the Trump administration.
“When billionaires talk about ‘personal liberties,’” media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25) noted, “they’re usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation.”
Meanwhile, as Bezos professes his love of personal liberties, “his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” said former Post executive editor Marty Baron (American Crisis, 2/27/25):
It was only weeks ago that the Post described itself as providing coverage for “all of America.” Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.
Such limitations may not be limited to the opinion pages. Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a column about Bezos’ directive—and, according to former Post editor Gene Weingarten (Gene Pool, 2/27/25), “It was spiked. Killed, in newspeak.”
‘A wingman in the fight’
Michael Schaffer (Politico, 2/26/25): Bezos’ “latest edict effectively rebrands the publication away from the interests of Washington and toward the politics of Silicon Valley—and looks likely to cost it a chunk of the remaining audience.”
Bezos’ fidelity to his other pillar, “free markets,” is no less questionable, considering his companies hoover up billions of dollars in government contracts, are massively subsidized, and Amazon, which Bezos founded, is an egregious antitrust violator.
And somehow Bezos, the world’s third richest person, believes his so-called free market “viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” But as Politico columnist Michael Schaffer (2/26/25) noted:
Between the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the Economist, there’s no shortage of outlets that are organized around a generally pro-market editorial line. For that matter, there’s the Washington Post. Do you recall the publication editorializing against the free market? Me neither.
Yet Bezos is now committed to turning his paper into a second Wall Street Journal—a project already under way, as Bezos’ handpicked Post publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, comes from the Journal, as does executive editor Matt Murray.
Naturally, the Journal’s editorial page (2/26/25) welcomed Bezos’ “free markets” pivot, writing, “It will be good to have a wingman in the fight.”
Despite Bezos’ claim that his views are underserved, it’s actually the lefty end of the spectrum for which that’s the case (FAIR.org, 10/9/20). But those wanting anything left of authoritarian capitalism will have to look elsewhere. “Viewpoints opposing [my] pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos wrote, adding, “the internet does that job.”
It’s unclear if Bezos was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he wrote these words, but it’s unmistakable that he’s aligning his paper with Trump’s so-called “America First” agenda. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Bezos wrote.
The answer wasn’t ‘hell yes’
Sara Fischer (Axios, 2/26/25): ” Efforts by the Trump administration to scrutinize media have forced media, entertainment and tech companies to make difficult decisions about how far they will go to defend their editorial values.”
As shocking as Bezos’ groveling is, it’s just the latest in a string of extraordinary favors he’s done for Trump and the man Trump has turned much of the US government over to, Elon Musk.
Bezos and Amazon have thrown millions of dollars at the billionaire duo running our country. At the same time, the Post has been kind to both men, most noticeably when Bezos killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the election (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). For Musk, the Post not only spiked an ad critical of him, but also dismissed his Nazi salute on Inauguration Day as merely an “awkward gesture” (FAIR.org, 2/19/25, 1/23/25).
With Bezos’ new directive, the Post is all but formalizing its lapdog arrangement with Trump and Musk. How this will impact the Post, which Bezos purchased from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013, remains to be seen. But the fallout has been swift, and it comes on the heels of a mass exodus of both readers and top talent since the election.
Now joining the exodus is Post opinions editor David Shipley. Bezos wanted Shipley to lead the Post’s rightward turn, but only if he was all in. “If the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos told him. But Bezos’ directive was too much even for Shipley, who had previously proven his loyalty by spiking a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech executives groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).
‘More like a death knell’
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25): “I foresee a mass subscriber defection from an outlet already deep in red ink; that must be something businessman Bezos is willing to live with.”
For those who remain at the Post, they do so warily.
Bezos’ “massive encroachment” into the opinion section “makes clear dissenting views will not be published,” wrote the Post’s Jeff Stein, who only days earlier had been promoted to chief economics correspondent:
I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side, I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.
Former Posties were also quick to weigh in. “Bezos’ move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization,” wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25):
Bezos no longer wants to own a credible news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.
Those commercial interests extend from earth into space.
“Amazon has a big cloud computing business. [Bezos’ space company] Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government,” Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25). “Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is [Bezos] going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.”
“It’s craven,” said Baron, who led the Post for eight years, nearly all of them under Bezos:
He’s basically fearful of Trump. He has decided that, as timid and tepid as the editorials have been, they’ve been too tough on Trump. He’s saying they’re going to have an opinion page with one point of view.
‘Contrary to the conspiracy theory’
Back when the Washington Post had “full independence” from Bezos, it was running twisted columns denying that the billionaire had a lot of money (FAIR.org, 10/3/17).
There’s an irony in Baron calling out his former boss, when he spent years attacking others for doing so.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a hair’s breadth away from securing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, questioned whether his critiques of billionaires (like Bezos) and low-wage behemoths (like Amazon) might be contributing to the Post’s blistering coverage of him (FAIR.org, 8/15/19).
“Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Baron said in response, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
Fast-forward six years, and the mask is off, so much so that Baron now sounds like Sanders (to whom Baron owes a belated apology).
That the Post’s hard-right turn comes at a time when other corporate and billionaire-owned outlets are also cozying up to Trump, only makes this moment all the more fraught.
This alarming state of affairs highlights the importance of independent media watchdogs. “We launched FAIR nearly 40 years ago with warnings about the influence of media owners on news content,” FAIR founder Jeff Cohen said in an email:
The first issue of our publication featured a cover story on the corporate takeover of news written by legendary journalist and Media Monopoly author Ben Bagdikian. The recent antics of Bezos show that the need to scrutinize and expose corporate media owners is even greater today.
Janine Jackson interviewed Color of Change’s Portia Allen-Kyle about predatory tax preparers for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: April is nominally tax season, but right about now is when many people start worrying about it. That’s why TurboTax paid a heck of a lot of money for Super Bowl ads to hard-sell the idea that people could use its service for free—if they hadn’t used it last year, or if they filed by a certain date.
But if free, easy tax-filing is possible, should it be a gift to taxpayers from a for-profit corporation, from a corporation that has already been fined for unfairly charging lower-income Americans, from a corporation that has aggressively lobbied for decades to prevent making tax filing free and/or easy?
Our next guest has looked into not just the top-down inequities of the tax preparation industry—described by one observer as the “wild, wild West”—but how those problems fall hard on Black and brown and low-income communities.
Portia Allen-Kyle is interim executive director at Color of Change. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Portia Allen-Kyle.
Portia Allen-Kyle: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
JJ: I want to ask you about the report you authored, called “Preying Preparers.” I believe that many, if not enough, people have a sense that poor, low-income folks are at the sharp end of tax policy generally, and tax-filing specifically—that rich people get to keep, not just more money, but a higher fraction of money than low-income folks, who have less money and who need every nickel of it.
But I’m not sure that people understand, that isn’t just the capitalism chips falling where they may. Your report says, “Exploiting low-income taxpayers is core to the business model of tax prep companies.” Tell us what we might not know about that.
PAK: Doing that report was so eye-opening for so many different reasons, both personally and professionally, at Color of Change, in our advocacy. I remember years ago, when I discovered after going to H&R Block, and paying more than $300 for a fairly simple return, and finding out that the person who filed my return wasn’t even an accountant. And I remember how ripped off I felt.
So fast forward, being in this role and doing this work, and this report in particular, just going into how much of a scam the tax preparation industry is, both the storefront tax prep companies—so your H&R Block, your Liberty Tax, your Jackson Hewitts of the world—as well as large corporations, such as Intuit and other software providers, that provide these tax-filing services.
And the reality of the situation is that you have an industry that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars preventing people from being able to either pay the government what they owe or, in many cases, receive money back from the government that is technically already theirs. They have earned it, the government has kept more of it than they were perhaps entitled to, and now people are in the position for a refund.
And these businesses, especially for Black taxpayers, for low-income taxpayers, have found ways to profit off of people’s already-earned money, by inserting themselves as these corporate middlemen in the tax preparation game, where their sole role is to fleece people’s pockets, either from the money that folks have already earned and they are due as a refund, or by upcharging, upselling and preying upon folks who are eligible for certain tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, and have made businesses off of selling the equivalent of payday loan products to these taxpayers, where they take a part of their refund and just give people the rest, under the guise of giving them a same-day advance or same-day loan. And so no matter what the angle is, it is all unnecessary and all a scam. And it’s why government products like IRS Direct File are so important to both our democracy, how government works, and how people receive and keep their money.
JJ: A key fact in your report is that the tax preparation industry has these basic competency problems: Tax laws change all the time. You’re looking for someone who can make sure you pay what you’re supposed to, and look for any benefits you’re entitled to. And, of course, throughout this is that the most vulnerable people are the most in need of this help. But an unacceptable number, if we could say, of these tax preparers are not required to really prove that they know how to do it. That’s an industry-wide failing.
PAK: Oh, absolutely. There are no real requirements for tax preparers in these companies. Whereas if you go to an accountant, accountants have professional standards, they have training requirements. Not anybody can hang up a shingle and say, “I am an accountant,” in the same way that not anyone can walk into a hospital, put on a white coat and say, “I am a doctor.” But what we have is an entire industry of people that are able to say, “I am a tax preparer, because I have applied for a job, maybe taken an internal training to these companies, and am now in the business of selling tax preparation.”
JJ: But not to everyone, because let’s underscore that, the fact that these systemic problems, this is a regulatory problem, clearly, but it doesn’t land on everyone equally, and it’s not designed to. And so in this case, you see that these unregulated tax preparers are taking advantage of, well, the people that it’s easiest to take advantage of. Talk a little bit more about the impacts of that particular kind of predation.
Portia Allen-Kyle: “It’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us.”
PAK: One of the ways in which especially storefront preparers are able to prey on communities is simply by location. And so many of these franchise operations, some of them maintain year-long locations, many of them do not, but they pop up, kind of like Spirit Halloween, often around tax season, in neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black or communities of color, disproportionately lower income, disproportionately taxpayers and residents who are eligible for what are expected to be larger refunds, so those who are eligible for the earned income tax credit, those who are eligible for the child tax credit, and really prey upon those folks in selling tax preparation services.
And the key here is selling tax preparation services, because what they really are are salespeople. They have sales goals, it’s why they’re incentivized to upsell products, some of the products that they’re also selling are refund anticipation loans. So they may lure you in and say, “Get a portion of your refund today,” or “Get an advance upfront.” That’s an unregulated bank product. So you have an unregulated tax preparer now selling you an unregulated loan product, that often sometimes reach interest rates of over 30%. And they know what they’re doing, because that is where they make their money, in the selling of product.
And we see that in the data, that free programs such as VITA, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, disproportionately prepares the taxes of filers who don’t have children, and aren’t eligible for EITC. So many of these companies will refer out other folks, for whom they find that it is not worth it to prepare their taxes, prey on folks that they think they’re getting big refunds, but more importantly, what really illustrates the difference in tax preparation and expectations: the wealthy millionaires, billionaires, corporations, they’re not going to H&R Block. Mark Cuban is not walking into H&R Block to file his taxes, right?
Folks on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum are relying on accountants, are relying on folks who are not just preparing a service in the moment, but who are providing year-round advice on how to make the system work for them.
And so there’s a service and an additional amount of financial insight and oversight that they are getting, that an entire segment of the market is not, when tax prep is handled in this way. Because, at the end of the day, it’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us, doing this while providing services that they know are subpar in quality, and deliver questionable outcomes. I mean, demonstrated in the report, the error rate of those who prepare taxes for companies like H&R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt and other companies is extremely high, sometimes upwards of 60%. So you have a scenario where you have a portion of taxpayers who disproportionately have their returns prepared by preparers who are unqualified and unregulated, and essentially increases their risk of an audit.
And then, when they are audited—it was found that the IRS disproportionately has audited Black taxpayers, and particularly those who are eligible for EITC, etc. And that is not unrelated to the way that it is structured, and the predation of the corporate tax lobby in the first place.
And while it sounds like, when you see advertisements from H&R Block or Intuit about how they stand by and guarantee their services, they’ll defend you in an audit. Well, they need to defend you in an audit. It’s not altruistic. You’ll need that protection, because they’re going to mess it up, and have messed it up, for so many people.
And that part of the story is not often talked about, when we talk about the disproportionate audit rate. It often is not always included how those folks had their returns prepared. And that’s often by these same companies that are presenting and fighting against things like direct file, which is essentially the public option for taxes, in the same way that the Affordable Care Act is the public option for healthcare.
JJ: What is direct file, and why can we expect to hear in the media a lot of folks saying, “Oh, well, you might think direct file is good, but actually…”? What should we know about it?
PAK: What we should know about it is, as I mentioned, direct file is the public option for taxes. And it’s important, because it allows people to file returns, simple returns, directly with the IRS. So last year, the pilot program was only available in 12 states. This year, the program is open to folks living in 25 states. We hope to see and are fighting for the expansion after this season into all 50 states, and recognize the tough road ahead for that.
But it is a program that, in its first year, saved over, I believe it was 130,000 taxpayers, millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours in tax preparation. And already we’ve seen folks flock this season to the direct file system. And in the first two weeks, Color of Change has been doing a lot of advocacy; we are the top referrer of traffic to direct file. And so we’re already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours, which is a real benefit to community. This is a system that is government working for you.
It’s also important, because the other thing that private companies have really invested in, and fought so hard about, is that even when you file with H&R Block, when you file with Intuit or TurboTax, when you file with Liberty Tax, that information is still going to the government, to the IRS. But now it also is housed in this private corporation that essentially uses it as a part of their business model, to sell other products to you and prey on you in other ways.
And so it’s not a coincidence that a company like Intuit owns TurboTax, which is a software platform that will take up your data. They also own QuickBooks, so they have a bunch of data on small businesses that keep their accounting in that way. They own MailChimp, and so they have information of millions of folks who join direct marketing email campaigns, and so they can link data in that way. And then they also own Credit Karma. And so for those who are looking to improve their credit scores, for example, they also then have information about Americans in that level. And match this to essentially prey in different ways, with different types of tax products and other banking products.
And we’ve seen this in the expansion of fintech tax product loans that has been going crazy. When Cash App, for example, is telling you that you can file your taxes for free, you should assume that you are the product. And cutting out that corporate middleman is critical and essential, for not just ensuring that families keep money in their pockets, save time, that they are able to put back, spend with their kids, spend with their families, spend pursuing other things, but also is a data protection strategy as well.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change. The report, “Preying Preparers: How Storefront Tax Preparation Companies Target Low-Income Black and Brown Communities,” can be found at ColorOfChange.org. Portia Allen-Kyle, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is.
But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Deadline (1/22/25) noted that the last FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed the complaints Brendan Carr reinstated because “they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent.”
Brendan Carr, newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is waging a war on the news media, perhaps the most dangerous front in de jure President Donald Trump and de facto President Elon Musk’s quest to destroy freedom of the press and the First Amendment.
Trump’s FCC has revived right-wing requests to sanction TV stations over their election coverage—complaints that had previously been dismissed by the FCC as incompatible with the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. The media industry news site Deadline (1/22/25) summarized:
The complaints include one against ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, alleging bias in ABC’s hosting of the September presidential debate; one against WCBS-TV in New York that accuses CBS of “news distortion” in the way that 60 Minutesedited an interview with Kamala Harris; and another against WNBC-TV in New York for alleged violations of the equal time rule when Saturday Night Livefeatured Harris in a cameo the weekend before the presidential election.
Carr announced an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of Comcast and NBCUniversal, and vowed that other media companies would face the same scrutiny. He targeted PBS and NPR for their underwriting practices, while warning that their government funding would be in the crosshairs of congressional Republicans.
FCC vs. dissent
Despite his claim that “”I don’t want to be the speech police,” Ars Technica (12/17/24) reports that Carr has “embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias.”
Carr has also made it clear that will use the FCC to attack dissent. Ars Technica (12/17/24) reported:
Carr has instead embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias. Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC’s authority to ensure that broadcast stations using public airwaves operate in the public interest, despite previous chairs saying the First Amendment prevents the FCC from revoking licenses based on content.
Revoking licenses or blocking license renewals is difficult legally, experts told Ars. But Carr could use his power as FCC chair to pressure broadcasters and force them to undergo costly legal proceedings, even if he never succeeds in taking a license away from a broadcast station.
The impulse to go after broadcast licenses for airing unsanctioned viewpoints is similar to the methods used by authoritarian regimes like Hungary, Russia and Turkey to crush the free press (Deutsche Welle, 2/9/21, 9/15/22; Reuters, 10/17/24).
And no Republican crusade would be complete without fearmongering about George Soros‘s alleged control of media and politics. Fox News (2/25/25) reported that Carr “is expected to brief GOP lawmakers on the FCC’s investigation into Soros, including an investment firm he’s linked to purchasing over 200 Audacy radio stations nationwide.”
Regulation to benefit the right
What Carr “wants to do is use his bully pulpit to bully companies that moderate content in a way he doesn’t like,” Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer told Wired (11/20/24). “And if he continues to do that, he’s very likely to run smack into the First Amendment.”
Carr, one might remember, wrote the policy section on the FCC in Project 2025, a right-wing policy agenda that is guiding the second Trump administration. In it, Carr complained that the “FCC is a New Deal–era agency,” which has the “view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes.” He vowed to eliminate “many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo.”
It all sounds like old school, free-market Reaganism, but Carr is actually very much inclined to use state power to interfere in the media marketplace when he has a chance to enforce the ideological limits of political discussion in the news media.
US conservatism likes to sell itself as a general resistance to federal regulation in the marketplace, allowing for capitalism to run wild without government interference. In reality, the struggle between American liberals and conservatives is more about what kind of regulation they want to see.
Just look at Carr’s record: He likes regulation when it benefits the right, and opposes it when it doesn’t. His reported use of his FCC power to investigate the Soros-linked fund buying Audacy stations contrast with his rejection of calls to block Musk’s takeover of Twitter (FCC, 4/27/22).
He has spoken out against social media content moderation (Wired, 11/20/24), but he has supported the move to ban TikTok (NPR, 12/23/22), a campaign based on anti-Chinese McCarthyist hysteria (FAIR.org, 3/14/24). And as the first Deadline piece notes, Carr revived FCC complaints about CBS and ABC, both Trump targets, but didn’t reintroduce a similarly dismissed complaint alleging
that the revelations from the Dominion Voting System defamation case against Fox News showed that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch lacked the “character” to hold a broadcast license.
While press freedom advocates fear Carr’s crusade against liberal speech, local television news giant Sinclair (11/18/24), known for its right-wing politics (On the Media, 5/12/17; New Yorker, 10/15/18), embraced Carr’s FCC leadership.
‘To punish outlets Trump dislikes’
Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz told the Guardian (2/24/25) that Trump plans to “use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen.”
The aggressive drive to go after outlets like CBS and ABC stems from Trump’s longstanding belief that these networks are conspiring with the Democrats against him. The Trump administration, as FAIR (11/14/24) had predicted, will try to use the state to cripple media it deems too critical to his regime.
The FCC’s tough approach is already having an impact. Trump sued CBS and its parent company Paramount for $20 billion on claims that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris; Paramount is considering settling the suit, despite its baselessness, as the litigation could impede a lucrative potential merger that requires government approval (New York Post, 11/20/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/17/25).
ABC has already settled another bogus Trump lawsuit for $15 million (FAIR.org, 12/16/24)—which indicates that even giving Trump massive amounts of money will not protect media outlets from the wrath of MAGA.
Carr’s ideological campaign will almost certainly have a chilling effect on any media outlet with an FCC license. News managers may veer away from too much criticism of the Trump administration out of fear that the FCC could strangle it with investigations and red tape. The Guardian (2/24/25) cited American University law professor Rebecca Hamilton on the danger that “the FCC investigations could affect journalists’ ability to report on the Trump administration”:
Valid FCC investigations can have a positive impact on the information ecosystem. But the latest FCC investigations launched by Carr are aligned with a broader effort by the Trump administration to punish outlets that Trump dislikes. Such investigations risk creating a chilling effect on the ability of journalists to report without fear of retaliation.
‘No regard for the First Amendment’
More than a year ago, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) warned that “the American press is facing, arguably, the gravest potential threat to its freedom in a generation.”
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told FAIR that “rather than guessing precisely what line of attack might come next, broadcasters will be incentivized to tone down their coverage overall, and make it more friendly to the Trump administration.” Worse, he added, the viewers won’t know that such self-censorship is happening. “We only know what gets aired,” he said. “We don’t know what gets pulled.”
Before Trump’s election, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) fretted that Trump was “overtly vowing to weaponize government and seek retribution against the news media, showing no regard for the First Amendment protections afforded to the Fourth Estate.”
We’re seeing those fears already beginning to materialize in the FCC. The only way to truly resist is for media outlets to simply not comply with the insane, authoritarian dictates of the Trump administration—as AP has done by refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico, despite having its White House correspondents blacklisted (FAIR.org, 2/18/25).
But now is the time to relentlessly and honestly report on the most powerful political figure on earth, and not to back down.
Stern said the press can continue to take legal action to defend the First Amendment under Trump. But also said journalists should advocate for free speech through their outlets. “Journalists are always hesitant to write about press freedom, for fear of making themselves the story, but the time for that is long gone,” he said. “You’re not making yourself the story, Trump is.”
Michelle Goldberg (New York Times, 11/6/24): “Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism…. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us.”
The New York Times editorial board (2/8/25) this month urged readers not to get “distracted,” “overwhelmed,” “paralyzed” or “pulled into [Donald Trump’s] chaos”—in short, don’t “tune out.” But what good is staying informed unless there are concrete actions Trump’s opponents can take to rein him in?
Right after the election, in a column headlined, “My Manifesto for Despairing Democrats,” Times columnist Nick Kristof (11/6/24) suggested readers “hug a lawyer,” get a dog, and/or remain “alert” to “gender nastiness.”
Michelle Goldberg (11/6/24) used her post-election column, “This Is Who We Are Now,” to castigate the voters who “chose” Trump, “knowing exactly who [he] is.” “This is…who we are [as a country],” she added mournfully, despite the fact that less than 30 percent of US adults voted for Trump. She did not mention the nearly 90 million Americans who were eligible to vote but didn’t, or explore why they were so alienated from politics. Her own instinct, she wrote, was to turn inward, and she predicted the next few months would be “a period of mourning rather than defiance.”
Although she saw “no point” in protesting Trump’s inauguration, she did express a vague hope that people would “take to the streets if [Trump’s] forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away,” and that they would “strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions.” The work of the next four years, she concluded, would be “saving what we can” and “trying to imagine a tolerable future.” But, for the moment, all she could do was “grieve.”
Even in a column headlined “Stop Feeling Stunned and Wounded, Liberals. It’s Time to Fight Back,” the Times‘ Charles Blow (1/29/25) presented fighting back as a strangely inactive process: “People, especially young people, are simply not built to passively absorb oppression,” he wrote; they will, at some point, “inevitably react and resist.” Yet he offered few suggestions for how they might do this, defaulting instead to vague proclamations like “Confidence has to be rebuilt” and “Power and possibility have to be reclaimed.” Finally, he noted, “resistance must be expressed in opinion polls and at the cash registers,” because “the people’s next formal participation in our national politics won’t come until the 2026 midterms.”
Reinforcing disarray
Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein (New York Times, 2/2/25): “Elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided…. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.”
While counseling patience, discipline and self-care, the paper runs several headlines per month painting opposition to Trump as pointless, ineffective, disorganized and/or pusillanimous. It is both fair and necessary to report critically on efforts to oppose Trump, and the New YorkTimes has done that to some extent. But in headlines, framing and content, the paper often goes from reporting on Democratic disarray to reinforcing it.
Days after the election, the Times (11/7/24) began a story headlined “Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future” as follows: “A depressed and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future.” According to a photo caption in the story, “Many Democrats are left considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from enacting a sweeping right-wing agenda.”
From more recent stories like “‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump” (2/2/25), “Venting at Democrats and Fearing Trump, Liberal Donors Pull Back Cash” (2/16/25) and “Democrats Fear They Are Missing the Moment to Remake the Party” (2/17/25), we learn that Trump’s opposition is “demoralized,” plagued by “second-guessing” and “fretting.”
It’s true that many Democratic voters are furiousat the Democratic Party. But other reporting suggests that a functional opposition exists. Democrats’ legal strategy is slowing Trump down. His approval ratings have notably declined. A broad majority of Americans feel the president isn’t doing enough to address the high prices of everyday goods, and a slim majority (52%) say he’s gone too far in using his presidential power. This has spurred a fed-up public to lead dozens of mass proteststhroughout the country. And Bernie Sanders recently held massive rallies in Omaha and Iowa City to pressure the area’s Republican representatives to vote against Trump’s federal budget in March, drawing overflow crowds of more than 2,500 in Omaha and 1,175 in Iowa City.
‘I think of socialism’
Shane Goldmacher (New York Times, 2/17/25): “For disillusioned Democrats…what is needed is a deeper discussion of whether the party’s policies and priorities are repelling voters.”
Because the New York Times treats the complaints of mega-wealthy donors as more legitimate than the fury of the Democratic base, it often presents money as the best and/or only means of affecting policy. “Prominent” Democrats have “lost faith in the party’s resolve to pinpoint its problems, let alone solve them” (2/17/25), and rich donors are “furious” over “Democrats’ tactical missteps and wasteful spending”—so they’re withholding their money accordingly (2/16/25).
The Times (2/17/25) quotes wealthy donors who blame progressives for the party’s losses at length, like personal-injury lawyer John Morgan, a “major Democratic contributor…who has often backed more moderate candidates”:
When I think “progressive,” I think of the Squad…. And when I think of the Squad, I think of socialism, and when I think of socialism, I think of Communism, and when I think of Communism, I think of the downfall of countries.
The needs and policy preferences of rank-and-file voters don’t get similar attention.
Though it framed the findings differently, the Times (2/17/25) mentioned a poll that showed a slender majority of Democratic voters—six points more than the share who favor more moderation—want the party to become more liberal or stay the same, and one which shows that a large majority of Democrats across all demographics want the party to focus on economic issues like wages and jobs (63%) rather than cultural debates (31%). These views are strikingly different from those wealthy donors typically express, with different implications than the polls’ headlines suggest.
When it comes to identifying what went wrong, Democrats are more aligned than the Times has indicated. Two weeks after asserting that “leaderless, rudderless and divided” elected Democrats have “no shared understanding of why they lost the election” (2/2/25), the paper reported that there is, in fact, “almost universal agreement on a diagnosis of the party’s problem with the working class” (2/17/25). And despite the fact that far more Americans didn’t vote in 2024 than voted for Trump or Harris, the Times has expanded its coverage of undecided and Trump voters, while demonstrating scant interest in the tens of millions of Americans who stayed home.
‘No parallel in history’
Peter Baker (New York Times, 1/20/25): “Trump…opened an immediate blitz of actions to begin drastically changing the course of the country and usher in a new ‘golden age of America.’”
The New York Times’ emphasis on Democratic weakness stands in stark contrast to its treatment of Trump. While the Democratic Party struggles to define “what it stands for, what issues to prioritize and how to confront a Trump administration,” Trump is “carrying out a right-wing agenda with head-spinning speed” (2/2/25).
After years of dismissing Trump as an amateurish reality television star (6/16/15, 12/22/15, 9/16/16)—in 2015, the paper couldn’t come up with a single reason why he might win the GOP nomination, despite having “really tried” (6/16/15)—the Times now sees him as forceful and decisive, if reckless; a born leader fulfilling his mandate with impressive speed and strength. He has engineered a “remarkable political comeback” and an “audacious and stunningly successful legal strategy that could allow him to evade accountability.” He has “redefined the limits of presidential power,” his “success in using his campaign as a protective shield has no parallel in legal or political history” (11/6/24), and he has “little reason to fear impeachment, which he has already survived twice” (2/5/25).
Compared to its headlines about Democrats, the Times’ headlines about Trump could just as easily have been written by the man himself: “With Political Victory, Trump Fights Off Legal Charges” (11/6/24), “For Trump, a Vindication for the Man and His Movement” (1/20/25), ” “A Determined Trump Vows Not to Be Thwarted at Home or Abroad” (1/20/25), “Trump’s New Line of Attack Against the Media Gains Momentum” (2/7/25) and “Trump Targets a Growing List of Those He Sees as Disloyal” (2/17/25).
The overall message is that Trump is virtually unstoppable, and even high-ranking congressional Democrats and billionaire donors, let alone ordinary Americans, have no idea how to stop him. The Times has answered its own question, “Resisting Trump: What Can Be Done?” (2/10/25) with a resounding very little, aside from responding to opinion polls and meekly waiting to vote in the 2026 midterms.
Acknowledging Trump’s political savvy is partly a business decision—as the Times (1/13/25) has noted, “many reporters, editors and media lawyers are taking [Trump’s threats against the media] seriously…. He is altering how the press is operating.” Some would rather stay proximate to power than take on a vindictive, litigious and power-drunk president. It’s also a mea culpa of sorts; chastened by criticisms from both left and right, elite journalists and editors have spent years thinking maybe they were too quick to dismiss Trump’s appeal and too late to understand it.
Fighting Trump’s agenda
The New York Times‘ Jacey Fortin (12/3/24) covered successful resistance to a culture-war bogeyman in Republican-dominated Montana.
Whatever the reasoning, it does not serve readers to present Trump as a force of nature, and avenues for resistance as minimal, especially when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Ordinary people are fighting Trump’s agenda through long-term political and labor organizing.
And the New York Times has covered elected leaders who have taken effective stands against anti-democratic bullies. When Montana Republicans barred her from the House floor in 2023 for “attempting to shame” them in a debate, state legislator Zooey Zephyr fought back to defend both “democracy itself” and the transgender community to which she belongs (New York Times, 4/26/23).
Her courage paid off. Zephyr was reelected, and in December she joined colleagues in defeating a GOP proposal to restrict which bathrooms lawmakers could use in the Montana State Capitol (New York Times, 12/3/24).
Weeks earlier, Tennessee legislators expelled two Democrats from the state House after they joined constituents in demanding stricter gun laws. An attempt to expel a third Democrat who joined the protest failed by one vote (New York Times, 4/6/23).
After being expelled, state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were quickly but temporarily reinstated, reelected several months later, and have “risen in national prominence” (New York Times, 2/2/24). Their colleague, Rep. Gloria Johnson, who survived the attempt to expel her, won Tennessee’s 2024 Democratic primary for US Senate. Johnson lost the Senate race to GOP incumbent Sen. Marsha Blackburn in November, but voters reelected her to the Tennessee House.
Even when efforts to prevent the passage of anti-democratic laws and policies ultimately fail, as they did when Texas Democrats fled the state to block voting restrictions in 2021, they inspire people to engage in politics and fight for their communities. The New York Times has a responsibility not to scold its readers for their supposed apathy, but to show them how to take on corrupt and lawless leaders like Trump. Hector a person for tuning out, and they’ll read the news for a day; show them how to use power, and they’ll civically engage for a lifetime.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky:@NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber’s Gregory Shupak about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When a Los Angeles police officer killed a child in a department store, the New York Times ran the story with the headline “Stray Bullet Kills Girl as Officers Fire at Suspect in Los Angeles Store.” A later headline from the Times referred to the ”Officer Whose Bullet Killed a 14-Year-Old Girl.”
That used to be thought of as just newspaper speak, but we can now recognize how that distorted, passive-voice language is a choice that obscures agency and undermines accountability. It’s not just words.
We see that obscuring of agency, and undermining of accountability, writ larger when crimes are committed by governments corporate media favor, against populations they don’t care much about. Here, journalistic language takes on another level of import, because calling those crimes by their name brings on particular legal and political responses. New research from our guest explores that question in Gaza and the West Bank.
Gregory Shupak is a media critic and activist. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone from Toronto. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.
Gregory Shupak: Hi, how are you?
JJ: Well, I’m OK. When Trump declared his plans for Gaza: “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” and then later he declared that the US would “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it,” if you still have an outrage bone in your body, you may have thought, surely this will be seen as the wildly illegal, immoral move that it is.
How can it be resisted? Who can counter it? What bodies do we have to protect Palestinians in the face of this? All of those would be questions for journalists to pursue, but you can’t challenge something that you won’t name. Which brings us to the research that you’ve just been working on. Tell us about that.
GS: Sure. So this plan that Trump has put forth and stuck to for quite some time—I thought perhaps it would just be one of his many deranged statements that would be later walked back by, if not him, then others in administration, but he keeps pressing on this—it was widely described as ethnic cleansing by people who are positioned to make that assessment. So people like António Guterres of the United Nations, their secretary general, or Navi Pillay, who is another UN official focusing on Palestine. This plan that Trump brought forth was denounced by them and by others, like Human Rights Watch, as ethnic cleansing.
And yet that term has seldom found its way into the coverage. I looked at coverage of the first, just over a week, since Trump’s racist fever dream, and I found that 87% of the articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post did not include the term “ethnic cleansing.” And, in fact, only 26% of the coverage included a term like “ethnic cleansing,” or something similar that captures the violence of what he is proposing. So terms like “forced displacement” or “expel” or “expulsion” or “forced transfer.”
Just automatically, you have a whitewashing of what he’s proposing to do, even in coverage that is critical of it. And that’s really leaving audiences, who’re maybe not terribly well-versed in international law, not in a very strong position to understand just how egregious of a crime it is that Trump is advocating.
JJ: And ethnic cleansing is almost like just a pejorative, as though it had no actual meaning. In fact, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, you found, put it in scare quotes, like it’s an accusation and not a phenomenon.
GS: Exactly. And I talk in my piece about Bret Stephens and a couple of Wall Street Journalpieces that endorsed Trump’s plan. However, I didn’t mention that Stephens had a second piece that addressed Trump’s plan in passing, and he blatantly lied and said that Trump’s plan does not involve forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza. But Trump has been quite clear that that’s exactly what he has in mind. So not only do we have a widespread failure to properly name this plan for ethnic cleansing, we also have quite a few cases of endorsements of what Trump is calling for.
JJ: We know that for many US media—and you illustrated it—US exceptionalism, just the idea that, “Oh, sure, we can do this anywhere in the world,” extends to the point where they don’t even really acknowledge international law. And this is a longstanding problem, where the UN is just kind of meddling in US power, and that sort of thing. But it really comes to the point where they don’t even invoke the idea that there is something called international law.
GS: Yeah, that’s quite important. Only 19% of the coverage of Trump’s proposal for Gaza, if you can even call it that, only 19% include the term “international law,” which is really a key paradigm through which this, and any kind of international armed conflict, needs to be understood. But it’s just not even being presented to the audience as something that they need to think about.
And it put me in mind of Richard Falk and Howard Friel, [who] wrote a book 20 years ago or so, called The Record of the Paper, and it talked about how in coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, international law was totally absent from New York Times editorials that were in various ways endorsing or at least giving credibility to the concept of the attack. And we still see the same pattern with regard to Gaza, as well as the West Bank, where patterns of ethnic cleansing are also unfolding.
JJ: And yet we know they will invoke international law when it suits, when it seems like something that bolsters the US case.
You found, finally, similar issues with coverage of the West Bank, and I think it’s important for folks to understand this is not just a story of Gaza anymore, obviously; this is an expansive story. And when we talk about the West Bank here, as is often the case, you can find an example of an outlet or a journalist who is doing straightforward, informative witnessing, and you can actually use that to contrast with what many powerful, better resourced outlets are doing. And that’s the case in coverage of the West Bank, right? It’s not that everyone is refusing to witness or acknowledge.
GS: No, I think that one of the main problems I see in the way that the events unfolding in the West Bank are being portrayed is that there’s a refusal, you might call it, to connect how each “individual” event or incident connects to others.
So you’ll have reports that’ll say, Israel’s invasion of Jenin refugee camp that has unfolded in recent weeks has largely emptied out the entire area. But the coverage of that fails to situate that in relation to the fact that we are seeing similar types of violence unfolding in other parts of the West Bank that Israel is attacking, particularly the lower West Bank, and that these are part of a longer-term trend towards, as several observers that I cite in the article have pointed out, of ethnic cleansing the territory.
So, for example, I talk about how in October of last year, the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese put forth a report in which she describes escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And she talks about how, since October 7, 2023, at least 18 West Bank communities have been depopulated under the threat of force.
So what she and others have observed is that this is not a matter of, OK, there’s a couple days of fighting, and people go back to their homes when it’s safe. It’s part of a longer-term trajectory whereby it’s becoming difficult, and often impossible, for people in West Bank towns to go back to their homes once Israel drives them out. So not at all unlike what we have seen in Gaza.
Gregory Shupak: “What we’re talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.”
JJ: But the refusal to connect those dots, and to make it seem as though, oh, a skirmish happened over here today, and oh, a skirmish happened over there yesterday, and not telling the bigger story, is the failure.
GS: Exactly. And as is so often the case with coverage of Palestine, and other issues as well, we get a muddying of the agency of the perpetrators of the violence, right? Everything’s reduced to just “clashes” and “conflict,” rather than efforts to enforce colonial subjugation, and resistance to that. So that kind of power dynamic is completely glossed over, when you get this anodyne language about just conflicts and clashes. There’s no space within that language for communicating that what we’re talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.
