New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”
Sulzberger details Trump’s many efforts to suppress and undermine critical media outlets during his previous presidential tenure, as well as the more recent open declarations by Trump and his allies of their plans to continue to “come after” the press, “whether it’s criminally or civilly.” He documents the ways independent media have been eroded in illiberal democracies around the world, and draws direct links to Trump’s playbook.
You might expect this to be a prelude to an announcement that the New York Times would work tirelessly to defend democracy. Instead, Sulzberger heartily defends his own miserably inadequate strategy of “neutrality”—which, in practice, is both-sidesing—making plain his greater concern for the survival of his own newspaper than the survival of US democracy.
‘Wading into politics’
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) says his paper is “taking active steps to prepare ourselves for a more difficult environment” regarding press freedom—but not, crucially, by reporting on Donald Trump as though he were a clear and present danger to democracy.
“As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence,” Sulzberger writes, “I have no interest in wading into politics.”
It’s a bizarre statement. Newspapers, including the Times, regularly endorse candidates. Presumably, then, he’s referring to the “news” side of the paper, rather than the opinion side.
But, even so, you can’t report on politics without wading directly into them. Which political figures and issues do you cover, and how much? (See, for example: media’s outsize coverage of Trump since 2015; media’s heavy coverage of inflation but not wage growth.) Which popular political ideas do you take seriously, and which do you dismiss as marginal? (See, for example, the Times‘ persistent dismissal of Bernie Sanders’ highly popular critiques.) These decisions shape political possibilities and set political agendas, as much as the Times would like to pretend they don’t (FAIR.org, 5/15/24).
Sulzberger goes on (emphasis added):
I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.
Sulzberger is always raging against critics who, he claims, want him to skew and censor his paper’s reporting (FAIR.org, 5/19/23). The Times must instead be steadfastly “neutral,” he claims. But those very political coverage decisions that media outlets make on a daily basis make it impossible for the outlets to be neutral in the way Sulzberger imagines.
Neutrality could mean, as he suggests, independent or free from the influence of the powerful in our society. This is possible—if difficult—for media outlets to achieve. Yet the Times, like all corporate media, doesn’t even try to do this.
Instead, the Times seems to take neutrality as not appearing to take sides, which in practice means finding similar faults among both parties, or not appearing overly critical of one party or the other (FAIR.org, 1/26/24). This strategy didn’t work particularly well when Republicans and Democrats played by the same set of rules, as both parties took the same anti-equality, pro-oligarchy positions on many issues.
But it’s particularly ill-suited to the current moment, when Republicans have discarded any notion that facts, truth or democracy have any meaning. If one team ceases to play by any rules, should the ref continue to try to call roughly similar numbers of violations on each side in order to appear unbiased? It would obviously be absurd and unfair. But that’s Sulzberger’s notion of “neutrality.”
It would be brave for a media outlet like the Times to take a stand and oppose Trump’s candidacy. But it would make a big difference if the paper would even do the bare minimum of calling fouls fairly rather than evenly.
‘A fair and accurate picture’
Sampling of New York Times headlines raising doubts about President Joe Biden’s age (Campaign Trails, 9/5/24). The Times highlighted more than two dozen stories about President Joe Biden’s age in a single week (CSSLab, 3/24/24); since his withdrawal from the race, the paper has not spotlighted similar concerns about Donald Trump’s competence.
“It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away,” Sulzberger continues. “At the Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it.”
A “full, fair and accurate picture” of the election and its stakes are exactly what the Times‘ critics are asking for. Instead, the Times offers a topsy-turvy world in which crime is still a top concern (it’s at its lowest level since the 1960s—FAIR.org, 7/25/24)); inflation has been brought down to near the Fed’s ideal rate of 2%, but it’s still “a problem for Harris” (7/23/24); the nation’s “commitment to the peaceful resolution of political difference” is primarily threatened by neither party in particular (FAIR.org, 7/16/24); and Biden’s age merits more headlines as a danger to the country than Trump’s increasing incoherence–or his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the election.
It’s not “giving up independence” for a news outlet to try, through its reporting, to prevent a tyrant from taking over the country. There’s no reason the paper can’t put the threats posed by Trump on its front page every day while continuing to offer careful scrutiny of the Harris campaign. But it’s also worth asking: What good is a “free” press if it can’t protect democracy before it’s gone?
‘Balance’ at all costs
Sulzberger concludes by explaining how he plans to confront the looming challenge Trump presents—by preparing for lawsuits and harassment and, most crucially, by not taking sides:
through it all, treating the journalistic imperative to promote truth and understanding as a north star — while refusing to be baited into opposing or championing any particular side. “No matter how well-intentioned,” Joel Simon, the former head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote last month on what he’s learned studying attacks on press freedom, “such undertakings can often help populist and authoritarian leaders rally their own supporters against ‘entrenched elites’ and justify a subsequent crackdown on the media.”
Does Sulzberger actually think that by writing a several-thousand-word warning against Trump’s threat to press freedom, but simultaneously announcing that he will resolutely oppose “taking sides” in this election, he is somehow inoculating himself against right-wing populist hatred of the Times, and any future retribution from a Trump presidency?
The far right has learned how to exploit this central weakness of corporate media, its adherence to “balance” at all costs. Sulzberger might think he’s working to fend off Trump’s attack on an independent press corps; in fact, he’s playing right into Trump’s hands, and working to speed along his own paper’s irrelevance.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
This week on CounterSpin: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators,” not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.
Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Freddy Brewster about the supermarket megamerger for the August 30, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In October of 2022, the largest supermarket chain in the US, Kroger, announced a plan to take over the second-largest supermarket chain in the country, Albertsons, in a merger that would create the country’s third-largest private-sector employer overall—after Walmart and Amazon—a conglomerate of some 5,000 stores and 710,000 employees. What could go wrong?
A lot of things, the Federal Trade Commission suggested, as they sued to block the merger this February, including less competition, lower quality products and weaker bargaining positions for workers. Legal proceedings began this week.
Our guest is helping make sense of this story. Writer and journalist Freddy Brewster’s latest piece on the proposed Kroger and Albertsons merger, and the maneuvering behind it, appears at LeverNews.com. He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Freddy Brewster.
Freddy Brewster: Hi, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
JJ: If we could first situate this in common sense and lived experience: Americans have been seeing the price of eggs and milk and other staples go way up, to the point where already-struggling people are pressed to the limit. Asking why this is happening, we’ve been told for years now, well, Covid, and related supply chain problems, and inflation. It’s out of companies’ control.
I have problems already with that, because the notion that companies have to maintain a certain profit margin, no matter what’s happening in the world, is a choice. Companies could always accept less profit, or pay managers less, if keeping prices down was their aim.
But, OK, Covid, supply chain, inflation: That’s no longer the reality, yet it’s still somehow the story. Did Kroger not just acknowledge in testimony that, oh yes, we did push prices higher than inflation just because we could, but still if you give us more market power, you should believe we won’t do that anymore? I want to ask you about specifics, but this whole baseline, to begin with, almost seems like a joke at the expense of people already struggling. Am I missing something there?
Freddy Brewster: “Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices.”
FB: No, no, you’re kind of right on it. And just add to that, in 2021, Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices, pass the cost on to consumers and keep prices high. In fact, I have a quote right here from Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, from that shareholder call, and it says, “We view a little bit of inflation as always good in our business, and we would expect to be able to pass those costs through to consumers on things that are permanent in nature.” And so, right here, he is admitting that they can use inflation to raise prices, and then keep those prices high.
JJ: And that sounds like exactly what they’re saying they won’t be doing in this sort of PR talk about lower prices and better choices.
I went to look up this story, and I found a website called KrogerAlbertsons.com, which opens with this, I find, hilarious disclaimer, and I just want to read it:
Certain information included in this website is forward-looking, and involves risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the assumptions and beliefs of Kroger and Albertsons companies management in light of information currently available to them.
And it goes on:
Such statements are indicated by words or phrases such as “accelerate,” “create,” “committed,” “confident,” “continue,” “deliver,” “driving,” “expect,” “future,” “guidance,” “positioned,” “strategy,” “target,” “synergies,” “trends” and “will.”
Now companies call this skating where the puck’s going to be, right? You just act as though you’ve already gotten the thing that you’re demanding. And then if the deal doesn’t happen, you’re encouraging people to see it as nature’s path being interfered with, rather than public-protecting processes being followed.
FB: Yeah, that website is funny, and it’s almost like, if there’s any young people out there who are aspiring to work in PR, you can read that website. It is just like those words that they highlight themselves are rather interesting, and kind of like buzzwords, to be able to push a certain type of narrative that they find benefits them, or would be profitable to their narrative.
JJ: What information is the FTC working with when they set up to question or potentially block this merger? Why are they doing that?
FB: They want to block this merger because, like you had mentioned earlier on, this merger could result in poor-quality products, higher prices and worse employment options for employees, especially for employees who are trying to unionize or who want to threaten to be able to go work at the competitor.
Just to give you kind of a sense of Kroger’s market power, in an attempt to allay the concerns from the FTC about this merger, Kroger had promised to sell off 600 stores, slash prices by a billion dollars, and invest a billion dollars in wages if the merger is allowed to go through.
So what this kind of says and highlights is that Kroger is already buying Albertsons for $24.6 billion, and is willing to invest another $2 billion to bring down prices and to get more wages. That shows that they already have quite a bit of market power. They have $29 billion sitting around that they can use to buy another company and lower prices and give people better wages. Well, why aren’t they lowering prices and giving people better wages right now?
That statement itself just highlights the market power that Kroger has, and if this merger is allowed to go through, they’ll have even greater market power. And Kroger says that they want this merger to go through to be able to compete with Walmart and Amazon, which may be legitimate, but Walmart and Amazon, they operate in different spheres than what traditional grocery stores do.
JJ: Right. So the idea that all four of these companies… we as citizens are meant to be excited about a bigger behemoth getting into the fight with other behemoths.
FB: Yeah, exactly. And Kroger already owns a handful of common grocery stores that people know about. There’s Fred Meyer, there’s Harris Teeter, they own King Soopers and Ralphs. And then also Albertsons owns Safeway. They own…
JJ: Acme, I think….
FB: Shaw’s and Vons. Yeah, exactly. And so all of this would put it all under one roof.
And then also, if this merger’s allowed to go through, what puts it under that same roof, too, are also all those store-brand products. Like Kroger has Kroger brand salad dressing, for example, or different sauces or snacks or whatever. And Albertsons has the same thing. But then that puts it all under one roof, one house in one store, and that leaves less options for consumers.
And an expert I talked to highlighted about how when there’s less options, that these companies are focused on profits, and they often use emulsifiers and other things that really aren’t the best to be consuming for the average human, and that can affect health in different ways, weight in different ways.
JJ: Among other tactics, Kroger is declaring that the FTC’s whole case should be thrown out because it’s unconstitutional, because it involves Kroger’s “private rights.” What legal legs do they think they’re standing on there?
FB: So, historically, the courts have ruled in favor of these government agencies. The FTC, for example, and similar with the Securities and Exchange Commission, have these internal courts that rule on certain matters. So, for example, the FTC internal administrative court, they hear evidence, kind of like a standard court, and will issue initial decisions. And companies have sued in the past to try to say this is unconstitutional, and has to be fought in federal court. But the courts have largely ruled in favor of these government agencies.
Up until recently; that’s begun to change. Now the Supreme Court, earlier the summer, ruled that the in-house courts issuing civil penalties for securities fraud, for the Securities Exchange Commission, is unconstitutional. And then, also, there was a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that allowed companies facing an FTC enforcement action to challenge those actions that the companies deemed unconstitutional in federal court, before those actions are deliberated inside the internal FTC court. So it’s a little convoluted, but those are the two main cases that Kroger is relying on to say that the internal FTC court is unconstitutional.
JJ: Listeners will know that we’ve been instructed to see corporations as people since Citizens United, but if I’m in court and I’m deleting relevant text messages, I’m not sure that I could just say, “Oh, well, you know, stuff happens.” Tell us a little bit about some of the behind the scenes actions, if you will, that seem meaningful here to this case.
FB: So deleting text messages and internal chats has seemed to become the go-to tactic for business executives facing enforcement actions and regulations from the federal government. Jeff Bezos and Amazon executives were caught using Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app, but it also has the option for auto delete. And so a lot of these messages that they were exchanging between each other were automatically deleted.
Google executives were also caught deleting messages. So Google has this internal policy where it directs employees to use a feature that automatically deletes Google Chat messages after 24 hours. And Google received an order from regulators to preserve these messages, but a judge found that the executives did not properly notify employees to stop using the auto delete feature, and some messages were deleted.
And there’s also, in the case of Google, messages that have been preserved that show that some of these executives realized the fact that the auto delete function was not turned off. And so it’s preserved in court documents that show that they know that they were supposed to turn off this auto delete function, but they had left it on.
But then Albertsons, some of their executives were using auto-delete features on iPhone, and recent filings from the FTC, I’ll just quote right from it, it says: “Of the eight Albertsons executives set to testify at this evidentiary hearing, four exhibited a pervasive practice of deleting business-related text messages,” the FTC found. And these text messages allegedly included details on whether selling off certain stores will remedy the merger’s anticompetitive impacts, and FTC investigators urge the court to view the executive’s testimony with skepticism, meaning that they should view what they have to say in light of these guys deleting text messages talking about details about the merger.
JJ: Yeah. I’ll bring you back to that big regulatory picture in just a second, but let me just ask you about corporate media response. There’s been some coverage. I’ve seen some coverage.
It includes things like the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, who weighed in saying that, yes, food prices in America are a real problem, but that it’s “only politicians who want to be seen as doing something about them” that “conveniently focus merely on retail operations, because those are price stickers most voters see.” Well, yeah, OK. But they go on to say:
In reality, supermarkets are a famously high-volume, low-margin business, and their price increases are downwind from wholesale price increases with those flowing from suppliers with increased costs. And the retail operations have their own costs dominated by the price of labor, which has seen hefty increases in recent years.
Now, I think listeners can likely parse that: It’s supply chains and it’s unions that are driving those high grocery prices—even as Kroger’s own senior director for pricing admits in testimony that, yeah, we’re actually price-gouging, but if you let us merge, well, we pinky promise to stop. What do you make of media response here?
FB: Yeah, so I haven’t read that Chicago Tribune article, but I’d imagine that they don’t take in consideration the billions of dollars that Kroger has spent in stock buybacks over recent years. And so it’s not like they’re hurt or cash-strapped in a way that they’re having to pinch pennies to get by. They pay their executives handsomely. They’re paid well, and they have billions of dollars in leftover money to buy back stocks to juice shareholder value. I don’t really see that mentioned too often in corporate media, but that is a key context to consider when it comes to these issues and food prices.
JJ: Yeah, consumers and workers and competition, those terms get thrown around a lot in stories like this. But the Consumer Federation of America opposes the merger, the Food Workers Union opposes the merger, state attorney generals who are interested in competition oppose the merger. So there’s this gap between media and political rhetoric, and what folks on the ground actually see and have seen happening, it seems like.
FB: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and folks on the ground know really what’s affecting them, and what’s affecting them largely, as of late, has been high prices at the grocery store. And we know from Kroger’s own internal conversations that they see these price hikes as a good thing.
JJ: While it is hard, understandably, for many of us to see past the price of eggs, which is alarming, but there is also, as you write about, a long game here that has to do with hobbling government’s ability to protect consumers, or to regulate businesses, period. I think Kroger seems to see, and other businesses seem to see, a longer-term gain here by undermining the whole system.
FB: Imagine Kroger’s case against the FTC. This is a bit of a prediction from me. I’d imagine it’ll make its way to the Supreme Court, because if the federal court in Cincinnati, where Kroger sued, if they rule in favor of Kroger, then that says the FTC control of courts is unconstitutional, and I imagine the FTC would challenge that or appeal that. And if Kroger loses, I’d imagine they would appeal as well, because they want to be able to fight this in federal courts, which have largely been stocked with corporate-friendly judges over the past few decades.
JJ: We try to always say, notice those down-ballot elections. Notice those electoral judge positions. All of this is so integral to the rules and policies that govern our lives, but we don’t always see it highlighted as those races or those positions as important as they absolutely are.
Well, corporate America hate them some Lina Khan, don’t they? I mean, we have seen this, in terms of the FTC. It’s almost like there’s something wrong with a person in a government agency just straight up saying, “I’m looking to protect the public interest here.” It’s almost as though we’re being told to see regulatory agencies as just kind of refereeing the game between big corporations, and we, the public, are just not in it.
FB: And a lot of these executives, they get brought onto CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and they praise Vice President Harris, and are happy she’s running, but they also pressure her to fire Lina Khan and other regulators. And the news anchors there failed to mention the cases that those business executives or those billionaires have in front of the FTC, or have in front of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Or some of the motivations on why they would want to get rid of regulators who have a strong anti-monopoly type of mindset, and a very pro-consumer mindset. That doesn’t really get mentioned too often on some of these corporate media outlets.
JJ: What do you think happens now? You’ve indicated it a little bit, but we’re still very much in the midst of this case. What do you think is likely to happen, and what would you look for journalists to be keeping an eye on?
FB: Yeah, so it’s hard to determine what’s going to happen. I think it’s really going to be interesting on the federal case out of Cincinnati, Ohio, where Kroger sued, challenging FTC’s internal court being constitutional. The current case that’s playing out right now, that’s a temporary halt to the merger. That’ll have some ramifications for sure, but the big one to pay attention to is the Kroger v. FTC federal case out of Cincinnati, and what the ramifications of that will be, because that could also have, if that rules in Kroger’s favor, then that case could be cited to challenge other regulators, their internal administrative courts as well.
JJ: I won’t put words in your mouth, but I’m guessing that you think that independent journalism has a role to play here, in terms of informing the public about these sorts of things?
FB: Absolutely, absolutely. Independent journalists have been ones that have been spearheading some of the pro–consumer protection type stuff. This stems back all the way from a consumer protection advocate, Ralph Nader, back in the ’70s, all the way to our current system now. Independent media is very important in our current age.
And if you are interested about the corporate takeover of America and America’s courts, we have a really good podcast out right now called Master Plan that tracks the beginnings, the origins of how money in politics came to be. Like all good political conspiracies, it goes back to Watergate, in the Nixon administration, that involves the milk lobby, that involves Lewis Powell and the infamous Powell Memo, and then goes all the way to Citizens United and the billions of dollars that are being spent on our current election. So if listeners are interested in that, then they can check out Master Plan.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with writer and journalist Freddy Brewster. The piece we’re talking about, on the Kroger/Albertsons merger, can be found at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Freddy Brewster, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (8/21/24), knowing that “outrage” sells, saves for the last paragraph the information that a supposedly canceled author turned down an offer to reschedule his talk in the same bookstore.
Author and journalist Joshua Leifer is the latest scribe to be—allegedly—canceled. A talk for his new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled when a member of the store’s staff objected to Leifer being joined by a liberal rabbi who was also a Zionist, although still critical of Israel’s right-wing government (New York Times, 8/21/24).
Leifer’s book is doing well as a result of the saga (Forward, 8/27/24). Meanwhile, the bookstore worker wasn’t so lucky, when the venue’s owner said “he would try to reschedule the event” and said “that the employee” responsible for canceling the event “‘is going to be terminated today’” (New York Jewish Week, 8/21/24).
It’s worth dissecting the affair and its impact to truly assess who can gain popular sympathy in the name of “free speech,” and who cannot, and how exactly Leifer has portrayed what happened.
‘One-state maximalism’
To Joshua Leifer (Atlantic, 8/27/24), opposition to platforming Zionists is “straightforwardly antisemitic.”
Leifer is a journalist who has produced nuanced coverage of Israel and Jewish politics for Jewish Currents, the New York Review of Books and other outlets. Reflecting on the bookstore affair, Leifer said in the Atlantic (8/27/24) that Jewish writers like him are in a bind because of the intransigence of the left, saying “Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.”
He added:
My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on US military aid—as beyond the pale.
The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing US policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.
No ‘destruction’ required
For me, personally, canceling Leifer’s talk was a bad move. No one would have been forced to listen or attend, and if someone wanted to challenge the inclusion of a moderate Zionist at the event, they could have done so in the question and answer session. Speech should usually be met with more speech.
But Leifer is somewhat disingenuous about a “zero-sum” game that forces people into the “morally repulsive” concept that “requires Israel’s destruction.” Many anti-Zionists and non-Zionists believe that the concept of one state, “from the river to the sea,” means a democratic state that treats all its people—Arab, Jew and otherwise—equally. Leifer’s counterposing being “committed to Israel’s existence” with “one-state maximalism” suggests that the Israel whose “existence” he is committed to is one in which one ethnic group is guaranteed supremacy over others. People who are committed to the preservation of Israel as an ethnostate are probably going to have a hard time being in a “big tent” with those who “work to end its domination over Palestinians.”
It is understandable, given the context, that some people might object to a Zionist speaker on a panel while a genocide is being carried out in Zionism’s name. Would the Atlantic have reserved editorial space if an avowed Ba’athist was booted from a panel on Syria?
And Leifer is hardly being censored, and he has much more than a “little room to maneuver.” He has access to a major publisher and the pages of notable periodicals, and is pursuing a PhD at Yale University. His book sales are doing fine, and the event’s cancellation has, if anything, helped his reputation. (It got him a commission at the Atlantic, after all.)
Free speech protects everyone
Osita Nwanevu (New Republic, 7/6/20) writes in defense of “freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values.”
Meanwhile, a bookstore worker who expressed a questionable opinion got fired. Free speech debates tend to value the importance and rights to a platform of the saintly media class—the working class, however, doesn’t get the same attention, despite the fact that “free speech” is meant to protect everyone, not just those who write and talk for a living.
And expressing the opinion that a bookstore should not be promoting Zionism is just as much a matter of free speech as advocating Zionism itself. The First Amendment doesn’t stop publications, university lecture committees, cable television networks and, yes, bookstores from curating the views and speech they want to platform. As FAIR has quoted Osita Nwanevu at the New Republic (7/6/20) before:
Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.
Whose speech is punished?
eLife‘s Michael Eisen’s approval of an Onionheadline (“Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”) was deemed to be “detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build” (Science, 10/23/23).
Worse is what Leifer leaves out. While his event should not have been canceled, he fails to put this in the context of many other writers who have suffered more egregious cancellation because they exercised free speech in defense of Palestinians. Those writers include Masha Gessen (FAIR.org, 12/15/23), Viet Thanh Nguyen (NPR, 10/24/23) and Jazmine Hughes (Vanity Fair, 11/15/23).
New York University has “changed its guidelines around hate speech and harassment to include the criticism of Zionism as a discriminatory act” (Middle East Eye, 8/27/24). Artforum fired its top editor, David Velasco, for signing a letter in defense of Palestinian rights (New York Times, 10/26/23). Dozens of Google workers were “fired or placed on administrative leave…for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel’s government” (CNN, 5/1/24). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor of the science journal eLife (Science, 10/23/23) because he praised an Onion article (10/13/23).
Leifer’s Atlantic piece erroneously gives the impression that since the assault on Gaza began last October, it has been the pro-Palestinian left that has enforced speech norms. A question for such an acclaimed journalist is: Why would he omit such crucial context?
‘Litmus test’
The lead example of “antisemitism on…the left” offered by the Atlantic (3/4/24) was a high school protest of the bombing of Gaza at which “from the river to the sea” was reportedly chanted.
Leifer has allowed the Atlantic to spin the narrative that it is the left putting the squeeze on discourse, when around the country, at universities and major publications, it’s pro-Palestinian views that are being attacked by people in power. The magazine’s Michael Powell (4/22/24) referred to the fervor of anti-genocide activists as “oppressive.” Theo Baker, son of New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, claimed in the Atlantic (3/26/24) that his prestigious Stanford University was overrun with left-wing “unreason” when he came face to face with students who criticized Israel.
Franklin Foer used the outlet (3/4/24) to assert that in the United States, both the left and right are squeezing Jews out of social life. Leifer is now the latest recruit in the Atlantic’s movement to frame all Jews as victims of the growing outcry against Israel’s genocide, even when that outcry includes a great many Jews.
Leifer’s piece adds to the warped portrait painted by outlets like the New York Times, which published an op-ed (5/27/24) by James Kirchick, of the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, that asserted that “a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” A great many canceled pro-Palestine voices would have something to add to that, but they know they can barely get a word in edgewise in most corporate media—unlike Kirchick, Foer or Leifer.
Leifer’s event should not have been canceled, and I would have been annoyed if I were in his position, but he continues to have literary success and is smartly cashing in on his notoriety. He should not, however, have lent his voice to such a lopsided narrative about free speech.
One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.
Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.
When the far-right won the first round of French elections, that was front-page news in the New York Times (7/1/24). When the left won the second round, that was much less newsworthy to the Times.
It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.
Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.
France is in an unprecedented political situation, in which there is no clear governing coalition in the National Assembly. After the snap elections concluded on July 7, the left coalition New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, beating out both Macron’s centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally (RN). (While the sitting president’s coalition won the second-most seats, it actually got fewer votes than either the left coalition or the far right.)
These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party.
Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.
‘Institutional stability’
When someone in a headline “fumes” (Washington Post, 7/27/24), that’s a signal that you’re not supposed to sympathize with them.
Where US corporate media do comment on Macron’s denial of the election, their framing is neutral or even defensive of the president’s equivocations. Critiques are couched as attacks from the left; one AP piece published in the Washington Post (8/27/24) reports not that Macron is denying an election, but simply that France’s left is fuming:
France’s main left-wing coalition on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of denying democracy…. Leftist leaders lashed out at Macron, accusing him of endangering French democracy and denying the election results.
Left unchallenged are Macron’s claims that he is simply trying his best to preserve stability, election results be damned:
On Monday, Macron rejected their nominee for prime minister—little-known civil servant Lucie Castets—saying that his decision to refuse a government led by the New Popular Front is aimed at ensuring “institutional stability.”
AP left out of its story the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), the supposedly most objectionable member of the NFP coalition, even offered to accept an NFP government led by Castets, with no LFI members in ministerial roles, to assuage the fears of centrists. This olive branch did not impress AP, which instead relayed Macron’s call for “left-wing leaders to seek cooperation with parties outside their coalition.”
Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.
‘Scorched-earth politics’
To the New York Times (8/23/24), the idea that a left coalition would try to implement the platform it successfully ran on is a “hard-core stance.”
The New York Times’ reporting (8/23/24) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.” Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”
She went on to admit, however, that Castets, the NFP’s choice for prime minister, “has softened her position from its original hard-core stance”—that is, that the coalition would implement the program it ran on—and that “she says she would pursue something more reflective of minority government position.”
However, the Times continued, “the biggest party in her coalition, France Unbowed, has a history of scorched-earth politics that makes the pledge for conciliation feel thin.” In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.
The Times seemed to accept an equation between LFI and the RN, which was founded (as the National Front) as an explicitly neo-fascist movement. The paper reported that it was not only a departing minister from Macron’s party, but “many others,” who
consider France Unbowed and its combative leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, to be as dangerous to France’s democracy as the extreme right.
The anti-immigrant agenda of France’s extreme right, as represented by the RN, includes repealing birthright citizenship in favor of requiring a French parent and implementing strict tests of cultural and lingual assimilation. Mélenchon’s LFI, in contrast, favors medical aid for undocumented migrants and social support for asylum seekers.
Despite the Times’ previous reporting (7/9/24) that LFI is a “hostile-to-capitalism” party, the party’s platform only calls for more state intervention in the market economy, with a critique that is more anti–free market dogma than anti-capitalist, per political scientist Rémi Lefebvre.
Whether supporting intervention in the market is as extreme as supporting ethnic determination of “Frenchness” is left as an exercise for the reader. But according to the French government’s official categorization (Le Parisien, 3/11/24), LFI is categorized simply as “left,” while the RN is indeed categorized as “extreme right.”
Despite the sparse and incomplete coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, they must be given credit for covering the story at all. A Nexis review of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS NewsHour reveals next to no reporting on Macron’s refusal to name a prime minister, with no critical reporting whatsoever.
Since July 23, when Castets emerged as the left’s choice, there have been two brief mentions of Macron’s lack of a decision, on CNN Newsroom (7/24/24) and Fox Special Report (8/23/24). Neither program mentioned Castets, much less the exceptional circumstances faced by the French electorate.
This week on CounterSpin: The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it—a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And also: If you try to stop us, that’s illegal!
It could hardly be clearer that the public—consumers and workers—needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com. We hear about that this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed North Central College‘s Steve Macek about “dark money” campaign contributions for the August 23, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If you use the word “democracy” unsarcastically, you likely think it has something to do with, not only every person living in a society having some say in the laws and policies that govern them, but also the idea that everyone should be able to know what’s going on, besides voting, that influences that critical decision-making.
“Dark money,” as it’s called, has become, in practical terms, business as usual, but it still represents the opposite of that transparency, that ability for even the unpowerful to know what’s happening, to know what’s affecting the rules that govern our lives. A press corps concerned with defending democracy, and not merely narrating the nightmare of crisis, would be talking about that every day, in every way.
Our guest has written about the gap between what we need and what we get, in terms of media. Steve Macek is professor and chair of communication and media studies, at North Central College in Illinois, a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program, and co-editor and contributor to, most recently, Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, out this year from Peter Lang. He joins us now by phone from Naperville, Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, Steve Macek.
Steve Macek: Thanks for having me, Janine. I’m a big fan of the show.
JJ: Well, thank you. Let’s start with some definition. Dark money doesn’t mean funding for candidates or campaigns I don’t like, or from groups I don’t like. In your June piece for the Progressive, you spell out what it is, and where it can come from, and what we can know about it. Help us, if you would, understand just the rules around dark money.
SM: Sure. So dark money, and Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets gave me, I think, a really nice, concise definition of dark money in the interview I did with her for this article. She called it “funding from undisclosed sources that goes to influence political outcomes, such as elections.” Now, thanks to the Supreme Court case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, and some other cases, it is now completely legal for corporations and very wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcomes of elections.
Not all of that “independent expenditure” on elections is dark money. Dark money is spending that comes from organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. One sort of organization, I’m sure your listeners are really familiar with, are Super PACs, or, what they’re more technically known as, IRS Code 527 organizations. It can take unlimited contributions, and spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections, but they have to disclose the names of their donors.
There’s this other sort of organization, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which is sometimes known as a “social welfare nonprofit,” who can raise huge amounts of money, but they do not have to disclose the names of their donors, but they are prevented from spending the majority of their budget on political activity, which means that a lot of these 501(c)(4) organizations spend 49.999% of their budget attempting to influence the outcomes of elections, and the rest of it is spent on things like general political education, or research that might, in turn, guide the creation of political ads and so on.
JJ: When we talk about influencing the outcome of elections, it’s not that they are taking out an ad for or against a particular candidate. That doesn’t have to be involved at all.
SM: Right. So they can sometimes run issue ads. Sometimes these dark money groups, as long as they’re working within the parameters of the law, will run ads for or against a particular candidate.
But take, for example, Citizens for Sanity, the group that I talked about at the beginning of my Progressivearticle: This is a group that nobody knows very much about. It showed up back in 2022, and ran $40 million worth of ads in four battleground states. Many of the ads were general ads attacking the Democrats for wanting to erase the border, or over woke culture-war themes, but they’re spending $40+ million on ads, according to one estimate.
What we do know is the officials of the group are almost identical to America First Legal, which was made up by former Trump administration officials. America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, that xenophobic former advisor and sometimes speechwriter to Donald Trump. No one really knows exactly who is funding this organization, because it is a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, and so is not required by the IRS to disclose its donors.
It has been running this year, in Ohio and elsewhere, a whole bunch of digital ads, and putting up billboards, for example, attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown for his stance on immigration policies, basically saying he wants to protect criminal illegals, and also running these general, very snarky anti-“woke” ads saying, basically, Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they only care about race and gender and DEI.
JJ: Right. Well, I think “rich people influence policy,” it’s almost like “dog bites man” at this point, right? Yeah, it’s bad, but that’s how the system works, and I think it’s important to lift up: If it didn’t matter for donors to obscure their support for this or that, well then they wouldn’t be trying to obscure it.
And the thing you’re writing about, these are down-ballot issues, where you might believe that Citizens for Sanity, in this case, or any other organization, you might think of this as like a grassroots group that’s scrambled together some money to take out ads. And so it is meaningful to know to connect these financial dots.
SM: Absolutely. It is meaningful. And since you made reference to down-ballot races, one of the things that I think is so nefarious about dark money, and these dark money organizations, is that they are spending a lot on races for things like school boards or, as I discussed in the article, state attorney generals races.
There is this organization, it was founded in 2014, called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which is a beautiful acronym, and they have been trying to elect extremely reactionary Republicans to the top law enforcement position in state after state. And in 2022, they spent something like $8.9 million trying to defeat Democratic state attorney generals candidates in the 2022 elections.
Now, they are a PAC of a kind, they’re a 527, so they have the same legal status as a Super PAC, so they have to disclose their donors. But the fact is, one of the major donors is a group called the Concord Fund, which has given them $17 million.
Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) that was founded by Leonard Leo, the judicial activist affiliated with the Federalist Society, who is basically Donald Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, who is largely responsible for the conservative takeover of the federal courts. His organization, this fund that he controls, gave $17 million to RAGA.
And we have no idea who contributed that money to the fund. We can make some educated guesses, but nobody really knows who’s funneling that money into trying to influence the election of the top law enforcement official in state after state around this country.
That’s alarming because, of course, some of these right-wing billionaires and corporations have a vested interest in who is sitting in that position. Because if it comes to enforcement of antitrust laws, or corruption laws, if they have a more friendly state attorney general in that position, it could mean millions of dollars for their bottom line.
JJ: And I think, from the point of view of the public, filtered through the point of view of the press, if you heard there’s this one macher, or this one rich person, and they’re pulling the strings and they’ve bought this judge, and they’ve paid for this policy and these ads, that would be one thing. But to have it filtered through a number of groups that are kind of opaque and you don’t really know, a minority point of view can be presented as a sort of groundswell of grassroots support.
SM: Exactly. It can create this sort of astroturfing effect where, “Oh, there are all these ads being run. It must be that there are lots of people who are really concerned or really opposed to this particular candidate,” when, in fact, it could be a single billionaire who is routing money for a number of different shells and front groups in an effort to influence the outcome of an election.
So I think attorney generals races are one kind of down-ballot race where we’ve seen a lot of dark money spent. School board elections are another, and this is something that has been really evident in the past couple of years, where various different Super PACs and other dark money groups have spent millions of dollars, that are affiliated with advocates for charter schools, and advocates for school vouchers have been spending money trying to elect school board members that are pro-voucher and pro–charter school.
In 2023, City Fund, which is a national pro–charter school group, bankrolled in part by billionaire Reed Hastings, donated $1.75 million from its affiliated PAC to a 501(c)(4), Denver Families for Public Schools, to try to elect three “friendly” pro–charter school candidates for the city school board, and all three of the candidates won.
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have children who went through the public system here in Naperville, I didn’t pay very close attention to who was running in those races, or who was backing those people. I just would read about it a couple days before the election. Most people don’t pay very close attention, unless they’re employees of the school district, or have children currently in school. They’re not paying that close attention to the school board elections. And so this influx of dark money could very well have tipped those races in the favor of the pro–charter school.
JJ: And name that group again, because it didn’t say “charter schools.”
SM: So the charter school group was City Fund, and it donated money to Denver Families for Public Schools….
JJ: : For “public schools….”
SM: Right, which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Yes, and it’s got this Orwellian name, because it’s Denver Families for Public Schools. But what they wanted to do was, of course, create more charter schools.
JJ: It’s deep, and it’s confusing because it’s designed to be confusing, and it’s opaque because, you know….
And then, OK, so here come media. And we know that lots of people, including reporters, still imagine the US press corps as kind of like an old movie, with press cards in their hat band, or Woodward and Bernstein connecting dots, holding the powerful to account, and the chips are just falling where they may.
And you make the point in the Progressive piece that there have been excellent corporate news media exposés of the influence of dark money, connecting those dots. But you write that news media have “missed or minimized as many stories about dark money as they have covered.” What are you getting at there?
SM: I absolutely believe that. So it is true, as I say, that there have been some excellent reports about dark money. Here in Chicago, we had this reclusive billionaire industrialist, Barre Seide, who made what most people say is the largest political contribution in American history. He donated his company to a fund, Marble Freedom Fund, run by Leonard Leo, again, a conservative judicial activist.
The Marble Freedom Fund sold the company for $1.6 billion. It’s hard for the corporate media to ignore a political contribution of $1.6 billion. That’s a $1.6 billion trust fund that Leonard Leo, who engineered the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court, is going to be able to use—he’s a very right-wing, conservative Catholic—to put his particular ideological stamp on American elections and on American culture. And so that got reported.
And, in fact, there have been some really excellent follow-up reports by ProPublica, among others, about how various Leonard Leo–affiliated organizations have influenced judicial appointments and have influenced judicial elections. So you have to give credit where credit’s due.
But the problem is that there are so many other cases where dark money is in play. Whether or not you can say it’s determining the outcome of elections or not is another story. But where dark money is playing a role, and it is simply not being talked about.
Steve Macek: “Outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.”
Think about the last month of this current presidential election. There hasn’t been much discussion about the influence of dark money. And yet OpenSecrets just came out with an analysis where they say that contributions from dark money groups and shell organizations are outpacing all prior elections in this year, and might surpass the $660 million in contributions from dark money sources that flooded the 2020 elections. So they’re projecting that could be as much as a billion dollars. We haven’t heard very much about this.
I don’t think necessarily dark money is going to make a huge difference one way or the other in the presidential race, but it certainly can make a difference in congressional races and attorney generals races, school board races, city council races, that’s where it can make a huge difference.
And I do know that OpenSecrets, among others, have done research, and they found that there were cases where, over a hundred different congressional races, there was more outside spending on those races than were spent by either of the candidates. Which is a scandal, that outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.
JJ: And it’s disheartening, the idea that, while you’re swimming in it, it’s too big of an issue to even lift out.
SM: And I think that’s also part of the reason why it’s accepted, sort of like the weather. And I think that’s part of the reason why there isn’t as much reporting in the corporate media as there ought to be about legal struggles over the regulation of dark money.
JJ: That’s exactly where I was going to lead you, for a final question, just because we know that reporters will say, well, they can’t cover what isn’t happening. But it is happening, that legal and community and policy pushback on this influence is happening. And so, finally, what should we know about that?
SM: State-level Republican lawmakers, and state legislatures across the country, are pushing legislation that would prohibit state officials and agencies from collecting or disclosing information about donors to nonprofits, including donors to those 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that I spoke about, that spend money on politics. So they’re trying to pass laws to make dark money even darker, to make this obscure money influencing our elections even harder to track. And I will say there are Republicans in Congress who have introduced federal legislation that would do the same thing.
Now, the bills that are being pushed through state legislatures, not probably going to be a surprise to anybody who follows this, are based on a model bill that was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which is a policy development organization that is funded by the Koch network of right-wing foundations, millionaires and billionaires. And they meet every year to develop model right-wing, libertarian legislation, that then is dutifully introduced into state legislatures around the country.
And since 2018, a number of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia, have all adopted some version of this ALEC legislation that criminalizes disclosing donors to nonprofits that engage in political activity.
And in Arizona, where this conservative legislation was made into law, in 2022, there was a ballot referendum by the voters on the Voter’s Right to Know Act, Proposition 211, that would basically reverse the ALEC attempt to criminalize the disclosure of the names of donors. It would require PACs spending at least $50,000 on statewide campaigns to disclose all donors who have given more than $5,000—a direct reversal of the ALEC-inspired law.
Conservative dark money group spent a lot of money trying to defeat this, and yet they lost. And then they spent a lot of money challenging the new law, Proposition 211, in court. And it has gone to trial, I think, three times, and been defeated each time.
Now, the initial battle over Proposition 211 was covered to some degree in the corporate media, the New York Times, Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who does excellent reporting on dark money issues, discussed it. But since then, we have gotten very little coverage of the court battles that continue to this day over this attempt to bring more transparency to campaign spending in the state of Arizona.
JJ: So, not to hammer it too hard home, but there are legal efforts, policy efforts around the country, to bring more transparency, to explode this idea of dark money, to connect the dots, and more media coverage of them would actually have an amplifying effect on that very transparency.
SM: Absolutely right. You would think that media organizations, whether they’re corporate or independent media, would have a vested interest in seeing more transparency in election spending. That would benefit their own reporting, and the reporters. And yet they really haven’t done a great job of covering it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois, and a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program. The piece we’re talking about, “Dark Money Uncovered,” can be found at TheProgressive.org. Steve Macek, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Much like the front page, breaking-news newsletters demonstrate which stories news outlets think deserve the most attention. It’s important real estate: By pushing these stories to readers, they influence the way we think about the world, even what in the world we should be thinking about. Even if readers don’t click through, just seeing the headlines can shape our perceptions. And, as a new FAIR study has found, those headlines often feed into predictable patterns that parrot official narratives, and prioritize clicks over well-informed citizens.
Outlets like the New York Times promise to send readers alerts about “important news.”
Most major outlets produce a variety of email newsletters for readers, which have increasingly broad reach. Subscription numbers are generally not made public, but the New York Times‘ top newsletter, the Morning, reportedly has over 5 million readers daily, and CNNadvertises over 1 million total newsletter subscribers.
To see what kinds of stories outlets present to readers as urgently important, FAIR studied four national outlets that offer unpaywalled breaking news email alerts over the course of two months. We subscribed to alerts from the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and Fox News from April 1 to May 31, 2024, and recorded each alert sent. These outlets advertised that subscribers would receive “24/7 alerts” as the “biggest” and most “important” stories to “stay on top of the news.”
We excluded the occasional roundups of top stories, as these were outside the “breaking news” format. The Times and USA Today periodically offered op-eds as breaking news alerts, and we did include these. FAIR recorded 630 alerts during the study period.
We coded each alert by topic (National Politics, International Politics, Business/Economy, Crime, Entertainment, Sports, Health, Science, Disaster, Personal Advice, Miscellaneous) and subtopic (e.g., Gaza Protests, Abortion Rights, Foreign Aid Bill). Seventy-five alerts were assigned to more than one topic; for instance, a story about the trial of a celebrity might be coded as both Crime and Entertainment.
National politics dominates
Trump’s hush money trial, with its titillating details, was the subject of numerous breaking news alerts (New York Times, 5/7/24).
The outlets put out alerts with varying frequency—USA Today put out the most (224, or almost four per day) and CNN the fewest (83)—but National Politics stories dominated across all outlets, making up 274 (43%) of 630 total alerts. Within these stories, Donald Trump figured prominently, referenced in 121 alerts (44% of all National Politics stories). Eighty-eight of these, or 73% of the total stories about Trump, were about his trials—predominately his criminal trial in Manhattan, which ran through all but the first two weeks of the study period.
The Times, with 207 alerts sent out overall, devoted the highest percentage of its National Politics alerts (79) to Trump’s legal woes (39%), while Fox, with 116 alerts sent out, afforded them 17 articles of 63 National Politics stories—the smallest percentage of the four outlets (27%). Twice—the day Stormy Daniels testified (5/7/24) and the day the jury announced its guilty verdict (5/30/24)—the Times sent three trial-related alerts to its subscribers over the course of the day.
President Joe Biden received far less attention in National Politics stories; he was referenced in 35, or 13% of them. Fifteen of these stories were about the election, of which only two (USA Today, 5/28/24; Fox News, 5/1/24) did not also mention Trump.
Gaza, at home and abroad
After the Trump trials, the top National Politics topics included the university campus protests for Gaza (41), abortion rights (16) and the foreign aid bill (6). (We coded stories about abortion into the Health category as well.)
Twenty-six (61%) of the 41 alerts about campus Gaza protests came from Fox News, accounting for 22% of all Fox alerts across categories, making it the outlet’s single most frequent alert topic. On seven days between April 17 and May 3, Fox sent multiple alerts about the protests; its fixation peaked on April 30, when the network sent five such alerts in a single day.
Fox’s encampment alert subject lines consistently referred to protesters as “agitators,” calling them “anti-Israel” and even “antisemitic” (4/30/24). (The New York Times called them “pro-Palestinian protests,” and USA Today simply referred to them as “protests.”) “Columbia University, Anti-Israel Agitators Fail to Reach Agreement as Unrest Continues” read a typical Fox subject line (4/29/24). “Facilities Worker Says Anti-Israel Columbia University Agitators ‘Held Me Hostage’” read another the next day (4/30/24).
The only Fox News alert (4/26/24) for an international issue other than Gaza was about King Charles’ health.
There were many other Gaza protests occurring around the country during the study period (Democracy Now!, 4/18/24, 4/24/24, 5/22/24, 5/30/24, 5/31/24), yet only one alert (Fox News, 4/9/24) mentioned any besides those on college campuses.
The second-most prevalent news category was International Politics, which had 97 alerts (15% of all). Sixty-three of these (65%) pertained to the ongoing Gaza crisis (not including the campus Gaza protests, which were coded as National Politics). Iran was sometimes mentioned in Gaza-related alerts, but it was also featured in eight unrelated alerts (8%) concerning the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Other recurring topics included Ukraine and the Ukraine War (6%), the shooting of the Slovakian president (5%), British elections (3%), China (3%) and Julian Assange (2%).
Curiously, while Foxadvertises its breaking news alerts as keeping subscribers “in the know on the most important moments around the world,” it only produced seven alerts on international issues—six of them on the Gaza crisis. (The other article discussed King Charles’ return to royal duties after his cancer diagnosis.) That’s just one more alert on Gaza during the entire study period than Fox put out on its peak day of breaking news coverage of the encampments. At the other three outlets, International Politics stories were the second most frequent alerts.
Climate crisis not breaking news
This CNN story (5/7/24) about climate change breaking heat records was not deemed urgent enough to qualify as breaking news.
It’s impossible to argue that the climate crisis isn’t an ongoing urgent news story. Yet the Science/Environment category had the fewest number of alerts, at 24, making up just 4% of alerts tracked. And only seven (1%) of the subject lines that appeared in our inbox referred or even alluded to climate-related topics.
During the study period, there were multiple major climate crisis stories that CNN, USA Today and the Times (but not Fox) reporters covered—but, for the most part, the outlets chose not to include these stories in their breaking news alerts.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that a right-wing outlet like Fox put out no alerts about climate change; its lone science story (4/8/24) was about the April solar eclipse. But CNN and the New York Times did only marginally better. CNN sent alerts for two Science stories, only one of which (4/15/24) was about the climate crisis: “Ocean Heat Is Driving a Global Coral Bleaching Event, and It Could Be the Worst on Record.”
At the same time, CNN‘s website reported on extreme ocean temperatures causing mass marine mortalities (CNN, 4/21/24), extreme heat causing health emergencies (CNN, 4/18/24) and April’s record-breaking heat (CNN, 5/7/24), among other climate change–related topics. On the days that these stories were published, however, CNN only sent out National Politics alerts, or simply no alerts at all.
One of the eight Science stories that the Times pushed was directly about the climate crisis, a story (5/13/24) about federal regulations impacting renewable energy (which we also coded as National Politics). Another Science article (7/3/24) that was not primarily about the climate crisis did mention its role in increasing turbulence experienced on airplane flights.
The Times does offer a paywalled newsletter for stories about climate, called Climate Forward. But they also have a free newsletter called On Politics, offering election-related news alerts—and that didn’t stop them from promoting eight articles directly related to the 2024 presidential election as breaking news.
In its online and print editions, the Times reported plenty of stories related to the climate crisis—but, as at CNN, they simply didn’t deem them important enough to send as breaking news alerts. On April 10, the Times published a story about ocean heat shattering records, and on April 15 it covered the coral bleaching event. Neither were sent as alerts.
The New York Times found mattress reviews more urgent than climate change.
On May 28, the Times published a piece headlined “Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year”; that story wasn’t deemed “important news” that day by the Times’ breaking news alert team, but the “Best Mattresses of 2024” was.
All the outlets studied also failed to send out stories about major flooding disasters in Brazil, Afghanistan and Indonesia (Democracy Now!, 5/13/24, 5/14/24), or about the major heat waves in South Asia that killed hundreds of people (Democracy Now!, 5/28/24; CBS News, 5/15/24). All of these crises are major examples of how climate change is affecting people around the world in drastic ways.
USA Today did best on climate, sending out 13 alerts under the Science/Environment category; four of them discussed climate change, including topics such as carbon emissions and pollution. That’s still less than 2% of the paper’s alerts during the two-month period.
Corporate outlets have long been more than willing to leave climate change out of their stories about weather phenomenons and natural disasters around the world (FAIR.org, 9/20/18, 7/18/23, 6/28/24).
According to data published by the Pew Research Center in August 2023, 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat. According to data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication up until the fall of 2023, 64% of the nation is worried about global warming, 58% believe global warming is already harming people in the US, and 70% think that global warming will harm future generations.
If more than half of the public views global warming and climate change as an urgent issue, why do these major publications not treat it as one?
Crime, entertainment over economy
Many Crime alerts involved celebrities, like one for this Fox News story (4/15/24) about Alec Baldwin.
Although news media frequently report that the economy is “voters’ top concern,” leading into the 2024 election FAIR identified only 40 news alerts as belonging to the Business/Economy beat—6% of all.
Fox and CNN suggested to alert subscribers that Crime stories were more than twice as important, making up 21% of Fox‘s alerts and 19% of CNN‘s. (USA Today and the Times only devoted 7% and 4% of their alerts to crime, respectively.) The violent crime rate has actually gone down 26% (and the property crime rate 19%) since President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, according to the New York Times (7/24/24), but media (including the Times) still focus heavily on the topic (FAIR.org, 7/25/24).
Mass shootings made up 21% of Crime alerts (13) across all outlets, which is not surprising, considering there have already been 348 mass shootings in 2024.
Celebrity crimes made up a large portion of Crime alerts across all outlets, at 25 (40%) out of 62. Many of these stories were about Alec Baldwin (5), OJ Simpson (5) and Scottie Scheffler (5).
Fox’s Crime alerts featured headlines meant to catch a reader’s attention—but not provide a lot of information. Take the May 17 news alert from Fox, “Pelosi Hammer Attacker Learns Fate During Sentencing,” for example. Why not include what the sentence was—30 years in prison—in the alert itself?
On April 15, when three out of four alerts sent out by Fox were about Crime (the fourth was a story about Trump’s hush money trial, coded as National Politics), one was headlined “Search for Kansas Women Takes a Turn as Spokeswoman for Investigators Gives Update.” The “turn” was an announcement that officials had given up hope of finding the missing women alive.
For its part, the New YorkTimes gave its readers more Entertainment alerts (18) than Economy alerts (14), pushing out 46% of all Entertainment stories tracked in the study. The paper also put out the highest number of Personal Advice (81% of all) and Miscellaneous stories (72%). The Times and USA Today were the only outlets to send out Personal Advice stories as breaking news alerts, such as “The Six Best White Sneakers” (New York Times, 5/15/24) and “Being a Bridesmaid Can Be Expensive. Should You Say Yes or No?” (USA Today, 5/5/24).
A few New York Times Personal Advice stories (5/15/24, 5/28/24, 5/30/24) were from Wirecutter, the product-review website the Times bought in 2016. The website states at the top of each article that “when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” (This process is explained in a bit more depth here.) In the Times’ annual report, revenue made from Wirecutter commissions is listed as part of “Other Businesses,” a category that made the Times$265 million in 2023. These Wirecutter stories are not urgent news stories—but they do help the Times make a profit off its readers (FAIR.org, 6/17/21).
Questionable urgency
Stop the presses! The New York Times (4/22/24) reports that some songs on Taylor Swift’s latest album “sounded a whole lot like others she has already put out.”
The New York Times and USA Today sometimes considered op-eds newsy enough to dedicate an entire alert to, in addition to their regular “breaking news.” An op-ed about Gmail’s 20th anniversary warranted an alert, just like the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did. An op-ed on the dangers of sexual choking got the same weight as the news of the ICC preparing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. And in both instances, alerts were pushed on the same day within hours of each other.
The Times also published the most Health stories (21) about seemingly random (rather than breaking news) topics, such as whether oats and apple cider vinegar can really help you lose weight, why we age and tips for a better sex life. (Many of these Health stories were dually coded into Personal Advice.) These types of stories may have surprised readers who subscribed in order to, as the Timesadvertises, “get informed as important news breaks around the world.”
Times alerts of questionable urgency were often sent out with no apparent rhyme or reason, in the midst of other, more obviously newsworthy alerts. For example, on April 24, the Times sent out alerts about abortion laws in Arizona and Idaho, and the US secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine—along with a story headlined “Has Taylor Swift Fatigue Finally Set In?”
Many of the Times’ stories we coded as “Miscellaneous” had obvious clickbait headlines, like “A Hiker Was Lost in the Woods. Snow Was Falling. Time Was Running Out” (4/30/24) and “These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement” (5/8/24). The latter was linked to the New York Times Magazine, the Times‘ weekly Sunday magazine that highlights interviews, commentaries, features and longer-length articles—again, not urgent news.
On May 27, when over 2,000 people died in Papua New Guinea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the tent massacre in Rafah, the Times thought it reasonable to also send alerts about Manhattanhenge, nude modeling and a celebrity obituary that linked to its recently-acquired sports news site, the Athletic. As we’ve seen before (FAIR.org, 6/7/24), the Times enjoys focusing on trending and glamorous topics.
These media outlets offer newsletters that promise comprehensive news alerts about important breaking stories occurring everywhere. After tallying the topics covered, we can confidently state that that’s not what subscribers are getting.
As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel and the US immediatelyblamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC, 7/28/24).
But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.
The New York Times (7/28/24) matter-of-factly described an explosion of disputed origin as a “rocket from Lebanon.”
Despite multiple eyewitnesses describing an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor missile falling on the field during the time of the Majdal Shams strike (Cradle, 7/28/24), the New York Times insisted on spotlighting Israeli and US claims in its headlines, rather than genuinely assessing the facts on the ground.
On July 28, the Times published “Fears of Escalation After Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field,” pinning the blame squarely on Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The next day, reporting on the potential escalations, the Times headline (7/29/24) described the strike as a “Deadly Rocket Attack Tied to Hezbollah.”
While the July 29 subhead acknowledged that Hezbollah denied responsibility, the assertion in the headline undermined any reference to alternative explanations. Attribution to Hezbollah was then repeated without qualification in the first paragraph of the story.
Rebroadcasting government talking points not only does a disservice to newsreaders as Israel has a long history of misleading the public, but it also serves Netanyahu’s goals of justifying an escalation against Hezbollah. Predictably, the New York Times did not contextualize accusations of Hezbollah responsibility with information about Israel’s current objectives for wider war. This continues a long trend of US media outlets obscuring and distorting reality in order to downplay Israel’s aggressive regional ambitions (FAIR.org, 8/22/23).
Israel an unreliable source
Even lying about the murder of a journalist doesn’t make Western journalists skeptical of official Israeli claims (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22).
The first problem is that the New York Times accepts narratives from Israeli military and government officials at face value. From peddling evidence-free claims about Palestinian use of human shields during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 (Amnesty International, 2009; Human Rights Watch, 8/13/09), to dodging responsibility for its assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22), to consistently attempting to conceal its use of illegal white phosphorus munitions across the Middle East (Haaretz, 10/22/06; Human Rights Watch, 3/25/09; Guardian, 10/13/23), the Israeli military has been known to circulate disinformation to the international public for decades. Neither in headlines nor in the text of its pieces does the Times acknowledge this well-established history.
The current assault on Gaza has made the central role of lies in Israel’s public relations arsenal clearer than ever. As early as October 17, there was controversy over the origin of a rocket strike on the Al-Ahli Arab hospital that killed hundreds of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 11/3/23). In the media confusion, Israel released audio it said captured two Hamas militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by Britain’s Channel 4 news (10/19/23) found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together. In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip to substantiate the notion that it had not committed a war crime.
In November, Israel laid siege to Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital facility, leaving behind mass graves. In another dubious public relations campaign, Israel justified its assault on Al Shifa hospital by alleging that there was a Hamas command center underneath the facility, and that no civilians were killed in the operation (FAIR.org, 12/3/23).
What might be labeled “disinformation” when it comes from an official enemy is called “information missteps” from Israel (NBC, 11/18/23).
During and after the assault, Israel pumped out high volumes of low-effort lies (NBC, 11/18/23; New Arab, 11/14/23) to convince the public that there had indeed been a Hamas operations base in the basement, going so far as planting weapons in hospital rooms to insinuate Hamas activity in the area (CNN, 11/19/23). In the face of mounting public ridicule, Israel’s official Arabic Twitter account was compelled to delete a staged video of an Israeli actress boosting the Hamas-hospital-occupation theory while pretending to be a Palestinian Al Shifa nurse (France 24, 11/15/23).
However, after the mainstream outlets expressed skepticism at the claims and acknowledged that Israel had not provided sufficient evidence to back them up (New York Times, 11/17/23; Guardian, 11/17/23), Israel announced that the supposed Hamas base was actually in southern Gaza.
At the same time as the Al Shifa raid, Israel stormed Rantisi Children’s Hospital, and engaged in similarly preposterous propaganda efforts to justify its attack. Noting the presence of hospital gowns, baby bottles and toilets in the children’s hospital, Israeli spokesperson Daniel Hagari declared that this was proof of hostages in the facility (Jerusalem Post, 11/13/23). Hagari (Al Jazeera, 11/17/23) later pointed to what he said was a handwritten list of Hamas fighters hanging from one of the hospital’s walls, holding that “every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift, guarding the people that were here.”
But, this was not, in fact, a damning roll call of Hamas fighters, but instead an Arabic calendar. All that appeared on the calendar were the days of the week, though this was unknown to most of Hagari’s largely non-Arabic-speaking audience (Electronic Intifada, 11/14/23).
Even recently, when Netanyahu visited Washington, DC, the Israeli prime minister gave a speech to lawmakers that was filled with obvious lies, including the contention that during attacks on Rafah, no civilians were killed, save for the two dozen who were murdered in a Hamas weapons depot explosion (New Arab, 7/25/24). This flies in the face of numerousreports detailing fatal bombings and rocket attacks in Gaza’s southernmost city, including a single Israeli missile that killed at least 45 people (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).
It is not possible that the writers and the editors at the Times—the supposed newspaper of record—are ignorant of this seemingly unending series of deceptions. The decision to uncritically accept the word of the IDF regarding the Golan Heights strike demonstrates a deliberate editorial decision to knowingly advance the deceitful public relations goals of a genocidal state.
Justifying a wider war
Two days before the Majdal Sham massacre, Israel was reportedly told that “now is the right time” to escalate its war against Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24).
In light of Israel’s past lies, serious journalism ought to refrain from regurgitating Israeli claims without significant context or qualification. This is especially true when doing so would advance goals as disastrous as Netanyahu’s current aims. In the case of the Majdal Shams strike, media proliferation of Israeli propaganda manufactures consent for escalating the war on the northern border—something Israel has longstated as its goal, and something American officials have long been concerned about.
Multiple generals have bragged about Israel’s combat readiness in the north. In February, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that if a ceasefire was reached in Gaza, Israel would increase its fire against Hezbollah, and later said his government is preparing to send Lebanon into the “stone age.”
Although some in the Israeli press believe that Israel is incapable of handling a front against both Hamas and Hezbollah (Cradle, 6/28/24), statements of readiness have intensified in summer months. The IDF announced on June 18 that it had approved operational plans for a war in Lebanon. Later, Axios (6/24/24) reported that the US envoy to Lebanon warned Hezbollah, “The US won’t be able to hold Israel back if the situation on the border continues to escalate.” Just two days before the Majdal Shams strike, Israeli media reported that Washington had given “full legitimacy” to an IDF campaign in Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24), contrary to apparent earlier efforts to avert a wider war in the Middle East.
On top of neglecting to acknowledge Israel’s flimsy credibility in their Majdal Shams analysis, Times reporters failed to address this readily available information about Israeli military objectives. By ignoring Israel’s strategic aims, they are ensuring the reader doesn’t encounter further reasons to question Israel’s account about the strike.
Who fired the rocket?
Though it included a pro forma denial from Hezbollah, the New York Times (7/30/24) referred throughout this article to a “rocket attack” rather than an air-defense misfire.
When reporting on Israel’s “reprisal” assaults on Lebanon following the strike on the soccer field, the New YorkTimes (7/28/24) again asserted Israeli claims as fact, saying in the first paragraph that “a rocket from Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town,” which “prompted Israel to retaliate early Sunday with strikes across Lebanon.”
Was Lebanon—and implicitly Hezbollah—the source of the explosion that killed the 12 children? The Times does not care to examine this question, which warrants exploration. Israel’s military chief of staff declared that the damage was done with an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket fired by Hezbollah, a claim that was uncritically repeated as fact by the New York Times (7/30/24), despite the lack of independent corroboration. While there has been fighting in the area, and Hezbollah acknowledged that they fired Falaq-1 rockets at the nearby IDF barracks, there is significant reason to doubt that one of these rockets struck the soccer field.
The Falaq-1 was described by Haaretz (7/28/24) as a munition that targets bunkers. But, images from the aftermath of the attack show that the damage to physical structures was far from bunker-busting. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the Hezbollah expert Saad cited military specialists who told her that “if [Hezbollah] had used the Falaq-1, we would have seen a much larger crater…. It would be much, much bigger and there would be much more destruction.”
As discussed above, Israel, well-known for planting or fabricating evidence for propagandistic ends, released images of rocket fragments that it alleged were found at the impact site, though the Associated Press (7/30/24) was unable to verify their authenticity.
A substantial case can be made that the projectile came from the IDF. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, multiple eyewitnesses told Arab news outlets the projectile was a misfired Iron Dome missile (Cradle, 7/28/24; Drop Site, 7/30/24). The New York Times omitted this from its coverage of this event.
Contrary to the mythos behind the high-tech defense system, there have already been several cases of Iron Dome missiles falling on populated areas within Israel since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/11/23; Jerusalem Post, 12/2/23, 7/25/24; Times of Israel, 5/4/23, 8/9/24) with many such instances resulting in civilian injuries and deaths. There was even a report of an Iron Dome malfunction near Majdal Shams, months before the recent July strike.
Bolstering the case for an Iron Dome malfunction, OSINT researcher Michale Kobs noted that the sound profile of the projectile suggested that its speed was constant until it hit the ground. Hezbollah’s projectiles constantly accelerate as they fall on their targets, since they are driven by gravity, whereas Iron Dome missiles are propelled throughout their entire flight.
For their part, the Druze people in the Golan Heights—an Arabic-speaking religious community which has largely declined offers of Israeli citizenship—repudiated Israel’s displays of sympathy for their slain children, rejecting the use of their suffering to advance Israel’s plans for a broader war (Democracy Now!, 7/30/24). Locals even protested a visit from Netanyahu, chanting “Killer! Killer!” and demanding he leave the area (New Arab, 7/29/24).
In the Times reporting on the strike, Lebanese and Syrian denials of Hezbollah’s responsibility for the strikes were acknowledged and reported, but portrayed as predictable denials that did nothing to alter the narrative. By omitting the evidence pointing to Israeli responsibility for the strikes, the New York Times assists Israel in yet another propaganda campaign to mislead the public in order to justify further regional strife and bloodshed.
Featured image: Screenshot from a New York Times video (7/28/24) that claimed to know that the explosion in the Golan Heights was caused by a “rocket from Lebanon.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.
So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.
Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.
Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.
JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?
VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116° Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.
Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.
And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.
JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.
VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”
JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?
VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.
JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.
VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.
JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.
And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?
Victoria St. Martin: “To connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more.”
VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.
But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.
And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that. I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.
I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.
While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.
JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.
VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.
I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest…. I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…
JJ: Opaque.
VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.
JJ: Absolutely.
Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?
VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.
Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.
So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before. There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.
I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.
Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings.
If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:
In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.
Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.
1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.
MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.
2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New YorkTimes (2/26/03).
This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you? We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece, “Dark Money Uncovered,” appeared on TheProgressive.org.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy (8/20/24) described Sen. Bernie Sanders’ speech to the Democratic National Convention as an attempt to “make policy proposals that put [Kamala] Harris in a big-government vise, binding (or pushing) her in a direction that a lot of moderates do not want to go.”
Healy depicted Sanders as
grasp[ing] the lectern with both hands as he unfurled one massive government program idea after another in a progressive policy reverie that must have been music to the ears of every democratic socialist at the United Center.
New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healey (8/20/24): “On Tuesday night, Sanders put Harris on the hot seat.”
Healey followed the standard New York Times line (FAIR.org, 7/26/24) that progressive candidates need to move to the right to win—and scorned Sanders for ignoring that advice: “Harris needs some of those swing-state moderates if she’s going to win the presidency, but the electoral math didn’t seem to be on Sanders’s mind.”
Strangely, though, the specific policies that Healey mentioned Sanders as promoting don’t seem to be particularly unpopular, with moderates or anyone else. Rather, opinion polls find them to be supported by broad majorities:
“Overturning Citizens United“: Three-fourths of survey respondents (Center for Public Integrity, 5/10/18) say that they support a constitutional amendment t0 overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allows the wealthy to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. In the same survey, 60% said reducing the influence of big campaign donors is “very important.” According to the Pew Research Center (5/8/18), 77% of the public says “there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations” can spend on political campaigns.
“Making healthcare ‘a human right’ for all Americans”: A 2020 Pew Research Center poll (9/29/20) found that “63% of US adults say the government has the responsibility to provide healthcare coverage for all.” Another Pew poll (1/23/23) reported 57% agreeing that it’s “the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”
“Raising the minimum wage to a ‘living wage’”: According to the Pew Research Center (4/22/21), 62% of Americans want the federal minimum wage raised to $15 an hour. (Most of the remainder wanted the minimum wage increased by a lesser amount.) According to the think tank Data for Progress (4/26/24), 86% of likely voters do not think the current federal minimum wage is enough for a decent quality of life.
“Raising teachers’ salaries”: The 2023 PDK poll found that 67% of respondents support increasing local teacher salaries by raising property taxes. The AP/NORC poll (4/18) reported that “78% of Americans say teachers in this country are underpaid.”
“Cutting prescription drug costs in half”: A poll from 2023 by Data for Progress found that 73% of all likely voters supported Biden administration initiatives allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs. Health policy organization KFF (8/21/23) reported that 88% of adults support “limiting how much drug companies can increase the price for prescription drugs each year to no more than the rate of inflation.”
Back in 2015, when Sanders was running for president, Healy co-wrote an article for the Times (5/31/15; Extra!, 7–8/15) that declared him “unelectable,” in part because he supported “far higher taxes on the wealthy.” But raising taxes on the rich turns out to be consistently popular in opinion polls (FAIR.org, 4/20/15).
What we’re learning is that progressive policy proposals are deeply unpopular—with the New York Times‘ deputy opinion editor.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.
Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.
Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.
Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.
Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.
JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?
ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.
And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.
So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.
So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.
So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.
Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”
And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.
The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”
And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.
And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.
JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.
So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”
And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.
ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.
JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.
ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.
And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.
And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.
JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.
ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.
He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly and morally—questioned the horrific US invasion of Iraq.
Phil Donahue in 1977.
Beginning in the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, consumer rights, gay rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe, warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.
Mainstream media obits have predictably had a focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.
I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration, and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”
But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, congressmembers Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.
No one on US TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a US journalist.
Phil Donahue (right) with Michael Moore—three right-wingers for balance not pictured.
But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq War—she was told she’d need to book three right-wingers for political balance.
Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.
Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indie media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s).
Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him, to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: Body of War.
Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.
He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement, and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.
A version of this post appeared on Common Dreams (8/19/24) and other outlets.
This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.
Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.
Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Recent student-led campus encampments in solidarity with Palestine prompted considerable media conversation. But, according to a new FAIR study examining TV and newspaper discussions in the period from April 21 to May 12, those conversations rarely included students themselves—and even fewer included student protesters.
FAIR examined how often key corporate media discussion forums contain student and activist voices. The Sunday morning shows (ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday) brought on no students or activists, opting instead to speak primarily with government officials.
The daily news shows we surveyed—CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News‘ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour—were slightly better, with six students out of 79 guests, but only two of them were pro-Palestine protesters.
The op-ed pages of the New York Times, WashingtonPost, USA Today and Wall StreetJournal featured two students out of 52 writers, only one of whom was a protester.
Sunday Shows: Student-Free Zone
The agenda-setting Sunday morning shows, which historically skew towards government officials (FAIR.org, 8/12/20, 10/21/23), showed no interest in giving airtime to student or activist voices. For the first weeks following the first encampment set up at Columbia University, when the student protests began to command national media attention, FAIR analyzed every episode of ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday.
Out of 36 one-on-one and roundtable guests across all networks, 29 (81%) were current or former government officials or politicians, and five (14%) were journalists. One academic and one think tank representative were also featured. Of the 29 government sources, only six spoke about having personal experience with the protests, or about universities in states they represent.
No students or activists, and only one academic, were invited to speak on any of the Sunday shows. The one academic, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, didn’t speak about his own experience with the encampments, but about his research on student safety.
Some guests utilized inflammatory language when discussing the protesters, who were never afforded the opportunity to defend themselves. On This Week, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (ABC, 5/5/24), referred to the encampments as “Little Gazas,” and said the students “deserved our contempt” and “mockery.” “I mean, they’re out there in their N95 masks in the open air, with their gluten allergies, demanding that Uber Eats get delivered to them,” he said. Later on, Cotton referred to a keffiyeh—a symbol of Palestinian identity and solidarity—that protesters had put on a statue of George Washington as a “terrorist headdress.”
Jeffrey Miller lies on the pavement, one of four students killed when the National Guard was sent in to suppress protests at Kent State on May 4, 1970.
Three guests were asked about the idea of bringing in the National Guard to quell protests, only one declared it to be a bad idea. The other two gave similarly equivocal answers: Sen. J.D. Vance (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) said, “I don’t know if you need to call in the National Guard,” while Republican congressional candidate Tiffany Smiley (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) responded, “I don’t know if the National Guard is necessary.” But both agreed that some kind of police response was needed to these student protests.
In most other instances, the host would ask a politician for their thoughts on the encampments, to which the guest would respond with platitudes about nonviolence. For instance, CNN‘s Jake Tapper (5/5/24) asked Biden adviser Mitch Landrieu whether groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “causing unrest for the American people.” Landrieu responded, “Everybody has a right to protest, but they have to protest peacefully.”
Framing the questions
Throughout the Sunday show discussions, there was a heavy focus on whether the protests were violent and antisemitic, and next to no explanation of the demands of the protesters. Even though violence by—as opposed to against—campus protesters was very uncommon, politicians continually framed the protests as a threat to safety. White House national security communications advisor John Kirby (This Week, 4/28/24) decried “the antisemitism language that we’ve heard of late, and…all the hate speech and the threats of violence out there.”
Of all 64 questions asked to guests, only one—CNN’s interview with LA Mayor Karen Bass (4/28/24)—mentioned divestment, the withdrawal of colleges’ investments from companies linked to the Gaza military campaign and/or Israel, which was the central demand of most of the encampments. Moreover, this was the only instance in which divestment was discussed by any host or guest on the Sunday shows. On the other hand, 20 of the 36 conversations named antisemitism as an issue.
There were two questions asked about the safety of Jewish students (CNN, 4/28/24, 5/5/24)—by which CNN meant pro-Israel Jewish students, as many Jewish students took part in the encampments. (Forty-two percent of young Jewish Americans say Israel’s response to October 7 is “unacceptable,” according to Pew Research Center polling.) Only one question was asked about the safety of Muslim students (CNN, 5/5/24), even though both groups reported feeling almost equally unsafe.
All questions on violence related to the protesters, and not to counter-protesters or law enforcement. The interview with Bass (CNN, 4/28/24) made no mention of the violent counter-protests at UCLA that sent 25 protesters to the emergency room, but instead focused on hypothetical dangers to pro-Israel students.
Weekday News Shows: Rare Sightings of Protesters
In the same period as the study on Sunday shows, FAIR analyzed every episode of CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News’ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour. These daily programs were chosen as representative, highly rated daily news shows that have a focus on political discussion. Although the evening shows, unlike the Sunday shows, included occasional student voices, they were far outnumbered by government officials, journalists and educators—and only two student guests were protesters.
Of the 79 guests who appeared on these shows, 23 (29%) were current or former government officials and politicians, 19 (24%) were university-level educators and administrators, 18 (23%) were journalists, six (8%) were students and 13 (16%) had other jobs.
These shows showed more variation across the networks than the Sunday shows. Sixty-five percent of PBS NewsHour‘s guests were university-affiliated, for instance, and none were government officials, while almost two-thirds of Hannity‘s guests on Fox News (64%) were government officials and politicians, with no educators or students appearing.
The three student journalists found on daily news shows all appeared together on one episode of the PBS NewsHour (4/30/24).
There were a total of six students invited among the 79 guests, accounting for fewer than 8% of all interviewees. Two of these were pro-Palestine protesters, both appearing on MSNBC‘s ReidOut (4/22/24, 4/30/34). Three were nonaligned student journalists, all appearing together on PBS (4/30/24), and one, a student government leader at Columbia, was an Israeli who supported her government (CNN, 4/30/24).
One of the students on ReidOut (4/30/24), identified only by his first name, Andrew, described the police brutality at Washington University in St. Louis: “I was held in custody for six hours. I wasn’t provided food or water, and I have since been suspended and banned from my campus.”
Andrew was one of just two guests who mentioned police brutality. The other student protester, Marium Alwan, told host Joy Reid (4/22/24) that the Columbia encampment, and all encampments, “stand for liberation and human rights and equality for Jewish people, Palestinians.” When asked about antisemitism, she said they “stand against hateful rhetoric.”
Maya Platek, the only student featured on CNN‘s Lead (4/30/24), was president elect of the Columbia School of General Studies (and former head content writer for the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit). She said that at Columbia, she “would not say that I have been feeling the most comfortable.” She called the idea of divesting from Israel, and suspending Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University, “completely atrocious.”
Completely shutting out student voices, Fox News prioritized right-wing politicians like former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to speak on the protests. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Hannity, 4/30/24) compared the encampments to “Poland pre–World War II” and “Kristallnacht.”
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft (CNN, 4/22/24) was brought on to talk about student protests more often than all student protesters put together.
CNN‘s Lead, the show with the second-highest number of government official guests (35%), featured more centrists than did Hannity. Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz (5/1/24) said that while “it’s their First Amendment right” to protest, for students to say such as “go back to Poland or bomb Tel Aviv or kill all the Zionists” was not acceptable, a message similar to those frequently heard on the Sunday shows.
Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a major donor to Columbia University, was invited to speak about encampments three times (Fox, 4/22/24, 5/1/24; CNN, 4/22/24)—more times than student protesters spoke across all four shows.
Although a slight improvement over the Sunday shows’ complete shut-out of student voices, these daily news shows still had relatively few references to divestment, which came up in 16 interviews (20%), or police violence, mentioned in seven interviews. This compares to 33 interviews (42%) that discussed antisemitism.
Newspaper Op-Eds: Views From a Staffer’s Desk
Free-speech celebrant John McWhorter wrote a column for the New York Times (4/23/24) that wondered why students were allowed to protest against Israel.
The opinion columns of corporate newspapers did no better at including student protesters’ voices than the TV shows. FAIR analyzed every op-ed primarily about the campus encampments in the same time span (April 21–May 12), from the New York Times, USA Today, Wall StreetJournal and WashingtonPost.
In the observed period, the Times published 11 op-eds about the campus encampments, all written by Times columnists. The paper failed to include any students or activists in its opinion section.
Out of nine different Times columnists, only one mentioned visiting an encampment: John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia professor who writes regularly for the paper, was critical of the protests happening at his university. The self-styled free-speech advocate demanded to know, “Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
During the same period, the Washington Post also ran 11 encampment-related op-eds. Ten were written by regular columnists, and two mentioned having visited an encampment. Those two—Karen Attiah (5/2/24) and Eugene Robinson (4/29/24)—wrote positively of the protests. Attiah wrote of her visit:
Around me, students were reading, studying and chatting. Some were making art and painting. I saw an environment rich with learning, but I did not see disruption.
The paper’s only guest column on the encampments was penned by Paul Berman (4/26/24), a Columbia graduate and writer for the center-right Jewish magazine Tablet, who opined that the student protesters had “gone out of their minds,” and that professors were to blame for “intellectual degeneration.” Like the Times, the Post failed to include any students or activists in their opinion section.
‘We bruise, we feel’
In the only op-ed the study found written by a student protester (USA Today, 5/8/24), Columbia’s Allie Wong was able to succinctly state the objective of the encampments: “We are calling to end the violence and genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”
USA Today published fewer encampment-related opinion pieces, but invited more outside perspectives. Of its seven columns during the study period, four were written by regular columnists, one by Columbia student protester Allie Wong (5/8/24), one by pro-Israel advocate Nathan J. Diament (4/22/24) and one by the son of Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel (5/2/24).
In her op-ed, Wong described the police brutality exhibited during her and other protesters’ arrests:
We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls and slammed us into the hallowed ground of brick and concrete. But unlike rag dolls, we bleed, we crack, we bruise, we feel.
Wong’s piece was also the only one in USA Today to mention divestment, and one of only three pieces to mention divestment among all op-eds in the study. (The other two, from the Wall Street Journal, called the divestment demands “useless”—4/30/24—and “a breach of fiduciary obligation”—5/5/24.)
‘Fraternities a cure’
The Wall Street Journal (5/9/24) ran an editorial calling fraternities the antidote to encampments, written by someone who sells insurance to fraternities.
The Wall Street Journal had the most op-eds of the four papers. Its 22 pieces on the encampments included four by educators and one by a student. Unlike most other student and educator voices across our study, however, the student and educator guests on the Journal were highly critical of the protests.
Dawn Watkins Wiese (5/9/24) wrote a column titled “Fraternities Are a Cure for What Ails Higher Education,” asserting that the counter-protesters instigating violence at UNC “acted bravely.” Wiese is the chief operating officer of FRMT Ltd., an insurer of fraternities.
Ben Sasse (5/3/24), president of the University of Florida (and a former Republican senator), charged that the students were uneducated: “‘From the river to the sea.’ Which river? Which sea?” he wrote, suggesting that students didn’t know what they were protesting about.
The one student on the Journal‘s op-ed pages, Yale’s Gabriel Diamond (4/21/24), called for the expulsion of his protesting classmates for being “violent.” According to Yale Daily News president Anika Seth (4/30/24), no violence had been documented at the school’s encampment.
Takeaways: Avoid Demands
Across corporate media, the lack of student and protester voices in discussions of student protests is striking. Virtually every university has student journalists, yet only four of them were found in the study, compared to the more than 50 non-student journalists and columnists, the vast majority of whom gave no sign of ever having been to an encampment.
Despite polling that found Jewish and Muslim students feeling almost equally unsafe, antisemitism was mentioned in 88 different interviews and editorials, while Islamophobia was mentioned in only six interviews and one op-ed (Washington Post, 5/2/24). Divestment was only mentioned 26 times, despite it being the principal goal of the encampments.
The Palestine campus protests were not the first time corporate media avoided the demands of protesters. A 2020 FAIR study (8/12/20) of coverage of Black Lives Matter protests showed a “heavy focus on whether the protests were violent or nonviolent, rather than on the demands of the protesters,” a description that applies equally well to the coverage and commentary examined in this study.
As the Democrats headed toward their convention with momentum for the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket, newspapers have collectively found an August scandal. Major press outlets are amplifying Republican claims that Walz, as governor of Minnesota, let the Twin Cities burn during the 2020 George Floyd uprising. By spotlighting these charges, corporate media are assisting GOP attempts to portray themselves as the party of law and order against a tide of anarchic anti-police chaos.
To recap, Walz, who had spent a quarter century in the National Guard, was governor of the state in the summer of 2020, when white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on camera murdering George Floyd, a Black man, suffocating him to death. Protests in the city erupted and turned violent, and protests popped off around the country.
When the head of the Minnesota National Guard was told by Gov. Tim Walz that the entire force would be mobilized, Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen said his first reaction was, “Whoa, wait a second here, sir” (MPR, 7/10/24).
Walz, originally hesitant to call in military assistance to restore order, eventually called in the National Guard, which Minnesota Public Radio (7/10/24) praised for having “mobilized quickly” and “adjusted on [the] fly for Floyd unrest.” MPR added that it had been the state guard’s “largest deployment since World War II, and it occurred with remarkable speed.”
The “law and order” aspect of this election is muddy. Donald Trump, who makes “tough on crime” conservatism a part of persona in his attempt to return to the White House, is the only presidential candidate in history to be convicted of a felony. Meanwhile, Harris made her career in California as the San Francisco district attorney, and then the state’s attorney general. Despite Walz’s career in the National Guard, the Republicans are drumming up the 2020 George Floyd drama to try to win back the title of the party of order.
Too much of the corporate media are helping the Republicans make this flimsy case—and allowing the debate to revolve around the question of whether Walz was quick enough to use force against Black Lives Matter protests.
‘I fully agree with the way he handled it’
Four years ago, Trump praised Tim Walz’s response to the protests after George Floyd’s murder, calling the governor “an excellent guy” (CNN, 8/8/24).
For starters, then-President Trump had actually praised Walz’s handling of the crisis in 2020 (CNN, 8/8/24). “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said of Walz in a conference call with governors:
Tim Walz. Again, I was very happy with the last couple of days. Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.
Surely this is relevant context for any story about the Trump campaign now attacking Walz’s response to the Floyd protests. (A transcript of the call has been available online at CNN.com since June 1, 2020.)
And it should be hard for journalists to recall the police response as being any kind of hands-off approach. At FAIR (9/3/21), I covered the case of Linda Tirado, an independent journalist who lost vision in one eye after being shot by a Minneapolis cop while covering the protests; she was one of dozens of journalists that summer who sustained eye injuries because of the overzealous police response.
Two years ago, AP (11/30/22) reported, Minneapolis “reached a $600,000 settlement with 12 protesters who were injured during demonstrations after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd.” The ACLU, AP said,
alleged that police used tear gas as well as foam and rubber bullets to intimidate them and quash the demonstrations, and also that officers often fired without warning or giving orders to leave.
At least a dozen Minneapolis police officers were sanctioned for misconduct related to the department’s riot response in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and subsequent crowd control efforts in 2020.
‘Draws fresh scrutiny’
But three major newspapers are repeating the partisan attacks on Walz’s response—that he was basically more or less acting in concert with the protesters and not interested in maintaining order.
The Washington Post (8/13/24) carried the headline “Walz’s Handling of George Floyd Protests Draws Fresh Scrutiny,” with the subhead, “Republicans say Tim Walz was slow to act as violence raged in Minneapolis. Activists say he showed restraint and compassion.” It summarized that former Trump “and his allies are seizing on criticism from other Democrats that Walz was too slow to act to portray him as weak,” making him out to be “another lenient liberal politician, in their telling, who gave a pass to protesters and allowed destruction in their cities.”
The point of this New York Times article (8/14/24) is that after Walz was asked in a nighttime call to send in the National Guard, he slept on it and decided to do so in the morning.
A day later, a New York Times story (8/14/24) ran with the headline “Walz Faces New Scrutiny Over 2020 Riots: Was He Too Slow to Send Troops?” Its subhead: “Gov. Tim Walz’s response to the unrest has attracted new scrutiny, and diverging opinions, since he joined Kamala Harris’s ticket.”
The piece starts out summarizing the case that Walz was slow to respond. In the ninth paragraph, the Times offered a baby-splitting verdict on Walz’s response:
But a reconstruction of the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder reveals that Mr. Walz did not immediately anticipate how widespread and violent the riots would become and did not mobilize the Guard when first asked to do so. Interviews, documents and public statements also show that, as the violence increased, Mr. Walz moved to take command of the response, flooding Minneapolis with state personnel who helped restore order.
This wasn’t the first such story in the Times. Earlier in August, the New York Times (8/6/24) ran the headline “Walz Has Faced Criticism for His Response to George Floyd Protests,” with the subhead “Some believe that Gov. Tim Walz should have deployed the Minnesota National Guard sooner when riots broke out following the police murder of George Floyd.” The third paragraph said:
Looting, arson and violence followed, quickly overwhelming the local authorities, and some faulted Mr. Walz for not doing more and not moving faster to bring the situation under control with Minnesota National Guard troops and other state officials.
‘Make America burn again’
The real problem Heather Mac Donald (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/24) has with Walz is that he believes there’s such a thing as “systemic racism.”
On the same day the Post story ran, the Wall Street Journal (8/13/24) ran an op-ed by pro-police pundit Heather Mac Donald, who said it wasn’t just Walz’s allegedly slow response that was bad for Minnesota, but his entire worldview that sympathized with Black victims of police violence:
In 2022, Mr. Walz declared May 25 “George Floyd Remembrance Day” and has done so each year since. The 2022 and 2023 proclamations invoked “systemic racism” or its equivalent five times. They urged the public to “honor” Floyd “and every person whose life has been cut short due to systems of racism,” and to “deconstruct and undo generations of systemic racism.”
She continued, “Mr. Walz’s belief in ‘systemic racism’ dovetails with Kamala Harris’s worldview. Both portray the police as the major threat to Black Americans.”
Elsewhere in the Murdoch press, Fox News (8/14/24), citing a “former federal prosecutor in Minneapolis who prosecuted George Floyd rioters,” said “Walz’s record as governor on that issue, and several others, including fraud, makes him ‘unfit’ for a promotion to vice president of the United States.” The man quoted here is Joe Teirab, who also just won a GOP House of Representatives primary with Trump’s backing (WCCO, 8/14/24).
A CBS piece (8/13/24) straightforwardly related that “Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, claims Walz ‘actively encouraged’ rioters” in the lead of its story. Fox News (8/7/24), as a sort of GOP public relations arm, was more forceful when it ran the headline “Vance Praised for ‘Absolute FIRE’ Takedown of Harris/Walz ‘Tag Team’ Riot Enablers: ‘Make America Burn Again’” Fox‘s subhead:
“Tim Waltz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. And then, the few who got caught, Kamala Harris helped them out of jail,” JD Vance said.
‘Record is mixed’
Criminologist David Squier Jones pointed out to MPR (8/13/24) that “Americans tend to have an inflated sense of crime occurring in their communities that don’t gel with crime statistics.”
Given that Trump himself had praised Walz’s leadership during the protests, and that the law enforcement response to the protests cannot be framed as too lax, one would think newspaper coverage would apply more skepticism to the Republican claims. Newspaper coverage of these Republican attacks has followed the “Republicans allege this, while Democrats deny it” model, simply rehashing partisan talking points without illuminating the issue.
David Squier Jones, a criminologist at the Center for Homicide Research, offered a much more measured version of the events of 2020 and their aftermath to MPR (8/13/24). While Walz sympathized with the anger toward the police murder of Floyd, he said, contrary to Vance, “I did not see anything, read anything, or hear anything that he encouraged active rioting.”
Jones also noted that Walz’s “record is mixed in terms of encouraging police reforms.” “He has also supported police in terms of increasing funding for police departments throughout the state,” he said. “He’s looking for better policing, not defunding policing, not removing policing, and he is certainly not anti-police.”
Such analysis doesn’t make for great attack-ad copy, but it will probably do more to help citizens cast an informed vote in November than parroting GOP press releases.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Shayana Kadidal about the Guantánamo plea deal for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Years of negotiations led to the recently announced pretrial agreements for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of directing the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that would’ve meant their pleading guilty to charges, including murder and conspiracy, and receiving lifelong prison sentences.
The torture that the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has slowed the cases and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts still uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.
But at the 11th hour, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stepped in to override the agreements, claiming to do so in the name of victim’s families, the US military and the American public, who, he says, “deserve the opportunity” to see a military commission trial play out.
Here to help us understand what happened and what happens now is Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shayana Kadidal.
Shayana Kadidal: Thanks for having me.
JJ: Media attention to Guantánamo Bay, and what happens to those held there, has been spotty and, in recent years, largely absent. So listeners may have forgotten that men were held there for years without charge, much less conviction. Some have been approved for transfer, meaning they’ve been determined not to be a threat, yet have remained there. And, of course, it’s undisputed that many have been tortured and abused at this extralegal military prison.
So these plea agreements came with all of that context, all of that history, and they weren’t seen as a victory for anyone; those aren’t the terms to think in. But they were seen as a meaningful and overdue step, yes?
Shayana Kadidal: “They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch.” (image: TRT World, 3/3/17)
SK: Yeah, I think any plea bargain is a compromise, right? I’ve seen these described as kind of the least-worst solution, given the history of these cases. And, basically, they’ve been presented as trading off the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea.
But I think the thing listeners need to really know is that prosecutors, the military prosecutors, really badly wanted this deal done, because they think, like everyone else who is observing these cases, they recognize that the death penalty was never, as a practical matter, going to happen in these cases, for a bunch of different reasons, right?
First of all, the military commission system is incredibly slow. They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch. So things that have been well-established for two centuries in the federal criminal system have to be reasoned out from the beginning in the military commissions.
And then, on top of that, there are these issues around the use of torture evidence that have really slowed things down. That’s not to say that torture evidence is the main problem standing in the way of a conviction. There is plenty of evidence against these particular defendants that isn’t contaminated by torture, including interviews they did with media before they were ever captured.
But the bottom line is that this process is going along really slowly. The defendants are in their mid-50s, the two older ones, already.
And then there are a bunch of other questions. Even if they got a guilty verdict, then there would be a sentencing phase, where a military jury gets to decide between death and probably life imprisonment. And we know that the CIA is very reluctant to produce its own officials as witnesses in that kind of phase or proceedings. They basically refused to do it in another case that we had involving a plea bargain. So that may end up being something that stands in the way of a death penalty verdict.
Then, on top of that, there’s a way that military juries will do what some civilian juries have done, and react to the torture at Guantánamo with clemency, that they’ll want to punish the government by issuing a life sentence instead of death.
So, bottom line, the prosecutors really wanted this deal badly.
JJ: That might surprise some folks, I think, on the face of it. And then, on the other hand, some people might imagine that any kind of plea deal would be opposed by the families and friends of those killed, the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, but that wasn’t really the case, was it?
SK: Yeah, it’s a very mixed bag, I must say. The family members—there are a small group of family members who are very heavily engaged in the details of these cases, including the politics of it, and they fall all over the spectrum, just like regular Americans. We’ve got 9/11 families who have been out there saying that they were strongly in favor of this deal, because it offered some semblance of finality, and because part of the deal, apparently, was the ability to pose questions, I believe, in writing to the defendants, and have them answered within 45 days. And those questions would go to, not just things like their motivations for carrying out the attacks, but also some detailed things that we don’t have a lot of information about, even from their interrogation, things like the financing of the attacks, right? So the families wanted answers to these questions, and this is really the only way they were going to be able to get it.
On the other side, you’ve got folks who have been on FoxNews a lot, talking about how the commissions are much tougher than the civilian criminal system—which, really, I think at this point in history, we can say is definitively not true—but have been very actively organized in favor of keeping these cases in the military system, right?
I suppose it’s probably worth noting that if these cases had been brought to the civilian system, they probably would’ve been over a long, long time ago. Eric Holder had made the decision in 2009 to bring these cases to New York and try them in front of a civilian jury. If that had been the case, as he said last week, these guys would’ve been a memory. The cases would’ve gone to trial in a year or two, the appeals would’ve been over in a year or two, and they probably would’ve received pretty severe sentences, maybe even death, and the cases would have been over. As Holder said, it was “political hacks” who stopped the cases from being brought to New York, where they would’ve been disposed of much more quickly than in the commissions.
But, again, that’s political water under the bridge. Congress has banned bringing men to the United States for trial from Guantánamo. So, again, this is kind of the least-worst solution, plea bargain in the military trial system.
JJ: When people hear that Defense Secretary Austin revoked the pretrial agreements because there ought to be trials, I think a lot of people might be misled about what is meant by a “trial” in this situation, a military commission trial. What should we know about that?
SK: The first thing is that it’s going to take years to get there. These charges originally were brought in February 2008, and so it’s been, what is that, 15, 16 years of pretrial motions, and they’re nowhere close to being done with that. Then once you get to a trial, there are going to be all sorts of issues about, again, the CIA producing witnesses, to what they did to these men, not just in the merit phase, but also in the sentencing phase.
And then, also, where it took place. We have a lot of sensitive diplomatic concerns around where the secret prisons the CIA held these men in were located, right? So that may stand in the way of actually conducting a trial.
And after that, we’ve got appeals, into a military appeal system, and then from there into the appellate courts and the federal system, and then to the Supreme Court.
So, again, the oldest of these defendants is 56 years old. They are de facto already serving life sentences, if you think that these cases are never going to come to a resolution after a trial and appeals. And so, again, it made perfect sense for the prosecutors to pursue this.
The real question is, what was Lloyd Austin thinking? He had to have been aware that these negotiations were underway and were pretty close to being resolved. The New York Times even reported over the weekend that DoD officials knew about the progress of the negotiations. So why the reversal? I think there’s no explanation other than politics and the election.
JJ: That’s what I was going to ask, because Austin says he’s long believed that military trials were the only way forward. So that rings a little weird, given the timing.
SK: When you see people like Tom Cotton coming out and saying that this is Biden being soft on the terrorists with the plea bargain deal, you can understand why it might’ve been everybody’s preferred timing on the political end for this to happen after November.
But what comes next looks like it’s going to be legal challenges. There are very narrow circumstances where an assigned pretrial agreement like this, a plea bargain agreement, can be withdrawn. So I think the defendants are first probably going to challenge whether or not what Austin tried to do in voiding the agreements was even effective, whether he has power to void them.
And on top of that, military prosecutors are supposed to be relatively independent of the people above them in the chain of command. In the federal civilian criminal system, everybody knows that President Trump can relieve the attorney general if he doesn’t like some prosecution that he’s undertaking. But there are some norms about how the AG is supposed to be relatively independent in making judgment calls, right?
Well, on the military system, those aren’t norms; they’re actually written into the two major statutes, the Military Commissions Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So when you have civilian officials like Lloyd Austin, political appointee, trying to pull the strings on a prosecutor’s judgment, it’s a serious problem, and dismissal of the case is the usual remedy for that. So, again, something that could add years and years more delay to a system that wasn’t exactly moving along quickly.
JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note.
We’ve been speaking with Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can track their work on Guantánamo cases and others at CCRJustice.org. Shayana Kadidal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed the American Economic Liberties Project’s Lee Hepner about the Google monopoly for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” So ruled district court Judge Amit Mehta in United States v. Google, being called a “landmark” antitrust case that will affect not just Google, but potentially all tech giants in the current landscape. The point was, Google pays billions every year to companies like Apple and Samsung that distribute search engines, to ensure that it’s the only search engine anyone would see, by making sure it’s the preset default on devices.
If your supermarket only had one brand of milk on the shelf, even if it had some others in the back, you would recognize that as unfair. But for many of us, the internet is still a mystery miracle, and we’re not used to bringing the same sorts of questions to bear. If it did nothing else, this ruling changes that.
So what happened? Lee Hepner is an antitrust lawyer and senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project. He joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Lee Hepner.
Lee Hepner: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: The Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a history lesson. It’s from 1890, but it’s living, meaningful law. How or why exactly did the judge determine that Google was in violation of it?
LH: You said it right there. This law that dates back to the 19th century, that used to be used against railroad barons, has now been applied to this new tech industry. It’s really proof of the durability of one of the foundational laws for ensuring fair markets and competition across our economy.
And Google is ripe for being addressed by this law. The judge found that Google was essentially without competition in the market for search engines, and truth be told, I mean, 80% of overall searches are conducted via Google; on mobile devices, that’s 95%. And Google is able to profit extraordinarily off of not having competition, and by blocking out rivals who threatened to create new and innovative products that actually benefit consumers and move this technology forward. So that was really at the crux of the judge’s decision in this case.
JJ: So it isn’t just that Googleis the default search engine; it’s that they are doing things, including paying money, to maintain that, and to prevent other companies from being that.
LH: That’s exactly right, and the judge really eloquently, in his opinion, describes how Google maintains its power through that circular system. It pays for exclusive agreements across Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, other device manufacturers, and by virtue of those exclusive agreements, it achieves scale that it then sells to advertisers for extraordinary revenue, and then it reinvests that revenue back at the beginning, in securing those exclusive agreements. So you really see how this is a self-reinforcing monopoly that Google has been able to maintain through anti-competitive conduct.
JJ: And we know it’s not by accident, if anyone were to believe that. There are internal messages, I just read in a piece by Matt Stoller, where Google is saying, “Inertia is the path of least resistance.” They know what they’re doing.
LH: Oh, absolutely. It’s a clear monopoly strategy. And, just to be clear, those are the communications that we were able to see. Google was also criticized by this judge for deleting untold number of records that were relevant to the litigation. And that was a big part of this case, too: what Googledidn’t say, because they were training employees to move communications to secret servers and auto-deleted chats. So even in the absence of a smoking gun, there was a very clear sense that Google was intentionally perpetuating an illegal scheme to maintain its market power.
JJ: It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a meta-issue, or inconsequential. There is an impact of the quality of searches. Not everyone’s just looking for “Thai restaurant near me.” It matters if searches are not the best that they could be, yeah?
Lee Hepner: “Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals.”
LH: Yeah. We’ve all heard stories about Google search becoming worse over time. It’s harder to find that thing that you were looking for, because they’re not necessarily investing in the rank of search results, or they’re prioritizing paid ads that look like organic search results. So Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals. And that’s just the core characteristic of monopolies that is as old as time, and we see across a lot of industries.
JJ: Yeah, I was just going to say, Google is not being punished for building a better mousetrap. And news media, I think, play a role here for the anthropomorphizing of, especially, tech companies as scrappy, as game changers: They’re not AT&T. We’ve been trained to think, these guys–and they are guys–break the rules, but on behalf of all of us. And that’s not what’s happening here.
LH: Sure, and it’s just a radically different industry than it was, say, in the early 2000s, after we broke up the last big monopoly, Microsoft. That was a quarter century ago since the last decision on a case brought by the government against a big monopoly.
And then we were seeing that kind of scrappy innovation. Google was a startup at that point, and I think that right there really lends to the potential of this case, and of this decision, to unlock a new era of innovation, where small tech innovators are able to have a chance at entering the market, and creating something new and cool that maybe we can’t imagine today, but wouldn’t be possible without breaking up Google‘s hold on this industry.
JJ: I was going to ask you, what do you think happens now? We can’t necessarily predict it, but in terms of the case, what do you think will happen as we look to the remedy stage of things?
LH: Just to be clear, this is a case that was bifurcated. We just concluded the liability phase, and now the judge has to decide what to do about it. And what’s good about this stage is that the court has broad latitude, and must be deferential to the government’s request for remedies after that really difficult finding of liability.
And there’s a lot of tools on the table. Certainly we can expect an end to some of the exclusive agreements that have tied up this market for Google. But we also might see structural remedies that deprive Google of some of its ill-gotten gains, and divest certain business lines, or allow other search engines to have access to properties like Google‘s web indexer, or even their large language model.
The future of search is really in artificial intelligence, and the ability of chatbots to really revolutionize how people get information off the internet. And so I think that we’re going to be really clued in to how this court crafts remedies that ensure that that next era of AI innovation is not being controlled by Google, or any other dominant player in this market.
JJ: And then, finally, do you see knock-on effects? It does seem like a paradigm shift in terms of antitrust and the way we think about big companies. Do you see knock-on effects on, not just tech companies, but other big businesses?
LH: I do. And I think that when you have a case of this magnitude, there is going to be a bit of a culture shift. So if I’m a big law firm advising my clients, I’m going to tell them, “Hey, if you are entering into these types of exclusive agreements that are intended to maintain your market power, maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore, because the court is looking at these agreements with fresh eyes, and they’re not passing muster.”
I also think this decision builds momentum behind some of the other cases that the government has brought. There are parallels to the case against Live Nation, which also uses Ticketmaster to enter into exclusive agreements with venues. There are other parallels to the case against Apple or Amazon, which also lock consumers into a single-product ecosystem. So there’s going to be knock-on effects outside of this case, outside of this industry, and also for other pending cases that we’re watching closely.
JJ: All right then; we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. They’re online at EconomicLiberties.us. Thank you so much, Lee Hepner, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Haven’t you heard? Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s decision to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was based in antisemitism. At least, that’s what the New York Times wants us to believe.
While Democrats of many stripes seemed thrilled with Walz, a Midwestern progressive with military service and a down-home attitude, the Times has kept up the fiction that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who made the short list of vice presidential hopefuls, didn’t get the nod because of left-wing antisemitism. The claim is a thinly veiled insinuation that Democrats who oppose the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza—and Shapiro’s aggressive backing of Israel—are motivated by bigotry against Jews.
‘Veered past anti-Israel fervor’
By failing to choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the New York Times‘ Jonathan Weisman (8/6/24) wrote, she passed up a chance to “mollify many Jewish voters and other centrists over a subject that has bedeviled the Biden-Harris administration for nearly a year, Israel’s war in Gaza.”
Jonathan Weisman came out in force in a piece (New York Times, 8/6/24) with the headline “Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters,” and the subhead, “Many Jewish organizations backed Harris’s pick for running mate, but beneath that public sentiment is unease over antisemitism on both the left and the right.”
Weisman wrote:
Was her decision to sidestep Mr. Shapiro, some wonder, overly deferential to progressive activists who many Jews believe have veered past anti-Israel fervor into anti-Jewish bigotry?
The reporter acknowledged that there were “scores of reasons” why Harris might have chosen someone other than Shapiro “that had nothing to do with the campaign that the pro-Palestinian left had been waging against him.” But he added, without citing evidence, that “Jews face a surge of antisemitic sentiment on the left,” and see the Democrats as “harboring strongly anti-Israel sentiment on their left flank.”
After noting that the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump’s influence has been rife with antisemitism, Weisman quoted Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president for the Orthodox Union, saying “our greater worry right now is that antisemitism on the left seems to be far more influential on a major party than the antisemitism on the right.”
For anyone who needs a reminder, Weisman was demoted at the Times (8/13/19) when he suggested (“C’mon”) that congressmembers Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar are not really from the Midwest, despite representing Detroit and Minneapolis, respectively, any more than Atlanta’s Rep. John Lewis is from the Deep South, or Austin’s Rep. Lloyd Doggett is from Texas—Weisman’s apparent point being that being Muslim, Black or (in Doggett’s case) just liberal disqualifies you as being from such regions. It was just another example (FAIR.org, 8/14/19) of what the Atlantic (5/4/18) meant when it said of his book (((Semitism))), “His facts are wobbly and his prescriptions are thin.”
‘Plenty of upsides’
Before Harris made her choice, Weisman (New York Times (8/1/24) touted Shapiro as an “opportunity to stand up to her far-left flank in an appeal to the center of the party and to independents.”
This wasn’t Weisman’s only attempt to paint opposition to making Shapiro the Democratic running mate as a sign of Jew hatred. Before Harris’s choice was announced, Weisman wrote a piece (New York Times, 8/1/24) whose subhead said that Shapiro, “an observant Jew, is seen as bringing plenty of upsides to the Democratic ticket,” while “some worry about setting off opposition to the Democratic ticket from pro-Palestinian demonstrators.”
The false implication was that it was his religion that aroused concern from activists, rather than his record on Israel/Palestine. (The insinuation was even clearer in an online blurb the Times used to promote the piece: “Pro-Palestinian groups are seeking to block Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, from becoming Kamala Harris’s running mate.”)
Shapiro has been strongly supportive of Israel throughout the Gaza crisis—“We’re praying for the Israelis and we stand firmly with them as they defend themselves as they have every right to do,” he announced early on (Harrisburg Patriot-News, 10/12/23), after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had declared a “full siege” of Gaza, with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” (Washington Post, 10/9/23).
“We are fighting animals, and we will act accordingly,” Gallant declared. As Israel followed through on that promise, Shapiro was criticized for not speaking out against the soaring Palestinian death toll (New Lines, 8/3/24).
Shapiro assisted in the McCarthyite ousting of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, calling her congressional testimony about student protests a “failure of leadership,” and urging Penn’s trustees to hold her accountable (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/23). The governor later issued an order barring state employees from engaging in “scandalous or disgraceful” behavior—vague terms that were seen as a threat to free speech (Spotlight PA, 5/14/24).
Shapiro distinguished himself in his vituperation of pro-Palestine activists by comparing them to “people dressed up in KKK outfits” (Jacobin, 8/5/24). “I don’t know anybody who used the Ku Klux Klan when they talked about protesters,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told FAIR. “That’s going pretty far.”
When Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he “went after Ben and Jerry’s when the ice cream company decided to stop selling to Israeli settlements in the West Bank” (NBC, 7/31/24). He is a strong supporter of divestment, however—when it comes to Muslim countries. “We must use our economic power to isolate our enemies and strengthen our allies,” he said as he introduced a bill mandating that Pennsylvania state pension funds boycott companies that did business with Iran or Sudan (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 4/22/09).
Shapiro was also forced to “distance himself from a recently uncovered op-ed he wrote in college, in which he identified as a former volunteer in the IDF” (Times of Israel, 8/3/24). The op-ed argued that “peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible,” since “battle-minded” Palestinians “will not coexist peacefully” and “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/2/24).
Another pre-VP announcement piece in the New York Times (8/2/24), by Jess Bidgood, acknowledged some of this background, but still put Shapiro’s religion before his policy, describing him as “an observant Jew who speaks of his faith often” before noting that
his outspoken support of Israel’s right to self-defense and his denunciation of college students’ protest of the war in Gaza have also drawn opposition from the left.
‘Not captive to the left’
Trump advisor Mark Penn (New York Times, 8/3/24) encouraged Harris to choose Shapiro not despite but because of the fact that he is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” and therefore “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”
Weisman’s pre-announcement piece on Shapiro (8/1/24) contained this nugget:
The campaign to thwart his nomination is, by its own admission, not well organized. People working against Mr. Shapiro come from groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America; Uncommitted, which waged a campaign to convince Democratic primary voters to register protest votes against President Biden; the progressive Jewish group IfNotNow; and a group of anonymous pro-Palestinian aides on Capitol Hill known as Dear White Staffers. It does not include some of the largest Palestinian rights groups, nor have more prominent progressive groups joined, like Justice Democrats.
Which raises the question: If this coalition is so weak, why write about it? The Uncommitted campaign, which attracted nearly 1 million votes in the primaries, greatly worried Democrats who supported Biden (NBC, 3/6/24; Guardian, 7/3/24). Biden is now out of the race, and the influence of this coalition had enough impact to grab the concern of the Times.
In a New York Times op-ed (8/3/24) that pushed for Shapiro as the running mate, pollster Mark Penn—identified by his work with the Clintons from 1995 to 2008, not by his counseling Trump in 2019—said that Shapiro’s presence on the ticket
would also reassure Jewish voters—long a key part of winning Democratic voter coalitions—at a time when many of them see hostility and antisemitism coming from some in the far left of the party.
Penn’s op-ed made a flimsy case that concern for Palestinian life is “antisemitic.” But in hailing Shapiro as a moderate, Penn revealed it was his politics, not his identity, that gave the left pause. Shapiro is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” Penn noted. This is a good thing, in Penn’s view; picking Shapiro as a running mate “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”
‘Won’t assuage concerns’
The New York Times Katie Glueck (8/6/24) depicted scrutiny of Shapiro’s Israel/Palestine positions as ” an ugly final phase of Ms. Harris’s search.”
Following Harris’s announcement of Walz as her running mate Times reporter Katie Glueck (8/6/24) wrote that
after the conclusion of a vice-presidential search process that prompted intense public scrutiny of his views on Israel, Mr. Shapiro’s familiar references to his religious background took on a raw new resonance.
“He seemed to sound a note of defiance” by saying “I am proud of my faith,” Glueck wrote.
Although his Mideast positions were “well within the Democratic mainstream, and were not markedly different from other vice-presidential candidates under consideration,” Glueck wrote, Shapiro “drew outsize attention on the subject, his supporters said, and some saw that focus as driven by antisemitism”—linking to Weisman’s piece about how the Walz choice might “alienate Jewish voters” as evidence.
In a particularly bewildering piece, Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn (8/6/24) chided that Walz “does relatively little to define or redefine Ms. Harris”: “He won’t assuage concerns that she’s too far to the left,” Cohn lamented; “his selection doesn’t signal that Ms. Harris intends to govern as a moderate”—which is, of course, the New York Times‘ constant concern about Democrats. No matter, wrote Cohn—”there will be many more opportunities” for Harris to move to the right, “like a policy platform rollout and the Democratic convention.”
‘Didn’t dare cross the left’
The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) came out and said what New York Times writers mostly insinuated: Shapiro was “vilified and maligned because he is Jewish.”
The Murdoch press has painted Shapiro as a victim of antisemitism as well, although as outlets that practically equate the DNC with the USSR, it’s hard to see why they would care about the Harris campaign’s internal debates. “The attack on Mr. Shapiro is part of a far-left campaign to portray Jews as perpetrators or enablers of genocide,” Daniel Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the Wall Street Journal (8/1/24). The New York Post editorial board (8/6/24) said that Shapiro was the “clear best choice” but Harris rejected him “plainly because she didn’t dare cross the left by tapping a Jew.”
At FAIR (6/6/18, 8/26/20, 12/12/23), we’ve grown used to establishment media like the New YorkTimes conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism as a way to keep the struggle for Palestinian rights on the political margins. But with the paper’s laments for the unchosen Shapiro—so parallel to the Murdoch media’s crocodile tears—the reach feels so extreme one wonders if even the authors themselves believe it.
The Democratic Party boasts many Jewish lawmakers in both houses, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, a sort of mascot of New York Jewishness rivaling Mel Brooks. Shapiro wouldn’t have even been the first Jew on a Democratic presidential ticket; the late Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, similarly observant but far to Shapiro’s political right, has that distinction. The suggestion that without Shapiro on the presidential ticket, the Democrats remain some kind of goyish social club is comical. (If we accept that spouses are unofficial parts of presidential tickets, Harris if elected will also give the White House its first Jewish resident.)
Clearly, the Times does not believe that voters must simply accept Jewish candidates without looking at their records. It did not suggest that the party’s rejection of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 was rooted in disdain for his unabashed Brooklyn Jewishness. When New York City Comptroller Brad Lander challenges Mayor Eric Adams from the left in the 2025 city primaries, the paper is unlikely to suggest that voters who stick with the incumbent are Jew haters.
It’s becoming clear that for the corporate media, it is OK to not support Jewish candidates if they support lifting wages, fighting climate change or addressing racial injustice. But at a time when concern for Palestinian lives has become so mainstream that being too pro-Israel can become a political liability, the New York Times wants Jewish politicians’ support for Israel to be a taboo topic.
This week on CounterSpin: You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins,” that “corners the market,” does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We’ll hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.
Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
Also on the show: A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001, “plunged the US” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right; choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside US law. None of it was inevitable. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We’ll get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Janine Jackson interviewed author and educator Tim Wise about ‘DEI hires’ for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: While Republicans are clearly scrambling to find profitable lines of attack in a new presidential race, they’re deploying one line that draws on a lot of history: labeling presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a “DEI hire,” with reference to programs designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The notion, if anyone needed it spelled out, is that any Black or brown person or woman in a job is only there because employers were forced to hire them.
To many, this sort of thing is transparent misogyny and racism, and then that special combination of the two. But being obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t impactful. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s built on decades of undermining any intentional efforts to dismantle or even acknowledge the living history of structurally embedded white supremacy in this country.
Tim Wise is an anti-racism educator, author and critical race theorist. He joins us now by phone from Nashville. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tim Wise.
Tim Wise: Thank you for having me.
JJ: One official definition of DEI is “organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have been historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination.” We might add that could be historically and currently, but that’s the idea.
Now, it used to be most everyone would say, “Sure, that’s a good idea,” but then maybe just not do it. Now, we seem to have slipped backward to where the right feels they can boldly say, “Oh, we don’t even support that idea.” It’s strange, isn’t it, to miss the good old days when people didn’t say what they thought?
Tim Wise: “When you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression.”
TW: Right—we’ve sort of gone from the days of the dog whistle to the air horn or bullhorn on these things. I remember, 30-plus years ago, when I started out doing this work in the campaigns against David Duke down in Louisiana. Duke felt the need to sort of hide his racism, to downplay his overt white supremacy.
And it seems like the gloves are off now. And so DEI has become essentially the new n-word for certain folks on social media. They will apply it to any person of color, regardless of that person’s qualifications, regardless of that person’s accomplishments. And they’ll apply it to public officials who, after all, pass the only test one needs to determine qualifications, which is, they got elected, right?
So if the mayor of Baltimore happens to be a Black man, and a barge hits a bridge and the bridge falls down, they call him the DEI mayor. What does that even mean? I mean, you get elected by getting votes, just like white mayors. And if the mayor had been white, I don’t think there would’ve been some special white man superpower that would’ve kept the bridge up.
But what that is is a way of reminding people, or telling people, these folks are less qualified, and they’re taking your stuff.
And I think the reason that they’ve ramped that up, and the gloves have come off, is that unlike 30-some odd years ago, 20 years ago, we suddenly have white folks confronted with a couple of realities. One is that the culture and the demographics of the country are changing, in a way that renders us less hegemonic than we once were. And when you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression. You feel like the wheels are coming off the bus. And so there’s this perfect storm of white anxiety that we are in the midst of, and we’re going to have to figure out how to respond to that.
JJ: And we’ll come back to that. Just doubling on what you’ve just said, folks may remember this 1990 ad for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms that showed white hands crumbling a job- rejection letter with the voiceover, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”
It’s powerful, in part, because of what it glides over. How does our dude know he was the best qualified? And then the implication that decades of rejecting minorities because they weren’t white represents the state of fairness that we’re trying to get back to. And, I was just going to say, even though these current campaigns are more overt, they’re still drawing a lot of power from what they don’t say. And why does that work? Who does that work on?
TW: I think it works because, first off, we have a long history of believing, No. 1, of course, that folks of color are less qualified, and whites are more qualified. That’s always been a problem in our country.
But I think there’s an even more fundamental thing at work, and that is, if you think about the most dominant ideological underpinning of America, what is it? The core of our belief system is this belief in meritocracy, rugged individualism, the idea that wherever you end up is all about you. So if you work hard, you can make it, anyone can.
And that’s, in theory, a race-neutral ideology, it’s also the secular gospel. If America were a Bible, it would be Genesis 1:1.
The problem is, once you imbibe that, once you internalize that belief, and you look around, and you see a society of profound racial inequality, of gender inequality, of class inequality, what is the logical thing for a person to do? And by a person, I don’t even mean an overt bigot. I mean an everyday average person who thinks about that, goes, “Gosh, if where you end up is all about your own effort and anyone can make it, then I guess these people on the bottom, maybe they are lesser, right? And the people on the top really are better.”
And so racism and sexism and classism can all be reinforced in people who are not actually particularly hateful, prejudiced or bigoted, but simply put two and two together: the idea of rugged individualism, and the objective reality of social stratification or inequality. So we really have to address that, because that suggests that a core element of American political thought is going to reinforce this kind of thinking. And once it does that, it can reinforce the very systems that promote that thinking.
JJ: Republicans may have faith that they can just say “DEI” and their work is done, because of the success of other recent efforts. I will never get over how Christopher Rufo just called his shot. He just said:
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
And news media, who were in a place to say, “Well, no, you can’t just take a term and say it doesn’t mean what it claims to, it means whatever you say it does”—they didn’t do that. They simply folded this intentional misrepresentation into the public dialogue. I feel like they got played like a fiddle, and for reasons. But it didn’t just allow, but promoted, the notion that these attacks were some organic bottom-up thing, rather than an orchestrated campaign. What do you see as the current or potential role of the press in this?
TW: I think the media have done a miserable job, as you suggest, in responding to the blatantly, transparently dishonest narrative that folks like Rufo are spinning, when he says, as he has on his Twitterthread—he’s amazingly transparent about this—that we’re basically going to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We’re just going to name things what we want to name them. We’re going to tell people, this is what it is. We don’t even care.
He’s been quoted in a speech saying he doesn’t give a—and I know I can’t say the next word, because we’re on radio—about what CRT actually is. He doesn’t care about it. He, in fact, wants us to debate the specifics of it, while he just uses it as a propaganda cudgel.
And the media, rather than exposing that, have done piece after piece after piece, and I’m talking puff pieces, about Christopher Rufo, where they don’t dig into the funding, for example, the multi-billionaire dollar stuff that’s coming in for him and the organizations he works for.
This is not some grassroots, bottom-up campaign of some simple guy sitting at his computer in his home, taking on the powerful. This is somebody being funded by the powerful. But hardly any of the media have really attempted to pull back the veil on who he is and who is funding him and what their agenda is. And we know what their agenda is, because it’s the same agenda they’ve had for 50 years or more, really more than that, going back 60 years.
These are the ideological descendants of the people who never supported the civil rights movement, who never supported the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act. They’re the ideological descendants of the folks who used to write, at the National Review, that Black folks basically weren’t ready for the right to vote. They weren’t civilized enough yet. That was the official position of Bill Buckley’s magazine back in the ’60s. So that’s who these folks are, and if the media really believed in investigative journalism, they would expose that.
JJ: And then the other line that bugged me was, “Well, they aren’t even teaching CRT in elementary school,” as if that was a pushback.
TW: Yeah, there was sort of a capitulation, right? This idea that liberals, rather than standing up and fighting the attacks, said, “Oh no, that’s not us, my goodness.” Because the implication is, “Well, thank God it’s not, I mean, thank goodness we don’t do CRT with children, that would be poisoning their minds.”
But all CRT tries to do, and this is so important for people to understand, is to provide a theoretical grounding so that when you look out and you see racial disparity, you have a framework and a lens for understanding it. And without a systemic lens, frankly, the only explanation left is the one the right prefers, which is, these Black and brown folks are broken. And CRT is saying, “No, it’s not Black and brown folks who are broken.”
It’s not necessarily that white people are bad. CRT doesn’t bash white people. That’s a great myth. CRT doesn’t really say anything about white people as people. It says something about white supremacy as a system, historically and contemporaneously. And if you don’t have that framework, I don’t know how you can make sense of the world around you, except by blaming the people on the bottom for being there.
JJ: Finally, you travel the country, and have for years, talking to people about these issues. What’s the vibe? Where do you find hope right now?
TW: I find hope in the young folks, disproportionately, who led the uprising, obviously, in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. I find hope in the young people, disproportionately, who have stood up for the rights of Palestinians and the lives of Palestinians in this moment as well.
I find hope in the enthusiasm that we’re seeing right now in the newly refashioned presidential race. I think there’s a lot of energy to realize that there is an opportunity to defeat Trumpism. There is an opportunity to beat back these folks who say they want to make America great again, by which they obviously mean a directional reference to the past.
I think there’s hope in knowing that the vast majority of the people in this country believe in democracy, want democracy, reject things like Project 2025, and want to move the country forward, rather than moving it backward where those folks want to go.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Tim Wise. The most recent book is Dispatches From the Race War, from City Lights. Tim Wise, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Following Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut—along with a woman and two children (Al Jazeera, 7/30/24)—and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, corporate media pundits have called for the US and Israel to escalate the region-wide war.
According to the Wall Street Journal (7/28/24), the “way to make war less likely is to announce that American munitions transfers to Israel will be expedited immediately.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial (7/28/24), using galaxy-brain logic, said the
way to make war less likely is to announce that American munitions transfers to Israel will be expedited immediately, as they were earlier in the war and as Congress has approved, and that all oil sanctions on [Hezbollah ally] Iran will be enforced again.
US-supplied weapons have already been a major part of Israel’s post–October 7 attacks on Lebanon, inflicting a terrible cost. The Washington Post (12/13/23) reported that, in October, Israel fired US-made white phosphorus—incendiary material that can cause ghastly injuries and death—into the Lebanese village Dheira; the attack incinerated at least four homes, according to residents, and injured nine. In March, Israel used a US-provided weapon in an airstrike on the Lebanese town of al-Habariyeh, killing seven volunteer paramedics, aged 18–25, in violation of international law (Guardian, 5/6/24).
Prior to last week’s Israeli attack on Lebanon, Israel had killed at least 543 people in Lebanon since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/27/24), including roughly 100 civilians (BBC, 7/22/24); US fighter jets have played a key role in Israel’s Lebanon campaign (Deutsche Welle, 7/19/24). Far from “mak[ing] war less likely,” US armaments enable Israel to kill and maim Lebanese people. (According to Israeli officials, Hezbollah attacks have killed 33 Israelis, mostly soldiers, since October 7—BBC, 7/17/24.)
The editorial invoked a tissue-thin casus belli on Israel’s behalf, saying that Hezbollah carried out a “rocket attack on Saturday [that] killed 12 children and wounded more on a soccer field in Israel’s Golan Heights.” One problem: There is no such thing as “Israel’s Golan Heights”; there is only Syria’s Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally occupied, illegally annexed and illegally settled (Foreign Policy, 2/5/19). Casting the deaths in Majdal Shams, the predominately Druze village in the Golan where the killings occurred, as an attack on Israel makes it sound as if Israeli violence against Lebanon (such as its Beirut bombing) is what the editorial calls Israel “defend[ing] itself.”
‘Israel returns fire’
The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) maintains that the assassination of a Hamas negotiator could help peace negotiations, as “Hamas politicians remaining in Qatar now know their lives are also on the line if they continue to resist Israel’s reasonable terms.”
A second Wall Street Journal editorial (8/1/24) pushed a similar line, deploying the headline, “Israel Returns Fire on Iran and Its Proxies.” Strangely, Iranian actions are not described as “return[ing] fire” for Israel’s years of attacks on Iranian territory, which have taken the form of sabotaging the Iranian electrical grid, cyberattacks (New York Times, 4/11/21) and murdering Iranian scientists (Politico, 3/5/18). Doubling down on its demands for belligerence, the editorial’s authors argued:
The US can help Israel prevent a larger war by putting pressure on Hezbollah and Iran. Expediting weapons to Israel, including deep-penetrating bombs that would put Iran’s nuclear facilities at risk, would send a message, as would enforcing oil sanctions again. Sending US warships to the eastern Mediterranean, as after October 7, would also make Iran think twice about Hezbollah’s next move.
The Journal seems to think that doing the same thing over and over again—namely, sending more weapons to Israel, choking Iranian civilians through sanctions (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23) and upping the US military presence in the region—will produce different results. Maybe this time, the authors seem to suggest, Iran and Hezbollah will decide to just let the US and Israel dictate what happens across West Asia.
Nor does the editorial explore the possibility that Iran might be less inclined to strike Israel if Israel were to cease carrying out assassinations on Iranian soil, bombing its embassies (Reuters, 4/4/24) or carrying out genocide against Iran’s Palestinian allies.
‘Response to Hezbollah’
For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/30/24), Israel is at war not only with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, but with “Israel’s most strident critics” on campuses, with the “‘yes but’ thinking” that supports Israel while condemning civilian deaths, and with “Jews who provide moral cover and comfort to Israel’s enemies.”
In the New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens (7/30/24) put forth a similar view, writing that
the world will soon know the full shape and scale of Israel’s response to Hezbollah for [the] rocket attack on a Druze town in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 children.
Another problem with this line of argument is that there is some doubt as to whether it was a Hezbollah projectile that hit the Golan, and a great deal of doubt as to whether, if it was Hezbollah’s rocket, it was deliberately fired at Majdal Shams (LA Times, 7/30/24).
Despite Stephens’ suggestion that an Israeli assault on Lebanon would be a “response” to a Hezbollah “attack,” only 20% of Majdal Shams residents have accepted Israeli citizenship, while the bulk of the town’s inhabitants continue to be citizens of Syria (LA Times, 7/30/24).
Not content with last week’s attack on Beirut, Stephens wrote that
whatever Israel does next, it should be calculated to advance the national interests on all [fronts of its multifaceted wars]. If that means postponing a fuller response to explain its rationale, necessity and goal, so much the better.
The “fuller response” he has in mind seems to be more Israeli violence, since what it would be “fuller” than is the bombing of Beirut, and the premise of the article is that the Israeli government is fighting a five-fronted war. Worry not, Stephens assures his readers, any further Israeli bombings and assassinations will by definition be a “response,” and thus defensible.
‘Iranian imperialism’
Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 8/1/24) recasts the Gaza crisis as “part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive America out of the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, Stephens’ colleague Thomas Friedman (8/1/24) painted Iran as the primary aggressor in West Asia. He called Iran an “imperial power,” condemning “Iranian imperialism” and “Tehran’s regional imperialist adventure.” Iran’s goal, he asserted, is “to control the whole Arab world.”
Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the state has carried out zero full-scale invasions of Arab majority countries (and zero such attacks on non-Arab nations). In the same period, the US, which is evidently not imperialist, and not trying to “control the whole Arab world,” has carried out full-fledged invasions of Libya and (more than once) of Iraq. In addition to annexing and colonizing part of Syria, Israel has repeatedly invaded Lebanon. Colonizing, occupying and annexing Palestinian land, and now committing genocide against Palestinians, presumably also constitute the US and Israel seeking to “control” an important slice of the “Arab world.”
Yet in Friedman’s topsy-turvy universe, Iran is the main source of violence in the region. That misleading framing wrongly suggests that past and future acts of war against Iran are legitimate and necessary.
Nobody knows what the political and military outcome of a broader conflagration in the Middle East would be, but the human and environmental toll on the region would be colossal. High-profile pundits in America are doing their part to help such an outcome materialize.
Janine Jackson interviewed Food Not Bombs’ Keith McHenry about criminalizing homelessness for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: With wages, including the minimum wage, largely static, prices rising out of the reach of many who call themselves middle class, and rents outpacing wages in 44 of the country’s 50 biggest cities, you could be unsurprised that homelessness is at record rates. The latest federal count found 650,000 unhoused people on a single night, nearly half of them sleeping outside. The response of several localities is to criminalize the act of sleeping outside or, in some places, of having a shopping cart.
States are using their budgetary power to punish communities that don’t push people off the street, including places that have more unhoused people than shelter beds, and to arrest people who don’t have a safe space to go to. As of October, in Florida, any city that doesn’t enforce their ban on camping can be sued, including by individual residents or businesses. “We’re going to have clean sidewalks,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, signing the law in March.
Other places have introduced fines, so that a person who asks for a quarter can get a fine of hundreds of dollars. This is being called a “crackdown on homelessness,” as though that were an isolated abstraction, and not a broad societal failure.
Keith McHenry is an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. He joins us now from Santa Cruz, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Keith McHenry.
Keith McHenry: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
JJ: Let’s start with California, and Governor Newsom’s directive to dismantle encampments throughout the state, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling that gave governments more authority to do that. Newsom says he’s directing state agencies to “move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them.” Is that a thing that can happen?
KM: Even before Newsom’s executive order, he was giving out money to cities to clear homeless encampments. It’s called the Homeless Encampment Resolution Grants. And in Santa Cruz, $4 million was given to clear the camps around the homeless shelter. And, in fact, the management of the homeless shelter was all excited that they got the money, and that they could get rid of the homeless that were camped around them and in the neighborhood where the shelter is.
And this campaign, I think, is getting more and more aggressive, not only because of the removal of the protections from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case that went to the Supreme Court, but because it’s being driven, in part, by this organization called the Cicero Institute, which was started by Joe Lonsdale in 2016, and he is connected directly to the Central Intelligence Agency. He received funding, along with Peter Thiel, who is most famous right now for being the backer of JD Vance as the running mate with Trump, and by Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir.
So Palantir is one of the largest surveillance organizations in the United States, the private company that was created after protest of Total Information Awareness, which was a government plan after the 9/11 bombing. And they are involved in a matrix of things surrounding homelessness, including creating AI to find homeless camps.
So there’s already, since Newsom’s executive order, you can see police and people just throwing away homeless people’s belongings in these sweeps, mentioning both the Supreme Court ruling and Newsom’s executive order, basically stating that they’re going to get rid of the homeless from California.
But Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute has been providing model legislation to states across the country. The one that you just referred to, with DeSantis, was one of their victories. They also got a law passed in Kentucky where you can actually use the Stand Your Ground law to shoot homeless people that are not cooperating with your eviction of them from private or public land.
So this trend is frightening, and we’re already seeing it in Santa Cruz, and this is in San Francisco, it’s across the country, and the problem is, there’s no place for anyone to go. And in Newsom’s executive order, he claims that you’re supposed to store things for 60 days; this virtually never happens with the sweeping of the camp. The camps that were swept here in Santa Cruz in the last couple of weeks, people just didn’t get their belongings back, and we had to give them pup tents and sleeping bags and blankets, just to replace the equipment that was taken by the police and public works during these really vicious sweeps.
JJ: I hear that. And Miami Beach, I understand, is one of a number of places that allow arrests if the individual declines shelter placement. And I think that kind of line makes sense for a lot of people, for whom this is just a story in the paper—the idea that, well, they were offered shelter, and maybe even offered some kind of mental health care, or some substance abuse care. And aren’t those the personal problems that are driving them to the street? What’s wrong with that solution of, “Well, we’re offering them stuff”?
KM: The reality is there is no there that they’re offering. They’re just telling the public that there is some kind of shelter space. First of all, the shelters are already full, everywhere in the country, so you have to kick a homeless person out of a shelter, and that’s what they do here in Santa Cruz, to make place for a new homeless person. So when they cleared Coral Street in front of the homeless shelter, they evicted 10, 15 people out of another shelter, and then put the 10 or 15 people into that shelter, and then it’s a net gain of zero sheltered people.
But the other thing is, a lot of people do not want to go to shelters because, for instance, the shelter here is referred to as the “concentration camp,” and that’s because you can’t have your husband or wife with you, you can’t have your pets with you….
There’s one shelter that’s being proposed in San Diego where there’s 715 people in one room on bunk beds, and you get a little plastic box to put all your belongings in. And then you have to live in—just like the shelters here—very controlled, like a minimum security jail.
In our town, you’re not allowed to walk out of the shelter into the city. You have to get a van, because they don’t want homeless people walking by housed people’s houses. And therefore you’re limited by the staff as to when you can come and go.
I am very concerned with the increase in homelessness. Right now, there’s 81% of America is living paycheck to paycheck, and homelessness has already been increasing dramatically. According to HUD, it increased 12% last year. We have so many unhoused people, because of the rocky economy, that they will then be moving people into large camps outside of cities, like they did with the Japanese during World War II. I’m worried about it, because we are heading into what could potentially be a world war, and then a lot of the polite comments that can happen before war, and ideas, will just be out the window, and it’ll be okay to round up the homeless and place them in these camps, which will be presented as navigation centers, where they’ll somehow get a job somewhere in the future, or some kind of mental health help.
And here in California, they passed Proposition 1, and essentially they’re building mental hospitals, and then homeless people are becoming wards, basically, of the local county, who then controls all their Social Security benefits and everything. So it’s very tragic, and I think American people really actually do know, because so many of us have family members that are homeless, and probably struggled with their addictions, or with their having to sleep on our couch, and we’re getting tired of it. We’re all impacted directly in this, and there’s definitely solutions to ending homelessness, which is building things like single room occupancy hotels, and all the things that kept people off the streets before this catastrophe.
JJ: I just wanted to pick up on that, because I think a child would say, “Oh, people are unhoused. What about housing?” And yet, somehow, that seems like, ”Oh, no, no, no, we can’t do that. Well, we’ll put out signs, we’ll pay money to put out signs telling people, don’t give money to homeless people, but we won’t put that money into housing.”
Keith McHenry: “Millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.” (photo: KSQD)
KM: Governor Newsom here in California has spent $24 billion on homelessness. And, in the city of Santa Cruz, they gave us $14 million to help the homeless about a year and a half ago. And so far they’ve used $1 million to clean out a camp of about 400 people who had no place to go. Those people were just cleared out of the woods this weekend. So now they’re back downtown. And so millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.
And then there’s a very “Not In My Back Yard” campaign that happens. So every time there’s even a slight proposal to house some homeless people, build a building for them or open a hotel for homeless people, you end up with riots and protests, as you can see has happened in places like New York City. And then there’s the pitting of immigrants and homeless against one another, which is another divide-and-conquer tactic that is occurring, that’s also making housing homeless people very difficult.
So there’s just no policy, no national policy, no state policies, really, to resolve this, other than through criminalization.
Now, the criminalization is really dire. So, for example, in Santa Cruz, you get a $25 ticket each time you’re found camping. Of course, then they take most of your stuff when they give you that ticket. And then what ends up happening is if you fail to pay that, then you get a $350 fine for not paying your $25 ticket. And then two tickets in 30 days is a misdemeanor, and you can end up, ultimately, over time, spending months and months in jail for just the crime of being homeless.
And then each one of these tickets and late fees goes into collection. You get a job, finally, and then your wages are taken by the collection agency for your fines for having slept outside. So this is going to make ending homelessness in America much, much more dire, because more and more people will fall into that trap, because the system’s set up to be difficult.
JJ: And then don’t think about helping unhoused people with food, because that’s going to be a crime too. We talked with Megan Hustings back in 2017, when people from Food Not Bombs were being arrested in Florida for serving free food to homeless people in a public park. So even the places where other people might be trying to intervene, and trying to provide some support, offer some help, they’re being told no, no, that’s also a crime.
KM: Yeah, there was just a person arrested in Dayton, Ohio, for feeding the homeless there. In San Francisco, we were arrested a thousand times. I did 500 days in jail, and ultimately faced 25 to life in prison, when the city was so frustrated they eventually framed me on things that I never did. I also did 18 days personally in Orlando, Florida, for feeding the homeless at Lake Eola Park.
Fortunately, Food Not Bombs has pushed back across the country in that regard, and we won an appeals case in Florida, which ruled that sharing free food is a First Amendment–protected right. And the Dayton, Ohio, people are using that case to defend themselves.
And then we also have found in Houston, where we were ticketed nearly a hundred times, at $2,000- a-time fines, that they could not find a jury that thought it was reasonable to convict someone and force them to pay money for feeding the homeless. So they’ve kind of generally dropped that case. So we’re having some good fortune pushing back.
But the idea that a country that’s letting their people go hungry, and I answer the Hunger Hotline, 1-884-1136, and I get calls all day long, roughly 20 a day, from seniors who have no food, who get referred to me by UnitedHealthcare or Red Cross or something, for home delivery. And the system is breaking down. And the stories I hear of these 20, 30 people, sometimes—on a good day, it’s like 10 people—it’s just heartbreaking. And those are people on the verge of becoming homeless, that have a home but have no food, and live in America. Often they’re vets that have worked their entire lives, and now they’re in this precarious position, and it is just heartbreaking.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Keith McHenry from Food Not Bombs. They’re online at FoodNotBombs.net. Keith McHenry, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.
(photo: Elvert Barnes)
Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
With the presidential contest in full swing, the Sinclair Broadcast Group appears to be ramping up its right-wing propaganda again.
While millions of Americans are subjected to the TV network’s electioneering, few know it. That’s because, like a chameleon, Sinclair blends into the woodwork.
Turn on your local news and you may well be watching a Sinclair station, even though it appears on your screen under the imprimatur of a major network like CBS, NBC or Fox.
Here in the DC area, I occasionally tune into the local ABC affiliate, WJLA. Its newscasters are personable, and I like the weather forecasts. But then I remember that WJLA is owned by Sinclair.
I know this only because I’m a weirdo who follows Sinclair, not because there’s any obvious on-air sign the network owns WJLA—there isn’t. That’s why Sinclair’s propaganda is so hard to detect.
Hijacking trust
A video collage of dozens of Sinclair anchors reading a script warning that “some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda.”
While trust in the media has cratered in recent years, there’s a notable exception. “Seventy-six percent of Americans say that they still trust their local news stations—more than the percentage professing to trust their family or friends,” the New Yorker (10/15/18) reported.
Smartly, Sinclair leaves its affiliates alone long enough for them to develop a rapport with their audience. “In a way, the fact that it looks normal most of the time is part of the problem,” said Margaret Sullivan (CJR, 4/11/18), former public editor of the New York Times. “What Sinclair is cynically doing is trading on the trust that develops among local news people and their local audience.”
By hijacking this trusting relationship, Sinclair is able to sneak its propaganda into millions of American homes, including in presidential swing states where Sinclair owns more stations than any other network.
Sinclair does this by requiring its affiliates to air the right-wing stories it sends them. Because these segments are introduced or delivered by trusted local hosts, they gain credibility.
Mostly Sinclair’s sleight of hand goes undetected. But in 2018, the network pushed its luck by requiring anchors at stations across the country to read from the same Trump-like anti-media script. A video compilation of dozens if not hundreds of Sinclair anchors voicing the same “Orwellian” commentary went viral.
Despite the occasional brush up, Sinclair carries on largely under-the-radar, quietly gobbling up stations, mainly in cheaper markets. “We’re forever expanding—like the universe,” said longtime leader David Smith, who’s turned Sinclair into the country’s second-largest TV network. (See FAIR.org, 5/13/24.)
An anchor jumps ship
Popular Information (7/23/24) reported that Sinclair anchor Eugene Ramirez quit in part over a requirement that he air at least three stories from the network’s “Rapid Response Team” nightly. “The RRT has produced 147 stories this year that portray Democrats in a negative light,” Popular Information found, “and just seven stories that portray Democrats positively.”
Of the 294 TV stations that Sinclair owns or operates, at least 70 of them air Sinclair’s in-house national evening news broadcast. For a year and a half, this broadcast was anchored by Eugene Ramirez, but he resigned in January, and it’s not hard to see why.
Each night Ramirez was given a list of four stories produced out of Sinclair’s Maryland’s headquarters. From these, Ramirez had to select at least three to air. Often these stories were little more than writeups of press releases from right-wing politicians and groups, as Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report at Popular Information (7/23/24). One recent headline read, “Trump PAC Launches New Ad Hitting Democrats on Border: ‘Joe Biden Does Nothing.’”
Sinclair frequently booked far-right guests to appear on Ramirez’s broadcast, and he was “instructed not to interrupt them,” according to Popular Information. “Many of Sinclair‘s affiliates were not in big cities,” Ramirez was told, “and the content of the broadcast had to reflect the sensitivities of those viewers.” Progressive guests rarely if ever appeared.
Legum and Crosby also found that Sinclair requires around 200 of its affiliates to air its “Question of the Day,” which has included gems like, “Do you think former House Speaker Pelosi deserves some of the blame for January 6 riot?” But other questions are less obviously biased.
It’s one thing when a blowhard on Fox News asks, “Are you concerned violent criminals are crossing the border?” But it’s quite another when the same question is asked by a familiar and trusted local anchor.
The power of Sinclair is that questions like these are being posed not just by one trusted anchor, but by a small army of them in communities across the country every day. Elections are won and lost on less.
The Economist published a cover story on July 6 with the stark image of a walker, a mobility device typically used by disabled people, with the United States presidential seal on it. “No Way to Run a Country,” the headline stated. Disabled people responded angrily on social media at the implication that mobility aids are disqualifying for office, mentioning former President Franklin Roosevelt, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, all wheelchair users.
Similar visual messages previously appeared on a New Yorker cover (10/2/23) and in a Roll Call magazine political cartoon (9/6/23), both from the fall of 2023. The New Yorker cover showed President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell using walkers while competing in an athletic race. The joke was that it would be absurd for such elderly people to compete in a race, but the implication was that anyone similarly disabled might not be fit to serve in political office. None of these leaders use walkers in real life.
The Roll Call cartoon showed the US Capitol transformed into the “Senate Assisted Legislating Facility,” with a stairlift and elderly people with walkers. Disability advocates often write about how the media and others should avoid using disabilities and medical conditions as metaphors, as it’s usually done to negatively stigmatize them.
The Economist cover appeared during a period of intense media conversation over presidential fitness, which ramped up just after the last presidential debate on June 27, and continued until Biden withdrew from his campaign for re-election on July 21. With Biden and Trump both older than any other presidential candidates in history—and both showing many common signs of age—media have been discussing their capabilities for years.
Ability and age shouldn’t be off the table as media topics during elections, but there are ways to have these conversations without promoting harm. By not interrogating “fitness for office” as a concept, the media has contributed to a culture in which two elderly presidential candidates constantly bragged about their prowess, culminating in the surreal moment of their competitive discussion of golfing abilities during the debate.
Disability organizations have created style guides for non-ableist journalism in general. In terms of covering political campaigns, some common pitfalls to avoid include: stating or implying that all disabilities or conditions are inherent liabilities, even cognitive disabilities; diagnosing candidates without evidence; using illness or disability as a metaphor; conflating age with ability; conflating physical and cognitive health; using stigmatizing language to describe incapacities; and highlighting issues with ability or health without explaining why they are concerning.
‘Agony to watch’
New Yorker (10/2/23)
Biden’s struggles with articulating and completing his thoughts during the last debate prompted a flurry of news stories, including reporting on his tendency to forget people and events (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 6/4/24; New York Times, 7/2/24). Some of the same outlets that had previously defended him against claims of being cognitively impaired (New York, 7/31/23) were suddenly diagnosing him with possible medical conditions and doubting his ability to lead (New York, 7/7/24).
The Hill (7/20/24) called Biden’s verbal gaffes “embarrassing,” and casually quoted insiders referring to “brain farts” with scorn. “It was agony to watch a befuddled old man struggling to recall words and facts,” the Economist wrote in an editorial (7/4/24), which accompanied the cover image of the walker and called for Biden to drop out. The piece linked to another Economist piece (6/28/24) which argued that Biden had failed to prove he was “mentally fit,” and called on him to stand down and make room for a “younger standard-bearer.”
There are reasonable concerns about the age of candidates, including that our leadership doesn’t represent the majority of the country demographically and that elderly candidates may not live long. But the Economist made implicit assumptions about age and disability, including that a “younger standard-bearer” would likely be more “mentally fit.” According to scientists, slower communication and short-term memory loss are associated with aging, but some other cognitive abilities have been shown to strengthen.
What’s more, Biden’s gaffes might have been “embarrassing” to him, or “agony” for him to experience, but characterizing disability or struggle from the outside as embarrassing or unpleasant to observe is a common form of ableism. It’s reasonable to report on his mistakes without editorializing and stigmatizing language.
Neither Trump nor Biden have a record of supporting the needs of disabled people while in office, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, their disabilities or capacity issues do deserve sensitivity. By insulting memory lapses and mobility issues, even implicitly, the media insults everyone with those conditions.
It seems some part of the media’s panic around the abilities of presidential candidates has more to do with elections than with who is running the country. Biden’s re-election chances fell into jeopardy after the debate. The Washington Post (7/22/24) recently made this clear. “Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny after Biden’s exit,” it reported:
After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in history—and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent.
The Post makes it sound as if media are passively reporting on the next inevitable story, and not actively choosing to focus its disability-related concerns around its election concerns.
The recent Washington Post article (7/22/24) on Trump’s abilities points out that he hasn’t released his medical records since he was president, when he had “had heart disease and was obese.” It also points out his “elevated genetic risk of dementia.”
With the intense focus on medical records and physical tests, the news media often writes about the bodies of presidential candidates as if they were competing for Best in Show, instead of for a job that primarily involves decision-making, leadership and communication—and for which disability might even be an asset in terms of compassion and understanding.
News outlets have reported with concern on how Biden and Trump walk, despite the fact that the majority of people in their 80s deal with mobility challenges. (Biden is 81; Trump is 78.) According to the Boston Globe (3/12/24), “Joe Biden needs to explain his slow and cautious walk.” The news article does offer his physician’s explanation of neuropathy but doesn’t seem to accept it.
The article argues that Biden’s silence about his gait was contributing to concerns that he might have an illness like dementia or Parkinson’s. The Globe seemed to take for granted that Parkinson’s would be a problem for voters and not, say, an asset. Many voters have similar conditions and might appreciate the representation. The article then mentions that Biden’s slower walking might be a sign of diminished “mental capacity,” conflating physical and cognitive issues.
In 2020, there were similar articles about Trump showing signs of unsteadiness while walking and drinking from a glass of water, with the implication that difficulties with both might undermine his fitness for office (New York Times, 6/14/20).
The Americans with Disabilities Act protects disabled people from having to disclose details about their conditions. This is because stigma and bigotry are so widespread that it’s understood such details might be handled with prejudice by employers. Media outlets undermine those principles in their lust for detailed information about the medical records of presidential candidates.
Just after the last presidential debate, Bloomberg (7/3/24) insisted in a headline that “Presidential Candidates Shouldn’t Have Health Secrets.” The article not only demanded clarity on what caused Biden’s “poor performance” in the debate, but also that candidates go through independent medical evaluations, with the full results being released to the public. Implicit in this demand is that pre-existing conditions would be liabilities. Otherwise, why would the public need to know?
“Americans are naturally curious about the health of their president, and any sign of illness or frailty gets subjected to intense public scrutiny,” a follow-up Bloomberg article (7/10/24) insisted. Are Americans curious, or are the media? The article pointed out that the US obsession with presidential health is unusual; in most countries, leaders don’t release their medical records. Still, the article went into intense detail about everything known and speculated about in terms of Biden and Trump’s health, body weight, medications and the like.
The media’s focus on the physical imperfections of presidential candidates is biased not only towards abled people, but towards white men. Women and people of color are more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions, and more likely to face stigma as a result of them. The Washington Post (7/22/24) already noted that Kamala Harris hasn’t released her medical records, or responded to questions about it.
During the 2016 campaign for presidency, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton fainted. Her doctor said she had pneumonia and was overheated. Not surprisingly, right-wing media used it as a chance to portray her as weak and unfit, but even some liberal outlets (CNN, 9/12/16), decided this was a significant incident worthy of endless commentary, speculation and demands for investigations. Fainting is something many people, especially women, experience routinely, as part of illness, heat, exhaustion or just standing for too long. The media worked to denormalize it.
Overall, media seem to have a unique preoccupation with the bodies of presidential candidates–more than, say, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices or governors. There is a mythology around presidents, which Trump himself played into by recently referring to himself as a “fine and brilliant young man,” along with celebrating his survival of a recent assassination attempt.
Biden, who has historically portrayed himself as strong, and even claimed to overcome his stutter, finally started to let go of this mythology just before he dropped out of the race. He acknowledged age, exhaustion and slower speech. He joked about being fine besides his “brain.” And he mentioned that he might need more sleep. He was exhibiting another kind of strength through honesty, though it might have been strategic. It turned out to not be the most politically effective approach: Some media outlets highlighted him needing more sleep as headline-worthy and a red flag (NBC, 7/4/24; New York Times, 7/4/24).
The challenges Biden and Trump face in walking and speaking are evident to the public. Questions about underlying health issues are fair, but the implication of all of this “Best in Show” coverage is that people with significant disabilities, or even just a need for regular sleep, might face a hostile, intrusive media if they ran for president. And this discourse trickles down to how people feel permitted to speak about ordinary disabled civilians.
The presidency isn’t a sporting event. If media outlets are going to express concern about a candidate’s physical abilities, they should clarify what assumptions are guiding their concerns. As it stands, most of these articles and images just seem concerned with any signs of disability, which they implicitly associate with not being fit to serve.
Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman, about right-wing plans for minority rule, for the July 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: With so much attention on individual politicians’ temperaments, and on the country’s political temperature generally, it’s easy to forget that US governance is based around structures. These structures are being undermined, but they also have design flaws, if you will, that have been present from the start, as explored in a new book by our guest.
Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of a number of books, most recently Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.
Ari Berman: Hey, Janine. Great to talk to you again. Thank you.
JJ: My ninth grade government teacher said that he didn’t think we’d remember much from his class, but there was one thing we needed to know, and periodically, he would just holler, “What’s the law of the land?” And we would shout out, “The Constitution!”
There’s a belief that we have these bedrocks of democracy—and they might be ignored, or even breached—but in themselves, they have some kind of purity. Where do you start in explaining why we would be helped by disabusing ourselves of that kind of understanding?
AB: That’s right. Our understanding of the Constitution is basically these godlike figures in their powdered wigs decreeing the law of the land in 1787, and having the people’s best interests at heart. And in many ways, the Constitution was a remarkable document for its time, but the founders had their own self-interests at heart in many cases. And remember, these were white male property holders, many of them slave holders, and they designed the Constitution, in many ways, not to expand democracy, but to check democracy, and make sure that their own interests were protected.
And they realized that they were a distinct minority in the country, because they, as I said, were a white property-holding elite, and the country was not. There were a lot of white men without property, and then you think about women, and African Americans and Native Americans, and other people who weren’t part at all of the drafting of the Constitution.
And so the Constitution, in many ways, favors these elite minorities over the majority of people. It favors small states over large states in the construction of the US Senate. It favors slave states over free states in the construction of the US House. It prevents the direct election of the president. It creates a Supreme Court that’s a product of an undemocratic Senate and an undemocratic presidency.
So in all these ways, we have these fundamentally undemocratic institutions that form the basis of democracy. And that’s a fundamental contradiction, because, in fact, our country’s most important democratic document was actually intended to make the country less democratic. And that’s certainly something we’re not taught in ninth grade government class.
JJ: Absolutely. I think of Langston Hughes’ “America never was America to me,” but just to say it outright: US democracy has never meant one person, one vote. So it’s not that there’s this halcyon time that we should be trying to get back to.
AB: It’s funny, because in a way, that’s how we think that democracy should be, and that’s what the Supreme Court said in the 1960s, that the purest expression of democracy was one person, one vote. But if you look at so many of our institutions today, they violate basic principles of one person, one vote.
We don’t have a direct national popular election for president, in which each vote counts equally. Because of the Electoral College, some states matter more than others, and some states count more than others. So in New York, for example, we don’t have the same power of our vote as we do in Wisconsin, or even in Wyoming.
And then in the US Senate, smaller, more rural, more conservative states have dramatically more power than larger, more urban, more diverse states, because each state gets the same number of senators regardless of population. And in many ways, our core government structures violate these notions of one person, one vote.
That’s something that I don’t think we’re talking enough about. I mean, once again, we’ve switched presidential candidates, and it’s all about “how’s Kamala Harris going to do in these six battleground states?” without thinking, “Why do we only have six battleground states? Why do six states decide the elections, instead of 50?” This is a crazy system, if you try to explain to someone that’s not already familiar with how American politics work.
JJ: And yet, if you’re trying to be in the smart people conversation, to say something as basic as, “Well, wait, how come every person’s vote doesn’t count equally? Isn’t that the ideal we hold up?” Then you’re not invited to the party any more, because somehow being savvy is just kind of accepting these sort of fundamental anti-democratic propositions.
AB: It’s funny, and people don’t even know why the system exists the way it is. And that was a major factor into why I wanted to write this book, because I don’t think people even understand how we came to get the structure that we have today.
So the Electoral College was created because, No. 1, the Founding Fathers feared the people being given the right to directly choose the president. And that would be a very difficult argument to make in 2024, that the people should not have the right to choose the president. But, essentially, that’s why the Electoral College existed.
And then secondarily, it existed to protect the power of the slave state, which is something that we don’t talk about enough either, because James Madison, who was really the most influential Founding Father when it came to drafting the Constitution, he actually said that he thought the people would be the best way of choosing the president. But he said he worried that it would disenfranchise the South, because the South had so many enslaved people who couldn’t vote, therefore the Northern states would have more free people, and therefore the South would be at a disadvantage. So he basically came out and said, we should have a direct election of the presidency, except not for slavery.
Well, it’s not like suddenly slavery is over, then we got rid of the Electoral College. We abolished slavery, but we kept the Electoral College. And that’s the kind of thing that I don’t think makes a whole lot of sense to people.
And you hear various arguments against scrapping the Electoral College, but the fact is, 85% of Americans don’t have a vote that really matters in a presidential election. And that’s why polls consistently show that 70% to 80% of Americans don’t want to continue with the Electoral College. Because if you’re a Republican in California, the Electoral College isn’t helping you, either. And there’s a lot of them, too.
JJ: I’m amazed that people are able to respond and say, “We don’t want the Electoral College,” because they’re fighting against high school, and all the information that we’ve gotten, that’s saying that we’re a democracy, and this is the best system we can have. So the fact that people can independently come up with the idea that, no, actually, this isn’t working, is kind of amazing and wonderful for me. But I did want to say: It’s wrong to say Trump came along and ruined everything, but it’s also true that the inequitable effects of these structures have been compounding over time, to the point where they can be gamed, essentially.
AB: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think Trump is both an accelerant and a product of the broken system. I mean, Trump has never won a majority of votes. Trump has been helped by these counter-majority institutions. He was elected, and nearly reelected, because of the Electoral College. If there had been a national popular vote, he would’ve easily lost both times.
He was protected by a US Senate in which Republicans have dramatically more power, because conservative, white, rural states have dramatically more power. So the Senate first advanced his agenda, and then it prevented him from being held accountable for the insurrection.
Then the Supreme Court has dramatically helped him in this election, made it so that he’s not going to face trial for inciting the insurrection before the election, and helped him in so many other ways. And the Supreme Court’s a direct product of the undemocratic way that we elect presidents and elect senators, because five or six conservative justices were nominated by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote, and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans. So in so many ways, Trump has benefited from this anti-democratic structure.
And then, of course, he’s layered on all of these newer anti-democratic tactics on top of that. We weren’t talking about overturning elections before Donald Trump. There were disputes, of course, about elections, notably in 2000, but there were not efforts to just outright overturn elections until Trump came along. And so Trump has added a lot of anti-democratic features, but he’s been successful in the first place because of the anti-democratic system in which he exists.
JJ: And he’s also helped by saying things out loud, like saying, and I forget when it was, but saying, “We can’t expand voting access, because you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again if we expand voting access.” So he’s kind of laying out a template of what he’s doing.
AB: Exactly. Not only that, because other Republicans have done that too, but then he’s also sought to weaponize a lot of previously nonpartisan things. If you don’t like mail voting, well then, you try to sabotage the post office. No president’s tried to do that before.
If you don’t like the changing demographics of America, you try to sabotage the US Census. No president had tried to do that before, either, in the same kind of way. The whole Project2025 blueprint, one of the biggest aims of that is to politicize these previously nonpartisan institutions, to turn the federal government from a bunch of civil servants into basically a bunch of right-wing ideologues, controlling every level of power.
And so I think that’s an overriding theme of Trump, is that not only do you benefit from an undemocratic system, but then you try to tilt the system even more, so that everything becomes politicized and everything becomes weaponized to try to benefit this elite conservative white minority, as opposed to benefiting every American, or the majority of Americans, in terms of how these programs or these government institutions are supposed to work and were set up.
JJ: It isn’t that it’s never been recognized that there are these fundamental flaws in the founding premises, if you will, of the country. There have been efforts, historically, to bring about a true multiracial democracy, and the resistance today is built on those past efforts of resistance, isn’t it?
AB: Yeah, exactly. There’s been this long push and pull between democratic and anti-democratic forces, and it would be inaccurate to say that the country’s always been democratic, and it would be inaccurate to say the country’s always been undemocratic. There have been these clashes, and at various times, we’ve expanded democracy. We passed the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment, to give rights to previously enslaved people. We passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration Act and lots of other things, the 19th Amendment, to bring new people into the political process.
But at the same time, there’s been a backlash to those efforts. And I think you can draw a straight line between the backlash to the civil rights movement, and the backlash of the changing demographics of the country, and shifts in political power, and the Trump campaign. I think it’s very clear that when he talks about making America great again, the “again” is before we had things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and when the government was dominated by white males.
JJ: Where, concretely, do you see the resistance that you refer to in the book title, which is not, just to be rhetorical, not just a push back against something, but also a push forward. And you’re explaining this importance of our dynamic understanding of history, that it’s always been conflict-shaped, that it’s always been a work in progress. Where do you see the resistance happening right now?
Ari Berman: “There’s 60–70% support for a lot of these policies…. The problem isn’t what people believe. It’s translating majority opinion into majority rule.”
AB: I see the resistance happening in terms of the efforts to try to create a more robust multiracial democracy, efforts to try to elect the first Black senator in Georgia, the first Jewish senator in Georgia, and to do all of these things that have happened. I see a lot of progress happening at the state and local level. I talk about Michigan in the book, a state that was very gerrymandered, very rigged, for much of the last decade, but where people put initiatives on the ballot to ban partisan gerrymandering, to expand voting rights, to protect abortion rights, to legalize marijuana, going around politicians to do these things directly, and to show that, actually, the country’s less divided than we think.
We always hear, “Oh, the country’s so divided politically,” and I think it is divided if it’s a D versus R. But if you ask people, “Do you want to protect fundamental rights? Do you want to make democracy work better for more people?” there’s overwhelming bipartisan support for that. There’s 60–70% support for a lot of these policies. So to me, the problem isn’t what people believe. It’s translating majority opinion into majority rule.
JJ: I was going to ask, where do the hoi polloi fit in? But that sounds like the answer is to get invested and get engaged at a level where you are making a difference. But at the same time, how do we go about making the changes that we want to make at the federal level, at these things that seem impermeable right now? What’s happening there?
AB: I think we need longer-term movements for structural change. And I think it starts with talking about it and doing something about it. I mean, you’re going to see Biden talking about Supreme Court reform. He should have done this four years ago, in my opinion, because it was very clear the Supreme Court was broken and undemocratically constructed and ideologically unhinged back then. But, nonetheless, the fact that he’s going to talk about it will make it easier if there’s another Democratic president to do something about it.
You look at the issue of voting rights; Democrats pushed very hard for federal voting rights legislation. They came two senators short of making it happen. That was a big disappointment. But they got 48 Democratic senators on record saying we should change the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, which was a really big deal, because they did not start with 48 Democratic senators in that position. And I think if there were to be a Democratic Senate in 2025, there would be probably 50 votes to reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, because the two senators that opposed it, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are no longer going to be in the Senate. They’re no longer senators.
And so, sometimes, these things take more than one cycle. And I think that’s a lot of the problem with Democrats and progressives, is they’re thinking, OK, we need to accomplish these things in one Congress, or else we’re not able to do it. And, yes, we’d like to be able to achieve everything, but a lot of this stuff takes time.
I mean, the Project 2025 manifesto is the product of 40 or 50 years of conservative legal thinking and conservative weaponization of the government. It’s not like they just woke up one day and decided to do these things. This is a product of a long movement that they’ve pushed for many, many decades.
And sometimes you have to think that this is going to take more time, but I think it starts with a commitment to these issues. One of my frustrations is the Democrats have often been the party of the status quo. I mean, the Biden administration’s often defended how great American democracy is, as opposed to saying, “Yes, there’s a lot of good things about American democracy. There’s also a lot of flaws in the system that we need to improve.” And those flaws in the system are the ones that aren’t talked about enough.
JJ: Just a meta question about history, which, of course, the book is about lifting up relevant history. We have politicians, including Trump, saying, or strongly suggesting, if we don’t win the election, we’re going to take up arms and set up a civil war. But they still refer to the framework. They still say, “if we don’t win, that will mean the election isn’t fair,”—like, fairness somehow comes into the conversation, because they don’t come out and say, “We believe might makes right.” It’s too useful, still, to wave towards some principle of fairness, even if you’re obviously cynically invoking it. But I just think it’s why understanding real history, the dynamic, conflict-shaped history of this country, is so crucial. And if it weren’t crucial, they wouldn’t be trying to stop us from learning it.
AB: Exactly. That’s why there’s been so many efforts to try to prevent an honest teaching of history, because the more you understand the complexity of American history, and the fact that a lot of bad things happened that we still haven’t really done that much about, you understand that, of course, they don’t want to pass policies as a result of things that occurred; so they just want to make it like these things never occurred at all. And the fact is, things like the three-fifths compromise, Jim Crow, slavery, they happened whether we like it or not.
And the reason why they’re trying to prevent these things from being taught is because they’re trying to protect white power at all costs. And they have a whole agenda designed to weaponize and promote white power. And that ideology of white supremacy is premised on either just ignoring history, or distorting it to such a point that white supremacy is the only solution.
And that’s, in many ways, how we got Jim Crow. And I think there’s a lot of parallels between that and what’s happening today, where there’s stronger calls for racial justice, the country is changing. We’re heading towards the majority-minority future. And those people that don’t like it, they’re trying to build a wall—in some cases, a literal wall—to stop what they view as the coming siege.
JJ: And just finally, I do blame corporate news media for allowing fundamentally anti-democratic ideas, like anti-democracy ideas, to be one of the poles in our conversation about how to work our democracy, this triangulation that makes Trumpism just, “That’s a thing some people think.”
Now, clearly, it is a thing some people think, but a lot of people think it because it’s been made acceptable by what they read in the paper, as it being just part of a grownup conversation about how things should happen. I just wonder what you would look for from journalism at this time.
AB: I think the media have normalized Trumpism in a lot of ways, and I think that the media and Trump have a really abusive relationship, because I think for a lot of the media, they realize that Trump is this grotesque, anti-democratic figure, but they also can’t look away. So they’re just constantly giving him airtime, and he’s the best thing for their ratings. And so I think, for a lot of them, the Biden era was kind of boring, and it was maybe too substantive, and Biden himself wasn’t that interesting or charismatic. And so, on the flip side, Trump is such a reality show that you can’t look away.
But I think sometimes the way they cover it, even if it’s bad things Trump has done, like the criminal trial, they cover it in such a lurid, scandalous way that it kind of makes it feel like they’re covering just any person that would be convicted of doing something bad, as opposed to reminding someone, this guy tried to overturn American democracy. He did the worst possible thing you could do, and he’s just back.
And I don’t blame the media solely for that. I blame the United States governing institutions, that there was no mechanism that worked to disqualify him. I mean, the only actual mechanism would’ve been impeachment, and the Senate was too cowardly, and also skewed, to do it. So I don’t blame the media alone, but I also think, so much of the media coverage has focused on Biden’s age, or various things Trump is doing, in terms of picking a running mate and things like that, and sort of covered this election as if it’s normal, as if it’s a normal election, as opposed to the guy who tried to completely subvert American democracy could be back in.
And I just think that’s something that we haven’t heard nearly enough about. That’s not just the media’s fault, but I think the media play a role in the fact that that’s not at the top of voters’ minds.
JJ: Let me just give you one last opportunity to end on a note of hopefulness, or a forward-looking thinking, because these things are being recognized, and folks are trying to address them at various levels. And just what would you say to somebody who’s like, “All right, well, I’m going to pull up the covers.” How do we move forward here?
AB: What I always say is that if you’re not voting or not participating, someone else is, and they’re getting more power because of it. So I understand that it’s an exhausting time, that, in many ways, people are just kind of done with everything. And I feel that way too sometimes. I mean, that’s a natural response.
But, unfortunately, if people don’t get involved in changing the government, it’s going to create a void, and someone else will. And the reactionary forces are more than willing, and more than prepared, to try to fill that void.
So I would urge people to get involved wherever they feel like they can make a difference. And, again, if you’re overwhelmed by the national level, and you’re overwhelmed by the presidency and you’re sick of hearing about it, sick of talking about it, try to get involved locally.
Like I said, research if there’s a cool ballot initiative. In New York, for example, there’s going to be an initiative to pass a New York version of the Equal Rights Amendment. That’s a really interesting thing that nobody really knows about.
There’s lots of competitive state legislative elections, congressional elections, other elections that matter, where maybe you’re more inspired to get involved if you’re turned off by the presidential race.
And I also think we saw, based on the switch in the ticket, a lot of people were yearning to get involved in the presidential race, but wanted a different kind of choice. And you saw that when there was a different kind of choice, people responded to that. So I think it’s more just, find a way to get involved. Politics doesn’t have to be your entire life, it’s actually not healthy for it to be your entire life, but it can be part of your life, and I think that that way you can make a difference, and not allow a more reactionary movement to fill that void.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Ari Berman from Mother Jones. The book is called Minority Rule. It’s out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thank you so much, Ari Berman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
With Joe Biden’s historic decision to step aside as Democratic nominee for president and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, the 2024 presidential race has suddenly transformed from an uninspiring duel between two old white men to something altogether different. Powered by coconutmemes and refreshing cognitive competence, Harris has surged in popularity. Young voters, in particular, have shown a burst of enthusiasm.
The Washington Post, however, is concerned. An energetic alliance between progressives and liberals behind a woman who ran to the left of Biden during the 2020 primary could signal a leftward shift of the Democratic Party, which has generally been dominated by centrists over the last several decades. That’s not something the Jeff Bezos–owned Post has much interest in.
Kamala Harris is gaining ground against Donald Trump with most sub-groups of voters (Financial Times, 7/26/24).
‘What Harris needs to do’
The Washington Post (7/22/24) urges Kamala Harris to ” resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow.”
So the editorial board decided it was time to weigh in. A day after Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing, it published the editorial “What Harris Needs to Do, Now, to Win” (7/22/24).
In the piece, the board implores Harris to abandon progressive policy priorities such as “widespread student debt cancellation” and “nationwide rent stabilization” that Biden has backed during his term as president. Instead of promoting these policies, according to the board, Harris should mercilessly turn her back on the progressive wing of the party:
Ms. Harris should both resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow. Ms. Harris’s pick of running mate could be a revealing early indicator, too. Tapping a politician likely to appeal to the median voter would serve her—and the country—best.
This, we are to think, is not simply about the more conservative policy preferences of the members of the Post’s board. It is cold, calculated and smart electoral strategy. After all, everyone knows that America is a center-right country, and general election voters would never get behind a progressive platform. (Never mind that Biden adopted a slate of progressive policy positions in a desperate attempt to resuscitate his ailing campaign, precisely because these policies are so popular with the general electorate.)
Misty memories of 2020
Not only that, but remember what happened in 2020? In the Post’s telling, during that presidential primary, Harris
tried to play down her record as a tough-on-crime California prosecutor and embrace the progressive left of the Democratic Party, backing policies that lacked broad appeal, such as Medicare-for-all. She did not make it out of 2019 before folding her campaign.
The implication here seems to be that support for progressive policies hampered Harris’s campaign. A strange hypothesis, given that progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did exceptionally well in that primary, and only lost after moderates consolidated around Biden in a last-minute tactical alliance.
Medicare-for-all, meanwhile, posted majority support from the American public throughout the 2020 primary season, and had garnered majority support for years before that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. To be fair to the Post, the polling on this issue was incredibly sensitive to the framing of the question, so you could easily point to some poor results for the policy as well, often found in Fox’s (unsurprisingly biased) polling. But, unlike with many of the polls that returned unfavorable results, the wording used by Kaiser was eminently even-handed.
Polling by Kaiser (10/16/20) finds that Medicare for All has remained broadly popular for years.
In any case, what matters for the Post’s suggestion about Harris’s fate in the 2020 primary is not views among the general population, but views among Democrats. With that group, polls consistently found overwhelming support for Medicare-for-all. At best, then, we might call the Post’s claims here misleading, an attempt to pawn off opposition to a policy on the general public when, in fact, it’s really the paper that takes issue with it.
Ignoring full employment
Biden’s stimulus bill succeeded in keeping unemployment low for a span unprecedented in the past half century (Slate, 7/24/24)—but the Washington Post doesn’t want to talk about that.
The policies that the Post prefers Democrats to push are of a different sort, the Very Serious and bipartisan sort. Because only when Republicans also sign off on legislation is it any good. As the Post calls for a rightward turn from Harris, it celebrates the scarce moments of bipartisanship (sort of) over the last few years:
In the White House, Mr. Biden’s approach helped get substantial bipartisan bills over the finish line, investing in national infrastructure and critical semiconductor manufacturing. He also signed a bill that should have been bipartisan: the nation’s most ambitious climate change policy to date.
Conspicuously absent from the editorial is any mention of the American Rescue Plan, the stimulus bill passed in the spring of 2021 that spurred the most rapid and egalitarian economic recovery in recent American history. As the progressive journalist Zach Carter noted in a recent article titled “Full Employment Is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” (Slate, 7/24/24):
Across the 50 years preceding Biden’s tenure in office, the US economy enjoyed only 25 total months with an unemployment rate below 4%. Biden did it for 27 consecutive months—a streak broken only in May of this year, as an expanding labor force pushed the rate over 4% even as the economy actually added more jobs.
Given that the stimulus bill can claim much of the credit for this outcome, it stands as arguably the most significant legislative accomplishment of the Biden administration. For the Post, though, that’s apparently not worth highlighting.
Politically toxic
It’s “surprisingly doable” to cut the national debt, says the Washington Post (7/23/24)–especially if you don’t mind imposing cuts that are overwhelmingly unpopular.
Also conspicuously missing from the Post editorial is any discussion of the potential electoral damage that could result from continuing Biden’s support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In May of this year, the American Arab Institute estimated, based on their polling, that Biden could lose as many as 177,000 Arab American votes compared to his performance in 2020 across four swing states. It would be worth discussing this policy failure, and the ways in which Harris should break from Biden on Gaza, if the Post were really interested in helping Harris win. But that would distract the paper from advocating incredibly unpopular centrist policies.
Take its editorial (7/23/24) published a day after it admonished Harris for supporting Medicare-for-all, due to that policy’s supposed unpopularity. This piece finds the editorial board once again calling for cuts to Social Security, specifically through raising the retirement age. Benefit cuts are opposed by 79% of Americans, and raising the retirement age polls almost equally badly, with 78% of Americans opposing an increase in the retirement age from 67 to 70. Yet the Post evidently finds it critical to advocate this politically toxic policy just as Harris gets her campaign off the ground and starts shaping her platform.
As of now, it looks like Harris could break either way in the coming months. Her choice to tap Eric Holder, a corporate Democrat hailing from the Obama administration, to vet candidates for vice president, suggests a possible rightward shift. As do her team’s overtures to the crypto world. On the other hand, her relatively cold reception of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit could signal a leftward turn.
In short, Harris seems to remain persuadable on the direction of her campaign and the content of her platform. Unfortunately, while the Washington Post is doing its best to convince Harris to move right, there exists no comparable outlet representing the interests of the progressive wing of the party that can fight back.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”
