Janine Jackson interviewed CODEPINK’s Danaka Katovich about attacks on activists for the May 2, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin
Janine Jackson: It is misleading to portray public protest simply in photos of people being dragged off the street by law enforcement, because protest and dissent take many forms, some less visible than others. Still, the people in those photos have meaning for us, about being vocal and visible in frightening times. If standing up and speaking out loud in oppressive times were easy, well, there’d be less oppressive times, wouldn’t there? Whatever one’s imaginings about what they woulda, coulda done, the reality is that it is not a walk in the park to protest in person, knowing that you may face a lethally armed officer, tasked with grabbing you and throwing you in a cell, with the weight of the state behind them.
The state also has many forms of attacks on protesters and protest, and those are not always so visible, either. All of that is in play right now, and here to talk about it is Danaka Katovich, national co-director of the group CODEPINK. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Danaka Katovich.
Danaka Katovich: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.
JJ: I know that you see what’s happening to CODEPINK as just a piece of a bigger issue, but maybe first tell us a little about what’s been happening to CODEPINK in the last few months.
DK: Yeah. I think this new wave started with Sen. Tom Cotton, who’s the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he was at a hearing, during a CODEPINK disruption of the hearing, he stated, like it was a fact, that CODEPINK is funded by the Chinese Communist Party. We’re not, but someone in such a high position of power saying that is difficult to navigate, scary; you wonder what they’re going to do next.
And the very next day or two days later, Sen. Jim Banks, in a different Senate hearing, repeated and regurgitated the same lies about us, and asked Pam Bondi to investigate CODEPINK for these fake and not real ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
And they’re doing that to—you know, we’re very in their face. We’re in Congress every single day, challenging them on the genocide in Gaza, and their support for the genocide in Gaza, and their constant willingness to ignore the American public. It’s their job to listen to the American public and represent us, but they don’t do that. And we’re very in their face, and they’re trying to intimidate us, and scare us into being quiet.
JJ: MAGA couldn’t hate CODEPINK any more than they do, to the extent that they know you exist. So is the hope to isolate CODEPINK, even among other pro-Palestinian groups?
DK: I don’t think so, to be honest. In my honest assessment, I think they are going after us because we’re a well-known group—online, at least—and we posteverything that happens to us, and all the interactions that we have, to educate the public on what’s really going on in Congress. So I don’t think it’s to isolate us from the Palestine movement. If it is, it’s absolutely not working.
JJ: I sense that CODEPINK, along with other groups, understands that you have to talk around dominant media narratives. I just saw a message today talking about how simple it is to want a child born in Gaza to live. I think people can get explained away from that basic human understanding, told that politics is over your head and let smarter folks decide. But folks who don’t do organizing think maybe you just come up with a magic message, but it’s much more human to human than that, isn’t it?
DK: Oh, absolutely. And that’s what’s really rooted me in this work, is our position on this is not fringe. A poll came out last week that said 70% of Democratic voters do not support sending weapons to Israel. That is so vastly different than what that poll would’ve been two years ago, or was two years ago.
I’ve not had to read a million books—I mean, I have, but a lot of people haven’t read a million books—to have the opinion that Palestinians in Gaza, and children in Gaza, deserve every single right to dignity and life that any person on this Earth has.
Because we’re seeing their faces, we’re hearing their voices. We see what they’re going through on our phones every single day. There’s no shortage of content coming out of Gaza that Palestinians have demonstrated their humanity in the worst situations of their life. And I think people don’t have to be even politically aware to not support what’s going on in Palestine.
JJ: The expansive and transparently intimidating effort, the work that’s being applied against CODEPINK, to say you’re funded by Communist China, that’s meant to keep folks from listening to you, or thinking about what you have to say. But that intimidation could be applied to anyone that they designate they don’t want us to hear from. So it’s not like they’ve set themselves any guardrails. This is a bigger thing.
DK: Yeah. What’s funny is this morning, before we did this interview, the Trump administration was doing a press conference about Amazon. Amazon said that they were going to post the prices for how the tariffs are affecting consumers, and the Trump administration and the press secretary, I can’t remember her name, said Amazon is partnering with a Communist China propaganda arm.
JJ: Right. So it’s a go-to.
DK: It’s literally whoever they disagree with, which is probably great for us, because they’re completely making their propaganda seem so pathetic and deluded.
JJ: Right. But following from that, because it’s fascinating to me, in the way that MAGA and the right will just throw charges out there. And then when they’re disproven, they’ll say, Yeah, but they’re really still true.
It reminds me of the way prosecutors will never accept a wrongful conviction: If he didn’t do what we sent him to prison for, he did something else. So we were still right to send him to prison.
And I think, at a certain point, an observer has to acknowledge that truth is not the point. It’s just us versus them. And I think a lot of folks lose the plot right there, because we don’t know how to operate in a system where truth doesn’t matter. So in the face of just blatantly false charges against you, how do you keep going forward, and help other folks go forward themselves?
DK: I think one way we’ve done it is help people realize just how ridiculous it is, because they can say whatever they want, and they will continue to say whatever they want. They’re saying it as if it’s a fact. Even though, if any of this were true, they would’ve shut us down years ago, when they started bringing up these allegations. I think that is one way we approach it, is just making it as ridiculous as it is, and unserious as it is.
JJ: Finally, we need a brave independent press corps right now, that could push back on these scurrilous attacks—scratch ’em, you can see their falsehood, but they’re part of attacks on democracy and on human rights. Corporate media—spotty, good things here and there. But in the main, I don’t see it.
But of course, corporate media are not the only media. I wonder what your thoughts are, overall, on the state of journalism and protest, and just what you would like to see from reporters in this moment.
DK: When Mahmoud was arrested by ICE agents, I think there was a different sort of pushback than there were on groups that are being attacked in such ways, like these vague and false claims about supporting terrorism, or supporting Hamas, or being funded by these foreign agencies or whatever. I think there was some pushback from even mainstream media. They were asking critical-thinking questions that I feel like they’ve been completely not doing for years and years.
But when it’s a group, when it’s CODEPINK or all these other Palestine organizations, they don’t ask these critical-thinking questions that they’ve asked when it happens to individuals. So, when someone accuses a feminist organization in the US of being funded by a foreign government, I would like to hear them challenge that, because it’s a direct attack on civil society. We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and they’re trying to take us down a peg, and even mainstream media who claim to support women’s rights and all of these things don’t even question it at all. So I’d love to hear them actually be critical of the Trump administration in a way that’s not just benefiting their specific neoliberal values.
Danaka Katovich: “Their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion.”
JJ: And then, any final thoughts for activists who might be kind of afraid to go out in the street or to join an organization, because they feel targeted and fearful? What do you have to say to folks?
DK: I would say the fear is the point of all of this. I fluctuated between being scared that they want to shut down CODEPINK… The thing that I come back to is, their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion. The point is fear. And I think if they’ve instilled fear, then they’re winning. And I think it’s OK to be afraid. I think it’s normal and human. But in this trajectory that we’re on, it will only get scarier to resist what is happening.
JJ: And we’ll do it in community, yeah?
DK: Absolutely.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Danaka Katovich. She’s national co-director at the group CODEPINK. Thank you so much, Danaka Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The world doesn’t know yet what caused the dramatic power outage on the Iberian Peninsula (BBC, 4/28/25). Nevertheless, the right-wing press both in the US and Britain quickly exploited it to dubiously suggest that the blame rested with Spain’s push for more renewable energy sources. The insinuation that clean energy is at fault has even infected outlets like the New York Times and AP.
New York Post (4/30/25): “Experts have previously warned that Europe’s increasing reliance on renewable energy…could lead to blackouts and other supply issues.”
The right-wing New York Post (4/30/25), while admitting that a final determination on the cause of the outage in Spain hadn’t surfaced, ran with the headline “Devastating Blackout in Spain Raises Questions About Reliance on Solar Power, Wind Power.” As the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid criticized the Spanish government’s response, it reminded its readers that that government is “socialist.” It cited “experts” four times to pin blame on “renewables,” while naming only one. That expert noted that solar plants’ lack of inertia—which, the Post explained, is something produced by “gas and nuclear power plants,” means that “imbalances must be corrected more quickly.” (Inertia is not a characteristic unique to non-renewable energy, as the Post suggests; hydroelectric energy, another popular renewable, uses turbines and produces inertia.)
An op-ed by anti-environmentalists Gabriel Calzada and Fernández Ordóñez in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (4/30/25) said that “Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally.” They blamed “energy-transitionist ideologues” on the continent for the blackout, because they “forced in” renewables.
Again, while admitting that the cause of the outrage had yet to be determined, they echoed the Post’s suggestion that renewable sources are by their nature “unreliable,” focusing on their lack of “inertia”:
The greater the share of renewables vis-à-vis conventional power plants with synchronous turbines, the less inertia there is to cushion instantaneous load fluctuations in the grid.
This causes the whole system to become “increasingly fragile, with higher risk of failure.”
The far-right journal Compact (4/29/25) said renewable “sources, especially photovoltaic solar, can’t supply the requisite inertia the grid needs.” Admitting that the cause of the outrage was still unknown, it hoped the affair would repopularize climate-ravaging forms of power generation against woke wind farms and soyboy solar plants:
Whatever the cause, this blackout could have a salutary impact on European energy policy if it dissuades countries from pursuing aggressive renewable energy policies that make power less reliable.
The importance of inertia
Energy Central (8/14/24): “While transitioning to a renewable-based power grid presents challenges, the benefits significantly surpass the risks.”
The loss of power for Spain and Portugal, a major crisis reminiscent of the great northeast American blackout of the summer of 2003 (WABC, 8/14/23), has taught the world an important lesson about centrality of inertia in the electricity systems built around traditional energy sources. Gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants use giant spinning turbines that “store kinetic energy, which helps stabilize the grid by balancing supply and demand fluctuations,” explained Energy Central (8/14/24). “High inertia means the system can better withstand sudden disturbances, such as a generator tripping or a sudden surge in demand.”
Solar and wind energy, which are in growing use in Iberia and seen as a clean alternative in an age of climate crisis, lack this feature, which means integrating them into energy grids requires alternative ways of addressing energy fluctuation problems. It’s something engineers have long understood, and have been addressing with a variety of technical solutions (Green Tech Media, 8/7/20; IET Renewable Power Generation, 11/10/20).
In general, questions of inertia are an important concern of energy planners when it comes to balancing clean energy and the need to stabilize the grid. But they’re not the only way the grid is stabilized.
A Spanish professor of electrical engineering explained in Wired (5/1/25) that both local “meshes,” which help distribute electrical flows, and interconnections with neighboring grids are crucial for preventing the kind of imbalance that apparently led to the Iberian blackout. But the latter has always been Spain’s “weak point,” because of the “geographical barrier of the Pyrenees” mountains. Rather than suggest a pullback from solar or wind, as right-wing media seem to pine for, experts told Wired the needed response was greater interconnection, and more storage mechanisms or stabilizers to account for the reduction in inertia.
‘Uniquely vulnerable to outages’
New York Times (4/29/25): “The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources.”
But the anti-renewable drum beat from the right inspired similar reporting in more centrist corners. The New York Times (4/29/25) took a similar tone, under the headline, “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.” The article itself seemed to have an identity crisis, trying to paint the peninsula’s success in ramping up renewables as a false victory while at the same time acknowledging that it wasn’t just the renewable energy itself that caused the vulnerability:
The incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.
The article did also explain Spain’s relative lack of investment in necessary grid infrastructure and storage. But those who didn’t get past the headline would have come away with the same false impression about renewables as readers of the New York Post.
The Times (4/30/25) doubled down in a follow-up piece the next day, saying, “The incident has raised questions about whether Spain and Portugal’s rapid shift to renewable energy left them more vulnerable to outages.”
An AP (4/30/25) explainer, which was also picked up by the Washington Post (4/30/25), used phrases like “renewed attention” and “questions remain” to cast a vague haze over the role of the peninsula’s renewable energy:
On Tuesday, there was renewed attention on Spain’s renewable energy generation. The southern European nation is a leader in solar and wind power generation, with more than half of its energy last year having come from renewable sources. Portugal also generates a majority of its energy from renewable sources.
Questions remain about whether Spain’s heavy renewable energy supply may have made its grid system more susceptible to the type of outage that took place Monday. The thinking goes that nonrenewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, can better weather the type of fluctuations observed Monday on Spain’s grid.
After sowing doubt about renewables, the AP wrote that Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, said “it was too early to draw a straight line between Monday’s event and Spain’s solar power generation.”
‘You’ve got to get the engineering right’
Euro News (4/29/25): “Far from being the cause of the peninsula’s woes…the large percentage of renewable energy in Spain and the flexibility of hydropower systems enabled the nation to react and recover more quickly.”
Though none of the outlets above seemed able to find them, some experts suggested neither solar power nor inertia were likely at fault. Euronews (4/29/25) said:
Some experts have previously voiced concern that Spain’s grid needs to be upgraded to cope with the rapid integration of solar and wind. But others stress the unlikelihood of the mass blackout being down to the intermittent renewables, which the Spanish and Portuguese operators are by now adept at handling.
Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables explains that renewable power plants with 2MW of power generation or more were disconnected because of a disturbance in the frequency of the power grid—as per national safety protocols.
Essentially, the disturbance was “a consequence and not a cause,” it said in a statement. SolarPower Europe, UNEF and Global Solar Council also emphasise that photovoltaic power plants did not voluntarily disconnect; they were disconnected from the grid.
The English edition of the Spanish daily El País (5/1/25) concurred, quoting Pedro Fresco, general director of the Valencia Energy Sector Association:
The failure of a photovoltaic plant, however large, doesn’t seem likely to be the cause of the collapse of the entire electricity system…. Nor is it true that there weren’t enough synchronous sources at that time: There was nuclear, a lot of hydropower, some solar thermal and combined cycle power, and even cogeneration, coal and renewable waste… In fact, there was more synchronous power than at other times.
Others pointed more to the grid itself. Reuters’ energy columnist Ron Bousso (4/30/25) said the “issue appears to be the management [emphasis added] of renewables in the modern grid.” The outage, he said, “should be a stark warning to governments: Investments in power storage and grid upgrades must go hand in hand with the expansion of renewables generation.”
The Guardian (4/29/25) also intervened, quoting a European energy analyst: “The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause.” Further, the paper quoted University of Strathclyde electrical engineer Keith Bell:
Events of this scale have happened in many places around the world over the years, in power systems using fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro or variable renewables. It doesn’t matter where you are getting the energy from: You’ve got to get the engineering right in order to ensure resilient supplies of electricity.
Experts say it could take months to determine the exact cause(s) of the outage (New York Times, 4/29/25).
Exploiting the crisis
Spanish power company chief Beatriz Corredor (Al Jazeera, 4/30/25): ““These technologies are already stable, and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues.”
The quickness of not only right-wing but also centrist outlets to blame solar and wind power for the debacle is in part rooted in Spain’s right-wing political opposition’s exploitation of the crisis, using it to bash the left-leaning governing parties and Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the nation’s energy company. Al Jazeera (4/30/25) quoted a spokesperson for the right-wing People’s Party:
Since REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, we can only point to the malfunctioning of REE, which has state investment and therefore its leaders are appointed by the government.
It’s easy to see why the People’s Party would politicize this. Just last year, the party fell under heavy criticism in Valencia, where the party is in local power, for its failure to act in the face of dire weather reports that led to massive flooding, killing more than 200 people (AP, 11/9/24). The national blackout has allowed the right to attempt to shift the anger toward the ruling Socialist Workers Party.
But it’s also par for the course for the right-wing media to defend the conservative alliance with the fossil fuel industry, which is threatened by any move to address the climate crisis. The media’s jump to blame Spain’s renewables for a massive blackout looks a whole lot like their eagerness to (falsely) blame wind power for Texas’s 2021 blackouts (Media Matters, 2/19/21; FAIR.org, 2/26/21).
While we may eventually know exactly what happened—likely to be a complicated mechanical explanation that should inform us how to better guard against future problems—propagandists know that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.
Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”
The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.
I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”
It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.
Public vs. state media
Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”
Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)
FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.
His words, not mine
White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.
Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:
That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent masked police into the last independent TV station on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.
I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.
If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.
Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:
Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/LehrerReport were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.
He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.
The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.
A sloppy attack
Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”
Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for TheNation (4/15/25).
Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.
Taibbi continued:
People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.
I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.
As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.
Green Card–holding students are being abducted from the streets by agents of the state for attending protests and writing op-eds. News outlets are being investigated by the FCC for reporting that displeases the president. Federal web pages are being scrubbed of a lengthy list of words, including “race,” “transgender,” “women” and “climate.”
“Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy Era?” NPR (Morning Edition, 4/7/25) asked—with the argument for the former position being that “conservatives are just, in general, much more willing to speak their mind.”
NPR responded to this shocking government attack on free speech with a Morning Edition series on “The State of the First Amendment,” whose introductory episode’s headline (4/7/25) declared freedom of speech to be “shifting under the Trump administration”; it promised that the show would be “exploring how.”
The wishy-washy language wasn’t a promising start, and the segment only went downhill from there, taking an “on the one hand/on the other hand” framing to an assault on core democratic rights.
Host Leila Fadel explained: “All this week, we are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced?” After offering soundbites from people on “both sides” of this debate, she asked:
Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fearmongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?
It’s a vital question with a very clear and obvious answer—one that NPR, facing an investigation from the FCC into its corporate funding and a drive by Trump to end its federal funding, and laboring under ideological overseers installed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), refused to offer its listeners. (Trump signed a new executive order last night to attempt to defund NPR and PBS, accusing them of “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”)
‘Too early to tell’
NPR‘s Leila Fadel (4/7/25): “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?” (Photo: Mike Morgan/NPR)
After airing Trump’s claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” Fadel offered brief descriptions of “attacks on the press” and actions that have “broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways.” (The first example: “Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration.”)
The episode then took its balanced framing to an interview segment featuring two legal scholars, Lee Bollinger, former Columbia University president, and Jonathan Turley, a Fox News regular. Fadel introduced the two by noting that “they see the threats to [the First Amendment] in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump,” while “Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.”
In her questioning of Turley, Fadel did rebut his claim that the Biden administration and social media companies colluded to censor conservative speech. She then brought up “actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech,” citing “college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza or Russia’s war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest.” She noted as well that “government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity.” She asked: “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?”
It’s perhaps meant to be a tough question to make him admit that calling Trump a protector of free speech would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. (Turley responds, “Well, it’s too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.”) But Fadel’s language—”is censorship shifting?”—turns around and concedes the right’s false claims of censorship under the Biden administration (which she’d just rebutted!). Fadel and NPR offer only two ways of looking at the situation: Trump is increasing free speech, or censorship is just a swinging pendulum whose victims change as administrations change.
The segment wraps up with Bollinger and Turley finding at least one point of agreement: that the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil violates, in Turley’s words, “part of the core protections that define us as a people.”
‘They feel more free’
NPR (4/7/25) framed the First Amendment question as “who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”
The online version of the show (4/7/25), in which the audio transcript is condensed into an article format, bent even further backwards to find balance. It explained that the series “will explore who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”
That exploration started by naming real censorship that has already taken place: “scrubbing reports and federal grant applications of words the Trump administration has banned,” fears that “participating in protests could lead to deportation,” an online portal where people can “file complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion lessons in class with the US Department of Education.”
If this were a report on a foreign country, it’s hard to imagine NPR offering an “on the other hand” to that list of clearly authoritarian crackdowns on speech. But here comes the next paragraph, trotting out the obligatory balance:
Yet plenty of others—including anti-abortion activists, the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty and members of university Republican clubs—say they feel more free today to express views without fear of a backlash now that President Trump is back in office.
The article eliminates references to Turley and Bollinger, but includes two quotes. One is from a history teacher who feels afraid to answer student questions related to the Trump administration. That’s “balanced” by one from the president of the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, who says they have more members willing to “be outwardly and openly conservative than we did before the election.”
Orwellian redefinition
When you define the threat to free speech, as the New York Times (3/18/22) does, as “being shamed or shunned”—that is, criticized by others’ speech—it opens the door to suppressing speech in the name of free speech.
This absurd and harmful false balance NPR creates is predicated on the idea that “free speech” can mean simply how unconstrained a person feels to speak what might be unpopular opinions, including the various forms of bigotry and disinformation that have been unleashed by the Trump administration. But free speech is not, in fact, about feelings; it’s about consequences. It’s one thing to feel less afraid that your peers will criticize or even yell at you for speaking your opinions on campus. It’s another to fear that expressing your opinions will bring down official sanction, up to and including banishment from the country.
Free speech is not the freedom from “backlash” from those who disagree with your views, despite the MAGA movement’s best efforts to convince people of that—aided and abetted by many “liberal” elites and pundits who feel they have been “canceled” by left-wing criticism of their own (often bigoted) views. If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.
NPR concluded its article, “[Trump’s] critics say his concern for free speech is only for speech his administration finds acceptable.” That is, in fact, the only way you can make sense of the claim that Trump stands for “free speech”—by defining it as the ability of the approved people to speak, while those who would criticize (and thereby “cancel”) them are silenced (FAIR.org, 3/4/25).
The Trump administration is bringing the power of the state down on people who express opinions and ideas it finds objectionable. The consequences of that power, for both individuals and democracy, are quite dire. When NPR talks about “who feels more free to speak” and “who feels silenced,” it’s defining free speech the way MAGA wants it to be defined—as a vibe, not as a right. Ultimately, though, NPR‘s complicity in this Orwellian redefinition will not protect them from Trump’s vendetta.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here, or via Bluesky:@kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
The Summit (Colo.) Daily (5/2/24) amplified the anxiety health consumers felt in the face of providers’ and insurers’ threats.
This time last year, tens of thousands of people in Colorado anxiously wondered if they’d have to find a new doctor or start using a different hospital. Contracts setting payment levels for Catholic Church–affiliated hospital chain CommonSpirit Health to be a member of preferred provider networks run by insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado were set to expire on May 1, 2024, and negotiations were a train wreck.
CommonSpirit accused Anthem of trying to pay rates so low that its hospitals couldn’t afford to take care of patients, while Anthem shot back that CommonSpirit wanted rate increases at more than twice the rate of inflation (CBS KKTV 11, 4/30/24).
Media coverage reached a fever pitch as the deadline approached. Without a new agreement, Coloradans covered by Anthem insurance plans would have to pay far more out of pocket to use CommonSpirit hospitals and the system’s affiliated doctors (Denver Post, 4/26/24). The potential consequences would be extreme in communities where CommonSpirit is a dominant provider, especially in the state’s rural and resort areas, where the company’s facilities are the only available option for miles around (KOAA, 5/1/24). “What Do We Do?” a plaintive Summit Daily headline (5/2/24) asked.
The high-stakes negotiations dragged on for more than two weeks past the contract’s expiration, with the two corporate giants contending that the other side wanted dangerously low or unaffordably high rates.
The eventual settlement was greeted with a mixture of relief and anger from patients whose care had been disrupted. La Plata County resident Christie Hunter, whose son Ollie suffers from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that weakens voluntary muscles, told the Durango Herald (5/17/24, 5/1/24) she was glad the two healthcare titans had settled, but angry that the dispute disrupted her family’s healthcare. The time spent looking for new providers “would have been much better spent trying to help my son, and get him feeling well enough to go to school.” Ollie’s first day at school after months of treatment and preparation was the day the Hunters received initial notice that they could lose access to his specialists.
Although the high-stakes conflict was about money, the terms of the new five-year price deal remain secret.
Performative hostage-taking
This kind of performative patient hostage-taking has become standard practice in hospital rate negotiations across the US. At least four major network contracts in Ohio/Virginia, Connecticut, Texas and Missouri expired at the beginning of April alone.
Media coverage usually captures the anxiety that patients like the Hunters experience at the disruption of critical medical relationships. Otherwise, the quality and depth of coverage varies widely. Some reporting fuels public hysteria to the benefit of the parties, while the best coverage provides critical national context and alerts audiences what to expect.
To help FAIR readers understand what’s happening when these conflicts hit their communities, we’ve assembled a few lessons from the past few years, and principles that should frame local and regional media coverage.
Think mob war
These stories are best understood as economic warfare between gangsters dividing money already looted from the public. Insurers, who offer employers and patients nothing the government can’t do better and cheaper, fight with hospital corporations who wield monopoly power to negotiate the world’s highest prices for inpatient care, leaving millions of Americans saddled with unmanageable medical debt.
Communicating with the public and political leaders through the media is a key negotiating strategy for both hospitals and insurance companies. Each side accuses the other of threatening patients’ access to doctors and hospitals. The corporations issue a deluge of press releases, statements and FAQ webpages to inform patients of pending changes to coverage, and the consequences for their financial, physical and mental health—all seasoned with a heavy dose of spin. The goal is to ratchet up public anxiety as the deadline approaches, and attach blame to the other side to win concessions.
Negotiations receive intense local and regional media coverage, following the same script. Both sides publicize the looming deadline, and warn that patients may lose access to local hospitals and valued doctors. Insurers accuse hospitals of price-gouging, while hospitals insist that insurers want to pay them less than it costs to take care of patients.
You’ll probably keep your doctor
KFF Health News (2/1/19) accurately characterized the antagonists in the rate disputes as “behemoths.”
Outlets frequently catch on to the fact that they’re witnessing “a battle of Goliath and Goliath,” as Dallas-based D Magazine (4/1/25) framed a recent clash in Texas. But reporters and editors should also alert their audiences to the fact that the conflicts usually resolve themselves after a few weeks or months of widespread terror.
Large local and regional insurers can’t run provider networks without major hospital systems, and hospital systems can’t afford to lose access to patients covered by major health insurers. As Georgetown University professor Sabrina Corlette told KFF Health News (2/1/19) during a 2019 dispute in California:
When you have a big behemoth healthcare system and a big behemoth payer with tens of thousands of enrolled lives, the incentives to work something out privately become much stronger.
This is what the market looks like
The US healthcare financing system relies on the mechanism of having private health insurance companies build networks that use financial and bureaucratic coercion to force patients to use hospitals and doctors within the network, instead of other providers. Insurers offer hospitals privileged access to the thousands of “lives” they cover in exchange for discounted rates. This is supposed to lower costs and improve the quality of healthcare.
You can’t have networks with discounted rates without rate negotiations, which is why these high-stakes gang wars are so common and will continue. The degree to which these rate negotiations are central to the functioning of “market-based” healthcare is a critical piece of context for reporters, too often missing from coverage.
In Colorado, for example, Pueblo Chieftain reporter Tracy Harmon largely followed the companies’ scripts in two stories (5/14/24, 5/20/24) on the Anthem/CommonSpirit fight, focusing on patients’ need for access and sourced almost exclusively to the two combatants.
Summit Daily News reporter Ryan Spencer (4/14/24) offered some additional context, using public data to show that the CommonSpirit hospital in Summit charged rates at twice the statewide average, and “reported profit margins of 35% or more in 2020 and 2021,” according to a report by the state Division of Insurance. Neither Spencer nor Harmon made the critical policy point that the network rate negotiations are supposed to be the country’s primary cost control mechanism.
It doesn’t work
In Colorado, Durango Herald reporter Reuben Schafir (3/23/24) came closest to discussing the core policy problem illustrated by corporate collisions over hospital rates. A spokesperson for a consumer healthcare NGO told Schafir: “These negotiations are often a lose/lose situation for consumers. Even a timely agreement would likely result in higher healthcare costs.”
In other words, the primary US cost control mechanism doesn’t work. Leaving prices to the outcome of mob wars has given the US the highest hospital prices in the world. Since hospital care remains the largest single element of national health spending, the failure of market-based hospital rate negotiations is one of the driving forces making the US an outlier as the costliest system in existence.
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (4/3/25) that insurer/provider conflicts illustrate why “the government should step in and regulate prices.”
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram got this right. On April 1, contracts between Southwestern Health Resources (SWHR) and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas (BCBSTX) expired amidst the usual anxious media coverage (e.g., Dallas Morning News, 4/1/25; WFAA, 4/2/25; KDFW Fox 4, 4/1/25).
A long Q&A-style summary in the Star-Telegram (4/3/25; non-paywall MSN text here) featured MIT economist Jonathan Gruber saying that “really the insurers and the providers are both bad guys when it comes to costs.” According to Gruber, markets have failed, and
situations like these contract negotiations breaking down are good examples of why the government should step in and regulate prices that the private sector has failed to keep within reach of the average consumer.
Gruber’s quote could well have been national news itself. Gruber was the intellectual architect of the Affordable Care Act, and it’s remarkable for an expert of his stature and influence to say categorically that markets have failed, and that government needs to regulate prices. Regardless, Gruber’s observation that market contracts between private insurers and hospitals have failed, and are likely to continue failing, is essential to understanding what’s happening when the healthcare mob wars come to your town.
Washington gangsters agree
As usual in mob wars, politicians bought by the combatants publicly wring their hands, while collecting millions of dollars in campaign assistance from each side and doing nothing to end the carnage. When the allegedly charitable Northeast Georgia Health System and insurer UnitedHealthcare ramped up their fear campaigns in 2023, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.) sent strongly worded letters to both parties, typically devoid of anything indicating whether and how Senator Warnock and colleagues intend to prevent this from happening again. The dispute was a rare one that ended without an agreement.
The ultimate missing context for these stories is that for all their public antagonism, the insurance and hospital industries march in lockstep on the most important policy questions in the nation’s capital. The American Hospital Association and health insurers both spend millions of the dollars they get from premiums, and the rates exchanged under the terms of these contracts, to defeat Medicare for All, and make even modest partial reforms, like Gruber’s proposed price regulation, politically impossible.
This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”
Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week.
Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin
Also on the show: Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: ‘Normal people don’t protest.’ In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: ‘Or else.’
Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week.
Janine Jackson interviewed Pregnancy Justice’s Karen Thompson about criminalizing pregnancy for the April 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “Why Was a Georgia Woman Jailed After Suffering a Miscarriage?” That’s the headline over an account of Selena Chandler-Scott, a 24-year-old woman who was treated by paramedics after a miscarriage on March 20 and arrested the 21st, charged with “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body.” Charges weren’t dropped until April 4.
And the question of the headline remains, to which I’ll add another: Why was this story in People Magazine and not, say, the New York Times?
Joining us now to talk about where this terrible story fits in the current landscape is Karen Thompson, legal director at the group Pregnancy Justice. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Karen Thompson.
Karen Thompson: Hi, thanks for having me.
JJ: There’s a single sentence in this People story that gave me chills: “Police investigated Chandler-Scott because she was 19 weeks into her pregnancy when she suffered her miscarriage.” That “because,” you know. But the DA says law enforcement “acted in good faith” by arresting her. Why is that? Why did she go to jail?
KT: She went to jail because of an idea that fetuses have legal rights. She had a miscarriage at home. She did what most doctors tell folks who are experiencing a miscarriage to do, which is to stay at home. But because she did that, and because someone saw her disposing of those remains, the EMTs and the prosecutors decided that she was engaging in a crime. And why? Because that fetal anomaly, the fact that she had that miscarriage, was enough for them to justify arresting her. And that’s the basis of pregnancy criminalization, and what we’re seeing, not only in Georgia, but all around the country.
JJ: So to be clear, this is not an aberration. It’s one of a number of cases. Listeners may have heard some of them, but I think for some people, they’re getting caught up in this “fetal remains” and the “disposal process.” But this is part of miscarrying. In other words, what are the laws that are relevant here?
KT: I think that’s a really important place to start, right? First of all, let’s just think and talk about miscarriages. They are pretty common. I believe the number is three out of five pregnancies might end in a miscarriage, and that goes to show that this isn’t something that’s abnormal. It’s not something that is unknown to individuals who are pregnant. It’s a tragedy, but it’s a tragedy that occurs quite frequently.
And so I think the saddest thing about this is that in this moment of loss, when she should have been given healthcare, and when she should have had a moment to grieve, she was instead facing a law enforcement response, a carceral response, to what is really a medical question and a health issue.
JJ: What are the laws? There are laws governing, and I guess they differ state to state, but what are important laws around—what on earth is a person to do when they miscarry at home with fetal remains?
KT: Well, it’s unfortunate, because Georgia did pass a fetal personhood law in 2019, and it has that law in its criminal code. And so what that means is that we’re still trying to figure out what prosecutions are going to be brought under that law. And even though Georgia has a specific infanticide law, that is any kind of homicide involving children, even though they have a law that exempts the conduct of a pregnant woman with respect to her unborn child, Georgia’s murder statute doesn’t have that same exception.
And so although courts before the passage of that fetal personhood law declined to recognize fetuses as people for the purposes of murder, we don’t know where we are right now. And the fact that this poor woman was charged in this way is showing us that the laws that are on the books are now being expanded, and used in this method to criminalize pregnant women.
JJ: I think they’re making use of the sort of secrecy and shame with which miscarriage can be surrounded. The very fact that people might not understand what happens when you miscarry at home has to do with silences around it.
And I want to point out the fact that Pregnancy Justice has a resource called Unpacking Fetal Personhood that really talks you through these laws—where they come from, what they do and what they mean. And I would direct folks to that resource.
As we record on April 24, I did do another search this morning. I still saw nothing from broadcast news, major dailies. And now it’s been a month in the past, so is it even “news’ anymore? I don’t know if these major outlets think that they have met their quota of reporting on efforts to control pregnant people, but what do you make of media attention in general to these laws, to their predicted and predictable impacts? How do you think journalists are doing on this?
KT: I don’t think they’re doing great, to be honest, for the reasons that you said. I think that there are a lot of ways in which the attention is pulled to what is being framed as a crime. But what is not happening is the understanding that even this terrific news, which did get reported on, that the charges were dropped against Ms. Chandler-Scott, the bigger problem is that it doesn’t undo the very real harm and devastation that the charges bring in the first place.
And what the media are doing by not reporting on the charges being brought, instead of the fact that they were dropped after pressure was brought to bear by the community, by the outrage of huge swaths of the United States population, that is the stuff that gets things going. But, unfortunately, it is the stuff that is always ignored by the media.
And that’s not just within the reproductive justice space. We’ve seen it when it comes to racial equity, economic equity. There are places that fall out of the conversation because the issues that they foreground, the issues that they shine light on, are really hard for people to accept.
And so my hope is that even in this really calamitous situation, Ms. Chandler-Scott is getting rest and privacy, but what it’s showing us is that we have to continue to talk about these cases. We have to continue to talk about what’s happening, and we have to hold space for women who are going through something that a lot of other women have experienced. We need to make sure that they are not feeling shame, that they know that they did not do anything wrong, and they deserve to get the medical help and the support that they need.
JJ: I was struck by a number of stories, of what stories there were, they would end with, “We reached out to Ms. Chandler-Scott, and we haven’t heard back.” And I thought, “You think? You think maybe she doesn’t want to chat right now?” And what I wonder is, why not reach out to the police? Why not reach out to the DA and ask them why they did what they did, and demand answers from them, rather than trying to add human interest or color to the story by talking to someone who doesn’t have any reason to necessarily talk to you?
KT: Right.
JJ: Well, that’s my rant.
And I’m just going to ask you, finally: Pregnancy Justice. It’s not just abortion rights; that’s part of it. Pregnancy justice is a more expansive term and concept, that’s not about separating out cases from one another. I’d just like to give you an opportunity, finally, to talk about what that broader understanding means. And then, are there particular policies and laws that you point to, that could meaningfully intervene right now? Just final thoughts.
Karen Thompson: “The thing that is important to know about pregnancy criminalization is that it doesn’t stay still.”
KT: Pregnancy Justice, our entire mission is to advocate for those who are being criminalized because of their pregnancies, their pregnancy outcomes, like a miscarriage in this case, or stillbirth or abortion. But, as you noted, abortion cases are actually a tiny fraction of what we see, and, sadly, the vast majority of them involve people who are criminalized for behavior during their pregnancy that people don’t approve of, whether that’s substance use, or maybe not even getting prenatal care in a way that others would like folks to do.
And so the thing that is important to know about pregnancy criminalization is that it doesn’t stay still. The laws that are being used to criminalize folks, as they were used here in the Chandler-Scott case, they’re not made, actually, to protect a child, but they’re being used against pregnant people in a way that is just harmful to pregnant people, and not actually helping or serving their pregnancies, or the fetus that the state is saying that they have interest to protect.
So our work is to make sure that the truth about science, and the reality of giving rights and not stripping them from pregnant people, upholding bodily autonomy for folks who are experiencing pregnancy—all of those things are our focus, so that we can make sure that the law is doing what it’s supposed to do, and not spreading to just criminalize pregnant people, and socially control how they act and the decisions they make with their bodies.
And, unfortunately, we’re up against a lot of laws, a lot of legislative pushes to make abortion a homicide, to say that any exposure in utero that might involve drugs, whether prescribed or not, is sufficient to charge somebody with murder if they have an adverse pregnancy outcome. All of these laws are percolating in at least 17 different states in the country.
So my hope is that people will stay aware, that they will look at the resources, including the one that you just mentioned, on our website, and that we can start thinking about the ways in which what is happening now reflects a broader picture of trying to keep women out of public space, from having power over their own bodies to make their own decisions, and to understand where that fits into a bigger picture around criminal justice and incarceration in this country.
JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice. They’re online at PregnancyJusticeUS.org. Thank you so much, Karen Thompson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
KT: Thanks so much for having me, and having this discussion.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser about DOGE’s infiltration for the April 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Trying to keep up with the myriad harms to people and processes coming from the Trump White House is difficult and dispiriting. But piecing out what’s happening from what’s threatened and what’s feared is crucial if we intend to resist. Helping us keep meaningful track of one piece of the work before us—the actions and impacts of the weird shadow power called the Department of Government Efficiency—is new work from our next guest.
Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, where this work is housed. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jeff Hauser.
Jeff Hauser: Thank you for having me.
JJ: Tell us about the scope and the purpose of your work around DOGE, which I can barely bring myself to say. What does that project look like?
JH: So you don’t think that government should be organized around metaphors from cryptocurrency scams?
JJ: Oddly.
JH: Yeah, we at Revolving Door Project tend to agree that that is not how we should organize our government.
We, in general, track corporate influence in politics, with a particular focus on the executive branch. And there has never been a more blatant corporate incursion into the public sector than DOGE, which reflects the privatization of our domestic policy, and increasingly our foreign policy as well, by people who are not even bothering to give up any of their private sector ties, and actually join the government for a few years—which we’re not fans of; we believe in career civil servants. But these people aren’t even doing that much. They’re just continuing to run, say, Tesla and SpaceX while running large swaths of the government, and never having been put before the Senate for nomination.
And so we are tracking what DOGE does, and we will continue to do so, even if we chase Elon Musk physically out of the government, as he scurries back to Tesla, potentially. But we know that he has inserted his people all across the government, and they are doing some of the worst things we’ve ever seen, and the government is breaking as a result. We’re going to track what they do, and who they do it to.
Jeff Hauser: “They are doing some of the worst things we’ve ever seen, and the government is breaking as a result.”
JJ: Well, yeah, because “revolving door,” you think, “Oh, someone, they work for an oil company, then they go work for a regulator, and then they go back to the oil company, and isn’t that a conflict, and isn’t that problematic?” But now the door is a blur. There’s no door there.
JH: There’s just a gaping hole, and they have one foot on one side of the government, and they have one foot in the private sector at the same time, and they have one brain. And so you can bet which side they care about more, which has more meaning to them, the public interest or their private enrichment.
JJ: And part of what I resent is the way it makes you feel quaint for saying, “Well, no, you’re not supposed to make laws and policies based on your own private enrichment.” It makes it seem as though that’s an old-fashioned idea. It didn’t start with Musk, in other words. “If you can run a company, you can run the country” has been a message that we’ve been hearing, unfortunately, for some time.
JH: Oh, sure. I mean, it goes back. Even John F. Kennedy brought Robert McNamara into the government, and he became LBJ’s secretary of Defense, and the Vietnam War was a consequence. And Robert McNamara was actually a pretty serious individual, who ended up becoming reflective upon his many, manysins in government.
But the Whiz Kids of the 1960s, they destroyed America’s credibility across the world. I’m not saying it was perfect before the 1960s, but they did real damage, and they were much more serious people than Musk. So you have less serious people doing something that even the serious people can’t do. This is the result.
JJ: And you pointed out appointments, and I just saw this morning, Shawn Musgrave at the Interceptsaying that Musk has now put a Tesla employee as a senior advisor at the FBI. And he’s also going to be at the Justice Department’s Justice Management Division. This is a guy who worked at Tesla. So it’s not just that there’s this weird rogue agency. They’re putting their people everywhere.
JH: Yeah, they are increasingly not identifying their people as specifically DOGE, because they’re understanding that that makes them a bit of a legal vulnerability. And so they’re enmeshing their people as advisors and temporary employees in specific departments. But from published reports and from social ties, you can see that random engineers from Palantir, which is Peter Thiel’s panopticon, scary surveillance data-processing company—when you’re seeing all those people from Palantir across the government, whether or not you’ve identified them as DOGE, and we do have a list that we maintain of the people who are identifiably DOGE in the government. But some people who are their peers are now entering government, not exactly as DOGE, but we will monitor them as if they were DOGE, and monitor the privatization of government, and not allow them to change brand names just because the brand of DOGE is bad now and getting worse.
JJ: Right, right. And that’s the importance of the tracking, so that we are not simply overwhelmed and confused by different titles, and by connections that we might not be able to trace, we laypeople who aren’t making it our job, as you are.
The Supreme Court’s ruling blocking deportations without due process was so welcome, and maybe surprising, and we are seeing judges pushing back against some of this in some places. And I just want to ask you, broadly, where do you see meaningful resistance to this phenomenon? Are the courts the place to look for this?
JH: The courts cannot be relied upon on their own, for many reasons, including the makeup of the judiciary, and also just the nature of the judicial role in the United States, which has definitely always been more reluctant to be on the cutting edge of positive social change, then sometimes being a bulwark against positive change, as in the early 20th century.
But it’s still better for the courts and judges to have some self-respect than to not. And so I think what you saw in the seven-judge majority this weekend is seven justices of the Supreme Court standing up for the notion that courts are real, and that when the issues of law are clear, the president doesn’t get to do just what they want just because they won a one-and-a-half percent popular vote plurality. Pushing back against these insults that are coming from Trump, they’re coming explicitly from JD Vance, and are coming from Pam Bondi’sJustice Department. Basically, these justices may not all be committed to doing the right thing for the right reasons, but they do have egos. They do believe in the institution of the judiciary, sometimes because it’s just so enmeshed with their sense of self. I think the courts can be helpful.
But the courts are always going to do a better job if they think they are with the public and that they are speaking up for majorities, and against minorities or authoritarians seeking to grab power. So I think the more demonstrations we see, the more judges will do the right thing, and vice versa. So you can have vicious cycles and you can have virtuous cycles of resistance. And I think the more everyone does their particular job within our shaky democracy, the more likely we come out through the other side relatively OK.
JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about one of the ways that folks understand what the public is doing. If you’re not at the demo, what are you doing? You’re reading about it in the paper.
And I think it’s clear to most by now that the traditional media framing of balancing every Republican claim against a Democratic claim, and the best ideas are going to be right in the middle, that’s not appropriate, to put it mildly. If it ever was, it’s not today. And we have a White House that is promoting chaos, and that’s lying through its teeth. And that is a real challenge to reporters and reporting. And I just wonder, finally, if you think they’re, in general, rising to the occasion, and then what you would like to see.
JH: Sure. I don’t think they’re standing up to the moment, but we do have to recognize that the moment that they face is a very challenging one. I think about the Associated Press being denied full access at the White House because they continue to call the Gulf of Mexico by the name the Gulf of Mexico.
And I’m sure your listeners and readers are well aware of that, but that sort of travesty, just think about it from the economic model of the Associated Press. They need their articles and photographs to be picked up around the world. Their access is a valuable aspect of how they run their organization. At least they are standing up for it.
But then you’re seeing their peer organizations lacking any sort of solidarity. You’re seeing a lot of media organizations that are pursuing mergers for reasons unrelated to Trump, but are bending the knee to Trump because they want approval.
I mean, the scary news about the 60 Minutes executive producer stepping down, that’s worrisome. That doesn’t mean 60 Minutes was a perfect program at any point in time, but that’s a sign that things are going wrong.
What should the media do? They need to take the platitudes they say about the First Amendment seriously. If they’re going to be picked up and embraced by the public as institutions that are worth saving, they need to step up in this moment. This is the moment that you build up those reservoirs of credibility for. And if not now, when? So I’d like to think that they can sacrifice in the short run in order to come out as institutions worth saving, and potentially getting more reader support or viewer support in the future, because people believe in them, and they knew that they stood up when necessary, because right now that’s not happening. They are too fearful.
JJ: Absolutely. I’m going to end on that note for now.
We’ve been speaking with Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project. They’re online right where you’d look for them, RevolvingDoorProject.org. Jeff Hauser, thank you so much for joining us this week on Counter Spin.
Wikipedia editor Molly White told the Washington Post (4/25/25) that the Trump administration was “weaponizing laws to try to silence high-quality independent information.”
The Trump administration is very upset with Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. Ed Martin, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter (4/24/25) to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent nonprofit, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”
The letter said:
Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.
The letter threatened the foundation’s tax-exempt status, demanding “detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors,” the Washington Post (4/25/25) reported.
Wikipedia has been attacked before by countries with censorious reputations. Russia threatened to block Wikipedia “because of its entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reported Euractiv (3/4/22), and the site has been blocked in China (BBC, 5/14/19). Turkey lifted a three-year ban on Wikipedia in 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 1/16/20).
Martin’s letter indicates that the Trump administration is inclined to join the club.
‘Notice a theme?’
Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post (6/25/24) that Wikipedia displayed “bias” because its article about her used to quote her tweet (6/30/14) about Hamas: “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”
Right-wing media in the US have been complaining about Wikipedia for a while, displaying the victim mentality that fuels the conservative drive to punish media out of favor with the MAGA movement. Here are a few headlines from Pirate Wires, a right-wing news site that covers technology and culture:
“How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel/Palestine Narrative” (10/24/24)
“How Soros-Backed Operatives Took Over Key Roles at Wikipedia” (1/6/25)
“Wikipedia Editors Officially Deem Trump a Fascist” (10/29/24)
“More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” reported the New York Post (3/18/25), citing the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. “Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors,” Post writer Bethany Mandel (6/25/24) alleged, citing research by the right-wing Manhattan Institute.
Under the headline “Big Tech Must Block Wikipedia Until It Stops Censoring and Pushing Disinformation,” the Post (2/5/25) editorialized that the site “maintains a blacklist compendium of sources that page writers and editors are allowed to cite—and …which will get you in trouble.” The latter category, the Post claims, includes “Daily Caller, the Federalist, the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News and even the Post. Notice a theme?”
(Wikipedia’s list of “perennial sources,” which are color-coded by reliability, marks numerous left-wing as well as right-wing sources as “generally unreliable” or “deprecated”; the fact that the Post implies only right-wing sources are listed is an indication that its reputation as “generally unreliable for factual reporting” is well-deserved.)
‘Stop donating to Wokepedia’
Early Wikipedia staffer Larry Sanger told Fox News (3/7/25) he wants the government to investigate government influence on Wikipedia.
This hostility is amplified by one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, who accused the site of having a left-wing bias on Fox News (7/16/21, 7/22/21), although he has reportedly not been involved with the site since leaving in 2002 (Washington Times, 7/16/21). He even requested Elon Musk and the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to investigate possible government influence at Wikipedia (Fox News, 3/7/25). It’s an Orwellian situation, asking the government to use its muscle against the site on the grounds that it might have previously been influenced by the government.
Musk, the mega-billionaire who bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and lurched it to the right (Guardian, 1/15/24; NBC News, 10/31/24), also has his problems with Wikipedia. Before he took on a co-presidential role in the Trump White House, Musk (X, 12/24/24) posted, “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation is also gunning for Wikipedia. The think tank developed Project 2025, the conservative policy document guiding the Trump administration (Atlantic, 4/24/25) that has also called for tighter government control of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, it “plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic,” the Forward (1/7/25) reported. The paper speculated that the group was targeting “a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.”
For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is of plenty evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction (American Prospect, 5/1/08; Guardian, 8/18/10; Bloomberg, 3/7/25).
Capturing online media
AI’s heavy reliance on Wikipedia for training data (Verge, 4/17/25) means Wikipedia‘s point of view will largely shape the answers we get from AI.
One might ask, “Who cares if Wikipedia is biased?” Lots of media are biased in one direction or another. And the notion that any nonprofit organization’s political leaning requires its status be investigated is ludicrous, considering that three of the organizations hyping Wikipedia’s alleged wrongdoing—the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and the ADL—have the same tax-exempt status. It’s hard to imagine the New York Post accepting a Democratic administration pressuring these groups to change their right-wing positions.
Wikipedia remains popular, with some 4 billion visits a month worldwide. In addition to its lengthy entries, it’s a repository of outside citations that are important for researchers on a wide range of subjects. AI models heavily rely on Wikipedia articles for training—so much so that Wikimedia offers developers a special dataset to help keep the regular site from being overwhelmed by bots (Verge, 4/17/25).
Wikipedia is being targeted by an administration that clearly wants to bring all of Big Tech and major online media under its ideological watch. So far, the right has made progress in capturing the giants in Big Tech and social media. Musk turned the site formerly known as Twitter into a right-wing noise machine (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; PBS, 8/13/24; Guardian, 1/4/25).
“In recent months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of specific moves to signal that Meta may embrace a more conservative administration,” reported NBC News (1/8/25). Google donated $1 million to this year’s inauguration fund (CNBC, 1/9/25). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has grown closer to Trump (Axios, 2/27/25; FAIR.org, 2/28/25).
At the same time, the administration is disappearing international students who voice disagreement with US policy (FAIR.org, 3/19/25, 3/28/25), seeking to defund public broadcasting (FAIR.org, 4/25/25), attacking academic freedom (Guardian, 4/27/25) and weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).
So it is fitting that this administration also wants to pressure Wikipedia into moving rightward. What differentiates an authoritarian regime from other right-wing administrations is that it doesn’t just establish extreme policies, but it seeks to eradicate any space where free thought and discussion can take place. The Trump administration’s actions against media and academia show he’s not just right-wing, but an authoritarian in a classic sense.
The efficacy of Martin’s letter remains to be seen, but this is an attack on Wikipedia’s editorial independence. It will undoubtedly cause other websites and media outlets with nonprofit status to wonder if their content will be the next in the government’s crosshairs.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted that Republican officials at Mar-a-Lago “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival.
Of course, this was not the first time that senior Israeli officials had advertised their reliance on the war crime of forced starvation in the current genocidal assault on Gaza. On October 9, 2023, two days after the most recent launch of hostilities, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Two days after that, Foreign Minister Israel Katz boasted of cutting off “water, electricity and fuel” to the territory.
And just this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proclaimed that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.” Following an April 22 dinner held in his honor in Florida at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Ben-Gvir reported that US Republicans had
expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.
Never mind that the hostages would have been brought home safely as scheduled had Israel chosen to comply with the terms of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas that was implemented in January, rather than definitively annihilating the agreement on March 18. It is no doubt illustrative of Israel’s modus operandi that the March 2 decision to block the entry of all food and other items necessary for human existence took place in the middle of an ostensible ceasefire.
‘Starved, bombed, strangled’
A year ago, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) said it was “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.”
While Ben-Gvir’s most recent comments have thus far eluded commentary in the US corporate media, the roundabout media approach to the whole starvation theme has been illuminating in its own right. It has not, obviously, been possible to avoid reporting on the subject altogether, as the United Nations and other organizations have pretty much been warning from the get-go of Israel’s actions causing widespread famine in Gaza.
In December 2023, for example, just two months after the onset of Israel’s blood-drenched campaign, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC scale, determined that “over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse).” The assessment went on: “Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) were in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) were in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).”
A full year ago, in April 2024, even Samantha Power—then the administrator of the US Agency for International Development—conceded that it was “credible” that famine was already well underway in parts of the Gaza Strip. And the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that Gaza is “likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023”—its population being “starved, bombed, strangled” and subjected to “deprivation by design.”
Disappearance of agency
Typically, even when outlets report sympathetically on hunger in Gaza, they fail to state clearly that it is the deliberate result of Israeli policy, as in this New York Times headline (6/25/24).
None of these details have escaped the pages and websites of corporate media outlets, although the media’s frequent reliance on ambiguous wordiness tends to distract readers from what is actually going on—and who is responsible for it. Take, for instance, the New York Times headline “Gaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments” (6/25/24), or the CBS video “Hunger Spreads Virtually Everywhere in Gaza Amid Israel/Hamas War” (12/5/24). Even news outlets that intermittently undertake to spotlight the human plight of, inter alia, individual parents in Gaza losing their children to starvation remain susceptible to long-winded efforts to disperse blame. (As of April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that 27 children in northern Gaza had already died of starvation and disease.)
In an era in which news consumption often consists of skimming headlines, the phrasing of article titles is of utmost import. And yet many headlines manage to entirely excise the role of Israel in Gaza’s “hunger crisis”—as in CNN’s report (2/24): “‘We Are Dying Slowly:’ Palestinians Are Eating Grass and Drinking Polluted Water as Famine Looms Across Gaza.” Or take the Reuters headline (3/24/24): “Gaza’s Catastrophic Food Shortage Means Mass Death Is Imminent, Monitor Says.” Or this one from ABC News (11/15/24): “Famine ‘Occurring or Imminent’ in Parts of Northern Gaza, Experts Warn UN Security Council.”
It’s not that these headlines are devoid of sympathy for Palestinian suffering. The issue, rather, is the dilution—and even disappearance—of agency, such that the “catastrophic food shortage” is rendered as transpiring in a sort of vacuum and thereby letting the criminals perpetrating it off the hook. Imagine if a Hamas rocket from Gaza killed an infant in Israel and the media reported the event as follows: “Israeli Baby Perishes as Rocket Completes Airborne Trajectory.”
‘No shortage of aid’
NBC‘s headline (4/17/24) gives Israel’s denial of a problem equal weight with aid workers’ description of Gazans’ desperate situation.
Then there is the matter of the media’s incurable habit of ceding Israeli officials a platform to spout demonstrable lies, as in the April 17 NBC Newsheadline “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.” The fact that Israel is permitted to make such claims is particularly perplexing, given Israeli officials’ own announcements that no aid whatsoever may enter the territory, while the “dire conditions” are made abundantly clear in the text of the article itself: “The Global Nutrition Cluster, a coalition of humanitarian groups, has warned that in March alone, 3,696 children were newly admitted for care for acute malnutrition” in Gaza.
Among numerous other damning statistics conveyed in the dispatch, we learn that all Gaza bakeries supported by the UN World Food Programme closed down on March 31, “after wheat flour ran out.” Meanwhile, the WFP calculated that Israel’s closure of border crossings into Gaza caused prices of basic goods “to soar between 150% and 700% compared with prewar levels, and by 29% to as much as 1,400% above prices during the ceasefire.”
Against such a backdrop, it’s fairly ludicrous to allow Israeli officials to “maintain there is ‘no shortage’ of aid in Gaza and accuse Hamas of withholding supplies.” If the press provides Israel with space to spout whatever nonsense it wants—reality be damned—where is the line ultimately drawn? If Israel decides Hamas is using wheat flour to build rockets, will that also be reported with a straight face?
Lest anyone think that thwarting the entry of food into the Gaza Strip is a new thing, recall that Israel’s blockade of Gaza long predated the present war—although the details of said blockade are generally glossed over in the media in favor of the myth that Israel unilaterally “withdrew” from the territory in 2005. In 2010, the BBC (6/21/10) listed some basic foodstuffs—pardon, potential “dual-use items”—that Israel had at different times in recent history blocked from entering Gaza, including pasta, coffee, tea, nuts and chocolate. In 2006, just a year after the so-called “withdrawal,” Israeli government adviser Dov Weissglas outlined the logic behind Israel’s restriction of food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Fast forward almost two decades, and it’s safe to say that the “idea” has evolved; this is a genocide, after all—even if the corporate media refuse to say the word—and starvation is part and parcel of that. But on account of Israel’s extra-special relationship with the United States, US media have institutionalized the practice of beating around the bush when it comes to documenting Israeli crimes. This is how we end up with the aforementioned long-winded headlines instead of, say, the far more straightforward “Israel is starving Gaza,” a Google search of which terms produces not a single corporate media dispatch, but does lead to a January 2024 report by that very name, courtesy of none other than the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
‘Starving as negotiation tactic’
Megan Stack (New York Times, 3/13/25): “Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding.”
That said, there have been a few surprises. The New York Times (3/13/25), for example, took a short break from its longstanding tradition of unabashed apologetics for Israeli atrocities in allowing the following sentence to appear in a March opinion article by Megan Stack: “Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic.” In the very least, this was a vast improvement, in terms of syntactic clarity and assignation of blame, over previous descriptions of Israeli behavior immortalized on the pages of the US newspaper of record—like that time the Israeli military slaughtered four kids playing by the sea in Gaza, and the Times editors (7/16/14) went with the headline “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.”
In the end, Israel’s starvation of the Gaza Strip is multifaceted. It’s not just about physically blocking the entry of food into the besieged enclave. It’s also about Israel’s near-total decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system: the bombardment of hospitals, the targeting of ambulances, the massacres of medical personnel (FAIR.org, 4/11/25). It’s about Israeli military attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and workers, including the April 2024 massacre of seven international employees of the food organization World Central Kitchen.
It’s about Israel razing agricultural areas, wiping out food production, devastating the fishing industry and depleting livestock. It’s about Israel bombing water infrastructure in Gaza. And it’s about Israeli troops slaughtering at least 112 desperate Palestinians queuing for flour on February 29, 2024 (FAIR.org, 3/22/24)—which was at least a quicker way of killing starving people than waiting for them to starve.
In his 2017 London Review of Books essay (6/15/17) on the use of famine as a weapon of war, Alex de Waal referenced the “physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide,” noting that “forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust.” It’s worth reflecting on the essay’s opening paragraph:
In its primary use, the verb “to starve” is transitive: It’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: Today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase “man-made famine” as if such events were unusual.
As for the current case of the Gaza Strip, US establishment journalists appear to be doing their best to avoid the transitive nature of the verb in question—or any subject-verb-object construction that might too overtly expose Israeli savagery. And by treating famine in Gaza as a subject unto itself, rather than a “technique of genocide,” to borrow de Waal’s words, the media assist in obscuring the bigger picture about this very man-made famine—which is that Israel is not just starving Gaza. Israel is exterminating Gaza.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Khury Petersen-Smith about Yemen distortions for the April 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: You could say that US news media focus on this country’s lethal military assault in Yemen was distorted by the revelation that operational planning was fecklessly shared with a journalist in a Signal group chat. Though the sadder truth might be that, without that palace intrigue, US media would’ve shown even less interest in the US visiting what Trump brags of as “overwhelming lethal force” on the poorest country in the Arab world.
Most of what we’re getting are things like the April 9 parenthetical on PBS NewsHour, that the White House has reinstated emergency food aid to some impoverished countries, but “cuts will remain for war-ravaged Afghanistan and Yemen.” Yemen is presented as almost just a chess piece, a pawn in US designs in the Middle East, rather than a real place where real women, men and children live and die.
Khury Petersen-Smith I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you.
JJ: What people may have specifically heard is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying:
It’s been a devastating campaign, whether it’s underground facilities, weapons manufacturing, bunkers, troops in the open, air defense assets. We are not going to relent, and it’s only going to get more unrelenting until the Houthis declare they will stop shooting at our ships.
Some military analysts and former American commanders said that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.
What context, information, history—what is missing from that snapshot that might help folks better understand what’s happening right now?
KPS: Often, I want to take a big step back and go into history, even recent history, but actually, this time, let’s start with the immediate, and that statement from Hegseth. Because Hegseth is, I think, known for brash hyperbole and these wild statements. But in that statement, he was actually speaking with some precision when he said, We’re going to do this. We’re going to maintain this lethal policy until the Houthis declare that they will stop firing at US ships.
And the reason that “declare” is an important word there is because the Houthis actually had stopped firing at US ships. When Israel entered its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the agreement that Israel then broke, and we are now—not “we” in the US, but people in Gaza—really dealing with the reality of another broken ceasefire, as Israel really tightens its grip on the Gaza Strip, but when Israel and Hamas entered that ceasefire agreement, not only did Hamas honor it, but the Houthis actually honored it in Yemen.
So the immediate context for this latest round of vicious US bombing is that, actually, the Houthis were not firing at US ships. The Houthis had stopped their attacks. And it was the United States, really, that started the combat again, followed then by Israel, which then violated the ceasefire. So that’s a really important context, because it’s not the case that this US bombing came in response to an attack by the Houthis on US ships. Actually, the Houthis had agreed to stop fighting, and the US refused to take yes for an answer.
JJ: Right. Maybe, for some folks, what is the nature of the Houthis embargo? What was the purpose of that? When did that start?
KPS: Sure, and we can get into where the Houthis as a political force came from, but if we just go to the more recent history, in October 2023, the Houthis, which are effectively running much of Yemen, they framed their attacks on Israeli forces, on Israel and on global shipping through the Red Sea, in the context of solidarity with Palestinians, and as a response to the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. It is adjacent to the Red Sea, and that maritime corridor is extremely important for global trade.
And so the Houthis were basically taking advantage of that position, of that location, and saying, Until Israel stops its bombardment of Gaza, global shipping will be affected by our armed attacks—and Israel can also expect military intervention on behalf of the Houthis. So that’s really some other context for where this has come from. And it should be noted that, in the same way that the Houthis honored the latest ceasefire, the previous ceasefire that Israel and Hamas entered in the fall of 2023, November 2023, was also honored by the Houthis—and by Hezbollah, by the way. So these forces, these regional forces outside of Palestine that have framed their armed actions as a response to the Israeli attack, they have honored the agreements that Israel has entered with the Palestinians when that has happened.
JJ: That’s important to keep in mind, because Houthis and Hezbollah, and Hamas, are kind of tossed off in media as basically being a synonym for “terrorist.” You’re never offered any explanation, really, or rarely, of their role—with Houthis, in particular, their role within Yemen. It’s just as though these are kind of ragtag violent men.
KPS: In many ways, that kind of description or that characterization of these different forces throughout the Middle East is an extension of the way that Israel and the United States portray Palestinians–that any Palestinian actions against Israel or against Israeli forces are devoid of context of the Israeli occupation, and that it’s driven by some kind of irrational hatred of Israel.
The other thing, in tandem with this notion of an ahistorical, decontextualized anti-Israel violence, is the notion that these are all proxies of Iran, that Iran is the puppet master in the shadows that’s pulling the strings of Palestinian forces like Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and the Houthis. And not only is that part of a campaign to demonize and really legitimize violence against Iran and throughout the region, but it also ignores the fact that these countries, of course, have their own national dynamics, and these forces have their own interests. Even if they have some alignment with Iran, they have their own interests.
And so it’s worth noting that the cause of the Palestinian freedom struggle is very popular in Yemen. This is a country that has been divided by civil war. There’s divisions in Yemen, but one of the things that really unites the Yemeni population is the support for Palestinians. And so that’s another important piece of context when we think about why the Houthis have acted the way they have, and have framed their actions in terms of the Palestinian struggle.
JJ: I think I’m going to bring us back to Iran in a second, but I just wanted to say, a number of groups recently have stated the reality that US airstrikes across Yemen since mid-March are unconstitutional acts of war that lack congressional authorization. Hegseth is out there saying, We tracked this guy and he went into his girlfriend’s building and then we collapsed it. Well, as Paul Hedreen wrote for FAIR.org, that’s a war crime. Why does it seem quaint, or beside the point, to note that the US is not officially at war with Yemen, that killing civilians, as the US has done and is doing, these are crimes, yes?
KPS: Yes. There’s so many violations that are happening, but let’s start with the first one. It’s not only violations of international law that the US is committing by targeting civilian infrastructure, which it is doing in Yemen, it’s a violation of US law for the US to be effectively waging war against a country that it has not declared war against.
And to answer your question about, there’s something that’s maybe strange about just pointing that out, I think that we have to look at at least the past 25 or so years, the so-called “War on Terror.”
From the start, US forces have been operating in Yemen. The US special forces have been operating there. The US has carried out cruise missile strikes in the early days of the “War on Terror.” And that has continued during the Yemeni civil war, which really involved a massive intervention, and, frankly, its own kind of war, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their bombardment of Yemen, which began in 2015.
This was devastating. And the United States played such an essential role in supplying the airplanes, the bombs that those planes are dropping, but also intelligence. They did everything except drop the bomb themselves when Saudi Arabia was doing it. They supplied the targets, they supplied the planes, they supplied the bombs, to the extent that at that time in Congress, there was finally a real debate, where people like Ro Khanna and others said, Wait a minute. The US is effectively waging war here. Congress has not actually made a declaration of war. This is a violation of US law that President Trump, the first time, was carrying out.
And so I think that all that context is really important, including, by the way, the bombing that President Biden did last year of Yemen. For many years, Yemen has been a place that the US has seen fit to bomb and otherwise do violence against, with very little public discussion in this country.
JJ: As your colleague Phyllis Bennis wrote, the US bombing of Yemen is always referred to in the media as bombing the “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger.
I also think that carefully chosen phrasing, “Iran-backed Houthi rebels,” it sounds like it’s greasing the gears for a wider war.
KPS: I think that’s absolutely right. The first thing to say, of course, is that these bombs have a devastating impact on civilian life, on the people of Yemen. There’s this US and Israeli notion that through so-called “targeted strikes,” and what they call “precision munitions” or whatever, that they’re just targeting who they call the “bad guys.” And again, still illegal even if you’re….
JJ: Yeah. And then anyone else is a human shield.
KPS: Right? Exactly. Even if the US was only targeting and hurting and killing combatants, it would still be illegal, according to US law.
But for what it’s worth, that’s simply not the case. Civilians have suffered tremendously over these, again, more than two decades of various operations that the United States has supported. It’s been catastrophic.
Khury Petersen-Smith: “There’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that.”
And it’s just worth repeating that the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the destruction of Yemen’s infrastructure, the destruction of their sanitation facilities, the massive food insecurity that was caused, in particular, by the Saudi campaign of bombing—this was declared by the United Nations to be the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Subsequently, unfortunately—devastatingly—that crisis has been, on the global stage, eclipsed by the catastrophe in Gaza. But there’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that. So that’s the first thing that it’s important to say.
But, again, the notion that there’s some evil Iranian puppet master pulling the strings ignores Yemen’s own history and politics. And I think that you’re absolutely right: it’s about setting up an escalation of US and Israeli violence that is targeting Iran, which, essentially, the US is preparing for. They’ve moved more ships and more personnel into the Middle East. They’re very open about threatening Iran. When they started this latest round of bombing of Yemen, the Defense spokesperson said that “we are putting Iran on notice.” So it’s a pretty thinly veiled threat toward Iran, and I think that we should take it very seriously. I think that for many in the United States, it might be unimaginable for the US to have an open war with Iran, but I think that we are going to have to take these threats very seriously, and work to prevent it.
JJ: Let me just end on that note: What are the places for intervention? I am always sorry to sort of end with “call your congressperson,” but what are the levers that we have to work with, to prevent this slow-motion nightmare that we’re looking at? And then, also, what would you like to see journalists do?
KPS: I think that it is important for people to put pressure on US officials. And of course that includes members of Congress, where, unfortunately, there’s quite a large degree of unity in Congress about attacking Iran. And that’s been true for a long time.
In fact, the last time Trump was in office, there were members of Congress who were saying that Trump wasn’t going hard enough on Iran. This was during the era of so-called “maximum pressure.”
So just challenging that consensus is extremely important. We should keep in mind that, in the early days of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, members of Congress could say what they have always said, which is: You may not like this Israeli operation, but A) Israel has this so-called “right to defend itself,” and B) this is what the American people want. And then they no longer were able to say that, because they were flooded with calls and demonstrations and so many messages saying that the majority of Americans actually opposed this. And that only grew as the situation went on.
And that kind of cleavage between US elected officials and the US population is important. It lays the basis for actually changing that policy. So getting that ball rolling around Iran, before things escalate, is extremely important.
JJ: I appreciate that.
What I have seen that is critical and probing on this has been independent reporting. And I guess that might be the place, obviously, to continue to look. But what would you like journalists to be especially looking out for, or especially trying to avoid?
KPS: If I could say one thing to journalists who are doing their work right now, I would encourage them to please consider Iran and Yemen countries just like any other country. And countries that, when the people of these countries speak, know that there’s a diversity of opinions, as exists in every single society. And when the government speaks, they should take it seriously enough to evaluate it critically. And that’s true of any government.
And, frankly, one of the things that I’m struck by, this persistent reality in US journalism, is that countries like Israel and United States, particularly when they speak on international questions, and particularly when we talk about Iran or Palestine or Yemen, US journalists afford this credibility to the US and Israel that they deny to Palestinians and Yemenis and Iran.
When Israel bombs Gaza, and we hear the reports of how many people were killed, it’s still the case that American journalists use the Israeli language of saying “according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry,” as though US government agencies are identified with whatever political party happens to be in power at the moment. That’s simply not true.
The question is, why is there this kind of skepticism or cynicism, this notion that, well, this might not be a credible source, the government in Palestine, but the notion that the Israeli government or the US government, which have been shown to lie so many times—I mean, Pete Hegseth about this very episode, that our conversation is about, this scandal about sharing these plans on Signal, he lied directly to reporters.
And so I really hope that instead of affording him whatever credibility US journalists have afforded government officials, which I have thoughts about that as well, certainly now, when one has lied directly to you, the media, I hope that you treat his statements with the appropriate amount of interrogation. And then take seriously the perspectives that are coming out of Yemen and Iran, which are interesting and should be evaluated with the same tools of journalism that you extend elsewhere.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Khury Petersen-Smith of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can find their work online at IPS-DC.org. Thank you so much, Khury Petersen-Smith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher (center) testifies in Congress against cuts to public broadcasting (NPR, 4/15/25).
NPR (4/15/25) found itself having to write its own obituary recently when it reported that the “Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media, which includes NPR and PBS.”
The White House declared in a statement (4/14/25) that
American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.”
It said the administration would ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion, or two years’ worth of approved funding, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federally created and funded organization that channels money to both national and local public broadcasters.
‘Finally get this done’
Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69).
Republicans have been threatening to defund public broadcasting since its inception. Fred Rogers, known for his children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, testified in support of PBS before Congress in 1969 in the face of attempted cuts to the fledgling CPB during the Nixon administration (PBS, 11/22/19).
After the 2010 Republican congressional takeover, the House of Representatives under then–President Barack Obama voted to defund NPR and prohibit “public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR,” according to PBS (3/17/11). This came “a week after conservative activists secretly recorded an NPR executive making derogatory comments about Tea Party supporters,” leading to the “resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.”
But even when Republicans have had full control of Washington, the GOP has backed down from destroying public broadcasting generally, recognizing the popularity of shows like Sesame Street with constituents—and the ease with which they have wrung content concessions from the networks.
Indeed, while some right-wing critics seem truly opposed to public broadcasting, the repeated retreats from following through suggest that more of those critics preferred to simply use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right. (See FAIR.org’s critical coverage of NPRhere and PBShere.)
Times may be different now, though. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy book that guides much of this administration’s actions, says forcefully:
All Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake…. The next conservative president must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.
With Voice of America journalists fighting in court against the broadcaster’s closure (LA Times, 3/19/25; AP, 3/28/25), and the administration’s weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to chill speech of private and public broadcasters (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), the threat against PBS and NPR is very real.
Unpopular cuts
The right is loving the news. The New York Post (4/14/25) reported:
The White House memo notes that NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called Trump a “fascist” and a “deranged racist”—statements that Maher told Congress last month she now regrets making—and cites two recent PBS programs featuring transgender characters.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) applauded the plan Monday, tweeting: “NPR and PBS have a right to publish their biased coverage—but they don’t have a right to spend taxpayer money on it. It’s time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
More broadly, however, the proposed cuts aren’t popular, as only “about a quarter of US adults (24%) say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS,” according to Pew Research (3/26/25), while a “larger share (43%) say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government.”
While the cut wouldn’t decimate NPR, which only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB, the impact on its member stations could be significant, especially in minor media markets. (And NPR also gets 30% of its funding from those member stations’ programming and service fees.) Seventy percent of CPB funding goes directly to local public radio and public television stations. As Maher explained on NPR’s All Things Considered (4/16/25):
So the big impact would be on rural stations, stations in geographies that are quite large or complex in order to be able to receive broadcasts, where infrastructure costs are very high.
This could result in “those stations really having to cut back services or potentially going away altogether.”
The blow to public television, which faces higher costs and gets a much bigger chunk of its funding from the CPB, would be more dire—again, especially in smaller media markets. Both PBS NewsHour (4/16/25) and the New York Times (4/1/25) noted that Alaska Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate, could shutter entire stations in what is already a news desert.
Even if Congress manages to muster the votes to block the rescission of funds for now, Trump’s knives are clearly out for public broadcasting. Earlier this year, Inside Radio (1/31/25) reported, FCC chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into
whether NPR and PBS stations are violating the terms of their authorizations to operate as noncommercial educational stations by running underwriting announcements on behalf of for-profit entities.
As FAIR (Extra!, 9–10/93) has long pointed out, the “underwriting announcements” on public broadcasting are commercials under a different name, and they violate the noncommercial promise of both PBS and NPR. But the Trump administration is not offering to increase public funding so these outlets can be less dependent on corporate sponsorship; to the contrary, it’s trying to take both federal and corporate money away in hopes of destroying public media altogether.
Clamping down on dissent
Victor Pickard (Annenberg, 3/16/22): “A robust public media system is beneficial—perhaps even essential—for maintaining a healthy democratic society.”
One could look at this threat as part of Trump’s general distrust of major media and desire to seek revenge against outlets he believes have been unfair to him (AP, 12/14/24; Fox News, 4/14/25). Another way to look at the situation is that cuts to public broadcasting send a message to the Republican base that the administration is serious about reducing federal spending generally—a purely symbolic message, of course, since CPB funding amounts to 0.008% of the federal budget.
But going after public broadcasters is also a part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark, all in the name of protecting the people from partisan reporting (Political Quarterly, 3/28/24). That’s largely because strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand (Annenberg School, 3/16/22).
In Argentina, President Javier Milei has moved to shut down media seen as too left-wing, including the national news agency Télam. The move was blasted by press advocates and trade unionists (Página 12, 3/1/24; Reason, 3/4/24). “Télam as we knew it has ceased to exist. The end,” a presidential spokesperson reportedly said last year (Clarín, 7/1/24).
The Guardian (5/6/24) reported that journalists at the Italian state broadcaster RAI have struck “against the ‘suffocating control’ allegedly being wielded by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government over their work,” which included allegations that the network censored “an antifascism monologue that was due to be read on one of its TV talkshows by the high-profile author Antonio Scurati.”
After Meloni took power in 2022, according to Le Monde (7/23/24), RAI,
considered a bastion of the left, faced show cancellations, strategic personnel changes and program restructuring, all seen as part of a far-right cultural conflict under the pretext of promoting diversity.
The union representing RAI journalists warned (La Stampa, 1/26/25) that the broadcaster’s editorial control has shifted from hosts to a shadowy new management, which “risk[s] wiping out the work that over 150 journalists have been doing for years in network programs.”
The far-right Israeli government is pushing a bill to privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), which the nation’s attorney general warned threatened to silence criticism of the government and create a “chilling effect” on other media outlets (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24). The attack on Israeli public media comes as Netanyahu’s government has sought to curtail press freedom generally in Israel since the nation invaded Gaza in 2023 (Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24), including a government boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), and intensified military censorship of the press (+972, 5/20/24). The death toll among Palestinian journalists in the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon has been catastrophic (FAIR.org, 10/19/23, 5/1/24, 3/26/25).
What these figures have in common with Trump is that they aren’t just extreme in their conservatism, they are actively opposed to democracy (New Yorker, 3/7/23; Foreign Policy, 12/9/23; Jacobin, 6/14/24).
While the US right has no shortage of TV networks, radio shows, websites and podcasts, the attack on public broadcasters, widely regarded as Blue State media, tells the MAGA movement that the government is working to cleanse society of any remaining opposition to its illiberal takeover (CNN, 3/26/25). Trump’s move against PBS and NPR is in line with these other anti-democratic regimes, attempting the same kind of transition to autocracy. His administration is a part of a global authoritarian movement that wants less media, academia and other democratic institutions, because these can be incubators of critical dissent against the government and corporate elite.
NPR and PBS don’t always live up to that mission. But cutting their ability to operate makes politics more opaque by limiting news consumers’ options beyond privately owned right-wing broadcasters. And that appears to be the point.
This week on CounterSpin: Elon Musk reportedly told Tesla investors that he’ll be amping down his role with the Department of Government Efficiency to, one guesses, bring his big brain back into their service. Like the “War on Terror,” “DOGE” is a thing that was in part spoken into normalcy by the corporate press. Media seem ready to, if not embrace, to make respectful space for whatever hot nonsense is proffered—if it fits within their political template. In this case, it’s a thing—not officially a new Cabinet-level department, but acting like one—wildly powerful, yet utterly opaque and run by an unelected billionaire. DOGE sparked lawsuits about its legality from day one, but today’s news is about, legal or not, what it’s doing and how we can respond. The Revolving Door Project is tracking all of that; we hear from executive director Jeff Hauser.
Also on the show: There’s no reason you need to know that Selena Chandler-Scott is a 24-year-old woman from Georgia who had a miscarriage last month; pregnant people lose those pregnancies routinely. You should know that Chandler-Scott was sent to jail for her miscarriage, and though later released, she won’t be the last. “Fetal personhood” may sound abstract or legalistic; but this case brings home vividly how granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses doesn’t “potentially” “open the door to,” but concretely, today, means undermining the rights of people who carry pregnancies, leaving them open to surveillance, suspicion and prosecution.
US media seem uninterested in Chandler-Scott’s story and its implications, but we hear from Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pope Francis.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Politico (4/16/25) finds “a disconnect between political elites”—i.e., its own subscribers—”and the electorate.”
A recent Politico article (4/16/25) gave readers an excellent lesson in how not to report on a poll—unless the goal is to push politicians to the right, rather than reflect how voters are truly feeling.
“California Voters Have Trump-Resistance Fatigue, Poll Finds,” declared the headline. The subhead continued: “From taking on Trump to hot-button issues, voters writ large embraced a different approach—although Democrats are more ready to fight.”
From the start, the piece framed its polling results as showing the California “political elite” are out of step with voters, who are apparently tired of all this “Trump resistance” being foisted upon them. Reporter Jeremy White explained that “the electorate is strikingly more likely to want a detente with the White House,” and that “voters are also more divided on issues like immigration and climate change.”
But problems with this framing abound, from its wrong-headed comparison to its skewing of the results, revealing more about Politico‘s agenda than California voters’ preferences.
‘Driving the state’s agenda’
First of all, the poll in question—which the article never links to—surveyed two samples of people: registered California voters and “political professionals who are driving the state’s agenda.” Those “influencers” are a sample taken from subscribers to three of Politico‘s California-focused newsletters, which, the article explained, “included lawmakers and staffers in the state legislature and the federal government.” Presumably that sample also included many journalists, lobbyists, advocates and others who closely follow state politics.
But in a country where the political right has overwhelmingly rejected reality- and fact-based news in favor of a propaganda echo chamber, one can safely assume that subscribers to Politico, a centrist but generally reality-based media outlet, will include vanishingly few right-wingers. In contrast, in a state where 38% of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, a representative sample of voters will necessarily include a significant number of Trump supporters. In other words, by sampling their own subscribers, Politico has selected out most right-wing respondents and created a group that is by definition going to poll farther to the left than the general voting public of California.
On top of that, people subscribed to Politico‘s state-focused newsletters are highly informed about the policies being polled on. One of Politico‘s sources points this out, explaining that “they’re more aware of the factual landscape.”
As polling expert David Moore (FAIR.org, 9/26/24) has explained, large segments of the voting public are disengaged and uninformed on most policy issues, so their opinions on survey questions that don’t provide a great deal of context are not terribly firm or meaningful. There’s very little reason, then, to compare policy opinions of California political professionals from Politico‘s subscription list with a cross-section of California voters, unless your purpose is to push lawmakers to the right.
‘Lower the temperature’
And based on how they skew the polling numbers, that’s exactly what Politico appears to be trying to do here. Regarding the “Trump-resistance fatigue,” White wrote:
The poll shows that while Democratic voters favor taking on Trump, the electorate broadly wants their representatives to lower the temperature. Forty-three percent of registered voters said leaders were “too confrontational”—a sentiment largely driven by Republicans and independents—compared to a third who found them “too passive.” A plurality of Democrats surveyed, 47%, wanted a more aggressive approach.
This is what gives the piece its headline. But it conveniently leaves out all the voters who said state leaders’ level of confrontation was “about right”—a sizable 24%. In other words, 57%—a 14-point majority—either approve of their state leaders’ resistance to Trump, or want more of it, yet Politico manages to spin that into a headline about Trump-resistance fatigue.
Turning to one of the “hot-button issues” the poll asked about, Politico told readers that “a plurality of voters is skeptical of legal immigration.”
What the hell does that mean, you ask? White doesn’t say, except to note several paragraphs later that voters are “more likely to support reducing legal immigration” than the political elite are. Looking at the poll, it would appear to come from the question: “The US admits over a million legal immigrants a year. Do you think the number should be [increased, decreased, stay about the same]?”
Forty-three percent of respondents said “decreased,” either “a lot” or “a little,” while 21% said “increased” and 36% said “stay about the same.” Technically, sure, a “plurality” want fewer legal immigrants (which isn’t exactly the same thing as being “skeptical” of legal immigration). But, just as with the “Trump-resistance fatigue” spin, this buries the majority opinion, which is not “skeptical,” being either fine with current levels of immigration or wanting to see more.
On immigration, the article also reports:
While a clear 60% of voters support the state’s “sanctuary” laws, which partition local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, policy influencers were 20 points more likely to support that policy.
Again, that Politico subscribers in California poll to the left of voters is to be expected. That voters still support sanctuary laws by 20 percentage points despite the relentless onslaught of fearmongering from the Trump administration, as well as both right-wing and centrist media, about immigrants? That seems like important news—that Politico would apparently prefer to bury.
ACTION ALERT: Messages to Politico can be sent here (or via Bluesky@Politico.com). Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Featured Image: Protesters gathered at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to protest the Trump administration on April 5, one of 137 “Hands Off!” demonstrations across California that day (Creative Commons photo: Lynn Friedman).
Reuters not only had a stand-alone story (4/22/25) about Palestinians’ response to Francis’ death, but included his advocacy for Gaza in its main obituary (4/21/25).
The obituaries for Pope Francis in the leading US newspapers ignored the late pontiff’s commitment to the Palestinian people and the acute suffering in Gaza in the last years of his life. Many of them ran separate pieces that highlighted Francis’ concern for Gaza and the response of Palestinians to his death, but they failed to mention these aspects of his papacy in the lengthy obituaries that summed up his life.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936, Francis was the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to be pope. When he died at the age of 88, his leadership as a social justice pontiff was heralded widely.
“For Francis, the poor are ‘at the heart of the Gospel,’ and throughout his pontificate, he affirmed this by deed and word,” said the Catholic magazine America (4/21/25). His liberal philosophy addressed many pressing issues, “from climate change to global poverty, war and violence, LGBTQ+ people and women’s roles in the church,” said Sojourners (4/21/25).
Toward the end of Francis’ life, the head of the Catholic Church focused his attention on ongoing genocide in Gaza. “He used to call us at 7 p.m. every night. No matter how busy he was, no matter where he was, he always called,” George Anton, spokesperson for the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, told NPR (4/22/25). Reuters (4/22/25) ran the headline, “Gaza’s Christians ‘Heartbroken’ for Pope Who Phoned Them Nightly.” AP (4/21/25) called these communications his “frequent evening ritual,” noting that this “small act of compassion made a big impression on Gaza’s tiny Christian community.”
Francis was generally sympathetic to addressing political and human rights for Palestinians, and under his watch the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine (BBC, 5/13/15). He “suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people” (Reuters, 11/17/24). In his final Easter message, issued the day before his death, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza to end a conflict that “continues to cause death and destruction, and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” (Truthout, 4/21/25).
‘Privileged a politicized version’
As well as his call for an inquiry into charges of genocide in Gaza, the New York Post (4/21/25) didn’t like that Francis “took a very standard leftist line on President Trump, decrying his plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.”
Not everyone in the press approved of this act of compassion when recalling his life and church leadership. In an editorial, the New York Post (4/21/25) criticized the “leftist” positions of the “deservedly beloved figure,” complaining that Francis “even went so far as to call for an investigation of Israel over its nonexistent genocide in Gaza.”
When it came to Francis’ support for Middle East peace generally, the Jerusalem Post (4/22/25) said in an editorial, “Time and again, Israel expressed dismay at the Vatican’s tendency to elevate Palestinian narratives while brushing aside Israeli concerns.” It complained that “the Vatican’s posture under Francis consistently privileged a politicized version of the Palestinian story over the complex reality on the ground.”
But rather than criticizing Francis’ attention to Gaza, the lengthy obituaries in the most prominent US newspapers ignored his advocacy for Palestinian rights entirely.
‘Excoriated modern-day colonizers’
The New York Times‘ obituary (4/21/25) for Francis was almost 7,500 words long—but none of them were “Gaza.”
The New YorkTimes’ obituary (4/21/25), by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, did note that “he repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine.”
It also reported that Francis’ travels included “focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.” It continued:
In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.
“No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,” Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan’s presidential palace. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!”
Yet regarding his outspoken concern for Gaza, the Times found room for not a word.
‘Sometimes took controversial stances’
The Wall Street Journal (4/21/25) said Francis “sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice”—but his focus on Gaza could not be acknowledged.
Obituaries at other major US newspapers also failed to include Francis’ Palestine focus. A lengthy obituary in the Washington Post (4/21/25), for example, noted that the pope’s first official trip was to the “Italian island of Lampedusa, a burdened way station for refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East,” a nod to the fact that he offered a home to migrants in need. But it didn’t mention Gaza.
The Wall Street Journal’s obituary (4/21/25) didn’t say anything about the topic either, though it said that Francis
made a priority of improving ties with the Islamic world, washing the feet of Muslims on Holy Thursday, visiting nine Muslim-majority countries and insisting that Islam was, like Christianity, a religion of peace.
The same is true with AP‘s obituary (4/21/25), which likewise commented instead that he “charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.” USA Today’s obituary (4/21/25) said Francis “sometimes took progressive or controversial stances on pressing issues, such as same-sex couples and climate change,” but it didn’t bring up Gaza.
By contrast, it was not hard to find references to Gaza in Francis’ obituaries in major non-US English-language outlets. The British Guardian (4/21/25) noted, “During his recent period in hospital, he kept up his telephone calls to the Holy Family church in Gaza, a nightly routine since 9 October 2023.” The Toronto-based Globe and Mail (4/21/25) included Palestine in a list of war-ravaged places Francis prayed for, and devoted most of a paragraph to his nightly Gaza calls. Reuters (4/21/25), headquartered in London and owned by Canada’s Thomson family, noted that Francis’ last Easter Sunday message “reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—a conflict he had long railed against.”
Though the major US obituaries all ignored Gaza, the same outlets published separate articles on Francis and Gaza. USA Today (4/21/25) ran “Pope Francis Used Final Easter Address to Call for Gaza Ceasefire.” The Wall Street Journal (4/23/25) had “Pope Francis Kept Up Routine of Calling Gaza Until the End.” For the New York Times (4/22/25), it was “Even in Sickness, Pope Francis Reached Out to Gaza’s Christians.” AP (4/21/25) offered “Pope’s Frequent Calls to a Catholic Church Made Him a Revered Figure in War-Battered Gaza,” an article that appeared on the Washington Post‘s website (4/21/25).
These stand-alone pieces are welcome, and spotlight the importance of the Gaza crisis to Francis. But the official obituaries in these major outlets are meant to stand as a permanent record of Francis’ life and career. By relegating Francis’ compassion for Palestine to sidebars, as though it were only of transient interest, US outlets eliminated a central aspect of his papacy from that record.
Mike Gallagher (Wall Street Journal, 4/15/25) insists the “scientific elite…should have come clean about the pandemic’s laboratory origin.” His evidence for such an origin? “Western intelligence agencies…favor that view, and most Americans agree.”
For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”
The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:
Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.
‘Finally comes clean’
“In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 3/16/25) they were treated like kooks and cranks.” In fact, the theory got a respectful hearing from outlets like the Washington Post (4/2/20, 4/14/20), ABC (5/3/20) and CNN (5/3/20); see FAIR.org (10/6/20).
Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly US, one German).
Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”
Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”
The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.
It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the US went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”
Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.
Government talking points
Science (12/3/24): “The committee’s 520-page report…offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case.”
In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”
Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered
a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.
The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”
The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that
Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’
According to a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (2/24), epidemiologists and virologists believe a natural zoonotic origin for Covid is far more likely than a lab leak.
Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.
The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:
Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.
It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.
More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).
Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.
This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:
We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.
Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.
There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.
When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.
We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change.
AP (3/13/25): “Demonstrators from [Jewish Voice for Peace] filled the lobby of Trump Tower…to denounce the immigration arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University.”
In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.
JVP, an organization of Jewish Americans in solidarity with Palestinians, organized the March 13 sit-in of Trump’s Manhattan property in protest against ICE’s detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil.
As Jewish solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide does not fit neatly into the channel’s narrative that pro-Palestine protests are inherently antisemitic, Fox’s all-day coverage of the protest either cast doubt upon the organization’s Jewish identity or minimized mentioning JVP by name altogether—all while painting demonstrators as antisemites.
What’s more, discussion of the protest veered into unabashedly antisemitic conspiracy theories about how George Soros and his supposedly paid anti-American protesters seek to overthrow the West.
The coverage comes as an absurd reminder that while right-wing fearmongers cynically paint opposition to genocide or violation of due-process as antisemitic, the most-watched US cable news network has no problem echoing Goebbelsian talking points.
‘Don’t give them any advertisement’
“Look at some of the signage in here…. They hate Jewish Americans,” says Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner (3/13/25), while playing footage of protesters holding up signs proudly proclaiming their Jewish heritage.
The argument made on other programs that the protesters were antisemitic, anti-American and aligned with Nazis, requires a specific hesitance towards profiling JVP probably best captured in an interview on the Story (3/13/25) with NYPD Chief John Chell. Asked who the group was that organized the protest, he responded, “We’re well-versed in this group, I don’t wanna give them any advertisement.”
He only neglected to say the quiet part out loud—that a shout-out for JVP might advertise a reality in which protesters in solidarity with Palestine and campus demonstrators weren’t motivated by antisemitism.
On Fox‘s Outnumbered (3/13/25), host Harris Faulkner and other panelists spent ample time portraying the protesters as antisemites—while intentionally obfuscating the overtly Jewish messaging of the demonstration.
It’s not as though the panelists or reporter Eric Shawn were somehow unaware of who was protesting: About seven minutes into the coverage, panelist Emily Compagno read the back of one of the T-shirts, printed “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel.” Without missing a beat, she pivoted into an incoherent rant about how the Democratic Party and Ivy League universities venerate Hamas. A few minutes later, Eric Shawn stammered the group’s name once in passing, then never again.
Unsurprisingly, these two incidental mentions were drowned out by relentless accusations that the protesters voiced overt hatred for Jews.
Faulkner set the tone of the conversation with some of her leading remarks: “Look at some of the signage here…. They hate Israel, they hate Jewish Americans, they are Anti-American.” (Such virulently antisemitic signage included “Fight Nazis, Not Students,” “Opposing Fascism Is a Jewish Tradition” and “Never Again for Anyone.”) She then asked her audience, “If you are Jewish in that building, do you feel safe?”
Guest panelist Lisa Boothe added that protesters “hate the West,” arguing that they “are supporting the Nazis.”
‘Some said they were Jews’
“Some said that they…were Jews,” the Five panelist Greg Gutfeld (3/13/25) stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it! And they will not check…who paid for those signs, who paid for those T-shirts, and…who paid for the protesters.”
When the Five (3/13/25) first mentioned the Jewish identities of the protesters about eight minutes into the broadcast, they did so to cast doubt upon the premise that Jews would engage in such an act: “Some said that they…were Jews,” Greg Gutfeld stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it!”
(It’s unclear who Gutfeld considers to be “the media,” given that he’s a panelist on the top-rated show at the most-watched cable news network.)
Like on Outnumbered, the Five panelists accused protesters of supporting antisemitism while only mentioning the demonstrators’ Jewish identity in passing. Jesse Watters summarized the panel’s position best, stating that protesters were “supporting an antisemite” who “hates Jews” and “[blew] up Columbia.”
The commentary hinges on the assumption that an Islamophobic audience will hear that an antisemitic crowd rallied at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil “blow[ing] up Columbia”—and not follow up on who organized the rally, or why.
Such buzzword-laden obfuscation reveals a paranoia in such coverage: If viewers do choose to follow up and learn more about the protesters, it might give the game away. The hoards of supposed antisemites might be raising perfectly reasonable questions about erosion of due-process and US bankrolling of genocide. Some such protests, like the one at Trump Tower, might even be Jewish-led.
‘Hands in many protest pots’
Fox News discussed George Soros as though he’s the Palestine movement’s top financier—though according to its own graphic (Will Cain Show, 3/13/25), Soros is only JVP’s fifth-biggest funder, donating a third as much as its largest donor, and accounting for less than 2% of the group’s total financing.
Curiously, for all of their concern for antisemitism, Outnumbered, the Story, the Five, the Will Cain Show (3/13/25) and Ingraham Angle (3/13/25) all had one thing in common: a conspiratorial fascination with allegedly astroturfed leftist financing. Laura Ingraham was particularly explicit:
The group Jewish Voice for Peace…bills itself as a home for left-leaning Jews…and it gets its biggest funding from groups associated with George Soros…. Soros himself has his hands in many protest pots, stirring up a toxic brew of antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
She cited a graphic displayed on the Will Cain Show, which was also referenced on the Five. It depicted Soros’ Open Society fund as the fifth-biggest funder of JVP for 2019–21, contributing $150,000. Given that JVP has an annual budget of more than $3 million, this suggests that Soros is responsible for less than 2% of the group’s financing.
Ingraham nonetheless felt the need to rail against Soros and the broader Jewish left. She also went on to characterize the pro-Palestine movement as “the overthrow-of-the-West cause.”
So the “antisemitic” pro-Palestine protests are bankrolled by an anti-American Jewish billionaire seeking to overthrow the West? Like her peers on Outnumbered and the Five, Ingraham is empowered to advance such harmful tropes, so long as she also tacks on a spurious charge of “antisemitism.”
Anti-Arab, anti-immigrant tropes
Five panelist and former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro (3/13/25) condemned protesters “want[ing] Mahmoud [Khalil] to have all of his constitutional rights,” implying that violation of Khalil’s due process is legal because he “hates all of our Western values.”
Fox’s obfuscation of the protest’s overtly Jewish messaging is underpinned by another assumption—that Palestinian-led or immigrant-led protest against the genocide is somehow less legitimate than Jewish American–led protest. Coverage not only obscured JVP’s role in organizing the protest, but used anti-Arab tropes and calls for deportation to smear the legitimacy of protesters’ demands.
When Jesse Watters evoked fantasies of student protesters blowing up universities, or Outnumbered guest panelist (and former Bush White House press secretary) Ari Fleischer accused protesters of being illegal residents that “should all be deported from this country,” they played to the racist impulses of their audiences.
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian-Syrian immigrant—thus, his opposition to a genocide in which Israel has killed at least 51,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 presumed dead under the rubble, is illegitimate. And if JVP protesters are Arab immigrants too, then their opposition to repression and genocide is meritless and antisemitic.
It’s another reason why it’s in Fox’s best interest not to identify the Trump Tower protesters—to allow for the assumption that they’re Arabs, or immigrants, which somehow discredits them.
Enemies with no name
As a Jewish-led organization in solidarity with Palestinians, JVP stresses the importance of challenging false antisemitism smears against their Palestinian partners and in creating a Jewish future divested from Zionism.
Fox News’s hesitancy to identify JVP is a striking contrast to Fox’s general proclivity for naming enemies. A search on FoxNews.com for the “New Black Panther Party,” a fringe Black nationalist group, yields more than 100 results; compare that to less than 30 hits on AP‘s website. A Search for “Dylan Mulvaney,” a trans influencer who was targeted in a mass-hate campaign in 2023, yields more than 5,000 results on Fox, compared to AP’s 50.
Fox News thrives upon enemies—but Jewish Voice for Peace is different. As an openly Jewish-American group, JVP challenges Fox News’ narrative that protests against genocide in Gaza are rooted in antisemitism.
“We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness and Judaism,” JVP’s website says. “Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve.”
To be clear, conservative and centrist outlets’ continued preoccupation with the supposed antisemitism of opponents of Israel’s genocide is never in good faith—as when the New York Times (4/14/25), reporting on “Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Universities,” blithely claimed that “pro-Palestinian students on college campuses…harassed Jewish students,” without noting that many of the pro-Palestinian students were themselves Jewish. But the charge of antisemitism is even more ludicrous coming from an outlet that uses antisemitic tropes to make its own attacks on the pro-Palestine movement.
And the charge is most ridiculous coming from a network that is too afraid to name its enemy, as if the mere acknowledgement that some Jews oppose US support for Israel’s genocide might shake the foundations of its whole narrative.
The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).
As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.
In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).
The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”
In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)
The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).
‘An uncertain end’
The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”
The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.
In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”
At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”
The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:
Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.
But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.
These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).
House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).
In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.
‘Constitutional crisis is here’
“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”
Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.
Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).
This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.
Janine Jackson interviewed the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind about the criminalization of immigrants for the April 11, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: US legal resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was swept up by ICE and sent to an infamously harsh prison in El Salvador. A judge declared that unlawful, and, we are to understand, the White House said, “Yes, actually, that was an administrative error, but we won’t return him to his family in Maryland because, well, he’s there now, and besides, they paid for him.” And in the latest, as we record on April 9, the Supreme Court says, “You know what? Let’s sit on that for a minute.”
What in the name of humanity is happening? Is it legal? Illegal? Does that matter? What can thinking, feeling human beings do now to protect fellow humans who are immigrants in this country?
Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, and has been reporting on issues around immigrants’ rights for years now. She joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Dara Lind.
Dara Lind: Thank you for having me on. Let’s try to figure this out.
JJ: Yeah. Well, let’s start, if we could, with what some are calling “renditions,” because “deportation” doesn’t really seem to fit. The White House has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as justification for sending, in this case, Venezuelan people it has deemed to be members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.
They are no contact. We don’t know what’s happening to them, exactly. They haven’t been convicted of any crime. They’ve had no chance to challenge charges against them.
You’ve written recently about this rubric that’s being wafted over this, and that folks will have heard about: the Alien Enemies Act. Talk us through, if you would, what that is, and what we should make of this employment of it.
DL: Sure. So the Alien Enemies Act was enacted in 1798. It was part of a suite of laws, where every of the other laws that were passed around those issues—as America was very worried about war between Britain and France—all of the other acts passed around that were eventually rescinded, because everybody kind of looked at that moment and went: “Ooh, that was a little bit tyrannical. We may have gone too far there.” But the Alien Enemies Act stayed on the books, and has been used very infrequently since then, most recently in World War II, to remove Japanese and German nationals.
What the Trump administration has done is say, “One, we’re using it again. Two, we’re using it not against a government, but against a criminal group, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua,” which they argue is so enmeshed with the government of Venezuela that it constitutes a hybrid criminal state. And three, saying that any Venezuelan man over the age of 14 who they deem to be a member of Tren de Aragua can be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, without any of the process that is set out in actual immigration law.
Under immigration law, you have the ability to make your case before a judge, to demonstrate that you qualify for some form of relief, such as asylum if that applies to you, and the government has to prove that you can be removed. They say, “No, no, no, no, no, because this law existed before any of that, we don’t have to go through any of that process.” That is their interpretation of the law, under which they put people on planes and sent them to El Salvador.
What has been litigated, and with a Supreme Court order on Monday night, where we are right now, is that the courts have said, “No, it is illegal to use the Alien Enemies Act to remove people with no process whatsoever.” But the Supreme Court says, if people want to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, they need to do it through what are called habeas claims, which is not the way that the initial court case was brought.
So in theory right now, we’re in a world where someone hypothetically could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, but how that’s going to work in practice is a little bit unclear, because it would have to be a different process than the one the Trump administration used in mid-March. And what we’re actually seeing is, even in the hours before you and I are speaking, that judges have started to receive lawsuits filed under these habeas claims, and have started saying, “Yeah, you can’t remove people under this act through this either.” So it’s really changing very quickly on the ground, and part of that’s the result of this 200+-year-old law being used in a manner in which it’s never been used before, and with very little transparency as to what the administration wants to do with it.
JJ: It seems important to say, as you do in the piece that you wrote, that the Alien Enemies Act sidesteps immigration law, because it’s being presented as kind of part of immigration law, but one of the key things about it is that it takes us outside of laws that have been instituted to deal with immigration, yeah?
DL: I compare this to when the Trump administration, after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, used Title 42, which is a public health law, to essentially seal the US/Mexico border from asylum seekers. In that case, they were taking a law from outside of immigration, that had been enacted before the modern immigration system, and saying, because this law doesn’t explicitly say immigration law is in effect, we can create this separate pathway that we can use, that we can treat immigrants under this law without having to give them any of the rights guaranteed under immigration law.
They’re doing the same thing with this, saying, because this law that is on the books doesn’t refer to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed a century and a half later, we don’t need to adhere to anything that was since put in to, say, comply with the Refugee Convention, to comply with the International Convention Against Torture, all of these structures that have come into place as people have started to care about human rights, and not sending people to torture or persecution—they’re now saying they don’t have to bother with, because they weren’t thinking about them in 1798.
JJ: Right. And it brings us to, folks for many years on many issues have been saying, Well, it’s not legal, so it’s all going to be fixed, because the law’s going to step in and fix it, because it’s not legal. And I think you’re referring to the fluidity and the importance of the invocation of law. It’s not like it just exists, and you bring it down to bear. It’s fought terrain.
DL: Right. Yes, exactly. It’s contested, and when we say “contested,” it really is being fought out in the courts as we speak. Because the administration is using its authority, the fact that it is the federal government, and litigators are saying, “Please point to us in the law where you can do that, or demonstrate to us that you are adhering at all to what we think of as fairly basic constitutional protections, like due process, like the right to know what you’re being detained for.”
What is legal is ultimately what the courts decide, but how they rule on this is very unclear, and, to be fully honest, the government’s insistence on giving very little information, and in conceding very little—even in cases like Mr. Abrego Garcia’s, where, as you say, they’ve said there was a mistake made—makes it a little bit harder to understand what it would even look like to say a government that’s been so truculent and so resistant is in fact operating under the law.
JJ: Let me just pivot a little bit. The talking point of, If they just come here the right way, like my grandparents did—that’s ahistorical garbage, we understand, but it’s still potent. And we have seen for years an effort to cleave “bad immigrants” from “good immigrants,” and to suggest, even now, that the good ones have nothing to fear.
Your work places this “bad hombre” rhetoric within a broader context of immigration policy and enforcement, because you don’t have to throw people in the back of a van to stir up enough fear and uncertainty to upend lives. You can do it with a quietly announced rule change.
And so I just want to ask you to talk about some of the maybe less visible fronts—you know, the ending of the CHNV program, the demand for registration. Talk about some other things that are going on that are still, in their own way, violent and disruptive.
Dara Lind: “They’re taking far more sweeping, categorical actions toward people with fewer protections under current law, and it’s harder to talk about those.”
DL: I love this question so much, because something that I personally have been thinking about a lot over the last several weeks is that the administration has gotten a lot of attention for the unprecedented ways in which it’s treated people with legal permission to be here, especially student visas.
But we’re hearing about those in terms of individual cases of visas being stripped. And meanwhile, they’re taking far more sweeping, categorical actions toward people with fewer protections under current law, and it’s harder to talk about those, because they don’t look like individual cases. They look like policy changes.
So, for example, thousands of people have gotten letters over the last couple of weeks, saying that their permission to live in the United States and work, which was extended under a presidential authority known as humanitarian parole, has been revoked, or will be revoked as of later this month, and that they’re supposed to return to their home countries as soon as possible.
Now, some of those people received those letters in error. Some of them were Ukrainians who were let in under the United for Ukraine program, and the government said later, the day that it sent them, “Oops, you guys, we didn’t mean to send that to you guys, so hopefully you didn’t see that and pack up and leave already.”
But many of them are being told they need to leave immediately, or within seven days, and it’s absolutely upending their lives, because they were told they had two years, or that they didn’t have to think about this until the next time their parole was up for renewal.
What you’re alluding to with registration is this bind that they’re trying to place immigrants in. People may very well not know that while we talk about “unauthorized” or “illegal” immigrants in the US, millions of those, at this point, are known to the government in some form or another: They have pending immigration court hearings, or they have some form of temporary permission to be in the United States.
While the Trump administration is, on the one hand, talking about this “invasion” of people who we don’t know who they are, on the other hand, they’re trying to use yet another obscure pre-1960s law to force anyone who isn’t already on the books with the federal government to register.
Now, are they going to be protected by registering? Are they being given legal status? Are they being given the right to work? No, not at all. And, in fact, the government has said nothing—the implication is that they’re using that information to go find people and deport them. But if you don’t register, then you risk being prosecuted as a federal criminal.
So they’re doing their best to, instead of actually going after the criminals who they promised were lurking around every corner on the campaign trail, to turn people who have not committed any crime into criminals, simply by engaging in what previously was a civil violation of immigration law.
JJ: To put the pin on it, this would make the United States a place where you can be stopped and told to show your papers.
DL: Yeah, this law that was passed in 1940 says that if you do not produce evidence that you’ve registered if asked by an immigration official, then that also constitutes a federal crime. It’s absolutely one of those where, we say all the time, we’re not a country that asks people to show their papers, and actually, according to this obscure law, that is a thing we can do.
But as with so many things in immigration law, there are powers the federal government in theory has but doesn’t use. And the Trump administration is trying to use them for the first time, and reminding a lot of people just how much power we’ve given the government and trusted them to use correctly.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, we understand, if we’re paying attention, that the Trump administration is not just interested in so-called criminals when we read that they are tracking anyone—immigrant, citizen, no matter—who expresses criticism of the deportation agenda on social media. So it seems clear that this is ideologically based on its face, or at least pieces of it is. Is that not a legal front to fight on?
DL: A lot of things that would be entirely illegal, if the government went after a US citizen for them, are in fact historically considered OK for the government to do in the context of immigration law. For example, the grounds that are being used for many of these student visa revocations are this obscure regulation that the State Department can revoke the visa of anyone it deems to be a foreign policy problem for the United States, which does open itself up to deporting people for speech, for protected political activity, for, again, the sort of thing that would be a core constitutional right for US citizens, but that, in the context in which US immigration law has developed, which was a lot of people being very concerned about Communist infiltration, immigrants have been carved out.
I think in general, it’s really important for people to understand that while the Trump administration loves to imply that it’s going to use all of its powers maximally, that no one is safe and that everyone should be afraid, in fact citizens do have more protections than Green Card holders, Green Card holders do have more protections than others.
For example, the one Green Card holder who they’ve tried to use this State Department thing on, the judge in that case, as of when we’re talking, has told the government, give me some evidence in 24 hours or I’m ordering this guy released. Because it does take more to deport somebody on a Green Card.
So how scared people should be, this isn’t just a function of what the government is saying—although what it’s doing is more relevant—but it should also be a function of how many layers of protection the government would have to cut through in order to subject you to its will.
JJ: And that gives us points of intervention, and I appreciate the idea that while we absolutely have to be concerned about what’s being said, it’s helpful to keep a clear eye on what is actually happening, so that we see where the fronts of the fight are. But I then have to ask you, when you hear analysts say, well, this person had a disputed status, this person had a Green Card, and make those distinctions, but then you hear Trump say, well, heck yeah, I’d love to send US citizens to prison in El Salvador.
He’s making clear he doesn’t think it’s about immigration status. He says, if I decide you’re a criminal, and you bop people on the head, or whatever the hell he said, you’re a dangerous person. “Well, I would love the law to let me send US citizens to El Salvador also.” So you can understand why folks feel the slipperiness of it, even as we know that laws have different layers of protection.
DL: I do. The thing that strikes me about these US citizens–to–El Salvador comments is that I was reporting on Trump back when the first time he was a presidential candidate, so I’ve been following what he says for a minute. It’s really, really rare for Donald Trump to say “if it’s legal,” “we’re not sure it’s legal.”
But he said that about this, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt has also said that about this, and that caveat is just so rare that it does make me think that this is different from some of the other things where Trump says it and then the government tries to make it happen, that they are a little bit aware that there’s a bright line, and even they are a little bit wary of stepping over it.
And I’m kind of insistent about that, mostly because I worry a lot about people being afraid to stand up for more vulnerable people in their communities, because they’re focused on the ways in which they’re vulnerable. And so what I don’t want to see is a world where noncitizens can be arrested and detained with no due process, and citizens are afraid to speak out because they heard something about citizens being sent to El Salvador, and they worry they will be next.
JJ: I hear that. And following from that, I want to just quote from the piece that you wrote for the New York Times last November, about focusing on what is actually really happening, and you said:
The details matter not only because every deportation represents a life disrupted (and usually more than one, since no immigrant is an island). They matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on January 20. Millions of people will wake up on January 21 not knowing exactly what comes next for them—and the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts, the better able immigrants and their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears.
What I hear in that is that there is a real history-making moment for a press corps that’s worth its salt.
DL: Absolutely, and to be honest, in the weeks since the flights were sent to El Salvador, we’ve seen sometremendousreporting from national and local reporters about the human lives that were on those planes. We know so much more about these people than we would have. But what that means is that these people who, arguably, the administration would love to see disappear, Nayib Bukele would love to see disappear, they’re very, very visible to us.
And that’s so important in making it clear that things like due process aren’t just a hypothetical “nice to have.” Due process is the protection that prevents, in general, gay makeup artists from getting sent to a country that they’ve never been to because of their tattoos, that it’s an essential way to make sure that we’re not visiting harm on people who have done nothing to deserve it.
JJ: Finally, I do understand that we have to fight wherever there’s a fight, but I do have a fear of small amendments or reforms as a big-picture response. We can amend this here or we can return that person. It feels a little bit like a restraining wall against a flood.
And I just feel that it helps to show that we are for something. We’re not just against hatefulness and bigotry and the law being used to arbitrarily throw people out. We have a vision of a shared future that doesn’t involve deputizing people to snitch on their neighbors who they think look different. We have a vision about immigration that is a positive vision that we’ve had in this country, and I guess I wish I’d see more of that right now, in media and elsewhere.
DL: What makes it particularly hard, from my perspective, is that most Americans know very little about immigration law. It’s extremely complicated, and most people have never had firsthand experience with it. So in order to get people to even understand what is going on now, you need to do more work than you do for areas where people are more intuitively familiar with what the government does, and that takes up space that otherwise could go to imagining different futures.
The other problem here is that, frankly, it’s not that new and radical ideas on immigration are needed. It’s a matter of political will, to a certain extent, right?
The reason that the Trump administration’s use of this registration provision is such a sick irony to some of us is that there was a way, that Congress proposed, to allow people to register with the US government. It was called comprehensive immigration reform. There have been proposals to regularize people, to put people on the books, to bring people out of the shadows.
And the absence of that, and the absence of a federal government that was in any way equipped to actually process people, rather than figuring out the most draconian crackdown and hoping that everybody got the message, is where we’ve gotten to a point where everyone agrees that the system is broken, and the only solutions appear to be these radical crackdowns on basic rights.
JJ: Yeah. We’ve established that the ground is shifting under our feet, but anything you’d like reporters to do more of or less of, or things to keep in mind?
DL: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the amount of attention, and duration of attention, on the Salvadoran removals. It’s been something where I could easily have seen things falling out of the headlines, just because there weren’t any new facts being developed.
I do worry a little bit that now that the court cases—with a couple of exceptions, we’re unlikely to see really big developments in the next several days—that that’s going to maybe quiet the drumbeat. And I’m hoping that people are continuing to push, continuing to try to find new information, to hold the government accountable to the things that it’s already said, especially if they’re going to start removals back up again.
Because it’s often the case that in the absence of new facts, important things don’t get treated as news stories anymore, and it would be really a shame if that were to happen for this, when our only recourse, unless the courts are going to end up ruling that the Trump administration has to send the plane back and put everybody on them and bring them back to the US, is going to be some measure of public pressure on the administration—on the government of El Salvador, even—to do the right thing.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dara Lind. She’s senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Thank you so much, Dara Lind, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NBC (4/7/25) presented evidence that killed 15 aid workers and buried their bodies along with their vehicles as an IDF “mistake.”
Israeli soldiers on March 23 massacred 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers near the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide has officially killed more than 50,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The slaughter took place before dawn, as a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck from the Palestinian Civil Defense service endeavored to respond to a lethal Israeli attack on another ambulance, which had itself been attempting to rescue victims of an Israeli airstrike.
Eight Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, six Civil Defense workers and one UN staff member were murdered by Israeli gunfire. Their mutilated bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave, their vehicles crushed and buried as well.
The initial Israeli narrative was that nine of the emergency responders were militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously…without headlights or emergency signals.”
As it turns out, however, all headlights and emergency signals were very much on—not that it’s fine to massacre people for driving with no lights, of course. When, after a week of negotiations with Israeli occupying forces, another convoy was finally permitted to access the mass grave and unearth the bodies, the mobile phone of massacre victim Rifat Radwan was found to containfootage of the lead-up to the assault, which shows the clearly marked rescue vehicles advancing with emergency lights on. A barrage of Israeli gunfire then persists for more than five minutes, as Radwan’s screen goes black and he bids farewell to his mother.
Following the release of the video footage, Israel conceded that perhaps its version of events had been partially “mistaken”—but only the claim about the headlights being off. The number of alleged “terrorists” on board was furthermore downgraded from nine to six, the other fatalities naturally being labeled human shields and therefore fundamentally the fault of Hamas.
Anyway, no one committing a genocide really cares about the precise identities of 15 people; mass indiscriminate killing is, after all, the whole point of the undertaking. Since Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas on March 18, the United Nations calculates that more than 100 children per day have been killed or injured in Gaza.
Ludicrous headlines
The New York Times‘ lead (4/4/25) says the aid workers were killed “when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire”—but the headline omits Israel altogether, and the subhead treats Israel’s responsibility as a UN accusation.
Notwithstanding reality, the Western corporate media somehow could not bring itself to report this particular massacre of medics without beating around the bush. The New York Times (4/4/25), for example, ran the following ludicrous headline: “Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On.” There was no room, apparently, to mention the role of Israel in said gunfire barrage, although the syntax implies that the ambulance lights may have perpetrated the killing.
The article’s subheadline specifies that “the UN has said Israel killed the workers”—and yet the singular attribution of this opinion to the United Nations is entirely confounding, given that the very first paragraph of the article itself states that the video “shows that the ambulances and fire truck… were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.”
For its part, NPR (4/5/25) went with its own similarly diplomatic headline: “Palestinian Medics Say a Video of Gaza Rescue Crews Under Fire Refutes Israeli Claims.” CNN (4/6/25) opted for: “Video Showing Final Moments of Gaza Emergency Workers Casts Doubt on Israeli Account of Killings.”
NBC News (4/7/25) reported that the Israeli military had “walked back its account of its killing of 15 paramedics and emergency workers in southern Gaza last month after video emerged that called into question its version of events”; the Washington Post (4/6/25) concurred that that Israel had “backtracked on its account…after phone video appeared to contradict its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on.”
The Guardian (4/5/25), meanwhile, went as far as to assert that the cell phone footage, which “appears to contradict the version of events put forward” by the Israeli military, “appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle” and features “a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.” Imagine if all news reports were written in such roundabout fashion, e.g., “State officials say that what appears to be a bridge collapsed on Thursday into what appears to be a river.”
The New York Times on April 7 produced its own follow-up headline, “Video Shows Search for Missing Gaza Paramedics Before Israelis Shoot Rescuers”—thanks to which readers were presumably too busy trying to parse the grammar to think about anything else.
‘Not seen as fully human’
Ahmed Najar (Al Jazeera, 4/6/25) : “Their story is not just about one atrocity. It is about the machinery of doubt that kicks in every time Palestinians are killed.”
In the case of Israel, corporate media have institutionalized the practice of dancing around the straightforward statement of fact, which is why we never see headlines like “Israel Massacres 15 Palestinian Medics in Rafah,” or, obviously, any acknowledgement that Israel is currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). Thanks in large part to Israel’s oh-so-special relationship with the US, which happily bankrolls its crimes against humanity, the media have long grotesquely skewed reporting in Israel’s favor in order to validate the whole arrangement.
As Palestinian political analyst and playwright Ahmed Najar writes in a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera (4/6/25), the slaughter of the 15 medics and rescuers in Gaza matters because “their story is not just about one atrocity.” It’s about an entire system
in which Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must prove they are hospitals, schools must prove they are schools and children must prove they are not human shields.
A system in which, “when Palestinians die, their families have to prove they weren’t terrorists first.” Najar concludes: “When Palestinians are not seen as fully human, then their killers are not seen as fully responsible.”
Western media insistence on giving ample space to Israel’s patently absurd arguments naturally doesn’t help matters—as when the Associated Press (4/6/25) allows an anonymous Israeli military official to contend that there was “no mistreatment” in the killing of the 15 medics. How could there ever be “mistreatment” in a genocide?
In its dispatch on how Israel “walked back” its account of the killing, NBC (4/7/25) quoted the Israeli military as saying that soldiers weren’t trying to “hide anything” by burying the 15 corpses, which is kind of like allowing someone caught holding up a bank with an AK-47 the opportunity to state that they weren’t trying to “steal anything.” From a journalistic standpoint, it makes no sense to grant credibility to a clearly disingenuous narrative. From a propaganda perspective, unfortunately, it does.
‘Good reason to be anxious’
As Doctors Without Borders (1/7/25) noted, Israel has killed hundreds of healthcare workers as part of its war on Gaza.
In the end, the slaughter of these 15 men should come as no surprise; as of January, Israel had already killed more than 1,000 health workers in Gaza in a little over a year, while engaging in repeated attacks on hospitals and an obscene decimation of medical infrastructure. On April 1, the UN reported that 408 aid workers had also been killed since October 2023, including 280 UN staff.
Killing medical personnel and emergency responders has long been Israel’s modus operandi. Recall Razan al-Najjar, the 21-year-old Palestinian nurse fatally shot by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2018, when Israel claimed that unarmed Palestinian protesters were conducting “kite and balloon terrorism.”
Or recall Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which kicked off in Gaza in December 2008 and killed 1,400 Palestinians over a span of 22 days, among them 300 children. The brief assault left 16 medics dead and damaged more than half of Gaza’s hospitals. The Guardian (3/24/09) quoted the Israeli army as reasoning that “medics who operate in the area take the risk upon themselves”—to hell with the Geneva Conventions.
To be sure, war crimes are all in a day’s work for Israel—and covering them up is, it seems, all in a day’s work for the corporate media. In a dispatch about how Israel “acknowledged flaws” in its “mistaken” account of its killing of the rescue workers, the New York Times‘ Isabel Kershner (4/6/25) cited Israeli military affairs analyst Amos Harel on how the Israeli soldiers who did the killing “had ‘good reason to be anxious,’ and that it would be wrong to assume immediately that the case was one of ‘murder in cold blood.’”
Naturally, it would be inhumane to assume that any aspect of genocide might transpire in cold blood. And as Israel continues its quest to normalize total depravity, Western journalism is becoming ever more cold-blooded, too.
This week on CounterSpin: We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program—not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy, or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.”
It is disheartening to see a report like one in Newsweek, about how Trump “loves the idea” of sending US citizens to prisons outside of US jurisdiction, that feels it has to start by explaining “Why It Matters.” But things as they are, we have to be grateful for what straight reporting we get—at a time when some outlets are signing on to shut up if it buys them a moment of peace, which it won’t—and a moment in which staying informed, paying attention, learning what’s happening and how we can stop it, is what we have to work with.
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Jessica González about Trump’s FCC for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There are reasons that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is an opaque entity for many people. The fact that there is a federal agency setting the terms for media companies’ operations conflicts with many Americans’ understanding of the press corps as a group of brave, independent individuals looking to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may.
There are, in fact, many community-supported, differently structured news outlets doing just that. But, listeners know, the big major papers and stations and channels we may look to for news are owned and sponsored by big profit-driven corporations that share the status quo–supporting interests of other big profit-driven corporations.
In allowing these companies’ increased conglomeration, and sidelining their nominal public interest obligations, the FCC has long played a role in determining whose voices are heard and whose are not. But maybe not quite as loud, as proudly prejudiced and bare-knuckled a role as right now.
Our guest reports how Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has got straight to dangerous work, undermining free speech and press freedom right out of the gate. Jessica González is co-CEO at the public advocacy group Free Press. She joins us now by phone from Los Angeles. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jessica González.
JJ: As you have noted, Brendan Carr is not so much regulating as delivering on Trump’s threats to punish anyone who reports critically about him, including by giving any space to anyone who opposes him politically. It’s beyond the beyond, and we see there’s no piece of government that MAGA will not weaponize.
And so appeals to gentility, and “let’s agree to disagree,” are just not serving the public, not serving marginalized communities or democracy, even a little bit.
So what do you have your eye on right now? What should we know is not “maybe going to happen” with a Trump-led FCC, but actually happening?
JG: You know, Janine, I remember 10, 15 years ago when the concerns we had about the FCC were structural in nature. They were allowing runaway media consolidation, which was resulting in fewer voices, and particularly fewer voices of color, controlling the narratives that we were hearing on broadcast media. Or we were concerned about net neutrality, making sure that internet service providers were not allowed to stop or slow down the traffic online, so that everyone had an equal opportunity to be heard. These, of course, were free speech issues, but they weren’t quite as in-focus threats to free expression as what we’re seeing now out of the Brendan Carr FCC under Donald Trump.
Brendan Carr has systematically gone after broadcasters who have given Trump’s political opponents airtime, or who have factchecked the president. For instance, in his first week in office, he revived three out of the four claims against broadcasters that the FCC chair under Biden had dismissed as politically biased. He left in place the dismissal of a complaint against Fox News, and revitalized the complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS, under claims that are specious, to say the least.
It’s very clear that his intent is to punish broadcasters who have broadcast opposing viewpoints—in ABC‘s case, factchecked the president at a debate before the election, in CBS’s case, they aired on 60 Minutes a recording of Kamala Harris that was edited as per normal standards in broadcast. We saw Brendan Carr going afterNBC when they aired an SNLsegment with Kamala Harris, even though they gave the president airtime the next day during a NASCAR race. This appears to be a clear and systematic effort to weaponize the FCC against broadcasters whose political speech, or just their news reporting, the president and his allies don’t like.
Another case in San Francisco is an investigation that the FCC chair has opened into KCBS radio station, where he is complaining that KCBS aired information about an ICE raid that was happening in the area. This is clearly First Amendment‒protected speech that these broadcasters are—you know, we expect them to cover the news, that’s presumably part of a public interest obligation. But the FCC chair is going after any political speech or any news reporting or any speech, frankly, that the president and his allies don’t like.
Jessica Gonzalez: “They are directing the reporters to be careful, because they fear government retribution for their speech.”
This is chilling. We heard from FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, who’s a Democrat, that she has visited radio and television broadcasters across the country, and is already hearing that they are directing the reporters to be careful, because they fear government retribution for their speech. And this is exactly the type of environment where authoritarianism thrives. Not only is Brendan Carr going after broadcasters, which are clearly regulated entities under the FCC’s scope of work, he’s also, in his diatribe in Project 2025, threatened to go after social media companies, and forced them to leave up hate and lies.
So this is an all-out war on the First Amendment. It’s chilling. And this is the type of stuff that our allies in Hungary tell us they were seeing before Orban took power. A couple weeks ago, we had a convening with András Biró-Nagy from Hungary, and Maria Ressa from the Philippines, who tracked Duterte’s authoritarian takeover of the government, and they were pointing out how similar the attacks on free speech in the United States look to the attacks on free speech in their countries, the similar tactics of quashing dissent, dehumanizing people, of going after minority groups. This is really clearly giving us great concern.
JJ: I will just say, finally, and thank you, we are gripping on with our fingernails, and thank you for acknowledging lessons from other places. We’re so committed to US exceptionalism, but we actually need to be listening to other countries right now.
But if we are dreaming, if we are not just trying to hold on to scraps, are there policies, is there legislation, is there a vision that we can be looking to as a template, imagining that we are surviving this moment?
JG: Yeah, I mean, I imagine we are surviving this moment, and I’m looking to what you’re doing, Janine, and what thousands of other reporters are doing throughout the country, to hold the power to account, be a Fourth Estate. And we’re looking at state policies, and maybe one day federal policies, to expand community journalism, noncommercial journalism that is not relying on moneyed interest to call the shots, that’s really just helping people understand what is happening when people take action when they don’t like what they see.
And so we have, with the Media Power Collaborative that Free Press is helping convene, and with the Media 2070 project that my colleagues are convening as well, that holds attacks on communities of color to account, and that repairs the harm that’s being done, not just now, but that historically has been done through our media system, what does it look like? This is what the Media 2070 project is queuing up for us. What does it look like to have a media system that loves Black people? The Media Power Collaborative is really looking at state-based policies to make sure that there is more public money for noncommercial journalism.
And so these are the types of models that are infusing new reporters on the ground. There was a bill in California that actually didn’t pass, but there was a budget line item for $25 million that went to UC Berkeley here. And we have local reporters embedding inside of newsrooms that are covering city halls, that are covering the state house. This is bringing much-needed capacity to track what’s actually happening in local civics to participate in our democracy.
JJ: All right, I’m going to end right on that note. We’ve been speaking with Jessica González; she’s co-CEO at Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net. Jessica González, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center’s Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.
Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.
Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.
Paul Offit: Thank you.
JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.
You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy’s book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.
PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren’t really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren’t contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren’t.
And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.
So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it’s spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn’t really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you’re in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.
JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don’t get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.
PO: Right. And if you’re a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you’re given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you’ll be injected, or you’ll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.
JJ: And also, CBSNews is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we’re not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It’s because they need treatment.”
PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don’t want measles in the hospital. It’s a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.
Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that’s confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it’s probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there’ll be another child death or more.
JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:
Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.
I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.
PO: That’s a really good point. I think we haven’t done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.
And that’s the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it’s always self-correcting. It’s introspective, and you’re willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.
I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That’s OK. That didn’t mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.
And I think people, at some level, don’t accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can’t trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.
JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there’s something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”
RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you’ve talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.
PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.
For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I’m on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they’re going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there’s things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.
And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that’s caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it’s so easy to make that case.
JJ: When it’s presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let’s parse what is being said. Let’s talk about these ideas. Let’s talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as “controversial” shut down that more nuanced conversation.
PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I’m not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”
Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.
JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it’s being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn’t die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It’s just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn’t have the media pickup.”
And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.
Paul Offit: “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”
PO: No, you’re right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.
But I’m a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.
But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it’s come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they’re learning now.
JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, there’s a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What’s the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?
PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it’s just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.
But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we’re doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we’re just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.
Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.
But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn’t vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we’re going to continue to suffer this.
JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Paul Offit, who’s director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Just under four years ago, New York’s third-term governor, Andrew Cuomo, resigned from office in disgrace, forced out by a looming impeachment inquiry led by his own Democratic Party over sexual harassment and Covid mismanagement scandals.
Shockingly, however, Cuomo has entered the New York City mayoral race and catapulted directly into the polling lead, with the help of his widespread name recognition—and some journalists willing to lend a hand to his image rehabilitation campaign. While some local papers have been scathing in their coverage of the ex-governor, the New York Times seems to be largely buying what Cuomo’s selling.
Scandals galore
Biden’s Justice Department concluded that “Governor Cuomo repeatedly subjected these female employees to unwelcome, non-consensual sexual contact” (New Republic, 1/26/24).
Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021, shortly after the release of Attorney General Leticia James’s investigation that concluded that he had sexually harassed at least 11 women, failed to report and investigate sexual harassment claims, and engaged in unlawful retaliation. A subsequent Justice Department investigation that reached a settlement with the state last year corroborated James’ report, and added two more female victims to its findings.
The bombshell sexual harassment report came on the heels of another major scandal involving nursing home deaths during the early months of the Covid pandemic. On March 25, 2020, Cuomo ordered state nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients released from hospitals. More than 4,500 such patients were admitted before the order was rescinded in May, after heavy criticism and a mounting nursing home death toll (FAIR.org, 2/19/21). Despite Cuomo’s protestations to the contrary, his order did not follow CDC guidelines at the time.
What’s more, in a subsequent probe of his myriad ethical violations, the Democratic-controlled New York State Assembly found that Cuomo’s office had tampered with the nursing home death count released in a state health report, in an effort to hide his order’s impact and avoid investigation. And a Republican-led congressional inquiry found emails showing that Cuomo himself had seen and edited the report, which sought to deflect blame to nursing home employees for the rampant Covid spread among residents.
The state assembly probe also found that Cuomo had ordered staff members to use work hours to help produce his book on pandemic leadership—a book he was paid $5 million for, and which was approved by the state ethics commission on Cuomo’s promise that he would not use state time or personnel to produce it. And it affirmed the attorney general’s findings about Cuomo’s sexual misconduct, citing “overwhelming evidence.”
The assembly probe was launched as part of an impeachment inquiry. Had Cuomo not resigned, he almost certainly would have been impeached. Instead, he’s spent the last several years taking a “scorched earth” approach against his accusers, burning through millions of taxpayer dollars for his legal fees, and gearing up for a political rebirth as New York City mayor—and perhaps, in 2028, US presidential candidate.
As the front-page New York Times article (3/1/25) reporting Cuomo’s entrance into the mayoral race explained, “To win, he will have to convince New Yorkers that he is innocent—or at least to look beyond his transgressions and a field of newer talent.”
It would appear the paper is doing its best to help Cuomo achieve that.
‘Clear advantages’
The New York Times (3/1/25) said that Cuomo “can cite his success as governor…leading the state through the Covid crisis.” In 2020, the last full year of Cuomo’s governorship, New York had the second-worst death rate from Covid in the nation.
The Times article by Nicholas Fandos and Emma Fitzsimmons, which called Cuomo’s comeback attempt “audacious,” acknowledged that his campaign came with “hefty baggage.” Yet it also pointed to his “clear advantages,” including not just $15 million in anticipated super PAC money, but “his success…leading the state through the Covid crisis”—breezily erasing a key component of that baggage.
Shockingly, the reporters didn’t mention the Covid nursing home scandal until the final paragraph of the lengthy piece—which, failing to mention the two Democrat-led reports on Cuomo’s misdeeds, suggested that the whole thing might just boil down to another Republican witch hunt:
A House Republican chairman referred Mr. Cuomo for potential prosecution after he accused him of lying about a report on nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Mr. Cuomo insists he did not lie, but rather failed to remember certain details that he later sought to correct.
Regarding the sexual harassment scandal, the paper wrote: “Mr. Cuomo has had success chipping away at the credibility of some of the harassment claims.” How so, you ask? That paragraph continued:
Last year, the Justice Department reached a civil rights settlement with the state concluding that he and his executive staff subjected at least 13 female employees to a “sexually hostile work environment.” (Mr. Cuomo was not a party to the settlement and disparaged its findings as a rehash of old information.)
If the Times wants to assert that Cuomo has chipped away the credibility of the claims, they ought to at least offer some evidence. None of the accusers have retracted their claims, though one recently dropped her case against him, explaining:
Throughout this extraordinarily painful two year case, I’ve many times believed that I’d be better off dead than endure more of his litigation abuse, which has caused extraordinary pain and expense to my family and friends. I desperately need to live my life. That’s the choice I am making today.
Cuomo immediately countersued her in response (Independent, 12/19/24).
Meanwhile, when the Times article reports that some “opponents say Mr. Cuomo is to blame for some of the very things he says he wants to fix, including the state of the city’s subways,” evidence is also called for. But in this case, the evidence would show that it’s not just a political attack, but an indisputable fact: As governor, Cuomo repeatedly raided hundreds of millions of state dollars earmarked for the city’s public transportation system—which is actually state-run—to help fill state budget holes and fund pet projects, while at the same time working to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy (Jacobin, 3/3/25).
Indeed, Fitzsimmons might have quoted her own reporting from 2018 (New York Times, 10/23/18):
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, helped create the subway crisis by failing to adequately support the system—his administration even diverted transit funding to ski resorts—and he has been pilloried by subway advocates for prioritizing aesthetics over maintenance.
‘It has been discredited’
New York Times (3/1/25): “A campaign-style video on Valentine’s Day showing [Cuomo] holding a rose and hugging women…reinforced the idea that many women still like him.”
The same day (3/1/25), the paper published another piece by Fitzsimmons, “Cuomo’s Foes Look to Renew Focus on Sexual Harassment Scandal.” The article named some of the accusations and noted that Cuomo’s “team often cites how, despite criminal investigations by several district attorneys, none resulted in charges.” It did not mention the attorney general’s investigation or the state assembly probe, leaving readers with essentially a he said/she said duel to evaluate the credibility of the claims.
Another line in that piece stood out: “The power of the #MeToo movement has seemed to wane in recent years, with the re-election of President Trump, a Republican, a visible example.” It’s worth pointing out, as the Times does not, that much of the power of that movement came from pushing news outlets to take more seriously accusations of sexual misconduct against powerful people. If the power of #MeToo has waned, journalists shouldn’t pretend they’re passive observers of the phenomenon.
Even some in the media admitted that Trump’s extensive list of accusers never got the kind of coverage they deserved, which helped smooth his path back to the White House. The Times‘ formulation erases the media’s complicity in shielding sexual harassers and abusers from facing the kind of scrutiny #MeToo demands.
#MeToo also helped the public understand that it’s incredibly hard to convict someone of sexual misconduct, which so often happens with no third-party witnesses, so that charges and conviction can’t be the only standard by which powerful people accused of such deeds are judged. If journalists shift back to reporting on such accusations strictly through the lens of the legal system, as the Times does here, it means winding back an important part of #MeToo’s impact.
Fitzsimmons returned to the subject less than two weeks later in the article “For #MeToo Movement, Mayor’s Race in New York City Poses a Test” (3/10/25). Noting that three of the mayoral candidates face sexual misconduct accusations—Cuomo, embattled incumbent Eric Adams and former city comptroller Scott Stringer—Fitzsimmons wrote that their candidacies “will provide a durability test for the #MeToo movement in New York politics.” She proceeded to lay out the accusers’ claims and the candidates responses, with this for Cuomo’s defense:
Mr. Cuomo told reporters on Sunday after attending a church service in Harlem that he did not agree with a report by the state attorney general, Letitia James, that found that he had sexually harassed 11 women.
“I said at that time it was wrong, I said at that time it was political, it has been discredited and nothing has come from any of it,” he said.
If a politician claims a report that took testimony under oath from 41 people and examined tens of thousands of documents has been “discredited”—a report your own editorial board at the time called “thorough and damning“—don’t you think you ought to press for substantiation of that eyebrow-raising claim? But New York Times editors let it stand unchallenged.
‘Criticism politically motivated’
The New York Times (3/23/25) stressed the political motivations behind pointing out that Cuomo’s Covid policies got people killed—as opposed to focusing on the people killed.
On the anniversary of Cuomo’s nursing home order, families of nursing home Covid victims held an event calling on him to apologize and take responsibility for his actions, bringing together most of Cuomo’s rivals—from the Democratic Socialist to the lone Republican in the race. The Times (3/23/25) lent its support to Cuomo’s framing of the criticism as merely politically motivated:
He has sharply defended his handling of the crisis and has called the criticism politically motivated.
On Sunday, nine mayoral candidates stood on a street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood in front of a memorial wall that displayed photos of nursing home residents who died during the Covid crisis. Each candidate said that they were not attending for political reasons, while taking the opportunity to criticize the former governor, who is leading in the polls.
Reporter Hurubie Meko’s opaque explanation of the scandal likewise offered Cuomo a friendly spin, turning the established findings of multiple inquiries into yet another he said/she said dispute between Cuomo and his “critics”:
Mr. Cuomo’s critics have focused on a July 2020 state Health Department report regarding nursing homes, which they have called inaccurate and have said deflected blame for the deaths away from the governor. In 2021, New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, found that Mr. Cuomo’s administration had undercounted coronavirus-related deaths of nursing home patients by the thousands. Mr. Cuomo, who has said the March 2020 order and the state’s other public health policies adhered to federal guidelines, called the lack of transparency a mistake but denied that his decisions were politically motivated.
It’s not just “critics” who called the numbers “inaccurate”; Meko leaves out the state assembly probe that found that, after intervention from Cuomo’s office, the nursing home death toll was edited to erase the thousands of residents who had died in hospitals. She also leaves out the difference between the CDC guidelines and Cuomo’s policy.
She does add that a “Republican-led House subcommittee…ultimately fault[ed]” Cuomo for tampering with the report, but let a Cuomo spokesperson counter that with further accusations of politicization.
‘An effective leader pre-scandal‘
New York Times Opinion writer Nicole Gelinas (10/8/24) on Cuomo: “There isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative.”
The paper’s kid-glove treatment of Cuomo isn’t restricted to the news pages. The Times opinion editors put together a four-person discussion on “the Democratic Party and Andrew Cuomo” (3/6/25), published as a guest essay, that appeared designed primarily to shore up the barricades against any candidates to the left of the centrist Cuomo. (Most of them are; the surging challenger currently polling second is democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.)
Joining editorial board members Mara Gay and Brent Staples were Giuliani biographer Andrew Kirtzman—whose most recent essay in the Times (10/8/24) had argued that “there’s a compelling reason [Cuomo] should run,” citing his “record of success and aura of competence”—and Nicole Gelinas, identified by the Times as “a contributing Opinion writer,” but more helpfully described as a senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute. (“Contributing Opinion writer” is a new position for Gelinas; apparently the Times felt her weekly column at the New York Post was not enough local exposure for her point of view.)
Gay asked the questions, while Gelinas offered claims like “voters aren’t interested right now in progressivism.” Kirtzman similarly opined, “New Yorkers in particular prefer their mayors to be pragmatists” rather than progressives. (This is the Times‘ line in news reporting as well, as when Fandos and Fitzsimmons—3/1/25—reported, “Democrats have been drifting slowly back toward the ideological center, where Mr. Cuomo has long been at home.”)
Staples offered nothing to counter those takes, and responded to Gay’s question about masculinity by suggesting that any breakout challenger to Cuomo or Adams would “have to give good bomber-jacket vibe,” presumably referring to Cuomo’s habit of wearing a leather bomber jacket in public appearances during the pandemic.
Kirtzman also presented a rehash of his October take, submitting that “the indisputable fact is that as governor [Cuomo] accomplished major things that his predecessors could not,” and that he “has been able to capitalize on the credibility he built up as an effective leader pre-scandal.”
Gelinas continued to hammer on the importance of centrism, saying that if New York City votes for Cuomo, “it won’t be because of ignorance of [his scandals], but because they feel there isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative.”
Right now, polling shows that most people simply don’t know enough about the other mayoral candidates to have an opinion about them, but of those that do, they give three of his five closest challengers higher net approval ratings than Cuomo.
And in terms of what New York voters want, it’s far from clear that centrism wins the day. The consistent topissues for New Yorkers are affordability—particularly housing—and safety. “Affordability” for New Yorkers is largely about housing costs, and the fact that real estate money has been pouring into Cuomo’s campaign bodes poorly for his ability to bring those costs down. “Safety” is driven primarily by fearmongering media coverage that rarely acknowledges that crime is actually near historic lows (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), but there is a visible mental health and homelessness crisis that also spurs fear and concern among residents.
As the Times itself (1/12/16) reported years ago, Cuomo worsened the city’s homelessness crisis as part of his commitment to fiscal austerity. Rather than raising taxes on the wealthy, he canceled the city’s access to a federal housing assistance program in 2011, costing the city nearly $100 million in funds and growing the city’s unhoused population by 16,000 in the next three years. Cuomo also sharply reduced the number of state-run psychiatric beds, shifting more of the seriously mentally ill population back onto the streets and subways.
Screwed over NYC
Politico (3/22/25) examines Cuomo’s “ties to a person loathed by many Democrats”—Elon Musk.
That’s far from the only stain on Cuomo’s record that the Times has reported on in the past but now seems to have conveniently forgotten. For instance, New York City is desperate for an alternative to their hopelessly corrupt current mayor, but Cuomo has his own history of corruption. During his time as governor, Cuomo established an anti-corruption commission, and then proceeded to impede any of its investigations that implicated him (New York Times, 7/23/14).
And Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” project, meant to revitalize the post-industrial western New York city by funneling tax breaks and state grants to economic development projects, quickly became “one of the most sweeping corruption scandals to ever rock a New York governor’s office”—including a massive giveaway to Elon Musk and his family for promised jobs that never fully materialized (Politico, 3/22/25).
But it’s no surprise the Times engages in selective amnesia over Cuomo, as New York City’s centrist neoliberal paper has a natural affinity for the centrist neoliberal politician. Cuomo’s barely a Democrat: As governor, he spent years supporting a posse of turncoat Democratic state legislators who caucused with the Republicans, to allow the minority party to block progressive legislation Cuomo didn’t want to see cross his desk (New Republic, 5/12/17).
He cut pensions for government workers, withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of school funding, and cut Medicaid in the midst of the pandemic.
He also specifically screwed over New York City, even aside from robbing city public transportation funds. In 2019, Cuomo singled out the city for a reduction in the standard state reimbursement for the local health department, so that New York City gets proportionally less than every other municipality in the state—costing the city up to $90 million a year (HealthBeat, 2/27/25). And he tried to cut a third of the state’s funding for the city’s public university system, which would have devastated it (Jacobin, 3/3/25).
‘Withering criticism’
The Daily News (3/22/25) examined Cuomo’s reluctance to criticize Trump—and the backing he gets from wealthy Trump supporters.
Another major local paper, the New York Daily News, has prominently included straightforward descriptions of Cuomo’s scandals in its coverage. In its article (3/1/25) on Cuomo’s entrance to the race, for instance, it explained:
He resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexually harassing 13 women, allegations the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division corroborated in a bombshell settlement last year. Cuomo has denied ever committing misconduct, but said upon resigning that he wanted to “deeply apologize” for making “people feel uncomfortable.”
Cuomo has also for years faced withering criticism over his decision to understate the number of New Yorkers who died from Covid-19 in nursing homes in the state after he enacted a policy in early 2020 prohibiting such facilities from denying entry for residents diagnosed with the deadly virus.
And under the print-edition headline “Cuomo Goes Easy on the President” (3/22/25), the paper covered Cuomo’s reluctance to criticize Trump in light of donation records they dug up showing tens of thousands of campaign dollars coming from wealthy “Trump donors and associates.” The Times has done no such digging.
Meanwhile, the Murdoch-owned New York Post seems happy to aim its disinformationmachine at Cuomo. Reporting on the same nursing home anniversary event as the Times, the Post (3/23/25) wrote that Cuomo’s nursing home directive “by many estimates resulted in the deaths of about 15,000 nursing-home residents.” FAIR is aware of no credible estimates that Cuomo’s directive killed 15,000, as that is the total nursing home death toll. Even Cuomo’s most vocal critics—those with any respect for truth and facts, anyway—don’t claim his order was responsible for every single nursing home death.
‘Strong ethical standards’
The Hill (3/8/25) presented Cuomo as an alternative to Mayor Eric Adams, someone who can tout “his leadership bona fides as Adams finds himself mired in controversy.”
While the Times‘ local competitors aren’t pulling their punches, its Cuomo-friendly reporting is finding some company among national outlets.
The Hill (3/8/25), in what read as a puff piece about Cuomo’s campaign to “woo centrists,” didn’t mention his nursing home or sexual harassment scandals until the 27th paragraph—a curious choice, especially considering that the 10th paragraph of the piece cited a poll that found city voters’ top priority was “strong ethical standards.” The Hill framed only Adams as the one “facing the major stumbling block of ethical questions.”
Politico‘s report (3/1/25) on Cuomo’s entrance to the race seemed determined to absolve him of his misdeeds, cherry-picking evidence to paint a picture of innocence:
Like Trump, Cuomo’s return to electoral office seemed improbable nearly four years ago when he left the governor’s mansion amid cascading scandals.
Still, the former governor’s allies believe he’s been vindicated in the years since he left office. One of the women who accused Cuomo of wrongdoing dropped her sexual harassment lawsuit against him and several prosecutors have declined to bring charges against him. A Justice Department inspector general last year determined the federal government’s probe of Cuomo’s nursing home policies launched under the first Trump administration was politically motivated.
In a piece critical of Democratic Party support for Cuomo, the Atlantic‘s David Graham (3/3/25) wrote, “If, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like [Rep. Ritchie] Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?”
The same might be asked of some in the corporate media, with the New York Times at the top of the list.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky:@NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
After the biggest anti-Trump protests since the 2017 Women’s March, many major media outlets seemed intent on downplaying the size and significance of the massive demonstration of opposition.
The Washington Post (4/6/25) relegated protesters “across the US” to the Metro section.
Despite the scale and significance of the protests, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had stories about them on their front pages the next day.
The Washington Post (4/6/25) had a thumbnail at the bottom of the front page with the blurb “Metro: Thousands gather in DC as protesters rally across the US against Trump.”
The New York Times (4/6/25) had a photo below the fold that was captioned: “A Day of Protest: People gathered around the country, including in Asheville, NC, to voice opposition to Trump administration policies. Page 18.”
“People gathered around the country” was how the New York Times (4/6/25) downplayed the massive wave of protest.
A Timesblurb promoting the story in a roundup of stories about “The Trump Administration’s First Hundred Days” minimized the scale and seriousness of the event:
Anti-Trump Protests: Demonstrators packed the streets in several cities to bemoan what they considered a lack of strong opposition to the president and his policies.
The verb “bemoan” is clearly belittling, and the focus of both organizers and participants was obviously on Trump (and Musk), not on the weakness of their opponents. And since when is 1,400 “several”?
The downplaying of the story couldn’t be explained by a lack of audience interest; indeed, people seemed extremely eager to hear about the protests. The protest coverage buried in the Times‘ print edition was the paper’s most-clicked article online that day, according to the paper’s Morning newsletter (4/7/25).
Little broadcast coverage
ABC‘s Good Morning America (4/6/25) offered protesters a few soundbites to speak for themselves.
The major broadcast networks gave the massive protests only passing coverage in most of their programming. On ABC, World News Tonight (4/5/25) gave only 20 seconds to a correspondent in Washington, DC, to explain the signs she was seeing. The network’s morning show, Good Morning America (4/6/25), offered a bit more, with a few soundbites given to protesters to speak for themselves. In a recent FAIR study (4/4/25) of protest coverage, ABC stood out for its blackout of nationwide anti-Trump protests that, even before this past weekend, already outnumbered protests in the same time period during Trump’s first term.
CBS Face the Nation (4/6/25) told viewers that “tens of thousands of people took to the streets yesterday from Washington, DC, to Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, protesting many of Trump’s policies, Elon Musk and tariffs.” CBS Weekend News (4/6/25) included a short description of the protests only in the context of Trump’s tariffs, airing a soundbite of a protester speaking against them. CBS Sunday Morning (4/6/25) had another, even briefer mention of the protests, in an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders.
A report on NBC Nightly News (4/5/25) mentioned “huge turnouts” and “protests in nearly every state.” The item featured several short soundbites from protesters. Meet the Press (4/6/25) also mentioned the protests briefly, with images.
Undercounting dissent
AP (via Politico, 4/5/25) reported that “thousands of protesters assailed Trump.”
NPR All Things Considered (4/5/25) told listeners that “thousands” gathered to protest Trump and Musk. So did the Associated Press (4/5/25)—whose credibility in the crowd-counting department could be judged by the article’s claim that the 2017 Women’s March also only saw “thousands.” (An effort at the time by the Washington Post to tally the US participants came up with a range of 3 million to 5 million—2/7/17.)
ABC World News Tonight (4/5/25) announced that “thousands” gathered on the National Mall in DC.
Over an otherwise commendable piece that compiled interviews with protesters in 11 cities and towns across the country, a USA Today subhead (4/5/25) also estimated “thousands.” It did so despite the fact that the piece led by reporting that “tens of thousands of people are gathering Saturday at rallies across the country”—itself a clear underestimate. The piece later explained that “more than 500,000 people have RSVP’d to attend” the protests, and that “protesters stretched as far as the eye could see along the National Mall and the crowd had been flowing toward the base of the Washington monument for hours.”
Given that there were some 1,400 separate protest events, it’s laughable to suggest that only “thousands” attended. Even if only 10 people showed up to each event, you’d have “tens of thousands”—but every event the paper reported on from small towns and cities (like Stuart, Florida) had at least several hundred if not thousands, while the DC and NYC events appeared to have at least 100,000 participants apiece (American Crisis, 4/8/25). Boston’s protest was reported locally to have involved “nearly 100,000” (CBS‘s WBZ, 4/6/25; NBC Boston, 4/7/25).
It would not be difficult for news organizations with resources like the national newspapers or major TV networks to produce credible estimates of crowd numbers at significant events. The fact that they don’t bother to do so reflects the scant importance these outlets place on the role of protests in the democratic process. Corporate media journalists are apt to regard protesters as akin to spectators rushing onto the field during a game, interfering with an activity best left to professionals.
Better reporting?
CNN.com (4/5/25; “updated” 4/6/25) edited this piece to change an initial “millions of people took part in protests” to a ridiculous “scores.”
CNN stood out among major corporate outlets for not underestimating the size and scope of the protests, with coverage of the protests in most of its shows over the weekend. The network repeatedly cited organizers’ estimates of at least 1,400 protest events across all 50 states, totaling “millions” of attendees (e.g., CNN This Morning, 4/6/25; CNN Inside Politics, 4/6/25). CNN correspondents in multiple US cities described the messages they heard and saw, and they also interviewed protesters on-air to let them speak for themselves.
CNN‘s online account (4/5/25) of the protests, however, originally reported that “millions of people took part in protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk across all 50 states and globally on Saturday,” but was stealth-edited on April 6 to ludicrously claim that “scores of people took part in protests.” We would be interested in hearing CNN‘s explanation for this self-evidently absurd alteration.
On CNN‘s Newsroom (4/6/25), as an indication of heightened interest in Trump opposition, senior data reporter Harry Enten pointed out that Googlesearches for the word “protests” were
up 1,200% versus a year ago…. We see that the percent in number of folks who are searching for protests, interested in going out in those protests is finally matching what we saw in January of 2017, if not exceeding it.
Axios (4/5/25) also reported organizers’ “millions” estimate, including their 500,000 RSVPs and their reports from the field that turnout was far exceeding those RSVPs. (For instance, they reported getting 2,000 RSVPs for Raleigh, NC, where they ultimately saw some 45,000 in attendance.)
Some local papers in the Gannett chain (which also owns USA Today) usefully offered readers information about the protests planned for their states before they took place (e.g., Columbus Dispatch, 4/2/25; Florida’s TCPalm.com, 4/5/25). These stories included why people were protesting, and the times and locations of every scheduled Hands Off! protest in their respective states.
Such coverage treats readers as citizens, and protesting as a basic part of a democratic system—not as an inconsequential sideshow, which is how it’s generally presented in corporate media.
“Resistance is alive and well in the United States.”
So declared the headline of a March 19 article on the nonprofit news site Waging Nonviolence. Authors Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam, political scientists at Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, outlined how—despite a common belief that grassroots public resistance against the depredations of the Trump Administration is lacking or lukewarm—protests are actually rising dramatically.
These demonstrations, the piece said, “may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but research shows they are far more numerous and frequent—while also shifting to more powerful forms of resistance.”
They note that while
the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025—held on January 18—saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since January 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.
The Crowd Counting Consortium, founded in 2017 to collect “publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States,” tracked more than 2,000 protests in February alone.
Chart: Waging Nonviolence
The acts of collective resistance documented by the CCC—as well as by other activism-tracking initiatives, such the “We the People Dissent”Substack—span every state. They focus on advocacy for diverse constituencies and issues under attack from the current administration, including public education, Medicaid and reproductive, immigrant, Palestinian, labor and LGBTQ rights.
Their common thread is opposition to Trump’s fascistic ideology and rapid rash of likely unconstitutional executive orders, such as freezing federal budget outlays approved by Congress, the mass firing of government workers and the dismantling of institutions by the “Department” of Government Efficiency by unelected “adviser” Elon Musk.
But if you relied on articles and broadcasts from the legacy national news media during early 2025, you wouldn’t know the extent of grassroots action prompted by this discontent. A FAIR examination of five major outlets found that coverage of anti-Trump/pro-democracy protests roughly overlapping CCC’s study timeframe (January 22 to February 26) was minimal, and downplayed the significance of this opposition, especially around the inauguration.
Mostly tepid coverage
FAIR examined reporting on three organized protest events occurring concurrently in Washington, DC, and across the US: The People’s March (January 18), the “50501” demonstrations in all state capitals (February 5) and the Presidents Day protests, sometimes dubbed “No Kings Day” (February 17). Using the Nexis news database and the outlets’ websites, we looked at the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, and at ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings—the top morning and evening national news programs on ABC and CBS—within four days of each of these dates. (NBC was not included in the study because its transcripts are no longer available on Nexis.)
Broadcast coverage was abysmal. None of the four network shows in our study ran any reports focused on any of the three protest events. ABC World News Tonight mentioned none of the events, and GMA referred to only one of them in passing. In their coverage of the January 18 protests, CBS Evening News and Mornings gave more coverage to speculation about violent protest than they did to actual (nonviolent) protest.
The newspapers had more coverage, but their stories tended to be relatively short, buried deep in the paper, or in the form of wire-service reprints. Longer pieces often downplayed the protests’ size and disparaged their significance. The Times and Post tended to focus on DC-based protests, whereas USA Today offered more thorough and accurate articles about the growing nationwide resistance movement.
The People’s March
The January 18 march, centered in Washington, DC, near Inauguration Day, was a reboot of the attendance record–setting 2017 Women’s March spearheaded by feminist nonprofits. The People’s March had a broadened focus on peaceful organizing around a range of progressive issues, and included solidarity actions in every state.
According to CCC data (available for download at the site), on January 18 alone, 352 protests, rallies, demonstrations or marches opposing Donald Trump and/or administration policy were recorded across the country. Though dispersed in a way the Women’s March was not, tens of thousands nonetheless participated in hundreds of acts of protest and civil disobedience around the country.
More than 200 additional on-the-street actions occurred on January 19–20, many linked to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but also including messages against Trump’s agenda, according to CCC data.
We found no mention of any of the People’s Marches on the ABC shows in our study, and no dedicated stories about the protests on the CBS shows we examined. In two segments focused on the incoming administration, CBS mentioned protests generically, only in passing, and focusing solely on those in the nation’s capital.
After noting that “today, thousands of people could be seen protesting the president-elect in Washington, DC,” reporter Jericka Duncan (CBS Evening News, 1/18/25) devoted more time to security measures around potential “violent protests”—a concern repeated in a January 20 segment on CBS Mornings (1/20/25).
The newspapers studied all covered the People’s Protests, but the Times and Post downplayed their significance. The Times (1/18/25) published “‘Angry and Frustrated’: Thousands Protest Trump Days Before His Inauguration,” a thousand-word story that captured the mood and nationwide extent of concern expressed by the events, but made a point of noting that the DC march “paled in comparison to the Women’s March.” It was buried on page A25.
The following day, the Times published a longer (1,600-word) piece on how “The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time,” based on interviews with middle-American activists. The article alleged that “the Democrats who mobilized against Donald J. Trump in 2017 feel differently about protesting his return,” by which they meant defeated and ambivalent. It asserted that “there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed ‘the resistance’ the last time [Trump] took office.”
There was also a 1,600-word Washington Memo (1/19/25) headlined “Defiance Is Out, Deference Is In: Trump Returns to a Different Washington”:
Unlike the last time President-elect Donald J. Trump took the oath of office eight years ago, the bristling tension and angry defiance have given way to accommodation and submission. The Resistance of 2017 has faded into the Resignation of 2025.
The Washington Post had two pieces. The predictive “How Resistance to Trump May Look Different in His Second Administration” (1/17/25) came in at around 1,800 words, while the paper gave coverage of the actual DC event, “People’s March Protests Trump” (1/19/25), only 1,400 words. Both were by Ellie Silverman, its dedicated activism and protest movements reporter.
Like the Times’ articles, the former piece was focused on dispirited activists and how the resistance supposedly ain’t what it used to be. It described a “feeling of resignation in the lead-up to Trump’s second administration [that] is a stark departure from 2017, when more than 1 million people took to the streets.” It added that “some demonstrators are sticking to the sidelines,” and warned that some experts “fear that whatever protests do emerge could be even more disruptive and potentially violent.”
The straightforward latter story was more nuanced, focused on interviews with protesters on the diverse issues that brought them there, who maintained that showing up was more important than rally size. However, it didn’t mention that the protest was part of a larger, nationwide mobilization.
USA Today‘s piece on the People’s March (“Thousands Travel to Washington for People’s March Ahead of Trump Inauguration,” 1/18/25), like those of the other papers, covered only the DC demonstration, and dwelt on its smaller-than-2017 size. But it also portrayed fired-up citizens who made a point of being there to take a stand, rather than trying to tell a story of, as the Times said, “accommodation and submission.”
The 50501 protests
The 50501 protests, short for “50 protests, 50 states, one day,” were the brainchild of grassroots activists on Reddit wanting to take “rapid response” political actions against Trump and Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government Trump and Musk seem to be following. Using mainly social media and the hashtags #BuildTheResistance and #50501, the organizers spurred others to organize and publicize demonstrations in all US state capitals on February 5. According to CCC data, some 159 “50501” or related protests occurred that day (exclusive of counter-protests), from Sacramento, Calif., to Augusta, Maine.
We found no coverage of the 50501 protests in the Washington Post, or on the CBS or ABC shows.
In its sole article, “Thousands Across the US Protest Trump Policies,” the New York Times (2/5/25) devoted only about 600 words to the nationwide rallies. Sara Ruberg’s story accurately portrayed them as “a grassroots effort to kick off a national movement,” quoting a Michigan state representative: “This was organized by people, for people, for the protection of all people…. There will be…more things for regular everyday Americans to plug into.” However, Ruberg depicted the decentralized, quickly organized efforts as something not to take too seriously:
Whether the protests will amount to a sustained anti-Trump movement is yet to be seen.
In the weeks following the election, Democrats were not able to come together under a single message as they did after the 2016 election, when Mr. Trump won the first time. Even the grassroots efforts that once organized large national marches and protests after Mr. Trump’s first inauguration have struggled to unite again.
The piece also said the events only occurred in “a dozen states”; CCC data confirms organizers’ claims that they spanned all 50 states, plus DC. An additional 1:20-minute video of protesters chanting appeared in the online version of this story, featuring passionate slogans like “Stand up, fight back,” “Stop the coup!” and “Impeach Trump” that belie the notion that activists have no uniting message.
At 2,500 words, USA Today‘s feature (2/5/25) on the 50501 demos, “‘People Are Feeling Galvanized’: Anti-Trump Protesters Rally in Cities Across US,” was by far the longest and most thorough of any in the study periods. Its lead set the protests in a broader context:
Groups opposed to actions by the Trump administration in recent weeks converged on cities Wednesday across the US to loudly register their discontent, days after widespread rallies and street marches against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Integrating reporting from DC and 10 other capitals and cities (Austin, Salem, Indianapolis, Harrisburg, Des Moines, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Palm Springs, Calif., and Greenville, S.C.), reporters John Bacon, Karissa Waddick and Jorge L. Ortiz discussed the major concerns of residents in each place, provided background on 50501 and Project 2025, and quoted marginalized people targeted by Trump, such as a trans woman and a refugee from Azerbaijan, along with supportive politicians and the AFL-CIO. The comments included captured the sense of seriousness and commitment of the rallies. It quoted 70-year-old Stewart Rabitz:
“I think a lot of people are now realizing that walking around with signs, people got to get their hands dirty.”… Asked whether he feared retribution, Rabitz said: “You can’t be afraid. I’m willing to be the first one. I’ll be the Tiananmen tank guy.”
The 50501 movement also spearheaded nationwide events, some dubbed “No Kings Day,” less than two weeks later, on February 17, to protest Trump’s undemocratic actions and monarchical leadership, coinciding with Presidents’ Day. The CCC tracked 207 such actions on February 17 (excluding a few counter-protests).
Once again, CBS and ABC had no reports focused on the protests. CBS gave them one sentence on CBS Mornings (2/18/25), which led with the controversy surrounding DOGE’s access to private information: “Protests called ‘No Kings on Presidents’ Day’ against Musk and President Trump’s actions were held across the country yesterday, including outside the US Capitol.” ABC (GMA, 2/18/25), too, briefly mentioned “protests popping up in cities across the country,” even including short clips of protest footage—but also used the demonstrations as a brief segue to discuss DOGE cuts and access to sensitive data.
New York Times coverage included one story (2/17/25), provocatively titled “Thousands Gather on Presidents’ Day to Call Trump a Tyrant.” It focused on the DC march, but did give a sense of the nationwide sweep of actions, noting that protestors framed themselves as patriots fighting tyranny. The piece acknowledged that while
Democratic leaders and operatives [are] worried about alienating voters in reacting hastily without reflecting first on why they lost in 2024. Many activists…have voiced frustration at the lack of a more aggressive stance.
The piece, however, was buried on page A18.
For its part, the Post devoted only one 500-word AP dispatch (2/17/25) to the events, “‘No Kings on Presidents Day’ Rings Out From Protests Against Trump and Musk.” But the subhead did note, “Protesters against President Donald Trump and his policies organized demonstrations in all 50 states for the second time in two weeks.”
USA Today published a photo gallery (2/17/25) and a 900-word story (2/17/25) about the Presidents’ Day protests, focused more on regional actions that “swept across the nation” than on DC. Providing important context, “‘Critical Moment in History’: Protests Across US Target Trump, Musk” (2/17/25) led with this:
Groups opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda and his top adviser Elon Musk converged on cities across the nation Monday to express outrage with slogans such as “Not My President’s Day” and “No King’s Day.”
The rallies, led by the 50501 Movement and other organizations, come less than two weeks after the last round of widespread rallies and street marches.
This broader perspective on the resistance demonstrations may be thanks to the middle-of-the-road paper’s less-insular focus: It covers all 50 states, serves a more diverse audience, and utilizes reporting from its partner papers across the country.
Another mass mobilization
On April 5, yet another grassroots, mass mobilization—organized around the taglines “Hands Off” and “People’s Veto”—is planned for the streets of DC and across all 50 states. Will the legacy media be there and give it the broad and contextualized coverage it deserves? Will they more proactively cover the increasingly localized demonstrations and other forms of political participation—or leave that task to the rapidly shrinking pool of local and regional news outlets? For if CCC’s data is accurate (and it may be an undercount), the nascent pro-democracy movement deserves its own dedicated beat.
This week on CounterSpin: If “some people believe it” were the criterion, our daily news would be full of respectful consideration of the Earth’s flatness, the relationship of intelligence to the bumps on your head, and how stepping on a crack might break your mother’s back. News media don’t, in fact, use “some people think it’s true” as the threshold for whether a notion gets talked about seriously, gets “balanced” alongside what “data suggest.” It’s about power.
Look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. When he was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune.
But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Timespiece has it, “unorthodox.”
Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that.
Also on the show: For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player.
That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesneyexplained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum…it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.”
The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg (3/24/25) complained “the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it”—an odd criticism for a journalist to make about government officials.
The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, are the de facto government in northwest Yemen. The group began as a religious movement among the Zaydis, an idiosyncratic branch of Shia Islam, before taking a political-military turn in the 2000s. Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been a powerful faction in the country’s civil war, fighting against the Republic of Yemen, the weak but Saudi-backed internationally recognized government. With the war on hold since a 2022 ceasefire agreement, the Houthis now control the capital city of Sanaa, and govern the majority of Yemen’s population.
Beginning on March 15, the US military began an operation that has killed dozens in Yemen and injured over a hundred, including women and children, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frankly acknowledged the leveling of a civilian building.
US planning for the operation was revealed in articles by the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg (3/24/25, 3/26/25), which disclosed that the journalist had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat that top administration officials were using to discuss bombing plans—an inclusion that was not noticed by any of the intended participants. This prompted a furor in establishment papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, centering on the Trump administration’s use of an insecure messaging app to discuss classified matters.
While leading newspapers were not wrong to skewer the Trump administration for the use of a commercial messaging app to communicate confidential information—which, it should be remembered, allows officials to illegally destroy records of their deliberations (New York Times, 3/27/25)—the focus on Washington palace intrigue over the bombing of women and children is a stark reminder of corporate media priorities.
‘It’s now collapsed’
The part of the Trump administration group chat where they discuss the actual bombing needed no comment, according to the New York Times (3/26/25).
Since news of the Signal leak broke, the Times has published at least three dozen stories and opinion pieces focusing on the scandal. One of those many pieces was an annotated transcript of the Signal chat (3/25/25). Most messages in the chat featured explanatory notes from journalists, some messages with multiple notes. One message from national security adviser Michael Waltz the Times chose not to annotate: “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
The “collapsed” building in question was bombed by the United States, killing at least 13 civilians, according to the Yemen Data Project. This is a war crime. While alternative media outlets have been quick to call these strikes out for what they are (e.g., Drop Site, 3/16/25; Truthout, 3/26/25; Democracy Now!, 3/26/25), the Times and the Washington Post chose not to go into questions of international law.
Amidst the dozens of stories on the Signal scandal, the Times published five stories focused on the strikes (3/15/25, 3/16/25, 3/19/25, 3/26/25, 3/27/25). None of these stories entertain the possibility of US strikes violating international law. Only one story (3/16/25) made mention of the phrase “war crime,” which was in a final paragraph quote from Hezbollah, with the group described by the Times as “another armed proxy for Iran in the region.”
The only mentions of children or “civilian” casualties were moderated by innuendo. The unfair convention of citing the “Hamas-run” health ministry—a formulation that deliberately downplays the death and destruction caused by US weaponry—has extended to Yemen, with both the Times (3/16/25, 3/19/25) and the Post (3/15/25) citing the “Houthi-run Health Ministry in Yemen” for casualty figures.
‘No credible reports’
The Washington Post‘s Missy Ryan (3/17/25) doesn’t question the Pentagon’s claim that there were “no credible reports of civilian deaths” after the attack on Yemen.
The Washington Post seemed similarly unable to bring international law into their reporting. The furthest the Post (3/15/25) was willing to go was relaying that the Houthis “claimed the strikes targeted residential areas and targeted civilians.” In the Post’s March 17 story on the US offensive, the only mention of civilian deaths was US Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich’s claim that “despite Houthi assertions, there had been no credible reports of civilian deaths in the ongoing US strikes.”
Even Ishaan Tharoor (Washington Post, 3/26/25), whose column on the Yemen strikes was both more humane and more geopolitically realistic than anything else published by the Post, chose not to bring in any mention of international law.
The fact is, unnecessarily bombing a civilian building, with civilians inside, is a war crime. A civilian building is any building not immediately being used for military purposes. Even if by some interpretation, a military officer’s girlfriend’s building could be construed as a military target, the attacker is responsible for ensuring that any civilian losses are not excessive compared to military gain (the “proportionality” rule), and ensuring that “all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.”
In this case, the “military” nature of the target is dubious at best. Further, the Houthis had not attacked US ships since December, before Trump’s inauguration (Responsible Statecraft, 3/21/25). When the Houthis attempted to respond to the recent airstrikes, a US military officer mocked the Houthis’ “level of incompetence,” claiming their retaliatory missile fire “missed by a hundred miles” (New York Times, 3/19/25). In other words, Houthi missiles are not such an imminent threat that killing over a dozen Yemeni civilians might be “proportional” to the military gain of killing their top missileer.
Finally, “all feasible precautions” were not taken to protect civilian life. Based on Waltz’s message, the military was tracking this officer, and chose to kill him only once he entered a building with civilians inside.
As the Times itself (1/16/23) has reported, “it is considered a war crime to deliberately or recklessly attack civilian populations.” The Washington Post editorial board (7/2/23) agreed, citing “large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure” and “methodical violence against…noncombatants” as violations of international law. But these confident media assertions are in reference to Russia, an official enemy of the United States.
The strike against the “missile guy” is just one example of the indiscriminate bombing with which the US punishes Yemen. This recent offensive by the United States has destroyed plenty of residences, and airstrikes have hit a Saada cancer hospital twice (Drop Site, 3/16/25; Cradle, 3/26/25).
‘A more aggressive campaign’
After the US bombs an apartment building, killing more than a dozen civilians, the New York Times (3/16/25) turns to sources who declare that a “more aggressive” approach is needed.
Houthi-controlled Yemen sits on one side of the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa that is a choke point for shipping between Asia and Europe. The Houthis announced in October 2023 that in opposition to the war on Gaza, they would use their strategic position to attack ships “linked to Israel” (Al Jazeera, 12/19/23). The Houthis have succeeded in disrupting Red Sea trade to the point that Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, the Port of Eilat, was forced to declare bankruptcy (Middle East Monitor, 7/19/24). As revealed by the Signal chat leak, the main motivation for the new air campaign on Yemen was to “send a message” and reopen the shipping lanes (New York Times, 3/25/25).
As US bombs fell on Yemen, the New York Times indulged in a variety of foreign policy reporting cliches. A day after the strikes began, the Times (3/16/25) took a survey of what should be done about the supposed threat the Houthis posed in the Middle East:
Some military analysts and former American commanders said on Sunday that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.
The only voices the Times offered as a counterpoint were spokesmen for Iran’s foreign ministry, Russia’s foreign ministry and Hezbollah. When the only people condemning the air campaign are America’s worst enemies, it’s not hard for the reader to see who they’re supposed to side with.
The fact is, the Houthis have withstood a decade of strikes by Saudi Arabia and the United States with no signs of faltering. Indeed, as Jennifer Kavanagh (Responsible Statecraft, 3/17/25) has pointed out, the Houthis’ “willingness to take on American attacks lend them credibility and win them popular support.” In a story whose subheadline mentions a claim that children were killed, the Times is irresponsible to present the only solution as more bombs, more aggression, more killing.
‘Iranian-backed’
The US has long been implicated in a string of atrocities in Yemen (Guardian, 8/19/18).
In each of their five stories on the strikes, the New York Times referred to the “Iran-backed” or “Iranian-backed” Houthis, playing into the falsenotion that the Houthis are little more than Iran’s lapdogs in the Arabian Peninsula. Even the Washington Post, to their credit, was able to find a distinction between an ally of Iran and a proxy (e.g. 3/15/25, 3/27/25).
The Times also had a case of amnesia over the circumstances of Yemen’s protracted civil war and famine. Two stories (3/15/25, 3/27/25) mentioned the Houthi victory over a “Saudi-led coalition,” culminating in a 2022 truce, still holding tenuously. What was left unsaid was the US role in that conflict.
During the Yemeni civil war, the United States provided Saudi Arabia with plenty of firepower and logistical support to prosecute their brutal military intervention. The Department of Defense gave over $50 billion in military aid to Saudi Arabia and the UAE between 2015 and 2021 (Responsible Statecraft, 3/28/23). Despite campaign promises to the contrary, the Saudi blockade and accompanying humanitarian crisis were intact over two years into President Biden’s term of office.
Infamous airstrikes using US-made weapons include a wedding bombing that killed 21, including 11 children, a school bus bombing that killed 40 elementary school-aged boys along with 11 adults, and a market bombing that killed 107 people, including 25 children, just to name a few (CNN, 9/18; Guardian, 8/19/18; Human Rights Watch, 4/7/16). The continuous provision of weapons, training and logistical support amounted to complicity in war crimes (Human Rights Watch, 4/7/22).
Deadly effects
The Yemen where tens of thousands of children died as a result of a US-backed blockade (New York Times, 11/21/18) seems like a different country than the one discussed in a bumbling group chat.
The civil war in Yemen, which began in late 2014, has killed hundreds of thousands. From 2015–22, Saudi-led, US-backed airstrikes killed nearly 9,000 civilians, including over 1,400 children.
More deadly than the bombs and other weapons of war are the indirect effects of the war, namely disease and famine. A 2021 UN report estimated that 60% of the 377,000 deaths in the Yemeni civil war came from indirect causes (France24, 11/23/21). By 2018, Save the Children reported that by a “conservative estimate,” 85,000 children had died from hunger (New York Times, 11/21/18). Today, nearly 40% of the Yemeni population are undernourished, and nearly half of children under five are malnourished.
This ongoing famine started during the war, and has been enforced by a Saudi blockade. While the 2022 truce allowed a trickle of international shipping to Houthi-controlled Yemen, cuts in humanitarian aid have kept Yemenis in precarity (The Nation, 7/27/23).
Since the Yemeni civil war began, not enough attention has been paid to the compounding crises in the region: the civil war itself, the accompanying famine and the Biden administration’s own ill-advised bombing campaign. As juicy as one more Trump administration blunder might be, newsrooms should not lose track of the fact that this military offensive, just beginning, is already stained by violations of international law.
Janine Jackson interviewed Mondoweiss‘s Michael Arria about Gaza “Power & Pushback” for the March 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Listeners may have heard about the violent attack by Israeli settlers on Hamdan Ballal, who had recently won an Academy Award for the documentary No Other Land. He has since been released from Israeli detention, but that doesn’t erase or obscure the fact that he was assaulted, arrested and spirited away in an overt attack on free expression and truth telling.
As his co-director told AP: “We came back from the Oscars, and every day…there is an attack on us. This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like punishment.”
Listeners may not have heard of all the non-Oscar-winning people who have been swept off the street and disappeared for voicing any concern about the Palestinian people, who are victims of what the majority of the world outside these borders are calling genocide.
Into the current context comes “Power and Pushback,” a new feature at Mondoweiss written by our guest. Michael Arria is Mondoweiss‘s US correspondent, and author of the book Medium Blue:The Politics of MSNBC. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Michael Arria.
JJ: Mondoweiss has been reporting, calling attention to, critiquing the occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide of Palestinians, and the US role there, and US news media’s distorted narrative for some time now, and yet there are still so many fronts to this fight. There is still so much that calls for resistance that you saw a place for a new intervention, this new focused feature. Tell us what you’re trying to do with “Power and Pushback.”
MA: I think the idea behind “Power and Pushback” is we’re in a situation, as you described, where there’s so much happening, and this can often be a challenge, I think, for any media, let alone independent media, to keep up with. We have a very small staff; obviously we don’t have the capacity that mainstream outlets do. And with so much happening on the domestic front, especially over the last few weeks, but really dating back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, when we saw the student protests begin, I think there was a need to develop another place to catch stuff before it fell through the cracks, so to speak.
So the idea behind “Power and Pushback” is to put a focus on repression that we’ve seen throughout the United States targeting the US Palestine movement, but also to talk about some of these local fights and local battles that not just students, but people in their communities or in their workplaces, are waging on behalf of Palestine.
And the idea is to really center that and focus on that, and just put a spotlight on these fights, and show people that they’re not alone, that people are fighting. There’s victories throughout certain states.
We didn’t want it to be just, like, this is the suppression report, and this is all terrible things that are being done. We wanted it to have both elements, which is the idea behind the title. We want to cover the power centers; we want to cover lawmakers pushing draconian policies, and pro-Israel groups moving to target Palestine protesters. And we wanted to cover, obviously, these terrible unconstitutional moves by the Trump administration. But we also wanted to show the resistance that’s developing domestically against those policies, and the people who are pushing for that.
JJ: It seems so important on many levels. First of all, if folks think there’s just no pushback or resistance happening, that shapes their understanding of what’s going on. But also, one person speaking out is easier to suppress, and they need to be backed and supported by a community, and by other people. So it’s not just, “Here’s a cool story about somebody resisting this.” It seems to me to give meaningful support to the individuals who are putting themselves on the line.
Michael Arria: “It’s not just one person or two people, it’s thousands of people that oppose these policies, and are trying to fight back.”
MA: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I think something we should keep in mind—one of the objectives of these kind of moves that we’ve seen in recent weeks from the Trump administration is to obviously crack down on dissent. And part of that is to make people fearful about fighting back, for fear that they might be scooped up by ICE if they’re not a citizen, or their student organization might be suspended from the given college or university.
Really, throughout American history, whenever we’ve seen these kinds of campaigns, they purposely have this chilling effect on the population, and that’s kind of the idea. So as you say, we’re kind of also developing the newsletter with this in mind to show people that it’s not just one person or two people, it’s thousands of people that oppose these policies, and are trying to fight back in the face of this, despite these attempts by lawmakers and pro-Israel groups to really chill the environment, and make people skeptical about standing up and voicing support for Gaza.
JJ: Particularly at a time when, it used to be, “Well, write your congressperson, if you’re upset about something.” And we see the frustration with that avenue. And lots of folks will say, “Well, go out in the street; protest.” And so then you have to ask, OK, what’s the follow-up to that when people do protest and they are harmed for that? You can’t simply say, “We all ought to be out in the street,” and then not care about what happens to people who go out in the street, is my feeling.
MA: Absolutely true, and to your point, I think this time around with Trump, we have seen a slightly different approach from the liberal establishment. I think they’ve been much more willing to go along with his plans, and much more complicit. We see the anger towards politicians like Chuck Schumer for approving the Trump budget.
But I think that focusing on the liberal establishment and their reaction tends to get people maybe to look at the situation the wrong way. I think there actually has been a lot of protest. The numbers indicate there’s been consistent protest.
And there’s also been a lot of attempts to challenge the Trump administration legally. So Just Security runs the tracker. This is just in my head, I just wrote a piece where I referenced it, but I think there’s 146 current lawsuits or legal challenges attempting to stop the Trump administration, when it comes to many issues across the country. But more than a few of those lawsuits are connected to our issue, the issue of Israel/Palestine and student protest.
So like you say, people want to do something that they feel goes beyond just sending a letter, just calling and leaving a message for their congressperson. Especially because, it’s worth pointing out, what we’ve seen for the last three weeks has really been a culmination of a push that we’ve seen for years, in terms of stifling pro-Palestine sentiment, and in terms of stiflingcriticism of Israel. And that’s really been a bipartisan project. Even though Trump is amplifying it now and increasing it and has taken it to these draconian levels, we’ve really seen both sides of the aisle embrace some of these policies that he is currently amplifying.
I was, along with many, struck by the statement of Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb to students, after they’d been told to scrub their social media, to essentially thought-cleanse evidence of concern for Palestinians, or protest against US actions. And this is in the context of the ICE arrest and whisking away of Mahmoud Khalil. And Cobb said, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.” He’s speaking to future journalists. What is the lesson there? What else might he have said?
MA: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. He said that in response to another professor making a comment, basically telling students not to post about the Middle East conflict on their social media page. I think we’re really at an interesting and scary time when we look at universities and colleges in this country, just the overall state of higher education. I think that, just like I was talking about before, how the stifling of pro-Palestine sentiment is not a new issue. It’s really been a culmination of something that’s been happening for years.
We can say the same things about our university system, right? Over the last 40 years, 50 years maybe even, we’ve seen this real push to neoliberal policies across higher education, to move to a donor model, as opposed to a model where these schools are set up and live up to the grandiose words of their mission statements, this idea that they’re these places that kids can go and learn about freedom of speech and have the freedom of inquiry, and learn about how society works and how the world works.
After October 7, we saw some big-time pro-Israel donors threaten to take away money to schools, or actually do it. I think the schools are really between a rock and a hard place, because they don’t want to see their endowments threatened. And in recent decades, we’ve seen that that is the important thing. An institution like Columbia, as a private university, they’re not really beholden to the First Amendment, technically, in the way that other places throughout the country are.
And, first of all, we should say the Trump administration first canceled about $400 million worth of contracts and grants to the school, for what it said was their inability to crack down on antisemitism. I mean, we know that they’re referring to the fact that there were pro-Palestine protests on campus. It had very little to do with antisemitism. We know that they’re being targeted because they were the first school to erect a Gaza encampment last spring, which kicked off a wave of protests throughout the United States, obviously across college campuses. We know why they’re being targeted.
But I think the very scary thing here is they withheld that money, and then they sent Columbia a letter detailing things that Columbia could do in order for them to revisit that issue, essentially implying that maybe you could get the $400 million if you did the following things. And those things include instituting a mask ban, suspending a number of students who were connected to an occupation of Hamilton Hall on campus last spring. They wanted new protocol in terms of disciplinary actions. They wanted someone to oversee the Middle East Studies Department, among other things.
And almost immediately, Columbia complied to all these demands. They’ve said publicly that they were actually thinking about doing some of this stuff before Trump had asked them. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
But that’s a huge part of this story. We’ve seen the universities in this country really cower and just respond to the Trump administration, and do pretty much everything they’ve asked for in this regard. And shortly before Mahmoud Khalil was detained on March 8 by plainclothes ICE agents, despite the fact he’s a permanent resident with a Green Card, Columbia had actually changed their protocol when it came to its status as a sanctuary campus.
Sanctuary campus is essentially the same as a sanctuary state. They had previously said that they wouldn’t comply or assist ICE if they were on campus. And days before Khalil was detained by ICE agents, they sent an email out to faculty and students and staff saying, “We’ve modified these policies. There are some situations where we’re going to let ICE on campus without a warrant in certain circumstances.”
So that’s a huge part of the story here. I just think that the university’s going along and being complicit in this entire ordeal. And we’ve seen a lot of resistance from faculty and Columbia students, and students across the country, who are really protesting not just these policies that we’ve seen from Trump and lawmakers, but also the complicity of their schools.
JJ: Gosh, there’s so much to say and to respond to. But along with, in particular, the Columbia protest, you see the erasure of Jewish people, of antisemitism being used as a cover to punish and penalize a community that is composed, in large part, by Jewish people who are protesting the actions of the state of Israel. And Trump, of course, being Trump, just says, “If Chuck Schumer opposes my policy, he’s a Palestinian.” He’s in his own world, but we are seeing other institutions essentially say, “Jewish people, you’re not Jewish if you are critical of Israel.” That seems like another shadow horror that is happening, and that media are playing a role in.
MA: It’s a very dark irony. I mean, not only have there been vast protests by Jewish activists and Jewish students; we saw Trump Tower occupied in the wake of Khalil’s arrest. The fact that the Trump administration is citing antisemitism as their reason for detaining these people, essentially…
I think when Khalil was first detained, there was maybe a belief that the Trump administration was going to rely on some War on Terror policy, or maybe something from Bill Clinton’s anti-terrorism law from 1995. But what we saw is that they’re actually relying on an immigration bill from 1952, which was introduced at the height of the Red Scare.
And that bill was introduced and wielded as a way to target, actually, survivors of the Holocaust, Jewish refugees in the United States, who conservative lawmakers had targeted because they accused them of being Soviet agents. So the irony here is that we see this law that was used to target Jewish people in the United States now used allegedly to protect them.
And it is another dark irony, I think, that it’s coming from this administration of all administrations. As you said, Trump casually will criticize Chuck Schumer by claiming he’s not Jewish, calling him a “Palestinian.” Trump has repeatedly criticized Jewish people more broadly for not voting for him, questioning whether Jewish voters are even Jewish, because he did all this stuff for Israel. Inherent there is the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, which in itself I think is antisemitic.
But it goes without saying that you don’t have to travel very far down Trumpland to start seeing examples of people that have been accused of antisemitism in his administration. We’re dealing with multiple people, either directly in his administration or in that broader world, who have literally given Nazi salutes in recent weeks.
So there is a real, like I said, irony to this whole situation that’s very disturbing, where you have this administration, which has a clearly anti-immigrant, bigoted, history of antisemitism in many areas, and they are detaining people for defending Gaza, for fighting against genocide; and claiming that they’re doing it because they’re antisemitic, and that antisemitism somehow threatens American foreign policy interests. So we’re really in a dark, upside-down time, I think, and it’s very terrifying.
JJ: Looking at what we know about media, we know that years from now, they will tell us, “Remember when we were all out in the streets protesting Israeli genocide in Gaza.” We know that they will say that “Martin Luther King would’ve said….” The powers that be, including in corporate news media, will co-opt the actions of today. Columbia University will have a photo montage about the protesters, and how they allowed protests to happen.
I mean, we know how history can be rewritten in real time by news media. It’s so frustrating to look at it today, and know the way that these folks are going to try to claim ownership of protest later.
That’s not a question, it’s just a rant. We can see it. We can see the way that they will talk about, “Oh, the Civil Rights Movement. That was good protest. This is bad protest,” when in real time, they hated the Civil Rights Movement.
MA: It’s very true. And these images and videos people probably have seen yesterday, a tremendously disturbing video coming out of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk, who’s a 30-year-old Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts, was detained, much like Khalil, snatched up on the street by undercover ICE agents wearing masks, where the police took her phone away from her. And it’s not hyperbole to say these people are being disappeared in broad daylight.
And to your point, I think people love to look back on history and convince themselves they would’ve been on the right side. They like to watch movies about historical time periods, and think that they would’ve been siding with the right side. But I think the way that people are reacting to this now, if they are supporting it or ignoring it, I think it’s pretty clear what side of history they would’ve been on if they had lived through something like the Holocaust, or like the Civil Rights Movement.
And also to your point, there is no kind of accountability for the media whatsoever, where—this is just an aside—but in the last couple of days we’ve seen this big controversy over the Signal chat, obviously, where the bombing of Yemen was revealed to a reporter.
That reporter is Jeffrey Goldberg, a former IDF soldier who has contacts throughout prominent politicians in the United States. But he’s also somebody who helped push a fabricated story about Iraq’s alleged connection to Al Qaeda, which, over 20 years ago, helped pave the way for the Iraq War. And the media is just filled with reporters like that, who have faced no accountability, or have actually moved up in their careers, and have more power now than they did 20, 23 years ago.
So it just speaks to your point, what will things look like a couple of decades from now? I think all the people who are maybe ignoring this or cheering it on, or not responding to it in any serious way, will probably not have to face any type of consequences. And to your point, they’ll also be controlling the narrative in terms of how this period gets remembered.
JJ: You can always fail upward in news media.
I’ll just ask you, finally, for any thoughts about “Power & Pushback,” what you hope folks will take from it, what you hope to uplift, any final thoughts on this intervention that you’re spearheading?
MA: I would encourage people, if they’re interested in this subject, to go on our site where they can subscribe to “Power & Pushback.” We’re really hoping, beyond this being a way to highlight the fights that I’m talking about, that it also opens up a dialogue, that people feel if they’re working in their community in terms of something, or they see something where free speech is being stifled, that they can reach out to us, and we can potentially shine a light on it and cover it.
Sometimes this stuff doesn’t happen where it’s a lot of news cameras. Sometimes it’s not a thousand people. Sometimes it’s just as simple as somebody being told they can’t wear a certain pin to work, or their website faces some sort of crackdown, or their student group at a small college is suddenly suspended. So we really are focused on covering this big-picture Trump stuff, and this big-picture higher education stuff. But we really hope that it also becomes a forum for these smaller-scale battles, because I think these are really going to add up.
And polling shows us that things have really shifted, Israel’s brand has really diminished over the past decade, particularly among progressives and Democratic voters, even if party leaders and Democratic lawmakers haven’t caught up to that. So I think, in some capacity, the momentum is on the side of the people who are protesting on behalf of Palestine, even though when you look at the media, it seems to be the opposite.
I think that a lot of these draconian measures are obviously a response to those successes. We’ve seen this crackdown on the BDS movement. We’ve seen this push to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates some criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
So I really think, insofar as Trump represents a backlash politics, and he does in many capacities, it’s also a backlash to the advances the Palestine movement in the United States has made over the last few years.
So like I said, in addition to covering the repression and suppression, we really want it to be a place that takes a close look at that progress, and looks at this in a wider way, where people can turn and you can talk to us about that.
So that’s what we’re hoping. I encourage people to check out our site where they can read about this stuff pretty consistently, but also sign up for our newsletter so they can get that information.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Michael Arria. He is US correspondent at Mondoweiss—that’s Mondoweiss.net—and author of their new feature “Power and Pushback.” Michael Arria, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
