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November 3, 2023

‘Drug Corporations Have Really Been in the Driver’s Seat’ – CounterSpin interview with Peter Maybarduk on Paxlovid price-gouging

Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Peter Maybarduk about Paxlovid price-gouging for the October 27, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231027Maybarduk.mp3

NPR (12/31/19)

Janine Jackson: There are a number of crises that the Covid pandemic did not create, but certainly threw into relief. It has always been disgusting, frankly, that pharmaceutical companies are permitted to sell necessary, life-improving and life-saving drugs at many times the cost of their development and production, keeping them out of the hands of those who can’t afford them, and leading some who can just about afford them to ration them dangerously. It’s a particularly callous aspect of the US profit-driven system—so out of keeping with basic tenets of public health that one kind of wonders how long it can be allowed to continue.

We’re looking at the latest example of this right now with a Covid-19 treatment. Here to tell us about it is Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines group. He joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Peter Maybarduk.

Peter Maybarduk: Great to be with you.

JJ: I’m sure that people won’t be shocked to hear that the company in question right now is Pfizer, though they’re hardly alone in these sort of practices. What is this most recent outrage that folks are concerned about?

PM: So Pfizer has more than doubled the price of its Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid—nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir—to the US government from around $530 a course up to $1,390 for a list price now. And that despite the fact that Pfizer’s already made $18 billion off this drug in global sales, and they’re raising the price right at a time when it hurts most, because will, obviously, to fight and to fund pandemic response has diminished greatly, and the US government is transitioning its response to the commercial market.

So there’s very limited public resources now, in the United States and around the world, to ensure continuity of treatment. And in order to make up for the loss of volume, Pfizer has decided to increase prices, but that’s going to suppress demand further; that’s going to make it harder worldwide to access Covid treatment for people that need it.

And it’s also been pointed out that the cost of production of this drug is a mere $13. And when you look at it that way, Pfizer is increasing prices to 100 times the cost of production for this drug.

JJ: I just take a pause there, and we’ll come back to it, but let’s just lay out there: Paxlovid is an important drug; it’s not an ancillary drug. It has been shown to be impactful, and then, globally, access to it has not been what it should have been.

Public Citizen (10/17/23)

PM: So we put out a study just last week finding that there’s been more than 8 million cases of unmet need in 2022 alone, looking in last year’s data; that basically more than 90% of need for Covid treatment, as measured by high-risk infections, was unmet in developing countries.

And this despite the fact that manufacturers have pointed to what they consider to be a supply glut; they say they’re making enough of the drug. But, again, the problem has been monopoly, single source of supply; opaque agreements about who is getting the drug and when; and very high prices have suppressed demand. So that if you look at high-risk infections in the Global South, if you look at even just people over 65—which is what we looked at, but it’s a significant undercount, because it doesn’t give you people with preexisting and ongoing conditions, and other vulnerabilities—you see that very, very, very few of those individuals received Paxlovid when they needed it.

JJ: It just seems, in a way, like there’s at least two different conversations going on, one of which is about: There’s a global health crisis, how do we address it? And then another one that’s like, well, we have these pharmaceutical companies, and they need to make money. And it’s almost as though there’s no overlap.

I mean, I just saw Pfizer’s CEO, a week ago, saying, “We remain proud that our scientific breakthroughs played a significant role in getting the global health crisis under control.” It sounds like, from what you’re saying, that, actually, they could have played a much different role in actually working towards getting the global health crisis under control.

Peter Maybarduk: “Pfizer has decided to charge high prices to the few, rather than affordable prices to the many, in order to meet its benchmarks.”

PM: It’s very frustrating to us that health authorities have relegated so much power to the pharmaceutical companies. In many ways, Covid-19 is a pandemic where prescription drug corporations have determined who receives what treatment or vaccine when, at least at a population level, at a sort of country-by-country level. And health agencies have been on the receiving end of that; they haven’t always known what price another country’s paying, they haven’t known what’s their place in line, the terms and conditions.

And, of course, global health authorities haven’t been able to effectively prioritize and indicate that we must prioritize population A, B and C, in these ratios, in order to end the pandemic as quickly as possible. Instead, drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money, or what public relations and pandemic concessions they want to make. And, unfortunately, that’s continuing here in this case.

Pfizer could choose to be a good partner at this stage, like set any sort of R&D ideas aside. They’ve made $18 billion off this drug. It’s a bonanza. And there’s an opportunity now to meet the funding shortfall with solidarity and with public health interest. Pfizer can afford to say, “We’re actually going to reduce the price of the drug, because there is a funding shortfall, so that more people can get it, so that we can make up the access gap.”

And you almost don’t hear about that anymore, because prices have been high enough, and funding limited enough, that the world has kind of given up. There was, if you roll the clock back a year or two, there was an ambitious call for a global test-treat programming. So all over the world, you could get a Covid test, and then have a straight path to the appropriate treatment that you needed.

And what materialized is a small pilot program in a dozen countries, instead of that great global ambition, and a very significant factor there has been that the treatments are too expensive for developing countries, or for the global effort, to pay for. And so, instead, we just have this shadow of an effort. We’re almost giving up on the idea that treatment can be available to everyone.

And if you walk around in public health circles, you’ll sometimes hear, well, there’s no demand; countries aren’t ordering the treatment. Then you have to think about why. And if you are a health ministry that’s squeezed for resources, you have to make tough decisions about, you know, hospital beds and available protocols against malaria. Do you shell out what was then $250, minimum, probably $250 to $500, I think, and probably now potentially going to be more, to Pfizer for this treatment? Or do you hold on that, not least given you don’t even know when you’ll receive it, because of those shortages.

And it might be different if the drug actually costs something like that. But knowing Pfizer’s production costs are far lower, $13, perhaps less, and the revenue they’ve made so far, it’s a conscious choice on Pfizer’s part to make it harder to prescribe Paxlovid, and to make up for that by charging a premium. Essentially, Pfizer has decided to charge high prices to the few, rather than affordable prices to the many, in order to meet its benchmarks.

Common Dreams (10/19/23)

JJ: And that’s a public health decision. It’s not a corporate—it is a corporate, capitalist decision, but it’s a public health decision in its impact. And I just want to say, finally, you’ve been quoted saying Pfizer is treating Paxlovid like a Prada handbag, a luxury for the few, rather than a treatment for the many. Meanwhile, Pfizer CEO took home $33 million last year, having been gifted a 36% raise from 2021. I think that folks can see that this is stomach-churning and confusing and weird and bad, but what Pfizer is doing is incentivized, or at least they’re not being prevented from doing it. So where are the checks, or where are the guardrails, on this sort of behavior? What do we do about it?

PM: Yeah, that’s part of the problem, is that we have insufficient guardrails. HHS recently negotiated a deal with Pfizer to keep people without insurance on treatment in coming years, and to contribute courses to a national stockpile. So HHS has taken some appropriate steps to ensure continuity of treatment here. But why did HHS have to pay the high prices that it paid? Could it have negotiated lower prices?

I think it is a significant concern, and undergirding it all is the patent monopoly that allows Pfizer to exclude competitors from the market; again, the drug is inexpensive to produce, and had we authorized generic competition, we probably could have an affordable supply by now, bringing these prices down to earth. We’re not paying for research and development here, we’re paying for a monopoly.

And we were among a number of organizations that called on the Biden administration early on to issue a compulsory license, or exercise certain rights it has under law, to authorize affordable generic competition with expensive patented Paxlovid, and bring alternatives online. And, of course, the government hasn’t acted on that proposal because of the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry.

So right now we’re kind of stuck, but there are reforms that we can make to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. And there’s going to be ongoing discussions about that. I mean, you saw this week, in the hearings for a new NIH director, we saw Senator Sanders taking a stand and saying we have to take responsibility for medicine pricing in our executive policies, and there will be an upcoming review by HHS and Commerce of government authority to act against drug monopolies in certain circumstances. So it’s an ongoing conversation, but our government has too few tools, and does not sufficiently use the tools that it has.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines group. You can learn more about their work online at Citizen.org. Thank you, Peter Maybarduk, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PM: Thanks so much.

The post ‘Drug Corporations Have Really Been in the Driver’s Seat’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 27, 2023

Peter Maybarduk on Paxlovid, Maya Schenwar on Grassroots Journalism

      CounterSpin231027.mp3

Paxlovid tablets

This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter.

That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new deal with Pfizer “extends patient access” to Covid treatment drug Paxlovid and “maximizes taxpayer investment”—as the HHS works with the drug company to “transition” Paxlovid “to the commercial market.” The announcement doesn’t note that this “transition” entails hiking the cost of the treatment to more than $1,300 for a five-day course, or 100 times the cost of production.

We discuss this outrage, and what allows it, with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines group at Public Citizen.

      CounterSpin231027Maybarduk.mp3

(image: Truthout)

Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners, more than many, recognize news media as a keystone issue—important not simply in their own right but to all of the other issues we care about. The media lens—the points of view that they show us day after day, those they obscure or ridicule—affects the way we understand the world, our neighbors and what’s politically possible. That’s why we see the fight for a thriving media ecosystem as bound up completely with the fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We talked about that nexus with Maya Schenwar, author and editor at large of Truthout, and director of a new project, the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism.

      CounterSpin231027Schenwar.mp3

The post Peter Maybarduk on Paxlovid, Maya Schenwar on Grassroots Journalism appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 25, 2023

‘Poverty in America Has Strong Structural Roots That Some People Profit From’ – CounterSpin interview with Christopher Bosso on food assistance

Janine Jackson interviewed Northeastern University’s Christopher Bosso about food assistance programs for the October 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3

New York Times (4/11/20)

Janine Jackson: Listeners may remember the images from the spring of 2020: farmers dumping milk, smashing eggs and plowing produce under, even as people were lining up at food pantries.

CounterSpin spoke with scientist Ricardo Salvador, who explained that it wasn’t perversity so much as a result of the structure of our systems of food production and distribution, that don’t work exactly the way we might think.

While more complex than it first appears, that imagery still reflects a difficult reality: the paradox of want amidst plenty that is at the core of our next guest’s new book.

The book is called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program. It’s out now from University of California Press. We’re joined by author Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University. He joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Christopher Bosso.

Christopher Bosso: Glad to be here.

JJ: The reauthorization for the 2023 Farm Bill is underway, and every time the Farm Bill comes up, folks are puzzled to see that SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is in there, alongside agricultural research and forestry. But this situation—this marriage, as you put it—has been central from the beginning.

(USDA, 1939)

CB: Yeah, and in two ways. First is the conceptual origins of SNAP, food stamps, and why they started in the first place, and that lies at the very intersection that you spoke about, this intersection of want amidst plenty, back in the Depression.

And, in fact, the original food stamp program was essentially a program designed to get rid of crop surpluses, or in some cases animal surpluses, as much as anything else. It really was designed initially that you would get, for every dollar in orange stamps you bought, if you were qualified to do so, you would get 50 cents in free blue stamps, and those blue stamps could be used at any retailer to buy any food declared in surplus by the US Department of Agriculture.

Now, this was during the Depression. When they’re brought back later on in the 1960s, that’s not as center, but it’s to boost food consumption for low-income households.

But then the politics of it takes over, that you still have SNAP food stamps, and then SNAP in the Farm Bill, first informally and now formally since the 1970s, to seal that deal between, essentially, the conservative rural representatives, who otherwise might not support what they might see as welfare for low-income residents, and for urban legislators, who would not otherwise vote for commodity program supports.

So that deal has been locked in since the 1970s, and lies at the heart of the Farm Bill Coalition, and especially for Democrats. That’s the reason that most Democrats will vote for the Farm Bill—not the only, but the primary reason.

JJ: To be clear, not being designed specifically as an anti-poverty program doesn’t mean that SNAP hasn’t had anti-poverty effects. But I just want to draw you out on the linking of it to farmer support, to commodity support.

You’ve just indicated this; it shielded it politically for years. So even though we know that these programs have been attacked—we see them being attacked all the time—they still survive, in some shape or form.

CB: They do. And in part because, and this is the part that a lot of people don’t want to really talk about, is that it’s essentially, before the pandemic, it was a $60 billion–a–year subsidy to the food system. That’s what it is. I mean, you’re basically priming low-income Americans to buy more food.

And that’s $60 billion, more now; since the pandemic, it doubled, and now it’s coming back down again, but still, pretty significant; I haven’t looked at the latest numbers. But at the end of the day, it’s as much a subsidy to Walmart as it is to low-income Americans, in a perverse sense.

JJ: Right. It’s interesting. It’s kind of a hidden aspect, in terms of the coverage. The coverage might be the farm aspects on one page, and then on another page, a story about SNAP. But it’s not connected, in the way that the policy itself is connected.

CB: That’s correct.

Wall Street Journal (5/30/23)

JJ: While the linking with agricultural policy has allowed SNAP to survive multiple efforts to gut it, all of that politicking, and you indicated in the book, it has interfered—it has led to things like work requirements, for instance, situations where, as you put it, the programmatically suboptimal is the politically necessary.

And you ask what I think is often an overlooked question, which is, “Compared to what?” Because, for sure, this book is not saying that SNAP is perfect, and it’s not saying, even more deeply, that SNAP would necessarily have a place in a truly healthy, just society, but it’s, “What else are we going to do?”

CB: I guess my “what else” is the political reality part of me. Given our strong anti-welfare ethos in this country, at least at the abstract level, most of our social welfare system is in-kind support, not cash.

JJ: I’m going to ask you, finally, about media. We were talking about work requirements; the Wall Street Journal complained this past May that veterans and the homeless were being exempted from work requirements for food vouchers, because, they said, “These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.” OK.

News media have often played a fairly inglorious role, punching down with the sensational shaming stories about people buying lobster with EBT, and then also just, if I could say, laziness.

In 1996, it seemed to us that a lot of reporters didn’t necessarily read the Personal Responsibility Act, because the preamble begins, “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” So it could have been obvious that this was going to be about behavior modification.

But then again, it was journalists, and writers like Michael Harrington, who have brought hunger to the foreground as a US issue, at a time when it wasn’t seen that way. Any thoughts, in general, about the role of the press, in the past or going forward on this set of issues?

Christopher Bosso: “Most SNAP families have somebody who’s working; they just don’t make enough money.” (photo: Matthew Modoono)

CB: I think it’s been far too easy for some in the press to just repeat the lazy narratives about poor people being poor because it’s their own fault. Poverty in America has some strong structural roots that, in fact, some people profit from, and I think we don’t really look closely at the complicated lives of poor people. That would be my one thing I would like to see.

Now, obviously, there’s a fair number of people—Wall Street Journal being one of them—where their view of poor people is this undifferentiated mass of not very morally strong people who basically should be out there working more. Yeah, most SNAP families have somebody who’s working; they just don’t make enough money.

So I think there’s a real consideration in what we might call the mainstream media to look more closely at these dynamics, and not take these facile arguments about poor people not wanting to work at face value.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Christopher Bosso from Northeastern University. Why SNAP Works is out now from the University of California Press. Thanks, Christopher Bosso, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: Well, thank you for having me.

The post ‘Poverty in America Has Strong Structural Roots That Some People Profit From’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 25, 2023

Australians Call to End Long Persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

Sydney Morning Herald (5/12/23): “The time has come to end this sorry saga.”

As WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange has nearly exhausted his appeals to British courts against a US extradition order, Australia has ramped up its advocacy on his behalf. Six Australian MPs held a press conference outside the US Department of Justice on September 20 to urge the Biden administration to halt its pursuit of Assange (Consortium News, 9/20/23).

They came representing an impressive national consensus: Almost 80% of Australian citizens, and a cross-party coalition in Australia’s Parliament, support the campaign to free Assange (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/12/23). Opposition leader Peter Dutton joined Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in urging Assange’s release.

The day before, an open letter to the Biden administration signed by 64 Australian parliamentarians appeared as a full-page ad in the Washington Post. It called the prosecution of Assange “a political decision” and warned that, if Assange is extradited, “there will be a sharp and sustained outcry” from Australians.

Given what is at stake for freedom of the press in the Assange case, and the intensified pressure from Australia—a country being wooed to actively enlist in the US campaign against China by spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines and supersonic missiles (Sydney Morning Herald, 8/10/23)—we ought to expect coverage from the Washington Post, New York Times and major broadcast networks. But coverage of the press conference was virtually absent from US corporate media.

Prosecuting publishing

The US has been seeking to extradite Assange from Britain on charges relating to the leaking of hundreds of thousands of documents to international media in 2010 and 2011, many of which detailed US atrocities carried out in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and other human rights violations, such as the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay (Abby Martin, 3/10/23).

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s administration brought Espionage Act charges against Assange for obtaining and publishing leaked documents, a dramatic new attack on press freedom (FAIR.org, 8/13/22). Assange could face 175 years in a supermax prison if convicted under the Espionage Act, “a relic of the First World War” meant for spies (American Constitution Society, 9/10/21), and not intended to criminalize leaks to or publications by the press. The Biden administration has rolled back much of the legal mechanism used by Trump to attack journalists, but President Joe Biden has reaffirmed the call to extradite Assange.

The New York Times (11/28/10) published articles based on WikiLeaks‘ revelations, but pays little attention to Julian Assange’s persecution.

Assange also coordinated with international news outlets to publish other material known as Cablegate about the “inner-workings of bargaining, diplomacy and threat-making around the world” (Intercept, 8/14/23). Indeed, the New York Times (e.g., 11/28/10) published many articles based on the WikiLeaks documents, which had been sent to Assange by US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

US officials have repeatedly justified their case by charging that Assange put lives at risk; to date, no evidence has surfaced that any individuals were harmed by the leaks (BBC, 12/1/10; Chelsea Manning, Readme.txt, 2022). As the Columbia Journalism Review (12/23/20) admonished, don’t let the Justice Department’s

misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity.

In failing health after suffering a stroke, Assange has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019. He had sought asylum at the embassy in London in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden for questioning over sexual assault allegations, because Sweden would not provide assurances it would protect him from extradition to the US. Sweden dropped charges against Assange in November 2019 (BBC, 11/19/19), after he was in British custody.

International condemnation

Brazilian President Lula da Silva (9/19/23): “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished [for] informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”
The Australian diplomatic mission coincided with the convening of the UN General Assembly in New York City, where President Lula da Silva of Brazil condemned the prosecution of Assange, offering yet another opportunity for US corporate media to cover the strong international opposition to Assange’s treatment.

A video (9/19/23) of Lula speaking at the opening of the UN General Assembly was widely circulated on social media. “Preserving press freedom is essential,” Lula declared. “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”

Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented about Lula’s reception at the UN (Twitter, 9/17/23):

It is really not normal for the hall at the UN General Assembly to break into this kind of spontaneous applause. The US has been losing the room internationally for a decade. The appalling treatment of Julian is a focus for that.

US media absence

Yet, with a few exceptions (Fox News, 9/20/23; The Hill, 9/21/23; Yahoo News, 9/21/23), none of this made the major US news outlets.

Business Insider (10/1/23): “The Assange issue is expected to be on the table during Albanese’s upcoming four-day visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden on October 25.”

Over a week later, Business Insider (10/1/23) ran a long piece that featured an interview with Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s half-brother. It pointed out that Assange had become an obstacle to US plans to involve Australia in its aggression toward China, quoting the PM. But the piece also hashed through a number of long-debunked claims, including one that reminded readers that Mike Pompeo once called Assange “a fugitive Russian asset” (FAIR.org, 12/03/18; Sheerpost 2/25/23), and another that repeated US assertions that WikiLeaks releases would put the US at risk.

The New York Times has been conspicuously absent from the coverage of Assange. Though the Times signed a joint open letter (11/28/22) with four other international newspapers that had worked with Assange and WikiLeaks, appealing to the DoJ to drop its charges, the paper has remained almost entirely silent on both Assange and the issues raised by his continued prosecution since then.

As FAIR pointed out, during the Assange extradition hearing in London, the Times

published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20).

There were no editorials on what the case meant for journalism. FAIR contributor Alan MacLeod noted that the Times seemed to distance itself from Assange and WikiLeaks, and its own reporting on the Cablegate scandal, coverage that boosted the papers’ international reputation.

Other opportunities for coverage have been missed by the Times. For instance, Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a letter (4/11/23), signed by six other members of the Progressive Caucus, calling for the DoJ to drop the charges against Assange. Tlaib cited support from the ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights & Dissent and Human Rights Watch, and many others, stating that his prosecution “could effectively criminalize” many “common journalistic practices.” The letter was covered by The Nation (4/14/23), the Intercept (3/30/23), Fox News (4/1/23), The Hill (4/11/23) and Politico (4/11/23), but the Times and other major newspapers were conspicuously silent.

When Assange lost his most recent appeal against extradition in June, a few outlets reported the news online (e.g., AP, 6/9/23; CNN, 6/9/23), but not a single US newspaper report could be found in the Nexis news database. (Newsweek‘s headline framed the news as a “headache for Biden”—6/8/23—rather than a blow for press freedom.) The Times only vaguely referred to the news (Assange “keeps losing appeals”) two weeks later in a feature (6/18/23) on the late whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had criticized Biden’s decision not to drop the case against Assange.

The world is watching

Australian Greens Sen. David Shoebridge (Common Dreams, 9/19/23) on Julian Assange: “The core crime he faces is the crime of being a journalist.”

A huge collective breath is being held as the world watches to see what will happen to Assange, the most famous publisher on the globe. Will he be returned to his country and his family by Christmas, as the Australian MPs have requested? Or will Britain and the US continue to slowly execute him?

Assange’s case is expected to be discussed during Prime Minister Albanese’s current visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by Biden on October 25. MP Monique Ryan, part of the pro-Assange delegation, told news outlets: “Our prime minister needs to see this as a test case for standing up to the US government. There are concerns among Australians about the AUKUS agreement, and whether we have any agency” (Business Insider, 10/1/23).

As Common Dreams (9/19/23) quoted from the delegation’s letter:

We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States’ Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange…. It is well and truly time for this matter to end, and for Julian Assange to return home.

The post Australians Call to End Long Persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 24, 2023

In Hours of Israel/Gaza Crisis Coverage, a Word You’ll Seldom Hear: ‘Ceasefire’

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the subsequent, ongoing Israeli airstrikes, US TV news has offered extensive coverage of Israel and Gaza. But as casualties mount, most outlets have paid scant attention to the growing calls for a ceasefire.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk (UN News, 10/23/23): “The first step must be an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, saving the lives of civilians through the delivery of prompt and effective humanitarian aid.”

After Hamas killed more than 1,400 people in Israel on October 7 and took some 200 hostages, Israeli bombing killed over 5,000 people in Gaza, as of October 22—including more than 1,400 children—and at least 23 journalists and 35 UN staff (UN News, 10/23/23). Ninety-five Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank as well, by both Israeli government forces and settlers. With Israel enacting a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off power, food, water and medical supplies, and nowhere for civilians to seek safety, a broad spectrum of critical voices have decried the humanitarian crisis and insisted on a ceasefire and an end to the siege.

Jewish-led protests in New York and other cities on October 13, and again in Washington, DC, on October 18, made a ceasefire their central message. Progressive lawmakers on October 16 introduced a House resolution “calling for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” And a recent Data for Progress poll (10/20/23) found that 66% of likely US voters agree that “the US should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.”

Internationally, the head of the UN, the UN human rights expert on Palestine, a growing list of scores of legal scholars, and hundreds of human rights groups—including Save the Children, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders—have likewise spoken out for a ceasefire.

But the Biden administration has actively tried to suppress discussion of de-escalation. HuffPost reported on October 13 that an internal State Department memo instructed staff not to use the words “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm” in press materials on the Middle East.

At the UN Security Council, a Russian resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire was voted down last Tuesday by the US, Britain, France and Japan; a Brazilian resolution the next day seeking “humanitarian pauses” in the violence was vetoed by the US alone. (On October 24, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “humanitarian pauses must be considered” to bring help to Gaza civilians—ABC, 10/24/23.)

Broadcast nightly news

US television news outlets appear largely to be following the administration’s lead, minimizing any talk of ceasefire or de-escalation on the air. FAIR searched transcripts of the nightly news shows of the four major broadcast networks for one week (October 12–18) in the Nexis news database and Archive.org, and found that, even as the outlets devoted a great deal of time to the conflict, they rarely mentioned the idea of a ceasefire or de-escalation.

While ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS NewsHour aired a total of 105 segments primarily about Israel/Gaza and broader repercussions of the conflict, only eight segments included the word “ceasefire” or some form of the word “de-escalate.” (The word “de-escalate” never appeared without the word “ceasefire.”)

NBC and PBS aired three segments each with ceasefire mentions; CBS aired two, and ABC aired none.

The October 18 protest on Capitol Hill led by Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now demanding a ceasefire—a peaceful protest that ended with over 300 arrests—accounted for half of the mentions, briefly making the evening news that night on all the broadcast networks except ABC. (The protesters’ demand was mentioned in two segments on NBC.)

Diana Odeh, Gaza resident interviewed on the PBS NewsHour (10/12/23), was one of only two voices who called for a ceasefire on a nightly news show during the study period. (The other was also on the NewsHour—10/18/23.)

That was the only day CBS Evening News (10/18/23) mentioned a ceasefire or de-escalation, though correspondent Margaret Brennan also noted in that episode, in response to a question from anchor Norah O’Donnell referencing the protest, that Biden “refrained from calling a ceasefire. In fact, the US vetoed a UN resolution to that effect earlier today.” Brennan continued:

Given that there have now been 11 days of bombing of Gaza by Israel, with thousands killed, there is a perception in Arab countries that this looks like the US is treating Palestinian lives differently than Israeli lives.

Of course, one doesn’t have to live in an Arab country to see a double standard.

Only twice across all nightly news shows did viewers see anyone, guest or journalist, advocating for a ceasefire—both times on PBS NewsHour.

The NewsHour featured a phone interview with Gaza resident Diana Odeh (10/12/23), who described the dire situation on the ground and pleaded: “We need help. We don’t need money. We don’t need anything, but we need a ceasefire. People are getting worse and worse.”

A few days later, the NewsHour (10/18/23) brought on Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst currently serving as military advisor at PAX Protection of Civilians, who said: “You’re talking about 6,000 bombs in less than a week in Gaza, which is the size of Newark, New Jersey. It’s just incredibly dangerous to the population, and we need to have a ceasefire and get an end to this conflict as quickly as possible.”

Sunday shows and cable

Across the agenda-setting Sunday shows, which are largely aimed at an audience of DC insiders, the word “ceasefire” was entirely absent, except on CNN State of the Union (10/15/23)—but there, only in the context of reporting on a poll from earlier this year that found a strong majority of Gazans supporting the ceasefire that had previously been in place between Hamas and Israel.

Looking at the broader cable news coverage, where the 24-hour news cycle means much more coverage of the conflict, viewers were still unlikely to encounter any mention of the idea of a ceasefire. Using the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, FAIR found that mentions of “cease” appeared in closed captioning on screen for an average of only 19.7 seconds per day on Fox, 11.1 seconds per day on CNN, and 9.2 seconds per day on MSNBC. (FAIR used the shortened form of the word to account for variations in hyphenation and compounding; some false positives are likely.)

Meanwhile, mentions of “Israel” did not differ substantially across networks, averaging 18–20 minutes per day. (Note that this is not the amount of time Israel was discussed, but the amount of time mentions of “Israel” appeared onscreen in closed captions.)

Fox mentioned a ceasefire roughly twice as often as either CNN or MSNBC, largely to ridicule those on the left who called for one, as with host Greg Gutfeld’s comment (10/18/23):

Enough with the ceasefire talk…. I mean, Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire is like the typical leftist pleading not to arrest their mugger because he had a bad childhood.

Fox also frequently compared Jewish peace advocates unfavorably with January 6 rioters (Media Matters, 10/19/23).

Former Mossad official Rami Igra opposed a ceasefire on Anderson Cooper 360 (10/16/23) because “our obligation…is to go into the Gaza Strip and eradicate the Hamas.” He went on to note that “there’s 150,000 Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip.”

CNN on a few occasions featured a guest advocating a ceasefire, such as Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative party. On Situation Room (10/17/23), Barghouti argued forcefully:

The only way out of this is to have immediate ceasefire, immediate supply of food, drinking water to people immediately in Gaza and then to have exchange of prisoners so that the Israeli prisoners can come back home safe to Israel.

On CNN‘s most-watched show, Anderson Cooper 360, the possibility of a ceasefire was mentioned in three segments during the study period—each time in an interview with a former military or intelligence official, none of whom supported the idea. For instance, with former Mossad agent Rami Igra on the show (10/16/23), Cooper asked about negotiating the release of hostages. Igra noted that Hamas had “twice already” said they were “willing to negotiate the release of the prisoners,” contingent upon a ceasefire and release of Palestinian prisoners. But Igra insisted Israel should not negotiate:

IGRA: Israel will do all it can in order to release these prisoners, and some of them will or maybe all of them will be released, but by force.

COOPER: That’s the only way.

IGRA: The only way to release prisoners in this kind of situation is force.

Meanwhile, the only time viewers of MSNBC‘s popular primetime show The Beat heard about the possibility of a ceasefire was when guest Elise Labott of Politico told host Ari Melber (10/12/23) that, for Israel, “this is not a ceasefire situation.” Melber responded:

If you said to someone in the United States, if ISIS or Al Qaeda or even a criminal group came into their home and murdered children or kidnapped children or burned babies, the next day you don’t typically hear rational individuals discuss a ceasefire or moving on. You discuss resorting to the criminal justice system or the war machine to respond.

Melber’s eagerness to lean on the “war machine” left his argument a muddle. Obviously, those calling for a ceasefire are not suggesting simply “moving on”—in fact, a “criminal justice system” response is more than compatible with a ceasefire, as you don’t try to bomb someone that you’re seeking to put on trial.

Netanyahu has been trying with limited success to equate Hamas with ISIS for many years now (Times of Israel, 8/27/14), and the Israeli government continues to try to paint Hamas’s tactics as so barbaric as to justify the mass killings by Israel. (See FAIR.org, 10/20/23.) But it’s passions, not reason, that allow individuals like Melber to gloss over the deaths of thousands of civilians—a child every 15 minutes, according to one widely circulated estimate—in their thirst for revenge.

With Israeli bombing intensifying and a ground invasion appearing imminent, US television news outlets’ refusal to give more than minimal airtime to the widespread calls for a ceasefire fails to reflect either US or global public opinion, and fuels the warmongering march to follow one horror with another.

Research assistance: Keating Zelenke

The post In Hours of Israel/Gaza Crisis Coverage, a Word You’ll Seldom Hear: ‘Ceasefire’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 24, 2023

In Hours of Israel/Gaza Crisis Coverage, a Word You’ll Seldom Hear: ‘Ceasefire’

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the subsequent, ongoing Israeli airstrikes, US TV news has offered extensive coverage of Israel and Gaza. But as casualties mount, most outlets have paid scant attention to the growing calls for a ceasefire.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk (UN News, 10/23/23): “The first step must be an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, saving the lives of civilians through the delivery of prompt and effective humanitarian aid.”

After Hamas killed more than 1,400 people in Israel on October 7 and took some 200 hostages, Israeli bombing killed over 5,000 people in Gaza, as of October 22—including more than 1,400 children—and at least 23 journalists and 35 UN staff (UN News, 10/23/23). Ninety-five Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank as well, by both Israeli government forces and settlers. With Israel enacting a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off power, food, water and medical supplies, and nowhere for civilians to seek safety, a broad spectrum of critical voices have decried the humanitarian crisis and insisted on a ceasefire and an end to the siege.

Jewish-led protests in New York and other cities on October 13, and again in Washington, DC, on October 18, made a ceasefire their central message. Progressive lawmakers on October 16 introduced a House resolution “calling for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” And a recent Data for Progress poll (10/20/23) found that 66% of likely US voters agree that “the US should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.”

Internationally, the head of the UN, the UN human rights expert on Palestine, a growing list of scores of legal scholars, and hundreds of human rights groups—including Save the Children, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders—have likewise spoken out for a ceasefire.

But the Biden administration has actively tried to suppress discussion of de-escalation. HuffPost reported on October 13 that an internal State Department memo instructed staff not to use the words “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm” in press materials on the Middle East.

At the UN Security Council, a Russian resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire was voted down last Tuesday by the US, Britain, France and Japan; a Brazilian resolution the next day seeking “humanitarian pauses” in the violence was vetoed by the US alone. (On October 24, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “humanitarian pauses must be considered” to bring help to Gaza civilians—ABC, 10/24/23.)

Broadcast nightly news

US television news outlets appear largely to be following the administration’s lead, minimizing any talk of ceasefire or de-escalation on the air. FAIR searched transcripts of the nightly news shows of the four major broadcast networks for one week (October 12–18) in the Nexis news database and Archive.org, and found that, even as the outlets devoted a great deal of time to the conflict, they rarely mentioned the idea of a ceasefire or de-escalation.

While ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS NewsHour aired a total of 105 segments primarily about Israel/Gaza and broader repercussions of the conflict, only eight segments included the word “ceasefire” or some form of the word “de-escalate.” (The word “de-escalate” never appeared without the word “ceasefire.”)

NBC and PBS aired three segments each with ceasefire mentions; CBS aired two, and ABC aired none.

The October 18 protest on Capitol Hill led by Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now demanding a ceasefire—a peaceful protest that ended with over 300 arrests—accounted for half of the mentions, briefly making the evening news that night on all the broadcast networks except ABC. (The protesters’ demand was mentioned in two segments on NBC.)

Diana Odeh, Gaza resident interviewed on the PBS NewsHour (10/12/23), was one of only two voices who called for a ceasefire on a nightly news show during the study period. (The other was also on the NewsHour—10/18/23.)

That was the only day CBS Evening News (10/18/23) mentioned a ceasefire or de-escalation, though correspondent Margaret Brennan also noted in that episode, in response to a question from anchor Norah O’Donnell referencing the protest, that Biden “refrained from calling a ceasefire. In fact, the US vetoed a UN resolution to that effect earlier today.” Brennan continued:

Given that there have now been 11 days of bombing of Gaza by Israel, with thousands killed, there is a perception in Arab countries that this looks like the US is treating Palestinian lives differently than Israeli lives.

Of course, one doesn’t have to live in an Arab country to see a double standard.

Only twice across all nightly news shows did viewers see anyone, guest or journalist, advocating for a ceasefire—both times on PBS NewsHour.

The NewsHour featured a phone interview with Gaza resident Diana Odeh (10/12/23), who described the dire situation on the ground and pleaded: “We need help. We don’t need money. We don’t need anything, but we need a ceasefire. People are getting worse and worse.”

A few days later, the NewsHour (10/18/23) brought on Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst currently serving as military advisor at PAX Protection of Civilians, who said: “You’re talking about 6,000 bombs in less than a week in Gaza, which is the size of Newark, New Jersey. It’s just incredibly dangerous to the population, and we need to have a ceasefire and get an end to this conflict as quickly as possible.”

Sunday shows and cable

Across the agenda-setting Sunday shows, which are largely aimed at an audience of DC insiders, the word “ceasefire” was entirely absent, except on CNN State of the Union (10/15/23)—but there, only in the context of reporting on a poll from earlier this year that found a strong majority of Gazans supporting the ceasefire that had previously been in place between Hamas and Israel.

Looking at the broader cable news coverage, where the 24-hour news cycle means much more coverage of the conflict, viewers were still unlikely to encounter any mention of the idea of a ceasefire. Using the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, FAIR found that mentions of “cease” appeared in closed captioning on screen for an average of only 19.7 seconds per day on Fox, 11.1 seconds per day on CNN, and 9.2 seconds per day on MSNBC. (FAIR used the shortened form of the word to account for variations in hyphenation and compounding; some false positives are likely.)

Meanwhile, mentions of “Israel” did not differ substantially across networks, averaging 18–20 minutes per day. (Note that this is not the amount of time Israel was discussed, but the amount of time mentions of “Israel” appeared onscreen in closed captions.)

Fox mentioned a ceasefire roughly twice as often as either CNN or MSNBC, largely to ridicule those on the left who called for one, as with host Greg Gutfeld’s comment (10/18/23):

Enough with the ceasefire talk…. I mean, Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire is like the typical leftist pleading not to arrest their mugger because he had a bad childhood.

Fox also frequently compared Jewish peace advocates unfavorably with January 6 rioters (Media Matters, 10/19/23).

Former Mossad official Rami Igra opposed a ceasefire on Anderson Cooper 360 (10/16/23) because “our obligation…is to go into the Gaza Strip and eradicate the Hamas.” He went on to note that “there’s 150,000 Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip.”

CNN on a few occasions featured a guest advocating a ceasefire, such as Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative party. On Situation Room (10/17/23), Barghouti argued forcefully:

The only way out of this is to have immediate ceasefire, immediate supply of food, drinking water to people immediately in Gaza and then to have exchange of prisoners so that the Israeli prisoners can come back home safe to Israel.

On CNN‘s most-watched show, Anderson Cooper 360, the possibility of a ceasefire was mentioned in three segments during the study period—each time in an interview with a former military or intelligence official, none of whom supported the idea. For instance, with former Mossad agent Rami Igra on the show (10/16/23), Cooper asked about negotiating the release of hostages. Igra noted that Hamas had “twice already” said they were “willing to negotiate the release of the prisoners,” contingent upon a ceasefire and release of Palestinian prisoners. But Igra insisted Israel should not negotiate:

IGRA: Israel will do all it can in order to release these prisoners, and some of them will or maybe all of them will be released, but by force.

COOPER: That’s the only way.

IGRA: The only way to release prisoners in this kind of situation is force.

Meanwhile, the only time viewers of MSNBC‘s popular primetime show The Beat heard about the possibility of a ceasefire was when guest Elise Labott of Politico told host Ari Melber (10/12/23) that, for Israel, “this is not a ceasefire situation.” Melber responded:

If you said to someone in the United States, if ISIS or Al Qaeda or even a criminal group came into their home and murdered children or kidnapped children or burned babies, the next day you don’t typically hear rational individuals discuss a ceasefire or moving on. You discuss resorting to the criminal justice system or the war machine to respond.

Melber’s eagerness to lean on the “war machine” left his argument a muddle. Obviously, those calling for a ceasefire are not suggesting simply “moving on”—in fact, a “criminal justice system” response is more than compatible with a ceasefire, as you don’t try to bomb someone that you’re seeking to put on trial.

Netanyahu has been trying with limited success to equate Hamas with ISIS for many years now (Times of Israel, 8/27/14), and the Israeli government continues to try to paint Hamas’s tactics as so barbaric as to justify the mass killings by Israel. (See FAIR.org, 10/20/23.) But it’s passions, not reason, that allow individuals like Melber to gloss over the deaths of thousands of civilians—a child every 15 minutes, according to one widely circulated estimate—in their thirst for revenge.

With Israeli bombing intensifying and a ground invasion appearing imminent, US television news outlets’ refusal to give more than minimal airtime to the widespread calls for a ceasefire fails to reflect either US or global public opinion, and fuels the warmongering march to follow one horror with another.

Research assistance: Keating Zelenke

The post In Hours of Israel/Gaza Crisis Coverage, a Word You’ll Seldom Hear: ‘Ceasefire’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 20, 2023

Unconfirmed ‘Beheaded Babies’ Report Helped Justify Israeli Slaughter
Nicole Zedek (i24, 10/10/23) reports from the scene of the alleged mass decapitation.

There’s perhaps no more serious a time for journalists to do their jobs responsibly than during a war.

But corporate media have not been, as evidenced by their repetition of the shocking, unsubstantiated claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in its violent attack on a kibbutz in southern Israel on October 7.

It all started with television reporting by journalist Nicole Zedek, who works for the 24-hour Israeli cable news channel i24, now embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces. In one October 10 report, she said, “I’m talking to some of the soldiers, and they say what they’ve witnessed…babies, their heads cut off.” In another report later that day, she says, “About 40 babies at least were taken out on gurneys,” prompting the host to interject: “Nicole, I have to cut in—that’s such a shocking, jarring statement there…. You’re saying 40 babies, dead babies?”

Zedek’s reporting was cobbled together into the viral claim that 40 babies were beheaded, despite that, by her own account, she had not seen the bodies herself, and relied solely on Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers as her sources. This might not have mattered as much if she were reporting on a less inflammatory subject, or had a more reliable source, but the IDF is known for misleading journalists.

The next day, Zedek told a podcast (Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, 10/11/23) that “it’s sickening” that people were scrutinizing her reporting of alleged baby beheadings closely: “We have these soldiers confirming what they’ve seen of the mutilation of these children.”

The claim remains up on i24’s website, as of October 18. Israel’s largest newspaper Ha’aretz (12/2/19) found in a 2019 investigation that i24 had compromised its integrity years earlier by becoming more pro-Netanyahu in order to obtain a broadcast license. It also reputedly has close ties to the Israeli military (Anadolu Ajansi, 10/11/23).

Amplifying the claim

Business Insider (10/10/23): “A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces told Insider on Tuesday that its soldiers found the decapitated corpses of babies…although he hadn’t seen images or videos himself.”

But Zedek and i24 alone could not have produced the flood of social media posts about 40 decapitated babies. That took other outlets amplifying her “reporting” within hours, lending it further credibility and helping it go viral. Some typical headlines:
- “IDF Says Hamas Fighters Killed and Decapitated Babies at One Kibbutz Near the Gaza Border” (Business Insider, 10/10/23)
- “Hamas kills 40 Babies and Children—Beheading Some of Them—at Israeli Kibbutz: Report” (New York Post, 10/10/23)
- “Israeli Forces Say They’ve Uncovered Evidence of Brutal Killings: ‘They Cut Heads of Children’” (The Hill, 10/10/23)
The British Daily Mail (10/10/23) got it all into the headline:

Hamas Terrorists “Beheaded Babies During Kibbutz Slaughter Where 40 Young Children Were Killed”: IDF Soldiers Reveal Families Were Killed in Their Bedrooms—”Not in War, Not a Battlefield… a Massacre’”

Later in the day, a Turkish news outlet (Anadolu Ajansi, 10/10/23) did what Zedek and others should have done in the first place, reporting the story rather than just repeating the sources’ claims. It called the Israeli Defense Forces and found that the military would not confirm the account—a minimal step that Zedek and the many outlets that repeated her claims should have taken, given the gravity of the charges.

But the damage had been done; by Wednesday, nearly a dozen British newspapers ran the i24 claims on their front pages. The Israeli government picked up the story and ran with it too, even as it wouldn’t confirm it. Eventually, US President Biden was caught saying that he had seen photos of decapitated infants when he had not; the White House was forced to issue an embarrassing “clarification.”

Why does it matter?

Reuters (10/13/23): “There were no images to suggest militants had beheaded babies—a particularly explosive accusation that first emerged in Israel’s media and initially confirmed by Israeli officials.”

So we have a story, and that story was generated in a grossly irresponsible way, and then repeated over and over. But what proof do we have that the story is false? After all, even if it was reported badly, and repeated without additional substantiation, it might be true.

Aside from the questionable nature of the sourcing, there is circumstantial evidence that it is false. The Israeli government released horrific images of dead infants over social media (Reuters, 10/13/23). None of the photos showed any evidence of decapitated infants. If the Israeli government had proof that such a horrifying crime had been committed, and was willing to release other traumatic photos of dead infants, surely it would have also released the ones that backed up its claims?

Even with all this said, why does it matter? After all, other horrific crimes were committed in southern Israel. It matters because the war in Gaza was already underway when i24 reported on the “decapitated babies” story—about 260 children were killed in the Gaza Strip as of October 10 (AP, 10/10/23). To maintain lockstep international support, the IDF needed to differentiate its mass slaughter from Hamas’s violence–which it could only do by painting Hamas as sadistic, savage, subhuman. The claim about beheading babies was ideal for the job: a shocking story that served to turn off logic and critical thinking. Who wouldn’t want to avenge murdered, desecrated infants?

Such stories have worked in the past; when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, George H.W. Bush repeated the claims of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti teen that she had seen Iraqi soldiers take babies in Kuwait out of incubators and leave them to die (Democracy Now!, 12/5/18). The teenager later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and her claims to be fabrications orchestrated by a DC public relations firm hired by the Kuwaiti government.

In addition, the Israeli government explicitly attempted to draw an equation between Hamas and ISIS, noted for their use of decapitation as a tactic. This aspect of the claim evokes stereotypes of “barbaric” Muslims.

By credulously repeating the soldiers’ claims and Zedek’s reporting on them, countless outlets around the world have contributed to these harms. And the people who have suffered the most in the process are the million-plus children of Gaza.

The post Unconfirmed ‘Beheaded Babies’ Report Helped Justify Israeli Slaughter appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Saurav Sarkar.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
October 20, 2023

Christopher Bosso on Food Assistance, Barbara Briggs on Workplace Disasters

      CounterSpin231020.mp3

(USDA, 1939)

This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which partly explains why the primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the anti-poor, racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on. We talk with Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, the author of a new book on that history, called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program.

      CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911

Also on the show: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 mainly immigrant women and girls died, many leaping from windows to escape the flames, horrified New Yorkers and galvanized the workers’ rights movement. The October 11 unveiling of a monument to those who didn’t just die, but were killed that day, put many in mind of how much still needs to change before we can think of things like Triangle Shirtwaist as relics of a crueler past.

In 2015, CounterSpin spoke with Barbara Briggs of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights about Rana Plaza, the 2013 catastrophe that killed more than a thousand workers in Bangladesh, in circumstances that in some ways echoed those of 102 years earlier. We’ll hear that interview again today.

Transcript: ‘Workers Are the Best Guarantors of Their Own Safety When They’re Organized’

      CounterSpin231020Briggs.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Net Neutrality.

      CounterSpin231020Banter.mp3

The post Christopher Bosso on Food Assistance, Barbara Briggs on Workplace Disasters appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 19, 2023

Israeli Attacks on Journalists Stifle Reporting on Gaza Horrors

CPJ (10/18/23) tallied 17 journalists killed in the first 11 days of the Gaza crisis—the same number as have been killed in Ukraine in the 20 months since the Russian invasion.

The Israeli communications minister’s attempt to shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Jerusalem—on the grounds that the Qatari news outlet is biased in favor of Hamas and is actively endangering Israeli troops (Reuters, 10/15/23)—should inspire some déjà vu. In the last war in Gaza, an Israeli air strike destroyed a Gaza building housing both Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices (AP, 5/15/21). And just months ago, Al Jazeera (5/18/23) reported that “the family of Shireen Abu Akleh,” a Palestinian-American AJ journalist killed by Israeli fire while on assignment, “has rebuked Israel for saying it is ‘sorry’ for the Al Jazeera reporter’s death without providing accountability or even acknowledging that its forces killed her.”

Since the launch of the network’s English service, Americans interested in Middle East news beyond what can be found in US broadcasting have often turned to Al Jazeera, and even more so as the BBC’s foreign service has declined (Guardian, 9/29/22).

But the ability of Al Jazeera and other Arab reporters to cover the assault on Gaza is jeopardized by the alarming number of newspeople Israel has killed since the crisis began. The Committee to Protect Journalists (10/18/23) has counted 13 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since the crisis began, with two more missing or detained. Three Israeli journalists were also killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack, with another taken prisoner.

A BBC News Arabic team “was stopped and assaulted last night by Israeli police,” the BBC (10/15/23) reported.

While the primary focus of this conflict is Gaza, journalists have wondered if a second northern front would open between Israel and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, creating a multifaceted regional war (New York Times, 10/17/23; CNN, 10/17/23). Israeli fire in southern Lebanon injured Al Jazeera staffers, along with Agence France-Presse personnel, and killed a Reuters journalist (Reuters, 10/14/23). Lebanon has planned to file a complaint with the United Nations over the incident (TRT World, 10/14/23), calling the attack deliberate (Telegraph, 10/14/23).

Press advocates fear those numbers will rise, and it is all happening as the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens (UN News, 10/13/23).

The BBC (10/15/23) reported that its own journalists “were assaulted and held at gunpoint after they were stopped by police in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv,” and that they were “dragged from the vehicle—marked ‘TV’ in red tape—searched and pushed against a wall.”

In addition, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement that the Israeli military caused “severe damage to 48 centers of press institutions,” including “the Palestine and Watan towers, and other buildings that include media institutions,” including the AFP office. It said that the army had also “completely or partially demolished the homes of dozens of journalists.”

‘Terror attack against democracy’

“It is clear that there was a decision from occupying forces to prevent journalists from covering what was happening in the camp,” reporter Ali Al-Samoudi said in July after Israeli snipers killed three newspeople and destroyed TV equipment on the West Bank (International Federation of Journalists, 7/4/23).

War reporting always carries risk. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the deaths of media workers in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. Middle East conflicts have always been dangerous places for journalists; it’s hard to ignore high-profile deaths of journalists like Marie Colvin of London’s Sunday Times in Syria (CNN, 2/1/19), or freelance photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya (Washington Post, 4/21/11). In that sense, the war in Gaza and a possible war in southern Lebanon are no exceptions.

But as FAIR (5/19/21) documented during the previous Israeli military operation against Gaza, Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists, as well as harassing foreign journalists and human rights activists entering the country. Over the summer, the International Federation of Journalists (7/4/23) reported that “several journalists have been directly targeted by Israeli snipers as they were reporting on Israel’s large-scale military operation in Jenin.”

Inside Israel, the situation for journalists is relatively safer, but the far-right government has—like authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary—attacked journalists and the ability to critically cover institutions in power. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019 accused the owners of Israel’s Channel 12 of committing a “terror attack against democracy” for reporting on the corruption charges against him (Times of Israel, 9/1/19).

In 2020, Netanyahu (Ha’aretz, 6/11/20) indicated that “Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker should be arrested and jailed” for airing “recordings of Netanyahu crony Shaul Elovich and his wife, which demonstrated how they sought to tilt news coverage in the prime minister’s favor.”

Galit Distel-Atbaryan, who recently resigned from her role as public diplomacy minister (Jerusalem Post, 10/14/23), reportedly said this summer that she wanted the “authority to deny press credentials to foreign journalists critical of Israel” (Ha’aretz, 8/30/23).

‘You better be saying good things’

An Israeli security officer threatens an Al-Araby reporter (Arab News, 10/15/23): “If you don’t report the truth, woe is you.”

The threat to journalism has only become more explicit as Israel’s assault on Gaza escalates. An Israeli security officer interrupted a live report by Ahmed Darawsha, correspondent for Qatar-based Al-Araby news (Arab News, 10/15/23):

What are you saying? I don’t care if you are live…. You better be saying good things. Understood? And all of these Hamas should be slaughtered. Am I clear? If you don’t report the truth, woe is you.

The officer then shouted at the camera: “Detestable! We’ll turn Gaza to dust. Dust, dust, dust.”

Israel’s siege of Gaza becomes more nightmarish as the days go on, and as that happens, the ability of journalists to document the horror becomes next to impossible. Palestinian journalist Sami Abu Salem told the International Federation of Journalists (10/12/23) about working in Gaza: “We have no internet service, there is a lack of electricity, no transportation, and even the streets are damaged. That’s why we cannot tell lots of stories—thousands of stories.”

Because audiences in the US and the Anglosphere depend on Al Jazeera, as well as local journalists in Israel and the Occupied Territories, to receive news from the region, these attacks do act as filters through which the truth is diluted. In many ways, Americans can see in real time how the powers that be attempt to control information coming out of the region.

The post Israeli Attacks on Journalists Stifle Reporting on Gaza Horrors appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 18, 2023

The Need for a Less Hypocritical Center at the New York Times

The phrase “a decent left” comes from Dissent editor Michael Walzer’s piece “Can There Be a Decent Left?” (Spring/02), which chided progressives for not supporting the invasion of Afghanistan—which led to a 20-year occupation that killed a quarter of a million people.

“Part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in her New York Times column (10/12/23).

Funny—the crisis in Israel/Palestine is making me think we could sure use a less hypocritical center.

In the wake of the upsurge in violence, Goldberg had harsh words for progressives: “Some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance,” Goldberg said. “The way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.”

She cited problematic statements from Students for Justice in Palestine, Democratic Socialists of America’s New York and Connecticut chapters, Black Lives Matter Chicago and the president of the NYU student bar association. She referred to their “hideous dogmatism,” suggesting they were the sort of leftists who “relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty.”

What makes such attitudes tragic, Goldberg argued, is the need for a “decent and functional left” to protect Palestinian civilians:

As I write this, Israel has imposed what the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called a “complete siege” of Gaza’s 2 million people, about half of whom are under 18. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” said Gallant. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Such collective punishment is, like the mass killing of civilians in Israel, a war crime….

It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow…universal ideas about human rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted. Their views are the mirror image of those who claim that, given what Israel has endured, the scale of its retaliation cannot be questioned.

Is it “disgusting” for the New York Times (10/9/23) to say, “America’s duty as Israel’s friend is to stand firm in its support”—even as Israel commits war crimes?

But does she really believe this? If the law student who says “I will not condemn Palestinian resistance” is just as bad as someone who refuses to condemn Israel as it commits war crimes, shouldn’t she be criticizing the latter people as well? Particularly as that group includes many figures rather more influential than local chapters of marginalized left-wing clubs, such as the president of the United States (“We are not urging restraint right now,” a Biden official told CNN—10/10/23) and Goldberg’s own employer. (“President Biden is right to express America’s full support for Israel at this painful moment,” declared a New York Times editorial—10/9/23—though it averred that “cutting off power and water to Gaza…will be an act of collective punishment”—”if it continues.”)

Centrists love to decry “both sides” in order to leave the middle as the place of moral purity. Yet somehow it’s almost always the left that earns the bulk of their contempt.

Goldberg did quote, with implicit disapproval, US special envoy against antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt’s declaration that “no one has the right to tell Israel how to defend itself and prevent and deter future attacks.” But Lipstadt is not called “disgusting” or “hideous,” or motivated by “cruelty” or “depravity.” Instead, Goldberg gently admonishes: “If humanist principles spur total revulsion toward the terrorist crimes in Israel, they also demand restraint in Gaza.”

How would Goldberg feel about someone who expressed “total revulsion” toward Israel’s war crimes, while suggesting Hamas show more “restraint”? So much for mirror images.

Michelle Goldberg (New York Times, 10/16/23): “It is not fair that events are moving too quickly to give people time to grieve the victimization of their own community before being asked to try to prevent the victimization of others.”

To be fair, in a subsequent column (10/16/23), Goldberg described “the language of some Israeli leaders”—not the actions of the Israeli military—as “murderous.” She said that “many people I’ve spoken to, Jewish and Palestinian alike, are terrified that this rhetoric will become reality.” This came after the Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israeli attacks had already killed 724 Palestinian children (AP, 10/14/23)—apparently not enough to qualify as a reality to Goldberg.

And she is still not ready to condemn those who side with the Israeli government and ignore its crimes:

I can empathize with liberal Jews both in Israel and throughout the diaspora who feel too overwhelmed, at this moment of great fear and vulnerability, to protest the escalating suffering inflicted on Palestinians.

Some people who overlook war crimes deserve empathy, while others exhibit “depravity.” That’s the great thing about being part of the “decent” center—you get to decide!

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

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October 17, 2023

In Gaza, ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’ – CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza

Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis about Gaza for the October 13, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231013Bennis.mp3

Al Jazeera (10/9/23)

Janine Jackson: As we record on October 11, headlines tell of horror and misery across Gaza as Israel rains airstrikes on hospitals, mosques and refugee camps; declares a complete siege blocking access to electricity, food and fuel; and musters for a possible ground offensive. An Israeli Defense Force spokesman is being quoted warning that scenes coming out of Gaza in coming days will be “difficult to understand and cope with.”

If the past is guide, scenes from Gaza will be especially difficult to understand if those presenting them avoid context—political, historical, human—in favor of storybook simplification and bloodthirsty cheerleading, followed by pronouncement by elites of rhetorical banalities endorsing injustice and indignity for millions.

With occasional exceptions, US corporate media’s distortions of Palestine/Israel make it harder to do what so many want, to see a way forward without violence, with justice.

Phyllis Bennis is Director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author of a number of books including Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: A Primer, now in its seventh updated edition. She joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

JJ: I’m hearing it said that while the specific nature of Hamas’s October 7 attacks was surprising to some, it’s not entirely true or useful to call the attacks “unexpected” in the way that we understand that word. What do people mean by that?

PB: I think the reference is to the understanding that resistance, including resistance violence, never just happens out of thin air. It happens in response to something. It happens in the context of something.

And if we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future, understanding the acts of violence that have already occurred, we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context, looking at root causes, something that at moments of crisis, which for Israelis, this is clearly a moment of unexpected crisis, but for people in this country as well, it’s crucial that we take those hard steps to figure out what gives rise to this. Because otherwise we’re simply mouthing platitudes of condemnation.

Condemnation of violent attacks on civilians is completely appropriate. Some of the acts of some of the Hamas militants were in complete violation of international law, and should be condemned. And it’s also true that they didn’t just happen. They happened in the context of 75 years of oppression of Palestinians, decades of an apartheid system.

And crucially, in Gaza, where Hamas was born in 1987—with, we should note, significant Israeli assistance at the time—the people in Gaza, the 2.2 million people who live in that enclosed, open-air prison, if you will, one of the most crowded places on the face of the earth, have lived under a state of siege that was imposed by Israel in 2007.

Ironically, when we heard this horrific call from the minister of defense from Israel yesterday—who said, we are going to impose such an incredibly tight siege, there will be nothing that gets in, no food, no fuel, no water, no electricity—this was a call to essentially commit genocide, knowing that with the sealing off of the last remnants of the siege that has already been in place, they are predicting that the impact of their policy will be mass starvation, mass thirst, mass death from injuries that the hospitals will be unable to treat, because the hospitals won’t have fuel for their generators, which they rely on because there’s already insufficient electricity available in Gaza.

Phyllis Bennis: “We have to understand…why these things happen. Otherwise, we have no basis to figure out a strategy to stop the violence on all sides.”

In an article I’m just writing, I quote a Gaza woman, 72-years-old, who said, “Years ago, we had electricity 24 hours a day and took that for granted. Now that seems like a dream.” And this was last June, before this new siege. So what they’re talking about with this new siege is almost like a quantitative escalation of what is already in place.

I found out today, and I’ve got to say, as familiar as I am with the human rights violations in Gaza, this one shocked me: As of May of this year, 20% of all children in Gaza are stunted by the age of two. I had no idea that was the case, and yet it is. And that’s before this level of punishment.

So all of those things have to be taken into account to understand—not to justify, not to ever justify—the killings of civilians, the killings of children and old people; unacceptable, should be condemned; and we have to understand from where that comes, why these things happen. Otherwise, we have no basis to figure out a strategy to stop the violence on all sides.

JJ: I do want to talk about stopping the violence, but just some definitions as we go forward. I have been surprised to read things like Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in announcing the siege, say, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” And then you might say, well, that’s just rhetoric. But then we also have IDF officials saying, according to Ha’aretz, out loud, that with Israeli airstrikes, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

Isn’t this unlawful collective punishment? Why does this become, in reporting, something that “some critics” say “might possibly” be “seen as” a war crime?

PB: These are clear war crimes. These are not potential, maybe, somehow war crimes. These are clear, unequivocal war crimes. This is the kind of crime for which the Geneva Conventions, of which Article 33 is a specific prohibition of collective punishment—it’s exactly these kinds of actions for which those articles were drafted. So, yes, these are violations of international law, period, full-stop.

It is not, however, surprising or new that international law is not taken into account when its violations are committed by close allies of the United States, and Israel is at the top of the list for that kind of protection.

This is an old story. International law is not imposed in the way that we hear it consistently imposed, appropriately, for Russian violations, for instance, in Ukraine. Those violations have been massive, and appropriately they’ve been called out. We can identify the hypocrisy of the US being the one to call them out, given US histories of violations of international law. But nonetheless, it’s accurate to call out those violations.

Times of Israel (12/30/22)

The notion that somehow the Israeli actions, collective punishment, failure to distinguish between civilians and fighters—all these things are direct violations of international law. They are war crimes. And United States support for Israel goes far beyond the $3.8 billion a year that we give as a baseline to the Israeli military, but also includes the protection of Israel at the United Nations from ever being held accountable, the insurance at the International Criminal Court that Israeli officials, whether political or military officials, are never held accountable.

This is unconscionable, and makes the United States, and frankly us as taxpayers, makes us a component of that policy of apartheid and oppression. It makes us complicit. We are enabling. That $3.8 billion—which is a pittance of our military budget, which is approaching a trillion dollars this year, 53 cents of every federal discretionary dollar goes directly to our military—but aside from that, we are paying 20% of the entire Israeli military budget. We don’t do that with any other country.

JJ: I just read James Zogby saying that the State Department deleted two initial statements they had put out, urging restraint and protection of civilians, and changed them to offering Israel full US support. And a lot of the talk that we hear is about what Palestinians should do, or what Israel should do. And that kind of talk is a little bit abstract, and it’s maybe a little easier for US citizens to do, than to grapple with what we as US citizens should and could be doing. So I wanted to ask you just about that. Besides lamenting, besides condemning and looking on in horror, what place is there for us as US citizens?

PB: Ironically and perhaps somewhat sadly, given the depth of this crisis, what lays ahead, I’m afraid, both in numbers and in brutality, is going to be even worse than the brutal and high numbers of dead and injured on both sides that have happened already. What we’re going to see in Gaza, as the Israeli bombardment escalates, as I have no doubt it will in coming days, is going to be disastrous, and it means we have a real obligation.

What we need to be doing, I think, is to stop the US government, from doing what all of its institutional instincts—if I can coin a phrase like that, I’m not even sure that makes sense, but I think listeners will maybe understand what I mean. It’s as if the institution of Congress, the institution of the State Department, the institution of the White House react in certain ways when the perception is that Israel, for the first time, is facing the kind of horror that it has in fact inflicted on Palestinians so many times before. And that means that we have an obligation to escalate the pressure that we’ve already been calling for on our members of Congress to stop saying we should send more weapons.

There was something very interesting, in Biden’s speech on October 11, he said two things that I found very useful, ironically enough. In one of them, he said that he had just gotten off the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel, and he said, “I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming.” And I thought, you know, a lot of people are saying this is Israel’s 9/11. And we did experience that, and our response was swift and decisive and overwhelming. And it failed. Our response was war in Afghanistan and then war in Iraq, and they both failed.

He went on to say, “We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.” He was right. They are. And we didn’t. And so it failed.

It was an extraordinary moment. And I don’t think anybody in the commentariat, if you will, of the mainstream press, caught that, to say that that’s exactly what we did in 9/11, and it failed. It failed to do any of the things we claimed it would do.

JJ: It’s remarkable, and really reflects the kind of funhouse mirror understanding of, really, the very recent history that we’ve all lived through. And it brings me to this final question, because, in many ways, in terms of media, I almost could have re-aired an interview that we did with you five years ago or 15 years ago, in terms of missing context, of dehumanization. But reality and opinion have changed, are changing, in this country. There’s a growing openness to criticism of Israel and the apartheid state. And I just want to ask you, do you think that this might redirect or weaken that growing openness, or what do you think?

PB: You know, Janine, I think you raise a really crucial point. And from the moment that this crisis, this particular crisis, erupted on Saturday morning, I’ve been worried about exactly that. I’ve been writing a lot, talking a lot about the success of our movement, the movement for Palestinian rights, how we have managed to change the discourse. It hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been quick, but over the last 20, 25 years, we’ve seen an extraordinary shift, an enormous shift in the public discourse, a very significant shift in the media discourse—not as great as at the public level, but still—and the beginnings of a shift at the political/policy discourse level.

Ha’aretz (7/13/21)

It’s been huge. You have things like, if we look at the polls, in a recent poll, there was evidence that 25% of American Jews believe that Israel is an apartheid state. Thirty-eight percent of young Jews believe that, and 44% of Democrats said they think Israel is like apartheid. Those are huge shifts. They are huge changes. And I think that’s very key.

We see at the policy level, we saw in 2021 when Israel attacked Gaza, not even as bad as this, but in a horrific way that killed a number of people in Gaza in bombing, aside from the fact that several groupings of congresspeople and senators were demanding a ceasefire at a time when their own president, their own party was refusing to support a ceasefire.

More important than any of those, I thought, was a group of 500 former Democratic campaign staffers, the people who had actually put Biden in office, who headed up the statewide and citywide campaigns, 500 of them signed off on an incredible letter that talked about 75 years of oppression against Palestinians, etc., and called for a ceasefire.

And what it said, aside from the text of the letter itself, it meant that those 500 campaign workers, who have to find a new job every year in a new campaign, had come to the conclusion that criticizing Israel is no longer political suicide, that it was not going to stop them from getting a job. And I thought that was an incredible example of how this discourse shift has gone forward.

Now the danger is, of course, that with the emotional response to what has gone on in the last several days—and we should be clear, we saw this in earlier examples, in Syria and elsewhere, that televised and video versions of up-close and personal violence are far more passionately responding than what happens when a pilot drops a bomb, which probably kills far more people. Not surprisingly; it’s a very human response, but it’s a misleading response.

And when it keeps getting repeated, over and over again, not just in social media, but in mainstream media as well, some of which have been false videos as well, that are being circulated around and repeated in some mainstream outlets, there is a level of emotional response that’s much harder to engage with than the responses to the far greater wholesale killing, if you will, where far more people get killed, under US bombs or under Israeli missiles, than ever get killed by individual acts of violence that are so horrific to watch or to even contemplate.

So we’re up against a big new challenge right now, to at least not lose those advances that we’ve made in how the discourse goes forward. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s not going to happen by itself. It’s something that we’re going to have to work on. And organizations like FAIR play a huge role in reminding us of that, reminding us of how the media discourse shapes how we come to understand it.

The Hill (10/8/23)

One of the things I’ve been talking about a lot in the last few days is this notion that our understanding of history and our understanding of reality is shaped by when we start the clock. If we started the clock on Saturday morning, we would have one version of what happened, when those hundreds of Hamas fighters invaded Israel, broke out of the walled prison that was Gaza, and began to attack, not only military installations and military officials, but unfortunately attacked civilians as well, in a horrific way. That’s one narrative.

The broader narrative, if we start the clock a week earlier, we would hear an entirely different thing of how things started. We could move the clock back. We could move back to the last attack on Gaza in 2021. We could move it back to the beginning of the siege of Gaza of 2006 and 2007. We could move it back to the beginning of the occupation of Gaza in 1967. So when we start the clock determines how we understand what we’re seeing in front of our own eyes.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. You can find her recent piece, “As Israel and Gaza Erupt, the US Must Commit to Ending the Violence—All the Violence,” at TheHill.com. Phyllis Bennis, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PB: Thank you, Janine. I’m glad to have been with you.

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October 13, 2023

Papers That Ignore Causes of Violence Can’t Help Prevent It

If the commentary that news media outlets offer up is supposed to equip audiences to understand the world, then major US outlets’ coverage of the unfolding horrors in the Middle East are failing spectacularly. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined ran seven editorials on Israel/Palestine between October 7–9: one from the Times, four from the Journal and two from the Post.

These three days of coverage begin the day that Hamas fighters broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip to kill and take captive hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians, after which Israel launched yet another massive bombing campaign against the Strip, killing hundreds of Palestinian militants and civilians. At no point do these analyses provide readers with the information necessary to comprehend what is happening and why, and they consistently mislead readers about key facts.

Root causes

Amnesty International (10/7/23): “The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”

Many credible observers have pointed to the relationship between this weekend’s escalation and Israel’s decades of mass violence against and dispossession of Palestinians. Amnesty International, for example, offered the following assessment:

The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians. The Israeli government must refrain from inciting violence and tensions in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, especially around religious sites.

Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal center based in Israel, called Hamas’ attacks “brutal and illegal,” and said that their “root causes” are

the illegal 56-year-old Israeli military occupation, the longest occupation in modern history; the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians; the blockade on Gaza; Israel’s settler-colonial policies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; and the denial of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination—as well as the total disregard by the international community of its obligations to fulfill UN resolutions.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem documents that since 2001, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. More than 2,000 of these were minors, almost a thousand of whom were children aged 13 and younger. Over the same time period, some 1,300 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, including 145 minors, 58 of whom were 13 or under. Nearly 9 out of 10 deaths this century have been on the Palestinian side—a reality to consider when deciding whose killings are to be considered “retaliation.”

Mohammed El-Kurd (Democracy Now!, 10/10/23): Media outlets “are preemptively justifying the genocide of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.”

Palestinian journalist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd said on Democracy Now! (10/10/23):

One wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence, and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end for all of this violence to end.

An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (10/8/23) noted that the current administration of Israel has established “a government of annexation and dispossession,” with “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” The paper criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “overt steps taken to annex the West Bank” and “to carry out ethnic cleansing in…the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.” Under the current government, the paper pointed out, there has been

a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in [Netanyahu’s] governing coalition.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, condemned all attacks on civilians, and also called Palestinian violence a result of “decades of oppression imposed on the Palestinians, brutalization, structural violence, of course punctuated also by eruptive violence.”

Lack of context

Washington Post (10/7/23): The attack “clarifies” in that “we now know just how audaciously Iran and its proxies might act to preempt negotiations among the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

As Ari Paul pointed out (FAIR.org, 10/11/23), the top US editorial boards downplayed or outright ignored the Netanyahu government’s expansionist policies.

They also declined to offer any of the broader historical context that’s urgently necessary to understand the causes—and therefore paths to resolution—of the current violence in Israel/Palestine.

The closest the Washington Post came was when its first editorial (10/7/23) alluded to “the legitimate Palestinian grievances that Hamas is exploiting.” Yet the paper gave no indication of what these are, omitting such foundational elements of Israel/Palestine as the 1947–48 Nakba, through which Israel created a Jewish majority by ethnically cleansing 750,000 Palestinians, and refusing to let them return to their homes despite their UN-stipulated right to do so. That history directly connects to contemporary events, in that approximately 2.1 million people live in Gaza—the territory that Hamas governs, and from which Palestinian fighters emerged on Saturday—and 1.7 million of these persons are Palestinian refugees.

Knowing these details would give readers a much more comprehensive picture of the recent killings in Israel/Palestine, but the Post editorial abstracts them into the vague, dismissable category of “legitimate Palestinian grievances.”

Without ‘immediate provocation’

The New York Times (10/9/23) endorses giving “America’s full support for Israel,” even as “the Israeli government is cutting off power and water to Gaza,” which “will be an act of collective punishment”—but only “if it continues.”

The New York Times editorial (10/9/23), on the other hand, didn’t mention that Israel has done any harm to Palestinians at all, asserting that Hamas fighters “burst through border fences without warning or any immediate provocation.” Setting aside that the barrier is a prison fence and not a “border” (+972 Magazine, 5/17/18), the word “immediate” is doing quite a lot of work here.

The UN noted in August that Gaza residents have

been living under collective punishment as a result of the [Israel-imposed] blockade that continues to have a devastating effect as people’s movement to and from the Gaza Strip, as well as access to markets, remains severely restricted. The UN secretary general has found that the blockade and related restrictions contravene international humanitarian law, as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed.

Food security in Gaza has deteriorated, with 63% of people in the Gaza Strip being food insecure and dependent on international assistance…. Access to clean water and electricity remains at crisis level and impacts nearly every aspect of life. Clean water is unavailable for 95% of the population. Electricity is available up to an average of 11 hours per day as of July 2023. However, ongoing power shortage has severely impacted the availability of essential services, particularly health, water and sanitation services, and continues to undermine Gaza’s fragile economy.

NPR (9/24/23): “Israel has been carrying out stepped-up military raids, primarily in the northern West Bank, for the past year and a half.”

Furthermore, at the end of August, Human Rights Watch said that “the Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability.” On September 23, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli government policies and government-condoned pogroms carried out by settler groups have displaced at least six West Bank communities. The group called this

an illegal policy that implicates Israel in the war crime of forcible transfer…. a choice the [Israeli] apartheid regime is making in order to realize its goal of maintaining Jewish supremacy in the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In late September, Israel bombed Gaza for several days in a row (NPR, 9/24/23). Israeli settlers stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque complex, one of Islam’s holiest sites, days before the Hamas attack (Al Jazeera, 10/4/23). The Guardian (10/4/23) also reported on evidence of Israel shooting Palestinian protesters at the Gaza fence just prior to the Hamas onslaught. From January 1, 2023, to October 4, the Israeli military killed 234 Palestinians and rendered 821 Palestinians homeless through housing demolitions.

Such actions would seem to meet the threshold of both “immediate” and “provoca[tive].”

‘No more condemnation’

Wall Street Journal (10/7/23): “Saturday’s assault from Gaza shows the reality of the global disorder that is expanding by the month.”

The Journal’s editorials went even further than those the Post and Times offered, not only neglecting to situate Palestinian violence but outright denying that Israel oppresses the Palestinians. Their first editorial of the weekend (10/7/23) admonished: “Please no more condemnation of Israel’s ‘blockade’ or ‘occupation.’ Israel has been allowing 17,000 Gazans to work in Israel each day.” The scare quotes suggest that Israel isn’t actually occupying Palestinian land or blockading Gaza.

The UN, however, considers Gaza and the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, to be occupied territories. On August 30, the United Nations General Assembly Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People issued a study that “lends its weight to the growing body of evidence that Israel’s belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territory is illegal.”

Moreover, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently noted:

Since the imposition of the blockade in 2007, the Israeli authorities have restricted the entry into Gaza of goods they consider having a dual (civilian and military) use, such as building materials, certain medical equipment, and some agricultural items.

Such measures, the OCHA pointed out, “continue to hinder access to livelihoods, essential services and housing, disrupting family life and undermining people’s hopes for a secure and prosperous future.”

Observers who are serious about wanting an end to violence against civilians would consider its causes. The Times, Journal and Post have shown that they are not up to the task.

The post Papers That Ignore Causes of Violence Can’t Help Prevent It appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 13, 2023

Phyllis Bennis on Gaza

      CounterSpin231013.mp3

BBC (10/11/23)

This week on CounterSpin: In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not.

“War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence—when so many people are looking for another way forward.

We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

      CounterSpin231013.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, US political division and the Federal Reserve.

      CounterSpin231013.mp3

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 12, 2023

‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ – CounterSpin interview with Rodrigo Camarena on wage theft

Janine Jackson interviewed Justicia Lab’s Rodrigo Camarena about wage theft for the October 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3

Retail Dive (9/27/23)

Janine Jackson: Investigation by the National Retail Federation found that the effect of store theft by shoplifters and by employees is largely on par with historical trends. But mere data don’t stand a chance against corporate media’s energetic interest in the smash-and-grab phenomenon, which they confidently explain is the reason that Target, for instance, is closing stores in what one news account called “a series of liberal cities.”

News media can make something a crisis, a thing you should worry about, when they want to. Video can be found; harmed people can be interviewed.

But what if there’s no CCTV? What if the harm isn’t being done erratically, sporadically, caught on camera—but every day, in documents, in tax filings, in one-on-one unrecorded conversations between employees who need their job, and bosses who want their profit rate?

News media interested in crime—its impact on human beings, on society, its cost to the economy—would be interested in wage theft, the more than $50 billion a year stolen from workers in this country. But when is the last time your nightly local news talked about that, or encouraged you to be outraged and concerned and moved to action about that? There are efforts to address this ongoing, mundane thievery, but so far it seems to be under the radar of news outlets that, in every other way, suggest they care very much about crime, all the time.

NonProfit Quarterly (9/6/23)

Rodrigo Camarena is director of Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is also co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rodrigo Camarena.

Rodrigo Camarena: Hi, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I don’t think it’s crazy to say that many people truly don’t know what wage theft is, how it happens, what it is. What would you have us know about, first of all, the scale and the impact of wage theft? What does it look like?

RC: Sure. Wage theft is so common and so ubiquitous that we don’t really consider it in our day-to-day lives. But, like you mentioned, it’s this huge problem. It’s actually the largest form of theft, when you compare it to burglaries, armed robberies, motor vehicle thefts combined. And it happens whenever a worker is deprived of the wages that they’re owed lawfully. So that could mean not being paid a minimum wage, not being paid overtime, having deductions from someone’s paycheck made, or just not paying someone; they show up at the job one day and the person that hired them isn’t there anymore. Failing to honor sick leave or other benefits is another form of wage theft.

So it’s very common. It’s a term that we use as advocates to underline what is happening here, which is that you’re being deprived of what you’re owed and it’s being taken from you, but it’s not a legal term per se.

JJ: Yeah, I always think of the older sibling that holds your hand and makes you hit yourself, and says, “Why are you hitting yourself?” It’s like, something is going on, but you’re not allowed to complain about it, because somehow it’s your fault. Somehow you didn’t take that pay stub home and say, oh wait, I’m owed this and I didn’t get this. It seems like it’s a very invisible kind of crime.

Rodrigo Camarena: “In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage.”

RC: That’s right. It’s something that happens on a daily basis, actually, and in some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage. And it’s a problem that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, women and immigrants, and in particular undocumented immigrants, who often don’t feel like they can stand up for themselves, or request what they’re owed lawfully, because of their status.

So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about your rights as a worker that might prevent people from standing up for themselves and defending these rights, but this is part of the challenge in addressing this problem.

JJ: I wanted to ask you, there does seem to be a particular impact on immigrants here, and it’s not to say that it doesn’t affect low-wage workers across the board, but immigrants are in a particularly precarious situation.

RC: That’s right. And in the state of New York, where I am, and I think this is probably the case in many other states, it’s twice as likely for you to experience wage theft if you’re foreign-born than if you’re native-born.

This makes complete sense, when you think about immigrant labor in this country. It’s often some of the toughest jobs, that a lot of people don’t want to do, but that immigrants are willing to do because they need income; they’re here to work and contribute. And that puts them in a precarious position, because it allows the employer to not only pay them very little, in many cases less than they’re lawfully owed, but also exposes them to other forms of exploitation and harassment.

We can talk about sexual harassment, we can talk about discrimination because of language, of country of origin, gender or sex, and these are overlapping issues that really do a lot of harm to people that we depend on for some of the most critical industries in our country.

JJ: And I know that victims often don’t even understand that they were supposed to be paid for overtime, or they were supposed to get sick leave. There’s an absence of education from the jump, so that workers don’t even know what they’re entitled to.

RC: That’s right. Very few people will tell you what the minimum wage is, both federally or at the state level. It’s difficult to know sometimes that there’s been a change to sick leave laws in the state, or wages. And so much of the problem is really about getting this information out there more proactively.

In the state of New York, again, where I am, it’s actually required that an employer communicate what your wage is and if that wage has changed, and they can be fined for not doing so. But this is not the case across the country, and it’s often not the case even when it is mandated by law.

Albany Times Union (9/12/23)

JJ: Well, that’s the thing. I mean, I’ve read about efforts to combat wage theft, and there is legislation in the works, and I hope to talk about it. Kathy Hochul, here in New York, is saying wage theft is now larceny under New York penal law, which means that prosecutors can seek stronger penalties.

But what are your thoughts in general, in terms of the legal—this is a crime, theft is a crime, but what are your thoughts on the state of the legal response to this problem?

RC: Absolutely. Theft is a crime, and I think we need to understand it. It’s not just a crime that impacts workers who have been victims of wage theft, but it’s a crime that impacts all of us.

Wage theft contributes to poverty; the Department of Labor study of California and New York, showed this a couple of years back. It contributes to people’s need to use public benefits or welfare, and it steals from city and state tax revenues.

So it’s a crime that doesn’t just hurt the most vulnerable amongst us, but it’s a crime that impacts all of us indirectly. We need to treat it as a societal crime. We need to treat it as the severe act of injustice that it is. And I think raising the cost for employers is certainly one approach. In some municipalities, businesses can lose their licenses if they are found to be repeat offenders. So there’s a lot of policy solutions.

But I think part of what we need to understand is that there’s also a cultural expectation at this point that if you are either a low-wage worker, a new worker, someone who has been marginalized by society, that you shouldn’t expect more than what you might be paid by an employer. And I think that’s wrong.

CBS News (6/30/23)

JJ: And I want to just pull you back, in terms of the problem, that sometimes folks will say, “Oh, they won this case,” but sometimes even when you win, workers don’t collect. I just wanted to just bring you back to the reality of it, that the law may say, yes, wage theft happened here, and it still might not be possible to make workers whole.

RC: That’s right. In many cases, even when an employer is found guilty of having committed wage theft, they might then declare bankruptcy, and in some cases start a new company where they go ahead and repeat these same offenses. There are some efforts to try to hold assets accountable and put them on liens, in the event that a business has declared bankruptcy.

But, you’re right, the problem is also structural. We punish businesses after the fact. There isn’t a lot of prevention that’s happening during the event of wage theft, right? Many folks report after they’ve had their wages stolen, or they’ve been fired by their employer.

So I think there needs to be a lot of work at the local and state level to encourage people to report wage theft, to encourage people to know and understand their rights, and find solutions while they’re being victimized.

JJ: Right, and then I want to ask: Why do workers, who are already so vulnerable, who already have their whole life hanging by the thread of this job, why do they have to be the one to bring the complaints? I know that that brings us back to how Justicia Lab worked with Make the Road New York to develop this ¡Reclamo! tool. And I want to ask you to talk about the need that you saw for that, and then talk a little bit about this ¡Reclamo! tool and what it does.

Center for Public Integrity (5/4/21)

RC: Sure. So the ¡Reclamo! app was a collaborative effort between us at Justicia Lab, which is a program of Pro Bono Net, and Make the Road New York, a worker center here in New York City and New York state.

And I think the need we saw was twofold. One, in the short term, there aren’t enough lawyers to help address every wage theft claim, or enough investigators at the state level to investigate these claims. So we said, how can we use technology that, one, helps someone identify if they’ve been a victim of wage theft and, two, file a wage theft claim in New York State, but also perform strategies that we know are effective at recovering stolen wages, like writing a demand letter, which is typically written by an attorney, or just calling the employer and having a structured conversation around how they can settle this matter.

So ¡Reclamo! does all those three things. It files a complaint with the state of New York. It produces a demand letter, which is something a lawyer might make, and it helps you have a conversation with an employer around what wages you’re owed and how they can settle the matter.

And I think in the long term, what we’re really trying to do with this tool is empower non-lawyers to feel comfortable navigating this very convoluted process, and also give advocates data that they can use to tackle the structural problem here, to inform enforcement.

In some cases, advocates like Make the Road have approached the Department of Labor and said: “Hey, we see a problem in the car wash industry. Can we approach this problem together, enforce this problem together?” And that’s been effective as a strategy as well.

So there’s a number of solutions that we’re trying to put forward with this initiative, and we’re very excited about the response so far.

Axios Boston (1/12/23)

JJ: Do you see any role at the federal level for this? I mean, it seems such an across-the-board problem, and I read about Maura Healey, I read about people, and it sounds like people are saying, “We’re going to pass some legislation to make crime illegal”—wage theft should already be illegal, and so is it a matter of enforcement? And do you see any role at all at the federal level here?

RC: Definitely. I mean, the federal government can do a lot. One, they can start by raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 for decades, but they can invest more in enforcement. They can invest more in public education. They can increase the cost to employers that might commit wage theft, repeat offenders.

And they can help advocates by sharing data proactively, both federal data and state-level data around this problem. There’s a lot of information that we still don’t have about the scale of this problem, and I think if there’s better collaboration between advocates and government, we can really make a dent on this issue.

JJ: I can’t really see a more compelling story for news media. They’re reporting every day about people’s difficulties, and the idea that somehow they would not include the fact that their employers are systematically keeping their wages, while they’re out of the other side of their mouth fighting to make those wages lower, that they’re keeping some of the wages that these people have actually earned.

I don’t understand why that is not a meaningful story. It’s a story about crime and violence, frankly. People’s lives are being affected here. And so I just wanted to, finally, ask you, what do you make of media coverage of wage theft, but also just of the conditions around it that allow it, that support it? Is there anything that you would change about the way reporters approach the issue?

RC: I think we have to recognize that wage theft and worker exploitation is, in many cases, built into the business models of many industries. Our food is relatively inexpensive, given the amount of labor it takes to grow and pick it. Our restaurants and other services, domestic work, it’s severely undercompensated, and that’s by design, in many cases. But it’s also something that we don’t talk about.

We don’t talk about immigrant labor being the backbone of a number of industries; what we do talk about, I guess on the right, is immigrants stealing jobs and incurring more costs for society. But we don’t talk about the subsidy that they provide to many businesses and many industries.

We don’t talk about our dependence on low-wage work. And I think that’s the reality that many Americans and policymakers don’t want to address, because it’s complicated, and it forces a conversation around comprehensive immigration reform and workers’ rights more broadly, which I know is something that in many cases is just not popular to talk about.

JJ: Who would reporters talk to that might change the story that they tell?

RC: I think talking to large agricultural producers, talking to restaurant groups, talking to construction companies that, in many cases, employ immigrant workers to get the job done at a certain cost, I think would be valuable. We don’t scrutinize the cost of labor in many of these industries.

Even as consumers, we don’t want to know that our food was grown and picked by someone that was making $8 an hour, or was being paid by each piece of crop that they harvested. We don’t want to know that someone that is in the service industry isn’t getting paid an hourly minimum wage, or getting paid on tips, or not being paid at all in many cases, because they’re maybe earning their ability to one day perform that job.

So I think there’s a lot of different approaches that we can take to understanding this problem, but it does require understanding how businesses have built this into their business model, as well as the societal impact at large when it comes to how families are affected, and also how states are undercut when it comes to the collection of tax revenue.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s director of Justicia Lab online at JusticiaLab.org, and you can learn about that ¡Reclamo! tool that we’re talking about at MakeTheRoadNY.org. Thank you so much, Rodrigo Camarena, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RC: Thanks so much, Janine. Happy to be here.

The post ‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 11, 2023

While Israeli Media Examine Government Failure, US Papers Push ‘National Unity’

As the world watches the ongoing horror in southern Israel and in the Gaza Strip, media grapple not only with the immediate violence, but to understand why this happened and how it can stop. This is truly no other Middle East skirmish anymore. Likely the deadliest offensive against Israel on its soil, and perhaps the most audacious operation by Palestinian militants, it’s been compared both to 9/11 and to the bloody 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations.

How could Israel—so famous for its military might and advanced intelligence capabilities—have missed the warnings of such an attack? The coordinated nature of the rocket attacks and assaults on nearby towns make clear that this was a huge operation that took time and planning; paragliding attacks require practice runs that are not easy to hide (L’Orient Today, 10/9/23), for instance. Already, Israeli media have begun looking closely at the Israeli government’s actions to understand how and why this happened—in sharp contrast to US broadsheet opinion, which has largely rallied unquestioningly behind Israeli “national unity.”

Blaming Netanyahu

In the wake of the Hamas attack, criticism of the Israeli government was widespread in the country’s media (Times of Israel, 10/8/23).

The Times of Israel (10/8/23) noted that Netanyahu was quoted telling Likud Party members in 2018 about his stance on Gaza, summarizing his quote saying “those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza”—meaning to Gaza’s Hamas-led government—as doing so maintains the “separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza,” thus dividing and conquering the Palestinians once and for all.

Gaza is sealed off, contained and highly surveilled (Middle East Institute, 4/27/22); it’s hard to believe no one in the Israeli government didn’t know something was being planned. The above ToI report quoted Assaf Pozilov, a reporter for the Israeli public broadcasting outlet Kan, saying before the attack, “The Islamic Jihad organization has started a noisy exercise very close to the border, in which they practiced launching missiles, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers.”

An Israeli military veteran in the New York Post (10/9/23), hardly considered a pro-Palestine publication, blamed Israel for ignoring warnings from Egyptian intelligence about “something big.”

An editorial at Ha’aretz (10/8/23) put the blame squarely on Netanyahu, saying “he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs.” It also pointed the finger at his right-wing policies on settlement expansion and allies with far-right extremist parties. “As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier,” the editorial said, noting that “Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack.”

At the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (10/7/23), David Halperin, chief executive officer of the Israel Policy Forum, wrote that for the last year, “my colleagues and I…have joined with others in expressing concern about the nature of Israel’s far-right government.” The article—which questioned why Netanyahu’s government, famously hard-nosed on security, failed to protect the people—was reprinted in the Jerusalem Post (10/7/23).

Alon Pinkas (Ha’aretz, 10/9/23) wrote more directly: “Netanyahu should be removed as prime minister immediately—not ‘after the war,’ not after a plea bargain in his corruption trial, not after an election. Now.”

‘Risks of disunity’

Unity, not accountability, was the key theme in US media (New York Times, 10/9/23).

But top US editorial boards are elsewhere, failing to ask questions about intelligence failures and Netanyahu’s hand on the wheel. Instead, they urged Israelis to put aside the concerns they’ve had about democracy, which brought throngs of liberal and left-wing Israelis into the streets to denounce the Netanyahu government’s neutering of an independent judiciary—a decision that has been likened to the “sham democracy” of Hungary (Foreign Policy, 8/3/23). This summer, military reservists joined the protests, causing alarm about the country’s military readiness (AP, 7/19/23).

A Wall Street Journal editorial (10/7/23) used the Hamas offensive to downplay Netanyahu’s judicial power grab, saying, “The internal Israeli debates over its Supreme Court look trivial next to the threat to Israel’s existence.”

The Journal also discounted any criticism of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza, saying, “Israel has been allowing 17,000 Gazans to work in Israel each day and would like to allow more.” The editorial said “the assault also underscores the continuing malevolence of Iran,” because its government “cheered on the attacks,” “provided the rockets and weapons for Hamas,” and “may have encouraged the timing as well.”

A Washington Post editorial (10/7/23) did blame the right-wing government for initiating the internal political crisis, but hoped that the political factions would soon come together. “Early signs are that Israel’s leading politicians are putting aside their differences with Mr. Netanyahu to meet the emergency,” it said. Another Post editorial (10/9/23) suggested that the US could take a lesson from Israel on the “risks of disunity,” criticizing Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul for setting off a “distracting backlash.”

An editorial at Bloomberg (10/8/23) admitted that Netanyahu’s judicial reform efforts “have needlessly riven Israeli society” and that his aggressive military policies in the Occupied Territories worsened things for Israelis and Palestinians alike. Yet the news service waved that all away, saying, “But all that’s for another time.” It also said the “assault deserves only one response from the world: outrage, and unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself.”

The New York Times editorial board (10/9/23) said that though Israelis were right to march against Netanyahu’s judicial restrictions, the Hamas attack changed the terrain, because “Israel’s military strength depends on its national unity, and Israelis have now come together to defend themselves.”

Of course, Israel, while mobilizing for war, has moved toward forming a unity government (Reuters, 10/10/23).

‘Your self-made weakness’

The other problem, according to Shimrit Meir (New York Times, 10/8/23), is that “Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight.”

Worse, the Times gave column space (10/8/23) to Shimrit Meir, a former advisor to far-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, to cite Israel’s political division as military weakness, urging the country to close ranks.

Israel was vulnerable to an attack because years of dissolving Knessets and new elections left the country divided, Meir said, adding that Israel had “forgotten its second role in the world, as a place that embodies the idea of Jewish solidarity,” and that the people “instead found themselves engaged in an all-out war—not against terrorists but against themselves.”

The idea that the Israeli populace–which has long included right-wing militarists, religious fanatics of various Jewish sects, left-wing anti-occupation activists and techy neoliberals—has always been one big family in political consensus without fierce debate is laughable. But for Meir, the dissension in recent years is a dangerous aberration:

As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.

She said she hoped that Israel returned “to its senses, ending the political crisis and forming a unity government.”

In other words, not only is Knesset opposition to Netanyahu’s internal policies now viewed as some kind of softness on the Hamas attack, but it was the nerve of the people to organize to protect their institutions that opened up the nation to the latest offensive.

No longer time for debate

The Washington Post (10/9/23) published an exceptional op-ed that pointed to the occupation as the root of violence.

The Washington Post, to its credit, ran an op-ed (10/9/23) from a Palestinian journalist that didn’t necessarily put the blame squarely on Netanyahu, but called on the US to support Palestinian statehood. But Post columnist David Ignatius (10/8/23) jumped in on the idea that the quarrel over the Supreme Court contributed to Hamas’ offensive. “Did that political chaos contribute to the Gaza attacks? I don’t know,” he said, adding that the “domestic feuds of the past few months might have led Hamas and its backers in Tehran to believe that Israel was internally weak and, perhaps, vulnerable.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal ran fiercely jingoistic pieces from well-known American neoconservatives like Douglas Feith (10/9/23) and Daniel Pipes (10/8/23), while Mitch McConnell (10/9/23), the Republican Senate minority leader, called for more US support for Israel’s war effort. And far from questioning the Israeli government’s preparedness, law professor Eugene Kontorovich (10/8/23) said the US and others “must not only refrain from limiting Israel’s operation in Gaza but resolve to oust the genocidal regime in Tehran.”

While Israelis, including those in the media class, ponder if their country is run by inept and corrupt leadership, much of the US media skip all this and insinuate that now is no longer the time for debate, but a time to brush aside uncomfortable conversations in the face of war.

The post While Israeli Media Examine Government Failure, US Papers Push ‘National Unity’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 6, 2023

‘Most Americans Really Do Feel Pretty Strongly About Human Rights’ – CounterSpin interview with Stephen Zunes on Menendez indictment

Janine Jackson interviewed the University of San Francisco’s Stephen Zunes about the indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez for the September 29, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230929Zunes.mp3

Janine Jackson: Major news media outlets have been putting out numerous stories on the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic senator from New Jersey and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Those stories are overwhelmingly on details of the charges of suspect dealings—interesting, important information—and on the support, or lack thereof, from other congressmembers, also undoubtedly meaningful information.

New York Times (9/26/23)

The September 27 New York Times explained that

Mr. Menendez was charged on Friday with using his power as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to assist the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey in exchange for bribes that included bars of gold bullion, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, exercise machines and more than $500,000 in cash.

That sentence says a little more than it says, in that it reflects US media’s evident prioritizing of details of the alleged corruption—What did he get? Gold, halal meat?—over interest in the impact on human beings who are not Robert Menendez or his wife or her friends, or any businesspeople who got cut a sweet deal—anyone who might be affected by this assistance to the government of Egypt.

We are still in the midst of it, of course, but so far, anyway, media seem more interested in what the Times called the “deepening crisis Mr. Menendez faces” than what it means for anybody else.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in an updated, expanded edition from Syracuse University Press. He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Stephen Zunes.

I am absolutely going to ask your thoughts about the indictment and its implications, but I wanted to do just a little history first, because it hasn’t been front and center in current coverage, and that context is important.

You wrote back in January of 2021, when Democrats selected Robert Menendez as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that that decision “rung alarm bells for advocates of peace, human rights and international law.” So why was that true already then, and were there particular issue areas that drew concern?

Stephen Zunes: There are quite a number. I mean, the brazenness, the jaw-dropping nature of the charges against Senator Menendez, as you noted, are great tabloid fodder. They’re quite extreme. This is not just the official corruption, legal corruption, we see, especially since the Citizens United decision at the Supreme Court, of influencing politicians. This is really old school, in terms of the cash, the gold bars and everything else.

And he’s had something of a reputation in New Jersey politics for the corruption. He was indicted some years ago on corruption charges, and it ended in mistrial with a hung jury. But despite this, the Democrats named him chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Sen. Frank Church (holding poison dart gun) with Sen. John Tower (Levin Center).

But my concern back then, as with a lot of us, was not on just the corruption per se, but he is one of the most hawkish, hard-line Democrats in the United States Senate. And he was put in the very powerful position of being head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Now, historically, the Democratic heads of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have actually tried to curb excesses and militarism, excesses in terms of supporting human rights violators and the like. We think back to J. William Fulbright, who was the leading critic, not just of Nixon, but of Lyndon Johnson, in terms of the war in Vietnam. We think of Frank Church in the 1970s, challenging the abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. We think of Claiborne Pell and others, in terms of checks and balances, which unfortunately there are not a lot of in foreign policy, but at least to some degree, we could have it through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the Democrats have been in charge.

But in choosing Menendez, Schumer and the Democrats went in the opposite direction—someone who has been to the right of even these centrist Democratic presidents.

So Menendez was one of only two senators, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer being the other one, to vote against the Iran nuclear agreement. He attacked Obama from the right, in terms of his attempts at normalization of relations with Cuba.

Stephen Zunes: “Menendez…has been one of the most vocal supporters of US support for authoritarian right-wing governments.”

The latter is particularly ironic, because Menendez has been obsessed with the authoritarianism and human rights abuses under Cuba’s Communist government, but he has been one of the most vocal supporters of US support for authoritarian right-wing governments with far worse human rights abuses, including that of Egypt.

I think the big thing that the mainstream media are really missing here is not just that he apparently received bribes from a foreign government, but one that has a particularly nasty human rights record. And even without the apparent illegal activity, why in the hell is the United States supporting this government in the first place?

Let’s remember that Egypt gets more US foreign aid, more arms and ammunition and security assistance, than any country in the world, save for Ukraine and Israel.

And the government of Egypt is one of the absolute worst in terms of its human rights abuses. Since Sisi seized power nearly a decade ago, literally thousands of demonstrators have been slaughtered in the streets.

There are over 60,000 political prisoners, one of the highest, if not the highest, number of political prisoners anywhere in the world. And these aren’t just Islamist radicals or anything else, far from it. Many of these people are nonviolent, liberal, secular activists, the very people who led the nonviolent uprising in 2011 against the previous US-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak.

We’re talking about torture on an administrative basis, not to mention corruption up the wazoo. This is a horrific government.

And yet, for years, we’ve had bipartisan support, both in Congress and in successive administrations, for supporting this regime. Now, there has been some growing concerns in some circles, particularly among progressive Democrats, but even among a handful of Republicans and others. But why the hell are we supporting this kind of regime?

And Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while occasionally giving lip service to human rights, has been steadfast in supporting this kind of aid. And, indeed, part of this indictment appears to be that in return for some of these lucrative gifts, he worked to lift a hold on $300 million worth of military aid that was being temporarily withheld on human rights grounds.

But the problem here, again, is not just the bribes and corruption by Menendez, but the very question that we really need to be asking is, why are we supporting this regime in the first place?

New York Times (9/14/23, 7/26/18)

JJ: Absolutely. Well, let me just add to that, frankly, because I looked at a headline from September 14 of this year from the New York Times, “Choosing Security Over Rights, US Approves $235 Million in Egypt Aid.” And it was, “Secretary of State Blinken overruled congressional restrictions on US military aid tied to Egypt’s dismal human rights record.”

OK, that’s interesting. But then I see another headline, “Despite Egypt’s Dismal Human Rights Record, US Restores Military Aid,” and that headline is from 2018. So there’s been this kind of yes/no/but, and it still has added up to millions of dollars of aid.

SZ: This is all too familiar. Some of us can think back to the 1980s, when the Reagan administration would claim they were concerned about human rights, and were pushing for human rights reforms in various Latin American dictatorships that were promoting death squads and the like. This is the same kind of thing.

But the problem is, is that a lot of Democrats, even liberal Democrats, who have been willing to raise human rights concerns when Republicans are in the White House, seem to be rather quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House. So there’s this feeling we see, and I certainly find this in online discussions and elsewhere, that so much of the criticism about the Biden administration from the right is so silly and outrageous, and given a very real threat of authoritarianism from the Republicans, people are so reluctant to say anything negative about Biden, that much of the left liberal wing of the spectrum of this country seems to be ignoring the kinds of abuses that would’ve mobilized people, were they being supported by Republicans.

And, again, it’s not just Egypt, and this is really important. Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a fanatically strong supporter of the Netanyahu government in Israel and the Israeli occupation. He has attacked the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, virtually anybody who dares document or investigate violations of human rights or international humanitarian law by the Israeli government.

And most Democrats at this point are starting to be, though very pro-Israel, more on the J Street end of the Zionist spectrum—that is, those that strongly support Israel as a Jewish state, but oppose the occupation and settlements. But Menendez is aligned with AIPAC and the Republicans, the right wing of the Zionist movement, in a totally unapologetic way, which is way, way to the right of average Democratic public opinion, in terms of the rank and file voters.

But it’s not just Israel. He supports the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. He is one of the few who’s openly supported Trump’s recognition of Morocco’s annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara, along with Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. And here’s a guy who talks about, “Oh, Russia cannot unilaterally change international borders. They cannot expand their territory by force,” in reference to Ukraine. That’s certainly true. But then he says, it’s OK if a US ally does it.

And just like his statements on human rights, criticizing them in Cuba and other left-leaning countries, but excusing them or even supporting them in terms of right-wing US allies, his attitude on international law is the same way. Violations of international legal standards, the UN charter, that’s a horrible thing if a country we don’t like, like Russia, does it. But if it’s an ally, like Israel and Morocco, it’s OK.

And this is not what most Americans, especially most Democrats, want. Again, if you look at the public opinion polls, a vast majority of Americans, particularly on the Democratic side, believe that international law should be enforced consistently.

Just as you would not want a Democratic attorney general to only prosecute Republicans, or a Republican attorney general to only prosecute Democrats, same thing with international law. Law is the law. You can’t pick and choose, depending on the political or geostrategic orientation of the offender.

JJ: Right. Well, against that backdrop, I think the fact that Menendez—who, as we’re recording on September 28, has pled not guilty; we’re still in medias res—but he says that the federal prosecutors are “misrepresenting routine congressional work.” And in the context of what you’ve just said, I feel like that should set off an alarm for an independent press corps, that he’s even comfortable saying, “Well, this is just what you do when you’re a congressperson.”

SZ: Yes. It is concerning that, even without this apparent illegal activity, even without its rather brazen nature, the fact is that it is really a scandal that the United States continues to support repressive regimes like Egypt, like Bahrain, like Saudi Arabia, like United Arab Emirates, like Morocco. They continue to support the Israeli/Moroccan occupations. We can go down the list.

There’s probably no single issue in foreign or domestic policy where public opinion and US policy is so widely differentiated. Most Americans really do feel pretty strongly about human rights.

Indeed, it’s what we hear all the time. It drives me crazy to hear the mainstream media, without irony, talking about how Biden is standing up for human rights, or standing up for international law, without mentioning that the United States arms 57% of the world’s dictatorships, 57% of the world’s authoritarian regimes receive US military aid or arm sales. And this doesn’t even count the countries that are nominally democracies, like Israel and India and others, which are also engaging in human rights abuses.

Syracuse University Press, 2023

So I think that the scandal, on the one hand, shows a failure of the mainstream media to recognize the larger structural problem. But on the other hand, I think it provides an opening for those of us who do care about human rights, who would like to see US foreign policy as actually more consistent with our stated values, to raise these issues and to challenge, not just these corrupt politicians like Menendez, but the whole system that ends up supporting these autocrats and occupiers, and the kind of system that would put a man like Menendez in charge of our foreign policy in Congress, the Democrats’ de facto foreign policy spokesperson, in that kind of position in the first place.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now from Syracuse University Press. Stephen Zunes, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SZ: My pleasure. Thank you.

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 6, 2023

NPR Falsely Claims Its Reporter Is the Only One to Visit Nicaragua

NPR (9/10/23) describes correspondent Eyder Peralta as “the first foreign journalist to make it into the country in more than a year,” which would come as a surprise to numerous independent foreign journalists.

NPR began its report “A Rare Look Inside Locked-Down Nicaragua” (9/10/23) with the demonstrably false claim that Nicaragua has “kept all foreign journalists out for more than a year.” This led into a harrowing story of how its reporter arrived in Nicaragua…and reported without incident.

In 2023 alone, numerous foreign journalists from press outlets from all parts of the world have reported from Nicaragua. Broadcast outlets based in the United States, China, Russia, Iran and around Latin America have regularly filed reports in both English and Spanish. Independent reporters from the United States, Canada and Britain have reported in outlets such as the Morning Star, Rabble and Black Agenda Report.

Most of the international journalists who have reported from Nicaragua in recent years have not been openly biased against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, which perhaps disqualifies them as reporters in NPR‘s eyes. But the Associated Press, whose main correspondent for Nicaragua, Gabriela Selser, calls its government “a perverse and cruel system that exceeds all limits” (Pledge Times, 6/23/23), has published at least two stories bylined Managua this year (2/11/23, 3/12/23), though most of Selser’s Nicaragua reporting seems to be done from Mexico City. (Selser, who previously held both Nicaraguan and Argentine passports, had her Nicaraguan passport revoked by Managua.)

Steve Sweeney, former international editor of Morning Star, was prevented from reporting on the Nicaraguan presidential election in 2021—not by Managua, but by the United States and Mexico. It’s not clear that his blocked travel was connected with his attempt to cover the election—Sweeney was not given an explanation for the denial of transit—but at the least his exclusion suggests that the US government has priorities higher than allowing journalists to travel freely to do their jobs.

Ayesha Rascoe, host of NPR’s Sunday Story, nevertheless said the Sandinista government of Nicaragua “has basically banned foreign journalists,” reiterating this claim on social media. Throughout the 39-minute podcast, Rascoe and correspondent Eyder Peralta didn’t name the foreign journalists who had been barred from entering, despite their emphasis on the claim.

Covid-19 entry requirements came into effect with heightened travel regulations in 2021–22, and slowed travel for all purposes to Nicaragua. A Washington Post correspondent (11/5/21) said she was unable to board her flight to Nicaragua from Mexico, after the airline informed her that she did not appear on the list provided by Nicaraguan authorities of passengers who had been approved for travel.

Similar experiences were reported by travelers who had inadequately followed the new pre-travel procedure. Nicaraguan health authorities strictly enforced the Covid-19 test requirement and even withheld approval, causing travelers to submit new tests with correct specifications and reschedule flights.

Getting in

NPR (9/14/23) complains of a speech by President Daniel Ortega, “only a select group of people were invited to hear the president’s speech in person”—in apparent contrast to free countries, where all presidential addresses are always open to the public.

Peralta recounted his entry through a “remote” border crossing from Honduras, where he got through the immigration checkpoint within “maybe five minutes” and entered Nicaragua: “And that was it. I was in. I was about to walk into one of the most authoritarian countries in the world, and I didn’t get asked a single question.” To his surprise, he found that “everything points to normal…. People are out shopping. They’re going to work, to school. On the Saturday that I was there, the bars were packed!”

Peralta—who at one point described at length his own family’s souring on the Sandinista movement and consequent flight from the country in the 1980s—clearly came in with preconceived notions of what he would find. Barring his own paranoia and his references to the Soviet Union, nothing about his actual experiences offered evidence of authoritarianism.

Life in what NPR (9/14/23) dubbed “a country steeped in fear” is in fact quite similar to other countries of the region that I’ve visited. Young people crammed into arenas to see popular Latino musical artists Christian Nodal, Camilo Echeverry and Olga Tañón in recent months. Bars and nightclubs are popular destinations for students and young people on weekends around the country, as are neighborhood block parties.

Nevertheless, NPR referred to the country as a “dictatorship” five times, “authoritarian” five times and, in the spirit of anti-Communism, linked it to the Soviet Union three times.

“Fear runs so deep that even the president and vice president don’t trust their countrymen enough to hold a real public rally,” Peralta reported. Peralta seemed to base this claim on the very basic security measures taken around the perimeter of a stadium on July 19 in preparation for the official act to commemorate the 44th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution. “Suddenly, a city that had seemed normal now has police officers on every corner,” Peralta dramatically related. He described “checkpoints” around the stadium and told listeners: “It becomes clear that only a select group of people are invited to hear the president’s speech.”

His dire portrayal of an event that he did not attend—but which I did—seemed to falsely suggest that only in an authoritarian country would an event with high-level officials and foreign government representatives have guestlists and other security measures in place.

Contrary to the claim that President Daniel Ortega is unable to hold “real” public events, he presided over multiple public events in the past few weeks, including a police parade, a military parade and a Central American Independence Day parade, which were held in the center of Managua with the attendance of the public. The open events were promoted in advance by major outlets like Canal 6.

The sources

NPR (9/14/23) depicted “supporters…of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega” in a photograph—but did not seem to think it journalistically to speak with any of them.

Though the segment ran 39 minutes long, it didn’t manage to interview a single supporter of the Nicaraguan government. The report relied heavily on perspectives from the exterior, despite the emphasis NPR put on Peralta’s travel to Nicaragua. Peralta interviewed three sources in the United States: an anonymous State Department official; Carolina Jiménez Sandoval of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA); and Félix Maradiaga, a former prisoner now released to the United States, who declared he “had always been anti-Sandinista and anti-socialist.”

Maradiaga was convicted of inciting foreign interference against Nicaragua’s sovereignty; he had appeared before a US congressional subcommittee in June to seek support for overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. His wife, Berta Valle, who is also Nicaraguan, was part of self-styled Venezuelan “president” Juan Guaidó’s delegation to Joe Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” in 2021.

A FAIR report (6/4/20) called WOLA “the Western media’s go-to source for confirming the US elite’s regime change groupthink.” Jiménez Sandoval is WOLA’s president, and her bio touts her record of “addressing grave crimes under international law in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

In Nicaragua, the only sources given airtime were located in Masaya, which saw a concentration of violence during the destabilizing protests of 2018. One was a woman Peralta described as “one of the organizers” of 2018 protests there; the other was a hospital employee who, among other things, talked about the lack of supplies at the hospital, and how he is “expected to stay quiet” about them. He also said that “the economic situation is tough.” Neither he nor Peralta offer the crucial context of US sanctions on Nicaragua that are precisely intended to worsen the economic situation.

Despite being in Masaya, Peralta’s report managed to omit the stories of victims whose lives were forever changed, such as Reynaldo Urbina, whom I interviewed, among many others.

No pro-government sources were featured or even mentioned in the NPR segment, aside from two short soundbites of public speeches from President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo.

The piece aired two days after affluent opposition figure Gioconda Belli, who since 1990 has lived in the United States and, more recently, Spain, took to NPR’s airwaves on Latino USA. She and other opposition celebrities have been featured in spreads in Western corporate media, which has platformed several former allies of the Sandinistas’ FSLN party; the party’s more than 2 million members and leadership have not gotten similar exposure.

Belli broke with the FSLN in the 1980s, around the same time that she married NPR‘s Central America correspondent. A member of WOLA’s Honorary Council, she has been interviewed numerous times on NPR since the early ’90s, and is frequently referred to as a leftist when she’s criticizing the governments of Cuba and Venezuela.

Confirmation bias

NicaNotes (3/23/23) published the open letter to the UN Human Rights Council, along with photos of buildings said to have been set on fire by the opposition.

In his 15 years with NPR, Peralta was based in Africa before specializing in Latin America. At the height of the corporate media’s interest in Venezuela, as the Trump administration was tightening sanctions and threatening military intervention, Peralta sought interviews with opponents of the government rather than supporters. Following NPR’s airing of his latest report, he sat down for an interview with the Nicaraguan opposition outlet Confidencial, run by Carlos Chamorro, the son of Nicaragua’s neoliberal former President Violeta Chamorro.

Peralta had previously framed arrests and convictions as a “crackdown” on “political opponents” and dissent, without reference to the charges brought against them based on the country’s laws. The reporting downplays the armed attacks carried out in 2018, and the crimes of money laundering and treason committed by individuals who received large sums of money from the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. These entities poured money into Nicaraguan NGOs after President Daniel Ortega was voted back into office in 2007, with the specific aim of training people to oppose his government and create the conditions for regime change (FAIR.org, 6/16/22).

The accusations of a “political crisis” and “constant turmoil” echo claims made in an update from the UN high commissioner for Human Rights that was presented before the UN Human Rights Council on September 12.

Professor Alfred de Zayas, a former UN independent expert on international order, objected to a similar UN report on Nicaragua released in March, as the lead signer of a statement that called the report “fatally flawed.” De Zayas and other critics called the human rights report “biased” and an “abuse of the UN system,” saying it

completely fails to address the enormous damage done to ordinary people, businesses, and public services by violent protesters in 2018, perpetuating a gross injustice against the human rights of thousands of Nicaraguans.

What’s missing

An account in MR Online (7/15/23) describes how violent opposition tactics eroded support for the opposition, as anti-government roadblocks “not only strangled the country’s transport system but became the scene of intimidation, robberies, rape, kidnappings and murder.”

NPR‘s report omits two important issues in understanding Nicaragua today. First, violent protests in 2018, funded by the US in an effort to overthrow the government, killed a large number of innocent civilians and police. The majority of the arrests and charges that were widely reported by corporate press during and following 2018 were either directly related to acts of violence carried out during the months of terror, or to subsequent investigations that revealed the foreign financing of the anti-government riots. As is standard in US establishment media, NPR showed no interest in the victims of the violent coup efforts, only in the plight of the people who were punished for allegedly instigating them.

Second, as mentioned above, coercive sanctions have been rolled out by the US, Canada and the EU in recent years. The latest US sanctions bill currently before Congress would extend the US government’s ability to impose economic punishment until 2028. Such sanctions were the subject of protest in the Havana Declaration of the G77 + China Summit, for their “devastating impacts on the realization of human rights, including the right to development and the right to food.”

At the end of Peralta’s report, back in the studio, he told host Ayesha Rascoe that the government has “closed the Jesuit University in Managua,” without mentioning that it was being reopened as a public and tuition-free institution. Classes are set to commence soon at the recently nationalized Casimiro Sotelo University, in a country whose hallmark policy since the Sandinistas returned to office in 2007 has been expansion of access to and improvement of public education at all levels.

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 6, 2023

Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft

      CounterSpin231006.mp3

This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.”

There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them.

We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

      CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests.

      CounterSpin231006Banter.mp3

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 5, 2023

Why Are Michael Lewis—and 60 Minutes—Hyping SBF?

Detail from a New York Times photograph (10/2/23) of Sam Bankman-Fried leaving a courthouse earlier this year. (photo: Hiroko Masuike)

Sam Bankman-Fried, once a celebrity of the cryptocurrency market, is now on trial for fraud and money-laundering charges related to the collapse of his billion-dollar crypto exchange, FTX, and its associated firm, Alameda.

The accusations, according to the New York Times (10/2/23), have made Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) emerge “as a symbol of the unrestrained hubris and shady deal-making” that have defined the cryptocurrency business. The trial will “offer a window into the Wild West–style financial engineering that fueled crypto’s growth,” which “lured millions of inexperienced investors, many of whom lost their savings when the market crashed.”

A year ago (FAIR.org, 11/19/22), I wrote that the business media, leading up to Bankman-Fried’s arrest, failed in their duty to scrutinize FTX and question what was going on behind its public relations. Far too often, he was lionized as a quirky visionary, a big-hearted man willing to funnel his profits into philanthropy and political progress. Bankman-Fried’s boy genius image collapsed with his arrest, but the business media’s credibility took a hit, too.

SBF’s chief defender

60 Minutes (10/1/22): “Michael Lewis has never before written something that dovetails so dramatically with a sensationalized news event.”

Today, acclaimed business writer Michael Lewis has stepped into the role of SBF’s chief defender. He interviewed Bankman-Fried over more than a year for his upcoming book on him, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Wall Street Journal, 10/4/23), and he took to CBS’s 60 Minutes (10/1/22) to tell the world that the accused was simply misunderstood.

“This is not a Ponzi scheme,” he said of FTX, adding:

In this case, they had a great real business. If no one had ever cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customer deposits, they’d still be making tons of money.

Lewis reiterated this point on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes (10/3/23), saying the “alleged crime makes no sense.”

This is the reporting (CoinDesk, 11/2/22) that Michael Lewis dismissed as “aspersions.”

It is true that CoinDesk (11/2/22) obtained documents showing that

Bankman-Fried’s trading giant Alameda rests on a foundation largely made up of a coin that a sister company invented, not an independent asset like a fiat currency or another crypto.

And as the New Yorker (9/25/23) later put it, “The disclosure raised questions about the true value of Alameda’s holdings and about the conflict of interest between the two supposedly independent companies.” This revelation led to doubts about and then a run on the exchange (CoinDesk, 11/10/22; New York Times, 11/14/22).

In essence, Lewis is upset that some parts of the business press and the cryptocurrency investing community were too probing of FTX and Alameda, despite the fact that no one disputes CoinDesk’s findings. As CoinDesk even noted, the exchange’s quick demise spoke to the risks involved in new markets with scant regulation:

The immense scope of this black swan-style event serves as a key reminder of just how rapidly confidence can erode in the parallel financial universe of digital assets—where there are no central banks to bail out the key players—as happened in 2008 when nearly all of Wall Street ran short of liquidity and had to turn to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding.

‘Misappropriating billions’

CoinDesk (11/16/23) compared the FTX/Alameda collusion to the corporate fraud behind Enron.

And even if Lewis genuinely believes the CoinDesk exposure or other players’ doubts about FTX unfairly caused an asset run, that still doesn’t negate the serious criminal activity being alleged. For starters, a Department of Justice press release (12/13/22) states that SBF

perpetrated a scheme to defraud customers of FTX by misappropriating billions of dollars of those customers’ funds. As alleged, the defendant used billions of dollars of FTX customer funds for his personal use, to make investments and millions of dollars of political contributions to federal political candidates and committees, and to repay billions of dollars in loans owed by Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund also founded by the defendant.

The federal government also accuses Bankman-Fried of “conspiring with others to defraud FTX’s lenders ‘by providing false and misleading information to those lenders regarding Alameda Research’s financial condition,’” and alleges that “he conspired with others to make illegal donations to political candidates, using the names of other persons to mask and augment political giving” (CNBC, 12/13/22). The prosecution claims that his wealth and power—highly lauded and accepted at face value in the establishment press until the moment of his collapse—was “built on lies” (Reuters, 10/4/23).

Like anyone, Bankman-Fried is innocent until proven guilty, and has the right to defend himself in court. And it is, of course, an open question if what SBF is accused of engaging in was a Ponzi scheme or mere fraud (Guardian, 12/17/22). In fact, CoinDesk (11/16/23) likens the FTX downfall not necessarily to a Ponzi schemer like Bernie Madoff, but to the shady energy company Enron: “One core similarity is the role of publicly traded, equity-like assets ultimately linked to the performance of the firms themselves,” it wrote; in “both cases, these internal assets flowed between entities that were nominally or even legally separate, but that in fact served the same masters.”

But it’s remarkable for an esteemed business journalist to use one of the country’s most important news programs to declare that everyone except SBF was to blame for a business collapse that had enormous consequences for everyone involved. It’s even weirder to hear a business writer insinuate that critical reporting and asking key questions about the health of a business constituted casting “aspersions.”

‘Effective altruism’

Dylan Matthews (Vox, 12/12/22): “SBF was an inexperienced 25-year-old hedge fund founder who wound up, unsurprisingly, hurting millions of people due to his profound failures of judgment.”

More bizarrely, Lewis went on to say that the world is poorer without SBF at the helm of a cryptocurrency exchange. “A lot of people wanted there to be a Sam,” he said. “There is still a Sam Bankman-Fried–shaped hole in the world that now needs filling. That character would be very useful…. What he wanted to do with the resources.”

One can only imagine that Lewis means SBF’s commitment to “effective altruism” (Vox, 12/12/22), a philosophy that often advocates amassing as much money as possible in order to have more to give away. But Lewis’ declaration here displays the narrow vision the business press has for the world: Society doesn’t need a massive market for internet-based currency, and surely no one needs to profit off such exchanges. Nor can social problems only be addressed by bleeding-heart rich people.

There is a hole in society. But it isn’t another crypto capitalist we need, but a system that taxes the wealthy to fund social programs and to curb the influence of money in our political system. Lewis’ desire for a new SBF is as much a political statement as it is commentary on SBF’s case.

And Lewis’ political naivete came on full display when he told 60 Minutes that SBF came up with an idea to pay Donald Trump not to run for president, an idea that would no doubt delight many liberals. However, putting aside the question of how much Trump ever entertained such a buy-off, the sleazy scheme would likely have no meaningful impact on our politics today. Whether Trump gets the nomination this year or not doesn’t change the fact that his ideas have become firmly rooted in the Republican Party, and living on in the policies of Republican governors around the country.

One has to wonder if SBF’s openness with Lewis inspired Lewis to cross the line into a guest of his source, compromising his vision. Andy Kessler wrote at the Wall Street Journal (10/1/23) that “Lewis spent more than 70 days in the Bahamas” with SBF, where FTX was based, “on a dozen different trips.” “That’s commitment,” Kessler wrote, noting that “Lewis had all access.”

Lewis told the Journal that in his many discussions with SBF, under house confinement at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California (Lewis lives nearby in the East Bay), “nothing he said was untrue.” He added, “If you asked him the right question, you got the answer.”

Judging from both this and the 60 Minutes appearance, Lewis is looking at the FTX and Alameda collapse not with a cold outside eye, but the view of an insider, by SBF’s side.

‘Too much in love with his subjects’

Michael Lewis (60 Minutes, 10/1/22): “The story of Sam’s life is people not understanding him.”

Lewis, a prolific author and a contributor at Vanity Fair, is far from just another business journalist. He is a rare kind of successful writer who can turn business reporting into drama, which has made him rich both via book sales (starting with Liar’s Poker in 1989) and movie deals (The Blind Side, Moneyball, The Big Short).

While his narratives about business and other spheres of life are popular around the world, some wonder if he’s on the other side of career peak. As long ago as 2015, Columbia Journalism Review (1/15) was noting he had been lambasted by critics for “journalistic laziness” and “falling much too in love with his subjects.” The Washington Post (5/5/21) called his pandemic account The Premonition “disappointing” and “murky and unconvincing.”

Then his book The Blind Side, about the adoption of future African-American football star Michael Oher by a wealthy white family, became the subject of a scandal all its own (People, 8/17/23), when Oher revealed that he was never actually adopted, and charged that the idea that he had been was “a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense” (ESPN, 8/14/23).

Personal tragedy also struck: Lewis told 60 Minutes (10/1/23) that he almost stopped writing after his daughter, along with her boyfriend, was killed in a car accident (AP, 5/29/21).

Lewis’ appearance on 60 Minutes is an extension of the press enthusiasm for SBF that FAIR documented before the fall of FTX. Lewis is entranced at SBF’s friendships with celebrities, his charismatic shabbiness, his lofty ambitions, and his obsession with news and information. All that creates an image of an adorable whiz kid rocking the stodgy world of Wall Street. But it really is the media’s job to look behind that and see him for who he really is: a competent adult who ran a business accused of serious wrongdoing.

But worst of all, Lewis’ praise for Bankman-Fried is the kind of business advocacy that not only takes the boss’ defense at face value, but doesn’t have any kind of empathy or interest in the victims of FTX’s collapse (Atlantic, 1/30/23; Fortune, 10/1/23). Skeptics of cryptocurrency often disregard cryptocurrency investors as dupes or small-time scammers. On 60 Minutes, Lewis dismissed the ethical implications of Bankman-Fried’s machinations: “What you’re doing is possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas.”

However, many people are attracted to cryptocurrency investing for the same reason people invest in other risky ventures that promise great reward: Wages are not keeping up with the cost of living, and thus people are desperate to find other ways to attain financial security (Business Insider, 1/12/20). Though some people come to crypto exchanges because they want a Lamborghini, others just want to create a nest egg for retirement, start a college fund or pay off their mortgage.

Whether it’s the subprime crisis of 2008 or the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, all financial collapses create victims, very real people whose lives are upended by greedy financial barons. We should be hearing more about the victims of financial collapse on venues like 60 Minutes.

The post Why Are Michael Lewis—and <i>60 Minutes</i>—Hyping SBF? appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 4, 2023

US Sanctions Missing From Coverage of Russia’s Cuban Soldiers

When Cubans began telling stories of being lured into Russia with promises of jobs and instead being sent to the front lines in Ukraine, many US media outlets seemed eager to report the story. But what might on the surface seem like journalism to expose the plight of the powerless was really just another exercise in bolstering official US narratives and whitewashing US complicity.

Reports emerged that Cuban recruits were promised citizenship and a monthly salary far higher than what most Cubans could ever hope for in their native country, in exchange for what some described as support work for the Russian military—things like construction or driving. Once they arrived in Russia, however, they found themselves sent to the front lines.

The Cuban government blamed a “human trafficking network,” and soon announced that they had arrested 17 people in connection with the scheme. FAIR could find no news reports confirming whether those involved in luring the Cubans were working for Russian or Cuban authorities.

US corporate media were happy to comment on Russia’s military weakness, speculate about the role of the Cuban government and paint a picture of bleak economic conditions in Cuba. But they were almost entirely silent on one of the key causes of that bleakness, which made the victims so susceptible in the first place: the US embargo on Cuba, ongoing now for more than 60 years and ramped up under Trump.

‘To bring about hunger’

Reuters (5/8/18): “The United States has lost nearly all international support for the embargo since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

The US imposed an embargo on Cuba in 1962 and has steadfastly maintained it since then, in a failed attempt to overthrow the Communist government. President Barack Obama began normalizing relations with Cuba in 2016, but Donald Trump sharply reversed course. He issued a series of new sanctions over the course of his presidency, including curtailing remittances from relatives in the US, barring US tourism and designating Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism—which, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, helped send Cuba’s economy into a tailspin. Despite campaign promises to restore diplomatic relations, Joe Biden has largely maintained Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.

The purpose of the embargo is precisely to inflict economic hardship on civilians so that they rise up against the government. As the State Department argued in 1960, recognizing that the Castro government had the support of the Cuban people, “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Therefore, “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba” and “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

While the embargo has been a miserable failure at its end goal of regime change, it has been much more effective at its intermediary goals of hunger and desperation. In 2018, the UN estimated that the sanctions had cost the country $130 billion (Reuters, 5/8/18); last year Cuba reported that number had risen to $154 billion (UN, 11/3/22). With the tightened Trump-era sanctions and the added impact of the pandemic, Cuba’s economy has nosedived in recent years, crucial context for a story of the exploitation of Cuban citizens.

Economy ‘devastated’—but why?

This New York Times piece (9/5/23) doesn’t mention the economic hardships that would make enticement by Russia effective, but does quote a Miami-based analyst who says that it is “not possible” that the Cuban government would not know about efforts to traffic its citizens.

The New York Times‘ first story (9/5/23) didn’t mention economic conditions in Cuba, let alone the US embargo. In a followup article, the Times (9/8/23) again elided any US role, but did note that “US officials have said that Russia has struggled to attract recruits for its war effort.”

The Washington Post (9/5/23) offered a more in-depth report that included the tale of two victims of the scheme who had been featured on Telemundo (9/3/23). The Post quoted one: “Given the situation in Cuba, we didn’t think twice.” The article then offered an explanation of Cuba’s “crippled” economy, pointing to a list of causes: “the coronavirus pandemic, lackluster tourism, US punitive action and inefficient policies.”

What “punitive action” might that be, and for what? The Post didn’t bother to clarify.

NPR‘s Morning Edition (9/6/23) chose to cover the story by interviewing Chris Simmons, described as “an expert in Cuban spycraft.” Simmons, who has not worked in counterintelligence in over ten years, and did not claim to have any inside information about the case at hand, nevertheless asserted confidently that “this is just the latest in a long series of criminal enterprises run by the Cuban government.” The Cuban government denies involvement, but aside from noting that perfunctorily, anchor Leila Fadel did not challenge Simmons’ speculation or offer any other perspectives.

Fadel asked if Cuba needs Russia, noting that Cuba “is a relatively isolated place. It’s one of the few remaining Communist countries. It’s facing its worst economic crisis in decades.” Simmons responded: “They absolutely do need Russia. The Cuban economy remains devastated, and the Russians have been their biggest and most generous supporter.” But neither Fadel nor Simmons made any effort to explain why Cuba is isolated, or why its economy is devastated.

A report on NPR‘s website (9/5/23) was more circumspect, offering a brief summary of the facts without “expert” commentary like that of Simmons, but provided only this explanation of the economic context:

Cuba is facing the worst economic crisis in decades. The government is struggling to keep the lights on and Cubans are struggling to keep food on their tables. If already bad relations with the United States deteriorate, things could get worse.

‘Aligned against its foreign policies’

A Newsweek headline (9/5/23) describes Cuba as “America’s backyard.”

Newsweek published an article (9/5/23) explaining that “Russian forces have been badly mauled in 18 months of combat in Ukraine.” Its only mention of US sanctions came in an explanation of Cuba/Russia relations: “Both have been under US sanctions for years and have generally aligned against its foreign policies in the Americas and beyond.”

A second Newsweek piece (9/8/23) cited Luis Fleischman of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research as its only expert source. Fleischman suggested that the Cuban government was involved, and argued that “Cuba’s economy is in dire straits, mainly because Venezuela’s oil bonanza is over.”

Fleischman did mention sanctions, but without reference to who imposed them or how they impact civilians, only the state: “Remember, both countries are under sanctions,” he said. “In other words, there is no reason for both countries to break such a convenient relationship.” Newsweek offered no further context.

In fact, FAIR only found two explicit references in US news coverage to the US embargo as a cause of economic crisis in Cuba. A CNN.com article (9/19/23), headlined “Why Cubans Are Fighting for Russia in Ukraine,” explained in its second paragraph:

Across much of Cuba, the economy has ground to a standstill as the Communist-run island reels from a sharp drop in tourism, spiking inflation and renewed US sanctions.

Time (9/18/23) reported that “Cuba has been crippled by a 60-year US embargo, island-wide blackouts and a hunger crisis.” It gave a sense of why these recruits were such easy targets:

The recruits’ social-media accounts underscore the hardship of their lives in Cuba, with posts begging for medicine and selling everything from cell phone parts to rationed meat on black market sites. “With the money you’ll pay me,” one Cuban man said in a video on WhatsApp addressed to Russian recruiters, “if I’m killed or not, at least I’ll be able to help my family.”

Time also spent most of its lengthy article attempting to establish the Cuban government’s complicity.

Uncovered denunciations

Meanwhile, when both Cuba and Brazil denounced the US embargo at the UN General Assembly in New York last week, none of those outlets saw fit to mention it.

Not a big enough story? How about when the General Assembly voted for the 30th year in a row to condemn the US embargo, 185–2, with only the US and Israel opposing. (Brazil and Ukraine abstained.) The only one of the above outlets we could find covering the vote was Newsweek (11/5/22).

The US sanctions on Cuba are an act of war, condemned globally and with immense impact on the lives of the Cuban people. US reporting on the plight of Cuban civilians that does not provide that context is little more than state propaganda.

Featured image: A Telemundo report (9/3/23) on Cubans who say they were recruited to Russia’s war effort under false pretenses.

The post US Sanctions Missing From Coverage of Russia’s Cuban Soldiers appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
September 29, 2023

The FCC Restores Its Responsibility to Oversee Corporate Control of Internet

Listeners will know that the FCC has been ineffectual for some time, because it’s been short of full staffing. Big media players torpedoed, with the most scurrilous of means, the nomination of public interest advocate Gigi Sohn, but eventually Biden nominee Anna Gomez was sworn in as fifth commissioner.

In the wake of that, FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel has now announced that the FCC is to be an active player again.

FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel (9/26/23): “Repeal of net neutrality put the agency on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the public.”

At the National Press Club this week, Rosenworcel (9/26/23) said that the FCC will vote on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at its next meeting in mid-October. And they will center the role of Title II, the part of federal communications law that gives the agency the power to even go about overseeing corporate control of the internet: to push against price gouging, anti-privacy moves, access-throttling—the whole range of things that makes people hate their internet service providers, and makes it a less hospitable arena for activism and organizing. That’s before you even get to whether they are allowed to shut off service during crises like Covid.

The FCC, under the sway of corporations and their lobbyists, abandoned that responsibility years ago, under former chair Ajit Pai, appointed by Donald Trump based on his career as a lawyer for Verizon.

With Title II invigorated, the FCC can engage net neutrality rules—which prevent internet service providers from slowing access for those that don’t pony up, and speeding it along for those that do. All of which machinations we as end-users may not be aware of, but that will absolutely affect what we see and know and act on.

The Wall Street Journal (9/26/23) framed the idea that telecom companies should be regulated as something only of concern to “tech giants.”

Net neutrality has always been overwhelmingly supported by the US public. Few wonder anymore whether broadband access is a fundamental right, like water or electricity—or whether you should lose access if you live in an underserved area, rural or urban.

But corporate powers and government enablers have shown they will work very hard to prevent it; remember Ajit Pai pretending that the FCC couldn’t acknowledge the flood of public comments it got because, um… technical sabotage…that turned out to be a brazen lie?

Net neutrality, backed by the FCC’s Title II authorization, is nothing less than the ability to monitor and regulate hugely powerful companies’ control over an essential element of public life—the ability to inform yourself, communicate, participate socially and politically.

In other words, expect pushback, both loud and subtle. We’ve already seen headlines like the Wall Street Journal’s suggestion (9/26/23) that a “Newly Empowered FCC Chair Moves to Rekindle Net Neutrality Fight Between Tech and Telecom Giants.”

Fighting? That’s bad. And who cares about a fight between tech and telecom giants?

There is something very important for all of us at stake here. So look out for coverage that suggests otherwise.

The post The FCC Restores Its Responsibility to Oversee Corporate Control of Internet appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 29, 2023

‘These Are Demands for the Whole Working Class’

Janine Jackson interviewed Labor Notes‘ Lisa Xu about the auto workers’ strike for the September 22, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230922Xu.mp3

Janine Jackson: Listeners will know that members of United Auto Workers are on strike against the Big 3 automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). Some elite media seemed to be doing their darnedest to fit this unprecedented action into old terms.

ABC (9/22/23)

ABC nightly news delivered a textbook segment on the UAW “threatening” to expand its walkout, the things they’re “demanding,” how the strike is already “disrupting” operations and “idling” workers, and closing on the note that economists are already looking for potential impacts on consumers, and if the action goes on, “ar prices will rise.”

It’s a stuffy script, and it’s not really working. Many people, inside and outside of organized labor, feel something different in the air. More and more question the cartoonish gap between everyday people working hard but still struggling to survive, and company owners asserting that profit rates prove they’ve earned their annual millions and the yachts that come with them.

So all eyes are on the auto workers strike for many reasons. All the more reason to think critically about the way the news media report it to us.

Lisa Xu is an organizer with Labor Notes. She joins us now by phone from Detroit. Welcome to CounterSpin, Lisa Xu.

Lisa Xu: Hi. Thank you for having me.

JJ: I want to talk about the feelings and energy and the people in this story, because it’s so crucial. But let’s start, though, with some backdrop for the strike.

It’s not the whole UAW out at this point; it’s a smaller group of workers in a few places. What, in general terms, or specific terms, is the UAW calling for? And, I mean, the whole union isn’t out, but they’re all ready to go, right? What’s going on here?

Sit-down strikers, Flint, Michigan, 1937. (photo: Sheldon Dick/Wikimedia)

LX: Yeah, no, thank you for that question. The UAW is calling this a “stand-up strike,” in reference to the 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strikes, which really led to a massive expansion of the UAW over the next decade.

And the strategy is, as you described, currently about 13,000 members across three plants—one each at Ford, Stellantis and GM—are out. The stand-up strike strategy is going to consist of escalation from there on out.

UAW President Shawn Fain, I think, has said this will just be dependent on what happens at the bargaining table. And they’ve announced that tomorrow is another deadline, and they’re going to assess how well bargaining is going. If it’s not going well, they’re going to call out more workers. That deadline is noon tomorrow.

In terms of what workers are asking for, this is really about clawing back concessions going back decades, and reversing a major decline in the standard of living for auto workers, a decline that many American workers have seen.

You’ve probably heard about the demand for big wage increases, same as the wage increases the CEOs have given themselves, an end to wage and benefit tiers, and the restoration of pensions and retiree healthcare to those hired after 2007. (That’s a major inequality existing within the UAW.) End to the long-term abuse of temps, a shorter work week, 40 hours of pay for 32 hours of work, and job security and protections against plant closure. And there’s more, too, on the table, but that’s some of the bigger ones.

JJ: A number of those things are absolutely resonant, I’m sure, for people in any industry. The idea of a shorter work week, the idea of getting back concessions—things that workers gave up because they were told that companies were suffering, and now that companies are not suffering, somehow it’s not time to give them back. I think a lot of those things have meaning outside of the auto industry.

But I wanted to just lift up one thing, which is, the UAW is really resisting the idea of tiered workers, the idea that there are temporary workers who were just on a lower tier, where they’re never going to get pensions or benefits. And I point to that, just because it seems so refreshing to see a union actively trying to get all workers to identify together. That seems to me like a great thing for building worker solidarity.

LX: Absolutely. And that’s why workers across the Big 3, whether they’re the so-called legacy workers, the first-tier workers, or they’re second-tier, they all recognize how much damage this has done to solidarity within the union. So there is a push across all these tiers to end tiers.

And like you said, tiers are an issue affecting many other workplaces in the US. We saw the Teamsters end a particularly pernicious form of tiers among UPS drivers, earlier this summer. And, yeah, it is really a big deal for exactly what you said, the strength of the union.

JJ: Another element, and this could be a whole show, but let’s just touch on it: I know that another piece of what the union is saying is, yes, they recognize there’s a transition to electric vehicles. They want that transition not to come at the cost of good jobs. And labor vs. the environment is such a perennial for news media. I wonder if you could just speak briefly to the idea that union auto workers are afraid of the future, somehow, or that they’re somehow opposed to adjustments to climate disruption.

LX: To get into the media critique portion of it, that’s kind of a tired narrative, too. I think a lot of UAW auto workers recognize, the writing is on the wall when it comes to the EV transition, and now it’s time for everyone pushing the transition to a clean energy economy to live up to everything they’ve been saying about good-paying union jobs. That part of it, they seem to have forgotten about.

I think it’s really as simple as that. It’s just calling out that hypocrisy. You said these would be good jobs, so where’s the action now, right?

JJ: Right. Well, I’m going to bring you back to media in just a second, but I did want to say that you dug into a particular aspect of this in your work that can be kind of invisible, or a little under the radar, which is the fact that the Big 3 also operate—it’s not just manufacturing plants—these after-sales parts distribution centers. And those places, the companies were kind of setting them up for a strike, and you dug into that. What did you learn about these parts distribution centers and their role, and what’s interesting about that?

LX: Yeah, they don’t get talked about very much. It was actually kind of hard to dig up information.

So they’re called “parts distribution facilities,” and that makes you think, oh, they supply parts for assembly plants. But no, it’s actually spare parts for when you need a new door when you get into a car accident, or you just need some kind of accessory.

When the Big 3 is selling them directly to dealerships, before the dealership applies any markups, the Big 3 is actually applying a huge markup. I think this is another site of consumer price-gouging for them. They’ve racked up these massive profits just operating these warehouses, and we think of them as making cars, not turning a profit on selling spare parts. It turns out it’s actually a significant money-maker for them.

An article I wrote, I dug up some statements that a former CEO of GM made about just how high these profit margins are, and how it generates billions of dollars of revenue for GM. And I think it’s the same for the other companies, too.

Labor Notes‘ map of Big 3 worksites.

JJ: Just a sort of tentacle that you only find when you report on it. You highlight the fact that unlike big plants, these distribution centers are often smack in the middle of an urban area. So if they were to go on strike, it would look different. It would be an opportunity for the community to have it really up close and personal that these workers were on strike. I thought that was interesting.

LX: Yeah, so there was a map we published along with this article. I wouldn’t say they’re downtown, but they’re within travel distance from coastal cities that might not think of themselves as being near a Big 3 facility. So, yeah, it’s a way for communities outside of the Midwest to support workers, should they walk out of these facilities.

JJ: Community support, of course, can be key. And here, the media play a role that determines how the story is presented to people who are outside of the industry, maybe people who’ve never been in a union or have personal knowledge of unions, and who might be late to work one day because of a picket line.

So media play a big role in explaining the validity, the importance, the issues at play here. You are also a reporter. What have you made of media coverage of this action? What would you like to see more of, or less of?

Lisa Xu: “The whole thing is designed to make you think anytime workers take action, they’re the ones at fault. They’re the ones causing trouble.” (image: Labor Notes)

LX: Yeah. Well, I’m a new reporter, to be fair. I was an organizer for five years. I’m new to reporting, but I’m bringing that same anger from organizing to some of the media coverage we’re seeing.

Honestly, it’s a little infuriating. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. And you mentioned some of the ways in which, through the rhetoric and the emphasis, the media are implying this is a really bad thing for you, the reader, the listener. But once you dig into that a little bit more, you’re like, wait, who is it actually bad for, right? I’ve been trying to tally up all the bosses’ talking points that journalists and editors have decided to just run with very uncritically, whether they know it or not.

So actually, prior to becoming an organizer, I was an economist. So I come out of this world of analysis that really has a pro-corporate slant, and a lot of people don’t realize that it doesn’t actually all add up; it’s just what they’re taught. And obviously the whole thing is designed to make you think anytime workers take action, they’re the ones at fault. They’re the ones causing trouble.

JJ: I don’t know that it’s a lack of general economic understanding. It does seem to be just the way media slant things, when corporate leaders are able to just say, as in this case, oh, we couldn’t possibly afford to give workers what they’re asking for here. I think one of them said, I forget which one, “That would put us out of business.”

As a reporter, you just type that up and put it out to the world? When we know that, I think it’s $21 billion of profits in the first six months of this year from the Big 3. That just doesn’t add up.

LX: One great thing that’s happening in the media, that I’m sure you probably talked about before, it’s just the wave of unionization among media workers and journalists. So I think there is now more critical thinking out there.

But there are a bunch of business reporters reporting on this too. I mean, come on, just look at the numbers. Do they really think this is true?

And the UAW has been doing a great job of comparing numbers. I actually, before this interview, dug up a chart that Shawn Fain presented on one of his last Facebook Lives, comparing the increase in the Big 3’s North American profits, which went up 65%, this is over the last four years; CEO pay, which went up 40%; stock buybacks, which went up 1,500%. And then you get down to UAW top wage rates—so not even the wage rates for second-tier workers or temps, just the top wage rate—that went up 6%. Labor costs are only 4 to 5% per vehicle, and vehicle prices went up 34%.

There’s a lot of numbers that just go to show you they’re making choices. All corporations are making choices. And then collectively, as a society, we’re making choices about how much, basically, labor’s share of income is supposed to be. And apparently it’s supposed to be very, very low.

JJ: Right. Well, it’s obvious that union activity is up, and we’ve seen reporting on that, but labor energy is also up. And it’s not, I don’t think, just because people are frustrated or frightened, though certainly many of us are, but unions seem to be different now. They’re doing different things. They’re engaging workers in ways that are new. And I think folks are recognizing that. Am I misreading that? It seems to me that something new is happening.

LX: I think if you’re on the ground and you’re talking to workers, especially in these unions that are undergoing this revitalization, I think it’s definitely real. And I mean, you see it in new organizing too, right, with new unions that are being formed. It’s real.

And I think the really exciting thing about the Big 3 strike is among union leadership, the new reform leadership, and the rank and file, I think there’s a feeling that they’re making history, not just within the context of the UAW, which would already be enormous, but labor history. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. I think people really feel like there’s something in the air, and especially with the ambition of demands that are being raised, these are demands for the whole working class.

Everyone knows it was unions that won the eight-hour workday. Now it’s going to be up to unions to bring that back, because people don’t have eight-hour workdays anymore.

So I think it’s absolutely real. And sometimes that’s hard to capture in the numbers. Sometimes it’s clearest if you’re on the shop floor, or you’re an organizer talking to a lot of workers every day,

Jacobin (9/16/23)

JJ: A writer for Labor Notes, Luis Feliz Leon, I heard say some time ago, “Solidarity needs to be experienced to be believed.” I thought that was a really compelling comment.

LX: No, I think that’s a great comment. I went through that myself, being in the union, that converted me. And yeah, I do think it’s hard for people who’ve never had that experience of workplace organizing to have faith in how transformative that can be, right?

So Shawn Fain, for people who haven’t heard it yet, gave this amazing speech on Facebook Live—Jacobin did a transcript of it; this was last Wednesday on the eve of the strike—just talking about the role of faith, asking union members to take that leap of faith and stand up in this historic moment. And it was just a very moving speech.

He’s Christian, and he cited scripture from the Bible, and I’m not, but it was just very, very moving. And I think it is about, I think once you’ve had that transformative experience, you understand what workers can accomplish when they’re organized.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Lisa Xu, organizer and reporter with Labor Notes. They’re online at LaborNotes.org. Lisa Xu, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LX: Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you.

The post ‘These Are Demands for the Whole Working Class’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 29, 2023

Bloomberg Muddies Climate Protests’ Vital Message: End Fossil Fuels

Tens of thousands of climate protesters gathered in Midtown Manhattan on September 17, kicking off Climate Week as President Joe Biden arrived in New York to speak at the United Nations General Assembly. These protests—some of the biggest since before Covid—had a pointed message, largely directed at Biden himself: End fossil fuels.

The Biden administration has passed historic climate legislation through the Inflation Reduction Act, which seeks to create clean energy jobs, increase investments in renewables and build infrastructure to support resilience in communities most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

At the same time, however, oil and gas production are still expanding. This year, the US exported a record amount of petroleum, and was also the biggest liquefied natural gas exporter in the world. The Biden administration also greenlit the ConocoPhillips Willow Project, a new oil drilling venture in Alaska (Vox, 9/8/23).

Meanwhile, the scientific consensus is straightforward—and bleak. We are at imminent risk of surpassing the internationally agreed-upon threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2023 report warned that global emissions need to be cut by almost half by 2030 if we are to meet this goal. The planet’s current 1.1°C increase has already led to more frequent and deadly severe weather across the globe.

The urgency with which we need to bring down emissions is clear. Still, news media muddy the waters, encouraging public apathy by focusing on protesters’ tactics at the expense of their demands.

Bloomberg missing the point

Bloomberg (9/16/23): “Marches—even quite large ones—don’t always get widespread media coverage.”

Previewing the demonstrations, Bloomberg’s “The Big Climate March Returns in an Era of Soup-Throwing Protests” (9/16/23) spent more time analyzing the psychology behind different forms of demonstration than the dire consequences if protesters’ demands are not met.

The piece compared traditional climate marches to more disruptive, but still nonviolent direct action tactics utilized by groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Blockade Australia in recent years. Across the world, demonstrators have taken to blocking roads and airport runways, overrunning billionaire-frequented Hamptons destinations, deflating SUV tires, gluing themselves to various surfaces—including the US Open tennis court—and, yes, throwing tomato soup on (glass-protected) Van Gogh paintings.

The piece outlines why many activists feel they need to engage in more extreme demonstrations to gain more attention—by citing a problem it is complicit in:

The rise of disruptive protests is, in part, a reaction to the feeling among some activists that traditional mass actions aren’t effective. Marches—even quite large ones—don’t always get widespread media coverage, limiting their usefulness in garnering attention.

The piece demonstrates just how to perpetuate that problem, offering only one paragraph on protesters’ demands, in the form of a quote from local youth activist Bree Campbell:

“We’re marching to make clear to President Biden that we expect him to uphold his campaign promise for him to be the climate president that we elected,” says Campbell. Those taking part want him “to stop approving fossil fuel projects and leases, phase out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters, and to declare a climate emergency so that he could halt crude oil exports and investments in fossil fuel projects abroad.”

Beyond this statement, there is no acknowledgement of the reality that these demands are not only urgent, but in line with scientific consensus and the UN’s Paris Agreement. Instead, Bloomberg moves on to questioning mass protest marches’ ability to change policy, relying on the expertise of cognitive psychologist Colin Davis, a protest researcher at Britain’s University of Bristol.

“We had 2 million people on the streets [in the UK in 2003], protesting against the invasion of Iraq,” he said. “Obviously, it happened anyway, despite the people coming out against it.”

Davis cited a similar dilemma with Brexit.

The piece would have benefited from some introspection: News media played a crucial role both in disseminating government lies about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that ratcheted up support of the war, and in framing Brexit as a popular anti-establishment rebellion (FAIR.org, 3/22/23, 10/15/21).

Bloomberg spent considerable time analyzing and pathologizing climate activists’ strategies by comparing their movement to the ostensible efficacy of others—including Black militant movements of the 1960s. Yet it spent almost no time explaining the life-threatening conditions that caused activists to develop these strategies in the first place.

Crucial connections

Bloomberg‘s report (9/17/23) on the march ahead of the UN meeting followed the pattern of marginalizing protesters’ demands.

After this pre-event article lamented that large-scale marches often don’t receive enough media coverage, a follow-up piece offered only a short recap, which also did not elaborate on why and how quickly we need to tamp down our fossil fuel use (Bloomberg, 9/17/23).

Despite its point that traditional marches usually garner less media attention, Bloomberg also failed to spell out this crucial connection during a more “disruptive” protest. When the Just Stop Oil protesters threw soup at Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers painting in 2022, the outlet (10/14/22) covered the demonstration in detail, being sure to specify the brand of tomato soup thrown at the painting, and where and when Van Gogh painted it. Yet it did not acknowledge the existence of a climate crisis, or fossil fuels’ central role in it.

Failing to clearly spell out the connection between protesters’ actions and the existential threats behind them leads to the framing of their demonstrations as merely symbolic at best and hysterical at worst. In reality, these protesters’ demand to end fossil fuels is concrete and in line with scientific consensus.

If the media avoid making these clear connections, it won’t matter what tactics protesters use.

The post Bloomberg Muddies Climate Protests’ Vital Message: End Fossil Fuels appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 29, 2023

Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment

      CounterSpin230929.mp3

New York Times (9/27/23)

This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop.

When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.”

Come again?

If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy?

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press.

We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.”

      CounterSpin230929Zunes.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup.

      CounterSpin230929Banter.mp3

The post Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 28, 2023

Both Opposition to and Support for Ukraine Aid May Be Less Than Polls Show

Last month, the Biden administration requested an additional $24 billion to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia. Some Republican leaders are skeptical or outright opposed to new funding, prompting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to urge his fellow legislators, “It’s certainly not the time to go wobbly.” That sentiment, of course, was reinforced by President Joe Biden during Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent visit to the United States.

At first glance, however, support among Republican voters appears to be wobbly already. Late last month, Daily Kos (8/31/23) headlined a story that noted declining support among Republican voters for supporting Ukraine: “McConnell Abandoned by Post-Trump Republican Electorate.” And three recent polls suggest that rank-and-file Republicans are indeed negative toward aid to Ukraine.

But all three polls wildly overstate how engaged Americans, including Republicans, are in this issue. Opposition, as well as support, is probably far lower than what the media tell us.

Polls report GOP opposition

“It’s odd that the party who cheered loudest when Rocky took down Drago in the ’80s is now more reticent to stand up to Russian aggression abroad, but that’s the new reality,” says Fox pollster Daron Shaw (8/17/23).

The most recent poll by CBS/YouGov (9/10/23) finds support for aid to Ukraine among Americans overall, but a decline in support among Republicans since last February.

Overall, 64% of Americans are positive about support for Ukraine—saying the Biden administration is either “handling things as they should be” (38%) or should be doing more (26%). Only 36% say it should be doing less. Among Republicans, 56% say the administration should be doing less.

An earlier poll by Fox (8/17/23) reports similar figures. Overall, 61% of registered voters have positive views about US support for Ukraine—40% who believe the US is giving the right amount of aid, and another 21% who want the US to do even more. Just 36% say the US should be doing less. Among Republicans, 56% believe the US should be doing less, the same figure CBS found.

The most negative results about aid to Ukraine are found in last month’s CNN poll (8/4/23), which reported that a majority of Americans overall believe the US has “done enough to assist Ukraine” (51%) and “should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine in its war with Russia” (55%). Among Republicans, 59% say the US has done enough, and 71% are opposed to additional funding.

Wording makes a difference

When CNN (8/4/23) asks if the US “should do more to stop” Russia, do respondents think that means continuing aid or increasing aid?

So all three polls report a majority of Republicans opposed to additional funding for Ukraine. But two of the polls, by CBS and Fox, find a net positive view of aid to Ukraine among Americans overall, while only CNN finds majority opposition.

The difference between CNN‘s and the other two polls is largely because of CNN’s tendentious wording:

CBS: Do you think the Biden administration should be doing more to help Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, should it be doing less, or is it handling things about as they should be?

Fox: Do you think the United States should be doing more to help Ukraine in its war with Russia, should be doing less, or is the US doing about the right amount to help Ukraine?

CNN: Do you think the United States should do more to stop Russian military actions in Ukraine, or has it already done enough?

(Note: Both CBS and CNN randomly rotated their response options.)

The CNN question gives just two options, compared with three in the other two polls. By itself, that is not a problem. What makes that question tendentious is that it provides a reason not to do more for Ukraine (because the US has “already done enough”), but provides no reason to do more (like, say, “the Russians refuse to stop their aggression”).

Also, the question is somewhat ambiguous: What does it mean for the US to do “more”? Does CNN mean more than the US has been doing, or does it mean to continue to provide aid at the same level? The other two polls make the issue clear—“more” means more than the US is doing now, because the middle option in those two polls (“doing the right amount” and “handling things as they should be,” respectively) essentially says the US should continue providing aid at the level it is currently doing. (The US has given Ukraine $77 billion so far over a year and a half of war, though it’s unclear how many respondents are aware of that.)

Given the problems with the CNN question wording, I’m inclined to discount its results in favor of the other two polls.

An idealized public

Still, even the other two polls have credibility problems. All three describe an idealized citizenry that is utterly at odds with reality. CBS suggests that 100% of Americans/voters have an opinion about the level of aid the US/Biden administration is providing Ukraine. For CNN, the comparable number is 99%. For Fox, 97%.

Such high responsiveness reinforces what two researchers have called the “folklore theory of democracy.” This notion of democracy posits that the vast majority of voters are well-informed and engaged on policy issues, so that when election time comes, they can make a sound judgment as to how well their elected leaders reflect the will of the people.

The reality, of course, is far different. As those authors make clear, the political science literature is replete with studies that describe widespread public ignorance of policy issues, as well as a lack of basic knowledge about the American government.

The illusion of public opinion

So, how did the three polls show virtually all Americans with an opinion on aid to Ukraine? Two major techniques.

First, they ask “forced-choice” questions, which give respondents positive and negative options to choose from, but do not provide an explicit “unsure” or “don’t know” option. Respondents feel obligated to give some answer, regardless of whether they have actually developed any opinion about it.

Second, the respondents are all “performing” for the interviewers. There is an implicit understanding that the respondents are there to answer questions. That is their “job.” If they didn’t want to answer questions, they wouldn’t be taking the poll. If the interviewer (or if the electronic form that respondents fill out online) explicitly offers the option of “no opinion,” then the respondent would feel free to choose that option. But with the forced-choice questions, respondents understand that they are expected to provide an answer.

CNN actually follows up volunteered “no opinion” responses by asking respondents if they “lean” toward one option or the other, thus ensuring they get close to 100% responses.

Unreliable results from unengaged citizens

Seventy-six percent of the respondents whose opinions Pew (6/15/23) cites say they are not paying “very” close attention to the Ukraine War.

How reliable are responses from people who are relatively uninformed? Again, political science research has long answered that question, and the answer is—not very. As one researcher explains:

The consequences of asking uninformed people to state opinions on topics to which they have given little, if any, previous thought are quite predictable: Their opinion statements give every indication of being rough and superficial…. [They] vacillate randomly across repeated interviews of the same people.

How many people are “uninformed”? That’s a bit tricky to measure, because it’s not a simple matter of informed vs. uninformed. People have varying degrees of knowledge. Pollsters avoid the problem by mostly ignoring it. But now and then, pollsters do try to measure how much people know about a given issue.

Last June, for example, a Reuters/Ipsos poll (6/28/23) reported that only 18% of Americans were following stories about the Russian invasion of Ukraine “very closely.” Another 39% said “somewhat closely,” leaving 43% saying not closely (or they didn’t know).

An earlier poll by Pew (6/15/23) also found few people paying particular attention to the war in Ukraine: 9% saying extremely closely and 15% very closely. Another 35% said somewhat closely. Again, 42% said not too, or not at all, closely (or they didn’t know).

Of course, people with little to no knowledge on an issue can still express an opinion about it, and sometimes even feel strongly about it—probably because they see the issue linked to something else they do feel strongly about, like party identification, or perhaps a political leader with whom they closely identify.

Still, if the poll question provides respondents with an explicit “don’t know” option, people who don’t know much about an issue will often choose that. And respondents who express an opinion, but don’t really care one way or the other, are likely to admit it if asked.

Few with strong feelings

We can see this dynamic in a Pew poll last June (6/15/23), which—unlike the three polls described earlier—explicitly provided respondents with a “not sure” option. The result: Overall, 24% chose “not sure,” and another 1% did not respond.

Even that level of participation—75% expressing an opinion—may overstate the public’s level of engagement. It could reflect the “job” that respondents have taken on, to answer poll questions, regardless of how much they’ve really thought about the issue.

Evidence for this idea is found in the question asked of Pew respondents immediately prior to the one about continued aid: “Do you approve or disapprove of the Biden administration’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?” Options allowed respondents to express intensity of opinion.

As the table makes clear, overall just 30% of the respondents express a “strong” opinion: 13% who approve, 17% who disapprove.

Another 44% express mild opinions: 26% approve, 18% disapprove. Another 26% have no opinion.

What to make of the respondents who “somewhat” approve or disapprove?

Andrew Smith and I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 2010, which included research showing that respondents who expressed mild opinions (characterizing their feelings as “not strongly” or “somewhat”) also said in a follow-up question that they would not be “upset” if their opinion did not prevail.

The conclusions we drew were that large numbers of respondents who express an opinion on a “forced-choice” question, like the ones in the CBS, Fox and CNN polls, are not really invested in their own responses. They are simply not engaged enough to care strongly one way or the other.

Using that criterion, the Pew poll suggests that overall, about 7 in 10 Americans are unengaged in the issue of US aid to Ukraine. Among Republicans, about 65%; among Democrats, 72%.

Among people who are engaged, Republicans are clearly quite negative, by a margin of 31% who strongly disapprove to 4% who strongly approve. Engaged Democrats are more positive: 23% strongly approve, while just 5% strongly disapprove.

Had the other three polls also provided an explicit “unsure” option, and then measured intensity of opinion, the percentage of Republicans who strongly disapprove would no doubt be considerably below a majority. By the same token, the percentage of Democrats who approve would also be considerably below a majority. Most people are simply unengaged in this issue.

Performative vs. realistic polls

As a general rule, news media are not fans of polls that reveal how disengaged the public is on most issues. They prefer what I call “performative polls,” because such polls give the illusion of an attentive and informed public that is consistent with our general conception of how US democracy should work.

More importantly, reporting on polls that regularly show large segments of the public unengaged on the issues would call into question the utility of conducting the polls in the first place. Perhaps the media should spend more effort to keep the public informed on current issues than on performative polls that do little to enlighten.

The post Both Opposition to and Support for Ukraine Aid May Be Less Than Polls Show appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 28, 2023

Media’s ‘Sick Man of Europe’ Diagnosis for Germany Needs a Second Opinion

Bloomberg (8/3/23)

Since the 19th century, the epithet “sick man of Europe” has been used to describe European nations undergoing economic hardship or social restlessness—first the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, then Russia in 1917, France in the 1950s, Britain in the 1960s, Italy in the 1970s and Germany in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Corporate media outlets have recently been applying the phrase to Germany again in response to the Central European nation’s negative GDP growth. “Is Germany the Sick Man of Europe?” a Bloomberg video (8/3/23) asked. A CNN article (8/24/23) explained “Why Some Are Calling Germany ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ Once Again.” CNBC (9/4/23) reported, “Germany Is the ‘Sick Man of Europe’—and It’s Causing a Shift to the Right, Top Economist Says.”

But their reporting has consistently ignored what is likely a primary source of Germany’s economic illness: the sabotage on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe.

Blowing up the economy

CNBC (9/4/23)

There is substantial evidence that the “sick” German economy has been significantly impacted by the loss of the pipelines, and it can be verified that the dearth of inexpensive Russian gas is a major contributor to Germany’s succumbing to a recession. Natural gas accounts for around a quarter of Germany’s overall energy mix. In 2021, the year before fighting over Ukraine’s secessionist Donbas region deepened, Germany imported 142 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas, with 52% of it originating from Russia. In the three years leading up to the current conflict, Germany’s natural gas consumption averaged 89 bcm. (Germany was able to reexport much of its imports, reaping the economic benefits from selling the surplus gas to neighboring countries.)

Nord Stream 1 alone was vastly larger than any other Russian gas pipeline to Germany, annually delivering up to 59 bcm. Germany’s Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control does not identify the infrastructural origin of imported gas, so the public remains unaware of the exact volume of gas imports coming from Nord Stream. But Germany lost, at least for the foreseeable future, as much as a staggering 66% of its gas consumption, and 42% of its supply.

“The German economy is the European Union’s greatest economic casualty of the war in Ukraine,” economist Jeffrey Sachs told FAIR:

The destruction of Nord Stream, the loss of trade with Russia and the boomerang effect of US/EU sanctions will weigh very heavily on the German economy, and hence on the EU-wide economy, for years to come.

Scrambling to find replacements for Russian gas, Germany has turned to liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States—and it may even turn to Russia LNG, too. The European Union and the United Kingdom saw their imports of US LNG increase more than threefold in the first four months of 2022 from the previous year. At the same time, Europe is now importing greater quantities of LNG from Russia than ever before. According to a report in Spiegel (9/12/23), “There are many indications that this fuel will ultimately also be burned in Germany.”

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is the largest component of natural gas; an estimated 56,000–155,000 metric tons were released into the atmosphere by the Nord Stream sabotage. If the destruction of the pipeline expedites the transition to green energy, its long-term net impact may be positive. However, there are short-term repercussions.

Russian pipeline gas is more cost-effective than LNG, and using the the latter as an energy source is more harmful to the environment: It requires energy-intensive, low-temperature storage, fuel for transatlantic shipping (in the case of LNG from the US), liquefaction and regasification, and often the construction of LNG terminals (as seen in Germany).

The $19 billion elephant

FAIR.org (10/7/22)

In September 2022, three of the four strands that make up the $19 billion Nord Stream 1 and Nord 2 pipelines were ruptured by underwater explosions. Russia held a 51% stake in the pipelines, with remaining ownership distributed among four Western European nations. Financing for the project came from a Russian energy firm and Western European companies. The pipelines made landfall in Germany, the nation that depended on them the most.

Nord Stream 1 began delivering gas in 2011. Nord Stream 2 never entered service, as its certification was suspended by Germany in February 2022 following Russia’s formal recognition of two breakaway regions in Ukraine. In August 2022, Russia halted gas flows through Nord Stream 1, citing maintenance work. After the sabotage, in October 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to supply gas via the one remaining line of Nord Stream 2 that had not been damaged in the attack; his offer was rebuffed.

Corporate media’s knee-jerk reaction was to blame Russia for what stands as one of the most significant acts of industrial sabotage in history (FAIR.org, 3/3/23, 10/7/22). Yet with emerging evidence suggesting a Western nation—either the US, Ukraine or possibly a combination of the two—as the likely perpetrator, self-appointed media doctors who have dubbed Germany the “sick man of Europe” are declining to associate German economic woes with the $19 billion elephant in the room.

Misdiagnosing the patient

NPR (9/27/22)

Hundreds of corporate media articles have recently focused on Germany, and many of them have characterized the country as the “sick man of Europe.” There is consensus in the reporting that skyrocketing energy costs, particularly the surging price of natural gas, are the primary drivers of inflation, recession and the plummeting industrial output of Europe’s largest economy. But omission of a key source, if not the main source, of the illness appears to be a significant oversight by the corporate press, akin to medical malpractice.

The case of Spiegel is a serious one, especially given the outlet’s recent history of breaking consequential stories about the Nord Stream sabotage. The attack is absent from a 7,000-word article—“Why Germany’s Economy Is Flailing—and What Could Help” (9/7/23)—bylined by no fewer than 11 reporters. The following week, the outlet continued to feign ignorance, posing the question “How Can That Be?” (9/12/23) in reference to Europe’s growing imports of Russian LNG.

NPR has covered the Nord Stream sabotage as well. However, an NPR article (9/27/22) on Germany’s energy crisis immediately following the attack excluded its impact. Published on the very day following the sabotage, NPR’s piece about Germany’s return to coal as a fuel amid the urgency to find alternatives to Russian gas notably neglected to mention the unprecedented attack on both the environment and industry.

“Nord Stream” and “sabotage” are missing words from these Spiegel and NPR reports, as well as from hundreds of articles assessing Germany’s energy crunch (e.g., PBS, 7/19/23). Here the omission is the bombshell news. The unreported constitutes the core of the story, serving as the viral headline that remains unwritten.

What connects the Spiegel pieces and much of NPR’s reporting is a suppression of the specifics of the breaking news. Euphemisms are employed to avoid providing an accurate diagnosis. In the case of Spiegel, the Nord Stream pipelines are rechristened “the Baltic Sea pipelines” and the deliberate act of sabotage is called “failed Russian pipeline gas.” For its part, NPR (12/26/22) found it suitable to bowdlerize the bombed pipelines as “now-defunct.”

Prescription: less rights for workers

CNN (8/24/23)

Having sidelined the sabotage as a major cause of Germany’s economic troubles, many in the corporate press went on to recommend dubious remedies. Take CNN (8/24/23):

One problem—the cost of natural gas—has been particularly acute for its [Germany’s] energy-guzzling manufacturers. European gas prices soared to all-time highs last summer. Although they have fallen steeply in recent months, they are ticking up again as the possibility of strike action at liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants in Australia has raised fears of a global supply crunch.

The “possibility” of a labor strike is scapegoated for the high “cost of natural gas.” The subtext is that workers’ rights, already dangerously widespread and infecting the economy, must be curtailed.

CNN appears to be constraining the wider facts. The outlet defines recession “as two consecutive quarters of declining output.” The data confirming Germany’s fall into recession are based on its GDP performance in the first quarter of 2023. Output, in other words, contracted over the first three months of the year, following a contraction of 0.4% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Both time periods precede the pathogens of organized labor allegedly “ticking up” gas prices and Germany’s recent designation as the “sick man of Europe” (New Statesman, 6/7/23).

This is not the first time FAIR (e.g., 8/10/23, 6/1/23, 9/1/97) has documented the corporate press scapegoating workers’ rights for economic conditions.

Slashing corporate taxes rates are also among the medications recommended in various articles about the “sick man of Europe.” The expertise of the chief economist at Commerzbank was sought by a number of media organizations (e.g., Financial Times, 8/20/23; Deutsche Welle, 8/1/23; Yahoo! Finance 5/25/23). The expert told CNBC (8/24/23) that

Germany needs lower corporate taxes, less red tape, faster approval procedures, more investment in roads, bridges and digital infrastructure, competitive electricity prices and better schools.

Some of those prescribed economic and structural restoratives may very well improve the patient’s economic health. But the articles touting corporate tax cuts as a cure overlook a critical fact: Corporate tax rates in Germany averaged 38.5% from 2001 to 2007, and have hovered at approximately 30% since 2008. How, despite these rates, the German economy managed to become, after 2008, a “powerhouse” and “economic superstar” doesn’t seem a question worth considering.

Too much social spending?

Politico (7/13/23)

Politico (7/13/23), too, seems to have recommended treatment unrelated to the disease:

A big flash point will be social welfare. Germany operates one of the most generous welfare states, with social spending accounting for 27% of the economy last year (compared with 23% in the US). With Berlin under pressure to spend vastly more on defense, the belt-tightening—and the public backlash—has already begun.

A lot to unpack there. Large military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, provide Politico with advertising revenue. Axel Springer, the multibillion-dollar German media company that owns Politico, has a documented history of hostility toward social democracy.

Like the CNBC article, the 3,400-word Politico piece does not contain even one sentence informing readers that “social spending” by the German government has seen a minuscule increase—from 25.5% to 26.7%—over the last quarter-century. Nor are readers told that although social spending in countries such as France and Austria accounts for around 30% of GDP, their economies are being given much cleaner bills of health than Germany’s.

US no model patient

Economist (8/17/23)

The implication is that health would be regained if sickly Germany adopted an economic model more closely resembling that of the United States. But Germany’s economy minister seems to disagree that the German welfare state is a weakness that makes the economy sick.

“At the same time, the German economy retains a host of strengths,” Robert Habeck wrote in the Economist (9/14/23) in response to its August 17 cover story, “Is Germany Once Again the Sick Man of Europe?” “Our social-market economy maintains its traditions of employer-union co-operation and a powerful welfare state,” Habeck declared.

Is Habeck wrong to reject the US model as a cure for the “sick man of Europe”? Nein.

Following the pandemic, life expectancy in many other high-income countries rebounded. But life expectancy in the US, already lower than in peer nations, declined. The US spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined, including China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia. “Among industrial nations, the United States is by far the most top-heavy, with much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1% than any other country,” according to Inequality.org.

Perhaps most damning of all for the US, a country that prides itself on the “American Dream,” is its failure to even crack the top 25 on the list of nations with the highest socioeconomic mobility. Germany is ranked 11th, well ahead of the US.

But the health of the two countries may be more intertwined than initial diagnoses suggest. According to an MSNBC op-ed (7/13/23), “The US also has a lower inflation rate than any other G7 member—it’s not like Biden’s policies are driving up inflation in Germany.” But if the United States, either directly or through proxies, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, it would bear a significant responsibility for the deteriorating condition of the “sick man of Europe”—and it’s going to need a really good medical malpractice defense lawyer, despite what establishment media have told readers.

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September 26, 2023

Scolding Striking Auto Workers in Advance for Wrecking Economy

The New York Times (9/19/23) warns that “the strike could inflict collateral damage that creates frustration and hardship among tens of thousands of nonunion workers.”

The first person quoted in the New York Times’ rundown (9/19/23) on the United Auto Workers strike was a lawyer representing management from Littler Mendelson, the go-to firm for big corporations’ union avoidance.

“Right now, unions are cool,” said Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson. But they “have a risk of not being very cool if you have a five-month strike in LA and an X-month strike in how many other states.”

The article, “Strike Is a High-Stakes Gamble for Autoworkers and the Labor Movement” highlights the “real pitfalls” of a so-called prolonged strike against the big three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (which absorbed Chrysler). “Stand-up” strikes began at limited locations on September 15, and a week later expanded across the country. Without significant progress in negotiations, more workers continue to join the picket line.

The New York Times‘ decision to platform one of the largest union-busting firms in the country, which currently represents management at Starbucks, Apple and Grindr, among others, is in line with other corporate media efforts to uplift CEOs and shareholders, and stoke fears around economic recession, green energy transition and “Bidenomics.”

Blaming Biden

About 13,000 autoworkers walked out in a limited strike at assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio and Missouri at the stroke of midnight on September 14. The workers are asking for a 36% raise in general pay over a span of four years, the end of a tiered system, a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay, and a return of cost-of-living raises.

This strike comes on the tail of what some deemed “the summer of strikes,” following Hollywood writers’ and actors’ historic work stoppage, and the last-minute labor deal that stopped thousands of UPS workers from striking. Meanwhile, public support for unions is at a multi-decade high. This may explain why corporations and their allies are working overtime to make sure unions “aren’t cool.”

A Wall Street Journal op-ed (9/19/23) endorses the CEO of Ford’s claim that “meeting the United Auto Workers’ demands…would drive the company out of business.” The Journal story (2/2/23) it links to to document Ford’s woes projects a $9–11 billion profit for the company for 2023.

As Stephen Miran of the Exxon-funded Manhattan Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal (9/19/23):

Strikes by auto workers, healthcare workers, and Hollywood writers and actors demonstrate that key pillars of President Biden’s economic agenda are bad for American industry.

Politicians like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance took it a step further, blaming the administration and “Biden’s stupid climate mandates” for the strike’s necessity. Bloomberg (9/14/23) bemoaned Biden being left with limited options to avert a strike and called it “a tough juggling act.” Unlike with the rail workers last year, Biden cannot order autoworkers back to work. It seems the media want Biden to be involved in any way they find possible.

While some blame Biden for the strike, or blame him for being unable to immediately fix it, others are ready to condemn union workers for a future Biden loss in 2024. “I worry about the implications for our economy and for President Biden,” wrote Steven Rattner in the New York Times (9/20/23).

Rattner, who is currently managing Michael Bloomberg’s money, was formerly a part of the Obama administration’s auto task force, and was in charge of negotiating the very concessions that helped inflate executive salaries and initiate stock buybacks. Rattner spends 1,000 words fretting about losses to Big Three profits and telling union members to manage expectations, while brushing off the pay gap between workers and executives as par for the course of doing business in America. Meanwhile, the auto industry’s record-breaking profits flow to the salaries of the CEOs of Ford, Stellantis and GM—$21 million, $25 million and $29 million, respectively.

However, as it turns out, workers are on strike to negotiate a fair contract with those CEOs, not Joe Biden. Despite the most pro-union president’s tepid support for autoworkers and calls for them to be fairly compensated, the situation is not what the Wall Street Journal (9/15/23) called “An Auto Strike Made in Washington.”

As union president Shawn Fain rightfully declared, “This battle is not about the president” or the former president. While CNBC (9/18/23) claimed in a headline that Fain “downplays White House involvement in strike talks,” they repeated the basic media propaganda that “the union’s demands would cripple the companies,” uplifting Ford CEO Jim Farley’s statement that his company would have gone bankrupt under the UAW’s current demands. Meanwhile, the Big Three continue to make record-breaking profits, with $21 billion in just the first six months of 2023 and $250 billion over the last 10 years.

‘Billions in damage’

The Hill (9/17/23) failed to note that the “offer” Stellantis made was one the union had turned down before the strike began.

Many articles from corporate media grieve that the UAW members “want a 40% pay increase,” while often obfuscating or neglecting to note that the union wants that over a period of four years (Insider, 8/30/23; Forbes, 9/18/23; Fox, 9/25/23). Some also occasionally float a 46% number, which Jonah Furman of UAW says “comes from compounding, which is management’s way of lying about a reasonable raise.”

The Hill (9/17/23) pounced on the UAW for rejecting a 21% pay increase over 4.5 years, an offer that was notably not new; Furman (Twitter, 9/18/23) clarified that it was not a “fresh offer,” as the union had already responded to it before the strike deadline. Meanwhile, autoworkers’ real wages have fallen 30% over the past 20 years.

Even before the strike began, nearly every outlet cited the labor unrest as something that could “damage the economy” (CNN, 9/16/23), be “painful” for the economy (Wall Street Journal, 9/11/23) or throw the economy, especially in Rust Belt states, into a recession—”Even Brief UAW Strike Seen Causing Billions in US Economic Damage,” read Bloomberg (9/10/23).

A brief UAW strike could reduce US GDP by 0.02%—though that’s not how Bloomberg (9/10/23) chose to report the number.

Bloomberg also reported that a 10-day UAW strike could cost the US economy $5.6 billion. That number, invoked wherever possible, is provided by Anderson Economic Group. As Sarah Lazare noted for the American Prospect (8/23/23), General Motors and Ford are clients of Anderson Economic Group.

The consulting firm also warned that a “Potential UPS Strike Could Be Costliest in a Century.” Further, they published a dubious study asserting that “electric vehicles can be more expensive to fuel,” and released a study in June 2020 that claimed looting during Black Lives Matter protests cost businesses in major cities $400 million, a number picked up by Fox (6/5/20), the New York Post (6/12/20) and others.

To be clear, this $5.6 billion number comes from estimating a 10-day strike of all 143,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) members. Given the stand-up strike strategy, which involves striking a few seemingly random plants at a time, it’s unlikely that all members will be on the picket line anytime soon.

Still, outlets continue to threaten recession, or if they cannot do that, at least mention the strike’s ability to “put pressure on new car prices” (Wall Street Journal, 9/22/23). As the UAW’s Fain noted in a video on September 18, the average price of a new car is up 30% over the past four years. “You think UAW wages are driving up that increase?” he asks. “Think again.”

As the car prices line exemplifies, corporate media love to present the everyday person as a consumer, someone who should be worried about car prices, rather than a worker who should be enthusiastic about labor’s resurgence.

In that vein, while asked on CNN (9/12/23) about the UAW strike damaging the economy, Fain responded:

It’s not that we’re going to wreck the economy. We’re going to wreck their economy, the economy that only works for the billionaire class. It doesn’t work for the working class.

The post Scolding Striking Auto Workers in Advance for Wrecking Economy appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 26, 2023

NPR Report on Depleted Uranium Shells for Ukraine Was a One-Source Dud

In its fundraising promotions, NPR touts shows like Morning Edition as providing listeners a “deeper look” at complicated stories.

Sometimes that is the case, but not this month, in its coverage of an announced decision by the Biden administration to further escalate the violence in Ukraine by supplying that country’s military with controversial depleted uranium (DU) anti-tank shells. Morning Edition (9/8/23) glossed over the reason many nations consider their use an atrocity. In fact, many commercial news organizations did a much better job in reporting in depth on this story.

‘Not nuclear or radioactive’

NPR‘s one source for its story (9/8/23) on depleted uranium (DU) munitions falsely assured listeners that “these are not…radioactive weapons.”

Morning Edition co-host Leila Fadel had one source for the three-and-half-minute report: Togzhan Kassenova, a senior research fellow at SUNY Albany’s Center for Policy Research, whom she introduced as “an expert on nuclear politics.” (The Center describes itself as having “a long and notable history of managing and implementing grants and sponsored programs for the government of the United States, including projects for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Naval Research.”)

Kassenova, responding to questions from Fadel, misrepresented what DU is and what its risks are when used in battle. “Anti-tank rounds with depleted uranium are not nuclear or radioactive,” she claimed, adding without any further detail that “there are some safety implications that need to be kept in mind.”

In fact, as the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website explains, “Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive.” DU is a mix of U-238 and some other, rarer uranium isotopes that are left after the fissionable U-235 used in nuclear bombs and as reactor fuel has been refined out. All uranium isotopes are significant releasers of alpha particles as they decay; in other words, they’re radioactive. These low-energy but relatively large particles, not even mentioned by Kassenova, are essentially helium nuclei, composed of two protons and two neutrons. They can do serious cellular and genetic damage when uranium dust is ingested or inhaled.

Fadel didn’t question her guest’s effort to minimize the risk posed by uranium projectiles, though even the most cursory attempt to research the issue would have disclosed these problems.

‘A serious health risk’

The EPA’s website warns that “if DU is ingested or inhaled, it is a serious health hazard.”

Pentagon apologists for DU weapons typically note that alpha particles are so low-energy they “fail to penetrate the dead layers of cells covering the skin, and can be easily stopped by a sheet of paper.” True enough, but when introduced into the body, where the tiny alpha-particle-emitting particles can become lodged in lung or kidney tissue, they prove to be quite good at killing or damaging adjacent cells.

Critics of DU weapons, whom Fadel only mentioned in passing, explain that it’s not the shiny uranium tip of a DU shell that poses a risk. The risk comes when that shell penetrates tank armor and explodes in the interior at a searing temperature of over 2,000 degrees, reducing the entire vehicle and the soldiers in it to cinders. At that point, the uranium has become uranium oxide dust, and that radioactive dust blankets the target and a wide surrounding area. Given that its constituent isotopes have half-lives ranging from 170,000 to 4.5 billion years, the DU residue will effectively remain there forever, until blown, washed or carted away, or until it migrates down into the water table.

Had Fadel bothered to check with the EPA, instead of just adopting the Pentagon’s self-serving line that DU is no big deal as far as radiation risk is concerned, she’d have learned that the agency’s website states: “If DU is ingested or inhaled it is a serious health risk. Alpha particles directly affect living cells and can cause kidney damage.”

Competitors more complete

Popular Science (9/8/23): “While depleted uranium poses some risk from radiation if ingested, the primary harms come from it being a heavy metal absorbed into a human digestive, circulatory or respiratory system.”

One-source reports on a controversial story like this one—where there is a long-running dispute about the use of a weapon—are lazy journalism, especially for a news organization that touts itself as providing more “depth” in its reports than its more openly commercial competition. (NPR gets 39% of its funding from corporate sponsorship, so it’s a stretch to call it “noncommercial.”)

Some of those competitors, in fact, ran more complete stories on the DU decision than Morning Edition did. The magazine Popular Science (9/8/23), for example, mentioned the EPA’s warnings about DU, even including a link to the agency’s article.

So did Associated Press (9/6/23) in an article by Tara Copp, at least when her article initially appeared on September 6. Unfortunately, Copp said she cut that paragraph in later revisions to make room for other background about DU.

The story by Copp, a former Pentagon correspondent, nonetheless stands out in corporate media coverage, providing a detailed account of where the US has been using DU weapons since Cold War days when the metal was first put into anti-tank shells and some rocket warheads.

She also mentioned reports of deaths, cancer and upsurges in birth defects that have sprung up in places where such weapons have been used in quantity. This information was left out of many other pieces on the Biden decision, including the one run by NPR.

Copp quoted a Russian source, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who called the US decision to supply depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine “very bad news,” and said its use by the US in the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Kosovo) had produced “a galloping rise” in cancers and other illnesses. “The same situation will inevitably await the Ukrainian territories where they will be used,” he added. (His points are backed up by reports in the Lancet—7/8/21—and Declassified UK: 7/13/23.)

Copp followed these claims with Pentagon denials about DU health risks. Its flacks for decades have denied that there is any evidence that the uranium oxide produced by DU weapons when exploded and burned pose cancer or birth-defect risks in impacted communities or among US troops. Given the history of misinformation from US government sources about US military atrocities over the years, it’s bracing to see a Russian source included in a US-based news article, even if that source might not be very convincing to US readers in the current political environment.

While there’s not enough evidence to draw ironclad conclusions, what’s available points to Peskov’s claims about Yugoslavia being at least arguable. Moreover, a 2013 article in Al Jazeera (3/15/13) by US journalist Dahr Jamail, based on data provided by the Iraqi government health department, showed that in Fallujah, where an all-out US destruction of that city of 200,000 people included significant use of DU shells, the cancer rate in Iraq before the two wars on Iraq had been 40 per 100,000, but jumped to 1,600 per 100,000 by 2005.

As Copp also noted, “US troops have questioned whether some of the ailments they now face [such as Gulf War Syndrome] were caused by inhaling or being exposed to fragments after a munition was fired or their tanks were struck, damaging uranium-enhanced armor.”

‘Adds to environmental burden’

Citing the UN Environment Program, the Wall Street Journal (6/13/23) reported that “the metal’s ‘chemical toxicity’ presents the greatest potential danger, and ‘it can cause skin irritation, kidney failure and increase the risks of cancer.’”

In a September 6 article reporting on the Ukraine DU decision, written by Andrew Kramer and Constant Méheut, the New York Times acknowledged some controversy, saying, “Some advocates have expressed concerns that prolonged exposure could cause illness, or that spent ammunition could cause environmental contamination.” However, it dismissively concluded, “The Pentagon says those fears are unfounded.”

The Washington Post’s September 7 article on the depleted uranium weapons, by Adam Taylor, gave a voice to those “activists,” quoting a statement from the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons that called the US decision “self-destructive and deceptive.” The organization added that the new anti-tank weapon “adds to the war-related environmental burden of Ukraine, damaging its legal integrity as victim of aggression and illegal attacks.”

The Wall Street Journal, in a June 13 article disclosing the US was about to approve depleted uranium shells for delivery to Ukraine’s military, highlighted health and environmental concerns in its subhead: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.”

Meanwhile, while Morning Edition host Fadel deserves a raspberry for her one-source, one-sided piece, her guest, research fellow Kassenova, at least should get credit for honesty in stating where her priorities lie. Asked by Fadel what her position was on the US provision of DU weapons, she said:

It is an important practical and symbolic action of support. Ukraine is losing people—both military and civilian—every day. So I think whatever can happen right now should be provided to the extent possible. So I am in support of the provision of these weapons.

Efforts by phone and email to obtain comments from NPR’s Fadel and from the University of Albany’s Kassenova went unanswered.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here (or via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor). 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.

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September 25, 2023

Police Seek a Radio Silence That Would Mute Critics in the Press

As a freelance journalist many years ago, I was walking the streets of Brooklyn, looking for a juicy story, anything that I could get into print. I was coming up empty. So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I had lunch.

Halfway through my Jamaican jerk chicken, I heard several gunshots, and in a flash, a man ran by the restaurant. I threw my money on the table and headed to the scene. When I got there a bystander pointed me toward the spent shells. I looked around and talked to witnesses. As one young man pontificated to me about poverty and unemployment leading to crime, I noticed that the cops weren’t there yet. But a photographer from the Daily News was.

That was because, like any good crime reporter, he was listening to police radio and responding to 911 calls, hoping to catch fresh crime footage, fires and other colorful photos that editors love. He’s not alone. Journalists around the country do this, as does anyone who is simply interested in cops, firefighters and other emergency services. Police scanners aren’t cheap, but they are readily available at many electronics retailers.

Restricting the right to listen in

Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen (Colorado Public Radio, 8/9/19) framed the issue as “public safety versus whether or not somebody can be entertained on a Friday night by listening to police dispatch.”

But today, the right to listen to police radio in real time is under attack. The Baltimore Police Department moved to encrypt its radio communications and implement a 15-minute delay (Baltimore Sun, 6/30/23). “The police department plans to provide the adjusted service on a radio broadcast via Broadcastify, and it will be free of charge,” reported WJZ-TV (7/1/23). This still allows for people to listen in, though not in real time.

But other departments are going further. The police in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California, announced it will move to encryption (KTLA, 9/19/23). The New York Police Department is considering an overall encrypted system as some precincts have switched to new technologies (Gothamist, 7/29/23).

When the Denver Police Department moved to encrypt radio communications, Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition (Colorado Public Radio, 8/8/19) protested the move, saying, “We always need an independent monitor. And that’s what the news media does on the public’s behalf.”

And when journalists protested the Chicago Police Department’s switch to encrypted radio, then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot (WLS-TV, 12/14/22) claimed the scanner access allowed criminals to evade arrest: “It’s about officer safety…. If it’s unencrypted and there’s access, there’s no way to control criminals who are also gonna get access,” who will then “adjust their criminal behavior in response to the information that’s being communicated.”

Tracking police misdeeds

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s Andy Ratto (City Limits, 8/25/23): Listening to police radio “allows reporters and photographers to identify events they can cover in real-time, on location.”

Crime reporting, of course, has always had its problems. On the one hand, covering crime is a public service by offering communities the ability to know about what happens in the streets every night. On the other hand, crime stories can be sensationalized and overhyped, painting crime as a bigger problem than it is, to bolster calls for bigger police budgets and more aggressive policing (FAIR.org, 10/10/18, 6/21/21, 5/6/22, 11/10/22, 12/7/22).

But police scanners are wonderful tools for journalists covering not just crime, but police as an institution of power, especially in their relationship to social justice movements. For example, during Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter uprisings in New York City, the citywide police channels offered play-by-play, block-by-block and arrest-by-arrest narratives of nightly confrontations. But this also gave reporters key insights into general police tactics and strategies.

It also allows for the public to track police misdeeds. For example, Alex Ratto noted at City Limits (8/25/23): “NYPD officers responding to protests were overheard on the radio telling each other to ‘shoot those motherfuckers’ and ‘run them over’” during the BLM protests of 2020. He added:

In 2021, radio traffic captured requests to the NYPD Strategic Response Group (SRG) for assistance with a missing person, which was rejected because the SRG was occupied monitoring a peaceful protest.

Even during the Occupy movement, it was clear the police knew these facts all too well. It was common to hear a commanding officer on the Occupy detail tell a subordinate to switch to a cell phone. The only reason for this was to evade public scrutiny. So it is no surprise that police are developing new communications systems that are meant to operate in the shadows.

In Mountain View, California, one major problem, as one newspaper editor pointed out, was that police are making these changes to radio encryption unilaterally. “The police shouldn’t be making their own policies,” wrote Dave Price, editor of the Palo Alto Daily Post (4/2/21). “They should be invited to provide their opinions about proposed policies, but the final decision should be that of the council members.”

Public deserves to know

Journalists and free speech groups are protesting the moves to hide police conversations from the public. And they should be—not mainly for the sake of getting spicy crime footage for the papers, but because the public deserves to know what police departments do.

Yes, more and more cops use body cameras. But those can be turned off (PBS, 4/15/22). Public records are available, but it takes time and institutional effort to obtain them.

The idea that encryption is necessary because criminals use scanners to evade police is questionable. There is, indeed, documentation showing that sophisticated criminal outfits have sometimes done this (e.g., Rolling Stone, 6/21/11). But in all the media frenzy in the last several years about shoplifting in San Francisco or rising murder rates in Chicago, very little seems to indicate that a prime source of the chaos was an epidemic of too many police scanners in the wrong hands. And even if a petty thief or a gang member did use a radio in the commission of a crime, one still doesn’t stand a chance against the vast police arsenal of street cameras, drones, helicopters and facial recognition technology. That’s hardly enough reason to keep the rest of the public in the dark.

“It’s yet another expansion of police power that’s completely lacking an evidentiary basis,” said Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing. “Where is the evidence of crime rates being affected by people using scanners?” He told FAIR:

It also assumes that there’s no public benefit to transparency. The police will sometimes mobilize an anecdote to make a broad claim without calculating the cost of what they’re proposing. We know that public access to scanner information has revealed abusive police behavior, racist exchanges between police officers, and there is a public value in having access to that.

Some police departments are trying to meet journalists halfway by offering the press access to encrypted communications. But as the Freedom of the Press Foundation (8/9/23) points out, this solution gives to the state enormous control over the information the public is allowed to have. And what constitutes a journalist? A staffer at a major institution who has police-issued credentials? What about a freelancer for an independent outlet? Some of the most important scrutiny of police abuse is done by citizen journalists—who are often not recognized by police as journalists at all (FAIR.org, 3/23/16).

In Chicago and Denver, it might be too late to turn the clock back toward more open police communications. But journalists, free speech advocates and good-government groups should strive to fight this kind of encryption where they can. Vitale, for example, noted that in addition to calling for governance transparency in policing, the public should question this new technology on budgetary reasons as well.

“This is very costly to local governments,” he said of proposed contracts with communications firms. “We need to ask them about their sweetheart contracts.”

Featured image: Police officer using radio in car (Creative Commons photo: Government of Prince Edward Island).

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September 22, 2023

The Baltimore Sun’s Reckoning on Freddie Gray

The Baltimore Sun‘s timeline (4/24/15) of Freddie Gray’s arrest and death relied heavily on the Baltimore Police Department’s narrative.

Five days after Freddie Gray’s death, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) published on its website an interactive slideshow on his arrest, which it updated later that month as the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) added information. Audiences could click through a timeline of details of Gray’s long April 12, 2015, ride in a Baltimore police van, during which police reportedly made six stops before officers said they discovered their prisoner was unconscious. (Gray died on April 19, after a week in a coma.)

The slideshow was almost entirely sourced from the statements given by BPD leaders during press conferences, without independent corroboration. Some of the police claims were repeated as fact, with no attribution. “The driver of the transport van believes that Gray is acting irate in the back,” it stated at one point.

There was one small sign of resistance to the police narrative included in the slideshow: “Multiple witnesses tell the Sun they saw Gray beaten [at the second stop], but police say evidence including an autopsy disputes their accounts.” Here, as elsewhere in its Gray coverage, the Sun implicitly “corrected” witnesses with the police version of events.

The slideshow illustrated the Sun‘s general approach to coverage of Gray’s death, one of the biggest national stories to come out of Baltimore in decades: The narrative was largely shaped by police’s version of events, presented by the paper with limited skepticism or contradictory information. When witness accounts did appear in the Sun, they were usually reduced to brief uncorroborated soundbites.

Public strategically misled

Freddie Gray (1989–2015)

In a new book, They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up, I reveal extensive evidence that undermines most of what the Sun reported in its slideshow timeline. My book is sourced to discovery evidence from the prosecution of six officers that was never presented in court, internal affairs investigation files and more. I reveal that police and prosecutors were aware of physical abuse that happened during the first two stops of Gray’s arrest, but strategically misled the public and manipulated evidence to hide it (as I also reported elsewhere: Appeal, 4/23/20; Daily Beast, 8/19/23).

In particular, I reveal that there were at least nine witnesses who saw police pull Gray out of the van at its second stop at Mount and Baker streets, shackle his ankles, and throw him headfirst back into a narrow compartment in the van. They also saw him becoming silent and motionless at that stop. Many of them reported these details to investigators early on. The medical examiner determined Gray’s fatal injury was caused by headfirst force into a hard surface, but she wasn’t told about these statements.

While the public saw a viral video of Gray screaming while he was loaded into the van during his arrest at the first stop, it heard much less about what happened at Mount and Baker streets. My book takes a look at the role the media played in both enabling the police’s coverup and gaslighting the witnesses.

The Sun was hardly alone in its “police say” approach to this story, but it arguably did the most damage. For one, it invested extensively in its Gray coverage, becoming the paper of record on the case, with its content republished or cited frequently by other outlets (e.g., Chicago Tribune, 4/25/15; CNN, 6/24/15). And much of the Sun’s coverage took a decidedly, and increasingly, pro-police slant.

Making a mystery

The Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) turned Freddie Gray’s death into a “mystery” by marginalizing witnesses who saw Gray physically abused by police.

Twelve days after police seized Gray, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) published “The 45-Minute Mystery of Freddie Gray’s Arrest,” exploring what was known and still unclear about his detention. The article cited three witnesses describing different types of excessive force used against Gray, alongside the police’s narrative. Over the next two years of protests, riots, trials of four officers (with no convictions) and outside investigations, the Sun continued fostering “mystery” and speculation around Gray’s cause of death (epitomized by the Rashomon-like documentary Who Killed Freddie Gray?, co-produced by the Sun and CNN—2/12/16).

Yet Gray’s death was a mystery by design. Police and city leaders began insisting early on that his cause of death could never be known. “It’s clear that what happened happened inside the van,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on April 20, one day after Gray died; she asserted that Gray’s fatal injury must have happened while the van was moving, when there was nobody present to witness it.

Two days later, the Fraternal Order of Police’s attorney made a similar statement: “Our position is, something happened in that van, we just don’t know what.”

There was no evidence to support these claims—police had more evidence of excessive force at that time—but the narrative took hold. The Baltimore Sun (4/23/15) followed those statements by speculating about “rough rides,” a practice where police van drivers harm unseatbelted prisoners by driving erratically.

As city leaders invalidated the claims of witnesses, the Sun stopped highlighting their accounts in its stories, even investigative stories. A May 2015 article (5/20/15) disclosed a cellphone video that showed a few seconds of Gray silent and motionless at Mount and Baker streets, the second stop. “Less is known about what happened…when the van stopped at Baker Street and he was shackled,” the article stated.

Yet the story omitted what witnesses had previously told Sun reporters (4/24/15, 4/24/15) about Gray being beaten and thrown headfirst into the van at that stop. The accompanying video to the May 2015 article said that officers merely “placed him back into the van” at the second stop, which was the police’s narrative.

By the time the autopsy report was leaked to the Sun (6/24/15) in June, revealing that Gray’s fatal injury was caused by headfirst impact into a hard surface—comparable to “those seen in shallow-water diving incidents”—the witness accounts of the second stop were seemingly forgotten.

While the Sun marginalized and ultimately erased witnesses, it did not hesitate to give frequent weight and credibility to the claims of police, even anonymously sourced. The Sun (4/30/15) headlined one such claim in “Gray Suffered Head Injury in Prisoner Van, Sources Familiar With Investigation Say,” with the story reporting:

Baltimore police have found that Freddie Gray suffered a serious head injury inside a prisoner transport wagon with one wound indicating that he struck a protruding bolt in the back of the vehicle, according to sources familiar with the probe.

During the trials, the medical examiner refuted the bolt claim entirely, explaining that she had told detectives on April 28 that the bolt was not consistent with any of Gray’s injuries. Two days later, the bolt story was leaked to the media.

Embedded journalism

CJR (5/5/15) noted that even as the Baltimore Sun was granted “exclusive access” to the BPD Freddie Gray task force, “a coalition of news organizations demanding that police respond to requests for records related to the Gray case was being stonewalled.”

In 1991, former Baltimore Sun journalist and TV writer David Simon published the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which reflected the year he spent “embedded,” as he has often described it (e.g., Simon’s blog, 3/25/12, 7/7/23), in BPD’s homicide unit. Decades later, many of the cases brought forward by the detectives Simon made famous were overturned due to withheld evidence, coerced confessions and other misconduct; a local Innocence Project leader called Homicide “a cautionary tale for embedded journalism” (New York, 1/12/22).

In 2015, Sun journalist Justin George used the same language, “embedded,” to describe the nine days he spent attending meetings of BPD’s Freddie Gray “task force” (e.g., Twitter, 10/9/15). Police set up the task force to investigate the case during the last two weeks of April 2015. While BPD promoted George’s involvement as evidence of its transparency, the department denied even basic evidence, including 911 tapes, to other news outlets (CJR, 5/5/15).

The Sun (5/2/15) published George’s first article on the task force, “Exclusive Look Inside the Freddie Gray Investigation,” on May 2, the day after State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges against six officers. Then it published his four-part series, “Looking for Answers” (10/9/15), in October, ahead of the first trial.

BPD picked the right news outlet to give exclusive access. George’s articles read like a love letter to BPD and an implicit challenge to any serious prosecution of the officers. He described the investigators having to hide their identities, while passing angry residents and a “Fuck the Police” sign:

They all realized the importance of their investigation and that they were part of a pivotal moment in Baltimore history…. Amid the allegations of brutality, they wanted to show that they would leave no stone unturned.

George also set up Mosby’s office, like the protesters, as callous antagonists to the well-intentioned police investigators. He turned up the rhetorical dial in describing Homicide Major Stanley Brandford, “a former Marine who kept his gray hair shorn close” with “a calm demeanor, quick wit and an uncanny ability to memorize facts.” Brandford, George reported, worked late through the night of his birthday, the last night of the task force’s investigation, to prepare files for the State’s Attorney’s Office:

Brandford didn’t finish copying the files until 3:30 a.m. He took the case file home, told his wife what he was about to do, and snapped some photos of the file as a keepsake. The next morning, Brandford placed the thick file in a blue tote bag and returned to police headquarters.…

It was less than a half-mile walk, but he felt the weight of history in his hands. He waited for walk signs before he crossed streets, fearful a car might hit him, scattering hundreds of important documents over the street, he said later.

In a speech the next day, Mosby described the files Brandford delivered as “information we already had.” George did not include this statement in his reporting—undercutting as it did the “weight of history” in the anecdote.

Dramatizing a locker search

The Baltimore Sun produced a dramatic video of the search of Officer Caesar Goodson’s locker—a search that turned up nothing notable.

The online version of George’s four-part series includes several highly produced videos following Lamar Howard, a chatty, well-dressed detective having a busy couple of days. He hands out fliers to people in the street and stops by a school to collect security footage.

The video also shows Howard participating in a raid on the locker of the van driver, Officer Caesar Goodson, on April 28. (The case files show that BPD was seeking to pin liability on Goodson from early on; Goodson is cast in a cloud of suspicion throughout George’s articles.) As papers and clothes are removed from Goodson’s locker, Howard looks toward the camera and shakes his head in dismay.

The Sun’s video editors added stirring music and artful stills and jump cuts to its videos. The camera zooms in on big bolt cutters forcing open the lock on Goodson’s locker. It then cuts dramatically to a close-up of a broken lock on the ground.

Nothing of note was ever found in Goodson’s locker. But the Sun invested its multi-media budget in doing PR for BPD.

Case files show that, by the end of the two-week task force, investigators had collected statements from a dozen witnesses describing Gray being tased, beaten, kicked, forcefully restrained and thrown headfirst into the van. None of George’s stories included any reference to these witness accounts.

George does cite Detective Howard arriving at a conclusion about Gray’s death that seemingly left the case unsolved for BPD: “‘Whatever happened,’ Howard said, ‘happened in the van.’” It was the same claim made by the mayor before the task force ever met.

Ignoring evidence

The Baltimore Sun (12/21/17) published texts messages from police officers it described as “candid, even vulnerable.”

In 2016, the Sun was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for its Freddie Gray coverage. Yet as more evidence in the case emerged over the years that followed, the news outlet neglected to update the public on it. (Until 2022, when the nonprofit Baltimore Banner launched, the Sun was the only major news outlet in the city.)

In 2017, BPD finally released files from the Gray investigation to the Sun (12/20/17) and other news outlets, including nine binders of paperwork and six sets of photos. While police withheld a lot of evidence, the binders still offered a gold mine. They included a transcript of the statement of the lieutenant involved in Gray’s arrest, which was never played in court and incriminates him in a coverup story; an alternate map of the van’s route that investigators were considering while promoting their official narrative publicly; dispatch reports that undermined the police narrative of when officers called for a medic; hospital photos showing marks on Gray’s body indicating excessive force; and more.

The Sun only reported on the files in one article (12/21/17), which covers some of the officers’ text messages. Reporter Kevin Rector described the text messages as “candid, even vulnerable.” He recounted the officers denying ever harming Gray and discussing the pressures they felt from so much “anti-police sentiment.” The article did not mention that, in the same text conversations, the officers discussed that they should be careful what they texted to each other.

In 2015, George wrote that the task force investigators had left “no stone unturned.” By 2017, the Baltimore Sun didn’t change that narrative by looking closely at any of the investigators’ work.

The Sun continued to overlook new evidence in Gray’s death in 2020, when I published an article in the Appeal (4/23/20) that contained embedded audio and video files never released to the public. These included the statements witnesses gave to investigators starting from hours after the arrest, photographic and other evidence of excessive force, and evidence of the officers developing their first-day coverup story around their knowledge of what happened at the second stop.

One Baltimore Sun reporter, Justin Fenton (4/27/20), tweeted out the Appeal article, indicating that he had at least reviewed the new evidence. A few months later, Fenton co-wrote an article (7/16/20) revisiting the Freddie Gray story in light of how Gov. Larry Hogan discussed it in his new memoir. The article gave no indication of new evidence in the case, while it perpetuated old narratives of a vague mystery:

[Hogan] writes that the cause of the man’s injuries and death is “in dispute.” But he offers just two possibilities: either the injuries were the result of “a tragic, unforeseeable accident,” or officers purposely gave Gray a “rough ride.” Could it have been something else? Hogan leaves out the possibility of anything in between, such as negligence on the part of officers in handling Gray’s transport.

In keeping with the Sun’s legacy in covering the Gray case, Fenton left off the accounts of more than a dozen witnesses who saw Gray abused by police and thrown headfirst into the van, the exact kind of mechanism that the autopsy report claimed caused his “shallow-water diving accident” type of injury.

The Baltimore Sun’s seemingly stubborn refusal to share specific new evidence in Baltimore’s best-known and reported story in at least a decade is perhaps more of a mystery than how Gray was killed by police. Whatever the Sun’s reasoning, the effect has been to support police and other officials in hiding facts behind a veil of endless speculation.

Parts of this story were adapted from Justine Barron’s book They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up (Arcade, 2023).

Featured image: Detail from the cover of They Killed Freddie Gray.

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