Israel “shot at and killed civilians, some of whom (including children) were holding makeshift white flags,” according to the UN report (CNN, 9/17/25). “Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.”
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a report on September 16 that charged Israeli authorities and security forces with having committed, and continuing to commit, acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The 72-page report, replete with 495 footnotes, was compiled by senior independent rights investigators appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Specifically, the report concludes that Israel is responsible for committing four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely:
(i) killing members of the group;
(ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
(iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
This report brings the UN into line with leading human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Oxfam, all of whom have explicitly labeled Israel’s crimes in Gaza genocidal. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) also recently passed a resolution stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.
The corporate press relayed the IAGS resolution to its readers and viewers with varying degrees of emphasis and efficacy. Writing for FAIR (9/4/25), Saurav Sarkar highlighted the fact that the New York Times (9/1/25) “buried the news in the 31st paragraph of a story headlined ‘Israel’s Push for a Permanent Gaza Deal May Mean a Longer War, Experts Say.’”
Fox News (9/17/25) spun the UN report on Israeli genocide as an anti-UN story.
Corporate coverage of the United Nation’s latest report was also of varying seriousness. The New YorkTimes (9/17/25) decided that it was appropriate to relegate the headline that “Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, UN Inquiry Says” to page A8 of its print edition. Granted, the UN finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was mentioned on the front page, only under the heading “Israeli Ground Forces Push Into Gaza City, Forcing Many to Flee: Assault Deepens a Humanitarian Crisis.”
ABC (9/16/25) similarly treated the UN report as a footnote, referring to it in the final moments of a minute-and-15-second report on the assault on Gaza. Fox News (9/17/25) covered the news in the course of rebuking the UN, going so far as to put the label of “genocide” in quotes. While the Wall Street Journal (9/16/25) included the most recent genocide allegations as a subhead, the only mention we could find on MSNBC‘s website (9/18/25) came in an opinion piece headlined “The New Gaza City Offensive Is a Disaster. Trump Is Shrugging.”
The Washington Post (9/16/25) ran a piece on its website about the UN declaration, but did not find it worth a spot in its print edition.
Some corporate outlets, such as CNN (9/17/25) and Time (9/16/25), have given more appropriate emphasis to the news that the world’s preeminent governing body has officially labeled what is happening in Gaza genocide, offering dedicated articles.
‘Help spread the Israeli narrative’
Jerusalem Post (9/15/25): “At a time when Israel faces growing isolation around the world, the largest-ever delegation of US lawmakers, representing all 50 states, arrived in Israel.”
On the same day the UN released its report, approximately 250 US state legislators, representing all 50 states and both parties, were in Israel for a “50 States, One Israel” conference sponsored by the Israeli government. The Jerusalem Post (9/15/25) characterized it as “the largest-ever delegation of US lawmakers” to Israel.
According to ethics disclosures reported in the Boston Herald (9/14/25), Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Alan Silvia’s trip to Israel for the conference cost $6,500. The Herald said Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would “reimburse, waive or pay for travel expenses, though it was unclear what portion of the costs the government planned to cover.”
Quoting Rep. Ilana Rubel (D-Idaho), Boise State Public Radio (9/17/25) reported that no Idaho taxpayer funds were used to send any of five Idaho state legislatures to the conference.
The Oregon Capital Insider (9/18/25) reported that Rep. Emily McIntire (R-Ore.) “said in an email from Israel that traveling to the country has always been a dream for her, and the trip has only solidified her support for Israel.”
In this connection, the Times of Israel (9/7/25) was open about the purposes of the conference:
The ministry stresses the [“50 States, One Israel”] delegation’s strategic importance, noting that state legislators often influence anti-Israel bills, such as those supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Israel hopes the visitors will help block hostile legislation at the state level and promote initiatives combating antisemitism and strengthening US/Israel ties.
The visit was previously announced as part of a broader campaign launched last month to host some 400 delegations involving over 5,000 participants by year’s end, “to help spread the Israeli narrative in international media,” according to the ministry.
Mondoweiss (9/25/25): “’50 States, One Israel’ occurred amid growing international solidarity against the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Israel’s further isolation on the world stage.”
Alert readers may have noticed that this article has only cited local, independent and Israeli sources about the “50 States, One Israel” conference. (See also Columbus Dispatch, 9/17/25; Georgia Public Broadcasting, 9/15/25; Mondoweiss, 9/25/25.)
At the time of this writing, the “50 States, One Israel” conference is conspicuously absent from all existing reporting on Israel in the national US corporate media. Not one major US outlet has covered the largest delegation of US state legislators to Israel. This is a startling act of omission on the part of the corporate media in the United States, and it speaks to the indispensability of local, not-for-profit, independent news.
Given that half of US voters believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 8/25/25), it is surely in the interest of the public to know if, when, why and that their local representatives were in Israel networking with parties to what the UN has labeled a genocide.
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Tim Karr about media capitulation for the September 19, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Even listeners who don’t track the business part of the media business will know that Disney‘s ABC has suspended, in their language “indefinitely,” the late-night talk show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, declaring the comedian’s comments about MAGA responses to the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk so unacceptable as to warrant silencing.
A search for the reasons a journalistic outlet would make such a decision could start with the response to it. Donald Trump said, “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” And new FCC chair Brendan Carr thanked Nexstar Media Group, which owns and operates many ABC stations, and had promised to preempt Kimmel, for “doing the right thing.”
So Trump and the head of a media conglomerate and the head of the federal agency charged with advancing the public interest in media just happened to share a very specific understanding of what the “right thing” is when it comes to censoring political views. But that’s not quite the whole story.
Joining us now to talk about what is neither starting nor ending with Jimmy Kimmel is Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tim Karr.
Tim Karr: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
JJ: Jimmy Kimmel talked about right wingers trying to “characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” and doing everything they can to “score political points from it.” FCC chair Brendan Carr called that the “sickest conduct possible.”
So right there, we can just sit with that for a second. A Fox host called for unhoused people to be given lethal injections—“just kill ‘em,” Brian Kilmeade said—but that didn’t amount to actionably “sick” conduct. So what does is failing to praise a person who said—well, actually, you’re not supposed to say what Charlie Kirk actually said, because that in itself is somehow unfair to his legacy, and in fact will put a target on you.
We’re obviously in the topsy-turvy here, rhetorically, where recounting someone’s hateful speech is hateful speech, because when he said it, it was God’s merciful love, or a hyper-intelligent debating technique, or whatever it is they come up with tomorrow. But it’s all the more reason to keep our own heads on straight, and to address what’s happening, which clearly this is just one piece of.
So what, concretely, has happened here? How should we understand it?
TK: All of the headlines of the past week have dealt with the death of Charlie Kirk, and—at least for the part of the story that you and I are particularly interested in—the media’s response to that. And there has been a concerted effort, across mainstream media outlets, to kind of canonize, to literally whitewash Charlie Kirk’s history, so that some of the horrible things that he has said, and he has said many horrible things, are no longer referenced.
And obviously, we have this incident, we have this response. We have now the story of ABC deciding to let Jimmy Kimmel go, or at least to suspend his programming. And what it is, is part of a larger pattern. What we’ve been doing at Free Press, through the Media Capitulation Index, is looking at the largest media companies, 35 large media companies, and measuring the degree to which they have capitulated to President Trump.
And this is all part of a project by the Trump administration to basically control the message, to control the media. And they have been more effective in this administration than he was in his first administration, of figuring out where those pressure points are.
And those pressure points are often with massive media corporations that have business before government. They’re seeking approval of a merger, as is the case with Nexstar and TEGNA, as was the case for Paramount.
And in order to get onto the government’s good side, they have to capitulate. They have to do whatever the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, tells them to do, and whatever the White House tells them to do.
So while what we’re seeing is one outrageous incident, I think people need to understand it’s part of a pattern, an extortionate pattern, where the government, the White House, is shaking down media owners in order to get them to follow the Trump agenda.
JJ: Some folks might think “extortion” is a heavy word, but FCC chair Carr said:
We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
This is not several steps away from extortion. “You are looking for a merger, you’re looking for beneficial federal policy, and we as a federal agency want you to change your tune. So, you know, what’s gonna happen?”
That’s not how policy and lawmaking are meant to work.
TK: Well, no, Carr’s language feels like it comes straight out of The Godfather, right? It’s like, you can either work with us, or you can work against us. And while he has been taking a victory lap—this is Chairman Carr at the FCC—every time one of these companies capitulates, there are bigger questions about whether the FCC should be in the business of doing this. Obviously, there are First Amendment restrictions against government interference in editorial content.
Tim Karr: “Unfortunately, the companies that have the freedom to report on it aren’t willing to take up their constitutional right, and speak truth to power.”
It’s a First Amendment story. And, unfortunately, the companies that have the freedom to report on it aren’t willing to take up their constitutional right, and speak truth to power—in this case, speak out against this extortion that’s happening at the hands of Brendan Carr and the Trump White House.
JJ: It’s so dispiriting, and not to stay at the level of language, but the twisting of language, and elite media’s resistance to untwisting it, rather than just saying, “Well, some say, others differ,” is just galling. I mean, Carr said:
We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. If there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their license in to the FCC.
It’s a very—you could say “creative,” you could say “weaponized”—use of the term “public interest,” isn’t it?
TK: Yes. The public interest, as far as the Federal Communications Commission is concerned, is largely that the agency, when it’s doling out broadcast licenses—we all own the public airwaves, and the agency hands out licenses—is to promote—this is one of the founding principles of the FCC—is to promote diversity (and that’s become a loaded term), localism and competition.
And what they’ve done, claiming it to be in the public interest, is they’ve rooted out diversity within these companies. And already media companies are largely owned by wealthy white male individuals. But they’ve also, through the approval of mergers, they’ve gotten rid of competition.
And they turned their back on localism. As you merge local news companies, local television stations, local radio stations, you get these economies of scale, where they use syndicated content, rather than local reporting, to cover the news program for these many stations that they now own.
JJ: So it’s important to understand how structure affects content. Sometimes when we talk about “ownership,” it sounds abstract, because people are thinking about what they saw on the television last night. But this is where these things connect. And this is why an understanding of media concentration, media consolidation—this is where it meets the idea of, if you don’t want to see folks fired for not appropriately eulogizing Charlie Kirk, this is why you need to understand who owns your local station.
TK: Yes. And the problem is that many of these owners are billionaires who have massive corporate empires. You look at the owner of the Washington Post, for example: Jeff Bezos also has a company called Blue Origin, which is in space exploration. And they have bids in for billions of dollars worth of government contracts, contracts from NASA, essentially, to help put US spaceships into orbit.
So when you have these massive corporations, you also have massive conflicts of interest. And someone like Jeff Bezos has clearly demonstrated he’s more interested in the bottom line, in his profits, than he is in the principles behind the First Amendment. So he has manipulated the Washington Post in ways that allow him to wrest editorial control from a lot of the journalists who work there.
JJ: It matters, again, very much how the news media that we still rely on cast this fight that we’re in, and cast this situation that we’re in, and we don’t really see an independent press fighting valiantly against moneyed interests and state power. And if we don’t cast the fight in the way that the fight really is, then people get confused about what’s happening, and what meaningful intervention might look like. So I just want to ask you, what would good journalism—and I know it’s out there, I know it’s happening—what does it include, what does it exclude, that we need?
TK: So as I mentioned earlier, when we did the Media Capitulation Index at Free Press, we looked at the 35 largest media companies, and judged their level of independence versus compliance, and in the worst case, acting as pure propagandists. What we found is that size does matter, but in the wrong ways.
These companies are too big not to fail. That is, when you get to a certain size, a media company like Paramount or Disney becomes so entangled with government, because they have so many competing interests, that they fail in their mission to act as the Fourth Estate, as a check against the powerful, and speaking truth to abuses by politicians and billionaires and others.
But as you get smaller, you’re finding more and more local, independent, many times noncommercial outlets that are doing good journalism, because they don’t have these corporate overlords who are making decisions based on their bank accounts.
JJ: Right. And folks should look out for those, and find ways to contribute at that level.
Also, I know that Free Press is saying, “Call your ABC affiliate about…”—if we come back to the Kimmel firing, and I understand that people might think that that’s not so meaningful, but talking back to big media is still a muscle that we need to exercise to get it strong.
TK: Yeah. I think, one, you need to shame these media outlets that are doing such a poor job of protecting our democracy. But there are also other things you can do in public policy.
The FCC, which is unfortunately under Chairman Carr at the moment, makes a number of important decisions about the shape of our media, about how much consolidation they will allow. Members of Congress, obviously, are very involved in these policies as well. So in addition to going directly to the source—the media company—I think it’s incumbent on people to be aware of these structures, the policies that have created the media system that we have today, and also for people to understand that they have some agency in changing those policies.
That’s the work that we’ve done here at Free Press, is we’ve brought a public voice. We brought the real public interest back into these debates over the future of our media, and now, more than ever, is an opportunity for people to speak out.
JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Tim Karr. He’s senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net. Tim Karr, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This same headline the BBC (9/18/25) used could run nearly every day.
The Israeli military unleashed a large wave of air strikes on densely populated towns in South Lebanon on Thursday, September 18—although you’d never know it from the Western corporate media, who have increasingly lost interest in reporting on Israel’s unceasing war on its northern neighbor. This proceeds unabated in spite of a ceasefire, brokered by the United States and France, that ostensibly took hold last November. Prior to Thursday’s strikes, area residents were given an hour to evacuate.
The BBC (9/18/25) was one of the few corporate outlets that managed to find a bit of space for these events, under the headline, “Israeli Air Strikes Hit Southern Lebanon.” The outlet noted that
an Israeli military spokesman said the targets were infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah and in response to the group’s attempts to re-establish activities in the area. He provided no evidence.
The piece also explained that Israel “has carried out air strikes on people and places it says are linked to Hezbollah almost every day, despite a deal that ended the war with the group in November.”
Reuters (9/18/25) managed an even shorter writeup—and took Israel’s word for it in the headline: “Israel Attacks Hezbollah Targets in South Lebanon.”
No casualties were reported in these particular attacks, but the fiery spectacle naturally sent a whole lot of people fleeing in terrorized panic. The fact that such terrorism by the state of Israel transpires “almost every day” is perhaps part of the reason the media have largely relegated it to the realm of non-news.
Another part of the reason might be that outlets are too busy serving as apologists (FAIR.org,4/11/25, 4/25/25, 6/6/25) for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the nearby Gaza Strip, which Israel launched in October 2023, and which has thus far officially killed more than 65,000 Palestinians, including 20,000 children—although this is likely a grave underestimate.
‘Along the border’
US Ambassador Elizabeth Richard (Baffler, 8/19/25) said the new embassy sends a “strong message” to Lebanon that “we intend to continue the spirit of cooperation and partnership that has defined our journey together for 200 years.”
It was the momentum of this very genocide—and the accompanying astronomical increase in America’s already-astronomical financial and military assistance to Israel—that spurred Israel to once again go after Lebanon (pardon, “Hezbollah infrastructure”). Between October 2023 and November 2024, Israel killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon and injured nearly 17,000 (Al Jazeera, 8/7/25).
In the seven months following the “ceasefire” agreement, another 250 people were killed, as the New York Times (7/9/25) acknowledged in one of its sporadic reports on Israel’s “near-daily strikes,” while also acknowledging that the Israelis had “held onto five positions along the border in violation of the agreement.” Had the paper wanted to be precise, it might have specified that these five positions are not simply “along the border,” but rather entirely within Lebanese territory.
Speaking of occupying Lebanese territory, it bears mentioning that the US is currently wrapping up construction of a gigantic fortress in the hills overlooking Beirut, which will soon serve as the country’s new embassy. It “dwarfs any government facility in Lebanon,” as observed by Lebanese journalist Habib Battah in an article for MERIP (4/10/24).
Boasting a trapezoidal swimming pool and buffed marble courtyard, the “19-structure ziggurat” also comprises a “labyrinth of megalithic blast walls emerging from deep excavation pits.” In other words, it’s the perfect setting for the US to continue strong-arming Lebanon into disarming Hezbollah, which, in addition to being one of Israel’s pet nemeses, has long been a thorn in the side of US empire, complicating America’s pursuit of regional hegemony.
And while Lebanese President Joseph Aoun is fully on board with the disarmament plan and the handing over of Hezbollah’s weapons to the Lebanese army, he warned in the aftermath of Thursday’s air strikes that the “silence of the states sponsoring the ceasefire agreement is a dangerous failure that encourages these attacks.” It is hardly a stretch to add that media silence similarly encourages such aggression, adding an extra layer to the impunity Israel already knows so well.
Given that Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanese history that has proved capable of defending the country from Israeli predations, pretending that Israel isn’t continuously bombing Lebanon during a “ceasefire” also seems like a pretty good way of denying that there is any further need for Hezbollah. The Lebanese army, for its part, has not once managed to protect the nation from its bellicose neighbor to the south—a failure directly related to the US’s longtime “security cooperation” with Lebanon’s armed forces.
When corporate media outlets do find themselves obliged to document Israeli strikes on Lebanon, this is done in typically decontextualized fashion. Hezbollah are generally understood to be the “bad guys”; rarely is it mentioned that the group owes its very existence to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, greenlit by the US, that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, and occurred in the context of a brutal 22-year Israeli occupation of South Lebanon.
‘Governments have been largely silent’
Given the scant coverage of Israeli attacks in the region, following the IDF’s X account can be informative—if you understand that when it says “military targets…responsible for distributing propaganda messages in the media and psychological terror,” it means “journalists” (CPJ, 9/19/25).
On Sunday, September 21, there was a relative flurry of corporate media activity after reports emerged that four of the five people killed in an Israeli drone strike on the South Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil—three of whom were children—were US citizens. The four got top billing, for example, in the CNN headline “Four US Citizens Killed, Including Three Children, in Israeli Strike on Lebanon, Says Lebanese Government,” with the fifth, non-American victim banished to the text of the article (9/21/25). CNN has now updated the headline as follows: “Five Killed in Israeli Strike on Lebanon, But Claim Some Were US Citizens Is Being Disputed.”
Indeed, the frequent selectivity of media coverage means it is sometimes easier to keep up with Israel’s activities in Lebanon by checking the Israeli military’s English-language X account—although the content must first be translated from Israel-speak about “terrorists,” “precision strikes” and so forth.
On Thursday, the same day as the underreported attacks on South Lebanon—and one year and one day after Israel detonated personal electronic devices across the country in an unprecedented terrorist attack, killing 12 and wounding thousands—the army’s X account broadcast another attack on eastern Lebanon that was unreported by the corporate media.
The next day, Friday, there was so much news out of Lebanon that the Xpost required bullet points, including one registering that “a Hezbollah ‘Radwan Force’ terrorist was eliminated in Tebnine, southern Lebanon.”
Bullet points were incidentally also necessitated the previous week when Israel slaughtered 31 journalists in air strikes on Yemen—another of the no fewer than six countries that Israel managed to attack in the span of 72 hours. The Xversion of this particular event began by claiming that the Israelis had “struck military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime in the areas of Sanaa and Al Jawf in Yemen.”
As the Washington Post (9/19/25) noted, the Israeli army “did not respond to a request for evidence of military activity at the site” where the journalists were struck. But why bother presenting evidence when you are never, ever held accountable? Even the Post found it worth remarking that “governments have been largely silent on the Israeli strike.”
‘Raising fears for truce’
The New York Times (7/9/25) expresses “fear for truce” that it reports has been violated by Israel on a “near-daily” basis—but puts the onus on Hezbollah to disarm “amid fears of a wider war.”
As for intermittent media silence on Lebanon, one effect of this is to normalize Israel’s unending war on the country. And yet sometimes it does have to be talked about at length, as in the aforementioned New York Times article (7/9/25) acknowledging Israel’s “near-daily strikes” that ran under the headline “Israel Launches New Ground Incursion in Lebanon, Raising Fears for Truce.” No kidding.
This article was occasioned by the visit to Beirut of US special envoy Tom Barrack, who was set to receive the Lebanese government’s response to the “road map” to Hezbollah’s disarmament. The Times reported: “Just hours before Mr. Barrack’s visit, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon,” while the “announcement of renewed Israeli ground operations came shortly after” his arrival. Following his meeting with President Aoun, Barrack nonetheless declared himself “unbelievably satisfied” with Lebanon’s response to the disarmament plan.
Fast forward to September 18 and the Reuters (9/18/25) nod to the South Lebanon air strikes, which includes this detail:
The Lebanese army warned on Thursday that Israeli attacks and violations risked hampering its deployment in the south, and could block the implementation of its plan to end Hezbollah’s armed presence south of the Litani River.
Which makes one wonder if perhaps an end to the war on Lebanon isn’t what Israel wants at all.
This week on CounterSpin: The St. Louis Post-Dispatchreports new rules from St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer about building data centers in the city, basically calling on builders to address their impact: “Will they support artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency mining? How much energy and water will they consume? How many permanent jobs will they provide? How will they limit pollution and noise?”
The questions might sound weird to people who don’t understand that something so vaguely named as a “data center” is actually a physical thing in real neighborhoods affecting real people. Mayor Spencer says, “We want to be open for business…. But we do want to be thoughtful in the regulation that we’re putting forward.”
That’s a rule we could use reporters to follow, but it’s a safe bet that many people relying solely on the press don’t understand what’s involved materially, much less what’s at stake, with what the Post-Dispatch describes as “an industry that is at once driving development and prompting backlash across the country.”
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, is a new report from the group MediaJustice. They keep an eye on developments in media and technology, and try to center conversations about the inequities around them in the voices of communities most harmed. We spoke with Jai Dulani from Media Justice, and with Vivek Bharathan from the No Desert Data Center Coalition in Tucson, Arizona.
Also on the show: While media were seeing who to fire for their insufficient worship of a racist, a Fox host called for killing homeless people, said oopsie, and went right back to his job.
News media are comfortable talking about killing unhoused people, in large part because they never talk with them as human beings, or about homelessness as something that could happen to anyone. We learned from Keith McHenry last summer; he’s an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. We’ll hear part of our conversation with him this week on CounterSpin.
New York Times headline writers (9/22/25) localized a nationwide protest, and got to use one of their favorite verbs—“clash.”
Marching through streets and blocking access to trains, highways and docks, tens of thousands of Italians called for solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza on Monday during a one-day general strike marked by dozens of demonstrations.
So read the first line of a New York Times item (9/22/25) on massive protests in Italy.
Given a lead like that, you might think that the Times’ online item on the protests and strikes in Italy would deserve a prominent place on its website. But if you’ve followed their coverage of Palestine, and action like strikes more broadly, you’d be unsurprised to learn that this story about grassroots opposition to genocide was buried in a stream of updates on high-level diplomatic negotiations around Palestinian statehood (New York Times, 9/22/25).
By way of contrast, at the same time, the Times home page was promoting threeseparatestories on the Trump administration’s attempt to link autism to Tylenol, and a feature on whether reptiles have moods—no doubt important stories, but perhaps less so than tens of thousands of people going on strike and in protest against genocide.
At least the Times did cover the Italian mass mobilization; there was only a smattering of online coverage among US corporate media outlets. While much of the rest of the world treated it as a significant story (Al Jazeera, 9/22/25; Reuters, 9/22/25; Guardian, 9/22/25), CNN (9/22/25) ran a 43-second video segment. NBC News (9/22/25) similarly had a 27-second video segment online. The Associated Press (9/22/25) ran a roughly 500-word story.
Common Dreams‘ Brett Wilkins (9/22/25): “Italian labor unions led a massive 24-hour general strike on Monday to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in dozens of cities across Italy.”
With most major corporate sources in the US abdicating their responsibility to cover this story, that AP story was carried in small outlets in the US that either don’t have the budget or the inclination to have a reporter based in Italy (Washington Times, 9/22/25; Times West-Virginian, 9/22/25; Daily Corinthian, 9/22/25).
The other major source for small outlets was a story by the Agence France-Presse (Yahoo, 9/22/25), which was carried in outlets like the High Point (N.C.) Enterprise (9/22/25), El Paso Inc. (9/22/25) and Redwood (Calif.) News (9/22/25).
That’s all US readers who relied on corporate media would have to go on to learn about the tens of thousands on strike and in protest in Italy. (Followers of independent US media would be better informed—Middle East Eye, 9/22/24; Common Dreams, 9/22/24; Drop Site via X, 9/22/24.) Perhaps it’s not surprising that the story got so little coverage, given that it combined two of corporate media’s least-favorite subjects: solidarity with Palestine and ordinary people working together to try to change the world.
NBC News (9/20/25): “Journalists who cover the Defense Department at the Pentagon can no longer gather or report information, even if it is unclassified, unless it’s been authorized for release by the government.”
The Trump administration has said it will require Pentagon reporters to “pledge they won’t gather any information—even unclassified—that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey,” the Washington Post (9/19/25) reported. It added that even being in possession of “confidential or unauthorized information, under the new rules, would be grounds for a journalist’s press pass to be revoked.”
The National Press Club (NBC, 9/20/25) called the rules “a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the US military.’” Even right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe (The Hill, 9/20/25) came out against the restrictions, saying the US government “should not be asking us to obey.”
Other Trump loyalists stood with the government decision. “For too long, the halls of the Pentagon have been treated like a playground for journalists hungry for gossip, leaks and half-truths,” long-time Republican activist Ken Blackwell said on Facebook (9/20/25). He added that “reporters have strutted around the building like they owned it.”
The authoritarian impulse
James Risen (Intercept, 1/3/18): ” The Obama administration used my case to destroy the legal underpinnings of the reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit…. That will make it easier for Donald Trump and the presidents who come after him to conduct an even more draconian assault on press freedom in the United States.”
The US government has always been aggressive when it comes to undermining the press’s ability to obtain government information, especially when it pertains to national security. The pooling system for frontline correspondents in the first US war against Iraq in 1990–91 has long been considered one of the most draconian acts of wartime censorship in recent US imperial memory. The US under the elder President George Bush regularly detained press who dared to report on the war independently and without the restraint of government minders (New York Times,2/12/91; Human Rights Watch, 2/27/91).
This authoritarian impulse only accelerated in the post-9/11 age (Extra!, 9/11). The Justice Department under then-President Barack Obama obtained “two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press,” AP (5/13/13) reported, in an apparent “investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.”
Former New York Times journalist James Risen (Intercept, 1/3/18) documented his ordeal with the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, which took legal action against him to force him to release sources:
My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.
Full-throttle attack
Donald Trump (USA Today, 9/18/25): “They give me only bad publicity or press…. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
The new Trump directive transcends this already anti-democratic tradition of suppressing national security and military information, and takes the nation into new authoritarian and absurd territory.
For one thing, telling Pentagon reporters to avoid unreleased information is like telling a fish to avoid water. Recall that top Trump administration officials accidentally includedAtlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal chat about an attack on Yemen. To quote Mark Wahlberg from The Departed, “Unfortunately, this shithole has more fuckin’ leaks than the Iraqi navy.”
Now the Pentagon is saying it will only credential reporters if they promise to be stenographers for the department’s press team, regurgitating press releases and spokesperson talking points, and avoid independent interviews and investigations. This is happening as the White House has iced out reporters from the AP for not relabeling an international body of water at the president’s directive (FAIR.org, 2/18/25), while bringing administration sycophants like Brian Glenn and Tim Pool into the presidential press herd.
Journalist access is only one piece of the Trump administration’s full-throttle attack on the free press. The president “said overwhelming negative coverage of him by television networks should be grounds for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke broadcast licenses” (USA Today, 9/18/25). He threatened ABC’s Jon Karl, saying the attorney general will “probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly” (Deadline, 9/16/25). More television and online new outlets are coming under the ownership umbrella of Trump allies (FAIR.org, 9/19/25).
Imperial bellicosity
Independent (7/15/25): “Trump’s airstrikes in Yemen have reportedly killed as many civilians within the eight-week bombing campaign as in the previous two decades of US attacks targeting militants in the country.”
It is especially chilling that this directive came from the Pentagon. The US has the most powerful military in the world, and it is the taxpayer’s largest expense after Social Security. Despite assurances from right-wing media that Trump would be a peace president (Compact, 4/7/23), he is in fact delivering a ferocious brand of imperial bellicosity.
Trump carried out nearly as many airstrikes in the first six months of his second term as the hawkish Joe Biden did in four years (Independent, 7/15/25). Almost as many civilians were killed in his attacks on Yemen as were previously killed in two decades of strikes against that nation (Airwars, 6/17/25).
Trump dropped 14 of the world’s biggest non-nuclear bombs on Iran, weapons that had never been used against an enemy before. He boasted of using the military to murder supposed Venezuelan drug smugglers, hundreds of miles from US shores. He resumed shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, even as he encouraged Tel Aviv to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza (Guardian, 1/26/25).
Meanwhile, he’s deployed the military domestically, vowing to use it to carry out mass deportations , renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War, firing top officers who disagree with him.
If there’s ever been a time when we need an independent press keeping a close eye on the military, and listening to dissenting voices, it’s now.
Resisting Pentagon dictates
Reuters (9/21/25): “Any effort by the US government to limit journalists’ ability to cover the news undermines fundamental First Amendment protections and constrains the free flow of information that is critical to informed public debate.”
Thankfully, some news organizations are speaking out against the Pentagon’s new edict (Reuters, 9/21/25; CNN, 9/22/25). The New York Times called it an “attempt to throttle the public’s right to understand what their government is doing”; the Washington Post said that “any attempt to control messaging and curb access by the government is counter to the First Amendment and against the public interest.”
All major news organizations can and should fight this, in the public and in court; a ban on reporting any unauthorized information clearly violates the First Amendment, and any prior restraint is regarded as constitutionally suspicious.
News outlets should also bear in mind that reporting on the military does not necessarily require being physically present in the Pentagon. As the brave correspondents showed who defied the US military’s patronizing pooling system in the Gulf War, some of the best reporting is done outside official channels. An independent press corps with no physical access to the Pentagon is infinitely more valuable to democracy than a press corps that has pledged to only report officially sanctioned news.
With the firing of Karen Attiah, the Washington Post no longer has any full-time Black columnists.
For many years, the nation’s capital was known as Chocolate City, owing to its sizable Black population, which in the 1970s topped 70%. These days that moniker is less used, as DC’s Black population is now a little over 40%.
This dramatic fall is due to runaway gentrification, which has made an already unequal city all the more so. One study from 2016 found that DC’s white families have an astonishing 81 times the wealth of Black families. At what point, I wonder, does a city pass from unequal to apartheid-like?
That’s a question probably best tackled by a Black columnist. But as of September 11, when Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post, DC’s paper of record has none who are full-time. They’ve all fallen by the wayside, as the paper is remade in the image of Donald Trump.
This is being done so that Jeff Bezos, the Post‘s owner since 2013, doesn’t see his companies lose out on multi-billion dollar federal contracts, as happened during Trump’s first term, when the president became enraged at the Post’s coverage of him.
“He’s prioritizing his other businesses over the Post,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25) in February. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and his space company Blue Origin in 2000. Baron pointed out:
Amazon has a big cloud computing business. Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government. Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is he going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.
“The way Bezos is undermining a major institution that he owns is crazy and tragic,” former Post columnist Joe Davidson told FAIR in an email. “His public coziness with President Trump is unworthy of the owner of the Washington Post.”
Devoted to dear leader
Washington Post opinion editor Adam O’Neal, brought in to make the Washington Post more like the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
To carry out the Washington Post’s MAGA makeover, Bezos tapped two men, who make an interesting pair. At the top is Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis, a hopefully sober and definitely scandal-plagued Brit who cut his teeth doing Rupert Murdoch’s dirty work in London, and now wishes that chapter of his life would stop resurfacing. With Lewis apparently in “a state of hiding,” however, we’ll focus on the other guy.
That’d be Adam O’Neal, a 33-year-old former Wall Street Journal editorial writer whom Bezos and Lewis tapped to helm the Post’s vaunted opinion page.
Right out of the gate, O’Neal decreed that the Post will be “unapologetically patriotic,” parroting Bezos and Lewis. In practice, this has resulted in an opinion page devoted less to the country than to its dear leader.
Just three of many examples:
On the first day of Trump’s military occupation of DC—the Post’s own hometown—the paper welcomed the putsch with an editorial (8/11/25) that began, “President Donald Trump is putting on quite the show to project strength on crime.”
The next month, when Trump called for corporations to no longer issue quarterly reports—an effort to hide the negative effects of his tariff regime—a Post editorial (9/17/25) called it “a daring suggestion.”
And when Trump called for once again putting US troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the Post (9/20/25) said it “isn’t a bad idea.”
If Trump turns on a dime tomorrow and says the opposite, expect the Post opinion page to do likewise. If anyone under O’Neal has a problem with that, they can resign—as record numbers have, Black columnists in particular.
“The Post has long struggled with diversity issues, like most of America, but now diversity among columnists is another casualty of Bezos’s leadership,” said Davidson, the former Post columnist, who was a founding board member of the National Association of Black Journalists.
“Nearly all of the left-leaning writers, myself included, accepted buyouts, as it became clear that the Post would not want our content,” Perry Bacon, another of the Post’s recently departed Black columnists, wrote in the New Republic (9/15/25). “Attiah opted to stay. I was worried that her time at the Post would not be long, and it was not.”
“Black journalists, like Black activists and politicians, are often the people in their profession most willing to discuss America’s shortcomings forthrightly and urge the country to do better,” Bacon continued. “For example, Attiah and [former MSNBC host Joy] Reid were two of the most prominent voices at their organizations calling for the United States to change its policies toward Israel to prevent the mass deaths of Palestinian civilians.”
But in a tense meeting this summer, O’Neal encouraged Attiah to do like many of her colleagues and take a buyout, according to Status (8/13/25). Attiah should do this, O’Neal explained, since her work no longer aligned with the Post’s new direction.
Attiah, however, decided to stay.
‘Right out of Goodfellas‘
Sen. Ted Cruz: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threat to ABC was “dangerous as hell” (New York Times, 9/19/25).
In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s shooting on September 10, getting rid of troublesome voices has become easier. The most prominent example has been at ABC.
Trump had called without success for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be taken off air in July, but after Kirk’s death, Trump’s FCC commissioner Brendan Carr made it happen for his boss. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr publicly threatenedABC and its affiliates over carrying Kimmel’s show. Within hours, the Disney-owned ABC caved.
“I’ve got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, an ally of Carr, said in response. “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
“Who is hiring these goons?” asked David Letterman, the former late-night host. “We all see where this is going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good.”
Kimmel was purportedly yanked over his benign comments about Kirk’s death. But his real offense may have been showing how Trump couldn’t be bothered to mourn his friend’s death, even as he insisted the rest of the country do so.
When asked how he was holding up in the wake of Kirk’s death, Trump breezily offered four words—“I think very good”—before turning unprompted to more important matters, namely the White House ballroom he’s building. “It’s going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure,” Trump rambled on. “It’ll get done very nicely, and it’ll one of the best anywhere in the world, actually.”
It’s an extraordinary clip of Trump, one Kimmel played to great effect just before his suspension (clip via the New York Post):
Trump was quick to gloat over Kimmel’s sacking, and then he pivoted to his next targets —late-night hosts Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon, who have also mocked Trump, as has Stephen Colbert, who in July had his show cancelled for next year, much to Trump’s delight.
Trump’s wheels were now turning. If he can cancel critical late-night hosts, what’s to stop him from doing the same to journalists on those same networks?
“The newscasts are against me,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.” The networks, Trump continued, are “getting free airwaves from the United States government” and should therefore show more deference to him.
Decrying corporate cowardice
John Oliver (Last Week Tonight, 9/22/25), noted that Jimmy Kimmel pointed out “that many on the right seem desperate to weaponize Kirk’s death, an argument that’s aged pretty well, given, you know, everything that’s happened to Kimmel since.”
As Trump ratcheted up his censorship, civil society roared back.
“In the days since ABC’s decision, at least five Hollywood unions, collectively representing more than 400,000 workers, publicly condemned the company,” the New York Times reported (9/22/25):
The screenwriters’ union decried what they called “corporate cowardice,” and organized a protest last week outside the main gate at Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. Damon Lindelof, a creator of ABC’s Lost, said that if Mr. Kimmel’s program did not return from suspension, he couldn’t “in good conscience work for the company that imposed it.” Michael Eisner, a former chief executive of Disney, issued a rare rebuke on social media on Friday, as well. Some conservatives expressed misgivings, too.
Elsewhere, over 400 entertainers joined Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Meryl Streep in signing an open letter organized by the ACLU. The Trump administration’s moves against Kimmel mark “a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation,” the letter read.
Many canceled their Disney+ subscriptions in protest, including talk radio host Howard Stern, who said on his show Monday, “Someone’s gotta step up and be fucking saying, ‘Hey, enough, we’re not gonna bow.” And Tatiana Maslany, who starred in a series that aired on Disney+, called on her Instagram followers to hit the company where it hurts, writing, “cancel your @disneyplus@hulu@espn subscriptions!”
Comedians also used their platforms to stand with Kimmel and lampoon Trump. “The Epstein list won’t be released but Jimmy Kimmel will be?” Sam Morril asked on Instagram.
Kimmel’s fellow late-night hosts went hard in the paint. On Last Week Tonight (9/22/25), his HBO show, John Oliver took the opportunity to speak directly to Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“Giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time,” Oliver said, before referencing the $15 million Disney paid Trump back in December to make his weak defamation lawsuit go away:
Instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school?… The only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away, and that is “Fuck you. Make me.”
The collective pressure worked, and ABC agreed to put Kimmel back on air beginning Tuesday night.
Still, many cities, including DC, won’t be able to watch the show on TV, because Nextstar and Sinclair, the two largest owners of ABC affiliates, still refuse to air the program.
‘Refusing to tear my clothes’
The kind of opinion you’re not likely to see in the Washington Post (10/13/23) anymore.
Also joining in the defense of Kimmel was a former president mostly known for staying out of the fray. “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level,” former President Barack Obama wrote (Bluesky, 9/18/25). Obama tied the silencing of Kimmel to that of Attiah, writing of her firing:
This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent—and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.
Like Kimmel, Attiah had also commented on Kirk’s killing, questioning how America can decry gun violence but not guns, or the white men who frequently wield them to such deadly effect.
“Political violence has no place in this country,” Attiah wrote on Bluesky (9/10/25) in the hours after Kirk’s murder. “But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence…. America is sick and there is no cure in sight.”
Attiah also quoted Kirk’s racist comments about Black women, and wrote, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is…not the same as violence.”
The scourge of political violence is not new to Attiah. As the Washington Post’s founding global opinions editor, she recruited and edited Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote critically about his home country of Saudi Arabia in the pages of the Post until October 2018. That’s when Khashoggi was dismembered in Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate by operatives working at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to a US intelligence report.
As a Post columnist herself, Attiah carried Khashoggi’s torch forward. In the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack, she presciently warned of Israel’s coming genocide on Gaza.
“The United States cannot stand by and allow Israel to carry out the collective punishment it has declared it will exact,” Attiah (10/13/23) wrote six days after October 7. “It cannot stand by as Israeli officials engage in genocidal language and describe genocidal intent against Palestinians for the actions of Hamas.”
Attiah also called out the coordinated effort to silence anti-war voices in the US. In a column (6/11/24) headlined “No one should be surprised a Black politician is the canary in AIPAC’s coal mine,” Attiah wrote:
“Shut up or else” is the message a pro-Israel lobby is sending to Black lawmakers in America who are critical of what’s happening in Gaza. The front line is New York’s 16th Congressional District, where Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) is facing one of the most expensive primary challenges in history.
‘The integrity of our organization’
Karen Attiah (Golden Hour, 9/15/25): “Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will still carry on the light.”
Despite 11 years at the Washington Post, and multiple journalism awards, Attiah was fired the day after Kirk’s killing “without even a conversation,” she wrote on Substack (9/15/25). The letter from Post HR chief Wayne Connell accused her of “gross misconduct” and “poor judgment” by making comments that “disparage people based on their race, gender or other protected characteristics.” He charged that Attiah’s posts “harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.”
Attiah’s termination letter is “ironic,” said Joe Davidson, because “it is Karen who is endangered by the death threats she received in the wake of her firing.” He added:
It is the actions of Jeff Bezos that have harmed the integrity and credibility of his own company, as evidenced by the thousands of cancelled subscriptions and the many resignations of fine journalists.
In firing Attiah, the Post “flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes,” according to the Washington Post Guild, which said the paper has “also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech.”
This summer, when Adam O’Neal told Attiah that her work didn’t align with the paper’s new direction, he was right. It was a damning indictment— not of Attiah, but of the Washington Post.
When readers asked Snopes, the popular urban legend–dispelling website, to look at a claim about Charlie Kirk’s take on stoning gays, the site’s headline (9/16/25) was definitive: “Charlie Kirk Didn’t Say Gay People Should Be Stoned to Death.”
The claim originated when a clip from Kirk’s podcast was circulated in which the right-wing organizer criticized children’s musical performer Ms. Rachel for supporting Pride month. Ms. Rachel had explained her support by quoting Matthew 22 from the Bible—which, Ms. Rachel correctly summarized, says that when questioned about the “greatest commandment,” Jesus replied that it is “to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
The clip showed Kirk, opening in mid-sentence, saying:
…is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death, just saying. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.
Snopes‘s Nur Ibrahim reprints this quote and writes:
The above clip does not show the full context of Kirk’s comments. Kirk did not directly advocate for stoning gay people to death. We searched through footage and clips of him discussing LGBTQ+ issues and did not find evidence of him stating outright that gay people should be stoned to death; rather, he quoted the Bible as part of an argument about how others selectively choose quotations. As such, we rate this claim as false.
It then offers that “full context” from the show, quoting Kirk at length:
She’s not totally wrong…. The first part is Deuteronomy 6:3–5. The second part is Leviticus 19. So you love God, so you must love his law. How do you love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth, not by confirming or affirming their sin. And it says, by the way, Ms. Rachel, might want to crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser reference—part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters. Now, so how do you best love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth. Don’t be cruel…. I would love for Ms. Rachel to respond to this: Is pride a Christian value? She thinks it is. Happy Pride Month everybody!… In fact the Scriptures tell us the opposite. “Pride goeth before the fall.”
Snopes concludes its analysis:
Kirk was not saying that gay people should be stoned to death; rather, he was quoting the Bible in an effort to show how Ms. Rachel was being selective in her interpretation of the Scripture. However, we should note that in the same comment, Kirk called the section about stoning, “The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
Reuters (9/13/25) noted that some of the people on a website doxxing “Charlie’s Murderers” were “critical of the far-right figure while explicitly denouncing violence.”
Well, gee, why should you note that, Snopes? Ibrahim doesn’t explain.
Set aside Kirk’s own straw man argument that pretends Ms. Rachel quotes Leviticus rather than Matthew. It is true, as Ibrahim writes, that Kirk did not “directly advocate for stoning gay people to death.” And yet the straightforward way to read a self-professed Christian—and biblical literalist—characterizing a chapter of the Bible as “affirm[ing] God’s perfect law” is as an endorsement of the laws in that chapter—in this case, condoning the stoning to death of non-celibate gay people.
Snopes offers no reason for us to doubt Kirk’s sincerity about his belief in the scripture he quoted—whether or not he was trying (speciously) to paint Ms. Rachel as cherry picking—and therefore no justification for its definitive “false” rating. At a time when intense state and right-wing cultural pressure (Al Jazeera, 9/13/25; CBS,9/16/25; Reuters, 9/13/25, 9/16/25) seeks to sanitize and censor accurate recountings of Kirk’s beliefs, it is all the more important for those claiming to set the record straight not to bend over backwards to accommodate that pressure.
ACTION ALERT: Please ask Snopes to reevaluate its finding that Charlie Kirk was not endorsing the stoning of gays when he called the practice “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
One of the “Trumpy billionaires” (Daily Beast, 9/17/25) taking over TikTok is Oracle‘s Larry Ellison (above right).
Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, is the second-richest billionaire in both the US and the world, and for a brief moment was No. 1 in the world (AP, 9/11/25). But for a long time, unlike many of his peers, he was unable to boast that he controlled a chunk of the news and opinion reaching the American public.
On Forbes‘ US list, he is sandwiched between Elon Musk, No. 1, who bought the social media network Twitter and rebranded it as X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos, at No. 4, has the Washington Post. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Nos. 5 and 6, operate the leading search engine as well as one of the most important news aggregators, Google News. Michael Bloomberg, at No. 13, the former New York City mayor, has Bloomberg and its various outlets.
Ellison seems to have joined the club, as TikTok, under US government coercion (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), is selling 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, along with investment firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz (Reuters, 9/16/25).
Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections (Washington Post, 5/20/22). Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.
‘CBS shifts to appease right’
David Ellison is CBS‘s new owner of record, but his father who bankrolled him may be more responsible for the shift to the right (NPR, 9/12/25).
But owning a big chunk of the US’s leading short-form video platform is not Ellison’s only claim to being a media mogul. Eyeing the corporate media throne, you can almost hear Ellison channeling Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza, confronted with the daunting prospect of competing in computer sales against IBM and Microsoft, declaring: “I’ve got a secret weapon. My son.”
Enter Larry’s son David Ellison, who was born into the kind of riches most can barely dream of. As I wrote for FAIR (7/24/25), the younger Ellison is the CEO of Skydance, which recently merged with Paramount, giving him control over CBS. David’s campaign contributions trend more to the Democratic establishment, but it’s his father’s politics that seem to be reshaping the newly bought network: “CBS Shifts to Appease the Right Under New Owner,” as an NPR headline (9/12/25) put it.
Anti-woke zealot Bari Weiss is nearing “a top role at CBS News,” which “left-leaning staffers at the network fret could amount to ‘dropping a grenade’ in the newsroom,” the New York Post (9/10/25) reported. It added that the network “is weighing naming Weiss editor in chief or co-president of the network,” and that Ellison is looking to buy her “news site, the Free Press, in a deal valued at upwards of $100 million.” According to Reuters (9/15/25), it was David Ellison who “installed Kenneth Weinstein—a supporter of President Donald Trump and the former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute—as ombudsman of CBS News.” (See FAIR.org, 9/9/25.)
‘Pretty hard to be optimistic’
With some hyperbole, the New York Post (9/11/25) says that a $40 billion–plus deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery would be “a rounding error on the Oracle co-founder’s balance sheet.”
The New York Post (9/11/25) reports that Ellison father and son are now looking to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which carries with it CNN, creating an unprecedented level of media consolidation. While the Post said such a purchase could be difficult, because Warner Brothers “has a market cap of around $38 billion,” that might not matter, as “Larry Ellison’s net worth leaped by $100 billion following Oracle’s latest blowout earnings report.” He is “closing in on being the richest dude in the world, with a net worth…of more than $370 billion.”
CNN reports 1.8 million viewers, and CBS reports an average total audience of 1.4 million viewers, for a combined 3.2 million, which eclipses ABC’s 2.3 million, NBC’s 1.4 million and MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers (Forbes, 7/24/25).
The CNN/CBS combo would reach far more Americans through online news, with CNN.com‘s 276 million visits per month already making it the nation’s second-biggest news site. Add CBSNews.com‘s 63 million visits and you’ll have an entity that edges closer to the heretofore undisputed leader, NYTimes.com, with its 425 million visits a month.
Former CBS Evening News star Dan Rather (Hollywood Reporter, 9/15/25) said Americans “have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets.” Rather added, “It’s pretty hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of the Ellisons buying CNN.”
‘Not a sign of a healthy democracy’
Fast Company (9/16/25) notes that Paramount and Warner Bros. would become “the biggest studio in the world.”
Fast Company (9/16/25) summarized the dangerous nature of the deal this way:
If the Warner Bros. Discovery deal were to go through, Ellison would control streaming services with a combined 200 million–plus subscribers, says Barclays (though there will be overlap between the Paramount+, HBO Max and Pluto services). It’s something Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned against on X on September 11. The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, she wrote, “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.” Add TikTok’s 170 million–plus users and one of the hottest properties in the social space, and you get to a position of dominance in the media….
“It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption,” says Steven Buckley, lecturer in media and digital sociology at City St George’s, University of London. Others have pointed out that the potential playbook, if this were to go ahead, draws comparisons with Elon Musk’s takeover of a social platform to dominate public discourse. Musk has previously taken credit for helping Trump secure the White House in 2024 through his positioning of X as a supportive social network….
“It is naive to think that over time [Ellison’s] business and political philosophy, combined with the external political pressures from this and future administrations, wouldn’t have an impact on how the American public experience TikTok,” Buckley says.
Conservative media capture
Even before the Ellisons bought them, the Hollywood Reporter (9/15/25) noted, CBS and 60 Minutes were under pressure from the previous owner: “The program needed to back off Trump.”
The United States has seen a tremendous amount of conservative media capture since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Bezos has moved to cull viewpoints at the Washington Post that might offend Trump (BBC, 2/26/25), Zuckerberg has taken steps to make Facebook friendlier to MAGA (NBC, 1/8/25) and Musk has turned X into a vehicle for his far-right politics (AP, 8/13/24; NBC, 2/16/25). All three men sat together at Trump’s inauguration.
The Los Angeles Times under billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has also made strenuous efforts to be more Trump-friendly (FAIR.org, 10/24/24; Independent, 12/17/24; NPR, 2/3/25; Guardian, 3/5/25).
Both Ellisons, the Hollywood Reporter (9/15/25) said, “have shown support for Trump in the past,” and they certainly buck the rising outrage against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “Paramount, under its new owner, David Ellison, has become the first major Hollywood studio to condemn a boycott of Israeli film institutions that more than 4,000 actors and directors now support,” the New York Times (9/13/25) said.
With the Trump regime shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; NPR, 8/1/25), the space for semi-skeptical media is shrinking as the space for regime-friendly broadcasters (Fox News still beats out both CNN and CBS in terms of viewers) is growing.
As for social media, given that Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founders are also Trump supporters, it seems that, along with Ellison, these oligarchs could steer TikTok in the same direction as Facebook and X (TechCrunch, 7/16/24).
Worse, critics of TikTok’s Chinese ownership fretted that data collection of American users eventually led to surveillance by the Chinese government. Data collection is a given with social media generally, but now that power rests partly with Ellison, who has gotten rich off such technology. Fortune (9/17/24) reported, “Oracle founder Larry Ellison…sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.” And funnily enough, an AP investigation (9/9/25) showed that Oracle was among the many Silicon Valley firms whose technologies have supported Chinese surveillance systems.
Just imagine what he could do with a large social media network like TikTok.
Rather and others are right that the Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy. And given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.
This week on CounterSpin: The reason those of us not directly on the sharp end of the violence of ICE agents disappearing brown people off the streets know about it is because we see it. Because people—journalists, but also regular folks—are recording these actions and sharing them with those of the public who care to look. Witness testimony is the reason we are able to resist official testimony about people “attacking officers” or “resisting arrest.” And you can tell how much it matters by the efforts to shut it down. We’ll talk about making it a crime to record ICE being ICE with Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writer and researcher, working with the Center for Media and Democracy.
Charlie Kirk
Also on the show: You could spend a lot of energy trying to make sense of the notion that anyone criticizing Charlie Kirk is more of a threat to the country than Kirk himself. But the fact that quoting Kirk’s own words is enough to get you fired, get your professor to state that “we will hunt you down,” get your show cancelled, get your group sanctioned—tells you we are not in a good faith debate. And that the prominent news media aren’t here to help.
Judging by the New York Times, the Trump who promotes the idea that Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, should be described as having “a penchant for sharing debunked or baseless theories online.” So why not offer the same respect given to his “ideas” about transgender mice to his “ideas” about the First Amendment?
It comes down to whose ideas we get to hear, which in turn comes down to: Who gets to own the media outlets we look to? We’ll talk about where structure meets content with Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
“Host difficult speakers,” Barnard president Laura Rosenbury (New York Times, 9/11/25) urged—but don’t screen difficult films about Zionism.
The definition of the Yiddish concept of chutzpah, or unbelievable audacity, often goes like this: A child murders his parents, and then asks the judge to take pity on him because he’s an orphan. Barnard College president Laura Rosenbury’s op-ed in the New York Times (9/17/25) about free speech on campus might be a fitting contemporary version of this old joke.
In print, her piece was headlined, “Barnard President: Charlie Kirk Challenged College Students. We Need More Like Him.” (It echoed liberal Times columnist Ezra Klein’s piece, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”—9/11/25.) In the wake of the right-wing organizer’s murder on a Utah campus where he was debating with students, Rosenbury said she wants more openness to speech on campuses:
A commitment to nonviolent disagreement should be an obvious part of the fabric of our campuses, just as it is obvious that students need oxygen to breathe. Colleges and universities need to reconfirm our commitment to nonviolent forms of disagreement — even when we are confronted with voices that disparage or dismiss identities and worldviews. This is also a time to foster more disagreement, not less….
College campuses must remain places where students are able to ask and grapple with hard questions, especially those that are uncomfortable and even hurtful. Higher education’s role is not to erase conflict but to channel it into dialogue, debate and learning. To do so, educators and students must face ideas we find offensive and speakers whose words cause pain….
We must have the courage to explore ideas that diverge greatly from our own. That will mean inviting a diverse range of outside speakers to campus. We do not need to create a specific balance of views; we must simply engage with the widest possible spectrum of views respectfully, without disruption or violence.
Put plainly, this would be like an op-ed promoting ethical veganism written by Jeffrey Dahmer. In the nationwide repression of anti-genocide protests on campuses, Barnard (the women’s college at Columbia University) has been under the spotlight, and Rosenbury has been a chief villain when it comes not just to the repression of protests, but the policing of thought and censoring ideas. She also completely disregarded Kirk’s signature achievement of building a movement to intimidate faculty to stifle political expression and thought.
‘Hostile environment’
“You could not have made more apparent who you consider to be valued members of the Barnard community, and who you are willing to sacrifice,” professor Nadia Abu El-Haj told Rosenbury (Columbia Spectator, 10/31/23).
The Columbia Spectator (10/31/23) wrote about one of Rosenbury’s dispatches to the campus community, falsely equating anti-Zionism as antisemitism:
“The war is also taking a toll on our campus,” Rosenbury wrote. “I am appalled and saddened to see antisemitism and anti-Zionism spreading throughout Barnard and Columbia.”
The Columbia chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine together published a letter addressed to Barnard faculty and administration on Instagram calling for a retraction of Rosenbury’s statement and an apology from the Barnard administration.
Laura Rosenbury, the president of Barnard College, called sociology professor Debbie Becher into her office to discuss an event Becher was helping plan alongside several Jewish students: a screening and discussion of the documentary Israelism, which chronicles young American Jews’ disaffection with Zionism. Joined by provost and dean of the faculty Linda Bell, Rosenbury told Becher to “pause” the screening, according to notes of the meeting Becher kept. Rosenbury acknowledged at the outset that it was “hard to think of [Israelism] as an antisemitic film.” Nevertheless, she wanted the screening indefinitely postponed due to fears that it would trigger legal action against the school under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars schools receiving federal funding from creating or permitting a “hostile environment” for students on the basis of race or national origin—and mandates that colleges found to have violated the statute must come to an agreement with the federal government to change policies or risk being stripped of their federal funding.
The question here isn’t whether or not one agrees with anti-Zionism, or likes the film Israelism. Anti-Zionism—like Irish republicanism or the anti-apartheid movement—is an idea that exists in the world, and according to Rosenbury’s op-ed, we should debate and discuss those ideas, even if that makes us uncomfortable. Obviously, the unsaid message of her piece is that there is a “Palestine exception” to free speech and academic freedom.
She is also falsely equating anti-Zionism, a position held by many since Jews for more than a century, with Jew-hatred. The irony, of course, is that Israelism, the movie too hot to watch on campus, is about Jewish criticism of Israel.
A ban on door decorations
Maybe a college president whose policies will “inevitably serve as a license for censorship” (New York Times, 1/24/24) is not the person the Times should be turning to as an expert on free speech?
Rosenbury also lost a faculty vote of “no confidence” for her mishandling of the protests (The Hill, 4/30/24). “The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Barnard and Columbia last and second to last, respectively, in its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings,” reports the Columbia Spectator (9/10/25).
After Barnard censored a faculty statement in support of the Palestinian people, the New York Times (1/24/24) reported that the school’s administration
rewrote its policies on political activity, website governance and campus events, giving itself wide latitude to decide what was and was not permissible political speech on campus, as well as final say over everything posted on Barnard’s website.
The moves caught the attention of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which wrote a letter to Barnard’s new president, Laura Rosenbury, in December, warning that the website and political speech policies violated fundamental free speech principles and were “incompatible with a sound understanding of academic freedom.”
“Such a regime will inevitably serve as a license for censorship,” the letter said.
And in an act of almost comical pettiness, after Barnard students “posted stickers and slogans supporting the Palestinian cause and naming the war in Gaza as a genocide” on their dorm room doors, the school’s administration “decided to enforce a ban on dorm door decorations altogether” (New York Times, 3/1/24).
‘Act of intimidation’
Rosenbury (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/3/25) called for “removing from our community those who refuse to share our values of respect, inclusion and academic excellence”—which is hard to square with wanting more Charlie Kirks.
Rosenbury’s name, needless to say, rings out in any discussion about the repression of free speech and academic freedom in the United States. Pro-Israel critics of the protests often say anti-genocide protesters were too disruptive. Rosenbury tried to justify her actions against student protesters in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece (3/3/25) headlined “When Student Protest Goes Too Far” (subhead: “I’m the president of Barnard. This is my line in the sand”). “Too far,” apparently, is when protest is a “calculated act of intimidation” that poses “an ongoing threat to our community.”
It’s bad enough that Rosenbury could look the public in the face with this record and pontificate about academic freedom. But she should also know that while no faculty members, staff or student in these anti-genocide protests around the country were gunned down like Kirk, protesters and their supporters have been threatened with firearms (The City, 10/13/23), and they’ve faced rubber bullets (Democracy Now!, 5/6/25). Protesters were assaulted (Common Dreams, 4/26/24; CNN, 5/16/24). Many have been expelled or disciplined (AP News, 7/22/25).
The piece also fails to name President Donald Trump’s administration, which has used Kirk’s killing as justification to ramp up repression on speech and activity it deems offensive to the regime (New York Times, 9/16/25). And many educators, including at institutions of higher education, have lost their jobs over their comments—again, speech–about Kirk (Guardian, 9/15/25).
Kirk was actually a crusader against free speech and academic freedom, with his movement working hard to target faculty members who fell out of the right’s ideological favor. As the Chronicle of Higher Education (9/15/25) said in a headline, “Charlie Kirk’s Watchlist Made Some Professors’ Lives a ‘Living Hell.’” His group’s Professor Watchlist sparked crippling fear on campuses nationwide (Guardian, 9/17/21; WBUR, 9/12/25; KRCR, 9/15/25; WBFF, 9/15/25; Ms., 9/15/25; LGBTQ Nation, 9/16/25).
As journalist Jeff Sharlet (Democracy Now!, 9/11/25) put it:
You’re seeing some people saying, “Well, you know, I disagree with what he said, but he was a champion of free speech. He died debating.” Look, the fact that he was murdered doesn’t change the fact that he also…was an opponent of free speech. There’s no other way to cut it, for a man who created something called Professor Watchlist, School Board Watchlist, to name and frighten people from teaching, who advocated restrictions on what school teachers could teach.
He punctuated his point, “That is not a champion of free speech.”
One might think that all this would be worth mentioning in a piece about maintaining freedom of speech in the wake of Kirk’s killing. But Rosenbury thinks “we need more like him.”
Perhaps Rosenbury thinks this is a good way to whitewash her image. But New York Times editors aren’t forced to publish something so hypocritical. The fact that the paper has shown hostility toward speech on campus that sullies Israel’s name (FAIR.org, 10/11/24, 3/21/25) shows that the paper is actively joining the college president in her display of chutzpah.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Alex Main about Trump’s Venezuelan boat assault for the September 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The US military struck a small boat in the southern Caribbean September 2, killing 11 people. The next day, the New York Timestold readers, “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”
As telling and concerning as that is, it seems it might’ve been generous in posing it as a question to be asked. In an online exchange, Vice President JD Vance declared that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” And when someone pointed out that killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians, without any due process, is called a war crime, Vance replied, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
It does matter what things are called, how they relate to the law as we understand it, and how such an act is responded to. We’re joined now by Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Alex Main.
Alex Main: Thank you, Janine. Great to be with you.
JJ: Reporting on this strike is full of qualifiers. Politicosays it was “against an alleged drug vessel leaving Venezuela, which President Donald Trump said was aimed at the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua group, killing 11 suspected traffickers.” But as the story gets told and retold, qualifiers morph into facts, and it becomes a matter of how else should we kill narco terrorists, if not in international waters?
And you want to say, “Wait, wait, wait. No. We have to first properly understand the events themselves.” So before we get to the pretenses behind it, the uses sure to be made of it, what do we actually know about this strike attack on a boat, that killed 11 people last week?
AM: Yeah, excellent question, and one that still needs to be figured out. And I’m really glad you bring up the fact that from the outset, so much of the media really took at face value what the Trump administration said about this boat and its occupants and its origin, and didn’t really seem to question this idea that they were all drug traffickers, that they might be associated with the Tren de Aragua. And we can talk more about the Tren de Aragua, which is a very nebulous sort of organization indeed.
And there was no effort whatsoever made, at least initially, to try to identify who the victims were, who were these 11 people that were shot in a small boat, that was clearly not a military boat of any kind. There was no indication that these individuals were armed, and all we know about them is what we see from aerial footage that was proudly posted by President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—just shows this grainy footage of a small boat, with what looks like people inside, and then a big flash of light, and that suggests that the boat was blown up.
And that’s really all we had. But, again, you immediately saw a lot of the media just go along with the narrative that was put out there by the Trump administration, and that itself is very problematic.
And to this day, I haven’t seen, really, any sort of major media, certainly from the US, make any sort of effort to try to identify the victims. The most I’ve seen in that regard has been from local media in Venezuela, where it seems that a small village, where there does seem to be drug trafficking, they had lost eight people from that village, and other people from neighboring villages. I mean, this sort of remains hearsay, but this is the most that I’ve really seen in terms of any kind of documentation. But I haven’t really seen any journalists investigate this, in any depth. And that doesn’t seem to be a priority.
JJ: Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be the priority, because it’s already being thrown into a number of narratives that were preexisting. So let’s put it in some context: If we call it a murder, that’s one thing. If we call it a military attack, well, those terms are going to affect your understanding. But we do know that it exists in a context of US bullying, essentially, of Venezuela and of President Maduro. I mean, that’s the way it’s going to be sold.
AM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s the two pieces of this, really. On the one hand, you have what appears to be the next stage of an ongoing drug war—a forever war, really, that the Trump administration has wholeheartedly subscribed to, as have prior administrations for decades now. But where, to date at least, we hadn’t seen such an overt, extrajudicial killing that had taken place by the US military, and publicly, proudly displayed, as it has been—without, as you mentioned, any sort of legal justification to this date.
And you do have a number of members of Congress that have been asking the Trump administration to explain what the legal grounds are for blowing up these people that didn’t seem to pose any kind of threat to the United States. They were in the south Caribbean, to begin with, hundreds of miles away from the coast of the US, and seemingly headed for the island of Trinidad, which is one of the islands of the Caribbean that’s really the furthest from the coast of the United States. So how could it be plausibly depicted as some kind of a threat? But the administration just hasn’t bothered providing a justification. And, of course, no Republicans, with the notable exception of Sen. Rand Paul, have tried to take the administration to task about that.
JJ: I’m going to bring us back to this expansion of “war on terror” in a second. But in your statement from CEPR, you referred to a massacre in Honduras that had resonance here that seemed to be a kind of referent. Can you just tell us a little bit about that, and why it made sense for you to connect these things?
AM: Absolutely. So Honduras is one of the countries that we’ve followed closely for many years at CEPR, where we monitor the impact of US policy throughout Latin America. And I think it’s fair to say that Honduras is one of the countries where the US has had perhaps the most negative impact, along with Venezuela, along with Cuba and a few others. But over the past 15 years or so, certainly with the coup in 2009 that was really enabled by the US, where the US allowed that coup, an overt military coup against the democratically elected leader, to be successful.
And then, following that, you really had many years of what a lot of Hondurans refer to as a “narco dictatorship,” enormous repression that was going on, an extreme militarization of the country, under the right-wing authoritarian governments that remained in place, really thanks to fraudulent elections, particularly in 2017, that ended up being endorsed by successive US administrations.
But in 2012, you had collaboration, if you want to call it that, a joint operation involving heavily militarized US DEA agents and a heavily militarized, supposedly elite Honduran police force. And together they carried out an operation in a remote part of Honduras with an Afro-Indigenous population, and had what they called a successful operation in which they killed some drug traffickers that had attacked them during the operation. That’s the narrative that they pushed out after the operation took place back in 2012.
But then locals, first of all, were reporting very different things, from what they’d seen on the ground during the operation. And I, along with colleagues who work on Honduras, Annie Bird, Karen Spring, we visited the village of Ahuas, and we interviewed many, many people, and we interviewed also local security officials, and put together a very different picture of what had happened.
And that involved, first of all, an operation that was led, directed, by the DEA, whereas the DEA had always presented it as a Honduran operation, where they were playing a secondary role. That, first of all. And then, secondly, it became increasingly clear that they had not been attacked in any way, that they shot innocent bystanders, really, that were on a boat that had nothing to do with drug trafficking, that happened to be on the river at that time, and that was perceived as a threat, and then was shot up.
And then it turned out afterwards, and there was a subsequent inspector general review from both Department of State and Department of Justice inspector generals, which confirmed that the DEA had actually given orders to fire on this boat, where four innocent villagers were killed, others badly injured, a really huge tragedy in this small community in a remote part of Honduras.
And a completely false narrative had been sold by the DEA to the media, to the US Congress. They lied outright about what happened. And, again, this inspector general review—which took years to come out, thanks to all the stonewalling that came from the DEA and the State Department during those years—well, that did finally confirm what we heard from people on the ground during our investigation, which was that the DEA was entirely responsible for this mission, and ultimately responsible for the deaths of these innocent people, who were shot up with a machine gun, essentially.
And we’re seeing such big parallels now. In fact, it’s just been revealed that the video, that was heavily edited and was then posted by President Trump and by Secretary Rubio, that editing, what it didn’t show—according to sources, apparently within the military, that spoke to the New York Times—is that the boat was shot at repeatedly. The boat had turned around, and headed in the other direction. So if it wasn’t bad enough that this boat had been shot up without any clear justification, it’s becoming clear that the boat had actually turned away and was heading in the opposite direction, thereby not posing, really, any kind of threat whatsoever, if ever it had posed a threat.
JJ: I maintain that when reporters took the expression “war on terror” out of quotation marks, something important was lost. We have laws against drug trafficking, against drug dealing, and even against drug use, and they just don’t include killing people without judge or jury. That’s why we call them “laws.”
This action, along with other actions we could talk about, seems to be a further step in this ever fungible rationale. Now we’re going to call crime, or drug crime, “terrorism,” and make it subject to the actions that unleashes. This seems to be, just in terms of public information and public understanding, a further creep of this very nebulous and concerning framework.
AM: Absolutely. And, of course, what we saw last Tuesday, with these extrajudicial killings, is very reminiscent of what we’ve been seeing in the Middle East for a while, with the drone warfare—if you want to call it that; I would say more drone assassinations—that have been carried out.
This became a very big thing during the Obama administration in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia; people were targeted with no sort of due process. Civilians were killed in the process, all in the name of the “war on terror” and under the AUMF, the Authorization of Use of Military Force, from 2001 after 9/11, all part of this big “war on terror.”
And now we’re seeing a similar sort of incident taking place in the Caribbean, but there isn’t even an AUMF in this case. Not that it was justified in the Middle East, but they attempted a legal justification; in this case, there is no attempt.
The only thing that we’ve seen from the Trump administration so far is a letter to Congress, basically affirming that this fell within Article Two powers of the president to defend the country against imminent attack. As if this little boat in the south of the Caribbean, hundreds of miles from the US—they couldn’t even reach the shore of the US—was somehow an imminent threat to the US.
And then things started to really heat up, I would say, when, at the end of July, the Department of the Treasury announced that the Cartel de los Soles is also a specially designated global terrorist organization.
Now, the Cartel de los Soles is sort of nonexistent in terms of the global drug trade. There’s no indication that they’re really involved in any sort of major drug trafficking. There’s no actual indication that they really exist.
What you have is, basically, this accusation that senior military officials in the Venezuelan government have been involved in drug trafficking, much as you see in many countries, really around Latin America and even other parts of the world, corrupt officials that are paid off by drug traffickers to allow them to ship their drugs through the country, outside of the country, to turn a blind eye to drug-trafficking activities. That’s really the extent of it.
And based on that, the Trump administration has created this monster. They depict the Cartel de los Soles as a major transnational cartel, with Maduro at the top, pulling the strings. There’s absolutely zero evidence of this.
And then, on top of that, they have increased the bounty on Maduro’s head, information leading to his arrest, to $50 million. And then, of course, the beginning of August, there was this announcement of a major deployment of US military assets in the south Caribbean to deal with the “narco-terrorist threat.”
So they’ve been setting the stage for this boat attack for a while. Apparently they want to do more of this. That’s certainly what Rubio has said, and Trump has said: There’s more where this came from.
JJ: And all the murk around it, and disinformation and misinformation and lack of information—all of that plays a role, particularly as media allow it to slip and slide: “accused of being,” “actually are.” And then, of course, well, are there drug dealers in countries whose regimes the US doesn’t want to overthrow? Like, why are we looking for the keys under the lamppost? There are a whole lot of questions that are not being asked, big-picture questions about this, that would tie this—“extrajudicial” is a very generous word—killing of people to just the simple desire of this administration to have a new president of Venezuela. And yet we as readers, as news consumers, we’re supposed to see these as separate news events.
AM: That’s right. I mean, this is just the latest chapter in the many, many attempts to bring about regime change in Venezuela from the US. It goes all the way back to at least 2002, when the George W. Bush administration supported a coup against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez, at the time, that was overturned, essentially thanks to a popular rebellion against the military coup.
But ever since then, there have been all sorts of attempts. And of course the last big one was in 2019, when then Senator Marco Rubio worked with National Security Advisor John Bolton to come up with this plan to support a parallel government in Venezuela, that of Juan Guaido, from the hardline opposition in Venezuela, to declare him president with very little legal basis, if any, and then to overtly push for a coup to take place.
And it went quite far. And at the time, it looked like they might actually be successful in getting at least a part of the Venezuelan military to rebel against the government.
Had that happened, I think we would’ve seen a real bloodbath, and probably a prolonged civil conflict in Venezuela, certainly in no one’s interest, no matter what you think of Maduro, certainly not in the interest of the people of Venezuela, and not in the interests of the US or any other country in the region that would suffer the consequences of a major war in Venezuela.
But that’s what happened. And the media went along with the narrative back then as well. And it’s been a recurrent problem on Venezuela. Facts don’t seem to really matter. For a long time, Venezuela was depicted as a dictatorship, despite the fact that you had transparent, competitive elections there. That was not the case of the last election, in 2024, and we can talk about that.
But the circumstances, as well, are of a country that’s been under siege by the US, through extremely potent sanctions that have been in place, well, for a very long time. But the particularly potent sanctions came into place under Trump in 2017, during the first administration, again, pushed by then-Sen. Marco Rubio and others, and then really hardened during this last attempt of regime change in 2019, to the point that it really devastated the economy of Venezuela, contributed to massive outmigration of millions of Venezuelans, including many, many to the US, due to the real economic collapse of that country. The economy was in bad shape to begin with. But there’s no doubt at all that the US sanctions really made the situation exponentially worse. Basically the worst depression that we’ve ever seen in the region’s history in a country that’s not at war.
And so that’s the reality of what’s happened in Venezuela, and it’s one that’s really not described, at least not correctly, in the media.
And we see the crisis in Venezuela. There is an ongoing economic crisis, there’s a political crisis, and the US’s role in that is generally never really talked about by the media. Only occasionally on the margins, maybe at the end of the article, they might mention that there are these very hard-hitting sanctions that have destroyed the economy. Though they’re unlikely to mention that they’ve destroyed the economy.
JJ: Right. And this strike is not going to necessarily play the role that we might hope, in terms of complicating that understanding of the US role in Venezuela.
Just finally, we understand we’re in medias res. It’s September 11; we’re just learning what we can learn. But what would you be looking for reporters, in terms of basic questions, in terms of bigger questions? What would you hope from US journalism at this point?
Alex Main: “I would’ve hoped by now that more US journalists would report on the fact that the US is at the brink of war with Venezuela.”
AM: I would’ve hoped by now that more US journalists would report on the fact that the US is at the brink of war with Venezuela, basically through enormous provocation, amassing these warships close to the Venezuelan coast.
More recently, they’ve brought in some F-35 stealth fighters that have never been used for counter-narcotics operations, that have been used for major military operations. They’re now based in Puerto Rico.
And, of course, this strike against the boat, with all the rhetoric accompanying it, the rhetoric directed at Maduro and his so-called “cartel,” certainly is pushing things in the direction of a direct conflict with Venezuela. And there is an anticipation among many, certainly in Venezuela, that the US is soon going to be carrying out strikes in Venezuela. They’re now well-equipped to do that, with these fighters based in Puerto Rico.
On the Venezuelan side, they’re preparing, basically, for a US invasion. They’ve militarized the entire coast at this point. They are mobilizing the militias.
And around the region, there are real fears that this is going to blow up. And not necessarily because of an existing plan to strike Venezuela, although many think that there is a plan. But simply because when you deal with this kind of brinkmanship, anything can happen.
Last week, Venezuela, as a response to the strike on the boat that came from Venezuela, with presumably Venezuelan citizens on it, did a flyover with a couple of F-16s over some US Navy ships. And this was, of course, very poorly received by the Trump administration. And the Department of Defense put out a very strong statement, very threatening towards Maduro, referring to the country’s government as a “cartel.”
And, again, we’re in the context of this “war on cartels,” this “war on narco-terrorists,” where, according to the Trump administration, the narco-terrorists are running Venezuela today. So, obviously, this creates real fear that things could escalate even more, and that there could be some sort of incident that sets off a direct military conflict with Venezuela. And that would have absolutely terrible consequences for the region, and ultimately for the US as well.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alex Main. He’s director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and you can follow their work online at CEPR.net. Alex Main, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood (9/11/25) expressed doubt that “this disgusting scene of high-definition murder…will restore the moral senses of all those who have hitherto been casually pro-violence.”
The assassination of far-right podcaster and political activist Charlie Kirk in Utah was truly shocking in every sense. It happened in the open, at a college campus in broad daylight with 3,000 onlookers. Graphic and close-up video footage of his final moment, showing a bullet placed precisely at his carotid artery at the very second Kirk was questioned about mass shootings, seemed out of a movie. The man who once said gun deaths were worth the price of the Second Amendment (Newsweek, 4/6/23) became an illustration of what that price looks like before our eyes.
Flags at half mast. A moment of silence at Yankee Stadium. The vice president skipped a 9/11 memorial event to be with Kirk’s family (USA Today, 9/11/25), and Kirk’s body was transported back to his home state on the vice president’s aircraft (CBS, 9/11/25). He was no mere pundit or activist, but a valued capo in the Trump political machine.
“Charlie Kirk’s murder was one of the worst moments in recent American history,” read the subhead of an Atlantic piece (9/11/25) by Graeme Wood. (It was apparently much worse than US support for killing thousands of children in Gaza, about which Wood shrugged, “war is ugly,” arguing that it’s “possible to kill children legally”—Atlantic, 5/17/24.)
Wood was not alone in the press, as much of the coverage has framed the murder as a moment where the United States crossed the Rubicon when it comes to political violence. While Kirk’s murder was bad news for democracy—as no one ever deserves to be killed for their speech—the media reaction glossed over the role that President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and Kirk himself, as a prominent supporter of that movement, have helped to legitimize the kind of political violence that Kirk apparently fell victim to.
‘Epidemic of leftist violence’
The assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June 2025 was one of several right-wing attacks that New York Post columnist Miranda Divine (9/11/25) ignored in order to claim that “political violence is almost exclusively from the left.”
The right-wing press, as expected, has whipped itself into a frenzy over a wave of domestic terrorism that is only coming from the left, though the motives of the killer at the time were unknown. “We are suffering through an epidemic of leftist violence,” said Miranda Divine of the New York Post (9/11/25), adding that Kirk’s killing is “the latest manifestation of the hateful rhetoric aimed at President Trump and his MAGA movement.”
President Trump has fanned the flames. As the New Yorker (9/11/25) noted:
Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”… Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned.
Elsewhere, coverage didn’t blame the left, but did suggest that Kirk’s killing had brought US society to an inflection point. The New York Times (9/11/25) said that before Kirk’s killing, “there were signs of a looming political crisis” and increased “polarization and the coarsening of public discourse.” While there have been other acts of political violence, reporters Richard Fausset, Ken Bensinger and Alan Feuer wrote, the “killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus…raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.”
The Times quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, saying “I think that you have a cultural civil war underway.” (Gingrich has been waging cultural civil war for a long time now; in 1990, he put out a memo urging Republican candidates to tar their opponents with words like “sick…pathetic…traitors”—Extra! Update, 2/95).
The Washington Post editorial board (9/10/25) noted, while listing off other instances of political violence:
Months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, the conservative activist warned about the spread of “assassination culture.” He cited the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, as well as the killing of a healthcare CEO. And now it seems all too likely that he himself became a victim of that violent fervor while speaking on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.
The Post’s news side featured a report (9/11/25) claiming that the nation is “facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s.” The paper summoned memories of the “assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson (9/10/25) said Kirk’s murder “will unleash unknown consequences in a nation that is angry and already confronting a fractured political future.”
‘More frequent and deadly’
Donald Trump posted an image of himself as an Apocalypse Now character as he declared war on Chicago.
Most of these pieces rightly situated Kirk’s murder with other acts of political violence that targeted both Democrats and Republicans. But what these pieces miss—or actively try to hide—is how much this dangerous era escalated when Trump came into the White House. The president and his allies in right-wing media not only provided the rhetoric that inspired an enormous amount of political violence, but worked actively to normalize it.
From Trump’s calls for violence against protesters who disrupted his rallies (FAIR.org, 3/12/16) to official presidential social media posts depicting Trump as Robert Duvall’s napalm-loving colonel from Apocalypse Now, MAGA is a political agenda that celebrates violence (FAIR.org, 11/1/19).
“We’ve seen a rising tide of attacks by far-right extremists in recent years,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Frontline. “The threat is coming from a host of ideologies, from white supremacists to incels, to everything in between. Unfortunately, the attacks are becoming both more frequent and deadly.”
To track that change, Frontline analyzed data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS defines terrorism as the “deliberate use—or threat— of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact,” a similar definition to the one used by the FBI.
According to a CSIS database, there were 405 such terror attacks or plots in the US from 2015 through 2020—more than double the total number in the previous decade. And in the last five years, those attacks or plots were predominantly carried out by white supremacists, militias and other far-right extremists: 63% and increasing. Far-left incidents are also on the rise but made up a smaller portion of the whole, 13% from 2015 to 2020, according to Frontline’s analysis. Religious extremists accounted for 19%, with the remaining 5% linked to “ethnonationalist” or “other” ideologies, per CSIS categorizations.
Political violence is of course nothing new in American culture; deadly extremism, coming mainly though not exclusively from the right, was rampant both before (Extra!, 3–4/95, 7–8/95; Extra! Update, 10/96) and after September 11, 2001 (FAIR.org, 4/16/13, 6/13/14). But MAGA has moved what was once far-right rhetoric and tactics to the center of the US right. As the Brookings Institution (3/12/21) pointed out, many right-wing tactics of the Trump era were pioneered by self-styled militia groups that have operated along the US’s southern border since the 1980s:
Many of the right-wing armed groups’ tactics exhibited during Trump’s presidency—harassment of minorities, purposeful recruitment of military veterans, cultivation of allies in law enforcement forces and among politicians, and efforts to influence elections—had years of beta testing at the US/Mexico border.
Five years ago, the Guardian (3/18/20) also painted a frightening picture:
White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the Trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a “surging” racist movement continues to be driven by “a deep fear of demographic change.” Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity groups and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs.
‘Bring a gun with you’
The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) wrote admiringly of Kirk’s “moxie and fearlessness.”
Charlie Kirk was a central actor in the right-wing hate machine that fomented violence. He encouraged violence against immigrants (Media Matters, 3/22/24):
At what point is it time to start to at least use rubber bullets, or use some sort of tear gas, to prevent this and quell this invasion?… And at what point do we use real force?. . . Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?
He incited partisan division and hatred, and encouraged the purchase and use of weapons in that context (Media Matters, 10/12/23):
You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. if you go into a public place, bring a gun with you…. Thank goodness in Arizona we can carry, and we carry.
Where the New York Times (9/10/25) saw “a charismatic right-wing activist” who “showed a genius for using social media and campus organizing,” those who found themselves targets of Kirk’s “genius” saw something entirely different.
Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” doxxed academics Kirk claimed “advanced leftist propaganda”; those listed quickly found themselves and their universities subject to a torrent of abuse—including racial slurs and death threats—from Kirk’s followers, at times requiring universities to offer those academics extra security. Journalism professor Stacy Patton, who experienced this harassment firsthand when she was put on the list in 2024, observed:
Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.
This is the activism that the New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) described as “practicing politics in exactly the right way”:
He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.
‘Throbbing middle finger to God’
Charlie Kirk (X, 9/11/23): ““The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God is the transgender thing happening in America.”
Kirk referred to LGBTQ identity as a “social contagion,” and called trans people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God” (Erin in the Morning, 9/11/23).
He said that Black women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson “had to go steal a white person’s slot” through affirmative action, because they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” he declared (Wired, 1/12/24).
Upon Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary, Kirk posted: “Twenty-four years ago, a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim socialist is on pace to run New York City.” “When we think of what it means to be an American, is [it] someone by the name of Islami Mohamed?” he remarked on another occasion (Media Matters, 8/19/25): “I don’t think so.”
“You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population,” Kirk insisted (Religion News, 1/7/25). He also claimed (Media Matters, 8/19/25) that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
‘Disgracefully ill-timed’
MSNBC‘s Rebecca Cutler said it was ““inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable” to connect Kirk’s murder to his hate speech (Guardian, 9/11/25).
In the wake of Kirk’s murder, it was taboo to point out that his politics, and those of the MAGA movement he embraced, contributed to a culture of hatred and demonization. MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd was promptly fired by the cable network after he observed:
Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions…. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.
When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in condemning violence, remarked that “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” the Washington Post (9/10/25) editorialized that this was “a disgracefully ill-timed comment.”
In fact, there is no better time to point out that the right-wing movement Kirk was a crucial part of has played the leading role in dehumanizing others and normalizing violence. Failure to honestly examine the politics that are driving extremism will steer us away from the kind of analysis and action that are needed to prevent more tragedies.
Thousands of people marching against the military occupation of our nation’s capital (Washington Post, 9/6/25) was not a news story to the New York Times.
Despite the late-summer sun bearing down, thousands of protesters marched towards the White House last Saturday carrying anti-Trump and Free DC signs. Many hailed from unions, activist organizations and religious groups. Two friends drove all the way from Illinois; “absolutely” it was worth it, they told the Washington Post (9/6/25).
Also at the protest was John Hanrahan, a longtime editor and journalist, and a former Post reporter who worked alongside Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Metro section—where he was a “third-string Watergate reporter“—until he refused to cross the Post pressmen’s picket line in 1975 (Esquire, 3/1/78).
Sunday morning, when Hanrahan picked the New York Times off his doorstep—yeah, he’s old school and still gets the paper edition—he didn’t see a single word or picture about the march. So late Sunday night, he wrote a letter to the editor lamenting the Times’ lack of coverage, even as other major outlets found the protest newsworthy.
“Not worth even a few column inches when thousands upon thousands of residents of a nation’s capital city stand up to protest against the ruling regime’s unwanted and unjustified takeover?” Hanrahan asked:
Would such an anti-authoritarian protest have gone unnoticed by “The Newspaper of Record” had it happened in Caracas, or Havana, or Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran? The question answers itself.
‘Only a few scattered protests’
A valuable New York Times story (9/6/25) about grand jury resistance to the military occupation dismissed widespread street activism as “only a few scattered protests.”
Less than eight hours after firing off his letter, Hanrahan scooped the Monday Times off his doorstep. Once again, there was nothing on the march. There was, however, a story (9/6/25) on how DC grand juries are rejecting charges brought amid Trump’s crackdown.
“In what could be read as a citizens’ revolt,” the Times reported,
ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president’s immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force.
The Times story was good—as has been much of the paper’s coverage (8/12/25, 8/16/25, 8/20/25, 9/10/25) of Trump’s DC takeover—but its opening line didn’t sit well with Hanrahan:
In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents, there have been only a few scattered protests.
DC has had more than a few protests against Trump’s military occupation, and Hanrahan is in a position to know. Despite clocking in at 87 years of age, he’s been a regular presence at protests over the past month, including numerous ones “ranging from 500 to 10,000 participants,” he wrote in an email to FAIR.
Explosion of smaller-scale actions
The Nation (8/29/25) described how DC’s night patrols “document the constitutional violations or brutality…so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing.”
“If a single massive protest could get rid of this man, it would have happened already, right? And so we have to think of different things,” Alex Dodds, co-founder of Free DC, told the Washington Post (9/6/25). “What fixes this is sustained resistance and noncooperation with people who are attempting to use our government, which belongs to us, to harm our communities and to harm us.”
And DC has seen an explosion of smaller-scale actions in response to Trump’s takeover. Parents have organized “walking school buses” to ensure kids make it safely to and from school. Others have mobilized to protect the homeless. More impromptu gatherings have formed to thwart ICE agents from snatching people off the streets. And each night at 8pm, neighbors bang pots and pans in protest, while deeper into the night, teams of volunteers go on night patrols.
This multifaceted, coordinated response has been taking place, even as thousands of DC residents have taken part in more traditional protest marches—like the September 6 march that the Times ignored. To dismiss the vibrant grassroots resistance to Trump’s occupation of DC as “only a few scattered protests” is a distortion that only serves to normalize authoritarianism.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Image of the boat released by Donald Trump on social media.
This week on CounterSpin: The US ordered a lethal strike on a small boat in the southern Caribbean that, we’re told, carried Venezuelan drug cartel members on their way to poison this pristine country of ours. How do we know that? We don’t. Who were they? We don’t know. Does it matter? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?
News media have basic questions to address on behalf of the US people: Can the Trump administration, or any administration, declare people guilty and treat them as criminals, absent the transparent legal processes we all understand as fundamental? Can they summarily kill people based on that declaration? And can they aim that illegal nightmare overwhelmingly at brown people and “enemy nations” without any principled interrogation on journalists’ part?
We hear about the killing in the southern Caribbean, and its various contexts, from Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Janine Jackson interviewed Defend Public Health’s Elizabeth Jacobs about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and public health for the September 5, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “I have a Kennedy,” Donald Trump allegedly bragged to donors, about putting in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services. Creepy as that statement sounds, you can almost imagine some reporters saying the same.
RFK Jr. is nothing if not “colorful,” what with the brain worm and the bear in the car. But what if news media centered their reporting on the millions of lives affected by the weird man with the famous last name? Would we still be joking about his belief that he can diagnose children walking past him in airports? Or would we be interrogating the systems that elevated such a delusional person, and determining how to mitigate the impacts of his work?
What if media took their eyes off the bouncing ball, and focused on how to safeguard hard-won medical advances, and fight assaults on the idea of health as a boutique purchase, rather than the very definition of a shared concern?
The group Defend Public Health has come together in that effort; our guest is a founding member. Elizabeth Jacobs is an epidemiologist and professor emerita at the University of Arizona. She joins us now by phone from Tucson. Welcome to CounterSpin, Elizabeth Jacobs.
Elizabeth Jacobs: Thank you so much for having me today, Janine.
JJ: I will start by saying that, looking for someone to talk about RFK Jr., I had no interest in talking with someone who only just now decided that he shouldn’t be allowed to touch public health with a pole. Kennedy was not a pig in a poke. There was plenty of record. So while we can be surprised every day by the brazenness of this administration and its believers, there was never a reason to believe that Kennedy as HHS secretary would be, to put the most generous face on it, helpfully critical of pharmaceutical companies, or corporate medicine, in service of regular people.
But there were reasons that some people thought Kennedy was a wagon to hitch to. So let me ask you first, what was the appeal? What void did people think they were filling, do you think?
EJ: I think he talks a really good game, and he was saying things that a lot of people have wanted to hear. Like he wants to look into things like pesticides or environmental toxicants—which, by the way, is a very broad category that he is usually fairly vague on—and I think a lot of people wanted to hear that.
But the issue is that scientists have been studying these things for a long time. And the thought that Mr. Kennedy was going to be the one who is going to address these issues is not one that I ever personally fell for. With that said, I completely understand why he appealed, at least on paper, to many other people. He simply said the right words.
JJ: And we’re in kind of new waters now. Susan Monarez, the head of the CDC, was fired, and then four other top leaders quit. Heads of federal agencies walking out together on principle is not an everyday occurrence. So what do we know about why those CDC officials felt they couldn’t possibly do what they were now being tasked to do? It’s about vaccines, right?
EJ: Right. And we are all faced with a choice: Do we want to believe what Mr. Kennedy says about why they left, or do we want to believe what the scientists themselves are saying?
And I choose the scientists. These are people who are career federal workers, who do this job because they’re dedicated to the public health of the United States of America. Working at the CDC isn’t a glamorous job. It doesn’t come with a huge paycheck compared to, say, if you worked in industry. So I tend to trust these individuals more than I trust Mr. Kennedy.
Their departure, the number of people who have been leaving the CDC, is unprecedented. And, frankly, it really provides a very strong hint as to the existential crisis that is happening right now with Mr. Kennedy as the head of Health and Human Services.
And a great example of that is the fact that he has just installed a person with no scientific training or background at all as the temporary head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is simply an outrageous, dangerous and unprecedented situation in which we find ourselves.
JJ: And let me just ask you to expound a little bit on the effects. What can we see coming down the road with RFK Jr. and his appointees leading public health policy? I hate to ask you to say it, but what could we be looking at?
EJ: I’ll start with the less obvious one, and then talk about vaccines. So the less obvious concern that I have, for example, is that Mr. Kennedy has said that he wants to fire all the members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force. And that group is responsible for providing recommendations for things like which cancer screenings we should get, and when we should start getting them. And their recommendations are what causes health insurance companies to be required to pay for those screenings. So if he disbands a committee like that, there is a likelihood that our health insurance companies will no longer cover things like cancer screenings.
The very obvious danger that we are in, and that several senators brought up today in his hearing with the Senate Finance Committee, is that vaccines are being undermined daily by Mr. Kennedy. And he protests this, and claims that he’s not an anti-vaxxer, yet he takes actions like replacing every member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices with people who are anti-vaccine, or hold other very dangerous, pseudo-scientific opinions on this topic. And so it’s going to be a very serious issue with regard to the vaccination coverage in this country. And it’s truly almost impossible for me to believe that this is happening in the United States.
JJ: It feels like a Dr. Seuss world we’re living in, in which the White House statement said that CDC head Susan Monarez was “not aligned with the president’s agenda of making America healthy again.” This is weird. This is just weird.
EJ: Yes. And Dr. Monarez, just one month ago, was praised as a very knowledgeable, ethical leader at CDC, which I agree with. So her dismissal is, again, a funhouse mirror.
If you listen to Mr. Kennedy, he claimed today in the hearing that Dr. Monarez was asked if she was a trustworthy person, and she responded “no.” I find that absolutely impossible to believe. I do not believe that’s what happened. I believe what she says, which is that she was fired because she would not agree with orders, so to speak, from Mr. Kennedy to approve things that were coming out that she did not see the data for, that were going to be released by a group of people who themselves are not trustworthy.
JJ: Public health and public information, as you’re indicating, are very much connected. The man, for example, who shot bullets at the CDC’s windows, that killed a police officer, was, we were told, motivated by beliefs he got from somewhere about Covid vaccines. So it matters very much what ideas we allow into the ether, and that’s where media comes in.
Elizabeth Jacobs: “It is my opinion that misinformation—not just scientific, but all kinds—is the greatest existential threat to the United States right now.”
EJ: That’s right. And it’s both legacy or traditional media and social media. It is my opinion that misinformation—not just scientific, but all kinds—is the greatest existential threat to the United States right now. And we are seeing this play out, and I’ll use social media as the first example.
Social media companies make money through engagement, and therefore they have no motivation whatsoever to stem the tide of misinformation on their platforms. We know, for example, that false information tends to spread on social media orders of magnitude faster than factual information does. And that’s dangerous, because it promotes controversy and engagement, which makes social media companies money.
Now, with the legacy media, my biggest concern is false equivalence. So, for example, when stories are run about vaccines, they may have a doctor on who says vaccines are good; they’re safe and effective. But then they’ll also interview somebody who says, “Oh no, vaccines are no good.” And the problem with that is it creates a false image that those two viewpoints are equivalent, when, in reality, if you wanted to show the equivalence of these two opinions, you would have 100,000 scientists or healthcare professionals who are talking about the benefit and safety of vaccines, versus one person who says that they are dangerous or harmful in some way. And so this false equivalence adds to this misinformation and distrust of science.
JJ: I appreciate that, and Defend Public Health’s Bruce Mirken wrote a great piece back in June, which I saw on 48 Hills, about the “sane-washing,” as we call it, of RFK Jr. And it was great because it talked about precisely what you’re saying: Reporters should note that he says things that are wackadoodle. But then also, they do this thing where they say, “Well, he’s a skeptic on vaccines.” And that ticks a box for a lot of folks, as though RFK Jr had principled concerns. He’s a “skeptic,” and aren’t we all skeptics?
I just want to ask you about the role of journalism here. You’ve started to indicate it, but what could they do less or more of, do you think?
EJ: So I really do think it’s critical to present factual information, and call things what they are. Mr. Kennedy is not a skeptic. He is an anti-vaccination enthusiast. He spreads propaganda. He actually actively spreads disinformation to the people of the United States of America. If he were skeptical, he would actually consider the just massive amount of scientific data to which he has access, which has shown time and time again that vaccines are safe and effective.
So the words that we choose are really important, and I just think there are media outlets who are doing better and better at this. But I just want to repeat that this is an existential crisis for the United States, and we have got to be clear about the danger that Mr. Kennedy poses. This isn’t a minor scientific disagreement. This is the complete undermining of the entire scientific infrastructure of the United States, and our vaccine program.
JJ: There are efforts, finally, including your own, to start with—not end with—getting RFK Jr. out of there. But there’s much more that we need to do.
EJ: Absolutely. And, again, I’m certainly far from alone. People who believe that Mr. Kennedy needs to be removed from office or resign, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands now, who agree with this. And I guess one bright spot from the hearing today is that there are now three Republican senators who spoke on the record about their concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s actions.
So I really hope that this keeps up. I hope that physicians and other healthcare practitioners, nurses, will come forward and really talk to their elected officials about their concerns. Because, again, this is not a trivial worry.
JJ: And let me just ask you, finally, if there’s reporters listening, is there anything that you would ask them to stop doing, or start doing, in terms of journalism? And not just RFK Jr., but public health in general—are there questions you would like them to start asking, or stop asking? What are your thoughts on media?
EJ: I’m not a journalist, and I have a lot of respect for how difficult this job is. I would just say to avoid any sort of desire to look for false equivalence, or present “the other side of the story,” when there are situations where there is no other side of the story. So to make sure that you’re talking with experts in regard to the field that you have under discussion, and, honestly, I would just really prefer to see people who are pseudoscientific quacks get a lot less ink and a lot less airtime, because they do not reflect the beliefs and the understanding of science among the majority of scientists and healthcare practitioners in this country.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Elizabeth Jacobs. You can find her work, and that of others, at Defend Public Health, right where you would expect to find it, DefendPublicHealth.org. Elizabeth Jacobs, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. Thank you so much.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Face the Nation (8/31/25) “shamefully edited the interview to whitewash the truth” because it cut out what AP (9/5/25) called “a series of unproven accusations about Abrego Garcia.”
After Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (X, 8/31/25) complained that several minutes of her August 31 Face the Nationinterview had been “shamefully edited…to whitewash the truth,” CBS News announced that its flagship Sunday morning program will no longer edit its interviews, except for “legal or national security” reasons (AP, 9/5/25).
According to AP, CBS said it had edited the interview, which ran 16 minutes and 40 seconds in its original form, for length, and posted the full interview on its website and YouTube. As the AP correctly noted, Noem “made a series of unproven accusations about Abrego Garcia” in the portion of the interview that was cut. This is a pattern of behavior by the administration with respect to Kilmar Abrego Garcia (FAIR.org, 6/20/25;USA Today, 9/8/25), a Salvadoran refugee who had been illegally deported to the CECOT concentration camp in his country of origin.
In the context of the recent capitulations by CBS News and its parent company Paramount in the face of Trump administration demands, the announcement is noteworthy—and dangerous.
Uneditable propaganda
As Variety (9/5/25) says, “Making decisions that seem to come in response to backlash from public officials is not seen as sound journalistic practice.”
Writing for FAIR, Ari Paul noted in July (7/24/25) that, in order to facilitate a merger with Skydance,
Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement.
Variety (9/5/25) argued that CBS‘s promise not to edit Face the Nation‘s interviews, which overwhelmingly feature government officials,
is an unorthodox one, potentially leaving show moderators and producers unable to remove false statements or propaganda uttered by political operatives and officials and undermining the authority and credibility of Margaret Brennan, the moderator of the Sunday public affairs program.
An anonymous CBS source weakly protested to the AP that Face the Nation‘s Brennan would “still be able to factcheck or challenge claims made by interview subjects.” But corporate media outlets have never been good at stopping political figures from spewing propaganda (FAIR.org, 6/28/11, 6/26/24, 2/28/25, 7/31/25), particularly those from Trump and his minions, who produce falsehoods at such a rapid clip that it’s impossible to challenge each one. Now CBS will have even fewer tools to do so.
Installing a commissar
AP (via KIRO, 9/9/25) points out that Kenneth Weinstein will not actually be an ombud, i.e., a person who resolves complaints from the public; “Paramount said it does not envision Weinstein having any public-facing role.”
In yet another move to the right, days after its editing announcement, CBS News (9/8/25) announced that, to fulfill part of its settlement with Trump, it would be appointing Kenneth R. Weinstein to serve as an ombud. In addition to being a prominent conservative—Weinstein previously headed the Hudson Institute for over a decade—the new appointee was nominated by Trump for ambassador to Japan in 2020 (though his nomination was never confirmed—Reuters, 9/8/25). Weinstein “will review editorial questions and concerns from outside entities and employees,” CBS said.
While FAIR has lamented the gradual disappearance of ombuds from major journalistic outlets over the years (FAIR.org, 6/1/17), and the loss of accountability to their audiences that that entails, it’s critical that ombuds be independent. Weinstein’s clear ideological tilt, his connection to the Trump administration and his position’s creation at the command of that administration stand as obvious obstacles to him performing any role but state censor.
FAIR (7/24/25) also pointed out that Paramount was looking to give right-wing journalist and censorious “free speech” activist Bari Weiss a top role at CBS News. It has since been reported that the company is looking to buy her publication, the Free Press, for as much as $200 million (Puck, 9/3/25).
Featured image, from left: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, CBS News “ombud” Kenneth Weinstein.
Janine Jackson interviewed Green America’s Cathy Cowan Becker about insurance and climate disasters for the August 29, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The Trump administration’s aggressive whistling past the graveyard notwithstanding, climate disruption is still actually happening, as reality doesn’t bow to weird political whims. In reality, people have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to insurance companies, money every month their whole working lives, with the idea that if a storm destroys their house, or a fire burns down their business, that will be acknowledged and they can be made whole, based on the insurance they have paid for for precisely this purpose for many years.
And yet here we are, where, as our guest reports, insurance companies are responding to people needing insurance by dropping them, canceling them, and straight up just not paying them, while continuing to monetarily support the industry that’s driving the crisis.
So what the heck is happening here, and why do news media make us feel that we’re somehow too dumb to understand the problem, or to see a way out of it?
Cathy Cowan Becker is responsible finance campaign director at the group Green America. She joins us now by phone from Ohio. Welcome to CounterSpin, Cathy Becker.
Cathy Cowan Becker: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: I saw your piece on OtherWords.org, headlined “Big Insurance Companies Are Fleecing Disaster Survivors—and the Rest of Us,” And I would encourage folks to find that piece. But then I saw the piece–and I was happy to see it carried and reprinted and put in front of people; that’s the point–but I saw it in another outlet, and the headline was changed. And listeners know reporters don’t write headlines, but this Florida paper gave it the headline, “Insurance Rates Rise Due to Climate Disasters.” And I thought, well, that doesn’t sound like precisely what she’s saying. There isn’t an automatic cause and effect; there are still choices being made.
So my question for you is: What are insurance companies doing right now in the face of climate disasters—and that’s plural, disasters, and multifaceted. What are they doing, and how does it stand up against what they might be doing, and what many folks thought they would be doing right now?
CB: Yes, thank you. Those are excellent questions. And I’m also very glad that you are pointing out making the connection to the climate crisis, because that’s at the root of this ongoing insurance crisis. The great increase in the number and severity of climate and weather events across the world—things like floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires—we saw in the United States last year 27 such events costing $1 billion or more, a total of $182 billion. And that’s up from about three of those sorts of events in the 1980s, according to NOAA.
So you’re right that when you buy insurance, you expect, if your house or your property is hit with a fire or storm, that your insurance policy will help you replace or rebuild. And insurance is designed for such one-off events, that if my whole neighborhood is buying insurance and my neighbor’s house catches fire, all of our premium costs will help go to help that neighbor rebuild. But it is not designed for systemic climate disasters that touch entire neighborhoods and towns and villages, and are becoming more intense and widespread every year.
Cathy Cowan Becker: “What they’re paying out in climate-attributable losses is almost the same as what they’re taking in from the fossil fuel companies in premiums.”
So what insurance companies are doing now, how they’re reacting to this right now, they’re taking a very short-term view of this unfolding disaster. So instead of looking at what is the root cause and how do we address that, they’re just moving to protect their own profits in a short-term way. So they’re, as you said, canceling policies, raising rates and not paying claims.
LendingTree just had a report that homeowners insurance has gone up over 40% in the last six years; that’s nationwide. There are many, many reports of companies canceling policies, not renewing policies in climate-vulnerable and really other areas, sometimes based on drone footage that they took of someone’s house without the homeowner’s knowledge or consent. And then we have insurance companies that are closing claims, many of them legitimate claims that people make; some of them have closing rates over 40%, where someone files a claim and there’s simply no payment. That’s according to Weiss Ratings.
The other just really baffling thing insurance companies are doing is they are insuring fossil fuel projects and investing in fossil fuel companies. So they’re insuring and investing in fossil fuels. And, as you know, fossil fuels are at the root of the climate disaster. So there is a coalition called Insure Our Future, and they’ve studied this problem for several years. They found that the amount that insurance companies, when they actually pay, what they’re paying out in climate-attributable losses is almost the same as what they’re taking in from the fossil fuel companies in premiums. So it just doesn’t make any sense for them to be investing in this industry that is making this problem that they are having to pay for worse. But they are.
So we know from a German nonprofit called Urgewald that tracks fossil fuel investments worldwide that GEICO’s parent company, which is Berkshire Hathaway, headed by Warren Buffett, they’re by far the largest investor in fossil fuels, at $95 billion. State Farm has $20 billion invested in fossil fuels, and other big insurance companies like USAA, AIG, Nationwide, Allstate, Travelers, all have a billion or many billions invested in fossil fuels. I think the second half of your question is, what should they be doing instead? Is that correct?
JJ: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. What we would be looking for them and hoping, as we write our checks every month, that they would be doing?
CB: Yeah, exactly. So the No. 1 thing, the first thing they should do, is to stop insuring and investing in fossil fuel companies that are making this climate crisis worse. This is to insure their longer-term future, insure everyone else’s longer-term future.
So big institutional investors, insurance companies, really have a role to play on where this kind of capital and funding goes. So instead of investing in fossil fuels, they could be investing in resiliency projects to make local communities, help them adapt to climate change. Things like levies or public works that would help save major storm systems, that would help cities deal with increased rainfall. They could be investing in that. They could be investing in clean energy projects and energy efficiency projects that lower the carbon pollution that’s causing climate change. So, basically, instead of sending their institutional capital to make the problem worse, they could be sending it to solutions that make it better.
So another set of things they could do is to work with policy makers to create an all-hazard insurance. So many people don’t know that in order to get flood damage covered, you have to have separate flood insurance policy. Your regular policy doesn’t cover that. And there’s also earthquake damage, that’s also a separate policy.
And on top of that, the FEMA flood insurance maps are very out of date. So places that are now susceptible to flooding are not shown on these flood insurance maps.
And so as a result, only 2% of people in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, and only 3% of people in Kerr County, Texas—both of which, as most people know, had recent major flood damage, flash flooding, as the result of tropical storms and hurricanes that came near where they were—hardly any of those people had flood insurance. And that means their claims are not going to be paid. And that is a real travesty.
And so what we need is an all-hazards insurance, whether that’s public or private, where you don’t have to have several different policies. You have one policy, and it covers fires, floods, earthquakes, even terrorism, just any sort of hazard that faces people.
And then, finally, is public policy. So recently, Florida passed a spate of what they call “insurance reforms,” but basically those laws are making it harder for people to sue when their insurance company doesn’t pay a claim, and instead they’re forced into unfair arbitration.
And so, instead, insurance companies could be offering people incentives, like, say, a break on their premium rates, to prepare their homes for climate disaster. So things like fortified roofs, or paying to trim nearby vegetation or install an additional sump pump. People could afford to do that if they got a break on their insurance rates. And then the companies wouldn’t have as many claims, because these houses would be better prepared for climate disasters. And there’s a program in Alabama called Strengthen Alabama Homes that shows the success of that approach. So those are some things insurance companies could be doing instead.
JJ: I would ask you, though, what is their business model? Is there something baked into what big insurance companies see as their business model that allows them, or encourages them, to pit policy holders against what I’m understanding as profits?
Because listening to what you’re saying, it sounds like insurance is a bait and switch. You pay for it every month, but then when you need it, they say, “Oh, no, no, now you need it? No, we’re not going to do that.” Is that something that is baked into insurance, or is that something that companies could do differently if they chose?
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s a question of the stock market.
There’s kind of two models for insurance companies. So some are stock insurance, which means they’re owned by shareholders, they’re traded on the stock market for a profit. And so they are under great pressure to take a quarterly approach, a very short-term approach, and just try to increase profits. And that’s what clearly a number of them are doing.
There’s also a model called mutual insurance, which is kind of how insurance started, where the insurance company is owned by its policy holders. It’s not traded on the market. There’s less of an immediate pressure for short-term profits.
That’s not totally a guarantee that they will always do the right thing, because it may depend on who those policy holders are. So, for example, Liberty Mutual has a lot of policy holders that are fossil fuel companies, and they provide a lot of insurance to fossil fuel companies. And so they are actively making the problem worse that way, in terms of exacerbating climate change. But in general, a mutual insurance company will be less driven by that profit incentive.
JJ: And I wanted to ask you, in your piece for OtherWords.org, for Green America, you talk about, there’s a difference between bigger and smaller insurers, and there are different things that folks who are looking for insurance can look out for. What are some of those ideas, in terms of, you’re looking for an insurance company, where—climate disruption is happening; it’s not like it’s going to turn off tomorrow, it’s going to happen, floods, heat, all of this. We’re not going back on it. There’s going to just be more and more of it.
And I want to add, also, not being able to be insured is a thing for people. So in terms of news we can use, as individuals, and as maybe small business owners, what are you looking for in an insurer? What are the sort of tabs or things to look out for, in terms of what you’re going to get from an insurance company?
CB: So we encourage people to look locally for your local and regional insurance companies, many of them mutual insurance companies. Because they are local, they’re less likely to treat policy holders as a number, because they live in the same towns and the same neighborhoods.
And also, these smaller companies don’t have enormous advertising budgets. So they don’t have to make a huge profit in order to hire an A-list Hollywood actor to star in an amusing commercial that’s aired nationwide. They’re not doing it that way. So they’re not household names, but many of them have been quietly doing business in their community for decades, some even a century.
So what we tell people to do is, well, first to shop around. So don’t just go with the first one that you know about. Call several different insurance brokers in your area. Ask them for quotes from local and regional insurance companies. And the reason to call more than one agent is, different agents work with different companies. So that’ll give you a better idea of what’s available in your area.
There are things you can do to save money. So bundle home or renters and auto insurance. If you bundle insurance, that saves money. Use any discounts you have from things like AAA, AARP, an alumni association. If you can’t pay one annual lump sum upfront, pay in monthly installments. Make sure your quote is for adequate coverage to rebuild completely if your property is a total loss. And keep in mind that construction and labor costs are going up.
A couple of other things you can do is check the company’s ratings in AM Best, make sure that they are financially secure, they’re not going to go out of business in two months. And also, Weiss Ratings has listings of nonpayment of claims rates for companies, for most large companies. And so if you find that a company has over 40% in nonpayment of claims, avoid that company.
And then, finally, if you get a non-renewal notice from your insurance company, there are several things you can do. (This is from Consumer Reports.) You can call them and ask for a written explanation. You can ask for any photos or videos they have. If their explanation isn’t accurate, file an appeal. If it is accurate, find out how you can remedy the problem, and then do it, and show them that you did it. And also ask for an extension on the non-renewal, so you have time to shop for a new company. And do shop, even if you’re trying to resolve it with your original company, do still shop for a new company. So those are some practical things that people can do during this time of great chaos and transition.
JJ: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that. And finally, I want to shout out Chicago Crusader reporter Stephanie Gadlin, who reported how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as you were just talking about, a lot of people learned that their homeowner policies didn’t include flood damage, and how the rebuilding has focused on higher-ground neighborhoods, and it’s left out a lot of Black communities. Richard Rothstein, listeners will know, has reported and worked for many years on how housing and insurance can often leave out race and racial discrimination as a consideration. And that has to do with the way media talk about these issues that we’re talking about.
And I would just ask you, finally, are there big misunderstandings that you face? What would you hope that news reporting, talking about this issue of insurance and climate change, what would you like them to do more of? What would you like them to avoid? What are your general thoughts about reporting on this set of issues?
CB: First, tell the stories of people. So as insurance rates go up, people have to have insurance in order to have a mortgage. And that prices a lot of people out of having a mortgage, especially young people and people of color, the populations to drop first from being able to own their own homes. So tell that story.
And there are people who go without insurance, it’s called going bare. And so Consumer Federation of America has a report about that showing, I think it’s 7.4%—don’t quote me on that, because that’s off the top of my head—there’s people going without insurance at all, and then one storm and their home is gone.
So one solution to this is wrapped up in a bill in New York State called the Insure Our Communities Act. And this bill would require insurance companies to phase out insuring and investing in fossil fuels, but instead it would require them to do a certain amount of investing in their communities. And this is modeled off of the Community Reinvestment Act that requires banks to invest a certain amount in their communities. The Community Reinvestment Act, that was passed back in the ’70s to try to do away with redlining. And so this would kind of take that idea to insurance, and get insurance companies to do the same thing. So those are the kinds of solutions we’re looking for.
JJ: And that we would hope that media would talk about, yeah? And put before people.
CB: Yeah, exactly. And so I guess a reporter can’t write about that if they don’t know about that, but look into that.
JJ: All right, then. Well, we’ve been speaking with Cathy Cowan Becker. She’s responsible finance campaigns director at the group Green America. They’re online at GreenAmerica.org. Cathy Becker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Multiple previous heads of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention wrote for the New York Times that “what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the CDC and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months—culminating in his decision to fire Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago—is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.” Kennedy, they wrote,
fired thousands of federal health workers, and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of US support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage.
Sounds like speaking truth to power, facing fascist fantasy with fact, like…journalism. Except that the country’s so-called paper of record labeled it “opinion.” It’s only an opinion, the Times says, that it’s wrong that the leadership of our federal health agency is a guy without a medical degree who claims he can diagnose children he walks past at the airport. For a lot of folks, that’s A-OK! And they deserve to be heard!
Corporate journalism is failing us at every turn, and the only upside is that every day they make it more obvious, and re-direct us to other sources. On RFK Jr., one of those sources is the group Defend Public Health. We’ll hear from a founding member, Elizabeth Jacobs, on this week’s show.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of genocide and starvation.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
The Washington Post‘s headline (9/1/25) on the IAGS resolution didn’t mince words–though it did get Israel calling the resolution “disgraceful” into the subhead.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution on August 31 declaring that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, with 86% of voting members in agreement.
The declaration by the group, described as “the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars” (Reuters, 9/1/25), was widely seen as significant news. Prominent US media sources like CNN (9/1/25), NBC (9/1/25), ABC (9/2/25), CBS (9/3/25), PBS (9/1/25), NPR (9/2/25), AP (9/2/25), Time (9/1/25) and Newsweek (9/1/25) published stories on the IAGS resolution. They bore headlines like the Washington Post‘s “Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Leading Scholars’ Association Says” (9/1/25). So, too, did numerous international news sources, with the BBC (9/1/25) running the headline “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say.”
But the New York Times (9/1/25), which has repeatedly come under fire for its bias against Palestinians during Israel’s two-year-long rampage in Gaza, buried the news in the 31st paragraph of a story headlined “Israel’s Push for a Permanent Gaza Deal May Mean a Longer War, Experts Say.” The article immediately followed the brief mention of the IAGS resolution with a response from the Israeli government that called it an “an embarrassment to the legal profession,” and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.”
The New York Times (9/1/25) thought the “experts” who thought Israel was risking a longer war were more newsworthy than the ones who thought Israel was committing genocide.
The Times‘ treatment as an afterthought of the confirmation by genocide scholars of an ongoing genocide in Gaza recalls the paper’s real-time coverage of the Nazi Holocaust, which often relegated news of mass death to its back pages, and sometimes to the last paragraphs of unrelated stories (Extra!, Summer/89). Those pieces rarely quoted the genocidaires justifying their atrocities, however.
The Times story of the IAGS resolution included this little nugget that promoted the conflation of Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters:
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including about 18,000 children and minors, according to Gaza health officials, whose toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
While the reporter on the story, Isabel Kershner, can’t be held responsible for the headline, FAIR has written previously on her history of misleading readers through pro-Israeli bias and her conflicts of interest. The activist organization Writers Against the War on Gaza has also thoroughly documented why she might not be the most objective source on Israel/Palestine.
But she may have just been following the directives of her editors, who warned staffers last year away from using the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza (FAIR.org, 8/4/25). “We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not,” the memo told employees.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Back in March, 29-year-old Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran native who had lived and worked in the United States for nearly half his life—became the face of Donald Trump’s sadistic mass deportation campaign when he was unlawfully sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison and torture center.
The US government itself acknowledged that Ábrego García’s removal had transpired as a result of an “administrative error.” However, both the Trump administration and that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—the self-described “coolest dictator in the world”—were huffily opposed to rectifying said error. Ábrego García was at last returned to the US in June, only to now face deportation to…Uganda, the east African country that has been roped into serving as one of numerous international dumping grounds for asylum seekers and undocumented persons who are unwanted in the US.
AP (8/26/25) reports that some say an agreement to exile Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda “stinks”—not because of its violation of human rights law, but because of a “lack of parliamentary approval for the agreement.”
On August 26, the Associated Press selected the following headline for its report on the new twist in the Ábrego García case: “The US Wants to Deport Abrego Garcia to Uganda. Critics There Say the Murky Deal ‘Stinks.’” The article explained that Uganda is not the first African nation to succumb to such agreements with the global hegemon; in July, the US deported five men to the southern kingdom of Eswatini, while eight others were shipped to South Sudan. Rwanda has also promised to accept up to 250 deportees from the US.
The article went on to note that “opposition figures and others in Uganda on Tuesday questioned the lack of parliamentary approval for the agreement”—which is what we are told makes the arrangement “stink.” And yet the AP did not find it necessary at any point to mention the sheer illegality of such “third country” deportation schemes, which happen to constitute a violation of international law—in other words, the “stink” is a whole lot bigger than we are led to believe.
As noted in an April United Nations press release on “illegal deportations” from the US to El Salvador:
The international law duty of non-refoulement prohibits deporting any person to a place where there is a substantial risk of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, unfair trial or other irreparable harm.
The US State Department’s 2024 writeup on human rights practices in Uganda included “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention,” and much more.
Fantastically unsafe destinations
“The Trump administration takes Panama up on its offer to act as a stopover for expelled migrants,” AP (2/13/25) reports without a hint of criticism.
Indeed, a common denominator running through the list of ostensible “safe third-country” destinations for US deportees—from Eswatini and South Sudan to Honduras and Guatemala—is that they are fantastically unsafe. The US government has warned its own citizens against travel to South Sudan “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict”; Honduras and Guatemala both produce significant numbers of refuge seekers themselves, precisely on account of sky-high levels of violence, much of it owing to decades of pernicious US meddling.
And while US corporate media have not shied away from reporting on the third-country deportations, they tend to dance around the illegality of the whole matter—not to mention the fact that it is batshit crazy. Imagine for a moment that you are a refuge seeker who has risked your life to reach the US, only to wake up one day and find yourself in a country where you don’t speak the language, and perhaps have never even heard of in the first place—with nothing to protect you from “irreparable harm.”
In February, AP (2/13/25) reported on the deportation of the first batch of 119 migrants, from Afghanistan, China and an array of other nations, to be deported from the US to Panama—as if it were the most normal thing in the world for a Central American country to be acting as an intermediary for the illegal expulsion of refuge seekers with no criminal record.
The report mentioned that since Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino took office in 2024, “Panama has made dozens of deportation flights, most funded by the US government.” Many of the almost 300 migrants ultimately sent to Panama by the US were effectively incarcerated in the country’s Darién region bordering the notorious Darién Gap, the veritable migrant graveyard that hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers have been forced to traverse in recent years in the hopes of reaching safety in the US.
Relying on ‘critics’
CBS (8/21/25) begins a story by reporting that the Trump administration is persuading “countries around the world to aid its crackdown on illegal immigration.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that that administration is actually “rerout[ing] asylum-seekers to countries that” it claims “can fairly hear their claims for humanitarian protection.”
Of course, corporate media have never been known for empathy, and so, instead of painting a picture of the acute human plight occasioned by illicit and ludicrous US policy, journalists rely on a variety of “critics” to call out what should be objectively condemned by anyone supposedly in the business of speaking truth to power.
A recent CBS News dispatch (8/21/25), for example, specified that
human rights advocates have strongly denounced the Trump administration effort, saying migrants could be deported to countries where they could be harmed or returned to the place they fled.
The CBS article noted that the US government is pursuing a “large-scale diplomatic effort…to strike deportation arrangements with nations across several continents, including those with problematic human rights records.”
A similarly noncommittal approach was taken in a July Washington Post piece (7/4/25) on the “imminent deportation to conflict-ridden South Sudan” of eight men from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Sudan and Vietnam—whose authors dispassionately observed, “Lawyers for the migrants said it is illegal and immoral for the US government to deport people to places where they could be killed.”
‘Uniquely barbaric’
Reuters (8/2/25) quoted Trump officials calling deportees “the worst of the worst” and “heinous illegal criminals.”
In early August, Reuters (8/2/25) calculated that, since Trump’s reassumption of the presidency in January, there had already been thousands of third-country deportations to Mexico, and hundreds to other countries. The aforementioned five-man deportation in July to Eswatini—which comprised individuals from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen—was praised by Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin as a “safe third-country deportation flight [that] took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”
And while Eswatini hardly qualifies as safe, “uniquely barbaric” would seem to be a pretty good description of current US policy. In her social media post on the five “depraved monsters” who had been “terrorizing American communities,” McLaughlin listed some of the crimes attributed to them—murder, robbery, “operating a motor vehicle under influence of controlled substance”—which, while certainly constituting criminal acts, are not exactly singularly barbaric. In fact, America’s ongoing habit of bombing civilians left and right across the globe—most recently including 11 alleged drug smugglers murdered in cold blood—could be perceived as rather more barbaric than, I dunno, driving under the influence.
Furthermore, as former US ambassador to Bulgaria Eric Rubin has pointed out (New York Times, 6/25/25), the Trumpian project of expelling folks to countries they have nothing to do with is an exercise in “terrorizing people…. Most of the people we’re talking about have not committed any crime.”
As for the alleged “refusal” by home countries to take their “monsters” back, this claim doesn’t really hold water, either. For instance, when Trump kicked off the eight-man South Sudan deportation that included one Mexican citizen, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government had not even been informed (Reuters, 8/2/25).
Shameless racist bullying
The New York Times (6/25/25) frames US coercing countries to participate in human rights abuses as “global deal-making”—just the way Donald Trump would want it described.
In June, meanwhile, a New York Times would-be exposé (6/25/25) headlined “Inside the Global Deal-Making Behind Trump’s Mass Deportations” shone a bit of light on how the US administration was “pushing nations around the world, including ones at war, to take people expelled” from the land of the free. Rwanda, for one, was said to appear “eager” at the prospect, after the US paid the former genocide-afflicted nation $100,000 in April to accept one Iraqi citizen.
Of a total of at least 58 countries that US diplomats had been instructed to approach as possible deportee dumping grounds, many had already been subjected to—or were contenders for—“a new full or partial travel ban to the United States by the Trump administration.”
Alluding nonchalantly to the administration’s shameless racist bullying, the Times brought up a State Department cable that “instructed diplomats to tell the countries being considered, most of which are in Africa, that they might be able to stay off the list if they agreed to take deportees who are not their citizens.” The paper went on to apply egregious euphemism to an utterly sociopathic spectacle:
At a cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with passion about the process: “We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries, and will you do that as a favor to us?’”
Again, it seems the US newspaper of record might have conjured a slightly more valid assessment of Rubio’s performance than one of “passion”—his own “despicable” would have been more appropriate. The article’s authors proceeded to allow the usual space for “critics of the deportations and lawyers” to argue that “the administration is ignoring the potential for human rights abuses in some of the countries willing to play host.”
Then comes the roundabout, watered-down verdict:
That appears to be the point. Administration officials say they are trying to send a message to those in the United States illegally that they could end up in brutal conditions in a faraway land if they don’t leave voluntarily.
One of the “faraway lands” listed as being targeted for a third-country agreement was Libya, which as the American Civil Liberties Union (6/6/25) has noted is “known for electrocuting and sexually assaulting migrants imprisoned in militia-run detention facilities.”
Don’t connect the dots
“Resettle” (Reuters, 8/15/25) sounds so much better than “ethnically cleanse.”
And this is basically the corporate media template for reporting on the blatant violation of human rights and international law: Go ahead and admit that the US government is consciously and intentionally setting refuge seekers up to “end up in brutal conditions,” but don’t bother dwelling on where that slippery slope might lead us all, or connecting the dots between illegal third-country deportations and Trump’s current mission to do away with the law altogether. (It is ironic, to say the least, that an administration so obsessed with going after “illegals” is committed to entirely illegal behavior.)
Nor, to be sure, are media concerned with exploring the implications of the racist, imperial hubris that causes the US to view much of the world—and African nations in particular—as potential carceral colonies. As coincidence would have it, America’s megalomaniacal partner in crime, the state of Israel, is also reportedly seeking to “resettle” the native Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip in—where else?—South Sudan. As per the typically disingenuous language of a recent Reuters writeup (8/15/25):
The plan, if carried further, would envisage people moving from an enclave shattered by almost two years of war with Israel [read: US-backed genocide by Israel] to a nation in the heart of Africa riven by years of political and ethnically driven violence.
By further coincidence, Israel in 2013 signed a secretive deal under which African asylum seekers in the country were deported to Rwanda and disappeared. But, hey, surely it’s become a “safe third country” in the meantime.
In June, CBS (6/24/25) reported on the Supreme Court’s
lift[ing of] a lower court order that prevented the Trump administration from deporting migrants to countries that are not their places of origin without first giving them the chance to raise fears of torture, persecution or death.
The article quoted Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion that the court was “rewarding lawlessness” and undermining due process. And as the corporate media tiptoe around reporting on this lawlessness, they may be rewarding just that, as well.
International human rights organizations have pleaded with governments to oppose Israel’s blockade of aid into Gaza for the better part of the past year. But it wasn’t until late July, when dramatic images of emaciated children circulated widely, that corporate media and establishment politicians finally took notice. After 21 months of relentless bombing and even more decades of occupation, the news cycle gave extended attention to Palestinian starvation (FAIR.org, 7/29/25).
Quantity, however, does not always equal quality. To see if the content of reporting on the engineered Gaza famine matches the seriousness of the situation, FAIR surveyed coverage from nine different news outlets (New York Times, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, BBC, NPR, Time and Politico) during the week after the initial proliferation of reportage (7/24–31/25) to assess how or whether they discussed the full scope of the crisis.
Apart from the acute, potentially fatal consequences of starvation, malnutrition comes with permanent, long-term side effects that could affect the population for generations. Though increased coverage pushed the immediate issue into the limelight, we found that media did not consistently report on the stakes and long-lasting impacts of starvation on Palestinians’ health.
The New York Times’ infamous addition of an “editor’s note,” explaining that a Gazan child depicted in a report as facing starvation should be re-interpreted as suffering from “pre-existing” conditions, highlighted the need for honest journalistic assessments of starvation’s impacts, as well as its causes.
‘Medical consequences’
NPR‘s article (7/29/25) provides detailed information on the effects of starvation—but the headline avoids saying who’s causing it.
NPR published two articles on July 29 that broke down the physiological process of starvation. In an article (7/29/25) headlined “People Are Dying of Malnutrition in Gaza. How Does Starvation Kill You?,” it elaborated on the “five phases of starvation,” where depletion of carbohydrates and fats leaves one first feeling fatigue before experiencing weakened organs and cardiac arrest. If one is pregnant, then starvation could result in “preterm birth, stunting, impaired immune function” and, for the babies, “long-term risks for noncommunicable diseases like diabetes.”
In another article, headlined “As Gaza Starves, the Next Generation May Also Endure the Consequences,” NPR (7/29/25) cited credible research that saw how children born to those pregnant during a famine were “more likely to experience obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and shorter lifespans.” The trauma of starvation is even remembered on a molecular basis, affecting “how genes are turned on or off,” where “those epigenetic changes can be passed down to descendants.”
Further, Time (7/30/25) platformed experts who warn that malnourishment and missed meals for pregnant people increase “the likelihood of miscarriage, stillbirth and undernourished newborns.” “Reduced IQ, learning disabilities and behavioral problems that persist through life,” along with compromised immune systems, are among other pressing health concerns for children consistently denied proper nutrition.
In discussing “The Medical Consequences of Starvation,” Time (7/31/25) not only touched upon lifelong mental health struggles for children like “anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and mental illnesses like schizophrenia,” but also the immediate threat of “refeeding syndrome.” Bodies that have adapted to an altered diet must slowly be reintroduced to normal food intake in an intensely monitored environment, lest they trigger “cardiac arrhythmia, organ dysfunction and death.”
Despite serious efforts in these articles to highlight how starvation will affect the Palestinian population beyond this “war,” none of them named Israel as the perpetrator in their headlines.
Israel not held accountable
This was a pattern in coverage: Even when outlets adequately addressed the dire consequences of food deprivation, reporting still fell short of holding Israel responsible for deliberately inducing starvation. Rarely if ever did these media label Israel’s food blockade as a tool of genocide.
Though one of the aforementioned NPR articles (7/29/25) attributed “what the UN is calling ‘catastrophic hunger’” to “Israel’s blockade and military offensive,” the outlet refused to explicitly call out the intentionality behind such a blockade. Instead, the article identified “conflict” as one of the root causes of prolonged starvation in Gaza.
While other articles (e.g., NPR, 7/29/25) cited a collapsing ceasefire deal with Hamas as the reason for Israel’s total blockade of aid into Gaza, Time (7/31/25) did not bother with such justification. The article simply stated that “Israel reimposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, preventing the entry of food, fuel, medicine and other humanitarian aid.” By restricting discussion of Israel’s responsibility in manufacturing famine to a single sentence, the magazine encourages complacency, an acceptance of the blockade and subsequent crisis as a natural consequence of a “conflict.”
Seeking Trump’s ‘moral leadership’
Discussions of “starvation” and “famine” became significantly more newsworthy when Trump was involved.
Headlines on July 28 largely focused on President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement of the crisis, dedicating equal, if not more, attention and platform to a figure who has himself threatened the people of Gaza with genocide than to those decrying the disaster.
Many outlets (NPR, 7/28/25; NBC, 7/28/25; Politico, 7/28/25; CNN, 7/28/25; BBC, 7/28/25; PBS, 7/28/25) reported how Trump saw what he called “real starvation” in Gaza, and how he’s breaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this front, who vehemently denies evidence of starvation and blames any malnutrition on Hamas. These articles, however, did not go beyond reporting the current available number of hunger-related deaths to illuminate the long-term, possibly permanent, bodily damage caused by starvation, and why it’s considered genocidal.
The New York Times (7/28/25) suggested that the Gaza famine, engineered with the active participation of the US government, would be a test of Trump’s “moral leadership.”
The New York Times (7/28/25) went further to claim that “For Trump, Starvation in Gaza Tests His Foreign Policy Approach,” putting a frame of political strategy on an urgent humanitarian crisis:
Global crises, especially those unfolding far from the United States, have often been tests of whether American presidents would show moral leadership on the world stage…. Now, it is Mr. Trump’s turn to address the question of whether America still intends to take a leading role among nations in confronting the humanitarian effects of war.
By casting US intervention as an opportunity to signal “moral leadership,” the Times attempted to obscure our direct participation in arming a genocide and financing famine. It is like asking whether someone is going to be a hero for saving the residents of a burning building they helped set fire to–without mentioning the arson.
The Times (7/31/25) also decentered Palestinians in another piece headlined “Anger Over Starvation Leaves Israel Incredibly Isolated.” This article brought in several political analysts to assess Israel’s standing with the global public, showing more concern for Israel’s abstract economic health than Palestinians’ physical health: “As anger grows over widespread hunger in Gaza, Israel risks becoming an international outcast.” The piece continued:
“What’s happening in Gaza is appalling,” and it diminishes the willingness of people to travel to Israel and to work with its scientists and companies, [Bernard Avishai, an Israeli American professor and analyst,] said. “For the Israeli economy,” he noted, “this is already devastating.”
While the Times gathered five analysts to discuss Israel’s economy and international image, the only source to amplify the plight of Palestinians was the generic collective “aid groups,” who were said to have documented “mounting malnutrition and cases of starvation.” Further, even though one of the quoted analysts mentioned “genocide,” it was not to illuminate how Israel’s actions constitute crimes against humanity. Instead, it was in reference to how the increasing use of the characterization was emblematic of Israel’s dwindling influence on public opinion.
And as noted, even when the New York Times (7/24/25) dedicated an article to actually covering the crisis, the outlet felt the need to apologize for it. Under the outrageously passive headline, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” the Times featured heartbreaking personal stories from doctors constrained by limited resources, and parents helplessly watching their children waste away. It noted how “doctors warn that malnutrition in early childhood can have long-term effects, disrupting growth, cognitive ability and emotional development.”
However, the Times issued an editor’s note five days after its initial publication, “clarifying” that one of the children featured in the reporting as “suffering from severe malnutrition” has “pre-existing health problems.” The paper of record seemed to expect readers to temper their outrage with this new information, as if manufactured famine does not exacerbate poor health.
‘Famine determination may not matter’
The word “Israel” appears only once in this ABC News article (7/30/25) , in the ninth paragraph, when an Oxfam official is cited saying that “much more food needs to enter Gaza than is currently being let in because of severe restrictions put in place by Israel.”
The media are also creating unnecessary debate around the classification of “famine.” ABC (7/30/25) platformed humanitarian workers and food security experts who expressed how “a famine determination may not matter because the time to intervene is now. Assessing famine often comes after many lives are lost.” And yet the news outlet didn’t heed their own advice, immediately following this with a section asking, “What is the criteria for how a famine is determined?”
NBC (7/29/25) similarly discussed “How Famine Is Assessed.” This was the concluding section of an article that was brimming with several alarming statistics from humanitarian organizations about rising death tolls and hospital admissions, due to starvation and malnutrition alone. To focus on the technicalities of classification rather than elucidate the realities of prolonged starvation reveals how media still fail to prioritize Palestinian lives.
The effects of starvation are neither obscure, unknown, nor drastically varied. They are quite universally applicable to any given human body. However, media seem confused as to whether they consider Palestinians human enough to afford such attention.
Starvation and famine are not mere moments in time, as per establishment media’s characterization. They are disastrous phenomena and traumas that a population carries long beyond the immediate crisis. They are not easily fixed by simply allowing in aid or reintroducing food to the body. And yet corporate media rarely admit the true scale of what has been destroyed and what that destruction signifies, let alone imagine what true repair would require. Substandard coverage distorts and conceals the gravity of the crisis.
This story was written in collaboration with Belly of the Beast, an independent outlet that covers Cuba and US/Cuba relations.
The Miami Herald‘s exposé (8/6/25) of the Cuban state enterprise GAESA appears to be based on a willful misreading of a financial document.
In an article published earlier this month, MiamiHerald journalist Nora Gámez Torres (8/6/25) claims to have obtained a “trove of secret accounting documents” proving that Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA (GAESA), the conglomerate run by the Cuban military, has been stockpiling $18 billion in cash while the Cuban people endure a devastating economic crisis.
The “wealth amassed by the Cuban military at the expense of the Cuban people is a secret no more,” proclaimed Gámez Torres. She added that GAESA is “squeezing the state out of the funds it could use to invest in healthcare, energy and food.” The documents, she wrote, demonstrate “that the Cuban government has been falsely blaming the US embargo as the sole cause of the island’s impoverishment.”
No credible evidence was presented to back up any of these sweeping claims.
As for the $18 billion dollars—it seems the Herald may have made an egregious error in interpreting the one “secret” document upon which the entire article appears to hinge. (For a deeper look into the numbers, and why we have more questions than answers about GAESA, check out Belly of the Beast’s interview with economist Emily Morris.)
This shaky, contextless reporting is par for the course for Gámez Torres, whose work has been repeatedly used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Cuban-American hardliners to legitimize the US government’s economic war on Cuba.
Fuzzy math
Gámez Torres claims to have obtained 22 financial statements, but the Miami Herald published only one—a low-resolution screenshot of a balance sheet that shows all the assets under the control of GAESA’s companies. Gámez Torres asserted that the screenshot shows GAESA has assets of $18 billion in US dollars, $14.5 billion of which are in cash in readily accessible bank accounts. She went on to explain that this amount of monetary assets is larger than the reserves of Panama, Uruguay or Costa Rica.
There is one significant problem with this potentially bombshell discovery: It seems to be based on a conspicuous misreading of the one document the Herald published. The figures that carry the Herald’s argument can be found in Column 8, under the heading “USD.” (See the screenshot below). At the top of this column, in bold, total assets are listed as nearly $18 billion ($17,895,719,315.39), and two lines down, total assets in bank accounts appear as around $14.5 billion ($14,467,838,651.66).
The upper-right cell of GAESA’s spreadsheet reads “Unidad de Medida: Pesos Cubanos con dos decimos”—or “Unit of Measure: Cuban Pesos with two decimal places.” The Miami Herald ignored this straightforward explanation.
But the upper-right cell of the header of the spreadsheet states in plain language that the unit of currency for the financial statement is not US dollars, but “Cuban pesos with two decimal points.” This indicates that the figures under the USD heading have been converted from their original dollar value to a value in Cuban pesos. (The fact that the figures have a dollar sign in front of them is not determinative; that symbol is commonly used to denote Cuban pesos as well as US dollars.) Since the Cuban government generally calculates one US dollar to be worth 24 Cuban pesos, GAESA’s US dollar assets would be worth $745 million dollars (1/24 of 17.9 billion pesos)—or about 4% of the figure reported by the Herald.
There’s another reason to think that the Herald has greatly exaggerated the numbers in the screenshot. The spreadsheet adds the figures in Column 8, which the Herald claims are US dollar amounts, to the figures in Column 7, which are labeled “CUP”—the standard abbreviation for Cuban pesos. You don’t have to be a CPA to know that adding two different currencies with different values together without first converting one of them is an accounting no-no. The logical conclusion is that the columns labeled “USD” and “CUP” are in the same unit of measurement—and the header note indicates that that unit is Cuban pesos.
The Herald didn’t acknowledge the note in the spreadsheet’s header about all the numbers being in Cuban pesos, although it did speculate as to why GAESA would be adding dollars and pesos as if they had the same value: “to conceal its dollar holdings” from the rest of the government.
Gámez Torres did not indicate why she believes such a patently obvious mistake would deceive anyone, much less number-crunchers at Cuba’s tax authorities or its National Office of Statistics and Information. It’s also unclear why she thinks the government of Cuba wouldn’t notice a diversion of wealth equal to almost 50% of the nation’s GDP. (Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information calculated GDP in 2023 to be 869.2 billion Cuban pesos, which is $36.2 billion dollars at a 24:1 rate.)
It’s not clear whether Herald reporter Nora Gámez Torres is intentionally distorting GAESA’s accounting, committing an innocent blunder, or, for some reason, withholding information that led her to draw these seemingly baffling conclusions.
It might not matter, since her reporting aligns with the widely accepted narrative that Cuba’s military is profiting off the backs of the Cuban people. Far from being questioned for her lack of journalistic standards, Gámez Torres is winning prestigious awards and being showered with praise by Republican politicians from Florida.
The case for economic warfare
Gámez Torres has spent the better part of the last year reporting on GAESA. Last December, she reported on documents allegedly leaked from Gaviota, a tourism company under the GAESA umbrella that manages many hotels and resorts on the island. Although she did not disclose any documents, she claimed that the company and, by extension, the military were “sitting on about $4.3 billion.” She wrote that the Cuban military used GAESA companies to “divert” massive public funds to the country’s military-run companies while ordinary Cubans face food, medicine and fuel crises.
Gámez Torres has since earned accolades from pro-embargo politicians, who use factoids from her reporting to push for ever-harsher sanctions on Cuba. In turn, she regularly quotes them in the Miami Herald.
In an article about GAESA earlier this year (3/4/25), Gámez Torres quoted Cuban-American Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who gushed over her “skill, determination and well-cultivated sources.” Díaz-Balart praised her reporting as “essential to policymakers and the American people to strengthen our national security.”
Gámez Torres’ latest article on GAESA provides another example of this echo chamber: She cites Rubio citing…herself.
She also quotes a State Department official who references her dubious reporting to justify sanctions:
Evidence of secret dollar reserves held by GAESA, while the Cuban people lack basic needs, serves as further evidence that President Trump’s actions to strengthen the US policy towards the Cuban people was of the utmost importance.
This policy, which amounts to economic warfare, has had disastrous consequences for the Cuban people.
Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, which he imposed during his first term and were largely kept in place by Biden, have sought to bring about regime change by destroying the island’s economy. Over the last eight years, the sanctions have taken a toll, causing scarcities of fuel and medicine and driving unprecedented numbers of migrants to the United States.
As much as the Herald reports on Cuba, it has done almost no reporting on the impact of sanctions on the Cuban people. Nor has it shown any interest in looking into the millions of dollars flowing through Miami to the pro-embargo activists, NGOs, media outlets and politicians who have helped sustain the US government’s Cold War–era policy.
Instead, Gámez Torres regularly downplays the massively destructive role the US embargo has played in bringing about the country’s economic collapse, and ridiculed the Cuban government for blaming sanctions—its “favorite whipping boy.”
The Herald’s recent exercise in trying to paint GAESA as a greedy hoarder of cash is a prime example of why the Cuban government may wish to maintain a high level of secrecy regarding the conglomerate’s finances. Any details might not only fuel the narrative that the Cuban government is to blame for the country’s deepening crisis, they might also provide useful information for hardliners like Rubio in their efforts to find “creative” ways to deprive the state—and ultimately, its people—of resources.
This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption and its predicted, measurable, life-altering impacts provides a clear example of an instance where countries and industries and science could come together: Here’s this problem that’s facing literally all of us. How do we cut it off at the source, and mitigate its obviously unequal fallout? “We have the technology.”
But the people using jets to ferry them from one state to another are not the same people who can’t escape the heat in treeless communities. The CEOs of fossil fuel companies can move home any time they want; they don’t have to care that communities are newly exposed to droughts or floods or storms. Climate change, according to elites, is a “sucks to be you” sort of problem. So much so that they can spend time ginning up arguments about how it isn’t even happening, so as to get more money out of the money machine while they can. And for the kicker, corporate media will recite those arguments and hold them up alongside science and humanity, as though we can and should choose what to believe as it suits us.
One obvious stress point of this institutional dystopia is insurance. You buy insurance in case something bad happens—like a fire, or a flood. But if that fire or flood is driven by climate disruption? Well, wait a minute. Turns out you’re no longer covered. And the fact that your insurance company is deeply invested in the fossil fuel companies that are driving the disaster? Well, that is neither here nor there.
We need journalism that would help us connect those obvious dots and act on what we learn. We’ll talk about that today with Cathy Cowan Becker, responsible finance campaigns director at the group Green America.
Also on the show: As we go into Labor Day weekend, we’ll revisit a conversation we had about the simple power of including worker voices in reporting—and, maybe more so, the power of silencing them. In 2016, the Boston Globe brought a story to its own doorstep with the decision to contract out its subscriber delivery service. We heard about it from Aviva Chomsky, history professor and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University, and author of, among other titles, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. We’ll hear part of that conversation this week.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
NBC News (8/21/25): “the Democratic Party’s base above all else is itching for a fighter to take on Trump and the GOP”—but can Newsom “overcome the Golden State’s reputation for lurching too far to the left”?
Corporate media outlets, and the consultants and former administration officials who work for them, have a message for Democratic voters: To revive its dwindling appeal, their party needs a fighter to take on Trump. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has lately made headlines for parodying Trump on X, is the man for the job.
What makes Newsom the “fighter” (Bloomberg, 8/20/25, NBC News, 8/21/25, Newsweek, 8/21/25) Democrats need? He is “owning the MAGAs” (CNN, 8/19/25) and “forcefully push[ing] back against President Donald Trump and his red state allies” (Bloomberg, 8/20/25). He has “hit a nerve by hijacking [Trump’s] tactics…flood[ing] social media with a steady stream of all-caps screeds mocking the president’s signature style” (NBC News, 8/21/25).
He’s adopted an “aggressive posture…both in policy and style” (Newsweek, 8/21/25). Moreover, he has “rocketed…to algorithmic dominance” with his “MAGA-parodying strategy” (Politico, 8/20/25). The Sacramento Bee (8/20/25) has dubbed him “feisty and statesmanlike.”
Arguably as eager as many Americans for someone to take on Trump, the Canadian press has jumped on the bandwagon; the Globe and Mail (8/21/25) recently published a column headlined, “Is Gavin Newsom the Last Best Hope for American Democracy?” Columnist Gary Mason praised Newsom as a “defender of American democracy” whose “televised speech to Californians during [Trump’s] ICE raids was a master-class in communication.”
‘The one we need’
Sara Pequeño (USA Today, 8/21/25): If he “could help win over some disaffected Democrats who want to see the party stoop to Trump’s level…Newsom may be the party’s best bet for the next presidential election.”
Even those with mixed feelings about Newsom have concluded that he is the man for the moment. Politico (8/23/25) wrote that although his decision to host influential right wingers (like Steve Bannon) on his podcast was “provocative,” and his social media posts were “posturing,” they had nonetheless “positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party.”
CNN analyst Aaron Blake (8/19/25) acknowledged 2024 polls that showed that most Americans who had heard of Newsom viewed him unfavorably, but argued that Democrats should nevertheless draw inspiration from the fact that “one of their own is showing some wherewithal in charting a path forward.”
USA Today columnist Sara Pequeño (8/21/25) declared that Newsom “isn’t the Democrat we want,” but he is “the one we need against Trump.” Newsom, Pequeño continued, “may come off like a sleazy politician, but at least he’s our sleazy politician—someone willing to be aggressive and stand up to Trump.”
Best of all, as far as these outlets are concerned, Newsom has accomplished all of this while “rejecting the belief of many liberal activists that effectively fighting Trump requires the party to move left” (Bloomberg, 8/20/25)—a belief shared by 50% of Democrats polled in April 2025. (Only 18% said their party should “become more moderate.”)
‘Long known for pragmatism’
AP (5/15/25) reports that Newsom is trying to “rebrand” himself, as if his brand hasn’t always been “business-friendly centrist entrepreneur.”
The problem with anointing Newsom the savior of the Democratic Party is the paucity of evidence that rank-and-file Democrats will be excited to vote for someone who claps back at Trump on social media, when that someone has a record of harming and betraying vulnerable Americans: seizing homeless people’s belongings and calling on cities to dismantle their dwellings, slashing healthcare for undocumented immigrants, restricting the rights of protesters, successfully pressuring lawmakers to gut California’s landmark environmental law, and calling it “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports.
Because corporate media outlets have taken Trump’s 2024 victory as evidence that the Democratic Party has moved too far left, they are eager to portray Newsom’s shifts as part of a commonsensical and pragmatic effort to broaden his appeal by tacking right.
Others say Newsom’s politics have been fairly consistent. In a 2022 story about the governor’s coziness with California business interests, Politico (12/29/22) asserted that he “has long been known for pragmatism on economic matters,” quoting a former adviser who said that Newsom had for years supported “social policies that don’t threaten economic privilege.”
The AP (5/15/25) headlined a recent story “California Gov. Gavin Newsom Tries to Rebrand Himself Ahead of a Potential Presidential Run.” “California’s Democratic governor is appealing to the political center and trying to shed his national reputation as a San Francisco liberal,” the article reported—though as a former San Francisco mayor, Newsom was a conservative in that city’s terms. The millionaire business owner campaigned on “get-tough ballot initiatives on homelessness and panhandling,” and won office with the help of the local Republican Party, which phone-banked for him (New York Times, 12/11/03).
Regardless of how these outlets frame Newsom’s decisions, it’s clear that his positions are out of step with the needs and priorities of most California Democrats and many of the state’s voters. Although multimillion-dollar anti-trans ad campaigns have weakened support for trans rights, Democrats are still much likelier—by margins of more than 30 points—than Republicans to support policies that safeguard the rights of trans people.
Californians of all stripes, including majorities of Republicans, support a range of policy solutions to homelessness other than banning encampments; California lawmakers voted down an encampment ban for the second time in 2024. And a statewide poll conducted by Tulchin Research in June revealed across-the-board support for California’s environmental law, including from a majority of Republicans.
Hungry for leadership
The key words here are “for people like you” (NBC, 4/25/25).
Most polling contradicts the belief that Trump won in 2024 because Americans, including those who are or lean Democratic, have soured on trans rights, the rights of homeless people and environmental protections. Attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, which are contradictory and media-driven, likely had more of an effect. Nor is there any compelling evidence that Democrats can win back Congress and the White House by strategically selling out small but vulnerable constituencies, or gutting popular environmental protections as floods, storms and wildfires ravage the country.
Just ask former US Rep. Colin Allred, the Democrat who challenged Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024, what happened after Allred—instead of defending trans kids and pivoting to issues more people care about—released an ad saying, “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff.” (Spoiler alert: He lost to Ted Cruz by 8.5 points.)
Multiplereports and a numberofpolls do reflect rank-and-file Democrats’ desire for a national leader who can effectively counter Trump. They also reveal widespread dissatisfaction with our politics; a sizable plurality of American adults now say neither major political party fights for people like them. In 2024, nearly 90 million Americans—far more than the 77 million who voted for Trump or the 75 million who voted for Kamala Harris—were eligible to vote but didn’t.
Americans who oppose Trump are clearly hungry for strong leadership at the national level. Yet the only policy Newsom has recently put forth that has garnered significant public support is his push for California to redraw its congressional districts to favor the Democratic Party. Newsom has presented this as a necessary response to Trump’s efforts to further gerrymander Texas—a move, Newsom has said, that requires fighting “fire with fire.” California lawmakers have approved the governor’s proposal for a special election on a ballot measure to replace its current district map with one that favors Democrats.
It’s wise for the Democrats to fight back on gerrymandering, at least in the short term. (In the long term, federal legislation is necessary to ensure that state governments implement truly fair and independent redistricting processes.) But Newsom seems to think that all he needs to bolster his 2028 prospects is one splashy issue he can fight Trump on–and a little help from his corporate friends, donors and media outlets. The problem is, without a robust policy agenda designed to ease their lives, words won’t protect ordinary people from Trump.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.
When the Washington Post (8/20/25) asked 604 DC residents about Trump’s takeover, Post editors didn’t like what they said, so they took it out of the headline.
As President Donald Trump commandeered DC’s police, and placed tanks, troops and federal agents on the city’s streets, DC’s hometown paper took the pulse of residents. The results from the Washington Post poll were unmistakable.
DC residents “overwhelmingly oppose” Trump’s moves, with around 8 in 10 opposing Trump’s takeover of DC police, the Post reported (8/20/25).
“We’re becoming a police state. I’m afraid of that, I really am,” Joseph Clay, an 89-year-old Black veteran who’s lived in his Northeast DC home since 1966, told the Post. “I wonder if they’re looking at Blacks and browns, and if I myself could be stopped and asked for my credentials.”
The Post noted that “nearly 9 in 10 Washingtonians say their neighborhood is an excellent or good place to live.”
These findings provide a stunning refutation to the stated premise for Trump’s takeover: that DC is experiencing a crime emergency. DC violent crime is, in fact, at a 30-year low.
But what most caught my eye in the Post story was DC resident Joseph Clay’s other quote. “The only crime I hear about is what I read in the Washington Post,” he said.
The story’s reporters—Joe Heim, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin—surely didn’t need to include this quote. My guess is they did so as a shot across the bow to their colleagues on the Opinion Page, who’ve echoed Trump’s false DC crime narrative (FAIR.org, 8/14/25).
But it’s not just the Opinion Page who needs a wake-up call; so do editors on the news side, at least those responsible for writing headlines.
The poll results story’s strong opening stated DC residents “overwhelmingly oppose” Trump’s moves, but the headline only read “Most DC residents oppose” them. And even this downgrade, from “overwhelming” to “most,” wasn’t enough for Post higher-ups, who further weakened the headline to “We Asked 604 DC Residents About Trump’s Takeover. Here’s What They Said.”
‘First day of school to look different’
The Washington Post (8/24/25) put a “please don’t read me” headline over Lauren Lumpkin’s harrowing story of children terrified by a state of siege.
This isn’t the only time Post editors slapped on a misleading headline. Monday was the first day of school in DC, and in addition to the normal jitters, students and parents had new ones to navigate.
“I’m kind of scared of being stopped,” Zoe Amen, a 17-year-old high school senior, told the Post (8/24/25).
“I’ve heard from several parents that have decided not to send their children to school because they’re afraid of being detained on the way or on the way back,” Vanessa Rubio, an elementary school mom, told the Post. “I know police and ICE have been present today in our neighborhood.”
Even though students can ride free to and from school on Metro, Yolanda Corbett told the Post she’s considering sending her Black teenage son to school via Uber for as long as she can afford to do so—two, maybe four weeks if she stretches things. Corbett is considering this at a time when federal agents, including masked ones, are lurking around Metro stations.
Rather than make DC residents feel safe, Trump’s takeover has struck fear in parents and students alike. (A worried five-year-old “asked if Donald Trump was going to come into his school,” the Wall Street Journal reported—8/20/25.) The Post’s eye-opening story, by Lauren Lumpkin, ran under the anodyne headline, “For Some in DC, First Day of School to Look Different Under Trump Crackdown.”
‘Trump fulfills dream role’
The Washington Post‘s Paul Schwartzman (8/23/25) whitewashed the military occupation of DC as Trump “inserting himself into the hurly-burly of city life.”
The headline and framing of another Washington Post story—“Donald Trump Fulfills a Dream Role: Big-City Mayor” (8/23/25)—“gave a light-and-frothy treatment” to Trump’s takeover, wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Substack, 8/25/25).
Sullivan took issue with the “soft-pedaled” subhead as well, which read, “The president’s showy effort to ‘clean up’ DC crime, streetlights and even the Kennedy Center has ruffled city leaders who say he has overstepped his authority.”
“With Trump in full dictator mode…mild words like ‘ruffled’ are absurd,” noted Sullivan. If Post readers felt similarly, they could post their concerns beneath the story—under a prompt asking, “What are your thoughts on Donald Trump’s approach to managing DC as if he were a big city mayor?”
Despite the “offensive prompt,” over a thousand Post readers weighed in, “overwhelmingly [to] criticize” Trump’s approach, “likening it to an authoritarian power grab,” according to the Post’s AI summary of reader comments.
Others took to social media to voice their displeasure with both Trump and the Post. “Stop minimalizing and attempting to normalize this shit,” wrote one commenter. “He’s a wannabe dictator… This is about asserting control like any strongman would.”
‘Tactics employed by Franco’
The original headline on Kathleen Parker’s column (8/15/25) was “DC Residents Should Be Outraged Over Trump’s Takeover”—so Post editors changed it to one less likely to outrage them.
But the most head-scratching headline appeared atop one of the only Post columns to meet this fraught moment.
Kathleen Parker began and ended her column (8/15/25) noting how Trump’s DC takeover serves as a distraction from a certain other news story: “Ever since he sent in the National Guard, hardly anyone has been talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files,” Parker wrote. (Trump was closely tied to the late child molester.)
Parker also called out the racialized nature of Trump’s targets. In addition to DC, Trump is going after “other liberal-leaning cities: New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland and Chicago—all places where the mayors happen to be Black,” Parker wrote.
But it’s on the subject of Trump’s authoritarianism that Parker soared:
I don’t want to suggest that Trump is acting like a military dictator. But I have seen—and felt—this type of intimidation before, when I was a student in Spain and witnessed tactics employed by Gen. Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1975. Franco and Trump share not only an obsession with loyalty but also a willingness to use military force to maintain civilian order.
The inexplicable headline atop Parker’s searing column? “Trump Has Brilliantly Orchestrated a Legal Coup.”
(Parker’s column marked such a departure from the rest of Post Opinions that I reached out to ask if she was leaving the paper, as record numbers of her colleagues have recently done. I didn’t hear back.)
‘Scale it up beyond DC’
Washington Post Opinion (8/21/25) framed a discussion of Trump’s occupation of Washington the way he wants it: He’s there to “fight crime” and DC is a “crime scene.”
Despite these misleading Post headlines, the reporting they sit atop has often been invaluable. But it’s unclear if Post Opinion columnists even bother to read their colleagues’ reporting.
“Many” view Trump’s DC takeover “positively,” Post columnist Shadi Hamid (8/22/25) wrote. Instead of the Post poll from two days earlier—which showed the opposite to be true—Hamid opted to cite another survey. But when I clicked on the link to the survey, I was met with a surprising headline: “Voters Oppose Trump’s Military Deployment in Washington, DC” (Data for Progress, 8/20/25).
Deputy Opinion editor James Hohmann took a different approach to negating his own paper’s poll. “Despite the polls, I think there’s a silent majority that is quite happy to have this packet of Band-Aids,” Hohmann (8/21/25) wrote in regards to Trump’s DC takeover.
“Something is clearly rotten in society when 14-year-olds from out of state are routinely carjacking people,” Hohmann falsely asserted, before calling on Trump to take his DC putsch to other cities:
This is a chance to come down hard on the gangs and hopefully make the whole community safer, with help from Uncle Sam. Then we just have to figure out how to scale it up beyond DC.
Hohmann’s responsibilities include “overseeing the Editorial Board.” His boss is the Post’s new 33-year-old Opinions editor Adam O’Neal, who’s promised an opinion page that’s “unapologetically patriotic” and conveys “optimism about this country.” O’Neal is only parroting the edict from billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos, who has been open about aligning his paper with Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25, 1/22/25, 2/28/25).
The Post is rotting from the head down. It’s a credit to the paper’s reporters that they continue to produce such quality reporting in this fraught moment, even as Post opinion writers and higher-ups debase themselves and the city they call home.
On Sunday, August 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a dramatic announcement: After 674 days of barring foreign media from Gaza, Israel was planning to begin staging guided tours, under Israeli military control, for embedded members of the foreign press.
“We have decided, and have ordered, directed the military, to bring in foreign journalists—more foreign journalists, a lot,” said Israel’s premier, in a rambling, paranoid half-hour press conference—staged, he said, to dispel “the global campaign of lies” against Israel. “There’s a problem with assuring security, but I think it can be done in a way that is responsible and careful to preserve your own safety.
Just seven hours later, Israel assassinated the beloved, world-renowned Palestinian Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, along with five other journalists, in a targeted airstrike as they sheltered in a tent for members of the press just outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
The timing of this announcement was no coincidence. Nor was Netanyahu’s pointed reference to guaranteeing the “safety” of journalists. Since the beginning of the so-called Global War on Terror, military regimes have used access to occupied territories as a tool to control and manipulate the media: first by denying that access, often through violence; and then by offering “safe” access in the form of highly coveted embeds. And from the beginning—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places—mass media have all too eagerly played along.
In a grotesque tweet posted after assassinating Anas and his colleagues, Israel’s military exulted over the killings and repeated the smears it had been airing for months as trial balloons for his murder: that he was “head of a Hamas terrorist cell” who “advanced rocket attacks” on Israelis.
Today, as the Israeli regime grows exponentially more violent, the implied promise of safety for embedded journalists increasingly means the explicit threat of killing for the unembedded.
Make no mistake: When journalists accept Israel’s terms of embedment, they accept the murder of their colleagues as an acceptable price to pay for a coveted moment of access to a killing field—granted to them by the killers, on their terms and conditions.
We know what the resulting stories will look like, because Israel’s military has already done this: In October 2024, during its illegal invasion and occupation of parts of southern Lebanon, it took roughly a dozen of the world’s most prestigious media outlets on tours of the Lebanese villages it was occupying.
The Public Source conducted an in-depth analysis of the resulting articles and broadcasts. We found them to be riddled with distortions, disinformation, dehumanizing language, and factual errors: in effect, state propaganda masquerading as actual news—but without any of the questioning, fact checks, or balance that distinguish legitimate newsgathering from public relations.
The Gaza tours promise to be an even more shameful attempt to manipulate the media into repeating meaningless lies, covered by the barest fig leaf of attribution. “One of the things you’re going to see is precisely our efforts to bring in Gazans, or rather to bring in food to Gaza,” Netanyahu said, in a preview of the kind of lines that Israel will be feeding its willing stenographers—the usual litany of falsehoods, the purpose of which is not belief, but instead what Hannah Arendt called the “trembling, wobbling motion” we experience when reality is drowned out by a constant chorus of lies.
Israel is offering these tours because it is, as Netanyahu admitted, losing “the propaganda war.” Israel is losing its war on the truth—and on reality itself—because of courageous professionals like Anas and his colleagues, who gave everything they treasured, including their lives, to show the world the reality of Israel’s genocide.
To go on one of Israel’s propaganda tours is to accept the bargain that Israel is offering: accept the murder of real reporters on the ground in exchange for a brief, stage-managed glimpse at genocide, shown to you by its perpetrators, with the goal of legitimizing it.
This calculus should be unacceptable to any journalist with professional ethics, integrity, or a conscience. Even those who don’t care about their colleagues should care about the truth.
Western governments have long chosen to normalize the state-sanctioned murder of journalists. But journalists don’t have to. They can and should say no. We are calling on news organizations and individual journalists to stand up and say no to Israel’s propaganda tours. Here’s what a principled news outlet or individual would do:
FOR NEWS OUTLETS: Refuse to send your reporters on Israel’s propaganda tours of Gaza. Issue a statement to your readers explaining why.
Instead of sending reporters on embeds, hire Palestinian journalists in Gaza and offer them the same protections as non-Palestinian correspondents.
FOR INDIVIDUAL REPORTERS: Refuse to go on military embeds to Gaza.
Sign letters and statements to newsroom leadership asking them not to send your colleagues on military embeds to Gaza.
This open letter originally appeared as an editorial in the independent Beirut-based outlet Public Source (8/27/25).
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Joseph Torres about the FCC and structural racism for the August 22, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners don’t need to be reminded of how central journalism is to everything we care about. Authoritarian leaders want to silence even half-awake news media, because information is so important to people’s understanding of the world, and how we might change it.
It’s also important to see, as on many issues, that Donald Trump didn’t invent bad, racist, anti-democracy media, or the legal landscape that allows it to thrive. As on other issues, there’s a history to understand and contend with if we’re serious about the goal of growing responsive, inclusive, intelligent news. And that history includes hope, as well as a lot of harm, much like the country itself.
Joseph Torres is senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator with Collette Watson of the project Media 2070, and he’s co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joseph Torres.
Joseph Torres: Yeah, Janine, thank you. Thank you for having me.
JJ: Well, I’m not saying that we aren’t in special times. Trump is daylight extorting from media corporations: “I give you the regulations you want, you give me the coverage I want.”
But for a lot of folks in 2025, it seems like the answer is government regulation in the service of the public good. And I think that sounds a lot better if you don’t understand how it’s worked up until now.
So in 2025, what should we know about the FCC, the ostensible defender of the public in the media world? What should we know about the FCC and Black and brown people?
Brendan Carr
JT: The current Federal Communications Commission, and its chairman, a man named Brendan Carr, are basically a part of Trump’s overall plan, overall scheme. The Trump administration—the far right, if you want to call them that—has now captured the presidency. It’s basically the ideology that is fueling this current moment of trying to undo all the gains that have been made for this period of 60-plus years, where equal protection rights in the 14th Amendment, and other civil and human rights, were extended to contend with the history of racial segregation in this country, and the history of racial subjugation in this country, starting from the very founding, and the system that’s been in place that resulted in enslavement of Black folks, and the land theft and genocide of Native American communities. And media has always played a critical role in this project of racial hierarchy.
And so the Federal Communications Commission today is trying, as part of Trump’s agenda, to roll back the very protections that were won over the past 60 years, as a way to consolidate power. The FCC is playing a critical role in that, because media is a place where the public understands what’s going on, and also derives meaning from, to understand the circumstances that they’re dealing with. Even though our media system has never truly shared the immediate information needs of Black folks and other people of color. (I’m being very kind by saying that.)
The FCC is rolling back, pushing companies to roll back their commitments to DEI, but really, it’s saying the presence of Black and brown people within institutions represents something inherently illegal or unlawfully gained. We got to get rid of any kind of programming, and the presence of Black and brown journalists or other content creators in the institutions; we cannot be trying to actually increase the presence of Black and brown people in the institutions.
And Janine, you and I, we’ve talked about it for years, these companies have never really sufficiently addressed what we need, our communities, the information needs they need to service. DEI commitments were actually committed to–and we could talk about our troubles with DEI, too–but after the George Floyd uprising, because these companies had not been serving those. But in order to have an authoritarian regime, you have to continue to ensure our voices are not heard.
This traces back to this recent essay I wrote, which is basically how, even though the FCC was created in 1934, [and] its mission is media policies to serve the public interest, you didn’t have to consider the public interest obligations of Black folks in 1934, because the 14th Amendment that was passed during Reconstruction didn’t exist then, because of Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow racism and all the racial violence that was happening during this period. You didn’t have to consider the public interest obligations for Black folks, because there was no equal protection rights. The equal protection under law was not being enforced at that time.
And so this is why we created a segregated media system, in a sense. Well, segregated media system is actually being too kind, we created a white-controlled media system, where white folks controlled all the broadcast stations, when the FCC was actually providing licenses to media companies that supported segregation, or profited off of segregation. And we have not contended with that history.
JJ: And I think a lot of folks don’t understand. They imagine that there was a time when media supported the public interest, and then somewhere along the line, that got perverted or confused, and you need to say: What you think of as the “public interest” was not something that included Black and brown people. So these ideas that you imagine you’re going to “get back to,” where everything was fair, you need to interrogate that understanding. You need to complicate that understanding, because that’s not how it actually worked.
And this is a conversation we always have, as Black media critics, as Black and brown people concerned with media, folks who are very smart understand top-down bias, and they understand capitalism and corporate capitalism bias, but they still want to say, “It’s not Black and white, it’s green.” And then we have to show up and say, “Yeah, it’s still actually Black and white.” You still have to look at that piece of it, because that piece never went away.
Josephus Daniels
JT: Yeah, I mean, just to illustrate that point, just to give examples, in the essay I tried to point out that the government’s role in the birth of commercial radio really started to accelerate during World War I, when the US Navy was investing heavily in wireless technology. The head of the US Navy, the secretary of the Navy, was a man named Josephus Daniels, and this is under Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
And Josephus Daniels was a newspaper publisher, a powerful newspaper publisher. And in 1898, he owned the Raleigh News and Observer. And he helped to orchestrate a coup of the multiracial government that existed, that was formed following Civil War Reconstruction, to overthrow the multiracial government in Wilmington, North Carolina. And he worked hand in hand with the Democratic Party to orchestrate that. And he called his newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer, to rally up support for the criminalization of Black folks, to overthrow the local government. And he called his paper the “militant voice of white supremacy.”
Now he is in charge in overseeing the development of commercial radio under Woodrow Wilson, with his devout white supremacist father who was a slaver, hosted Birth of a Nation at the White House, president of Princeton University. In his own writings, he talks about, in extremely racist terms, his hatred of Reconstruction, and the idea that Black people would actually be in some sort of position of power during Reconstruction. So he detested the idea of growing Black power in the South through the Reconstruction.
So these are the folks who developed commercial radio.
Then, following World War I, the US wanted to make sure that radio remained in control of the US. There was the Marconi radio company, that was the British-based company, and the foreign ownership broadcast stations that would become radio stations in the United States.
And so they created the Radio Corporation of America. First they tried to have the government be able to control radio, but then they compromised–Congress rebuffed that effort, and they created the Radio Corporation of America, RCA, where there was a trust, called the Radio Trust, where folks who were concretely involved in wireless radio technology all got together, and colluded together, helped to create the birth of commercial radio in this country.
And then Herbert Hoover, who was the president of the United States in 1929, but was the head of the Department of Commerce for most of the 1920s, oversaw the licensing of radio stations. But he also was a person who was using his department to promote racial housing segregation in the country.
So these are some of the forces, critical central forces, powerful forces, who were behind, not just the birth of commercial radio, but what would become the Federal Radio Commission in 1927. And then the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who was the last chairman of the Federal Radio Commission—the Federal Radio Commission from 1927 to 1934 became the Federal Communication Commission when it was formed. But the chairman sat on the Mississippi Supreme Court, appointed by Governor Bilbo, who was one of the most notorious white supremacist governors, and later senators, to serve in any kind of public office.
He was a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court for about eight years. And so the idea that he’s the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission…. I didn’t write in this piece, but there were other commissioners who were very devoted to white supremacy, or were mayor of, I believe, Charlotte, North Carolina, which was a segregated city. And so these white supremacists, in Wilson and the publisher Josephus Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer, these are the forces who helped to birth commercial radio.
Joseph Torres: “We have not reconciled the history of… how government regulation was just reinforcing the racial apartheid that exists in our country.”
And there were Black folks who were trying to get broadcast stations. There was a lot of interest in the Black community in broadcasting, and becoming broadcast owners. And so the whole point of it is that we have not reconciled the history of how our broadcast, not just institutions, for sure, but how government regulation was just reinforcing the racial apartheid that exists in our country.
And then it took until the 1960s, to the Civil Rights Movement, to this famous case in Jackson, Mississippi, WLBT, where the civil rights activists in Jackson, along with the United Church of Christ, were able to successfully challenge the broadcast license for a racist station in Jackson, that opened the door to give US citizens rights to actually challenge FCC policy, to where we saw Black and Latino and Asian American, Indigenous groups, filing license challenges in the late 1960s and 1970s, all over the country, that resulted, really, in the first wave of any kind of significant integration of our broadcast systems.
And that’s the fight we’ve been on for the past 50-plus years, trying to integrate these systems. And this is what the FCC is trying to undo. Again, that integration of these systems hasn’t been sufficient. We’ve been fighting to integrate these systems, and we can have an argument whether we’re integrating these systems that haven’t served our needs. But at the same time, the hope of ownership dwindles away, the idea that we can own broadcast stations dwindles away, because of the massive consolidation of our media system that starts happening in the 1980s, that continues through the 1996 Telecom Act, and all this massive consolidation that’s still happening now, that even more consolidation that’s going to further entrench the de facto media apartheid system.
JJ: Absolutely. And folks will know about those increased efforts at consolidation, where companies are what we call “skating where the puck’s going to be.” What they’re trying to do might be illegal right now, in terms of consolidating companies, but they’re pretty sure they’re going to get laws in their favor, so they’re going ahead and doing it anyway. And that is also not new to the Trump administration.
So I want to direct folks to your piece that we’re talking about at ObjectiveJournalism.org. And I want to just underscore what you’re saying: It’s history, it’s not rhetoric. It’s not like, if only Black and brown folks would’ve, could’ve tried something back in the day. We did. People did, and they were shut down repeatedly, officially. It’s not a question of “folks should have worked through appropriate channels” or “if folks had just built a better mouse trap, then maybe they could have won in the corporate world.” We’re still talking about deliberate racial discrimination. That’s part of the story that we have to tell, and you’re just not going to understand it if you can’t accept that that’s part of it.
JT: And in the piece I wrote, in 1927, there was a Black newspaper in Detroit, a weekly newspaper, that was saying, “Hey, we have to own our own radio stations. We can’t tell our stories and advocate for our community through the white man’s radio.”
In 1930, the Kansas City American, a Black newspaper as well, actually applied for a license to build a radio station, and they were denied. And there were other stations, in Hawaii, someone applied for a license to serve Japanese languages, serving the Italian communities or an Italian-language station. But these applications were denied, and it was basically like, “Hey, your community’s already being served by a radio station that exists.” Again, this is also a time with really, a lot like now, anti-immigrant sentiment in the country.
So this effort in the ’60s to try to desegregate our media system, that included to try to get increased radio ownership, it was always a recognition of the importance of ownership that was understood. In 1914, 1915, early 1900s, there were Black radio clubs being formed across the country to teach ourselves wireless communication technology, to be able to build their own radio sets, listen to broadcasts broadcasting from other parts of the country.
Rufus P. Turner
The first Black person—this is something that’s not too well-known, I only learned about it in the past couple of years. That’s the point with history. We’re still learning things we should know are buried in history, right?—there was a teenager named Rufus P. Turner, who was a real genius, who created the world’s smallest radio set. He was really received well in the radio community for his genius. At only 17 years old, he got the ability to be the first commercial radio station, a low-power station to serve the DC area in the mid-1920s. But this was before the official birth of commercial broadcasting, and the regulations around commercial broadcasting. And newspapers, and Black newspapers in Washington, DC, were hailing this young man as a genius.
The point is, we still don’t have the full story of how our communities were really embracing this new technology, because the story of the history of the FCC is often not told through this vantage point. There’s not too many folks who are studying this history from the issue of race and racial subjugation. But understanding that history, and understanding what is happening today—the circumstances are different in essence, but the DNA of how the system was created, we still have not resolved that.
So this FCC chairman can easily call for companies to get rid of their DEI commitments. And companies are able to say, of course, because we’re furthering our bottom line. And the idea for major companies, they’re not committed to our community, they’re committed to the bottom line.
Because, as you know, Janine, it’s hard to create any kind of lasting change with anti-Black narratives, and narratives against other people of color, that criminalize you, dehumanize you. And you see all this overt racism happening now, and just the cruelty of it is because these narratives have continued to work to dehumanize us. And when you dehumanize us, you can actually do anything to us.
And so I don’t know how we fight to get out of the situation we are at without addressing the history of anti-Black racism, and not just institutional, but structural. This is what the essay is attempting to do, is to place the media at the center of the current struggle that our communities have been fighting for a long time, to ensure that civil and human rights, especially the 14th Amendment, continue to be something to expand the possibility of redress.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, this is an ongoing conversation; we’ll just pause it for now.
We’ve been speaking with Joseph Torres; he’s senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at Free Press, co-creator of Media 2070 and co-author of News for All the People. His article, “Reckoning With the Federal Communication Commission’s History of Structural Racism,” is online at ObjectiveJournalism.org. Thank you, Joe Torres, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
In his last dispatch for Al Jazeera (8/10/25), journalist Anas al-Sharif reported, “For the past two hours, the Israeli aggression on Gaza City has intensified.”
Israel’s targeted assassination of six Palestinian media members in the Gaza Strip on August 10 sent shockwaves through the journalism community. Though the murder of journalists has been a common tool of the Israeli’s government’s suppression of information coming out of Gaza, the loss of Al Jazeera‘s Anas al-Sharif was particularly harrowing.
Many of us had been moved by al-Sharif’s heart-wrenching coverage, from watching him remove his press vest in relief when a ceasefire was announced (1/19/25), to seeing a languid al-Sharif reporting on the famine (7/21/25) as people fainted around him. “Keep going, Anas, don’t stop,” said a voice off-camera. “You are our voice.”
Three of the victims were al-Sharif’s colleagues at Al Jazeera, one of the few media outlets that was able to keep journalists reporting in Gaza despite Israel’s blockade. As millions around the world grieved not just for al-Sharif but for his colleagues Mohammed Qreiqeh, Mohammed Noufal and Ibrahim Zaher, and freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi, we were also gravely concerned about the vacuum their murders created of on-the-ground coverage of the genocide.
Establishment media, however, used these courageous journalists’ murders as an opportunity to continue parroting the same Zionist talking points that contributed to manufacturing consent for their killings. FAIR looked at 15 different news outlets’ initial coverage of the murders: the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, BBC, Politico, Newsweek, Associated Press and Reuters.
We found that they overwhelmingly centered Israel’s narrative, attempted to delegitimize pro-Palestinian sources, and failed to contextualize the killings within the larger context of the genocide.
Prioritizing Israel’s pretext
Fox News (8/11/25) went farthest in embracing Israel’s “terrorist” narrative.
Four of the 15 articles (New York Times, 8/10/25; NBC,8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) mentioned the allegations in either the headline or subhead. “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalists in Airstrike, Claiming One Worked for Hamas,” was NBC‘s headline, with Israel’s smear that al-Sharif “posed as a journalist” in the subhead. Fox offered “Israel Says Al Jazeera Journalist Killed in Airstrike Was Head of Hamas ‘Terrorist Cell.’”
Reuters’ original headline (8/11/25) was “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” only later changed to “Israel Strike Kills Al Jazeera Journalists in Gaza.”
Al-Sharif had been targeted and smeared by the Israeli Defense Forces for months prior to his murder, and had written a statement in anticipation of his killing. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice,” he wrote. He asked the world to continue fighting for justice in Palestine: “Do not forget Gaza.”
Six of the articles (ABC, 8/11/25; BBC, 8/11/25; New York Times, 8/10/25; NBC, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) completely omitted references to or quotes from al-Sharif’s final statement. Of those six articles, the New York Times, BBC, NBC and Fox did include quotes from Israeli government representatives—perplexingly choosing to prioritize the voices of al-Sharif’s killers over his own.
The New York Times (8/10/25) gave the Israeli government ample space to smear one of the journalists it had just killed, claiming he was “the head of a terrorist cell” who was “responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.”
Coverage by the Wall Street Journal and New YorkTimes devoted the most space to advancing Israel’s pretext for the killings. The Journal’s Anat Peled dedicated the first three paragraphs of her article to detailing al-Sharif’s supposed Hamas affiliation. Ephrat Livni of the Times also spent three paragraphs on the bogus allegations, allowing only one paragraph for a rebuttal from Al Jazeera and CPJ.
Every article except the ones from the New York Times (8/10/25) and Fox (8/11/25) cited the historically high number of Palestinian journalists that have been killed since October 7, 2023. The death toll currently stands at 192, according to the CPJ. However, only four articles (ABC, 8/11/25; CNN, 8/10/25; Politico, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) listed Israel as the primary perpetrator of these murders. More typically, the AP (8/11/25) wrote that “at least 192 journalists have been killed since Israel’s war in Gaza began,” leaving the identities of both these journalists and their killers unmentioned.
Six (ABC, 8/11/25; BBC, 8/11/25; Newsweek, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; CBS, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; LA Times, 8/11/25) of the 15 articles failed to mention Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and none mentioned the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.
Critically, only two articles (Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; Washington Post, 8/11/25) even noted the fact that the other five slain journalists had not been accused of belonging to Hamas. With this omission, the other outlets accepted and transmitted to audiences Israel’s premise that any number of bystanders can legitimately be killed in order to target a supposed Hamas member.
Unnecessary qualifiers
Including the October 7, 2023, breakout as background for the killing of journalists, NBC (8/10/25) specified that “many of the targets of those attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.” Palestinians killed subsequently by Israel, by contrast, were just described as “people…in the Hamas-run enclave.”
A common practice for Western media has been the use of unnecessary qualifiers to delegitimize information that comes from Palestinian sources. The coverage of al-Sharif’s assassination was no exception.
The BBC (8/11/25) wrote, “More than 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military operation began, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.” Western media have taken it upon themselves to seemingly rename the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) in order to cast doubt on the extent of Israel’s atrocities. They rarely note that a Lancet study (2/8/25) has found that the death toll could be up to 40% higher than what the GHM is reporting. The New York Times (8/10/25) and Reuters (8/11/25) also utilized “Hamas-run” to describe figures from the Gazan government.
These outlets also showed a clear bias as to how they characterize casualties. The New York Times (8/10/25), when reporting on the death toll in Gaza, wrote that the GHM doesn’t “distinguish between civilians and combatants.” Later on, the Times reported on Israeli deaths—and failed to distinguish between Israeli civilian and combatant deaths.
The implication is that some Palestinian deaths might be considered to be of lesser importance, or even justified, based on victims’ potential “combatant” status. Israeli deaths, meanwhile, are to be counted simply as human beings. The Washington Post (8/11/25) exhibited the same double standard in its reporting.
NBC (8/10/25) wrote, “Many of the targets of [the October 7] attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.” When reporting Palestinian deaths, NBC made no mention that over half of those killed by Israel have been women, children and the elderly. A more recent investigation found that civilians make up 83% of deaths, according to the IDF’s own data. The report also didn’t describe what Palestinian victims might have been doing when they were killed, such as the almost 1,400 who have been shot while seeking aid.
In addition to the usual rhetoric, eight of the 15 articles cast doubt on Al Jazeera by repeatedly mentioning its ownership by the Qatari government. (Qatar, like Israel, is one of 20 countries worldwide officially designated as a “major non-NATO ally” by the United States.) Three of the articles (New York Times, 8/10/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; LA Times, 8/11/25) mention the Israeli government’s adversarial relationship with Al Jazeera, with the New York Times and the Journal dedicating several paragraphs to the outlet’s alleged ties to Hamas as the presumed basis for the conflict, rather than Al Jazeera‘s critical coverage of Israeli actions.
False equivalences
Reuters‘ original headline (8/11/25) was written from the point of view of al-Sharif’s killers.
Only three of the articles use the word “famine” (Financial Times, 8/10/25; CNN, 8/10/25; Newsweek, 8/10/25), and only the Financial Times mentions the word outside of quotes. Reuters (8/11/25) and the Wall Street Journal (8/11/25) called the situation “a hunger crisis” and “a humanitarian crisis that has pushed many Palestinians toward starvation,” respectively.
Media outlets continue to push the narrative that this so-called conflict began less than two years ago, as when NBC (8/10/25) wrote, “Israel launched the offensive in Gaza, targeting Hamas, after the Hamas-led terror attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023.”
Though the rate of killing greatly escalated after the October 7 operation, Israeli violence against Palestinians goes back to before the founding of the state, as many historians have carefully explained. In the decades immediately prior to the Hamas operation, the Israeli human rights group B’tselem counts more than 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces between September 2000 and September 2023—most of them noncombatants, over 2,400 of them children under 18. (Over the same period, some 1,300 Israelis—civilians and military—were killed by Palestinians.)
The Financial Times (8/10/25) described the ongoing genocide as “triggered” by the October 7 attacks, as if the al-Aqsa Flood operation were a random act of violence unrelated to the apartheid system that Israel imposes on Palestinians. The BBC (8/11/25) described Israeli violence as a “response to the Hamas-led attack,” completely erasing Israel’s history of occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that long precedes the existence of Hamas. Obscuring this sort of context is part of the motivation for Israel’s systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, including al-Sharif and his colleagues.
This week on CounterSpin: Trump’s threats to media corporations are laying bare what many already knew: Media corporations are reliant on government for policies that benefit them as profit-driven corporations, because they are primarily profit-driven corporations, even though we may still see them as the journalistic institutions whose job is to inform us about the world and one another—without, as is sometimes quaintly referenced, “fear or favor.”
But while many are meaningfully and rightfully engaged in this White Houses’ harmful overreach and gross predations on the First Amendment, there is less attention to the role of the 14th Amendment—meant to secure basic rights of equal protection and due process for formerly enslaved people.
That’s in play here too; if, like our guest, you are able to contextualize this retrograde White House’s assaults on the press corps as part of, and not ancillary to, their direct assaults on Black and brown people, on the policies that aim to afford us equal rights, on the programs that allow us to enter the country as immigrants, on the laws that resist active discrimination against us on jobsites, in public accommodations, in housing, on the street, at the bank. They don’t actively, aggressively, despise Black and brown people over here, but then just have some sort of principled problem with news reporters, separately, over there; it’s all of a piece. And that piece has a history that we’d do well to learn—not only because of the ongoing, institutional harms it helps us see, but also the hope and resistance that’s there in that history, as well.
We get into it with Joseph Torres, senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator of the project Media 2070, and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump and TikTok.
