This week on CounterSpin: Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more like representing that conflict than confronting it.
Good Jobs First monitors megacompanies like Amazon and their impact on our lives. Their database, Violation Tracker Global, notes more than $2.4 billion in misconduct penalties for Amazon since 2010. The most expensive of those fines have been connected to the company’s anti-competitive practices; the most frequent offenses are related to cheating workers out of wages and jeopardizing workers’ health and safety. Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. We’ll talk to her about the effort to #MakeAmazonPay.
Amazon Seattle HQ (cc photo: kiewic)
Also: A few years back, Amazon, like it does, dangled the prospect of locating a headquarters in New York City. And the city, like it does, eagerly offered some $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to entice the wildly profitable company to bring its anti-union, environmentally exploitative self to town. The deal fell through for reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talked about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes. We’ll hear just a little of that conversation today.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Next year, Donald Trump will have the chance to reshape the American public health system with his nomination of anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary for health and human services. While corporate media haven’t necessarily endorsed this choice, many commentators have worked hard to downplay the danger Kennedy poses to the US public.
Dr. Rachael Bedard (New York Times, 11/15/24) says of Robert Kennedy Jr., “We can’t spend four years simply fighting his agenda.”
On one of the most influential platforms, the New York Times op-ed page (11/15/24), geriatric physician Rachael Bedard wrote that Kennedy has “seeds of truth” in his agenda: “There’s a health care agenda that finds common ground between people like myself—medical researchers and clinicians—and Mr. Kennedy.”
We shouldn’t fret too much about RFK Jr.’s vaccine positions, Bedard assured us, because “Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism on this topic may counterintuitively be an advantage.” His “statements on vaccinations are more complex than they’re often caricatured to be,” she insisted. “He’s said he was not categorically opposed to them or, as an official in the new Trump administration, planning to pull them from the market.”
Similarly, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky, aka Dr. Drew, downplayed Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance in The Hill (11/25/24):
I know Bobby Kennedy—I’ve had him on my show—and I have talked at length with him about these issues. Kennedy isn’t a vaccine-denier or a vaccine conspiracy theorist…. Kennedy isn’t attempting to deny access to vaccines to anyone.
In Newsweek (11/27/24), Brandon Novick of the Center for Economic and Policy Research acknowledged “legitimate concern about his vaccine skepticism” but went on to argue that those concerns are “overblown”: “He promises not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine,” Novick wrote. “Kennedy mainly wants to require more and higher quality studies of vaccine safety and increase transparency.”
‘Better not get them vaccinated’
Seth Mnookin (Scientific American, 1/11/17): “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality.”
A review of RFK Jr.’s record by the AP (7/31/23) clearly documents that he opposes vaccines generally, especially when talking to right-wing audiences: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” he told a podcast in 2021. (He also said, in 2023, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” but claims the podcaster cut him off before he could say something…more complex.) He has also peddled the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism (Scientific American, 1/11/17).
Of course, his dangerous anti-science views go far beyond vaccines. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (11/22/24) laid out the extent of Kennedy’s maddening ideas:
His opposition to life-saving vaccines, his belief that HIV may not cause AIDS, his desire to increase the use of quack autism “treatments,” and his comments about putting people taking psychiatric medication in labor camps should all be immediately disqualifying. Autistic people, the disability community and the nation’s public health will all suffer if he is confirmed.
Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (11/18/24), sees a direct threat public health under Kennedy:
Unfortunately, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated a consistent lack of willingness to listen, learn and act in the best interest of the health of the American people. He was identified in 2021 as a member of the “Disinformation Dozen” that produced 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms that contributed to the public’s mistrust in science, and likely led to morbidity and mortality.
Nowhere do Bedard, Pinksy or Novick take any of this into account when categorizing Kennedy’s views on vaccines as “more complex” or “overblown.” Unmentioned in all three pieces, for example, is that Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, helped spread misinformation in American Samoa, where vaccination rates plummeted and a measles outbreak subsequently killed dozens of children (Mother Jones, 7/2/24). Derek Lowe of Science (8/28/24) wrote: “As far as I’m concerned, he and Children’s Health Defense have blood on their hands.”
And Novick’s blithe dismissal of health experts’ concerns misrepresents Kennedy’s promise: He did not promise “not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine”; he promised not to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” It’s a crucial distinction. Banning vaccines would actually be fairly difficult for a health secretary to do by fiat, so it’s an easy promise to make. But many rightly fear he would work to make vaccines less accessible—not by “pulling them from the market,” as Bedard assures readers he won’t do, but by, for instance, making decisions that would mean vaccines would in many cases no longer be covered by insurance.
And by changing vaccination recommendations, Kennedy could strongly influence vaccination rates, which would increase the possibility of deadly disease outbreaks impacting far more people than only those able to choose whether they want to be vaccinated—again, whether or not he “takes away anybody’s vaccines.”
‘Best chance of reining in corruption’
Brandon Novick (Newsweek, 11/27/24): “Kennedy represents a unique shift away from the corporate capture that has pervaded the public health agencies.”
Many of these corporate media pieces try to frame Kennedy’s position as populist outrage against the status quo, portraying Kennedy as some anti-corporate crusader looking out for regular folks against parasitic healthcare profiteers.
Novick wrote:
Within the context of a Trump administration, Americans should strongly support Kennedy’s nomination as he is the best chance of reining in corruption and corporate power while prioritizing public health over profits.
“Kennedy has railed against price gouging, and he supports the ability for Medicare to negotiate drug prices like other nations who pay far less,” he argued. Novick added that Kennedy “seeks to stop the pervasive poisoning of Americans by large drug and food companies,” and points “to European nations which have stronger regulations.”
It’s hard to imagine the Trump White House, dedicated to destroying the administrative state, creating more federal regulations on commerce. As Greg Sargent (New Republic, 11/15/24) noted, Trump
didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country…. Trump is basically declaring that his administration will be open for business to those who boost and assist him politically.
The notion that you can pick through an agenda like Kennedy’s and join with him on just the sensible parts is a fundamental misunderstanding of how right-wing “populism” works. Its very purpose is to deflect legitimate concerns and grievances onto imaginary conspiracies and scapegoats, in order to neutralize struggles for real change.
When the far right talks about genuine problems, your response should not be, we can work together because we share the same issues. Those issues are just the bait that’s necessary for the switch.
‘Casualty of the culture wars’
Laurie Ochoa (LA Times, 11/23/24): “Many in the food community would love to see someone break the status quo.”
But this is a mistake that commentators, eager for compromise and common ground, make again and again. Asking if there’s a “silver lining” to RFK Jr.’s appointment, Laurie Ochoa at the LA Times (11/23/24) said that while scrutiny has
rightly been on [Kennedy’s] anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride positions, some have taken note of his strong language against food additives in the processed foods so many of us consume and that are making so many Americans sick.
Houston Chronicle (11/22/24) editorial writer Regina Lankenau used her column space to ask Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard University, “So is there any chance that RFK Jr. under a Trump administration will be the one to disrupt Big Food?” He answered, “Yes, and I’m hopeful,” saying that Kennedy’s potential oversight of “federal nutrition programs, including school meal programs” could help him tackle processed food intake.
At the Boston Globe (11/20/24), Jennifer Block argued that “When It Comes to Food, RFK and the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Crew Have a Point.” Block touted the right-wing pseudo-science “wellness” panel that launched the MAHA movement, writing that while it’s true that Biden-Harris have done much more for public health than Trump did in terms of nutrition and regulation of the food industry, “Yet the community voicing concerns about food and contaminants—like the people who showed up at Vani Hari’s rally in Michigan — feel as if they’ve gotten a warmer reception on the political right.”
Her evidence is that Democrats and the left have been critical of the pseudo-science wellness crowd. “But it would be a grave mistake if necessary conversations about chronic illness and our medical and food systems became another casualty of the culture wars,” she wrote.
The medical world just isn’t being open-minded enough, she wrote, arguing that the “debunkers’ credo is that anyone who’s critical of medicine or offers alternatives to pharmaceuticals will send you on a slippery slope to anti-vaccine, anti-science woo.” The problem, of course, is not that Kennedy is at the top of that slope, but that he’s already at the bottom of the hill.
‘A national disgrace’
Neil Barsky (Guardian, 11/21/24): “Should RFK Jr. be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.”
Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, admitted in the Guardian (11/21/24) that Kennedy’s “anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale,” but said he understood that “our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight.” Barsky added, “He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries [have] over healthcare policy.”
But Kennedy does not actually propose to replace that “national disgrace”; asked whether he supported a Medicare for All system, which would be a real step toward curbing the power of the pharmaceutical industry, his response was incoherent (Jacobin, 6/9/23):
My highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program . . . where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody.
In other words, he thinks “single payer” should be one of the payers!
So it is questionable how much Kennedy really wants to address these issues. But even if one were to give him the benefit of the doubt, the pro-business, anti-regulation nature of the rest of the incoming administration suggests there is scant hope any of Kennedy’s health food talk would ever become meaningful policy.
For example, Mande’s answer that Trump would allow Kennedy to make school lunches more nutritious appears naive in view of Trump’s first term, in which he rolled “back healthier standards for school lunches in America championed by [former First Lady] Michelle Obama,” moving to “allow more pizza, meat and potatoes over fresh vegetables, fruits and whole grains” (Guardian, 1/17/22).
In fact, Kennedy already seems at odds with Trump’s pick for agriculture secretary (Politico, 11/29/24), who will be his main influence over US food policy. Big Pharma already has Trump’s ear (Reuters, 11/27/24). And Kennedy has already felt the pressure of his new boss’s love of fast food when he threw out his ideals and posed with a Big Mac and a Coke (New York Post, 11/7/24).
As SEIU President April Verrett (11/15/24) explained, none of Kennedy’s pseudo-populist sloganeering can really outweigh the danger he poses if he becomes a part of state power:
SEIU members know that healthcare must be grounded in science and evidence-based medicine. Our healthcare workers put their lives on the line to protect patients during the darkest days of the pandemic, and we would have lost many more members and loved ones if it weren’t for lifesaving vaccines. We will not stand silent as an outspoken anti-vaxxer who spread misinformation about autism and widespread public health interventions is poised to take control of one of our most consequential government agencies.
‘Legitimating his extremist positions’
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: “Media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale.”
Pundits in the New York Times and elsewhere taking Kennedy at his word are part of a broader problem in the media, according to Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel. Media frame his MAHA movement to sound “like a health-focused initiative,” she told FAIR in an email, but it’s actually a “platform for dangerous rhetoric and fake science that directly undermines public health research”:
By framing RFK Jr. as a semi-legitimate voice on health issues at all, not only does it bolster the credibility of the MAHA agenda, the media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale, effectively legitimating his extremist positions on vaccines, climate change and chronic disease without sufficient scrutiny, right before his appointment will be up for debate in the Senate. Truly scary stuff.
Rather than critically examining his stances, mainstream outlets often frame his views as “alternative” or “controversial,” which not only normalizes them but implicitly elevates them to the level of mainstream discourse, or further bolsters his reputation among the wellness community as a class warrior/truth teller.
This is particularly problematic in the context of his potential role at HHS, where his views could directly influence policy, research and local health department budgets, drug approvals, healthcare safety guidelines, disability determinations, disease surveillance, health statistics, public health disaster and epidemic preparedness, and so much more, making the media’s soft treatment of him even more dangerous.
‘Failures of the pandemic response’
“Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy claimed (New York Post, 7/23/23), citing this as evidence that the virus “is ethnically targeted.”
These efforts to find a silver lining in the Kennedy appointment, strenuously searching for common ground on which progressives and medical professionals can work with him, necessarily involved distorting the record in order to create a potential good-faith ally who doesn’t exist. Bedard’s piece in the Times, for example, twisted the facts in writing about the context for Kennedy’s rise:
There’s been no meaningful, public reckoning from the federal government on the successes and failures of the nation’s pandemic response. Americans dealt with a patchwork of measures—school closings, mask requirements, limits on gatherings, travel bans—with variable successes and trade-offs. Many felt pressured into accepting recently developed, rapidly tested vaccines that were often required to attend school, keep one’s job or spend time in public spaces.
The Biden administration did, in fact, reflect on the Covid pandemic to better plan for upcoming pandemics (NPR, 4/16/24; STAT, 4/16/24; PBS, 4/16/24), as scientific journals and government agencies have looked at the last pandemic to come up with planning for the future. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (11/14/24) recently held a hearing on the subject, and the Government Accountability Office (7/11/23) offered nearly 400 recommendations on improving pandemic planning. It might be fair to evaluate how well this effort is going, but that’s not what Bedard wrote.
And the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates were popular when they were being rolled out (Gallup, 9/24/21)—as one might expect when an effective preventive measure is introduced to combat a contagious virus killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Meanwhile, the fresh face that Bedard hopes will give us a meaningful reckoning, the one that the Biden administration supposedly failed to give us, endorsed a xenophobic, antisemitic conspiracy theory to explain the coronavirus (New York Post, 7/23/23): “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Bedard sanewashed this lunacy, saying that RFK Jr. “is right that vaccine mandates are a place where community safety and individual liberties collide.” “Official communication about vaccine safety can be more alienating to skeptics than reassuring,” she declared.
If someone wrote that traffic lights are a place where road safety and drivers’ liberties collide, and that traffic enforcement was alienating to red light skeptics, the Times would laugh it off. Yet the Times let a doctor give oxygen to such nonsense, even as she admitted that vaccines are only effective when an overwhelming majority of the population gets them.
Places like the Times have also published criticism of Kennedy (New York Times, 11/18/24), including a thorough look at his role in the American Samoa crisis (New York Times, 11/25/24). But corporate media have no obligation to bend the truth to offer the “other side” of an anti-vaccine extremist who is only taken seriously because his last name happens to be Kennedy.
Beyond Gas (11/24): “We found indoor NO2 pollution levels from moderate gas stove use far above the health standard set by the EPA for outdoor exposure.”
It was the sort of feel-good, David-vs.-Goliath story that’s perfect ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
A coalition of DC-area faith, tenant and environmental groups spent two years studying the health impacts of gas stoves. Just ahead of the holiday, when countless families would be spending hours in their kitchens cooking turkey and fixings, the coalition released their report, and it was a shocker.
After running the gas oven and two burners for 30 minutes, nearly two-thirds of homes studied registered higher levels of nitrogen dioxide than the EPA health-protective standard.
Nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, is a gas linked to wide-ranging health problems, from asthma to heart issues, and possibly “tied to increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, as well as cognitive development and behavioral issues in children,” the report noted.
For the grassroots group, called the Beyond Gas Coalition, the most pressing message to get to families was how to lessen their exposure to NO2 by keeping windows open during and even after cooking with gas stoves.
Longer term, the group encourages localities to ban gas appliances in new construction—a step already taken by DC and Montgomery County, Maryland, the two jurisdictions Beyond Gas studied. (Those bans will take effect in 2027.)
Despite the timeliness of Beyond Gas’s findings, only two news outlets covered the release: the Washington Informer (11/22/24), a venerable Black newspaper, and WUSA9, the local CBS affiliate owned by the media conglomerate Tegna (formerly part of Gannett).
WUSA, in fact, produced no less than three stories on the day of the report’s release (Heated, 11/27/24). Unfortunately, WUSA’s stories were quickly followed by an about-face.
Yanked without explanation
WUSA‘s report (11/27/24) on the dangers of gas stoves disappeared from its website—then came back in a more industry-friendly form.
WUSA’s trio of pieces began running on the morning of November 21, but by that evening, two of the three links to its stories were broken. “I thought it was just a glitch or something,” Barbara Briggs, co-author of Beyond Gas’s report, told the climate newsletter Heated (11/27/24).
When [Beyond Gas] called up WUSA to inquire, they say the message they received from the producer who worked on the story was that the station made the decision at the behest of the utility company, choosing to pull the story down and hide the video from its YouTube channel until it could include a statement from Washington Gas.
Of course, Washington Gas was under no obligation to ever give a statement.
“[WUSA] essentially told Washington Gas, ‘We’ll kill the story, and let you decide when and whether we republish it,’” Mark Rodeffer, a member of Sierra Club’s DC chapter, told Heated‘s Emily Atkin. “It’s shocking to me that they’re letting one of their advertisers dictate stories.”
“Washington Gas has sponsored many WUSA environmental stories,” Heated reported, “most of which are designed to bolster the utility’s environmental reputation.”
While Washington Gas wasn’t initially named in WUSA’s main report, Scott Broom, the environmental reporter who produced the story, noted in his report the gas industry’s objection to findings linking NO2 exposure to negative health outcomes, as well as the industry’s lawsuits against DC and Montgomery County over banning gas appliances.
But Washington Gas apparently wasn’t happy with Broom’s story, and it was quietly yanked without explanation.
New and improved
Heated (11/27/24): “The incident raises questions about how much fossil fuel sponsorship is influencing environmental and public health journalism—both in the DC region and beyond.”
Then, just as suddenly, the story reappeared six days later (11/27/24), now with Washington Gas’s fingerprints all over it. An editor’s note affixed to the top read: “This story…has been updated to include additional research and sources regarding the safety of gas stoves.”
A more honest editor’s note might have read: “We changed this story to keep a sponsor happy.”
WUSA’s apparent accommodations to Washington Gas—a greedy local monopoly utility owned by the Canadian multinational AltaGas—started right at the top of the new story. Here’s the opening to Broom’s original story (which can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine):
As families prepare for Thanksgiving feasts, a new report highlights what studies show is a serious health hazard in the kitchen: gas stoves and ovens.
In the updated version, WUSA downgraded the health hazard from “serious” to merely “potential.”
Broom’s second paragraph initially stated that “a study” had “revealed” that nearly two-thirds of the gas-stove-kitchens tested exceeded standard NO2 levels. The updated version now says “a report” only “claims” this.
Further down, things got stranger. The new version contains a long tangent conveying a gas industry talking point that has nothing to do with the story.
“Gas appliances can play an important role in reducing health hazards in poor countries where people rely on dirtier fuels such as wood and kerosene,” WUSA reported, citing a study likely handed to it by Washington Gas.
Better than nothing?
You might think the advocates who spent two years working on their study would be outraged at WUSA. But the DC area’s local media scene is in such disrepair that any coverage, no matter how problematic, may be better than the all-too-common nothing.
“It’s not like public radio has done anything,” a resigned Briggs told Heated. “It’s not like any of the other stations have carried it.”
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Katherine Gallagher about the Abu Ghraib verdict for the November 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: For a press corps that described the grievous abuse of Iraqi detainees at the prison in Abu Ghraib as “seared into the American consciousness,” there’s been relatively little interest in the fact that a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI guilty of conspiring in that abuse.
Al Shimari v. CACI International was filed in 2008 and, CounterSpinlisteners will know, has been fought and fought and fought. And now, while its unclear what justice would look like for victims of torture, there is some acknowledgement of harm, and the fact that it was people, and not nameless forces in the “fog of war,” who were to blame.
How meaningful this verdict becomes could shape things going forward, given the US military’s increased reliance on private contractors, who’ve evidently been led to understand that they are above the law.
Katherine Gallagher: Thanks so much for having me back.
JJ: First of all, congratulations. I’m not sure people understand that, just because the paper says, “Oh, this was horrible abuse. Our conscience is shocked,” doesn’t mean that anything happens. So the law isn’t justice, but if you use the law, it’s something. So first of all, I want to say thank you.
KG: Thank you, thank you for that acknowledgement, and, really, the thanks and the effort was first and foremost to our clients, who filed this case 16-and-a-half years ago, and stuck with it and stuck with us and stuck with US courts through a rollercoaster ride of moments where they thought that justice might be coming, and then others where the case was dismissed and deep disappointment. So I agree, the law is not always an answer, but it can certainly be a tool, as it was in this case, to get some measure of justice for Suhail, Asa’ad and Salah.
JJ: I’ll ask you to say their names, actually, because they’re not often named. So the plaintiffs in this case, that made it this far, say their names.
KG: Salah al-Ejaili came and testified in person in Virginia in this case. He is a journalist, and he was working as a journalist for Al Jazeera at the time he was detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib. The second plaintiff is Asa’ad al-Zuba’e. He is a fruit vendor in Iraq, and he testified, via video link, live in the courtroom in Alexandria. And then the third plaintiff is Suhail al-Shimari, whose name is the lead name in this long-running case of Al Shimari v. CACI. And he is an educator.
JJ: It seems important to recognize and acknowledge that there are human beings here. I want to ask you to ground us, because some of our listeners weren’t even born. Ground us on the substance of the charges here, and maybe why is this the only lawsuit to make it this far?
KG: So this case stems out of what for many of us, or those of us of a certain generation, really is a historic event, in the negative sense. And that is the torture of Iraqi detainees at a US-run detention center in Baghdad, in Iraq, during the US invasion of Iraq.
At Abu Ghraib, especially during the time from fall 2003 until early 2004, there was a conspiracy to torture and otherwise subject Iraqi detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. And that abuse, that horrific abuse, was documented in photos.
And those photos came out, the world saw them in 2004, and really “shocked the conscience,” which is a term that we often use in the law, but here it was true, for the entire nation and the world, when we saw naked, hooded, Iraqi detainees in human pyramids, being threatened with dogs, being subjected to sexual assault and degradation and humiliation, being held in contorted, painful positions, shackled to bed frames and walls.
And all of this, military generals investigated, they found that this was done, in large part, to “soften up” detainees, to make them pliable and ready to speak when they went into interrogation.
Now, at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, the US went in far too quickly, and with not enough resources, and with really no plan for the counterinsurgency that followed. So in the summer of 2003, the US started detaining Iraqis en masse. And so there were thousands and thousands of Iraqi detainees.
And in order to understand who they were even picking up, the US set up a number of detention centers, and they didn’t have enough trained interrogators, and they also didn’t have enough trained translators within the US military. So they outsourced those functions to private companies, and one of them was CACI, or C.A.C.I., a private government contractor from Virginia.
And CACI was hired, and paid tens of millions of dollars, to augment and support the US interrogation services. So CACI was hired to find so-called resident experts—qualified, trained interrogators to work in Iraq, and to supervise those interrogators who were working with the US military.
But what we found out, as the torture scandal broke and the military investigations happened and more information came out, is that CACI sent over unqualified interrogators, in many cases, and did not provide the kind of oversight or supervision that was required, and that was particularly required at Abu Ghraib, where there was a breakdown in the command structure within the military that allowed the kind of torture and abuse in those notorious photos to occur.
So that’s the big picture of what happened. And the abuse in that time was also inflicted upon the plaintiffs, Suhail, Asa’ad and Salah, who were detained in that end-of-2003, early-2004 time.
JJ: It seems worth just lifting up, as a point of information, these were not people who were charged or convicted of any crime, the detainees that we’re talking about, many of them, at Abu Ghraib, right?
KG: Correct. The individuals in this case, and I’ve represented individuals in two other cases, one that settled back in 2012 and one that was dismissed back in 2009. And of those 338 plaintiffs I’ve represented across those three cases, zero were ever charged with a crime. But I also want to be very clear that, even if one were charged with a crime, torture is always unlawful.
JJ: Right. Well, the case is landmark, in part just because of the way that it names contractors as responsible parties. It’s always been their argument, right, that they’re just private actors following orders from the US, and the US has immunity, so we do too, right? That’s part of what’s important about this.
KG: That’s precisely right. Over the 16 years of litigation, CACI has filed at least 15 motions to dismiss. And whether they’ve invoked Derivative Sovereign Immunity or the Political Question Doctrine or the Government Contractor Defense or the Law of War Immunity, or most recently and throughout trial, the so-called Borrowed Servant Defense—all of these boiled down to essentially one argument, which is, we were working with the US military, and anything we did was because they were overseeing it. And if they were overseeing it, they should have any responsibility, not us. We were just, essentially, following orders.
Now, the conduct at issue in this case—and we have clear decisions from the Fourth Circuit saying as much in our long litigation—the conduct at issue is unlawful. We’re talking about torture. We had plead war crimes, we’re talking about cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. These are violations of US domestic criminal law, and they are also violations of US-signed treaties, including the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.
And so, this is not conduct that the military could order anyone, whether it’s soldiers or contractors, to do. This is unlawful, illegal. So CACI’s defense fails, insofar as this is not a lawful order that they could have ever received from the military.
But, additionally, CACI was hired to supervise its own employees. This is a for-profit corporation that hired employees at will. So, unlike an enlisted person at Abu Ghraib, the CACI employees could quit at any time, and notably, some did, and one even did, more than one, because of what they saw happening at Abu Ghraib. So this corporation should be held accountable for its own employees’ conduct.
And that’s precisely, after 16-and-a-half years, what a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found to be the case two weeks ago when they gave down a verdict against CACI and for our plaintiffs.
JJ: I will say I’m disheartened by the relative quietness of media around the verdict. There has been some coverage, but I feel like I can say pretty confidently that had this case died in court, we would’ve never heard about it again.
But I’m also saddened by the accounts that I have seen: Virtually all of them use the phrase “over two decades ago.” And that, to me, is not a neutral tag. It’s a linguistic wink that says, “Why are we still talking about this?” But as you’ve noted, the case has taken this long because CACI has resisted it for this long, right?
KG: That is absolutely the case. The plaintiffs filed back in 2008, and our plaintiffs, to this day, the 20-year time period doesn’t erase or make this historic. They are living every day with being an Abu Ghraib torture survivor. They still suffer from nightmares, from flashbacks, and talking about Abu Ghraib is not something that’s easy for them to do.
The fact that this case went to trial not once but twice, and that the plaintiffs had to tell their account, tell about their suffering, their humiliation, more than once, it wasn’t easy. And to remember the kinds of details, some of it is seared in their memory, and others, of course, over 20 years is less clear than it used to be. But the nightmares and the mental harm has continued to this day, and it should not be something that is relegated to the history books at all.
And one of the things I’d note: There weren’t many photos shown during trial, but there were a few photos shown during trial, and there were a couple of jurors who appeared to be on the younger side. And when those photos came up, particularly for one of the younger jurors, who may not have seen this on the cover of the paper each day, as those of us did back in 2004, there was absolute shock. There was absolute shock. I mean, these photos were shocking for everyone, but the accounts seemed to be unknown. And that is not something that should be permitted to happen.
And that’s part of why, despite the difficulty, our plaintiffs have brought this case forward, and stayed with it throughout all of this time, so that it is not forgotten. And it is so that what was done in our name, for me as a US citizen, is also not forgotten. And they want to be sure that this never happens to anyone else again. So to the extent that corrections haven’t been made, whether by the US military or by CACI, to ensure that their employees or soldiers do not ever, ever treat detainees, or humans, in the way that the Iraqi men, women and children who were held at Abu Ghraib were treated, that’s what this case is also about.
JJ: Well, what do you make of the “few bad apples” line, which literally has appeared in some of the journalistic accounts that I’ve seen, that these were some rogue CACI employees, and it’s wrong to hold the organization liable for that?
KG: CACI, again, by its contract, had an obligation to oversee its employees, and it had staff on site precisely to do that. Also, the staff in Iraq was in daily contact with the staff back in Virginia, and some of the staff in Virginia traveled to Abu Ghraib over this period of time.
And so, whether we’re talking about a contractor at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture, or frankly, other kinds of corporations, you have an obligation to look down your supply chain. And that, here, that supply chain is your employees, and you have an obligation to ensure that they are abiding by the terms of their contract, and the obligations that you as a corporation are putting forward that you will comply with. And that included following federal and international law. And that means no torture, no cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment.
JJ: I sort of resent the fact, though I understand it, that it’s being reported solely as a lawsuit, and not a human rights crisis. And the coverage as a lawsuit means, first of all, we see a note of monetary outcomes: These folks are getting millions!
And then, also, I see the Washington Post quoting CACI, saying CACI employees say, “None of them laid a hand on detainees.” Well, “laid a hand on,” like, I don’t know, that sounds like language you got from somewhere else.
But, also, plaintiffs are described as “saying” they were restrained, “claiming” they were tortured. There’s always this degree of difference. And I wonder, I wish, in some ways, we could move it outside of just the lawsuit framework, and talk about the human rights crisis that Abu Ghraib actually presents and presented for the United States.
Katherine Gallagher: “The jury found not that our clients ‘claimed’ that they were tortured, but that our clients were subjected to torture.”
KG: I appreciate that comment and that perspective. And just a few reactions to the language that you cited: What’s important here is, our clients testified in court, under oath, and there were findings made by a jury, factual findings against clear law. And Judge Brinkema gave the jury their legal instructions against which to apply facts.
So the jury found not that our clients “claimed” that they were tortured, but that our clients were subjected to torture, or cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. The jury found them credible, as did General Taguba when he investigated Abu Ghraib back in 2004.
And, in fact, one of our clients in this case was someone who provided an account of abuse already, back in late 2003. And at that time, General Taguba also found the report by him and other Iraqi detainees credible.
So these are not mere allegations at this point. We have a jury verdict, and the jury awarded each plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages, and $11 million each in punitive damages against CACI.
And that punitive damages award is saying that it wasn’t a few rogue employees, but it was a corporation that had responsibilities that it didn’t fulfill. The fact that that punitive damages award was meeting the amount that CACI was paid through their contract at Abu Ghraib, I really think sends a very clear message.
JJ: Finally, and perhaps you’ve answered it, but what are your hopes for the impact of this verdict, and what would you maybe say to other attorneys, frankly, who are working on years-old cases that might never lead to such an outcome?
KG: First, on the outcome, we certainly had a big victory, and it was a real validation of our clients, of what was done to them, and of their quest for justice. So that, again, I am very grateful for.
We will be facing an appeal; CACI has made that clear. So the litigation is not yet over, and our clients have not been given the monetary compensation. But, indeed, there already has been a real recognition for them by the jury, which mattered a lot, I have to say. It mattered a great deal to them, to know that they were heard and that they were believed.
In terms of the bigger picture of what this means, I do think that these cases are important. They may be difficult and, frankly, they also may be lost, but raising the challenges, and bringing the facts to the forefront, and putting harm with proper labels, so that those pictures Abu Ghraib are understood as torture, which means causing severe physical or mental harm, intentionally. And that is what happened to our plaintiffs.
CACI was part of a conspiracy to do that to our plaintiffs. And, indeed, they may not have been the ones to literally shackle our plaintiffs, but they gave instructions and encouragement to have our plaintiffs so mistreated and so harmed.
And I think that that message of challenging injustice, and for our clients to try and regain some of their agency, some of their dignity, it’s important. And I’m gratified that in this case it ended in a victory, but I still think it’s worth bringing cases, even if that’s not the outcome.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. They’re online at CCRJustice.org.
Thank you so much, Katherine Gallagher, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
In the aftermath of the Trump victory, the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published post-election eulogies for conventional economics. Remarkably, these columns shared almost the exact same headline.
Peter Coy’s column in the Times (11/8/24) read “The Election’s Other Biggest Losers? Economists.” In the Journal (11/7/24), Joseph C. Sternberg’s piece was headed “The 2024 Election’s Other Loser: Economists.”
While the headlines were nearly identical, the ideological differences between the Times and the Journal mean that Coy and Sternberg arrived at very different conclusions for the future of the field of study.
Coy’s piece is a lament for mainstream economists, who in his view perfectly analyzed the economic situation of the election, only to have their expertise rejected by the voters. Sternberg strikes a smugger tone, arguing that economists deserve scorn for not understanding what the economy meant to voters, as evidenced by the election results.
Despite their divergent tones, both columns suffered from similar problems, including a fundamental misunderstanding of how voters interface with “the economy” as a political concern.
‘Moment of reckoning’
Peter Coy (New York Times, 11/8/24): “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around economists.”
Peter Coy is the resident economics and business columnist at the New York Times. A longtime writer for BusinessWeek, he is an unabashed apologist for mainstream economics, so when “voters utterly ignored” the wisdom of 23 Nobel Prize–winning economists, Coy seemed to take it personally.
Coy ticked off Trump’s economic sins, including tariffs and immigration restrictions, before conceding that “voters ate it up. Economists were perceived as spokespeople for the power structure—if not outright harmful, then at least ignorable.”
One doesn’t have to be a Trump supporter to recognize that economists (or at least, the ones quoted in corporate media) are generally spokespeople for the power structure. That aside, Coy went on to pose the election loss as a “moment of reckoning” for Democrats:
Should Democrats stick to the economic platform of 2024, which on the whole is based on standard economic principles, with a few concessions to electoral politics, such as promises of mortgage down-payment assistance and fulminations against “nefarious price-gouging”? Or should they go full-on populist to compete with Trump?
Coy was vague on what he meant by “standard economic principles,” elaborating only to say “trade should be free, within reason,” and that “monetary policy should be insulated from politics.” (“Insulated from politics” is what media say when they mean bankers should be allowed to set interest rates without regard for their impact on people.)
In other words, Coy stumped for the status quo, in the most general sense. He believes that Biden bet big and lost on “deliverism,” the idea that voters will reward politicians at the ballot box for material gains delivered. Coy failed to mention the Covid-era relief, like the expanded child tax credit, that was delivered then taken back from US workers. Deliverism is far from full-fledged economic populism, but Coy uses Harris’s election loss to argue that interventions in the economy on behalf of working people are a fool’s errand.
‘Unfortunate’ populism
Franklin Roosevelt
Coy invoked the example of President Franklin Roosevelt, a president who turned to economic populism to “fight off threats” from political populists, as a “reference point” for Democrats.
But instead of investigating why Roosevelt’s populism was successful, both electorally and economically, in an effort to imagine what modern left economic populism could look like, Coy decried a hypothetical progressive populism as “unfortunate”:
Higher tariffs would slow economic growth and raise prices, no matter how many times Trump denies it. As for immigration, effective border controls make sense, but sharp restrictions on new arrivals and expulsion of people who are already in the country would leave millions of jobs unfilled and possibly unfillable.
Most progressives who wish a return to economic populism would agree with this analysis. The problem is that Coy presented tariffs and mass deportations as the only forms Democrats’ economic populism could take. Unmentioned were universal healthcare, a wealth tax and guaranteed basic income, to name just a few examples—odd omissions, given that he acknowledged that FDR called for “higher taxes on the rich, a federal minimum wage and Social Security.”
Advice from the right
A scholar from the highly ideological Hoover Institution advised Democrats to “offer nonideological solutions.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas)
Instead, Coy sought advice from Larry Diamond of the right-wing Hoover Institution, and experts from the arms maker–funded Center for a New American Security, on what Democrats can do to “fend off populism.” Their prescriptions include “offer non-ideological solutions…create unifying and aspirational narratives, use blame attributions sparingly,” and other safely capital-friendly methods.
Unsurprisingly, these experts agreed wholeheartedly with Coy’s assertion that left-wing populism in any form is the wrong path for Democrats. The fact that Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election after she renounced the progressive policies she once supported, then offered many “nonideological solutions” of her own, didn’t seem to concern Coy.
Instead, Coy concluded, Democrats would be better served by sticking to their (Hoover Institution–vetted) principles, and waiting for Trump to mess up. “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around economists,” Coy conceded, “but I do think the prescriptions of mainstream economics still make sense.”
It is clear why Coy and his fellow fans of mainstream economics were so disappointed by this election. In his eyes, the Harris campaign did everything right. She ran on an incumbent record that posted strong growth and low unemployment, and lowered inflation rates. She ran on a business-friendly platform (despite Coy’s disapproval of her anti-price-gouging “concession” to voters).
And after all that, Harris lost, decisively. Nonetheless, Coy was optimistic for the future of a Democratic Party committed to centrism: “In the long run, Democrats will be better off sticking to their economic principles while Trump and the party he controls founder.”
‘Those parts that matter most’
Aside from pointing to phony wage growth statistics, the Wall Street Journal‘s Joseph Sternberg (11/7/24) argued that numbers like the “business-investment component of …quarterly GDP releases” mattered most to voters.
Sternberg spent the first half of his Wall Street Journal column (11/7/24) arguing that “prominent economics commentators missed (or chose to overlook) those parts of the economy that matter most to most voters.” As someone who studies Marxian political economy, I am highly sympathetic to the view that the conventional economists have it dead wrong. However, instead of calling for a true reevaluation of the economics field, Sternberg limited his critique to Monday morning–quarterbacking his ideological opponents.
Sternberg claims that real weekly earnings fell 0.5% over Biden’s term in office, as opposed to 7% growth during Trump’s term. Sternberg appears to be looking at Current Population Survey earnings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which show a phantom spike in income just before the end of Trump’s first term. This clearly reflects lower-paid workers disproportionately losing their jobs during the lockdown rather than actual gains for workers’ pocketbooks (FAIR.org, 11/20/24).
More dependable statistics show real incomes increased at all income levels during the Biden administration, and increased the most at lower income levels. Per the Center for American Progress, workers poorer than 90% of all earners saw a 16% increase in real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) between February 2020 and September 2024; workers poorer than 80% of earners saw a 9% increase.
Other analyses similarly found across-the-board income increases from the Biden economic recovery (especially among lower income levels) in terms of both real wages and real weekly earnings. In other words, if you look at data without known aberrations, workers have indeed come out ahead.
Those datasets, however, don’t post-confirm Sternberg’s notion that economists sleepwalked into an election loss. Whether it’s earnings data or anything else, there will always be statistics that can support one’s post-hoc reasoning. Confidently proclaiming which economic indicators decide an election after the election takes place is low-hanging fruit.
Sternberg declared that “only an economist could be surprised by Donald Trump’s presidential victory.” But economists who favorably compared Kamala Harris’ platform to Trump’s weren’t predicting that she would therefore win; they were saying they thought her policies would result in better economic outcomes. That voters most concerned about economic issues picked the candidate most economists thought would hurt the economy is more an indictment of journalism than of economics.
Workers the actual losers
FAIR.org (7/13/23): “Any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings.”
The job of communicating economic activity to the masses is not that of economists, after all, but rather journalists and the punditocracy (of which Sternberg is a part). Throughout his column, Sternberg referred to the “economics pundit class,” “economics commentators,” “economists,” “academics,” “punditry” and “economic analysts,” all in more or less the same role. The problem is, these words describe people in a wide variety of jobs, who were by no means united in their electoral prognostication.
FAIR (1/25/23, 7/13/23, 1/5/24) has documented the media obsession with Biden-era inflation, and indeed, continuous news reports that decry the effects inflation will have on people’s quality of life go a long way to shaping perceptions of the economy. When media bleat for years about inflation, and workers recognize that prices have indeed increased, then workers’ justified dissatisfaction with the economy will be identified as “inflation.”
The pundit class has displayed an inability to differentiate between short-run grievances and long-term disaffection. It may be true that inflation is down, thanks to Biden’s remarkablerecovery. It may also be true that workers are fed up with the status quo, as represented by Harris’s bid to change “not a thing” about the current administration. Of course, Donald Trump has few real offerings for improvements for the working class, but that is another issue altogether.
To Coy, a dramatic Democratic underperformance, especially among workers, is a sign that economists should stick to the same great policies that have generated historic wealth inequality. To Sternberg, economists are fools because they weren’t looking at the figures that exactly predicted the election, notwithstanding the fact that 1) that’s not the job of economists, 2) he only chose his magic figures after the election took place, and 3) Sternberg’s chief data point, how much voters were paid, is known to misrepresent reality.
As long as writers like Coy and Sternberg fail to understand the motivations of voters, then the losers won’t be the economists, but the workers who are forced to vote for one faction of capital against another.
This week on CounterSpin: It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but the pictures of it, that forced public and official acknowledgement. The Defense Department vehemently resisted the pictures’ release, with good reason. Yet when, after the initial round, Australian TV put out new images, Washington Post executive editor Len Downie said they were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” The notion that acts of torture by the US military and its privately contracted cat’s paws are, above all, distasteful may help explain corporate media’s inattentiveness to the efforts of victims of Abu Ghraib to find some measure of justice.
But a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI responsible for its part in that abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has been behind the case, Al Shimari v. CACI, through its long rollercoaster ride through the courts—which isn’t over yet. We hear about it from CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the ICC’s Israel warrants.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Predictably, Israel and its allies condemned the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Washington Post, 11/21/24). A press release from the court (11/21/24) accused the Israeli leaders of “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.” These consisted of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare,” “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts” and “the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”
In addition to the US, Israel’s primary source of military and diplomatic support, Israel also received backing from Hungary and Argentina, two nations run by far-right leaders who seek to undo democratic liberalism (Al Jazeera, 11/21/24).
‘International Kangaroo Court’
New York Post (11/21/24): “This latest effort is simply another part of the international push spearheaded by Jew-hating high officials around the world to delegitimize Israel.”
There were also the expected cries of foul play in right-wing US media. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/21/24) said Israel was merely acting in self-defense because “Hamas started the war on October 7 by sending death squads into Israel.”
“The charge of deliberate starvation is absurd,” the Journal snarled, noting that “Israel has facilitated the transfer of more than 57,000 aid trucks”—in other words, about one-fourth of what Gaza’s 2 million people would have needed to meet their basic needs (NPR, 2/21/24).
Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Journal (11/24/24) that he was “putting together a legal dream team” to defend Israel’s leaders, as if to present Netanyahu as a sort of global stage version of O.J. Simpson. If you want to gauge the seriousness of Dershowitz’s announcement, consider that the “dream team” will reportedly include Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced ex-governor of New York (New York Post, 11/25/24).
Fellow Murdoch paper the New York Post (11/21/24) called the ICC charges “false.” “International Kangaroo Court is more like it,” its editorial board mocked, “and one more reminder why the United States should never recognize the ICC.”
“ICC Unleashes Chaos, Antisemitism” read a headline from an op-ed in the Unification Church–owned Washington Times (11/22/24).
‘Authoritarians who kill with impunity’
What is the right venue, according to the Washington Post (11/24/24)? Israel will bring itself to justice if it’s committed any war crimes.
While it’s not surprising to see right-wing outlets waving away the atrocities in Gaza, it is striking to see the Washington Post—a vehicle for the establishment center whose slogan is “democracy dies in darkness”—not only condemning the warrants, but arguing that the court should stick to prosecuting enemy states of the United States.
In a brutally honest way, the paper’s editorial board (11/24/24) declared that Israel must be held apart from other regimes who do terrible things, arguing that rules needn’t apply to the West and its allies, since they have the “means [and] mechanisms to investigate themselves.”
The board complained that the international justice system singled out Israel for “selective prosecution” while ignoring rogue regimes:
This is a gross oversimplification to the point of deception. In each of the cases the Post names, neither perpetrator nor victim are from countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, which means that it is extremely difficult for the ICC to claim jurisdiction over them. (Palestine, in contrast, is a signatory to the treaty that established the ICC, which is why the court has jurisdiction over that case.)
In the case of Sudan, the court did manage to prosecute pro-Sudanese government militia commander Ali Kushayb (ICC, 4/5/22) and indict former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (Guardian, 2/11/20) for atrocities committed in Darfur. This was possible because the ICC may also claim jurisdiction when a case is referred to it by the UN Security Council. (The court’s prosecutor has spoken to the legal complexities of confronting the current crisis—ICC, 8/6/24.)
An innovative legal approach involving cross-border claims from Bangladesh has allowed an ICC investigation of Myanmar’s genocide against the Rohingya to proceed, albeit very slowly (CNN, 7/7/23). A similar approach might work with the Syria case (Guardian, 2/16/22), but no member state has referred the case to the court (Atlantic Council, 9/26/24), in contrast to the Israel case.
A more apt comparison would be Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine: Russia, like Israel, is not a party to the ICC, while Ukraine, like Palestine, is. And the ICC has indeed, as the Post quietly acknowledges later in the piece, issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The legal complexities here are manifold, but the Post doesn’t bother to grapple with them, suggesting that it’s the Post more than the ICC that’s guilty of selective prosecution.
The Post went on:
The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity. Israel went to war in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and another 250 taken hostage, around 100 of whom still remain captive. The ICC’s arrest warrant for one of the authors of that massacre, Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who was probably killed in an Israeli airstrike months ago, looks more like false equivalence than genuine balance.
In fact, the court had sought a warrant for Hamas leader and October 7 attack planner Yahya Sinwar (CNN, 5/20/24), but the Israeli military killed him before the justice system could catch up with him (AP, 10/18/24). If the court had not prosecuted Hamas officials, then the Post and others would accuse it of singling out Israel. When the court does go after Hamas officials, the Post claims it’s political theater. The court can’t win.
‘Vibrant, independent media’
Israel’s “vibrant, independent media” reports that it is under heavy censorship, with 2,703 articles redacted by the military in 2023, and 613 banned entirely (972, 5/20/24).
The Post then offered some “to be sures.” Yes, “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed and maimed”; yes, Israel “has fallen short” on allowing in humanitarian aid. But it is the next part where one wonders if the Post board has left the earthly realm for another reality, in which Israel will be held accountable by—wait for it—itself:
Israel needs to be held accountable for its military conduct in Gaza. After the conflict’s end—which is long overdue—there will no doubt be Israeli judicial, parliamentary and military commissions of inquiry. Israel’s vibrant, independent media will do its own investigations. Some Israeli reserve soldiers have already been arrested over accusations of abuse against Palestinian detainees. More investigations will follow. The ICC is supposed to become involved when countries have no means or mechanisms to investigate themselves. That is not the case in Israel.
Has the Post been living under a rock? The biggest story in Israel before last year’s Hamas attack that instigated the attack on Gaza was Netanyahu’s attack on the independence of the judiciary (AP, 9/11/23), and Israel’s right-wing government is continuing this effort (Economist, 9/19/24).
As for the so-called free press, the government has moved to boycott the country’s main liberal newspaper, Haaretz (11/24/24), pulling government advertising and advising ministries to end communication with reporters. Israel has also banned Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24), and at least 130 journalists have been killed during Israel’s military campaigns against Gaza and Lebanon (FAIR.org, 5/1/24; Committee to Protect Journalists, 11/25/24). Military censorship of the media has also increased, the Israeli magazine 972 (5/20/24) found.
‘To ensure impunity’
In the tiny fraction of cases where soldiers were indicted for killing Palestinians, AP (12/22/22) reported, “Israel’s military prosecutors acted with leniency toward convicted soldiers…with those sentenced for killing Palestinians serving only short-term military community service.”
Meanwhile, there are isolated examples of the Israeli government prosecuting soldiers, but experts believe that most military crimes have gone and will go unpunished (ProPublica, 5/8/24; Al Jazeera, 7/6/24). “Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the last five years have been indicted in less than 1% of the hundreds of complaints against them,” AP (12/22/22) reported.
When an Israeli court acquitted a border police officer who killed an autistic Palestinian man (BBC, 7/6/23), the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (6/25/20) said that even the original investigation into the killing was “merely a fig leaf to silence criticism until the public outrage and media attention die down.” It added that, on the whole, “the investigation system works behind the scenes to whitewash the violence and ensure impunity for those responsible.”
Moreover, these investigations are largely of the “bad apple” variety, singling out extreme behavior of lower-ranking members of the military. Does the Post seriously expect Israel to hold accountable those at the top who are prosecuting the war?
Right-wing lawmakers are working to further block investigations, Human Rights Watch (7/31/24) said, a situation that builds an increased sense of impunity, as 972 (8/1/24) noted.
This doesn’t sound like a healthy parliamentary system with democratic guardrails, but a warrior state spiraling into authoritarianism. The Washington Post, too, seems to be moving away from liberalism and a rules-based system, and more toward defending Israel at all costs.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Lever’s Amos Barshad about legalized sports betting for the November 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Among other happenings on November 5, Missouri narrowly passed a ballot measure that will legalize sports gambling in the state. Like similar measures in other states, Amendment Two came with a lot of promises and perhaps not-deep-enough questions, as our guest explored in a timely report.
Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, online at LeverNews.com, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. He joins us now by phone from here in New York City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Amos Barshad.
JJ: So “ballot measure” sounds very bottom-up, but Amendment Two did not arise, as it were, organically from the community. Who did you find to be the driving forces behind it?
AB: Yeah, we found that backers of the ballot measure were the two big sports gambling companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, which are national corporations that probably a lot of people are familiar with through their advertising. And they allied with the professional sports teams in Missouri; there’s six of them. And everyone got together to push forward this ballot measure. I don’t know what the final number was; at least something like $36 million was spent backing this ballot measure.
JJ: We should take a minute to note that there’s a relevant Supreme Court ruling from 2018 that opened the floodgates to states doing this legalizing of sports gambling, right? Essentially, there was a law on the books, and it got taken off.
AB: That’s right, yeah. So the 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to make their own decisions on sports gambling. And very quickly, many states legalized; so we were up to 38 as of this year before November, and then Missouri did become the 39th state.
JJ: Now, there’s a sort of a blueprint that the industry uses, and it seems to be working. There’s kind of a template that’s gone from one state to another, right? Can you talk about that?
Amos Barshad: “The industry makes these promises that they can’t keep. They’re telling you that this will solve your issues, but it’s not true.”
AB: Yeah, so what we’ve found through our reporting is that the industry often makes promises that the tax revenue from sports gambling will go to causes that most people could get behind. So in Missouri, specifically, it was education, the public school system, money for teachers, money for kids in the public school system. And that’s common, I think a lot of people would maybe know that a lot of state lotteries allocate money for education.
From there, we found that it gets a little bit more cynical, for two reasons. Specifically in Missouri, the critics, the group that was opposing this ballot measure, made the compelling argument that there isn’t that much guaranteed money going to education, that the way the rule was written both creates carve-outs for the gambling companies to actually not pay quite as much in taxes as it might seem. Plus, then from there, there’s not even a direct conduit created so the money will go to education.
Yeah, that’s kind of been, like you said, the blueprint. So we looked at other states, and it seems like, for example, in Colorado, which faces drought via climate change, the money will be earmarked to address water scarcity; Washington, DC, parents faced really high family expenses, so the promise is with funding for childcare. And it’s almost like they’re engineering the end result; they’re saying, we can fix your problem.
And in California, which voted down a legalized sports gambling ballot measure in 2022, the money would have gone to try to alleviate the homelessness crisis. But, basically, the groups opposing that were able to effectively communicate that the industry makes these promises that they can’t keep. They’re telling you that this will solve your issues, but it’s not true.
JJ: And I wanted to ask you a little more about what we do know about that track record, but I just wanted to point out that in this piece in the Kansas City Star from November 6, it says:
A fiscal note attached to the measure estimated that the state revenue generated from legalized sports betting would range from nothing to $28.9 million each year. But the campaign argued those figures would be much higher.
Well, yeah, higher than nothing would be great, but, I mean, this is even, in the measure itself, it doesn’t sound like a promise.
AB: Yeah, exactly. It’s really interesting, because whatever any given voter’s personal opinion on sports gambling is, you can then go from, “OK, but we should write the legislation to ensure that the promises that are being made are being kept.”
And, basically, part of the reason why that minimum could be zero is because of this carve-out that the industry has successfully pushed for in state after state, which is that they can use their promotional spending against their tax bill, basically, which means the money that they use to lure in new gamblers. And it’s a whole big conversation about issues with sports gambling, where that, again, it gets pretty cynical, and that’s money basically spent on luring in, say, problem gamblers, people with gambling addiction issues. So they’re using that money, money that’s spent trying to hook new gamblers, and that not only maybe exacerbates the situation for any given person gambling too much, that can go into debt, create personal problems in their life, but then they get to deduct that from the tax bill. So, yeah.
JJ: So we have at least 38 sort of case studies, and it sounds as though you’ve said it, but can we say that there’s not a strong track record here in terms of sports betting filling budget holes in any meaningful way?
AB: It’s an interesting question, because, again, you can go state by state. So in the state of New York, they were able to push for a 51% tax rate, which is, as it sounds, extremely high, that’s the highest in the nation. There’s a few other states that have it at that rate as well, and they have been able to collect significant funds, and in New York state, that goes to education as well.
But it’s interesting, even there, there’s legislators that are friendly to the industry, that have tried to claw back, lower that tax rate, actually have tried to introduce that same carve-out where the gambling companies get to use the promotional spending to deduct from the tax bill.
And then in the other states, it can be 10%. I think that’s the tax rate in Missouri, a lot of the other states are set at 10%, and, yeah, it doesn’t become a significant enough source of funding to ameliorate all the issues that are then caused from legalized sports gambling. And I think the other point on that is: Education costs go up. These big issues costs go up, year after year. But is the revenue from the gambling going up year after year? It seems that that’s not necessarily the case.
JJ: You have a fact in the piece that says, “in the run up to the 2023 Super Bowl, Kansans bet $194 million, from which the state of Kansas raked in $1,134.” That is not impressive.
AB: It’s a stark figure, and that’s all about that carve-out that I mentioned. All that money, a lot of it was promotional money for their “free” app. What actually happens is, they get you onto their app; once you’re on there, it says, “Oh, you have to spend this $5 by a certain time.” So these gambling companies are extremely good at getting people onto the apps, and getting them to spend more than they necessarily intended to. And you hear, “Here’s a free $5 bet,” but from there, you have to spend a certain amount of money within a certain amount of time to cash in on the offers. So as you can see, a particularly egregious example, but you’re talking about a ton of money being spent, and the end result is not what would seem to be the correct amount of correlating tax revenue for the state.
Lever (10/24/24)
JJ: The piece starts with a photo op in which the mascots from Missouri’s professional sports teams delivered boxes of signatures in support of Amendment Two to the secretary of state’s office.
AB: [Laughs]
JJ: Very cute. What is in it for the teams? What do the teams see that made them put millions and millions of dollars into this?
AB: Historically, the professional sports teams in America were against legalized sports gambling, for probably reasons you’d expect, feeling that it would corrupt the sport in ways. We’re probably all familiar with certain scandals over the history of American professional sports in the 20th century, most famously Pete Rose, the baseball player. The idea that maybe once you legalized, you incentivize more gambling, that players would have reasons to throw games, or affect what’s happening on the field because of gambling interests.
But, basically, once the 2018 Supreme Court decision came out, once they saw just how much money was there to make, sports teams in America did a complete 180, and are all behind this.
And they’re not directly collecting money, there’s not anything written into the law where they get a certain percentage of the amount that’s gambled. But what ends up happening is, with these sports gambling companies, they have so much money to spend, and they end up spending it through the sports teams. They might set up by advertising inside the stadium, or during the broadcast of the team’s games. They might even set up booths inside the stadium, so they have to pay teams for the right to do that. The teams know that if gambling is legalized in their state, that their marketing revenue is going to go up a certain amount.
JJ: Another interesting part of this very interesting piece is FanDuel, their parent company, called Flutter, they operate in the UK, that’s where they started, but they have different rules about just the kinds of things that you’ve been talking about over there, don’t they?
AB: Yeah, and I think that’s really an important part of everything, because, again, any given person might think about sports gambling, and the legalization of it, and say: “It does exist in other states or other countries. Is it really so bad?” And I think that the counterargument would really be to look at the regulation that is happening in other countries.
Specifically in the UK, it’s actually been about 20 years since this kind of online mobile betting took off. And what critics say is that it took decades of families being ruined, individual lives being ruined through gambling debts, for really good regulation to come, in which gambling companies are legally obligated to make sure that the people betting aren’t betting beyond their means, and that they aren’t exhibiting problem gambling behaviors. And in the US, because this is relatively new, that regulation just doesn’t exist.
So you could say, OK, I believe in legalized sports gambling, I want the tax revenue to come in. But from there, you’ve got to think, what is the impact on people? What is actually going to happen next? And you can see, where sports gambling is legal, there is a spike in addiction, and issues of that nature. And so the question is, are we just going to let companies write the rule book, or is there common-sense regulation that could come in that would really save a lot of people?
JJ: I do see in the writeups from Missouri and other states, there’s kind of an offhand reference to, oh yeah, some of the revenue has to go to this fund to combat problem gambling, or something. But it is very vague.
AB: So it’s basically, anytime a state legalizes sports gambling, it will also either indicate that a certain amount of money is going to go to a preexisting state problem-gambling fund, or create a whole new one. So it’s very much, we are aware that these issues are going to come in, and we’re going to try to tackle them.
What I tried to point out in the piece is that there isn’t some sense that we’re going to prevent people from becoming addicts in the first place. We’re just going to be there to treat them after they become addicts. And I think we can see the obvious issue there, to accept the fact that harm is going to happen on a large public scale, and then say, “And then we’ll deal with it,” is not ever going to be as effective as trying to make sure that that harm doesn’t take place in the first place.
JJ: There is, as you’ve been discussing, a real incentive system to keep people betting, but right now this is still betting on actual games that actually happen. But some folks see a slippery slope. Talk about iGaming.
AB: iGaming is the industry-preferred term for any kind of casino game that we might be familiar with, probably most famously slots. And you could just basically play a digital version of that on your phone. But it just creates an endless variety of options for people to gamble on. It’s legal in some states, and the push is to continue legalizing it, and it’s basically much more lucrative because people lose more money playing it.
And the way that it’s set up, the way that certain games are created, for example, you could play multiple hands of blackjack. There’s one infamous game that you’re basically betting on watching a little cartoon rocket go up, and you’re trying to guess when the rocket will explode. So it’s almost cutesy, children’s entertainment almost, but people are spending real money and losing real money playing these games.
Again, it goes back to the idea of regulation. What are we going to allow people to bet on, as far as knowing that if they get hooked on these games, that it could damage their lives? I think with the iGaming, the way that some critics of the industry have talked about it, is that this sports gambling wave was always the prelude to this next phase, this iGaming phase. And when you think about it that way, yeah, it can feel a bit alarming that there isn’t any kind of organized pushback on a national level, because I think that’s what we’re talking about.
As we mentioned, it has passed in Missouri, and looking at the last few states left in the country, there’s good reason to think that they’ll get up to or close to having sports gambling be legal in every state in the country. You just have to wait and see. But I think the question is from there, then, that obviously indicates the need for a national response. And there are, Rep. Paul Tonko, congressman from the state of New York, he has introduced a bill called the SAFE Bet Act, and this is the first attempt to create restrictions, to create protections, to push back on gambling companies, who currently have a complete green light to do what they want.
JJ: Finally, it was a very tight race. Amendment Two passed by something like half a percentage point in Missouri, and we should understand that in the context that there were all these major sports teams, and millions and millions of dollars, supporting it. So there are a lot of people, it seems, who are concerned about this, who are pushing back on this. There’s a constituency there to stay in conversation with, it seems. I just wonder what you would like to see, along with the regulation from the state and perhaps from the federal level, what would you like to see in terms of reporting, follow-up reporting, on this incredibly impactful and interesting issue?
AB: As we talked about, all this has only been legal since 2018, so the data that has come in since then is starting to indicate the exact severity of the problem, and I think we’re just only going to see more of that. We’re going to have more hard numbers on what this is actually doing to people. There has been and continues to be great reporting on this and, yeah, definitely would just love to see more of that. We can really quantify this and say, OK, sports gambling would come in, here’s the amount of tax revenue that is created, and here’s the corresponding issues that it’s led to. And I think if you look at it in that way, here’s the black and white, and people can make informed decisions on where they stand on it, rather than, like we spoke about, being swayed by the funny mascots running around pushing it, their beloved sports teams pushing it, or being told that money is going to go to education. You can divorce yourself from the sales pitch and say, “OK, what’s the reality?” The numbers are all going to be there.
JJ: All right then; we’ve been speaking with Amos Barshad. You can find the article “The Gambling Industry’s Cynical Play for Your Vote” at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Amos Barshad, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer confronting a “Chinese invader” in Panama’s Darien Gap (X, 2/22/24).
In February, far-right political activist Laura Loomer—the self-defined “white advocate” and “proud Islamophobe” whom Donald Trump has praised as a “terrific” person and “very special”—descended on Panama to investigate the “invasion of America” allegedly taking place via the Darién Gap.
The Darién Gap, mind you, is 5,000 kilometers away from the US border. The only land bridge connecting South and Central America, it is largely comprised of spectacularly hostile jungle. It has become an epicenter of the global migration crisis, as international refuge seekers are forced to contend with its horrors in the pursuit of a better life. More than 520,000 people crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, while an untold number died trying—victims of rushing rivers, steep precipices, armed assailants and sheer exhaustion.
Over the course of her Darién expedition, Loomer exposed the diabolical logistics of the “invasion” by accosting numerous migrants who had just emerged from the deadly jungle, and now had a mere six countries—and all manner of additional life-imperiling danger—lying between them and the United States.
There were the “invaders from Africa,” for example, several of whom Loomer reported “were wearing tribal outfits.” Then there were the “Venezuelans invaders” [sic] who informed Loomer that Trump was a “bitch,” and the men from Afghanistan who “openly admitted” that they were migrating to “escape the Taliban”—the upshot in Loomerland being that it was “only a matter of time before we have another 9/11-style terrorist attack in our country.” And there was the “Chinese invader” from Beijing who was traveling with two children, and who constituted undeniable proof that “the Chinese Communist Party is actively invading the US via invaders. And they are coming in via the Darién Gap.”
Omission of context
Map showing the Darién Gap, which separates the Pan-American Highway into two segments (Wikipedia).
As Trump now prepares to retake America’s presidential reins and realize his dream of manic mass deportations, the likes of Loomer are dutifully standing by with their arsenal of “invading invader” babble. And while US Democrats are generally better at camouflaging their own anti-migrant militance with slightly more refined rhetoric, let’s not forget that President Joe Biden presided over plenty of deportations himself (Washington Post, 12/29/23)—in addition to expanding Trump’s border wall (Reuters, 10/6/23), in contravention of his promise not to do so.
Enter the corporate media, which play an integral role in abetting the bipartisan US war on migrants—even as the more centrist outlets enjoy cultivating the illusion of moral superiority to Trump’s brand of transparently sociopathic xenophobia. Much of the media’s complicity in this war has to do with what is not said in news reports—namely, that the US is itself largely responsible for wreaking much of the international political and financial havoc that forces people to migrate in the first place.
This conscious omission of context has long been on display in the Darién Gap, where, unlike in Loomer’s “reporting,” a constant stream of mainstream dispatches does serve to convey the terrific plight of migrants—but simultaneously excises the US role in the whole sinister arrangement.
‘A hole in the fence’
For corporate media (CNN, 4/17/23), the bad guys are those who help refugees escape, not those who create the conditions they’re escaping from.
Take CNN (4/17/23), which begins one of its countless Darién Gap interventions with a rundown on the various perils: “Masked robbers and rapists. Exhaustion, snakebites, broken ankles. Murder and hunger.”
Throughout the article, we are introduced sympathetically to an array of migrants, such as Jean-Pierre of Haiti, who is carrying his sick son strapped to his chest. According to CNN, Jean-Pierre was driven to leave Haiti because “gang violence, a failed government and the worst malnutrition crisis in decades make daily life untenable.”
This, to be sure, is a rather cursory flyover of the situation in a country where the untenability of daily life is due in good part to more than a century of pernicious meddling by the United States—from military invasion and occupation to support for torture-happy Haitian dictatorships, from repeated coups to economic subjugation. In 2011, WikiLeaks cables revealed that the Barack Obama administration had agitated to block an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian apparel workers beyond 31 cents per hour.
As is par for the corporate media course, CNN deems such history irrelevant, and instead assigns the overarching blame for the human tragedy playing out in the “most dangerous” Darién Gap to migrant traffickers:
The cartel overseeing the route is making millions off a highly organized smuggling business, pushing as many people as possible through what amounts to a hole in the fence for migrants moving north, the distant American dream their only lodestar.
Never mind that, absent the selective US-backed criminalization of migration for the have-nots of the global capitalist system, migrant traffickers would have no business to organize.
‘Seventy miles in hell’
For the Atlantic (8/6/24), economic suffering in Venezuela is the fault of its government’s “corruption and mismanagement,” with US sanctions merely a response to an “authoritarian crackdown.”
Caitlin Dickerson’s recent cover story for the Atlantic, “Seventy Miles in Hell” (8/6/24), similarly purports to show the human side of the story in the Darién Gap—but again without delving too deeply or accurately into the political realities that govern human existence. Traveling through the jungle with a Venezuelan couple, Dickerson offers a brief politico-economic analysis as to why, ostensibly, the pair found it necessary to pick up and leave:
Venezuela’s economy imploded in 2014, the result of corruption and mismanagement. Then an authoritarian crackdown by the leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, led to punishing American sanctions. The future they had been working toward ceased to exist.
This soundbite is no doubt music to the ears of the US establishment, precisely because it all but disappears the fundamental role of the United States in undertaking to destroy Venezuela as punishment for daring to attempt an economic model that deviated from imperial demands.
Hardly a new phenomenon, US sanctions on Venezuela were initially imposed by George W. Bush back in 2005, and extended by Barack Obama in 2015. They were further expanded by Trump in 2017, then intensified in 2019 in hopes of forcing out the government in favor of Juan Guaidó, the right-wing figure who had emerged from virtual obscurity to proclaim himself the country’s interim president. And yet, even prior to the intensification of coercive economic measures, US sanctions reportedly caused more than 40,000 deaths in the country in 2017–18 alone, as per the Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Of course, the US is also known for inciting and waging incredibly bloody wars worldwide, as well as contributing disproportionately to the climate crisis, which is also increasingly fueling displacement and migration. The corporate media’s refusal to mention such crucial facts when reporting on the Darién Gap, then, will only feed into Trumpian fearmongering about a migrant “invasion” in which the US is the victim rather than a key aggressor.
‘Migrant highway’
AP (12/17/23): “Driven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits.”
Another xenophobic media habit that feeds Trumpite self-righteousness is that of referring to the Darién Gap as a migrant “highway”—as in the December 2023 Associated Press report (12/17/23) headlined “The Jungle Between Colombia and Panama Becomes a Highway for Migrants from Around the World.” In the article, journalist Christopher Sherman contended that the more than half a million migrants who traversed the Darién Gap in 2023 were “enabled by social media and Colombian organized crime,” which had converted the “once nearly impenetrable” forest into a “speedy but still treacherous highway.”
As I note in my forthcoming book on the Darién Gap, millions of people somehow managed to make their way to Ellis Island without the enabling of either social media or Colombian organized crime—which simply underscores that human beings migrate when they perceive an existential need to do so.
For its part, the New York Times (11/9/22) characterizes the Darién Gap as “a traffic jam” that is playing host to an “enormous flood of migrants.”
And an April Financial Times piece (4/10/24), headlined “The Migrant Highway That Could Sway the US Election,” remarked on the “rapid transformation” of a “once-impenetrable jungle…into a global migration highway.” “The human tide crossing the Central American isthmus and heading north to the border has swelled to record proportions,” the Financial Times reported. It included a quote from a US Department of Homeland Security Official assuring readers that it was all the fault of “smugglers, coyotes and other bad actors.”
There’s nothing like visions of a migrant deluge surging up the Darién highway and straight into the heart of America to fuel a xenophobic field day under Trump’s second administration. Such rhetoric serves to justify the trampling of rights at home and in the United States’ self-appointed “backyard”—where Mexico already does a hell of a job making life hell for US-bound migrants.
Based on my own incursion into the Darién Gap in January 2024, I can safely say that “highway” is about the last word that comes to mind to describe the place. But the mediatic use of such terminology certainly paves the road for ever more hostile terrain ahead.
When two Venezuelan friends of mine crossed the Darién Gap, separately, in February and March, one reported that women in his group had been raped when they were found to have no money to hand over to armed assailants. The other said she had witnessed women be forced to squat in order to facilitate the probing of their intimate parts for valuables potentially tucked away.
In April, the New York Times (4/4/24) warned that sexual violence against migrants on the Panamanian side of the Darién Gap had reached a “level rarely seen outside war.”
But this is war. And by rendering sectors of the Earth unlivable while simultaneously criminalizing migration, the US is the principal belligerent.
This week on CounterSpin: Passed by a whisker in Missouri on November 5, legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people? Our guest wrote in-depth on the question ahead of the election. Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. We hear from him on this week’s show.
NPR‘s interview (11/18/24) with far-right pro-Trump Republican Marc Lotter appeared to be offered as balance to its interview (11/14/24) with far-right anti-Trump Republican John Bolton.
Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet, but he has wasted no time naming cabinet members and other nominations for his incoming administration. They must be confirmed by the Senate—unless Trump manages an unprecedented end run around the Senate’s power to advise and consent—which means the media play an important role in helping bring to light their records and qualifications.
Clearly Trump is trying to see how far he can push the limits of the country’s democratic institutions with these nominations, which include an anti-vaxxer to oversee the country’s public health infrastructure, and a congressmember investigated for sex trafficking to be attorney general. A look at NPR‘s coverage so far suggests that the public radio network has no interest in using the power of the so-far-still-free press to preserve those limits.
In its reporting on Trump’s picks over the seven days from November 13 through November 19, NPR‘s Morning Edition has featured eight guest sources offering commentary, in the form of either soundbites or lengthier interviews, according to a FAIR search of the Nexis news database. All but two were current or former Republican officials, including one current Trump adviser. The other two were a representative from the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, and a political risk consultant (who offered a perfectly neutral assessment). All of them were white men.
As a result, the most forceful denunciations of Trump’s parade of shockingly unqualified nominees that Morning Edition listeners were permitted came from one of the most right-wing members of the George W. Bush administration, John Bolton (11/14/24). And the show made sure to explicitly balance his interview by also giving one a few days later to Trump adviser Marc Lotter (11/18/24).
The dearth of nonpartisan experts and utter absence of any progressive or even mildly liberal voices also meant that only Trump’s most outrageous picks thus far—Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn), Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—were subject to “expert” criticism on the show. Meanwhile, most of his other picks weren’t even mentioned, let alone scrutinized.
One guest, a former George W. Bush official, made the only mention of Mike Huckabee, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz as picks, calling them “leaders who have to be taken seriously” (11/13/24). But in a sane democracy, the media would be taking a close look at these candidates, too, who have more polished resumes but similar levels of extremism: Huckabee, picked as ambassador to Israel, has argued repeatedly that the West Bank is Israeli territory, and that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” Waltz, for national security advisor, wants Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Stefanik, tapped to be UN ambassador, led the congressional witch hunt against college presidents last spring.
‘Look at the positives here’
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “knit together an unlikely coalition—some from the left and some MAGA supporters—eager to take on the establishment,” NPR (11/15/24) declared.
It wasn’t just Morning Edition sanewashing Trump’s picks at NPR. In a piece (NPR.org, 11/15/24) about Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, NPR‘s headline and opening framed the anti-science conspiracy theorist as just a guy who “Wants to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” but who “Could Face a Lot of Pushback.”
It took seven paragraphs for reporters Will Stone and Allison Aubrey to mention that scientists are “deeply worried about Kennedy’s history of questioning scientific consensus on vaccines and his antagonism to mainstream medicine more broadly.”
After quoting one public health expert who expressed strong fears about the serious damage Kennedy could do to the country’s public health system, NPR cheerfully offered the other side of things:
And yet there’s no denying there are areas of substantial overlap between the goals of MAHA and scientists who have long advocated for tackling the root causes of chronic illness.
The reporters did point out the contradictions between Kennedy’s regulatory goals, which would take on “big food and big pharma,” and the GOP/Trump war on government regulation of big corporations. But they gave the last word to Kennedy adviser Calley Means to argue, without rebuttal:
“I would tell anyone skeptical about this, to look at the positives here,” he says. “This MAHA agenda is one of the golden areas for true bipartisan reform.”
He says Kennedy’s approach will be to insist on what he terms “accurate science.”
In total, the piece gave more time to Kennedy allies with products to sell than to actual public health experts.
‘Expressed doubts’—or lied?
NPR (11/16/24) led with Trump’s claim that energy secretary nominee Chris Wright will usher in a “Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace”; the one quote from a critic came ten paragraphs later.
In a piece on Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, oil executive Chris Wright, NPR (11/16/24) offered a textbook example of sanewashing that ought to have jarred any editor:
Wright has also expressed doubts about whether climate change is driving extreme weather events.
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video uploaded to LinkedIn.
“We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fearmongering of the media, politicians and activists,” he also said in the video. “The only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”
Those quotes do not illustrate “doubts about whether climate change is driving extreme weather events,” they illustrate anti-science climate denialism in the form of flat-out lies.
‘Backstop’ in action?
As we reported last month (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), NPR recently installed a “Backstop” editorial team to review all content prior to airing or publishing, after the latest round of right-wing complaints of bias. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would be funding that team, it explained the purpose was to help NPR achieve the “highest standards of editorial integrity,” including “accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.”
The incredibly lopsided “balance,” lack of actually diverse viewpoints, and dubious fairness and accuracy displayed in the network’s nomination coverage reveals what the CPB was really going for with the new oversight it installed.
Not all NPR cabinet reporting has been spineless. A team of reporters led by Shannon Bond, for instance, published an in-depth piece (11/14/24) on Defense nominee Pete Hegseth that probed his strong links to extremist white Christian nationalism.
The problem with Trump’s nominees, NPR (11/17/24) reports, is that they might provoke “negative media coverage.”
But three days later, another NPR report (11/17/24) talked about Hegseth as if the biggest problem with him is simply that senators simply “have come to expect” nominees with a different “background”:
Real trouble started brewing with Pete Hegseth, an Army vet known for his weekend commentary on Fox News, being named secretary of Defense. Although a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, he does not have the background that senators have come to expect of someone appointed to head up the Department of Defense. Hegseth’s frequent attacks on the uniformed leadership of the armed services has included talk of firing current generals, including at the highest levels.
Similarly, on All Things Considered (11/16/24), NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro explained the “difference” between Trump’s 2016 picks and those this year, saying the 2016 nominations
sometimes stood in the way of things he wanted to do that broke with the normal way…that things had been done for years. This time around, he’s really surrounding himself with a team of loyalists.
What former cabinet members did was stop Trump from doing things that were unconstitutional or abuses of power. For NPR to minimize them as “the way things had been done for years” indicates that the network is currently more concerned with preserving its CPB funding than sustaining democracy.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
Ask voters to verify basic facts related to major political issues, and the results are depressing. An Ipsos survey from October of this year, for instance, discovered most Americans were unaware that unauthorized border crossings were at or near their lowest point over the last several years, that violent crime was not at or near all-time highs in most major cities—and that inflation was down from a year earlier and near historic averages.
The political implications of such ignorance are both predictable and striking, with more ignorance associated with greater support for Donald Trump.
Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.)
But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame.
And on perhaps no other issue has corporate media’s failure to inform been more consequential than on inflation. This was, after all, arguably the key factor in the election: Inflation surged, and Democrats were pummeled.
Did they deserve this fate, though? That’s a tougher question, but one that corporate media could help the public grapple with—if only they weren’t committed to misinforming the public about the issue at hand.
Artificially spiking Trump’s economy
It would be absurd to expect the public at large to have the time or ability to do a deep dive into statistics in order to develop as accurate an image of the economy as possible. It wouldn’t be so absurd, however, to expect journalists to perform this task. After all, their essential function is to deliver high-quality, accurate information to a lay audience. Unfortunately, in reality, they often fail at this job. We might refashion an old phrase to say: There are lies, damned lies and statistics as represented by journalists.
Take a recent piece by Washington Post columnist, and former economics correspondent, Heather Long (11/8/24). In it, she makes the claim that voters enjoyed much more robust wage growth under Trump than under Joe Biden, after accounting for inflation. Her column includes a chart showing wage growth outpacing inflation by 7.6 percentage points under Trump and only 0.6 percentage points under Biden.
Something important goes unmentioned here, something that might surprise a casual reader. Specifically, there was a serious and well-known—at least among experts—methodological issue that led to an artificial spike during 2020/2021 in the wage measure Long is citing. As many more low-wage than high-wage workers lost their jobs at the height of the pandemic, this measure artificially inflates wage growth under Trump and deflates it under Biden. Maybe an issue worth mentioning, if you’re making a claim about comparative real wage growth under the two.
When you chart the measure the Washington Post (11/8/24) used to show the superiority of Trump’s wage growth, it’s revealed as an artifact of people dropping out of the workforce during the pandemic (Arin’s Substack, 1/18/24).
Does Long mention this, though? No. Will the average reader be sufficiently in the economic weeds to know she is misleading them? Also no.
An unreal measure of real income
What explains everything for the Atlantic (11/11/24) is a cost-of-living crisis that disappears if you use a better measures of the cost of living.
Another offending piece appeared recently in the Atlantic (11/11/24). There, staff writer Annie Lowrey made the case that the cost-of-living crisis, and the Democrats’ inability to tackle it, explains the election results. Curiously, the media’s role in distracting the public from the remarkable achievements of macroeconomic policy during Biden’s tenure in office went unmentioned.
Lowrey at least acknowledged how impressive the macroeconomic figures have been coming out of the Covid downturn, but she asserted that this obscured a darker story: “Headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing.” Instead of relying solely on these numbers, Lowrey proposed consulting “more granular data” that “pointed to considerable strain.”
First among these data points was an apparent fall in real median income since 2019. As Lowrey put it, “Real median household income fell relative to its pre-Covid peak.”
What she failed to disclose was the flimsiness of the underlying measure being used. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/10/24) pointed out a couple months back, when the Washington Post (9/10/24) ran a piece highlighting trends in the same metric—a median income measure designed by the Census Bureau—making a comparison between the 2024 figure and the 2019 one is messy:
The problem is with the comparison to 2019, the last year before the pandemic. There was a large problem of non-response to the survey for 2019, which was fielded in the middle of the pandemic shutdown in the spring of 2020. The Census Bureau wrote about this problem when it released the 2019 data in the fall of 2020.
As a result of the non-response issue, the 2019 number is artificially inflated, and a comparison between it and more recent figures, which seem to also be inflated but to a lesser degree, is difficult at best. Othermeasures of income, meanwhile, find real income increasing for Americans since 2019. These critical pieces of information, however, are missing from the Lowrey piece.
Sloppy reporting of real problems
This is not to say that Lowrey and others who have made similar arguments don’t have a point that there are real issues facing the American public. For such a wealthy country, the US has obscenely high poverty, internationally aberrant levels of inequality, and a notoriously ramshackle welfare state.
Partially out of sheer necessity, the US welfare state was substantially boosted during the pandemic, and the unwinding of this enhanced safety net after 2021 must have had some effect on Americans’ perceptions of the economy and their own economic standing. Real disposable income, for example, spiked in 2021 due to temporary measures like stimulus checks, but then fell back to the pre-pandemic trend of growth, which may have felt like a loss to some.
And though the Washington Post‘s Long mucked up her analysis of wage trends under the Biden and Trump presidencies, the data that we have does indicate that inflation bit into workers’ wages early in Biden’s term, with median real wage growth turning negative in 2021 and 2022. (It’s nonetheless worth noting that these wage declines were concentrated among high-wage workers, not low-wage ones.)
From December 2019 through December 2023, inflation-adjusted growth in wages was highest in the poorest quintile, and only negative for the top quintile (Arin’s Substack, 1/18/24).
Clearly, there are reasons for people to be angry about the economy. The issue is that imprecise descriptions of the trajectory of the US economy over recent years leave people unable to decipher how the economic situation has deteriorated, and in which ways there actually has been improvement.
Citing a flawed measure of median income to suggest that people are worse off than in 2019, for example, is careless at best. We know that, even after adjusting for inflation, Americans’ wages, disposable incomes and, perhaps most crucially, spending levels are higher today than they were in 2019. Notably, this is true across income groups, with real retail spending up for low-, middle- and high-income households.
There are many ways in which the US economy flatly fails, but addressing those failures becomes even harder when the public is misled into thinking that inflation is outpacing wages, or that real median income is actually decreasing.
For the New York Times (11/8/24), inflation affects “everyone,” whereas unemployment matters to “only a minority of the population.”
Messing up the technical details when presenting statistical information is bad enough. But corporate media misinformation goes beyond that. Recently, for instance, the New York Times (11/8/24) decided to add to the barrage of inflation misinformation by blatantly misrepresenting how inflation and unemployment affect the public. In a piece titled “How Inflation Shaped Voting,” reporter German Lopez wrote:
Why does inflation anger voters so much? Some economic problems, like high unemployment, affect only a minority of the population. But higher prices affect everyone.
This is wrong. An increase in unemployment has economy-wide effects, dragging down wage growth across the income distribution, though particularly at the bottom. In fact, the societal effects of higher unemployment seem to be much more dramatic than those of higher inflation. According to a piece from the Times (7/20/22) published back in 2022:
In a 2003 paper, the economist Justin Wolfers, then of Stanford University, found that a percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate caused roughly five times as much unhappiness as a percentage-point increase in inflation.
Had Lopez written that high unemployment directly affects a small percentage of the population, he obviously would have been on solid ground. But that’s not what he wrote.
Skewing in one direction
“There’s another fundamental cause of economic discontent that should be getting more attention: corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation, which has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy” (FAIR.org, 1/5/24).
These criticisms of how journalists present economic information are technical, but they are important. Notably, in each instance cited, the skewing of facts has specific political implications.
In Long’s piece, workers’ gains under Trump were exaggerated, and their gains under Biden were understated. In Lowrey’s piece, income gains under Biden were disregarded. And in Lopez’s piece, the negative impacts of increased unemployment, which the Biden administration avoided at the cost of a somewhat larger spike in inflation, were downplayed. The negative effects of inflation were played up.
It’s not hard to see how such an approach to reporting will benefit one political party at the expense of the other. This would be totally reasonable if the reporting were based in reality, with journalists sticking to the facts and representing statistics with care. But that’s not what’s happening.
Instead, journalists over the past several years have engaged in a collective freak-out over a surge in inflation, feeding the public’s pre-existing negativity bias with a hyper-fixation on rising prices in economic coverage. That this coverage has not only overshadowed coverage of more positive economic stories—such as the successes of a historically progressive stimulus bill, and the massive wage gains it has spurred—but has misled the public about basic economic facts in the process is a scandal.
Journalists should face flak for imprecision in their reporting, and should be pushed to improve when they fall short of a high standard of accuracy, especially when they occupy elite perches in the US media environment. Otherwise, an information environment polluted by conservative outlets and social media misinformation will never get cleaned up. If corporate media’s mission is truly to inform the public, they have a long way to go.
The New York Times (11/8/24), like other corporate media, framed the Amsterdam violence in terms of antisemitism—treating anti-Arab violence as an ancillary detail at best.
When violence broke out in Amsterdam last week involving Israeli soccer fans, Western media headlines told the story as one of attacks that could only be explained by antisemitism. This is the story right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants them to tell: “On the streets of Amsterdam, antisemitic rioters attacked Jews, Israeli citizens, just because they were Jews” (Fox News, 11/10/24).
Yet buried deep within their reports, some of these outlets revealed a more complicated reality: that many fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club had spent the previous night tearing down and burning Palestinian flags, attacking a taxi and shouting murderous anti-Arab chants, including “Death to the Arabs” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there” (Defector, 11/8/24).
As Marc Owen Jacobs of Zeteo (11/9/24) wrote, the media coverage revealed
troubling patterns in how racial violence is reported; not only is anti-Arab violence and racism marginalized and minimized, but violence against Israelis is amplified and reduced to antisemitism.
Buried context
James North (Mondoweiss, 11/10/24): “You had to jump to paragraph 7, buried on an inside page, to learn that the Israeli fans had, in fact, been violent and provocative the night before.”
“Israeli Soccer Fans Attacked in Amsterdam,” announced NBC News (11/8/24). That piece didn’t mention until the 25th paragraph the Maccabi fans’ Palestinian flag-burning and taxi destruction, as if these were minor details rather than precipitating events.
Similarly, the Washington Post (11/8/24)—“Israeli Soccer Fans Were Attacked in Amsterdam. The Violence Was Condemned as Antisemitic”—didn’t mention Maccabi anti-Arab chants until paragraph 22, and didn’t mention any Maccabi fan violence.
James North on Mondoweiss (11/10/24) summed up the New York Times article’s (11/8/24) similar one-sided framing:
The Times report, which started on page 1, used the word “antisemitic” six times, beginning in the headline. The first six paragraphs uniformly described the “Israeli soccer fans” as the victims, recounting their injuries, and dwelling on the Israeli government’s chartering of “at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home,” insinuating that innocent people had to completely flee the country for their lives.
Also at Mondoweiss (11/9/24), Sana Saeed explained:
Emerging video evidence and testimonies from Amsterdam residents (here, here and here, for instance) indicate that the initial violence came from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also disrupted a moment of silence for the Valencia flood victims.
But despite that footage and Amsterdammer testimonies, coverage—across international media, especially in the United States—has failed to contextualize the counter-attacks against the anti-Arab Israeli mob.
Misrepresented video
Image from Annet de Graaf’s video showing violence by Israeli soccer fans—widely misrepresented as an example of antisemitic violence.
Several news outlets outright misrepresented video from local Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf. De Graaf’s video depicts Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdam locals, yet CNN World News (11/9/24) and BBC (11/8/24) and other outlets initially labeled it as Maccabi fans getting attacked.
De Graaf has demanded apologies from the news outlets and acknowledgement that the video was used to push false information. CNN World News‘ video now notes that an earlier version was accompanied by details from Reuters that CNN could not independently verify. BBC’s caption of De Graaf’s footage reads “Footage of some of the violence in Amsterdam—the BBC has not been able to verify the identity of those involved.”
Message to news outlets:
Today I received an apology from Tagesschau for abusing my footage of the incident which took place after the soccer game in Amsterdam between Ajax and M. Tel Aviv. I refer also to the footage of reporter @OmeBender who covered that same fight with more… pic.twitter.com/9QyEezb8tL
The New York Times (11/8/24) corrected its misuse of the footage in an article about the violence:
An earlier version of this article included a video distributed by Reuters with a script about Israeli fans being attacked. Reuters has since issued a correction saying it is unclear who is depicted in the footage. The video’s author told the New York Times it shows a group of Maccabi fans chasing a man on the street—a description the Times independently confirmed with other verified footage from the scene. The video has been removed.
‘Historically illiterate conflation’
Jacobin (11/12/24): “Far from acting like tsarist authorities during a pogrom, the police in Amsterdam seem to have cracked down far harder on those who attacked Maccabi fans than the overtly racist Maccabi hooligans who started the first phase of the riot.”
It is undoubtedly true that antisemitism was involved in Amsterdam alongside Israeli fans’ anti-Arab actions; the Wall Street Journal (11/10/24) verified reports of a group chat that called for a “Jew hunt.” But rather than acknowledging that there was ethnic animosity on both sides, some articles about the melee (Bret Stephens, New York Times, 11/12/24; Fox News, 11/10/24; Free Press, 10/11/24) elevated the violence to the level of a “pogrom.”
Jacobin (11/12/24) put the attacks in the context of European soccer riots:
There were assaults on Israeli fans, including hit-and-run attacks by perpetrators on bicycles. Some of the victims were Maccabi fans who hadn’t participated in the earlier hooliganism. In other words, this played out like a classical nationalistic football riot—the thuggish element of one group of fans engages in violence, and the ugly intercommunal dynamics lead to not just the perpetrators but the entire group of fans (or even random people wrongly assumed to share their background or nationality) being attacked.
But Jacobin pushed back against media using the word “pogrom” in reference to the soccer riots:
Pogroms were not isolated incidents of violence. They were calculated assaults to keep Jews locked firmly in their social place…. Pogroms cannot occur outside the framework of a society that systematically denies rights to a minority, ensuring that it remains vulnerable to the violence of the majority. What happened in Amsterdam, however, bears no resemblance to this structure. These were not attacks predicated on religious or racial oppression. They were incidents fueled by political discord between different groups of nationalists….
Furthermore, using that designation to opportunistically smear global dissent against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as classically antisemitic only serves to trivialize genuine horrors. This historically illiterate conflation should be rejected by all who truly care about antisemitism.
Breaking with the Netanyahu government’s spin, former Israeli President Ehud Olmert said that the riots in Amsterdam were “not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries.” Olmert, unlike Western media coverage of the event, seemed to be able to connect the violence in Amsterdam to anti-Arab sentiment in his own country. In a more thoughtful piece than his paper’s news coverage of the event, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (11/13/24) quoted Olmert extensively:
The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age—as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank—the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?
The events in Amsterdam called for nuanced media coverage that contextualized events and condemned both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab violence. Instead, per usual, world leaders and media alike painted Arabs and Pro-Palestine protesters as aggressors and Israelis as innocent victims.
Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider)
This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration of white supremacy.
(cc photo: Sasha Patkin)
Also on the show: If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration. We talked about that in July 2018 with Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer at Mijente.
The past is never dead, it’s not even past: This week on CounterSpin.
Donald Trump has repeatedly explained the critical importance of vengeance (Mother Jones, 10/19/16): “When somebody screws you, you screw them back in spades. And I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve gotta hit people hard. And it’s not so much for that person. It’s other people watch.”
“Revenge—it’s a big part of Trump’s life,” Mother Jones’ David Corn (10/19/16) wrote just before Trump was elected to the presidency the first time:
In speeches and public talks, Trump has repeatedly expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, to explain how he had achieved his success. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that successful people must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”
Knowing this about Trump, Democrats and liberals worry that he will use the Department of Justice, especially if Matt Gaetz is confirmed as attorney general, as an unrestrained vehicle to pursue the prosecution of political enemies.
But given Trump’s constant attacks on media—“the opposition party,” as his ally Steve Bannon called the fourth estate (New York Times, 1/26/17)—journalists fear that he will use the power of the state to intimidate if not destroy the press.
Defunding public broadcasting
If you run a journalistic outfit, like PBS president Paula Kerger (Politico, 3/27/19), and don’t know why Trump doesn’t like you, you probably aren’t doing your job very well.
Trump called for defunding NPR (Newsweek, 4/10/24) after a long-time editor accused the radio outlet of liberal bias in the conservative journal Free Press (4/9/24). Rep. Claudia Tenney (R–NY) introduced legislation to defund NPR because “taxpayers should not be forced to fund NPR, which has become a partisan propaganda machine” (Office of Claudia Tenney, 4/19/24). With Republicans also holding both houses of congress, bills like Tenney’s become more viable. Trump has previously supported budget proposals that eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Politico, 3/27/19).
The infamous Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda many see as a blueprint for the second Trump term, calls for the end to public broadcasting, because it is viewed as liberal propaganda:
Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first president in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.
In other words, all Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”
All of which means that the next conservative president must finally get this done, and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,” but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.
PBS and NPR, as FAIR (10/24/24) has noted, has for decades caved in to right-wing pressures—PBS by adding conservative programming, NPR by trying to rid itself of political commentary altogether. But the right will never let go of its ideological opposition to media outlets not directly owned by the corporate class.
‘Whether criminally or civilly’
A bill—defeated for now—”would have granted the Department of the Treasury broad authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed to be supporting ‘terrorism’” (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24).
Trump also has a well known track record of revoking the credentials of journalists who produce reporting he doesn’t like (Washington Post, 2/24/17, 5/8/19; New Republic, 11/5/24). It is realistic to assume that a lot more reporters will be barred from White House events in the years ahead.
While a bill that would grant the secretary of the treasury broad authority to revoke nonprofit status to any organization the office deems as a “terrorist” organization has so far failed (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24), it is quite possible that it could come up for a vote again. If this bill were to become law, the Treasury Department could use this ax against a great many progressive nonprofit outlets, like Democracy Now! and the American Prospect, as well as investigative outlets like ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The department could even target the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has already said in response to Trump’s victory, “The fundamental right to a free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, must not be impaired” (11/6/24).
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24), an avid media observer, said there is no reason to think Trump will soften his campaign against the free press. She said:
In 2022, he sued the Pulitzer Prize board after they defended their awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers had won Pulitzer Prizes for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.
More recently, Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation over the way the anchor characterized the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual misconduct case against him. Each of those cases is wending its way through the courts.
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24): “Donald Trump poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organizations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.”
She added:
There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression.
Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Trump has already gone after the New York Times and Penguin Random House since Sullivan wrote this. CJR (11/14/24) said:
The letter, addressed to lawyers at the New York Times and Penguin Random House, arrived a week before the election. Attached was a discursive ten-page legal threat from an attorney for Donald Trump that demanded $10 billion in damages over “false and defamatory statements” contained in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.
It singles out two stories coauthored by Buettner and Craig that related to their book on Trump and his financial dealings, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, released on September 17. It also highlighted an October 20 story headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and an October 22 piece by Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”
And just before his victory, Trump sued CBS News, alleging the network’s “deceitful” editing of a recent 60 Minutesinterview with Vice President Kamala Harris “misled the public and unfairly disadvantaged him” (CBS News, 10/31/24).
Expect more of this, except this time, Trump will have all the levers of the state on his side. And whatever moves the next Trump administration makes to attack the press will surely have a chilling effect, which will only empower his anti-democratic political agenda.
Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas about placing blame for Trump for the November 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: Horserace over substance, ignoring actual popular opinion that doesn’t serve major-party talking points, top-down sourcing that ensures that those most harmed by social policies are not at the table when responses are discussed.
But there’s also something about the role of elite media in this election that needs some illuminating as we try to move forward. My guests have just written the first of no doubt many pieces about media’s role. I’m joined by FAIR’s senior analyst Julie Hollar from Brooklyn, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, both of you.
JJ: Well, Jim, the Washington Post’s non-endorsement was a pretend silence that actually said a lot. But we know that most outlets would not stand up and yell, “Donald Trump is our guy.” So we have to think deeper than these once-in-four-years endorsements about how elite news media, still labeled liberal by very many, can grease the wheels of something like what just happened.
JN: Yeah, I do think that the non-endorsement was an important moment in the election. By saying, “We’re not going to take a position between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris,” they’re saying these are two acceptable positions that you can take. And, obviously, a lot of people took the Donald Trump position, so I think that did have more impact than the expected Kamala Harris endorsement would’ve had.
JJ: But when you look at the issues and the other things apart from the election per se, when you look at the way media covered particular issues, you found something that you found important.
JN: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”
I think that media have long understood that fear is a great way to catch and hold an audience’s attention, because we are really evolutionarily attuned to things that are dangerous. Our brains tell us to pay extra attention to those things. And so news media are prone to describe issues in terms of, “Here’s something scary, here’s something that’s going to hurt you.”
And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.
Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.
And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done–or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.
And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.
JJ: And it built on years, also, of crime coverage. The way that immigration and crime were stirred up together, I think, is also part of that fear mongering that you’re talking about.
JN: When you look at crime statistics, the striking thing is how much lower crime is now than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. It was at a much higher level than it is today, but that is not a story that is going to sell news to people. You want to sell people with the idea that, “You’re in danger, read our news report to find out how.”
And so even though crime is both historically down from earlier decades, and it’s been down over the course of the Biden administration, that is not the story that people have been told. The story is that, “Here’s some scary crimes, and what are we going to do about this crime crisis?” And, again, Donald Trump was able to use that picture, that had been painted by right-wing and centrist media alike, in order to present himself as this strong man who is going to do something about the criminal threat.
JJ: We can add to that: Truthoutreported, as you note, that “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people in this election cycle.” And that fits, too, with this, “There’s something to be afraid of. There are people to be afraid of.”
JN: Yeah, it is really striking that this was the big push in the closing days of the campaign; the Trump campaign was pumping their campaign funds into ads that presented this transgender threat. That was the thing that they thought was going to get people to vote.
Interestingly, a lot of the ads focused on the idea that Kamala Harris wanted to pay for gender reassignment surgery for federal prisoners. So it sort of ties in the trans threat and the crime threat, as trans criminals…. It’s hard to construct a rational danger that is posed by the situation.
JH: I could be wrong, so delete that if I’m wrong. But….
JJ: I don’t doubt it. Just for the reason that Jim’s saying, it’s hard to create a rational story around it. And the truth is, you don’t have to. You just say a number of words that have been designated hot buttons, and if you can throw ’em all together, well, then, so much the better.
JN: And this is really an issue where the groundwork was laid by right-wing and centrist media alike. Fox News, trans threat stories are part of their bread and butter, but the New York Times has also done a great number of stories about the supposed threat trans youth pose. They’re going to be getting into girls sports, or gender-affirming care is somehow going to snatch your child away from you.
These are stories that the supposedly liberal press has been hammering hard on, and so really given someone like Trump, who wants to demagogue these issues, a real platform to begin his harangue from, because you’ve already read about it in a supposedly authoritative source like the New York Times.
Julie Hollar: “You would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups.”
JH: I wanted to underscore that. I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority–although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them–but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.
So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.
And by not doing that at all–and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.
But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around–well, I’m getting ahead of myself–and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.
JJ: I want to draw you out on that, because the New York Times itself came out swinging. They’re pretty sure why Democrats lost, but you described their explanation as “mind boggling,” so just keep going with what you’re saying there.
JH: So the editorial board put out their diagnosis of the Democrats’ problem the day after the election. They had no doubts about this. They blamed it, in part, on the fact that it took, here I’m going to quote, “it took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters.”
They don’t say exactly what progressive agenda this was. From a progressive perspective, it’s hard to see very much progressivism in the Democratic agenda. But in the same paragraph, it goes on to talk about how Democrats have really struggled for the last three elections to find a persuasive message that Americans really can believe in, that they can’t find a way to offer a vision to people to improve their lives.
This is the same paragraph where they’re talking about this alienating progressive agenda, and when you look at the exit polls, it’s very clear that the main driver, it seems, of the Trump vote, when you set aside the real core believers, this election was won because of the economy.
And if the Democrats are struggling to find a vision that appeals to voters, the progressive agenda is the agenda that appeals to voters. It’s not in question. Medicare for All, a wealth tax, living minimum wage: all of these big, very popular progressive agenda items that the Democratic Party flirted with in the primaries four years ago, and has since really run pretty hard away from.
Harris had a few little economic agenda items that were somewhat progressive, like her anti–price gouging plan. She did have something about minimum wage, but, really, the big ticket items that people really want to see and could really make a big difference in their lives, those weren’t the things that Kamala Harris was hitching her wagon to.
Jim Naureckas: “When Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them.”
JN: And when Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them. They are very alert to any signs of economic radicalism, like universal healthcare. When Harris was talking to media, the repeateddemand that she re-renounce her former endorsement of Medicare for All was really striking. There was a suspicion that “you haven’t really changed from the candidate in 2020, who was suggesting that we ought to pay for everybody’s healthcare.” That is the kind of stance that that community finds very suspicious, and very nervous-making.
JJ: We only have a couple more minutes, and I do want you both to have an opportunity to talk about other takeaways. Obviously, this is a work in progress. We’re just getting started here, but it seems as though asking for corporate news media to be self-aware, to actually take some accountability, to acknowledge that there’s a relationship between what they report and how and what happens in the world. It seems like we’re moving farther and farther from that, and I’m reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Now, you might say that more of media owners, more so than reporters, but it does just bring us back, doesn’t it, to the fact of who owns and controls our news media, who they feel accountable to. And it’s not us. The top-down problems that we’re talking about, they’re structural.
JN: Absolutely. If you have a media that is dominated by billionaires, you are going to get a different take on the problems facing the country than if you had democratic media that was answerable to the general public.
Going back to the Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos refusing to let them endorse a candidate in the election, he’s a guy who is one of the richest people on earth. His fortune is largely based on government contracts, and so he has a super strong interest in making sure that the president of the United States doesn’t have a vendetta against him.
And he’s got another strong interest in the fact that the Biden administration was pursuing antitrust claims against Amazon, which was very important. The amount of money taken from the public by Amazon‘s artificially increased prices is actually quite large, and has a lot to do with why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on Earth. And so having Harris not in the White House could be a real boon for his personal fortune.
And then you have Elon Musk, again, someone who depends heavily on government contracts, who has been promised a prominent role in a Trump administration, and he was using his takeover of Twitter to pump out election disinformation on a really wholesale scale. The claims about illegal immigrants voting was a nonstop flow on what he calls X now, in the weeks running up to the election.
And he’s got tens of millions of people who are getting his stuff, and he’s rigged the platform so that if you’re on it, you’re definitely going to hear from the boss. It is just a firehose of disinformation, coming from the owner himself of this centrally important social media platform.
JH: Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.
And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with FAIR senior analyst, Julie Hollar, and FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. Thank you both, Julie and Jim, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (5/12/15) relayed Israel’s warning that “in the event of another conflict with Hezbollah, many Lebanese civilians will probably be killed, and that it should not be considered Israel’s fault.” Strangely, the same logic does not apply to Israel placing its military headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.
Back in May 2015, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged exposé (5/12/15)—headlined “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk”—in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah’s infrastructure in south Lebanon.
The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.” In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some “400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.”
Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that “the Israeli claims could not be independently verified.” But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict. Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that “many, many Lebanese will be killed” in the next showdown with Hezbollah.
I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article’s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering “Botox filling.”
Legitimizing destruction
CNN (9/17/24) labels the target of a terrorist attack as a “terror group.”
Nine years have now passed since Kershner’s bout of weaponized journalism, and Amidror’s words have certainly rung true: Many, many Lebanese have been killed in Israel’s latest war on Lebanon.
From October 2023 through November 5, more than 3,000 people have been slaughtered in the country—among them 589 women and at least 185 children. The vast majority were killed in September through November of 2024, when Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanese territory as a sideshow to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
More than 800,000 people have been displaced. Muhaybib has literally been blown up in its entirety, and much of Shaqra has been pulverized as well. Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly a quarter of all buildings along the entire southern border.
And while the United States newspaper of record and other Western corporate media outlets have not exactly been preemptively calling in the strikes, à la Kershner, they have nonetheless done a fine job of legitimizing mass killing, displacement and destruction in other ways.
For starters, as FAIR has written about recently (10/10/24), there’s the insistence on following the US/Israeli lead in branding Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization and a “proxy” for Iran. Never mind that the Shia political party and armed group emerged as a direct consequence of the 1982 US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people and constituted a textbook case of terrorism, including the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
When Israel in September staged an unprecedented terrorist attack in Lebanon by detonating personal electronic devices across the country — killing 12 people, including two children—CNN (9/17/24) spun the episode thusly: “Exploding Pagers Injure Members of Iran-Backed Terror Group.”
Converting communities into targets
The Guardian (10/4/24) was one of numerous outlets that referred to Dahiyeh, a densely packed Beirut suburb, as a “Hezbollah stronghold”—painting the entire community was a legitimate military target.
Then there is the matter of the term “Hezbollah stronghold,” to which pretty much every corporate media outlet has proved itself hopelessly addicted when describing the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Devastated in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, Dahiyeh is now once again under maniacal bombardment by the Israeli military, which on September 27 leveled a whole residential block in order to assassinate Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Sure enough, the New York Times (9/27/24) was standing by with the headline: “Israel Strikes Hezbollah Stronghold in Attempt to Kill Leader.”
Just google “Hezbollah stronghold” and you’ll see what I mean — that the press is apparently incapable of talking about Dahiyeh any other way. Or, if you’re not in the mood for googling, here are some illustrative links to the Washington Post, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC News, Reuters and Associated Press. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To be sure, there is substantial public support in Dahiyeh for Hezbollah—not that support for an anti-Zionist resistance organization should make anyone fair game for extrajudicial slaughter. There is also support for numerous other Lebanese parties and groups in this neighborhood of nearly 1 million people, although the “stronghold” designation tends to erase the diversity that exists.
But the real problem with the terminology is that, when deployed in the context of war, a “stronghold” is more likely to be interpreted as “a fortified place”—the first definition of the word appearing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In that sense, then, Dahiyeh is effectively converted into a legitimate military target, its inhabitants dehumanized by the linguistic arsenal of a media establishment that is ultimately committed to validating Israeli massacres of civilians.
And it’s not only Dahiyeh. The press has now expanded its obsessive use of the “stronghold” descriptor in accordance with Israel’s current killing spree in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, both of which regions we are now continuously reminded are also “Hezbollah strongholds.” When the Lebanese health ministry reported 60 killed in airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on October 29, the BBCnoted that “rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.”
Back in July, the same outlet had warned that the south Lebanese city of Tyre would “be in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.” Four months later, Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon are an unmitigated horrorscape, blunted for a Western audience by media euphemism.
MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews, once one of the most prominent pundits on cable TV, used his post-election appearance on Morning Joe (Mediaite, 11/6/24) to demonstrate just how unhelpful political commentary can be.
Asked by host Willie Geist for his “morning after assessment of what happened,” Matthews fumed:
Immigration has been a terrible decision for Democrats. I don’t know who they think they were playing to when they let millions of people come cruising through the border at their own will. Because of their own decisions, they came right running to that border, and they didn’t do a thing about it.
And a lot of people are very angry about that. Working people, especially, feel betrayed. They feel that their country has been given away, and they don’t like it.
And I don’t know who liked it. The Hispanics apparently didn’t like it. They want the law enforced. And so I’m not sure they were playing to anything that was smart here, in terms of an open border. And that’s what it is, an open border. And I think it’s a bad decision. I hope they learn from it.
You could not hope for a more distorted picture of Biden administration immigration policy from Fox News or OAN. “They didn’t do a thing about it”? President Joe Biden deported, turned back or expelled more than 4 million immigrants and refugees through February 2024—more than President Donald Trump excluded during his entire first term (Migration Policy Institute, 6/27/24).
Human Rights Watch (1/5/23) criticized Biden for continuing many of Trump’s brutal anti-asylum policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) called those restrictions unconstitutional. How can you have any kind of rational debate about what the nation’s approach to immigration should be when the supposedly liberal 24-hour news network is pretending such measures amount to an “open border”?
‘Democrats don’t know how people think’
In one brief segment, MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews (Morning Joe, 11/6/24) was able to mangle the most important issues of 42% of the electorate.
“It’s all about immigration and the economy,” Matthews told Geist. Well, he got the economics just as wrong:
I think you can talk all you want about the rates of inflation going down. What people do is they remember what the price of something was, whether it’s gas or anything, or cream cheese, or anything else, and they’ll say, “I remember when it was $2, and now it’s $7.” But they remember it in the last five years. That’s how people think. Democrats don’t know how people think anymore. They think about their country and they think about the cost of things.
The suggestion here is that success in fighting inflation would not be bringing the rate of price increases down, but returning prices to what they were before the inflationary period. That’s called deflation, a phenomenon generally viewed as disastrous that policy makers make strenuous efforts to prevent.
A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal (10/16/14) described “the specter of deflation” as “a worry that top policy makers thought they had beaten back”:
A general fall in consumer prices emerged as a big concern after the 2008 financial crisis because it summoned memories of deep and lingering downturns like the Great Depression and two decades of lost growth in Japan. The world’s central banks in recent years have used a variety of easy-money policies to fight its debilitating effects.
in a deflationary economy, wages as well as prices often have to fall—and…in general economies don’t manage to have falling wages unless they also have mass unemployment, so that workers are desperate enough to accept those wage declines.
It’s natural for ordinary consumers to think that if prices going up is bad, prices going down must be good. For someone like Matthews to think that, when he’s been covering national politics for more than three decades, is incompetence.
This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.
Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.
Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.
This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).
This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.
Scary issues
Corporate media rarely point, as this New York Times graphic (7/24/24) did, that crime has fallen dramatically since 1991, and continued to fall during the Biden/Harris administration.
Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).
This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of US residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).
With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.
Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, DC (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”
Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in the New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).
‘Classic fear campaign’
Republicans spent so much on transphobic ads (Truthout, 11/5/04) because they knew voters had been primed by media to fear trans people.
Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration and the economy combined.”
Journalist Erin Reed (PBS NewsHour, 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:
The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.
Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.
‘Alienating voters’ with ‘progressive agenda’
The New York Times (11/6/24) didn’t want people to vote for Trump—but its reporting contributed to the perception that “an infusion of immigrants” and “a porous southern border” were among “the nation’s urgent problems.”
But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with Biden too long):
The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election…. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.
It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision…to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.
More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.
‘Democratic self-sabotage’
The Washington Post‘s Matt Bai (11/6/24) thought Trump’s anti-trans ads resonated with “a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues.”
At the WashingtonPost, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’s Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Postroundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)
At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).
George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at the Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”
Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of the New YorkTimes‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”
Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.
But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.
‘Wary and alienated’
In a rare instance of actually listening to left-wing voices, a New York Times article (10/24/24) focused on pre-election warnings that Harris “risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”
The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:
In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.
She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.
Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.
Janine Jackson interviewed ProPublica‘s Nicole Foy about immigration and labor for the November 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: One of the weirdest and most harmful things so-called mainstream news media do is to take concerns, social problems, experiences, hardships—and reduce them to “electoral issues,” meaningful solely to the extent that candidates talk about them, and defined in terms of what they say—rather than starting with people, and our lives, and judging candidates based on whether their proposed responses are grounded and humane.
Immigration would have to be near the top of the list of phenomena that exists, has existed, worldwide forever, but that corporate news media seem comfortable larding with whatever ignorant hearsay and disinformation politicians of the moment care to spout. Anyone interested in just, human-centered immigration policy has to keep their eyes on the prize through the fog of horserace coverage.
Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica, where she’s Ancil Payne Fellow. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nicole Foy.
JJ: I want to talk about your recent piece that gets at a lot of things, but it really is a story of a person. And so, before anything else, please just tell us, if you would, about Elmer De León Pérez, and what happened in January of this year.
NF: Yeah, so Elmer was a young, only 20 years old, Guatemalan immigrant who was living in Houma, Louisiana, which is a little bit southwest of New Orleans, one of the areas that’s quite frequently threatened by hurricanes. He was working at a shipyard in the Houma area. He was a welder, pretty skilled welder. He made a decent amount of money, and was called upon to do some pretty difficult tasks, including helping build a ship for NOAA, which people may know for weather forecasting and hurricane forecasting. This shipyard that he was working at had a number of government contracts for ships.
He was building this ship for NOAA on that morning in January, when, essentially, his coworkers realized that he didn’t show up for lunch that day. And by the time he was found in the tank of the ship where he was welding, he was already unconscious, unresponsive, and, later, first responders did not continue trying to resuscitate him because he was already showing signs of rigor mortis, meaning that he had likely died some time ago.
And in the aftermath of all of that, his family, which, even though he was only 20, he had a young son with another immigrant who also lives in Houma, and he has an extended family, from Louisiana to all the way back in Guatemala, who cared quite a bit about him. They not only struggled to get answers about what happened to him for a long time, but they’ve yet to receive any sort of compensation, or even really acknowledgement, from the company he was working for, and even though he died on the job.
JJ: So this is a person who dies on the job, working for a government contract. So what is it that made you want to report this out? It can’t be because you thought this is an anomalous case.
NF: Yeah. The way this story started is kind of interesting, actually, because my editor and I were initially very interested in finding a story that explained what happens when immigrant workers die on the job. I had been telling him how often you see families raising money, whether through GoFundMe, or asking for help on Facebook, often because they’re trying to get their loved ones’ bodies home to their home country, whether they’ve been here for years and years, and they really would prefer to be buried in their hometown, or because they had only been here for a couple of years, and they’re just trying to get their bodies home.
We were really interested in that concept, because it struck us as something really, I think, indicative of, I don’t know—I think it spoke to a number of things about how immigrant workers exist in the United States. We rely on them so heavily now, and have always, and yet their families are often left in really difficult financial straits just to do what they would consider, I am assuming, is the bare minimum, which is get them home, get them buried in the land that they may have wanted to return to, or that they came from. And we were really struck by that.
So I was looking into a number of different cases. I was poring through GoFundMe and Facebook and through OSHA fatality-on-the-job records and pulling different cases, and there’s so many. You spend a lot of time doing this, and you see just how many immigrants are dying on the job, everywhere from California to Louisiana to Texas. And reading the GoFundMe pleas or the Facebook pleas of their family asking for help, to try to have a funeral, send the body home.
Elmer De León Pérez (right) with his father, Erick De Pérez (family photo)
And we were really interested in his case, because as we were doing reporting, not only was I able to find all of the different, just really moving videos that his family had posted on Facebook, of trying to raise money, and then eventually they filmed his body arriving back home to his hometown in Guatemala. And the way the community really came together in a common way was really moving. And also then we, as I looked into his employer and where he died, realized that this was a company that has a number of government contracts, to build and repair ships for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers—you name it, there’s a government agency that needs a ship.
And so that’s kind of how we got started there, is we were interested in what happens to immigrant workers, to their families, when they die on the job, what kind of care is taken for them. And then we discovered this really truly heartbreaking case of someone who was building a ship for our country, and still his family couldn’t get the help that they say they need.
JJ: This is where journalism connects the human story with a data story, with a broader story, a policy story. The story about immigrant workers and the workforce, it’s like the worst kept secret in the country, the idea that farmworkers, and shipbuilders as you’re talking about, that these industries rely on, they couldn’t operate without, immigrant labor. And yet we’re still supposed to accept this weird capitalist story about only Americans can work here, and immigrants are actually stealing jobs. And it’s such a weird disconnect between what a lot of folks know is actually happening, and the storyline that people are being told.
And I think that’s what’s so important about this story: Organizations, companies, rely on immigrant labor, but they rely on them in a particular way. And that has to do with the contratista, the idea of the legal designation that is given to these workers. And that, of course, is important in Pérez’s story.
Nicole Foy:
NF: Yeah, I think, too, what I found really telling, reporting this story, is that it really is such a common story for immigrants who don’t currently have the legal authority to work in the US, the ways that they still have to pursue in order to support their families. And it was really interesting to see that playing out in an industry that you don’t really see as part of the immigration debate, shipbuilding, and particularly shipbuilding for government ships.
This particular shipyard, they don’t have contracts to build nuclear submarines or even battleships or anything, but they’re building support vessels or research ships for NOAA, for so many different branches of the military and for the government, that are pretty essential to our country’s defenses, and also just to keep our country running properly. And that’s not really something that you see in the immigration debate, is that we also need workers desperately for those types of jobs.
I think people still think of welding in a shipyard as a job that should pay so well, and does pay so well, that everybody is competing with each other for them. But the economic facts of our country right now are very different. We don’t have as many blue collar workers as we used to, and we have quite a lot of work that needs to be done. So that’s why you see immigrants in these jobs that, again, I think there’s often this narrative of “they’re taking these jobs from workers,” but the shipbuilding industry in particular is suffering greatly from a really dramatic lack of workers to do the jobs that they need, whether it’s welding or another job in a shipyard.
I just thought that was another good example of his life and the work that he was doing. It’s another good example of how, if you’re commonly thinking of immigrant workers, you may be thinking of agriculture, you may be thinking of maybe restaurants or construction. And certainly there are many, many immigrant workers sustaining those industries.
But they’ve become very essential to the fabric of our entire economy. It’s not very easy to disentangle them from the work that we need to do as a country. And that’s something that I don’t think a lot of our current rhetoric accounts for, is how many different jobs and how many different types of jobs around the country that these workers are fulfilling, that we’d miss them quite a lot if they weren’t there.
JJ: Let me just ask you, you tried to get responses from employers and from folks to say, “What’s going on here? What happened here? Why are you not accountable for this?” What happened with that exercise in trying to say: A person died, a person died, his family deserves compensation. What happened there?
NF: I did my absolute best. ProPublica takes it very seriously that we want everyone to have a chance to tell their side of the story. And so I did everything possible. It wasn’t just phone calls and emails. I came by the shipyard several times. I hand-delivered, actually, a letter with a list of questions to one of the shipyard executives several weeks before the story published, just in an attempt to try to get some answers.
I also spoke very briefly with the contractor that actually employed Elmer. I talked to him briefly, but he declined a comment on the advice of his lawyers.
I don’t know why Thoma-Sea, the shipyard where he was working, didn’t want to comment, because they told me very little. I did my best to reach out to them.
But I think it was really important to try to get their side of the story, especially since we also looked into the campaign finance records, and saw that, even though there are so many immigrants like Elmer, he was not the only one working at the shipyard, the company’s main managing director, top executive, has donated fairly heavily to many Louisiana politicians who have been vocal about their desire to either close the border, restrict immigration, and, honestly, what they think about immigrants in their own state.
JJ: I was struck, as I’ve said, throughout the piece, by how many powerful people and company representatives said they just had no comment. And it reminds me, it takes me back to independent reporting. It’s the families of the immigrant workers who are killed and then ignored and not given compensation; they look to the press, they need to speak, they want to get their voice out. And the powerful people, what’s in it for them? They don’t need to speak or justify or explain themselves. And it makes me mad, because I think Journalism 101 would send you back to those powerful people and demand some sort of answer from them.
The other thing is that you show up at this person’s home, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really disrespectful to show up at the home of a company CEO where a worker has died on the job. It’s really disrespectful of journalists to bother us at home.” And I just think, there are people who need a press, an independent press, and there are people who don’t need it. It drives me angry. So I just want to say, the difference between getting access to people who are harmed and people who are harming, as a reporter, that’s a very different thing.
NF: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I just wanted to make sure that everyone gets to tell their side of the story. As a reporter, I try not to approach something speaking as if I know everything, but want folks to share their side.
And genuinely, too, I think a lot of people, including Elmer’s family, are still seeking answers. I was trying my best to get answers as well.
JJ: There are very particular legal regulations that folks hide behind, in a way, in terms of delivering protections. You’re not an employee, you’re a contracted worker, or you’re a subcontracted worker, and that allows them some degree of cover.
NF: And also, too, at the same time that it allows them some degree of cover when it comes to liability in an accident, it’s also what makes it possible for many of these companies to hire immigrant workers who do not have authorization to work. So it’s one of those things where it’s sometimes the only way that an immigrant worker can get a job, as they’re trying to maybe support their family, support themselves.
But it can leave them very vulnerable, because these layers of contractors can make it much harder for them, or their families if they pass away, to claim any type of support or resources. They still can, but the workers’ compensation system is pretty difficult to navigate without a lawyer in a straightforward case. And when you add on different barriers that contractors may face, and then certainly folks who don’t speak English as their first language, and then also you have legal status mixed in there, and folks being really worried that coming forward could endanger them.
All of that does tend to make it easier for the company to have these systems in place, and certainly disincentivizes many folks who need these resources, need benefits, need some type of financial compensation. It disincentivizes them from stepping forward, or just fighting through what can be a pretty difficult process.
JJ: And, not for nothing, incentivizes the companies themselves to set up this system in which their workers don’t have access to this kind of compensation.
NF: Yeah, I would imagine that—I can’t speak for anybody’s motives, but I do think they’re going to get the workers that they need, one way or the other, and some ways leave their workers with much more limited protections.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, if you have thoughts about the way that immigration and immigrants are covered, what would you have to say in terms of…. I had kind of a rant at the beginning about how I really am unhappy when immigrants are reduced to an electoral issue, when they’re human people and they have a story. And I feel like that’s what reporters should be doing.
But do you have thoughts in terms of the way that big media cover immigration, or just thoughts about something you’d like to see more or less of in terms of, big picture, the way the story is covered?
NF: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really wonderful immigration reporters out there who are doing their best to bring facts to a pretty charged conversation, honestly, a recurring conversation. I mean, I have not been in the industry for decades and decades and decades, but this is definitely the thirdelectioncycle that I’ve covered where immigration has been a pretty significant issue, whether because candidates have made it so, or people are concerned about folks arriving at the border. And I can say, as a journalist who is trying to present facts, it can sometimes be distressing to see the same misrepresentation of the facts repeated, sometimes without pushback or factchecking.
But the truth is, and I think the Elmer story shows this, is that candidates can say as much as they want that immigrants are stealing jobs, and the actual reality on the ground just does not really reflect that. And, at the same time, there’s a pretty significant narrative about, maybe, people who believe that immigrant workers get more than they do. I think you can see, in this case, that not only are many not getting more than a citizen worker, their families are often left abandoned and without any resources when something tragic happens.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Nicole Foy. Her article, “An Immigrant Died Building a Ship for the US Government. His Family Got Nothing,” can be found at ProPublica.org. Thank you so much, Nicole Foy, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Cuba is in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and October’s widespread power outages are only adding to the Cuban people’s troubles. For the last six decades, Cuba has been on the receiving end of myriad sanctions by the United States government. This blockade has proved devastating to human life.
Reporting on Cuba’s blackouts have either omitted or paid brief lip-service to the effects of US sanctions on the Cuban economy, and how those sanctions have created the conditions for the crisis. Instead, media have focused on the inefficient and authoritarian Communist government as the cause of the island’s troubles.
Pulping the economy
Michael Galant (The Hill, 1/5/24): “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves for association with ‘a sponsor of terror.’”
One of President Donald Trump’s final acts in office was to re-designate Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, after President Barack Obama had removed them from the list in 2015 as a part of his Cuban thaw. Inclusion on the list subjects a country to restrictions on US foreign aid and financing, but, more importantly, the SSoT list encourages third-party over-compliance with sanctions. “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves,” The Hill (1/5/24) reported.
Trump reportedly added Cuba to the list for harboring members of FARC and ELN, two left-wing Colombian armed movements. However, Colombian President Gustavo Petro later “noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks,” the Intercept (12/14/23) wrote. Indeed, if Cuba deported the dissidents, they would have been in violation of the protocols of the peace talks, which they were bound to by international law (The Nation, 2/24/23).
President Joe Biden has not begun the process of reviewing Cuba’s inclusion on the list, despite his campaign promises to the contrary.
The terror designation, plus the many other sanctions imposed by Trump and continued by Biden, are no small potatoes. Ed Augustin wrote at Drop Site (10/1/24) that
the terror designation, together with more than 200 sanctions enacted against the island since Obama left office, has pulped the Cuban economy by cutting revenue to the struggling Cuban state…. The combined annual cost of the Trump/Biden sanctions, [economists] say, amounts to billions of dollars a year.
Augustin argued that the economic warfare regime is a root cause of the rolling blackouts, water shortages and mass emigration that have plagued Cuba in recent years. Even imports that are ostensibly exempt from sanctions, like medication, are caught in the dragnet as multinational companies scramble to cut ties with the island. Banks are so reluctant to run afoul of US sanctions, Augustin wrote, “that often, even when the state can find the money to buy, and a provider willing to sell, there’s simply no way of making the payment.”
Cuba’s pariah status as a SSoT has put a stranglehold on its economy, and its government’s ability to administer public services. However, US restrictions on Cuba are almost never mentioned in US coverage, and reporting on the recent blackouts is no exception.
Cash-strapped Communists
Reuters (10/10/19): “Tougher US sanctions against Cuba have led international banks to avoid transactions involving the island, while prospective overseas investors put plans on hold.”
Coverage has emphasized the inability of Cuba’s government to pay for necessary fuel imports. The New York Times (10/19/24) reported “the strapped Communist government could barely afford” to pay for fuel. Elsewhere, the Times (10/18/24) claimed “a severe economic crisis and the cash crunch it produced made it harder for Cuba to pay for those fuel imports.”
The Washington Post (10/18/24) made broadly similar arguments, chalking the blackouts up to “a shortage of imported oil and the cash-strapped government’s insufficient maintenance of the creaky grid.”
The “cash crunch” referenced by the Times is not just the result of an abstract economic crisis, as is implied. Instead, it is a direct effect of US sanctions on financial institutions. During the Obama administration, European banks, including ING and BNP Paribas, were fined to the tune of over $10 billion for transacting with Cuba (Jacobin, 3/27/22). Even before Cuba was choked further as a result of their SSoT designation, reporting by Reuters (10/10/19) showed the extent to which banks were terminating operations with Cuba and Cuban entities:
Many Western banks have long refused Cuba-related business for fear of running afoul of US sanctions and facing hefty fines.… Panama’s Multibank shut down numerous Cuba-related accounts this year and European banks are restricting clients associated with Cuba to their own nationals, if that.…
Businessmen and diplomats said large French banks, including Societe Generale, no longer want anything to do with Cuba, and some are stopping payments to pensioners living on the Caribbean island.… For the first time in years, the island has had problems financing the upcoming sugar harvest. Various joint venture projects, from golf resorts to alternative energy, are finding it nearly impossible to obtain private credit.
This de-risking by financial institutions manufactures a cash-scarce economy. Cuba’s inability to procure cash for imports is not a function of financial mismanagement, or a lack of credit-worthiness. Instead, it is a deliberate effect of American foreign policy. By omitting the actions of the most powerful government on earth, mainstream coverage allows only that only Cuban failures could be the cause of a shortage of cash.
‘Terrorism’ cuts off tourism
Britain’s ambassador to Cuba told the Telegraph (11/6/23), “Those who come are profoundly shocked at what the SSOT designation is doing to the people here.”
Cuba has historically used tourism as a way of bringing money into the economy, but lately the Cuban tourism industry has been severely depressed. The explanation employed by corporate media for the decline of this industry is to blame the extended effects of the pandemic recession (New York Times, 10/19/24; Washington Post, 10/18/24).
This explanation, however, is incomplete. Cuba has indeed had a lackluster rebound in their tourism industry, but the Times and the Post fail to explain why Cuba has faltered while other Caribbean islands have more than re-achieved their pre-pandemic tourist numbers.
Travelers from Britain, Australia, Japan and 37 other countries do not need to procure a visa for travel to the United States. Instead, they can use ESTA, an electronic visa waiver. This greatly reduces the cost and the annoyance of obtaining permission to visit the US. However, since Cuba’s 2021 listing as a SSoT, any visit to the country by an ESTA passport-holder revokes the visa waiver, for life (Telegraph, 11/6/23). In other words, any Brit (or Kiwi, or Korean, and so on) who visits Cuba must, for the rest of their lives, visit a US embassy and pay $180 before being able to enter the United States. US policy, not a Covid hangover, is hamstringing any possibility of a resurgence in tourism to Cuba.
Blame game
During Cuba’s most recent energy crisis, the New York Times published three stories describing the blackouts. Two of these stories mention the US blockade only as something that the Cuban government blames for the crisis.
The New York Times (10/21/24) presented the idea that the US is punishing Cuba’s economy as a Communist allegation: “The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration.”
The headline on the Times website (10/21/24) read: “A Nationwide Blackout, Now a Hurricane. How Much Can Cuba Endure?” The paper was right to report on the humanitarian crisis ongoing in Cuba, but it chose to downplay the most important root cause: the decades-long US blockade on Cuba’s economy and its people.
That same story described Cuba as “a Communist country long accustomed to shortages of all kinds and spotty electrical service.” Why is the country so used to shortages? Eleven paragraphs later, the Times gave an explanation, or at least, Cuba’s explanation:
The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration, which severely restricts the Cuban government’s cash flow. The US Department of the Treasury blocks tankers that have delivered oil to Cuba, which drives up the island’s fuel costs, because Cuba has a limited pool of suppliers available to it.
Earlier coverage by the Times (10/18/24) similarly couched the effects of the blockade as merely a claim by Cuba. The Washington Post (10/22/24) also situated the blockade as something that “the Cuban government and its allies blame” for the ongoing crisis.
To report that Cuban officials blame the US sanctions for the energy crisis is a bit like reporting that fishermen blame the moon for the rising tide. It is of course factual that US trade restrictions–which affect not just US businesses, but also multinational businesses based in other countries–are a blunt weapon, with impact against not just a government, but an entire people.
At the very least, it is incumbent upon journalists to do at least minimal investigation and explanation of the facts concerning the subject of their reporting. None of the coverage in either major paper bothered to investigate whether this was a fair explanation, or even to report generally the effects a 60-year blockade might have on an economy.
Brief—and buried
“Cuban economists and foreign analysts blamed the crisis on several factors,” the New York Times (10/19/24) reported; 18 paragraphs later, the story gets around to mentioning US sanctions.
On October 19, the Times gave its most complete explanation of the relationship between the US sanctions regime and the Cuban blackouts:
Cuba’s economy enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the United States during the Obama administration, which sought to normalize relations after decades of hostility, while keeping a longstanding economic embargo in place. President Donald J. Trump reversed course, leading to renewed restrictions on tourism, visas, remittances, investments and commerce.
This explanation can be found in the 31st paragraph of the 37-paragraph story. Only once the Times has painted a picture of all the ways the Communist government has gone wrong can there be a brief mention of the role of US sanctions. And how brief it is; the Times chose not to detail the extent of blockade against Cuba, nor how Cuba was wrongfully placed on the SSoT list, nor the failure of Biden to reevaluate Cuba’s status as he promised on the campaign trail.
Describing the US starvation of Cuba’s economy in abstract terms like “economic crisis” provides cover for deliberate policy decisions by the US government. By reporting on the embargo only as something that the Cuban government claims, it is easy for readers to dismiss that explanation as simply a Communist excuse. Instead of asking why the United States is choosing to enforce a crippling sanctions regime on another country, outlets like the New York Times find it easier to repeat the line that Cuba’s government has only itself to blame for its problems.
The New York Times (10/12/24) says it “verified” supposed Hamas documents provided to the paper by Israel—which turns out to mostly mean that that the Israeli military “concluded the documents were real.”
Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24) and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.
Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.
Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.
A history of lying
Fake “Hamas” documents were being cited in the press as recently as September 2024 (Middle East Eye, 9/9/24).
Israel’s use of fabrications to shape public perception is well known, and was put on display early in the assault on Gaza that began last October. After an explosion at Al Ahli hospital killed and injured hundreds (misreporting of which caused a great deal of confusion), the media naturally pointed the finger at Israel. The Israeli government, concerned about the public backlash, denied responsibility, claiming that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (See FAIR.org, 11/3/23.)
To back up their claims, Israel released a recording allegedly capturing two Palestinian militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by the firm Earshot found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together (Channel 4, 10/19/23). In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip in an attempt to clear itself of war crimes in the public mind.
Investigations based on open sources have since come to various conclusions about the attack (Guardian, 10/18/23; Bellingcat, 10/18/23; Human Rights Watch, 11/26/23; AP, 11/22/23; Michael Kobs, 2023; New Arab, 2/19/24), but Israel’s fraudulent attempt to manipulate evidence certainly suggests that they had something to hide, and demonstrates their lack of reliability as a media source. Recently, the UN released a report accusing Israel of systematically targeting healthcare infrastructure in Gaza, making their denials of this earlier attack far less credible.
In another instance, Israel presented 3D renderings of a supposed Hamas “command center” beneath Al Shifa hospital, claiming it was based on intelligence. However, no such command center was ever found (FAIR.org, 12/1/23). Upon storming the hospital, Israel staged scenes in order to bolster claims that the facility was used by militant groups. The deception was so blatant that mainstream outlets were openly calling it out.
Recently Israel was caught actually providing fabricated documents to the press with the aim of manipulating public opinion. Earlier this year, the Israeli government provided documents to both the Jewish Chronicle (9/5/24) and the German paper Bild (9/6/24) that purportedly showed that Hamas had no interest in a ceasefire, and had a plan to sneak the late Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar out of Gaza to Iran, along with some of the remaining hostages. The reports were then uncritically repeated in outlets like the Times of Israel (9/6/24).
Shortly after these documents were published, the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (9/8/24) reported on an internal IDF investigation that found that they had been leaked to foreign media as part of a campaign to “shape public opinion on Israel.” The documents were determined to be forgeries, after a comprehensive search of all databases containing documents found in the wake of Israel’s operations. The IDF told the paper that an investigation was underway to determine the origin of the leak.
This non-exhaustive list of examples demonstrates a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.
Questionable authenticity
The Washington Post (10/12/24) reported that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established”—but there’s no trace of that doubt in the story’s headline or subhead.
Whether they are authentic or not, it is clear that the documents leaked to the Wall StreetJournal, New York Times and Washington Post serve the same purpose of propagandizing on behalf of Israel. In an attempt to preserve some journalistic integrity, the Post and Times both gave separate justifications for why they believed the respective documents leaked to them were authentic.
The Post was quick to note that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established,” but gave readers the impression there was reason to believe they were real. First, it claimed that the contents of the documents it received were
“broadly consistent” with US and allies’ post–October 7 intelligence assessments about Hamas’s long-range planning and complex relationship with Iran.
Then it wrote that unnamed US and Israeli officials they shared the documents with did not express concerns about their authenticity. (Iranian and Hamas officials they consulted didn’t comment on the documents but accused Israel of having a history of “fabricating documents.”)
The New York Times consulted former Hamas member Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, whom the paper frequently quotes on matters related to Hamas, and an unnamed Palestinian analyst with “knowledge of Hamas’s inner workings.” It also said an internal Israeli military report concluded the documents were authentic, and the paper “researched details mentioned in the meeting records to check that they corresponded with actual events.” It said “Hamas and Hezbollah did not respond to requests to comment” and that Iran “denied the claims made in the minutes.”
The Wall Street Journal story did not describe any attempt to verify the authenticity, and only reported that the paper “hasn’t independently verified the documents.”
But given Israel’s track record, there is no epistemologically sound way of verifying the validity of documents provided by the Israeli government without confirmation from Hamas itself. Citing sources who say that the documents resemble Hamas documents, without noting Israel’s history of creating credible forgeries, creates a patina of credibility without actually substantiating anything.
Advancing Israel’s agenda
Haaretz (10/14/24): The documents bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is “fighting a terrifying ‘axis of evil’ led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.”
The Israeli paper Haaretz (10/14/24), which took the documents as authentic, argued that their release by Israel was “Aimed at Aiding Netanyahu.” While both the Times and the Post have largely advanced Israel’s agenda over the past year of bombing (FAIR.org, 10/13/23, 2/1/24, 10/7/24), both papers are considered to be on the critical end of the press spectrum in the US, particularly towards Netanyahu. As Haaretz explained, this perception enhances the propaganda value of the document leak: “The Times and the Post enjoy greater credibility when they fall in line with Israel’s narrative.”
While Haaretz made no note of the leaked documents provided to the Wall Street Journal, the article ironically acknowledged that
having them published by Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal would have looked like an Israeli public diplomacy operation rather than a legitimate journalistic investigative report.
Haaretz noted that the documents promote narratives that “Israel would be happy to burn into the world’s consciousness,” namely the well-known propaganda effort to equate Hamas with organizations that are universally reviled by Americans. The Post documents purportedly outlined a Hamas plan to blow up a skyscraper in Tel Aviv, evoking the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center:
The Hamas documents are supposed to bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel isn’t fighting against a liberation movement seeking to free the occupied Palestinian people, or even against a paramilitary organization that is poorly funded and trained and lacks planes, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, tanks and artillery….
Rather, it is fighting a terrifying “axis of evil” led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.
Haaretz also argued that this kind of propaganda campaign was designed to ensure that the violence continues to escalate:
In this spirit, the documents are supposed to justify Israel’s counterattack, which has so far caused enormous death and destruction in Gaza and, to an increasing degree, also in Lebanon.
Obvious PR value
Unlike the New York Times or Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) acknowledged in its headline that the revelations in the documents are what “Israel says” they show.
While Haaretz overlooked the story from the Wall Street Journal, the same logic can be applied to the documents given to that paper as well. The Journal was apparently curious about the political purpose of the documents, noting that “the officials who provided the documents declined to say why they were releasing them now.”
The Journal wrote that the documents “suggest that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was negotiating with Iran over funding for a planned large-scale assault on Israel as far back as 2021,” and gave specific dollar amounts that Iran provided to Hamas’s armed wing. The obvious public relations value of these documents was that they boosted the negative image of Iran prior to Israel’s recent attack on that country.
Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza and greater war in the Middle East has been successful in part because the Israeli government can count on Western press to present and contextualize facts in a way that advances their narrative. Despite Israel’s long history of fabrications, the corporate media will dutifully republish documents, statements and explanations with complete credulity.
This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons US workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to.
Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life.
We hear that story this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at recent press coverage of NPR‘s overseers and the Washington Post‘s non-endorsement.
The Washington Post (10/24/24) claims that “the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.”
As the country begins to vote in an election that will be hugely consequential for the climate crisis, the central task of news outlets’ climate beats should be informing potential voters of those consequences. Instead, the Washington Post‘s “Climate Lab” seems to be working hard to cast doubt on whether climate change is really causing weather disasters to be more expensive.
In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:
The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.
The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.
Distorting with cherry-picked data
The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.
What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”
A review of Roger Pielke’s book The Climate Fix in the journal Science (11/26/10) accused him of writing “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.”
When Pielke published the argument in his 2010 book, the journal Science (11/26/10) published a withering response, describing the chapter as “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.” It detailed the multiple methodological problems with Pielke’s argument:
He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.
Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.
That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”
Debunked a decade ago
In response to Pielke, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (538, 3/31/14) pointed out that it’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product (GDP) if the intent is to detect an underlying climate trend,” since “GDP increase does not translate in any obvious way to damage increase,” as “wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets.”
Pielke peddled the story in 538 (3/19/14) four years later—and lost his briefly held job as a contributor for it, after the scientific community spokeoutagainst it in droves, as not being supported by the evidence.
The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”
That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?
Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.
Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.
Pielke agrees with Pielke
Roger Pielke “agrees with studies that agree with Pielke” (Environmental Hazards, 10/12/20).
Stevens tells Post readers that the science is firmly on Pielke’s side:
Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.
You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.
The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”
A phony ‘consensus’
Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say
disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.
He also adds that
many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.
Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that
the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.
But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)
When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.
Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?
By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Intercept‘s Shawn Musgrave about the voter fraud hoax as voter suppression, for the October 25, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When you hear that Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to turn over valuable possessions, including a Manhattan penthouse, watches and a signed Joe DiMaggio jersey, to the two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of ballot tampering in the 2020 election, you might believe that, though the harm is ongoing, at least the lawyers who propped up Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 vote have paid some kind of price.
And, indeed, catspaws like Sidney Powell, like John Eastman, have faced repercussions. But, our guest explains, not only is the scaffolding of Trump’s voter fraud hoax still standing, some key architects are still hard at work on it.
Shawn Musgrave is a media law attorney and reporter who serves as counsel to the Intercept, where you can find his recent piece, “Trump’s Big Lie Attorneys Are Back.” He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shawn Musgrave.
Shawn Musgrave: Thanks so much for having me on.
JJ: The key elements of the piece are right there in the lead:
Across battleground states, attorneys who helped former President Donald Trump undermine confidence in the 2020 election results are back at it, filing lawsuits that seed doubt in advance of this year’s outcome.
Let’s start with the lawsuits themselves, as lawsuits. What are the claims being made, and what can we say about those claims?
SM: So the lawsuits that I looked at fall into a couple of different buckets: one alleging the possibility of voter fraud for overseas ballots, under a federal law that helps US citizens abroad, including members of the military and their families, to vote. And in several states now, Republicans have filed last-minute lawsuits—with voting already going on, including overseas ballots—claiming that there’s a possibility of fraud using this mechanism.
And then the second bucket of lawsuits that I look at in this piece is another go-to boogeyman, which is the cybersecurity of voting machines. And the case that I look at is filed in Georgia over Dominion voting machines, which, again, were just one of the centerpieces of the election fights in court in 2020, and it looks like they will be again this year.
JJ: You note that these are last-minute lawsuits being put in there, but still, in terms of evidence, in terms of information, what can we say about, for example, fraud in overseas voting?
SM: So many of these lawsuits have already been rejected. They’ve been thrown out by courts, including [on] the basis that the people filing them did not show any evidence of actual fraud that had been happening. It’s all based on hypotheticals in the lawsuits themselves.
JJ: And the Dominion case, that’s not new news for folks. That’s also been kind of churned through, hasn’t it?
SM: The Dominion claims are very much recycled from 2020, and from other cases that were filed in between the 2020 cycle and now. And it just really underscores the fact that these are also many of the same attorneys who are trying to just recycle the legal playbook.
JJ: The big Big Lie attorney that you’re writing about in this piece is Cleta Mitchell. And so what should listeners know about her, and what she’s up to?
SM: Cleta Mitchell is very central to the election denial movement. And in 2020, she really came to prominence by being on the infamous call that Trump had with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump asked the Georgia secretary to “find” a few thousand votes. Cleta Mitchell was advising Trump on that call, and she resigned from the law firm that she was at at the time, and then has really since made election integrity, so to speak, her entire brand.
And now, in terms of her involvement this cycle, she has given this pretty frank interview—not to me, but to a conservative radio host—describing her involvement in putting together and helping organize lawsuits over overseas ballots. And she said she struggled to find an attorney who was willing to file one, that was ultimately filed in Pennsylvania.
JJ: I guess there’s something heartening about that, actually, about the difficulty of finding attorneys who would line up behind what looks clearly to be a specious set of lawsuits. And, just as a detour, there is something about the abandonment of principle, the politicizing of the professions—doctors who can say, “Well, torture is OK,” and lawyers who can abandon ethical codes. It’s somehow different than just being a bad lawyer. It really feels like a giving over of the whole principles of the profession. So I guess I’m happy to hear that it’s not so easy to turn up attorneys who will sign on to that.
SM: That was in Pennsylvania, where Cleta Mitchell said she had a hard time finding anyone else to file it. In two other states, where the Republican National Committee were the ones filing, other attorneys were found.
JJ: Right. Well, then, to bring us back, there’s no evidence, as you’ve indicated, for these charges; they haven’t been able to put forward any evidence, and they weren’t in the previous incarnations of these. So maybe it’s time to recognize that evidence, and even winning the lawsuit, is not the point. What is the point, do you think, of these last-minute lawsuits?
SM: When I talk to election law experts, they certainly don’t think that the point of most of these suits is to win in court, to convince a judge that they have evidence to support the pretty drastic request that they’re asking a judge to give. In the overseas ballots cases, asking for a court order that state election officials set aside ballots that were received from people who went through the registration process as it was when their ballot was sent.
But that doesn’t seem to be the point, to convince the judge that they should win on this. It really does seem to be to essentially put out a press release, put together to look like a lawsuit, to sprinkle a little doubt into the public’s thinking about the election headed into November.
JJ: And so then maybe, if the Trump team—whatever happens, we don’t know—but if the Trump team decides to dispute the election results, well, then, those seeds of doubt have already been laid, and people will say, “Oh, I remember something from even before the election about overseas ballots being perhaps corrupt,” right? So it can be successful in its real goal, even if nothing at all happens in court, or if it gets thrown out.
Fox43 (10/30/24)
SM: And I should mention, in the same radio interview, Cleta Mitchell implied that she already had evidence, but none of it made it into the lawsuit. She told the conservative radio host that Democrats were encouraging people to fraudulently register using these overseas mechanisms. So the striking thing is what is said out of court versus what actually goes into the lawsuit itself. And I think, again, looking at what happened in 2020, same dynamic, is that people will point to the lawsuits, even though the lawsuits don’t have any actual proof of fraud, and use the filing of the lawsuit itself as its own form of proof, even though the lawsuit itself doesn’t contain proof.
JJ: Well, it’s very Joe McCarthy: “I have a list right here in my hand,” and it turns out to be a blank piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. People see him holding what he says is a list, and the impression is made.
Well, I don’t want to say that we don’t see any reporting that is acknowledging folks like Cleta Mitchell’s strategy as a strategy, as an intention of sowing doubt. The New York Times. just on October 22, had a piece on the “election denial network.” But I know that listeners will also have seen coverage that just says, “concerns raised about overseas voting,” and stories that, if you don’t read them carefully, or even if you do read them, the very fact that the story got written suggests that there’s that there’s a there there, that there’s a valid question, even if, “Oh, well, we looked into it, and actually it’s not grounded. There’s no evidence there.”
And I wonder, what do you, as a reporter as well as an attorney, see as the professional, critical way for journalists to engage this sort of campaign, that uses legal tools and legal language and legal mechanisms, but isn’t really about the legality? How do you cover that?
SM: I do think that it’s important for reporters to be clear-eyed about what the strategy is, which is to get coverage of the lawsuit just as a lawsuit, and put it into this neutral reportage territory. Like you said, “Concerns raised.” My typical one that drives me nuts is “lawsuit filed,” or something like that, that really just says what the claim was, without looking, as I am currently doing, at—consider the source, consider the lawyer who is willing to sign their name to this, and think about what that means.
The Times today actually had a good story about one of the attorneys that I’ve also writtenabout, Kurt Olsen, and his background. And he was deeply involved in 2020, in a number of different efforts, including trying to get the election fight straight to the Supreme Court, on a pretty ridiculous theory that was panned by legal experts. But I just remember coverage at the time really focusing just on the stakes, the Supreme Court weighing in, and painting it as if it were similar to what happened in Bush v. Gore, things like that, as opposed to the extraordinary way that the lawsuit arrived at the Supreme Court in 2020.
That’s sort of what I’m trying, not to be too grandiose, but to do a little bit of correcting on, just focus on the people that are involved, and the attorneys who are willing to put their law licenses on the line, and sign their name, and attest that everything in the papers is true, even when they have often a checkered track record on that front.
JJ: And not to draw you out on it too much, but it isn’t that reporters can’t consider the source, because in some other cases they say, “Oh, well, this is the ACLU,” or, “Oh, this is this other organization, so maybe we ought to put an asterisk next to that.” It isn’t that they can’t do that. It just seems that they don’t do that in the way that would always be most balanced, or most useful, when it comes to electoral politics, or something somehow changes when it gets to presidential electoral politics.
But let me just ask you for final thoughts, Shawn Musgrave, about the way—because it’s not going to go away—we have indicated that these lawsuits are coming in at the last minute, while folks are already voting, so clearly it’s a last-minute press, in many ways, that we might see even more coverage of going forward. What should we be keeping an eye out for? What would you like to see more of, or less of, as reporters cover this going forward?
Shawn Musgrave: “”People will…use the filing of the lawsuit itself as its own form of proof, even though the lawsuit itself doesn’t contain proof.”
SM: What I aim for, and what I think that other reporters should aim for too, is to take a moment on some of these stories, as so many of these lawsuits are flying, and look at trends. Look at, not just the parties who are named in the lawsuit itself, like the RNC, the DNC, ACLU, different voting rights groups, which are often very generically named, and try to look at the people who are actually working on them. Because I do think, seeing from the postmortem on 2020, the people really mattered, in terms of what strategies were followed, which lawyers Trump was listening to, which he was sidelining and ignoring, or forcing to resign.
We know from 2020 that the people who were working on particular lawsuits matter incredibly. And I think, going into the election and afterward, when there are absolutely going to be lawsuits of one kind or another, it’s important that readers understand who the people are, not just faceless attorneys. Because it mattered in 2020, and I assume it’ll matter again.
JJ: All right, well, thank you very much for that.
We’ve been speaking with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave. You can find the work we’re talking about at TheIntercept.com. Thank you so much, Shawn Musgrave, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Jeff Bezos has finally taken the halo off of his head. It should have never been there in the first place.
Ever since his $250 million purchase of the storied Washington Post in 2013, Bezos has been feted as a savior of the free press (e.g., Slate, 8/6/13; Business Insider, 5/15/16; AdWeek, 11/28/16; New York Times, 2/27/21; Guardian, 6/12/24). The endless fawning was always misplaced. And for me, having grown up watching my parents run the local newspaper, this praise was nauseating.
While Facebook and Google have rightly been called out for destroying the news business, Amazon has been given a comparative pass, even though it may be the worst offender.
Amazon may hoover up a smaller (but growing) portion of ad revenue than Google and Facebook. But its ruthless business practices have helped turn once vibrant Main Streets into ghost towns across the country. Thanks to Amazon, it’s not just ad dollars being lost, but the advertisers themselves—local bookstores, clothing stores, toy stores, etc. And those losses destabilize fragile local economies, and the newspapers that depend on them.
If current trends continue, by the end of the year the US will have lost one-third of its newspapers and nearly two-thirds of its journalism jobs in a span of just two decades, according to a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. The number of lost reporting jobs, 43,000, is more than enough to fill DC’s baseball stadium.
‘A terrible mistake’
CJR (10/25/24): “Journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned” to learn that the paper would not be issuing a presidential endorsement.”
Fortunately, we won’t have to read this Bezos-saves-the-free press drivel any longer, which may be the only good thing to come out of his halo-off moment.
That moment came last Friday when the Postannounced that it will no longer be endorsing for president, breaking with its decades-long precedent, and providing a shot in the arm to Trump’s candidacy. The Post’s move came a week after the LA Times, another billionaire-owned paper, did likewise (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).
In short order, Bezos’ top lieutenants at the Post dutifully fell on their swords, claiming it had been their decision. But simultaneously they (or others) leaked to the media that the decision was in fact Bezos’ alone, and they’d even argued against it (New York Times, 10/27/24). In fact, the Post editorial board had been working on its draft endorsement of Kamala Harris for weeks, and for the past week had been awaiting only the sign-off from the top that Bezos never gave (CJR, 10/25/24).
The gold star for trying-to-put-a-happy-face-on-this-hot-mess goes to Will Lewis, the Post CEO and publisher. Bezos tapped the Brit for the paper’s top job last year despite his shady right-wing past. In attempting to defend the indefensible, Lewis (Washington Post, 10/25/24) wrote, “we are returning to our roots.”
No one found this terribly convincing, not even Post columnists, 21 of whom signed onto a statement (10/25/24) calling the non-endorsement “a terrible mistake.” “Disappointing” is how the famed Post duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein put it. But maybe the harshest criticism came from former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who called it “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.”
The fallout from Bezos spiking of the Harris endorsement has been swift. Since Friday, nearly a third of the Post’s 10-person editorial board has resigned in protest, two Post columnists have departed the paper entirely (with more resignations expected), and 250,000 readers—10% of the Post’s total—have canceled their subscriptions. “It’s a colossal number,” said another former Post executive editor, Marcus Brauchli.
Bezos’ blocking of the Harris endorsement came just 11 days before the election, and on the heels of the Post issuing endorsements for lower-level offices like Senate and House—a practice the Post will continue, even as it discontinues endorsing for president, the one office that can seriously threaten Amazon’s sprawling interests.
Hedging Bezos’ bets
Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (CNN, 10/27/24): “Trump rewards his friends and he punishes his perceived political enemies and I think there’s no other explanation for what’s happening right now.”
“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory,” Post columnist and opinion editor Robert Kagan, who resigned in protest after 25 years at the paper, told CNN (10/27/24):
Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. They have tremendously intricate relations with federal government. They depend on the federal government.
Recall that Trump as president routinely attackedAmazon and Bezos over the Post’s coverage of him. Trump even went so far as to upend a $10 billion cloud-computing deal between the Pentagon and Amazon Web Services. (Amazon then sued; the contract was ultimately divided among four companies, including Amazon.)
With Trump’s return to office looking as likely as not, Bezos has reason to hedge his bets. That’s especially true considering how dependent on federal largess Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, also is. It currently has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA, and is expected to compete for $5.6 billion in Pentagon contracts over the next five years. Surely this came up when Blue Origin’s CEO met with Trump only hours after the Post announced its non-endorsement (Guardian, 10/27/24). (Blue Origin’s chief competitor is SpaceX, headed by Trump superfan Elon Musk.)
‘Endorsements do nothing’
“Something we are doing is clearly not working,” writes Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 10/28/24)—and he’s decided that “something” is endorsing presidential candidates.
With all hell breaking loose in the wake of his personal electioneering, Bezos—who can rarely be bothered to explain himself to the free press he supposedly cherishes—had to interrupt his European vacation to pen an op-ed for the Post (10/28/24).
Mustering all the humility you’d expect from the world’s third-richest man, Bezos began not with an apology but an attack—directed at, of all things, the media, including his own paper.
“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom,” Bezos wrote at the top of his op-ed, headlined “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media.”
The fact that Bezos’ last-minute nixing of the Harris endorsement will only worsen trust in the media went unstated, of course. Thin-skinned billionaires are better at pointing fingers.
Bezos’ op-ed continued:
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.
And with that, Bezos absolved himself of any role in aiding Trump’s potential return to the Oval Office.
But in the eyes of Trump fundraiser Bill White, it sure looks like Bezos just put his thumb on the scale. “Bezos not endorsing Kamala Harris—I think that’s a $50 million endorsement for Trump,” White told the Post (10/28/24). “Not picking a horse is picking a horse.”
‘No quid pro quo’
Robert Kagan (Daily Beast, 10/26/24): “All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee.”
The billionaire went on to assure readers that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” regarding the meeting between the Blue Origin CEO and Trump that took place immediately following the non-endorsement.
Bezos may have penned this line in response to Kagan, the recently departed Post columnist who two days earlier told the Daily Beast (10/26/24) that a quid pro quo is exactly what went down:
Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people…. Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.
While Bezos’ non-endorsement may seem like a last-minute decision, it had “obviously been in the works for some time,” Kagan said, citing Lewis’ hiring as Post CEO and publisher back in January.
Lewis rose to prominence over a decade ago when he helped steer the British wing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to calmer waters, at a time when Murdoch’s tabloid News of the World was engulfed in a phone-hacking scandal. While Lewis’ actions during this time remain the subject of legal inquiries, Murdoch was quick to promote him, naming Lewis CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal in 2014.
When Bezos tapped Lewis to helm the Post earlier this year, he was aware of Lewis’ shady background (Washington Post, 6/28/24)—and may have even viewed it as a plus.
“[Lewis’] eager solicitude before power could well be why Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Lewis for the publisher’s job in the first place,” the Nation’s Chris Lehmann (6/21/24) wrote. “[Bezos] may well look at Murdoch’s sleazy antidemocratic empire and think, ‘I want one of those, too.’ If so, his eager quisling Will Lewis is already hitting all the right notes.”
For Kagan, Lewis’ hiring was an early signal of Bezos’ intention to take the Post in a different, right-wing direction. “All the facts” point to Bezos’s desire to remake the Post in the image of the Wall Street Journal, with an “anti-anti-Trump editorial slant,” Kagan told the Daily Beast (10/26/24).
Amazon’s antitrust antipathy
FTC chair Lina Khan (Wired, 9/26/23): “Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform.”
While media are focused on how Bezos bent the knee for Trump, something important has been left out of the story: namely, that it may be President Harris whom Bezos fears most.
A second Trump presidency may put Amazon’s (and Blue Origin’s) current government contracts in danger, but it’s Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, who poses a more serious long-term threat to Amazon, as she seeks to break apart dominant monopolies like the online retail giant, which she’s currently suing.
If Harris wins, there’s a possibility that Khan will stay put, enabling her to continue building on the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement.
While the FTC’s case against Amazon hasn’t received much attention, it “marks the biggest legal test to date for Amazon’s 30-year-old e-commerce business,” according to the Post (10/1/24). Khan’s lawsuit—which is joined by 17 state attorneys general—alleges that the retailer is “punishing sellers who offer their goods elsewhere at lower prices,” according to Wired (9/26/23)—keeping prices artificially high not only at Amazon, but at thousands of other sites across the web.
In addition to antitrust enforcement, there’s another reason that Bezos (and his ilk) may prefer Trump. “Further compounding the incentive for some executives to stay out of the race is Democrats’ policy agenda,” the Post (10/28/24) reported. “Harris has backed a plan to raise taxes on many of the country’s highest earners.”
For Bezos’ part, he insists (10/28/24), “I do not and will not push my personal interest.” But now that the halo is off, it’s easier to see this is nonsense.
“With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former Blue Origin employee told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
It’s supremely unhelpful of the New York Times (Upshot, 10/26/24) to compare income of white men without college degrees to white, Black, Latine and Asian-American women with college degrees:
The Times provided no similar graphic making the more natural comparison between white men without college degrees and Black, Latine or Asian-American men without college degrees. Why not?
Someone who did make that comparison is University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who has a blog called Family Inequality (10/27/24). Maybe you won’t be surprised to find that not only are white men without college degrees not uniquely disadvantaged, they’re actually better paid than any other demographic without a college degree. White men with college degrees, meanwhile, are at the top of the income scale, along with Asian-American men with college degrees.
As Cohen writes, the way the New York Times presented the data “is basically the story of rising returns to education, turned into a story of race/gender grievance.” That fits in with the Times‘ long history (e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/16, 3/30/18 , 11/1/19, 11/7/19) of trying to explain to liberals why they should learn to love white resentment.
The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.
Reuters (10/18/24) called October 7 “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”; no similar Nazi comparisons were offered for the (probably far more than) 42,000 Palestinians killed by Israel.
Reuters (10/18/24), for example, produced an obituary headlined “Yahya Sinwar: The Hamas Leader Committed to Eradicating Israel Is Dead”—a less than charming use of terminology in light of the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza.
Since last October, more than 42,000 Palestinians have officially been, um, eradicated—although according to a Lancet study (7/20/24; Al Jazeera, 7/8/24) published in July, the true death toll could well exceed 186,000. Per the view of Reuters, this is really the fault of Sinwar, a “ruthless enforcer” who, we are informed in the opening paragraph,
remained unrepentant about the October 7 attacks [on Israel] despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his Gaza homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.
Never mind that Sinwar’s elimination will have no impact on the genocide, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear: “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow, but our task has still not been completed.”
Delegitimizing resistance
The New York Times headline (10/21/24) seems to express surprise that assassinating a negotiating partner is not a pathway to peace.
Further down in the obituary, Reuters journalist Samia Nakhoul managed to insert some biographical details that hint at reasons besides “evil” that Sinwar chose to pursue armed resistance:
Half a dozen people who know Sinwar told Reuters his resolve was shaped by an impoverished childhood in Gaza’s refugee camps and a brutal 22 years in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab/Israeli war.
This, too, is a rather diplomatic way of characterizing the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that attended the 1948 creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land—an enterprise predicated on perpetual killing, as we are now witnessing most acutely. By portraying Sinwar’s actions as stemming from an intrinsic diabolicalness that made him hellbent on “eradicating” Israel—in contrast to Israel’s actions, which are implicitly restrained until “unleashed” by Sinwar—the corporate media delegitimize resistance while effectively legitimizing genocide.
This longstanding commitment to laying nearly all responsibility for the conflict at Palestinian feet also leads to bizarre headlines like the New York Times‘ “Yahya Sinwar Is Dead, But a Palestinian State Still Seems Distant” (10/21/24). It is the Biden administration’s alleged hope that Sinwar’s killing could “help pave the way for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.” The idea attributes the failure to create a Palestinian state to Sinwar rather than Israel, and ludicrously imagines that genocide, along with the massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure that Israel is committing in Gaza, are logical ways to go about state-building.
That report came on the heels of another Times intervention (10/19/24) that critiqued “Hamas’s single-minded focus on the Palestinian struggle, which had dragged the whole region into the flames”—even while acknowledging that Israel is the party presently responsible for perpetuating the conflict. This particular effort bore the headline: “Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive.” Well, yeah.
‘Terrorist Hamas leader’
Fox News (10/17/24) labeled Sinwar a “terrorist,” but didn’t use the word when noting that he “rose to the top positionthe killing of previous leader Ismail Haniyeh in the explosion of a guesthouse in Tehran”; in fact, it couldn’t even bring itself to mention that Israel had carried out the assassination.
For its part, Fox News (10/17/24) deployed predictable lingo in its memorialization of Sinwar, describing him in the obituary headline as “The Israeli Prisoner Turned Terrorist Hamas Leader.” Indeed, the “terrorist” label never gets old, even after decades of being wielded against enemies of Israel and the United States, the Israeli military’s partner in crime and the primary financial enabler of the current bloodbath. Lost in the linguistic stunt, of course, is the fact that both the US and Israel are responsible for a great deal more acts of terrorism than are their foes.
But pointing out such realities goes against the official line—and so we end up with Sinwar the “Hamas terrorist leader,” as ABC News (10/17/24) has also immortalized him. Time magazine (10/18/24) opted to go with a front cover featuring Sinwar’s face with a red X through it.
CNN (10/17/24), meanwhile, offered space in the second paragraph of its own reflections on Sinwar’s demise to Israeli officials’ spin on the man, noting that they had “branded him with many names, including the ‘face of evil’ and ‘the butcher from Khan Younis,’” the refugee camp in southern Gaza where Sinwar was born.
Given the Israeli butchery to which Khan Younis is continuously subjected these days, it seems CNN might have refrained from taking Israel’s word for it. On just one bloody day this month, October 1, at least 51 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent camp in Khan Younis (BBC, 10/2/24)—a space that had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area.” Israel killed 38 more there yesterday (AP, 10/25/24).
‘The threat remains’
Time (10/18/24): “The corpse of Yahya Sinwar was found in the landscape he envisioned—the dusty rubble of an apocalyptic war ignited by the sneak attack he had planned in secret for years.”
Sinwar is not the only Middle Eastern resistance leader to have been recently eliminated by the Israelis. On July 31, Israel assassinated Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniyeh with a bombing in Tehran, and on September 27, it killed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, in an operation that entailed leveling an entire residential block. (What was that about terrorism?)
On the latter occasion, the Jerusalem Post (10/6/24) got its panties in a bunch over the allegedly “unnerving eulogy of the terror chief” that appeared in the New York Times (9/28/24), whose authors had not only had the audacity to call Nasrallah a “powerful orator…beloved among many Shiite Muslims,” but had also mentioned that the man had helped provide social services in Lebanon.
(That Times article also reported that some Lebanese “felt he used Hezbollah’s power to take the entire country hostage to his own interests,” and it linked to another Times piece—9/28/24—about those who “welcomed Mr. Nasrallah’s death.”)
The Washington Post (9/28/24) went with the noncommittal headline “Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Leader and Force in Middle East, dies at 64,” while simultaneously running an op-ed by Max Boot (9/28/24): “Nasrallah Is Gone. But the Threat of Hezbollah Remains.”
Now that Sinwar is gone, too, rest assured that Israel will continue to exploit all manner of threats to justify unceasing slaughter—and that the media will be standing by with disingenuous and reductionist narratives all the way.
The Los Angeles Times will not be making a presidential endorsement in this election, the first time the paper has stayed silent on a presidential race since 2004. But the decision not to endorse a candidate was not made by an editor. The paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, stepped in to forbid the paper from doing so.
The move sparked a furor over the lack of editorial freedom (Semafor, 10/22/24; KTLA, 10/22/24; Adweek, 10/23/24). The paper lost 2,000 subscribers, and editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, along with two other staffers, including a Pulitzer Prize winner (Guardian, 10/25/24).
Guardian (9/23/16): “The lack of transparency around Soon-Shiong’s reasons for not allowing his paper to make a presidential endorsement has left journalists in the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom frustrated and confused.”
The LA Times was widely expected to support the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, a Southern California resident and former senator from the state. The paper’s editorial board enthusiastically supported Joe Biden in 2020 (9/10/20) and Hillary Clinton four years before that (9/23/16).
According to news reports, the paper had been preparing an endorsement until Soon-Shiong reached across the wall that is supposed to separate the business and editorial wings of a newspaper. He tried to rationalize his decision, according to the Guardian:
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Soon-Shiong told Spectrum News, noting he was a “registered independent.”
On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong tweeted that he had asked the editorial board to instead publish a list of positive and negative attributes about both of the presidential candidates, but that the board had refused.
Soon-Shiong said that the dangers of divisiveness in American politics was highlighted by the responses to his tweet about his decision not to endorse, saying the feed had “gone a little crazy when we just said, ‘You decide.’”
And the LA Times is not alone. The Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post will also issue no presidential endorsement, for the first time since 1980 (NPR, 10/25/24). Former editor-in-chief Martin Baron called the move “cowardice,” telling NPR:
Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
Alarms about editorial freedom
Stat (11/21/16): “Soon-Shiong called it an ‘incredible honor’ to dine with Trump, who ‘truly wants to advance health care for all.’”
Soon-Shiong, who bought the LA Times from Tronc in 2018, attempted to portray himself as a defender of the free press against attacks from then-President Donald Trump (CNBC, 9/7/18). But Soon-Shiong—a doctor who made a fortune in the for-profit medical industry (New Yorker, 10/25/21)—was not shy about his ambitions for a top health position in the Trump administration (Stat, 11/21/16, 1/25/17).
Is Soon-Shiong trying to make nice with Trump? One thing we know about him is that he’s not big on paying taxes; “He hasn’t paid federal income tax in five consecutive recent years,” ProPublica (12/8/21) reported.
He’s also not overly concerned about ethical niceties; Stat (7/20/17) has raised questions about conflicts of interest in his medical business and how they might impact patients. A Politico investigation (4/9/17) of Soon-Shiong’s research foundation found widespread self-dealing:
Of the nearly $59.6 million in foundation expenditures between its founding in 2010 and 2015, the most recent year for which records are available, over 70% have gone to Soon-Shiong–affiliated not-for-profits and for-profits, along with entities that do business with his for-profit firms.
This isn’t the first time Soon-Shiong’s intervention at the paper has raised alarms about editorial freedom. The Daily Beast (10/22/24) reported that earlier this year “executive editor Kevin Merida resigned after Soon-Shiong tried to block a story that accused one of his friends’ dogs of biting a woman in a Los Angeles park.”
Layoffs at the Times earlier this year also sparked outrage from trade unionists and journalists. “A delegation of 10 members of Congress warned Soon-Shiong in a letter that sweeping media layoffs could undermine democracy in a high-stakes election year,” reported Los Angeles Magazine (1/23/24).
There was also a racial element, the Times union said in a statement (Editor and Publisher, 1/24/24):
It also means the company has reneged on its promises to diversify its ranks since young journalists of color have been disproportionately affected. The Black, AAPI and Latino Caucuses have suffered devastating losses.
Bezos is far better known than Soon-Shiong; while it’s not reported that he directly intervened to stop a Post endorsement, like at the LATimes, NPR noted that Bezos depends on harmonious interactions with the federal government, as the company he founded, Amazon, depends on government contracts. Conflict-of-interest questions have long surrounded his control of the paper (FAIR.org, 3/1/14, 3/14/18, 9/19/19; CJR, 9/27/22; Guardian, 6/12/24; CNN, 6/18/24).
Helping a fellow billionaire
NPR (10/25/24): Elon Musk “has become one of the leading boosters of baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in immigrants to illegally vote for them — a conspiracy theory that Trump and other Republicans have made core to their narratives about the 2024 election.”
It’s hard to ignore that in blocking endorsements expected to go to Trump’s opponent, billionaire owners are using their media power to help a fellow billionaire. With the Washington Post, readers can easily assume that Bezos cares more about not offending the powerful than its now-laughable slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Bill Grueskin (X, 10/25/24), a professor at Columbia Journalism School, said that these endorsements are “unimportant politically” because “few votes would be swayed”—the Los Angeles area and the Beltway are solidly blue. But there’s an ominous factor here, he said, because “the billionaire owners are (intentionally or not) sending a signal to the newsrooms: Prepare to accommodate your coverage to a Trump regime.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is likewise using his wealth and his ownership of the social media network Twitter (rebranded as X) to boost Trump (PBS, 10/21/24; NPR, 10/25/24).
And Republican megadonor and billionaire Miriam Adelson “shelled out $95 million to the pro-Donald Trump Preserve America PAC during its third quarter,” Forbes (10/15/24) reported. Her late husband bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal in December of 2015 (AP, 12/17/15), and as the New York Times (1/2/16) reported:
Suspicions about his motives for paying a lavish $140 million for the newspaper last month are based on his reputation in Las Vegas as a figure comfortable with using his money in support of his numerous business and political concerns, said more than a dozen of the current and former Review-Journal staffers and local civic figures who have worked closely with him.
Big money has played an enormous part in US elections, especially since the Citizens United decision eviscerated limits on campaign spending (PBS, 2/1/23). “A handful of powerful megadonors have played an outsized role in shaping the 2024 presidential race through mammoth donations toward their favored candidates,” Axios (10/23/24) reported. These megadonors “skew Republican,” the Washington Post (10/16/24) reported.
Much of the press in the United States has, correctly, portrayed a second Trump term as a threat to democracy and a move toward corrupt autocracy, eroding institutions like the free press and independent justice system (Atlantic, 8/2/23; New York Times, 9/21/24, 10/3/24, 10/22/24; MSNBC, 10/22/24; NPR, 10/22/24). Yet the intervention of Soon-Shiong and his fellow moguls is an indication that our media are already not in democratic hands. Far from it; they are in the hands of the billionaire class. And it is sure to have an impact on this election.
In the aftermath of the Trump victory, the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published post-election eulogies for conventional economics. Remarkably, these columns shared almost the exact same headline.
(@iAnnetnl) 
