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  • NYT Assumed Antisemitism in DC Embassy Attack

     

    Ken Klippenstein: The Israel Embassy Shooter Manifesto

    Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) published a statement, ostensibly from embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, “citing the war in Gaza as its central grievance and framing the killings as an act of political protest.”

    Elias Rodriguez is the suspect in the murder of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, DC, outside a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. Journalist Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) has posted what he believes to be an authentic manifesto of the alleged shooter, a story that was subsequently reported on in the Jewish and Israeli press (Forward, 5/22/25; Israel Hayom, 5/22/25; Jewish Chronicle, 5/22/25). If the document is authentic, it appears the alleged gunman was violently opposed to the bloodbath in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government.

    Invoking the Palestinian death toll, the statement said, “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.” It referenced the 1964 attempt on the life of Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saying McNamara’s attacker was “incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam.”

    Rodriguez (AP, 5/22/25) reportedly told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”

    ‘Part of global surge’

    Details are still emerging about how and why the shooter chose these two people at this particular event. The Washington Post (5/25/25) noted that the victims were both employees of the Israeli Embassy who had attended the Young Diplomats Reception, an annual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, a Zionist organization. There is nothing in the public record that suggests Rodriguez harbored antisemitic sentiments or targeted his victims for being Jews. Rodriguez’ reported statements suggest that the assassinations were motivated by opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” do not appear in his purported manifesto.

    The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (5/22/25) reported that Rodriguez’ Chicago apartment had many political signs, including one that said “‘Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.’” The wire explained, “Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repair the world’ that has come to reflect a shorthand for social justice.” It’s a phrase commonly used by progressive Jews, and dubious decor for an antisemite. (FAIR readers might remember the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, which recently closed—Forward, 4/15/24).

    NYT: Slaying Outside D.C. Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism

    The New York Times (5/22/25) framed the embassy murders as “an extreme example of what law enforcement officials and others call a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”

    But a New York Times report (5/22/25) asserted definitively that Rodriguez’ violent action was antisemitic and must be understood in the context of global anti-Jewish hate. “Slaying Outside DC Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism,” announced the headline over the piece by White House correspondent Michael Shear. Its first paragraph implicitly attributed rising antisemitism to the Hamas attack of October 7, describing “a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”

    The Times quoted a number of politicians and activists who labeled the shooting antisemitic. Shear wrote, for instance:

    The shooting prompted fresh outcries from political leaders around the world, including President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both of whom expressed outrage at what they called evidence of antisemitic hatred. Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that “these horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!”

    Another key passage pinned rising antisemitism in the United States on the pro-Palestinian movement:

    In the United States, the war and the pro-Palestinian movement have amped up tensions and fears about antisemitism. The shooting at the museum is the type of development that many Jews, as well as some Jewish scholars and activists, have been worried about and warning about. They argue that the explosion of antisemitic language has already led to violent personal attacks.

    “You can’t draw a direct line from the campus to the gun,” said David Wolpe, who’s the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School as campus protests broke out there last year.

    “But the campuses normalized hate and anathematized Jews,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “Against that backdrop, violence is as unsurprising as it is appalling. After all, ‘globalize the intifada’ looks a lot like this.”

    ‘Corrosive to America’

    NY Post: DC antisemitic terror killings channel spirit of the campus protesters

    The New York Post (5/22/25) said the embassy shooting was “antisemitic terrorism, as is nearly all ‘anti-Zionist’ action.”

    None of these statements were ever countered or questioned in the piece, which more or less presented their viewpoint as unchallenged fact. While the Times prolifically cited those quick to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, it failed to acknowledge that a great many American Jews have been protesting against the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza, or to cite scholarship like that of Yael Feinberg, who has found that “there is no more important factor in explaining variation in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being engaged in a particularly violent military operation.”

    This Times news story fits neatly into the message of the right’s editorials on the shooting. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/22/25) said that, in light of the shooting,

    anti-Zionism, including enthusiasm for the total destruction of Israel and efforts to ostracize its domestic supporters, is corrosive to America and is stirring up old dangers for Jews.

    Calling the killings “antisemitic terrorism,” the New York Post editorial board (5/22/25) said, “Rodriguez did just what all those college protesters have been demanding: ‘Globalize the intifada.’”

    The Times jumped in on this Murdoch media rhetoric in a news article by Sharon Otterman (5/23/25), saying the killings

    cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel.

    It included this nugget:

    Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while attending a rally or being a member of pro-Palestinian groups does not predict violence, the broader ecosystem being created, particularly online, by groups strongly opposed to Israel, “created an environment that made the tragedy last night more likely.”

    Guilt by association

    NYT: The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

    The New York Times (5/18/25) described the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther as an effort  at “branding a broad range of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network,’ so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society.’” (It dubiously calls this “an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism.”) 

    The Times‘ Shear joined the right-wing Post and Journal in framing the attack as an act of antisemitism, as well as building a “guilt by association” narrative, implicating peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters rather than acknowledging any responsibility on the part of Israel’s war and its US backers. They suggest that, to stem antisemitism and acts of political violence against Israel, the logical solution is not to end the genocide, but to suppress and punish pro-Palestinian protest—something that the Trump administration will almost certainly use the embassy worker killings to do even more harshly (Jewish Currents, 5/23/25).

    His reporting might have been better informed if he had read the piece by his Times colleague Katie J.M. Baker (New York Times, 5/18/25) about the Heritage Foundation’s agenda to destroy pro-Palestine activism. Baker wrote of Heritage’s “Project Esther“:

    It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois.

    Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (5/19/25) followed up to note that Project Esther targets “the majority of Jewish House Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for anti-Israel language.” It “describes the Jewish congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as part of a ‘Hamas caucus’ in Congress, one that’s also supported by the Jewish senator Bernie Sanders.” Goldberg observed that “there’s something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism,” because it so often “tags Jews as perpetrators.”

    Antisemitic Zionists

    NPR: Multiple Trump White House officials have ties to antisemitic extremists

    Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick told NPR (5/14/25): “If the administration were serious about countering antisemitism, first and foremost they wouldn’t be appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration.”

    These passages in the Times allude to a point pro-Palestine advocates have made for a long time, which is that anti-Zionism not only isn’t antisemitism (many Jews are not Zionists, just as many Zionists are not Jews), but that a large part of the right-wing Zionist movement is inherently antisemitic. It’s often rooted in Christian apocalyptic fantasies in which Israel’s creation brings about the End Times.

    The book One Palestine, Complete, by Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev makes the case that under British rule in Palestine, between World War I and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, the imperialists sided with Zionist forces against the Arabs not despite their Christian antisemitism, but because of it. In a fiery assessment of the recently deceased Jerry Falwell, journalist Christopher Hitchens told CNN’s Anderson Cooper (Anderson Cooper 360°, 5/15/07) that the minister spent his life “fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping antisemitic innuendos into American politics,” along with other right-wing evangelists like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. The white nationalist Richard Spencer admitted that he looked to Israel as a model of the white, gentile Xanadu he desired (Haaretz, 10/19/17).

    Here at FAIR (5/1/05, 6/6/18, 11/6/23, 8/9/24, 2/19/25), we grow tired of having to point out that media, in the allegiance to the Israeli government narrative over Palestinian voices, use the insult of “antisemitism” to discredit criticism of Israel. Rodriguez’ alleged actions, of course, are not criticism but violence—murder is murder. But the Times’ evidence-free assertion that this attack was antisemitic adds to the false narrative that support for Palestine is inherently tied to bigotry against Jews.

    In fact, news coverage of Jew-hatred should focus on the growing power of the racist right. The worst recent antisemitic incident in the United States was the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (Axios, 6/16/23), carried out by a shooter obsessed with right-wing media tropes about Jews and immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18).

    That case was often linked to Dylann Roof, the Charleston church killer. While Roof targeted Black Christians, his manifesto “railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays and Muslims”; Roof said that Adolf Hitler would someday “be inducted as a saint” (New York Times, 1/5/17). In short, anti-Jewish vigilantes put antisemitic ideas in their manifestos, which it appears Rodriguez didn’t do.

    By contrast, these chilling ideas are widespread on the right. The QAnon movement, a proximate cohort to MAGA Trumpism, is enmeshed with antisemitic conspiracism (Guardian, 8/25/20; Just Security, 9/9/20; Newsweek, 6/28/21). NPR (5/14/25) reported that its investigation “identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a ‘Nazi sympathizer,’ and a prominent Holocaust denier.” Though the Jewish Democratic Council of America (5/21/25) lists the numerous antisemitic offenses of the Trump administration, that doesn’t seem to steer the coverage of the politics of antisemitism in the Times the way ADL’s spurious equation of pro-Palestinian with anti-Jewish does.

    ‘A much wider smear campaign’

    Guardian: Anti-Muslim hate hits new high in US: Advocacy group

    Guardian (10/3/24): “Among the most violent incidents of the last year were the fatal Chicago stabbing of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume and a Vermont shooting of three Palestinian college students that left one of them, 21-year-old Hisham Awartani, paralyzed.”

    It’s worth mentioning that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment has also increased since the October 7 attacks of 2023 (NBC News, 4/13/24; Guardian, 10/3/24; Al Jazeera, 3/11/25). An Illinois man was convicted earlier this year of “fatally stabbing a Palestinian-American child in 2023 and severely wounding his mother,” who reported him saying, “You, as a Muslim, must die” (BBC, 2/28/25). ABC affiliate WLS (5/24/25) reported that in the window of Rodriguez’ home in Chicago, law enforcement found a photo of Wadee Alfayoumi, the 6-year-old victim in this crime.

    In New York City, a pro-Israel mob terrorized a random woman mistaken for a pro-ceasefire activist; in addition to hurling rape threats, the crowd was heard chanting “death to Arabs” (PBS, 4/28/25; Battleground, 5/2/25). No arrests have been made at this time (Hell Gate, 5/23/25).

    Benjamin Balthaser, an associate professor of English at Indiana University/South Bend who writes widely on Jewish subjects, told FAIR:

    Over the past year and a half, we have seen an intensification of claims that all criticism and protest against Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza are just masked antisemitism, culminating with the deportation of students, the defunding of major universities, and the banning of lawful student organizations. The Heritage Foundation, as part of its “Project 2025,” has gone further, to claim that Palestine solidarity organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace are directly connected to armed militant organizations such as Hamas, despite JVP’s commitment to nonviolence and a peaceful solution to the now nearly century-long conflict between Israel and Palestine.

    Equating a lone gunman with campus protest not only lacks evidence, it is part of a much wider smear campaign with the sole intent to criminalize legitimate, legal protest for peace and human rights. It not only runs afoul of cherished American principles of the First Amendment, it also cheapens and hollows out any attempt to hold antisemites, such as in Trump’s cabinet, accountable.

    What happened in DC was alarming news that needed to be reported. But Shear’s piece, along with propaganda in the Murdoch press, added to the false Israeli line that all the people condemning genocide in Palestine are violent Jew-haters—or, in the case of Jewish activists for Palestine, self-hating Jews.

    Featured image: Embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, interviewed by Scripps News (1/23/18) at an anti-Amazon protest in 2018.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • An ‘Objective’ Press Won’t Alert You to Threats to Democracy

     

    Intercept: Trump Is Prosecuting a Congressional Democrat for Doing Her Job. The Media’s Response: No Big Deal.

    Natasha Lennard (Intercept (5/20/25): “News organizations should…have long ago stopped affording the Trump administration such credulous coverage.”

    A FAIR post (5/22/25) on New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s selective defense of press freedom (New York Times, 5/13/25) referred to him as someone who “clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs.” Natasha Lennard’s piece in the Intercept (5/20/25) on media coverage of the Trump administration’s arrest of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D–N.J.) illustrates what we mean by this.

    McIver, Lennard wrote, was charged with “assaulting” an ICE officer when she “attempted to conduct an oversight visit earlier this month at a massive, new ICE detention facility in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey.” Such oversight is part of representatives’ constitutional duty, and is specifically authorized by law in the case of ICE facilities. Lennard noted that if this had happened in a different country—one not favored by Washington—this would have been reported, accurately enough, as something like, “Regime targets opposition politician with fabricated charges for carrying out oversight.”

    But as it happened in the United States, that’s not how leading US news outlets—including the New York Times (5/19/25)—reported it. “Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center” was the Times headline over an article that followed the Times‘ he said/she said stylebook. “Both sides have pointed to videos from the chaotic scuffle…to accuse each other of instigating the altercation.”

    As the Intercept‘s subhead remarked, “You’d never know reading the New York Times that charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver are nothing but an authoritarian attack.” The Times article did not provide the context that ICE has been seizing immigrants without due process and shipping them to foreign prisons in violation of court orders—background that is critical to judging whether the prosecution of a lawmaker that attempted to investigate the agency is in good faith.

    NYT: Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center

    “Clash” is a useful word if you want to make an unarmed legislator sound like an evenly matched adversary for Homeland Security commandos (New York Times, 5/19/25).

    In his essay, Sulzberger warned that without press freedom, people might not know when their rights are being taken away, or democratic structures undermined:

    Without a free press, how will people know if their government is acting legally and in their interest? How will people know if their leaders are telling the truth? How will people know if their institutions are acting to the benefit of society? How will people know if their freedoms are being sustained, defended and championed—or eroded by forces that seek to replace truth and reality with propaganda and misinformation?

    But if you follow the Times‘ approach to journalism, in which you must never say that something is happening if someone in power claims it is not happening, then your audience won’t know when their government is acting illegally, or denying truth and reality. (“You can’t just say the president is lying,” Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller told a DC panel—Extra!, 1–2/05—expressing an actual rule that was enforced even on the paper’s opinion columnists.)

    Journalists inevitably, inescapably, have values, and those values necessarily affect what they communicate to their audiences. If they value democracy, then they communicate to their audience that arrests of opposition lawmakers are dangerous. If, on the other hand, they value the appearance of neutrality above all else, then the message readers will get is: Who’s to say?

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

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘I’m Not Seeing the Horror Reflected in Corporate Media’: CounterSpin interview with Mara Kronenfeld on Israel’s aid blockade

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed UNRWA USA’s Mara Kronenfeld about Israel’s aid blockade for the May 16, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Middle East Eye: Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe, explained

    Middle East Eye (5/14/25)

    Janine Jackson: It’s long been said of the turmoil in Israel/Palestine that your understanding is shaped by when you’re told to start the clock. Corporate news media’s deliberate timekeeping sets up the story we’re used to, in which Palestinians are always attacking and Israel is always only responding, and Israel’s long, violent occupation, and now genocidal operations against the people of Gaza, for example, becomes a matter of recurring “clashes” between presumably balanced forces.

    Into this landscape comes the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, May 15. For media, talking frankly about the 15,000 Palestinians killed, the at least 750,000 driven from their homes and land, for the 1948 founding of the state of Israel might force a context into coverage of today’s events, beyond vague gestures toward the region’s “troubled history.”

    We’re learning how hard some will fight to prevent that understanding. In the struggle to defend Palestinian lives, the protection of history is tied up with the witnessing of today.

    Mara Kronenfeld is executive director at UNRWA USA. UNRWA is the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. She joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Mara Kronenfeld.

    Mara Kronenfeld: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

    Al Jazeera: Israel kills over 100 in Gaza as Palestinians mark 77 years since the Nakba

    Al Jazeera (5/15/25)

    JJ: I want to ask you about attacks on aid and about disinformation, but we are recording on May 15. I just wonder, first, what your thoughts are on what this time of remembering, of acknowledgement, means today.

    MK: Yes, it’s a day, a difficult day, any May 15, and this is of course the 77th commemoration of the Nakba, but it’s only that much more painful after this morning, hearing that Gaza is yet again, yet another day of major attacks. We’re hearing of upwards of 100 civilians killed just this morning, and 77 yesterday. So it’s a painful reminder that the struggle continues, that Palestinian fathers, mothers, children are under attack, and that Palestinians, like any other people on Earth, want to live free of occupation, and have control over themselves and sovereignty. And this seems well farther off than it has, unfortunately, for a long time.

    JJ: Gaza has been under blockade since March, listeners will know, the hunger, the lack of medicine, the repeated displacement, destruction of hospitals—after decades, of course, of occupation—all contributing to the nightmare. But now we also see targeted, lethal attacks on aid workers themselves, and efforts to—you could say “politicize,” but really criminalize the work of aid organizations. This seems new, or is it?

    MK: Yeah, there’s been a long-time campaign, frankly, against UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. I wish I could say this is new. I think the vehemence and the coordinated aspects of the attacks are perhaps new, but UNRWA has always represented a threat, in the sense that it appears to guarantee the right of return for Palestine refugees, even though that right of return is embodied under a separate UN resolution. But it represents that, in fact, the 5.6–some million refugees that UNRWA is serving are refugees and, in fact, do hope to return home to a land that is under their sovereign control, in whatever political solution the political parties determine at the right time.

    The attack against UNRWA—and by the way, I am the executive director of UNRWA USA, which is actually a separate, independent, US-based NGO. Our mission is really to raise awareness about the work of the UN agency UNRWA, and raise funds for its relief and development programs in the Middle East, of course, for these 5.6 million refugees. But we have seen the propaganda against UNRWA, and, by extension against our small team, absolutely ramp up in the days and months and, unfortunately, now years following the horrific events on October 7.

    You can almost directly link the attacks on UNRWA to, yes, the fact that it embodies this right of return, but also UNRWA is simply being attacked because it keeps Palestinians alive. And as we’ve seen in this brutal, 20-month assault on Gaza, on the civilians of Gaza, collective punishment, and now we’re into almost the 70th day of a total blockade on food and medical aid-–again, collective punishment on an entire population, including 1 million children. We’re seeing that any attempt to keep this population alive, educated, sheltered is a threat to this current extremist government in Israel. And that’s the very reason UNRWA is attacked.

    Al Jazeera: Israel strikes UN warehouse in Rafah as famine looms in Gaza

    Al Jazeera (3/13/24)

    JJ: It’s a kind of a pincer move, because there are the actual missiles being dropped on warehouses where UNRWA is working, and on medical centers, and then also this simultaneous drive to say that UNRWA is not a legitimate organization, that really it’s just part of Hamas, and that therefore it should be sued into extinction, is my understanding.

    MK: Yes, there’s attacks on many levels, and I will say, and I think it’s worth mentioning here, that there are probably hundreds of accusations against UNRWA by the Israelis. The commissioner general of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini has consistently and continually stated that if there are allegations, then UNRWA needs to see the documentation, needs to see the evidence.

    Israel has a history of making allegations, of calling many different independent individuals and organizations “Hamas” or “terrorists” without any evidence. UNRWA cannot respond to every piece of conjecture in an extremely politicized environment. But in the one case where an accusation by Israel, that 19 members of UNRWA’s 33,000 employees may or may not have taken part in the horrific events of October 7, in only nine of these cases where Israel actually presented evidence, I have to say that if authenticated and corroborated—it hasn’t been—but if it could have indicated that [they] were guilty, UNRWA has done the right thing, in the sense of firing these individuals.

    UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini has stated emphatically that the engagement of any UNRWA employees in such activities, if so, if it were true, would, in fact, be an appalling betrayal of both Palestine refugees, the United Nations and UNRWA specifically. UNRWA made very clear that it has no tolerance for such activity.

    You said in the beginning of your introduction, the corporate media have chosen to tell a much different story, and I can tell you, working at UNRWA USA for five years, a story that’s fundamentally not true. And then you have attacks by certain members of this administration, which try to claim that UNRWA does not have immunity like every other United Nations entity, and that somehow UNRWA, established in 1949 by mandate of the member parties of the UN, is not a subsidiary of the United Nations, when Israel itself calls UNRWA a subsidiary of the United Nations.

    FAIR: Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage

    FAIR.org (8/22/23)

    The attacks, if they weren’t so dangerous and deadly—as yet, there’s been over 280 UNRWA staff members killed—would be laughable, but unfortunately we are in this crazy media environment, where too many allegations are somehow not checked, or repeated, and there are certain political opinions that hold sway in certain corporate newsrooms. That’s why I can tell you, as an individual, I’m so thankful for your work, for FAIR’s work, and for those who really try to understand what is underneath all of the propaganda and disinformation that we see every day.

    JJ: I’m going to ask you a little bit more about media in a second, but I just, as a point of information, because it can get lost: Israel, as an occupier, is required by law to allow aid, is it not? I mean, they’re required by international law to allow aid access into occupied territories.

    MK: A hundred percent. That is one violation of international law, absolutely. And we’re talking about, again, into the 70th day of a population of 1.9 to 2 million being denied commercial goods, but a thousand times worse, food and aid.

    And I don’t know about you, Janine, but I’ve seen, every day now, more and more photos of children who look malnourished. Just this morning, a horrific image of a child who was bombed, and one leg was severely injured, and the other leg is so skinny, it’s barely there. It is something that I wonder—we all wonder, those of us who are compassionate and thinking individuals—how the world can watch and let this happen, how the uproar is not loud enough to stop the withholding of basic food and medicine, now for over 70 days.

    Reuters: Israeli protesters block aid convoy headed to Gaza

    Reuters (5/13/24)

    JJ: Many are wondering why the response from the world is not what we think it should be, but we think it merits, and we—you and I—understand that media do play a role there. Using aid as a lure to drive Palestinians south, suggesting that providing food and water to people in Gaza is somehow akin to terrorism. This is part of what Francesca Albanese, I just heard, called “the tapestry of crimes against the totality of the people.” And I know that you and others contend that these crimes are made possible, in part, by dehumanization of Palestinian people, and that news media play a central role there.

    MK: Yes, yes, I’ve seen that and it’s been both in my professional and my personal life. I happen to be Jewish, married to a Muslim gentleman, and I think about my own kids, and I think about, in their lifetime, are we going to be more concerned about antisemitism or Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate? And while both are on the rise, I’m more concerned, in fact, about the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs in the media. And I think that this dehumanization of Palestinians is unique, definitely, because of the politicization of this issue. But it does have roots in the dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs that, unfortunately, our country has a long history of.

    Intercept: Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows

    Intercept (1/9/24)

    And definitely the media has played a huge role in furthering this dehumanization. There was a report out on a study of some thousand articles from the major newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times, and this was looking at all the articles, about a thousand articles, following the horrible attacks on October 7.

    And what we saw is that “Israeli” or “Israel,” both terms, generally got far more mentions in news stories than “Palestinians” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths massively far outpaced Israeli deaths. And we see really condemnatory adjectives, like “slaughter,” “massacre,” “horrific,” when they’re applied to Israeli citizens, not when they’re applied to Palestinian victims, even at a time when the Israeli military had killed upwards of 6,000 children in Gaza.

    And what is extremely frightening is seeing the genocidal language of this extremist government, and seeing almost that idea that we hear from this government that the children of Gaza are born evil; they’re born “snakes.” Imagine a news agency saying this about Jewish people, about my ancestors, that somehow they were born evil, they were born snakes. This kind of language being used has only served to dehumanize and prepare for the genocidal actions we’re seeing right now.

    But, unfortunately, our media is culpable in making Palestinian victims, changing them from victims to terrorists, including a million children who are trying to stay alive at this very minute, let alone their mothers and let alone their fathers. We’ve seen Palestinian fathers absolutely dehumanized at a level just outrageous, and which doesn’t match with any of my experiences, my long experiences, living and working in the Middle East region.

    JJ: On top of the more than 52,000 people killed since October 7, we have Israeli officials now openly declaring plans to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely, to use destitution and displacement to force Palestinians out, though neighboring countries say they don’t plan to take them. I would say appropriate reporting would not look like this, from the Guardian on May 6, that said that an Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and Palestinians will “leave in great numbers to third countries.” And the Guardian said, this is “raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory.”

    I feel that along with the day-to-day dehumanization and erasure of Palestinian lives, there’s also this kind of diplomatic dance that’s always like, It might turn into something that could be bad. There are warnings that it might be something to worry about. And it kind of leaves you to wonder: Media, what would you do if you thought it was ethnic cleansing? Why is it always “about to be,” or it’s someone “claiming that it is”? There’s a hesitancy that, to me, is very frustrating.

    Mara Kronenfeld

    Mara Kronenfeld: “Why hasn’t something happened to stop the killing already? And the displacement of 90% of the population?”

    MK: Oh yeah. So we’ve seen that around famine, that in other situations in which famine was predicted at the level, it has been predicted at different times than Gaza, it was declared famine. And we just don’t see that kind of collective statement or action when it comes to Gaza.

    And what we’re seeing now looks very much like ethnic cleansing. I’m not an international law specialist, but one does wonder why we’re not talking about interventions now, as opposed to some moment in the future, when we’ve already seen likely well more than 52,000 deaths. That’s the count that the Ministry of Health has tried to keep going, despite being nearly bombed out of existence. But the Lancet, the British Lancet, had stated in that second report towards the end of 2024, that the actual death count was probably more like 60,000 in the first six months of 2024. And if we count the second six months, when the bombing was even more brutal, we could be talking of upwards of 120,000 deaths. And at the very minimum, we’re talking about 17,000 children. The true number is probably much, much higher.

    So your question is very well taken. Why hasn’t something happened to stop the killing already? And the displacement of 90% of the population, from families displaced over 12 times in the last two years, with just a blanket and the clothes they’re wearing to carry with them from place to place?

    The depravity goes on and on. And I found myself repeating the statistics for the last 20 months, and I’m just continually shocked that I’m not seeing, the horror that I feel, I’m not seeing it reflected in the corporate media.

    And I tell everyone I talk to that we just can’t rely on traditional media. We have to be looking at video straight from Gaza, we have to be looking at independent news sites, because we’re just simply only going to get a very small part of the story.

    Stanford Daily: Nine days into hunger strike, students criticize University’s ‘nonresponse’

    Stanford Daily (5/21/25)

    JJ: Finally, we see that, despite the virulence, the wildness of the crackdown—student reporters being suspended, being arrested, simply for reporting on police assaults on campus protesters, the circulating of Do Not Hire lists of people who protest, threats to strip nonprofit status from groups that step out of line—it’s just not working. It’s silencing many people, of course, but at the same time, more and more people are speaking up. Stanford students have just started a hunger strike. Polls are showing large numbers of people don’t want their tax dollars going to Israel’s military. They’re trying to make it very scary to condemn this nightmare, and people are doing it anyway.

    MK: Yeah, the power of the people has been, frankly, beautiful, something extremely powerful to behold. And we’ve seen that play out at UNRWA USA, where our donor base was just some 7,000 in early October 2023. We saw our donor base grow 146,000 people since October 2023. And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, these donors are from every state in the union, every ethnic background. I can’t tell you how many Jewish people donated on Passover in 2023 and 2024, talking about what Passover means, freeing the oppressed from affliction. We have seen, in just that snapshot of support for us, that American people are compassionate and are caring, and it’s really the elites who are trying to tell a different story, and a false story, that, thankfully, many folks in this country are too smart to swallow.

    And I’ll just say that I view my work at UNRWA USA of serving the essential humanitarian needs of a population that is under brutal assault, which genocide scholars, including many, many in Israel, are calling a genocide. It is a badge of honor to provide humanitarian aid for a population that is under collective punishment.

    And I’ll tell you that I do this, like so many, because “Never Again” is not just never again for the Holocaust, for Jewish people, for my grandfather who escaped Nazi Germany, “Never Again” is for anybody. And so as hard as this moment is, in terms of the repression in this country, I am honored to work beside my colleagues at UNRWA USA, many Palestinians, and beside all of the brave people in this country who refuse to swallow the narrative, the false narrative, that’s being handed to them.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mara Kronenfeld of UNRWA USA. Mara Kronenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    MK: Thank you.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Bryce Covert on Work Requirements, Erin Reed on Trans Care ‘Questions’

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    Common Dreams: Trump Cabinet Members Regurgitate Lies About Work Requirements

    Common Dreams (5/14/25)

    This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert.

     

    WaPo: Good questions about transgender care

    Washington Post (5/11/25)

    Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • NYT Publisher Decries Assault on Press, But Ignores Journalism’s Worst Enemy

     

    NYT: A Free People Need a Free Press

    New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25) says the press should ask itself, “Were we open-minded enough to unexpected facts?” It’s a good question.

    New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered an impassioned defense of  press freedom to the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which later ran in the Times (5/13/25). At first glance, Sulzberger is repeating what many free press advocates, including myself (FAIR.org, 11/14/24, 2/26/25, 4/25/25), have said, which is that press freedom is under attack, and it is incumbent upon free society to fight back.

    Of course, this is A.G. Sulzberger, who clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs, so his otherwise hard-hitting critique of Trump’s all-out assault on the press and his emphasis on “upsetting powerful interests of every type” is directly undermined by his insistence that “our job is to cover political debates, not to join them,” and that “we are nobody’s opposition” and “nobody’s cheerleader.” (FAIR dissected Sulzberger’s virtually identical arguments about the role of journalism under Trump back in September—see FAIR.org, 9/6/24.)

    But the notion that journalists don’t play favorites is belied by another passage in Sulzberger’s updated manifesto. He wrote:

    A record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years. Many more are subjected to campaigns of harassment, intimidation, surveillance and censorship. Those efforts have been perhaps most obvious and intense in authoritarian states like China and Russia. But a more insidious playbook for undermining the press has emerged in places like Hungary and India. Places where democracy persists but in a more conditional way, under leaders who were elected legitimately and then set about undermining checks on their power.

    What’s most striking about this description is what it leaves out. The link is to a press release by the Committee to Protect Journalists (1/16/25), titled “The Number of Journalists Jailed Worldwide Reached a Near All-Time High in 2024.” “China, Israel and Myanmar were the leading jailers of reporters, followed by Belarus and Russia,” the release stated.

    Deadliest country for journalists

    CPJ: 2024 is deadliest year for journalists in CPJ history; almost 70% killed by Israel

    Committee to Protect Journalists (2/12/25): “The toll of conflict on the press is most glaring in the unprecedented number of journalists and media workers killed in the Israel/Gaza war, 85 in 2024, and 78 in 2023.”

    The fact that Israel found itself in a grouping with authoritarian regimes (most of which dwarf it in population, no less) seems like it would be worth a mention, but Sulzberger didn’t agree. He noted the authoritarian turn in India and Hungary—countries that imprisoned three and zero journalists, respectively, according to CPJ—while ignoring Israel, which jailed 43.

    Israel is often pitched to Americans as a Western democratic regime in a neighborhood full of backward autocracies. CPJ noted: “A total of 108 journalists were imprisoned in the Middle East and North Africa, almost half of those detained by Israel.” That means Israel’s jailing of journalists significantly overshadows the press repression in places like Egypt (Amnesty International, 7/25/24) and Iran (Reporters Without Borders, 9/11/23), both of which have far bigger populations than Israel.

    But Israel’s imprisoning journalists turns out to be the more benign part of its program of suppressing the press. CPJ also released a report (2/12/25) titled “2024 Is Deadliest Year for Journalists in CPJ History; Almost 70% Killed by Israel.” The report said, “At least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel.” The group also investigated Israel’s killing of journalists in Lebanon (CPJ, 10/10/24). Altogether, there were 82 journalists killed by Israel in 2024, 13 times as many as were killed in the next-deadliest countries for journalists, Sudan and Pakistan (with six each).

    And the world has known about how dire the situation is for the press in this operation from its earliest stages. Less than two months after hostilities began, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (11/28/23) reported, in a piece called “Israel’s War on Journalists”:

    Israel’s assault on Gaza has quickly become the deadliest for journalists covering conflict zones since 1992. No other war in the 21st century has been so lethal for journalists, with 34 killed just within its first two weeks.

    I covered this issue for FAIR.org (10/19/23) in the Gaza assault’s early days. But downplaying Israel’s often lethal repression of journalism has been a pattern for the Times generally (FAIR.org, 5/1/24), not just for its publisher.

    ‘Would-be strongmen’

    WaPo: How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America

    Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) wrote that “my colleagues and I have spent months studying how press freedom has been attacked in Hungary—as well as in other democracies such as India and Brazil.” But not, apparently, in Israel.

    As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time Sulzberger has made such an omission. Last year, he wrote a lengthy article in the Washington Post (9/5/24) about the decline of press freedom in Hungary, Brazil and India. He wrote that these countries are run by “would-be strongmen” who “have developed a style” of repression against the media that is “more subtle than their counterparts in totalitarian states such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, who systematically censor, jail or kill journalists.”

    It was an interesting piece, but again, Israel’s war on the press went unmentioned, even though it is a key example of press freedom decline in a Western state where the government has become more illiberal and authoritarian (NPR, 1/12/23; New Statesman, 1/17/23; Foreign Affairs, 2/8/23).

    Press freedom in Israel has been on the decline since the invasion of Gaza began in October 2023. In that time, the government has pushed a boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), moved to privatize public broadcasting (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24) and increased censorship (+972, 5/20/24). The country has banned the broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24). After Sulzberger delivered his address, the Israeli government moved to take even more control over broadcasting (Times of Israel, 5/18/25).

    Israel’s killing and jailing of journalists, as well as its domestic clampdown and censorship of the press, is arguably at the center of the global crisis in press freedom. The fact that Sulzberger omitted this undercuts his point, because it reinforces the perception that the Times goes out of its way to bury or sanitize unsavory details about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 5/16/25) and advance Israel’s narrative (Literary Hub, 4/30/24)—calling into question his claim that a free press is essential to “arm everyone else with the information and context they need to understand and meet the moment.”

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

    FEATURED IMAGE: The Committee to Project Journalists’ image of a van from the Al-Quds Al-Youm TV channel that was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza in December 2024, killing four journalists and a media worker. (Photo: Reuters/Khamis Said)

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • How NYT Reports on Weaponized Famine So You Don’t Have to Give a Damn

     

    WHO: People in Gaza starving, sick and dying as aid blockade continues

    The World Health Organization (5/12/25) “calls for the protection of health care and for an immediate end to the aid blockade, which is starving people, obstructing their right to health, and robbing them of dignity and hope.”

    More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”

    With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.

    The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.

    With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”

    ‘To pressure Hamas’

    NYT: Israel Faces World Court Hearings Over Gaza Aid

    The New York Times‘ online headline (4/28/25) reduces the prospect of mass starvation to the innocuous phrase “Gaza aid.”

    At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).

    A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.

    Reporter Aaron Boxerman writes up top:

    For more than a month and a half, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other relief from entering the devastated Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas to free the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages there. It argues that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza has enough provisions despite the restrictions.

    That frame looks like a simple sentence, but note that it tacitly requires you to accept that Israel determines whether people in the Gaza Strip can receive the basics for human life—asking why Israel is in charge of Palestinians’ food and medicine is beyond this conversation’s walls.

    Then, without even a comma, we are told that the denial of life to all Gazans is “an attempt to pressure Hamas”—Boxerman makes a silent skip over the acceptability of collective punishment there, and a frictionless transmission of Israel’s rationale for its actions. That Israel has itself deprioritized the release of the hostages vis-à-vis the reoccupation of Gaza is off the page. But that Israel “argues” the blockade is lawful and that Gaza has what we’re told to accept as “enough provisions”? Those are statements that the Times suggests can stand alone.

    Who you choose to believe

    "Lining up for food at a charity kitchen in Jabaliya, Gaza, this month." Photo by Saher Alghorra for the New York Times

    The New York Times (4/28/25) describes the relationship between Israel, which has announced a policy of starving millions of people, and the UN, which is trying to force Israel to allow food aid into Gaza, as “fraught with mutual recrimination.”

    But aha, you say, here comes another view—though it’s already set up by being in the responsive, “others differ” position:

    The United Nations and aid groups say the blockade has further harmed Palestinians already reeling from more than a year and a half of war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced well over a million and leveled large swaths of the enclave’s cities.

    While true, and ostensibly sympathetic, what with the reeling and the leveling, notice how this is not a direct response to the claims in the lead: that the blockade is lawful, and that Gaza has all it needs. It’s just a statement that the people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. And that even that is just a thing the UN and aid groups “say.”

    You could tighten this all to the NBC News headline (4/17/25) Belén Fernández clocked in her piece on coverage of Israel’s starvation of Gaza (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

    All of this depends on who you choose to believe, seems to be elite media’s message—with a few winky-wink tips on who to believe.

    Boxerman goes on to report:

    Ordinary Gazans have lamented the rising price of basic commodities under the pressure of the blockade. In some cases, the restrictions have turned the quest for getting enough nutritious food into a daily struggle.

    It’s like an unfunny game of “find the qualifier”: What’s an “ordinary” Gazan, and who are the extraordinary ones who deserve to starve? What defines the “some cases”?  Is un-nutritious food freely available? When does a “quest” become a “struggle”?

    It’s a perverse way to describe a situation where widespread starvation is not looming or imminent, but well underway. But it’s an excellent way to tell people they don’t necessarily, if you look at it a certain way, need to give a damn.

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

    Research assistance: Wilson Korik

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘This Budget Would Give Polluters the Green Light’: CounterSpin interview with Ashley Nunes on public land selloff

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Biological Diversity’s Ashley Nunes about the selloff of public lands for the May 9, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Common Dreams: On This Earth Day, Get Out and Fight Against Trump’s Greed and Destruction

    Common Dreams (4/22/25)

    Janine Jackson: 

    From lease sales to expedited permitting processes, the committee’s proposal creates an unprecedented pathway for developing our vast natural resources on federal lands and waters for generations to come.

    That’s a response to a piece of the budget reconciliation bill making its way through Congress, and it comes from the American Petroleum Institute. So you can sense what’s up, and why our guest calls this piece of Republicans’ effort to fund Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute.

    Ashley Nunes is a specialist in public lands policy at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ashley Nunes.

    Ashley Nunes: Thank you, Janine. Good to be with you.

    Outdoor Alliance: Public Lands and Waters Deserve Better than Reconciliation Package

    Outdoor Alliance (5/6/25)

    JJ: Let’s timestamp ourselves. We’re recording on May 8, and this is about the House Natural Resources Committee, and their contribution to the Republican House Reconciliation Bill, that’s going to tell us how to offset the billionaire tax cuts that they want to push through. But it’s not a done deal yet, right?

    AN: Right.

    JJ: So it’s still in process. There are lots of implications, but what would this plan do, particularly with regard to–I could say public lands, but I really appreciate your phrase, “precious wild places.” What would this do?

    AN: So as someone who’s focused on public lands policy, I am most interested in the part of the reconciliation package that’s come out of the House Natural Resources Committee. The proposed Republican budget hands over power to private industries to destroy our public lands and offshore waters. The excessive and indiscriminate development of fossil fuels, minerals and timber will harm wildlife and communities. This reckless development would undermine environmental protections. It would simply make air and water quality worse. And, of course, that’s harmful for wildlife and communities. So this budget wouldn’t just give tax breaks to billionaires, but it would give polluters the green light to raise emissions, destroy wild places and harm endangered species.

    JJ: In particular, I know that you look at, for example, Alaska. We’re looking at oil leases in Alaska, we’re looking at Minnesota. There are very specific things, and I wonder if you could just lift up some examples for folks to know what we’re talking about.

    AN: Absolutely. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I think I could do some highlights industry by industry.

    JJ: Please.

    NRDC: America’s Newly Discovered Whale Is Already in Trouble

    NRDC (4/4/25)

    AN: So let’s start with oil and gas on public lands. This bill would mandate dozens of lease sales every quarter, as you say, also sometimes in very sensitive locations, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There’s also at least 4 million acres on the coastal plains of Alaska for oil and gas, some of the most important bird breeding areas in the country, and really one of the last great wild places, not only in the Arctic, but in the world.

    Then if we go to offshore waters for oil and gas, this bill would mandate six lease sales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, and at least 30 lease sales in Gulf waters over the next 15 years. This offshore oil and gas development, when it pushes into sensitive ecosystems and deeper waters, it really risks another tragedy like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill that resulted in loss of human life and non-human life. The Gulf waters are home to the Rice’s whale, the world’s most endangered whale. So oil and gas here is really doing the most.

    The other fossil fuel we’re mentioning is coal. This bill would open at least 4 million acres for new coal leasing. Coal is a dying and downright dirty industry, but this bill would have taxpayers subsidizing to keep that industry alive.

    So across the board, there’s reduced royalty payments for these fossil fuel companies, for oil, gas and coal. And even though Republicans say that this is a bill intended to raise revenue, polluters get a really good deal here.

    NYT: Biden Shields Millions of Acres of Alaskan Wilderness From Drilling and Mining

    New York Times (4/19/24)

    So that’s just fossil fuels. And if I could say a bit more, as you said, there’s also mining and timber. These are other extractive industries in the bill. So, mining: The bill undoes protections put in place by the Biden administration, it pushes through contentious mining projects, one of which you mentioned. So reversing a ban on 225,000 acres adjacent to Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota, and then also a ban on a 211-mile mining road that would stretch across unspoiled wilderness in Alaska.

    And then for timber, there’s a mandated 25% increase in timber production on public lands. And I fear this puts a target on the biggest and oldest trees, because of their economic value for timber. A bigger tree would produce more timber, but these are also the most ecologically valuable trees for carbon sequestration, habitat protection and wildfire resilience. So this is a huge giveaway to extractive industry that would be hugely harmful for the places we love.

    JJ: And maybe to just pull it out a bit, this is opposing what communities want to do with their land, right? Land use is a local issue, and we hear hollering about states’ rights, but this is actually in opposition to what a number of places have said they want to do with their land.

    AN: That’s right, Janine, and this is wonky, but there are many provisions, across the bill, that would take away environmental review. And that’s the process that allows the public to have their say, to give their input. So if Congress rubberstamps projects, the public doesn’t have that opportunity.

    JJ: It’s so important. The fight to resist clean energy in this country is intense, and it’s also transparent. And those thumbprints are all over this as well. The fossil fuel companies, they’re following tobacco. They’re just going to hold onto it, to the very last penny. And that seems evident in this legislation.

    AN: You’re so right. There are provisions, as I said, to reduce royalties on fossil fuels, and that’s the status quo. But there’s also provisions to add rents for clean energy, renewable energy on public lands. So this is really a giveaway to polluters, and it’s to the detriment of that clean energy transition that we need.

    JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally: I think transparency is the least that reporters could demand from this process, that has such myriad implications. But what would you like to see from journalism on this set of issues? And maybe what would you like to see less of?

    Ashley Nunes, Center for Biodiversity

    Ashley Nunes: “This budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime.”

    AN: There’s just so much to say here, really. I think I would just say a couple of things.

    First of all, we were warned that this would happen. This budget bill is the Project 2025 and Agenda 47 playbooks in action. It’s not just “drill, baby, drill,” it’s also “mine, baby, mine” and “log, baby, log.” This proposal uses public resources to enrich private interests. It’s extreme. And if these provisions stay in the reconciliation package, and are enacted, this would be an obscene giveaway of our public resources to private industry, and it would put these places at serious risk. It’s heartbreaking. I think journalists, like you and others, can help people understand what’s at stake.

    So, secondly, I would just add that we are living through a climate crisis and an extinction crisis, and this budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime. It would not only cause harm to our cherished landscapes, coastal waters and wildlife, but also to our public health, and our ability to recreate on our public lands across the country. So people want to know what they can do, and ultimately, people need to call their congressional representatives and tell them to vote no, to stop.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. They’re online at BiologicalDiversity.org. Thank you so much, Ashley Nunes, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    AN: Thanks, Janine.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • With Friends in Media, Brazil’s Coffee Workers Don’t Need Enemies

     

    It seems like an odd moment for the US media to do a hit job on Brazil’s coffee industry.

    Protective tariffs have been used since the 1800s in the US to protect domestic industry and increase employment. As Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and other economists influential on Latin America’s “Pink Tide” argued, tariffs are also fundamental for Global South nations to escape from the prison of agricultural commodity export dependence, by enabling them to industrialize through import substitution.

    Regardless of heterodox economists’ arguments in favor of import tariffs, however, there seems to be little sense in the US government imposing tariffs on products that can never be produced nationally, like bananas or coffee. This is what it did on April 2—the day after April Fool’s day—when President Trump announced new, blanket tariffs on all imports from 57 countries around the world.

    Compared to other countries (like Cambodia or Madagascar) in the Global South, Brazil, which had a trade deficit with the United States in 2024, got off relatively easy, with 10%. One sector that will hurt, however, is coffee.

    Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, and its largest export market is the United States. Brazil exported $1.8 billion, or 15% of its total coffee production, to the United States in 2024. In 2025, US consumers will have to foot the bill for a 10% tariff on a product whose price has already increased by 6.9% this year, due to the effects of climate change weather events on last year’s harvest cycle.

    ‘Harvested by trafficked slaves’

    AP: Labor group sues Starbucks, saying it ignores slave-like conditions for workers in Brazil

    AP (4/24/25): “Eight Brazilian coffee workers…allege… they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.”

    The US’s new tariffs on Brazil came into effect on April 5. Nineteen days later, a Delaware-based NGO named Coffee Watch, which provides no funding transparency on its website, conducted a media blitz against Brazil’s coffee industry. It issued a letter to the US Customs and Border Protection, demanding a halt on all Brazilian coffee imports to the United States. On April 24, the New York Times, Guardian and AP, which sells content to hundreds of sites and newspapers, ran simultaneous articles on Coffee Watch’s campaign.

    Coffee Watch built on the stories of eight workers rescued by Brazilian federal labor inspectors from what the Brazil’s government called “slave-like conditions.” These workers came from five of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms. Coffee Watch and other quoted experts extrapolated from their cases to advocate for a complete halt of Brazilian coffee exports to the United States—itself a country where hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work on farms under conditions that could be categorized as “slave-like” within Brazil’s legal framework.

    The New York Times article (4/24/25), headlined “Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to US Authorities,” detailed a lawsuit filed against Northern companies, including Starbucks, Nestlé and Dunkin’, on behalf of eight workers from five of the 19,000 farms affiliated with the Cooxupé cooperative. The article, by the Times‘ Ephrat Livni, went on to describe Coffee Watch’s efforts to force the US Customs and Border Protection to block all coffee entering from Brazil.

    “This isn’t about a few bad actors,” the Times quoted Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.”

    The subheading of the Guardian article (4/24/25) read, “Brazil has been the world’s leading coffee producer due to the forced labor of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians.”

    AP (4/24/25) quoted International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs, saying, “Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves.”

    More labor rights than US

    NYT: Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to U.S. Authorities

    New York Times (4/24/25): “The laborers end up…harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.”

    From reporting like this, the casual reader might think that Brazil’s coffee industry is based on slave labor, and that many or most of the people who work picking coffee are enslaved. This is a greatly misleading depiction of the very real labor issues in Brazil.

    Although landless agricultural workers in Brazil, like nearly everywhere else in the world, suffer from low wages, lack of job stability and oppressive labor conditions, Brazil’s coffee farm workers have significantly better labor rights than farm workers in the United States. Nearly half of the US farm workforce are undocumented immigrants with no labor rights whatsoever, in fear of being arrested, imprisoned and/or deported by ICE.

    The arguments advanced to justify banning coffee imports from Brazil to the US rely on outliers representing a tiny portion of the workforce, not the norm, as these sensational articles present.

    Brazil’s coffee industry provides 580,000 full time jobs and millions of harvest-season temp jobs. According to Coffee Watch’s own letter, the highest number of workers rescued from “slave-like conditions” in any year since 2003 was 333, in 2023.

    When Higonnet tells the Times that “thousands” of coffee workers in Brazil work in “outright slavery” (a more than semantic leap from the Brazilian legal category of “slave-like” working conditions), she is misleadingly referring to Coffee Watch’s composite figure of 4,128, cited in Coffee Watch’s letter to Customs as the total number of coffee workers rescued from “slave-like” conditions between 2003 and 2024.

    Whereas the number of 221 workers rescued from slave-like conditions in 2024 certainly doesn’t represent the total number of workers subjected to those conditions that year, no methodology is presented to estimate what that undercount might be. The number of Brazil’s federal labor inspectors is 2,800, including 900 new hires this year, and the number estimated by IPEA needed to bring Brazil up to international standards is 3,700, so an undercount is a clear possibility, but it’s certainly a far cry from Collingsworth’s insinuation that most Starbucks coffee purchased from Brazil was produced by “trafficked slaves.”

    On the back of slave labor

    Guardian: ‘Morally repugnant’: Brazilian workers sue coffee supplier to Starbucks over ‘slavery-like conditions’

    Guardian (4/24/25): “Starbucks charges like $6 for a cup of coffee, where most of that has been harvested by forced laborers and child laborers.”

    Like the United States and most other countries in the Americas, Brazil was built on the back of slave labor, and was the last country to eradicate it, in 1888. The legacy of this today is that it has the highest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa, and huge problems of structural racism, including large but shrinking levels of inequality, and lack of opportunities for the poorest segments of society, which are disproportionately constituted of the 56% of the nation’s population that is Afro-Brazilian.

    There is a large population of landless rural workers, who with support from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST in Portuguese) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) have been successfully fighting for land rights since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship in 1985. Today, although millions of landless rural workers toil away in degrading conditions for low wages on farms producing export commodity crops like coffee, sugar and soy—some of which cross the line into violating Brazil’s slave-labor legislation—there is also a growing population of millions of family farmers who don’t employ anyone.

    Today, 78% of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms, producing around 48% of the total amount of coffee, are small-holder family farms. If Coffee Watch succeeds in lobbying the US government to halt imports from Brazil, the hardest-hit sector will be the same group that fair trade advocates work to empower. Without millions ferreted away in investment funds and offshore holdings, it’s the family farms that run the risk of financial ruin, not the agribusiness plantations, or companies like Starbucks and Nestlé that work with them. When small farmers lose their livelihood, they often become rural workers themselves, which, as Coffee Watch’s own letter to Border Patrol demonstrates, are among the lowest-paid and most vulnerable labor sectors in Brazil.

    Based on the actions of five farms that belong to a cooperative of 19,000 of them, Coffee Watch and the media organizations supporting its campaign are targeting an industry largely composed of family farmers. It’s reminiscent of Operation Car Wash, an “anti-corruption” campaign backed by the US DoJ that bankrupted Brazil’s five largest construction and engineering companies, and caused 4.4 million direct and indirect job losses, under the guise of punishing a handful of corrupt business executives.

    Just as was the case with corruption in the construction industry, the directors of the farms, the cooperative and the US corporations they sell to deserve to be held liable for their labor crimes. But punishing the industry as a whole will cause disproportionate suffering for the working class and poor, and raise Brazil’s level of extreme poverty.

    Different definitions

    Coffee Watch’s letter to acting Customs Commissioner Pete R. Flores cited US and International Labor Organization (ILO) legislation on slave labor used to justify the demand to block coffee imports from Brazil, but uses the Brazilian federal government’s much wider definition of “slave-like” labor conditions for the facts and figures used to back its argument.

    Brazil, a nation with a long history of slavery and oppressive labor conditions in rural areas, first recognized modern slavery as a problem in 1995, and widened its definition of “slave-like” labor in 2003 under President Lula da Silva. It created a series of enforcement mechanisms to hold companies accountable for violating labor laws, including a “dirty list” of companies convicted of using slave labor. These employers are required to pay a minimum of 20 months salary at minimum wage to each rescued worker, as well as court fines, and can face up to eight years in prison.

    Companies stay on the dirty list for two years and, during this time, are blocked from receiving government contracts or credit. Among the best-known companies that have appeared on the list is FEMSA, the world’s largest bottler of Coca-Cola. FEMSA was put on the list in 2018 after labor inspectors discovered truckers and warehouse workers at one of its Brazilian plants were being forced to work between 80 and 140 hours of overtime per month.

    This was one of many cases in which “slave-like” working conditions, although oppressive and illegal, did not mean they were being held captive or forced to work for no remuneration. Brazil’s definition of slave-like working conditions has some overlap with US and ILO law, for example, holding workers in captivity and forcing them to work for very low or no wages. But it also includes things that are legal in the US, even for those US agricultural workers who are not undocumented, let alone the US’s 800,000 prison slave laborers.

    As Brazil’s National Justice Council explains, the 2003 change in Brazil’s definition of slave labor represents

    significant progress in the fight against this social problem, because it goes beyond lack of freedom, expanding the criminal definition of slavery to include cases of subjection to degrading working conditions, exhaustive work hours or debt bondage.

    Coffee Watch’s own letter to Flores states:

    The Brazilian approach to forced labor is somewhat more expansive than the ILO’s, as it may allow for prosecution of employers who subject workers to extremely degrading conditions, regardless of whether coercion was present in the employment relationship.

    Any single violation of Brazil’s different criteria for slave-like working conditions makes the employer liable. This can include things like excessively long work days, not having an adequate number of bathrooms for the number of workers, making workers rent gloves and other safety equipment from the employer, not compensating workers for transportation to and from the work site, and not providing an adequate amount of drinking water. It would be easy enough for an organization such as Coffee Watch to verify this, but it’s a fair assumption to make that at least some of the coffee workers rescued from slave-like conditions since 2003 were victims of oppressive labor conditions that would not constitute slave labor by ILO or US legal criteria.

    Landless rural laborers

    This is in no way meant to minimize the oppression of those rural workers in Brazil’s coffee trade who are working in what Brazil’s government calls slave-like conditions. With over 1 million people employed in the sector, however, their situation is an outlier. Much more troublesome are the low wages and lousy working conditions that represent the norm in the industry—especially the fact that most temporary harvest laborers work off the books, outside of many of the safeguards in place to protect worker rights.

    Another problem is the low number of labor inspectors—the result of six years of gutting of the Labor Ministry by neoliberal presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, who, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed in 2017, left the government with neoliberal spending caps. These were only partially dismantled by a compromise amendment called the New Fiscal Framework, enacted as Lula returned to power in 2023.

    Capping social spending increases at 2.5% per year above inflation may have led to the compromise of only hiring 900 of the 1,800 inspectors needed to bring Brazil up to international labor standards, but the fact remains that Brazil has not reached the goal of one inspector for 10,000–15,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization.

    Around the world, landless rural laborers are among the most oppressed, poorest members of the labor force. Nevertheless, Brazilian coffee farms are not regularly raided by masked government police and their workers thrown into prison camps. In this political juncture, US institutions have little moral standing to criticize labor rights for agricultural workers in other countries—especially in countries like Brazil, whose labor rights issues stem in part from the US-backed military dictatorship’s systematic campaign of arrest, torture and murder of labor union leaders.

    Fundraising boost

    The idea that Trump’s US Customs and Border Protection would act to increase the price of coffee right now, in the name of “human rights,” based on abuses in five coffee farms, is very unlikely. This exposes the move as a publicity stunt, clearly designed to boost fundraising and legitimacy for a new NGO.

    If Coffee Watch were focused more on improving the lives of coffee workers than on institutional promotion, it could show solidarity by supporting the MST and CONTAG in their fight to help landless agricultural workers start their own farms.

    Taking big corporations like Starbucks and Nestlé to task for failing to obey local labor laws is commendable. But given the long history of US NGOs acting as regime change cheerleaders for the US State Department in Latin America, the priority that many of these organizations place on self-advancement over benefiting their target populations, and the long, cushy relationship between sleazy corporations like ExxonMobil and NGOs like Transparency International USA, can human rights guidelines for the Global South established by a US organization with no funding transparency really be trusted?

    You would think a publication like the New York Times would exercise enough due diligence to include the voice of, say, someone from Brazil’s DA office, or an official from an agency that works to monitor, punish and prevent occurrences of slave-like working conditions. Instead, it published a slightly modified press release from Coffee Watch, and the journalists involved probably thought they were doing their good deed for the month.

    Featured image: Cachoeirinha farm in Nova Resende, Brazil, on the government’s “dirty list” for labor abuses (photo: Ministry of Labor and Employment).

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Mara Kronenfeld on Israel’s Aid Blockade

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    Reuters: Activist aid ship hit by drones on way to Gaza, NGO says

    Reuters (5/2/25)

    This week on CounterSpin: As part of its deadly denial of food, water and medicine to Palestinian people, Israel attacked a civilian aid ship endeavoring to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, setting it on fire, injuring crewmembers, cutting off communications. The ship was called the Conscience. Millions around the world ask every day what it will take to awaken the conscience of leaders to stop the genocide of Palestinians, instead of trying to silence the outcry.

    Corporate media are complicit, with please-don’t-think-about-it headlines like NBC News‘ “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

    We talk about attacks on aid delivery and media’s role with Mara Kronenfeld, executive director at UNRWA USA (UNRWA being the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA USA being the partner group amplifying and grounding that work).

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Gaza’s starvation and the MOVE bombing.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Crypto Is the Biggest Corruption Issue With Trump’CounterSpin interview with Bartlett Naylor on Trump crypto grift

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Bartlett Naylor about Trump’s crypto grift for the May 9, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Common Dreams: 'A Crime With No Immunity': Trump Solicits Buyers for Corrupt Crypto Dinner

    Common Dreams (5/6/25)

    Janine Jackson: I read, thanks to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams, that Trump is planning a fancy private dinner for top investors in the $Trump meme coin. It has a dollar sign in front of it, but I don’t know how to pronounce that. But it’s the crypto token that is enriching him hand over fist, and with other crypto-related investments, has reportedly gifted the Trump family $2.9 billion in just the last six months.

    I would be ashamed, but I believe that a lot of listeners are with me as I ask, “Huh? It’s a what? That’s doing what?” Here to help us make sense of what’s happening, and why it matters, is Bartlett Naylor. He’s financial policy advocate at Congress Watch, part of the indispensable group Public Citizen. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bart Naylor.

    Bartlett Naylor: Many thanks for having me.

    JJ: What’s a meme coin? And why would anybody pay money for it?

    BN: I don’t know and I don’t know!

    So a meme coin is generally a term of derision within the cryptocurrency community for a coin that is simply developed as a joke to make fun of something, to take advantage of an internet theme. Folks have heard of Bitcoin, and a meme coin, like Bitcoin, is simply a digital receipt that you paid money for something. It’s not shares in a company that is an enterprise that, ideally, would make a profit and pay you a dividend. It’s just a digital receipt. With Bitcoin, you could sell that to somebody else, and if they paid you more than you paid for it, you’d make money.

    Marketing Trump's $Trump meme coin: Donald Trump; Fight Fight Fight; Join Trump's Special Community

    $Trump marketing website

    And that’s the idea with Trump’s meme coin, which surprisingly, for such a selfless guy, he named $Trump. So when you buy one, you are basically sending him money, and you’re also having a trading fee, which is where he’s actually made most of his money, which also goes to Donald Trump.

    You get nothing, according to him. He even says on the website, “This is not an investment opportunity. You should do this to celebrate me, to celebrate my leadership, my willingness to fight, fight, fight.”

    And he announced a few weeks ago that those 220 that buy the most will be invited to a dinner with him. It’s been a little unclear, sometimes he says the White House; other times he says it’s a golf club near Washington, DC.

    Middle East Eye: UAE's ruling family agrees to $2bn transaction with Trump crypto firm

    Middle East Eye (5/1/25)

    For background: you can’t do this. The law forbids the president from soliciting gifts. The law also forbids the president from accepting gifts from a foreign state, and this $2 billion that you had mentioned is coming from the United Arab Emirates, a sovereign fund in Dubai, and they’re going to use a separate cryptocurrency called the stablecoin. And, again, that’s a coin that is tied to a fiat currency such as the dollar. One Trump stablecoin equals $1, which basically, when you sent him that, you’re giving him an interest-free loan.

    JJ: Soliciting gifts—you’ve just said it, but soliciting gifts is a crime, right? And you wrote to the DoJ, you and others wrote to the DOJ and the Office of Government Ethics, to say just that.

    BN: Exactly. And so we are waiting on the edge of our seat that Pam Bondi will file a federal indictment of the president. I speak in jest, of course, and Trump controls the federal prosecutors. So for another three years and ten-ish months, nine months, we will await actual accountability for this.

    JJ: I mean, just to be clear, there are laws. I know that our minds are all blown, but there are laws, there are precedents, there are things to rely on. And, you know, I wasn’t a fan of the status quo. I don’t want to return to bipartisan gentility, but there are things where you think, “Wow, I didn’t even know that we needed a law to prevent that, because no one’s ever tried to do that.” Where are we, in terms of response and resistance?

    Bartlett Naylor

    Bartlett Naylor: “A number of senators have called this the biggest corruption in presidential history.”

    BN: A number of senators have called this the biggest corruption in presidential history, called for federal prosecution. Senator Ossoff of Georgia, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal, also of Connecticut, have called for an investigation by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. There are calls for this. But of course, we have a captured Congress, a captured Republican Party, and now a captured Justice Department that will not act.

    JJ: Well, what would you ask from journalism at this point? It’s strange times that we’re in, and we want to acknowledge that some of the groundwork has been laid in previous administrations. But at the same time, something new is happening. And I just wonder, finally, what you would ask from reporters on this.

    BN: Ongoing attention to this crypto grift. Because the two main stories of political influence in the 2024 election were the $280 million by Elmo Musk, to basically buy himself a co-presidency for a while. But the second was a hundred and some million dollars spent by the crypto industry, mostly to defeat anti-crypto lawmakers, the most prominent being Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. And that has sent a chill through all of Congress, and especially Democrats, who otherwise would responsibly be jaundiced about cryptocurrency, but they are voting in favor of it.

    There’s going to be a vote today. We actually don’t know the outcome, but it may well enable and give federal imprimatur to the cryptocurrency stablecoin, the kind that Trump just unveiled, this billion-dollar deal with Dubai. And they’re doing that because they’re afraid of political spending from the crypto industry.

    The advertisements paid for by the crypto industry don’t say, “Vote for Bernie Moreno because he’s pro-crypto, and vote against Sherrod Brown because he’s anti-crypto.” No, the political spending doesn’t mention crypto at all. It mentions something else, some problem that they made up about Sherrod Brown, or Katie Porter in California, or something else.

    Other PAC’s have done the same thing. If their own issue isn’t particularly popular, they pick something else. But voters need to know that crypto is the biggest bad corruption issue with Trump, and they should hold their lawmakers to account if they enable it.

    JJ: I’d like to end right there, but I just need to ask you—somebody is like, “What the hell is crypto? What is it that I’m concerned about?” Do you have your quick explanation for people who don’t even know where to start with this issue?

    CNN: Trump, who once trashed bitcoin as ‘based on thin air,’ addresses crypto’s largest convention

    CNN (7/27/24)

    BN: I would call it thin air, a Ponzi scheme. Cryptocurrency was devised by an anonymous person in 2008, as somehow a way to have a payment system that doesn’t rely on banks. And if we all just use his currency, Bitcoin, then we wouldn’t have to rely on the mega banks that crashed the economy in 2008, like JP Morgan. There would be a limited amount of them, and we would just use that.

    In fact, it has not caught on, for a number of reasons, as a currency. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to validate the transaction between, let’s say, you and me, and it’s unwieldy. But, again, I will call cryptocurrency thin air.

    And I’m actually quoting President Trump of 2018. He also understood that cryptocurrency was a big nothing. He has since realized that he can personally make a lot of money, so he’s grifting away.

    JJ: Yep. Times have changed. Well, thank you very much for that.

    We’ve been speaking with Bart Naylor of Congress Watch at Public Citizen. They’re online at Citizen.org. Thank you so much, Bart Naylor, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    BN: Thank you for having me.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • One Side Routinely Uses Human Shields in Gaza—But Not the Side That’s Usually Blamed

     

    Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:

    The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.

    In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to

    the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.

    Stunning assertion

    Jewish Currents: A Legal Justification for Genocide

    Jewish Currents (7/17/24): “By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.”

    Israel and its backers, however, have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality. The scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon (Jewish Currents, 7/17/24) explained how human shielding discourse has been misapplied to Gaza:

    Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.

    This corruption of the meaning of “human shields” has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide. At the outset of the October 2023 escalation in Palestine, a Boston Globe article (10/8/23) asserted that Hamas “uses its own civilians as human shields against attacks. Israel warns civilians before it launches attacks and urges that they leave conflict zones.” This was a stunning assertion, given Israel’s prolific record of deliberately killing Palestinian noncombatants, which long predates October 7, 2023 (FAIR.org, 10/13/23).

    The New York Times’ editorial board (10/16/23) flatly stated that “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign,” without pointing to any source documenting a single instance of this practice.

    The same was true of a piece that appeared a day later in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/23), which said that “Hamas uses the inhabitants of Gaza as human shields.” It described the group as employing a “human-shield strategy.”

    Evidence on one side

    Such claims have two major problems. One is the lack of evidence for them, and the other is the extensive evidence of Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

    Consider, for example, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s US-backed 2008–09 assault on Gaza. The UN’s fact-finding mission

    found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.

    The mission did, however, find credible allegations that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches.”

    The UNHRC’s report on Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, fell short of saying that Hamas used Palestinians as human shields. The commission said it was “disturbed by” a “report” that a Hamas spokesperson said people in Gaza should go on their roofs as a way of  “shielding their homes from attack.”

    The document said that “although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.” That’s quite different from saying that Palestinian fighters actually did compel Palestinian civilians to act as human shields.

    But the report said that that’s what Israel did:

    The manner in which the Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian civilians to stand in windows, enter houses/underground areas and/or perform dangerous tasks of a military nature, constitutes a violation of the prohibition against the use of human shields.

    An Amnesty International report (3/26/15) on Operation Protective Edge noted that

    Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.

    Another important context for the human shields issue comes from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/11/17). The organization says that, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967,

    Israeli security forces Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.

    This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities.

    ‘Hamas command bunker’

    WSJ: Israel Races to Root Out Hamas as Calls for Gaza Cease-Fire Mount

    By describing a raid on a hospital as an effort to “root out Hamas,” the Wall Street Journal (11/10/23) gave credence to unsubstantiated Israeli claims.

    Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, corporate media have frequently ignored this body of evidence. The human shields propaganda arguably reached its apotheosis in the run-up to Israel’s November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex at the time, and during and after the assault.

    A Wall Street Journal article (11/10/23)  on the matter carried the headline “Israeli Forces Race to Root Out Hamas,” with the subhead “Israeli forces face one of their toughest challenges as they converge on strip’s largest hospital.” Taken together, these phrases imply that Al-Shifa has a Hamas presence that ought to be “rooted out.” The piece said that Israeli

    troops have converged in the past day on the sprawling facility, which Israel contends holds a major Hamas command bunker underneath the complex, a claim Hamas has denied.

    At no point did the authors mention that Israel had presented no credible evidence in support of these allegations (FAIR.org, 12/1/23).

    A New York Times report (11/15/23) said that

    Israel maintains that Hamas built a military command center at the hospital, using its patients and staff as human shields.

    The seizure of Al-Shifa, along with whatever evidence the Israelis produce of Hamas’s military presence there, could affect international sentiment about the invasion, as well as the continuing negotiations to free the hostages captured by Hamas last month.

    This passage suggests that the question is what type of evidence Israel will provide of Hamas’s supposed operations at Al-Shifa, rather than whether it has any convincing evidence at all. The piece opted to present the supposed command center as a “he said, she said” narrative, but Hamas reportedly said that they were “prepared for an international delegation to conduct a search of the hospitals and their grounds for evidence of such alleged underground tunnels and command centers” (Mondoweiss, 11/13/23).

    ‘A deadly lie’

    HRW: Gaza: Unlawful Israeli Hospital Strikes Worsen Health Crisis

    Human Rights Watch (11/14/23) found that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”

    Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital denied that there was a Hamas command center under the facility (Guardian, 11/14/23). Human Rights Watch (11/14/23), for its part, said:

    The Israeli military on October 27 claimed that “Hamas uses hospitals as terror infrastructures,” publishing footage alleging that Hamas was operating from Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also alleged that Hamas was using the Indonesian Hospital to hide an underground command and control center and that they had deployed a rocket launchpad 75 meters from the hospital.

    These claims are contested. Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate them, nor seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals.

    Nevertheless, a subsequent CNN (11/17/23) report took the “shrug and say, ‘gee, golly, we just don’t know’” approach:

    Israel points to the hospital as an example of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.

    Since launching an operation at Al-Shifa this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it found a tunnel shaft and military equipment, but it has not yet shown proof of a large-scale command and control center. Hamas denies the allegations. CNN has not verified the claims of either Israel or Hamas.

    CNN may not have been unable to verify either party’s claims, but they do their audience no favors by leaving out Human Right Watch’s remarks, or the following from Katrina Penney (Otago Daily Times, 11/16/23), a representative of MSF, which had personnel working at Al-Shifa:

    We have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base. In fact to the contrary; the hospital facilities have been trying to treat patients and trying to shelter civilians and their families at levels far beyond their capacity.

    Excluding such testimonials gave Israel’s “command center” and “human shields” arguments unwarranted credibility. In contrast to CNN, Maureen Clare Murphy (Electronic Intifada, 11/15/23) offered a much sharper assessment of the available evidence, writing that

    Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses Al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.

    But such honesty and precision is generally too much to ask of corporate media.

    ‘A sub-army of slaves’

    WaPo: We can’t ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields

    To establish the “truth” that Hamas uses human shields, Washington Post columnist James Willick (11/14/23) quotes a Post editorial (11/5/23) criticizing Hamas for “provoking Israel militarily—while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels.” By this logic, any non-suicidal military operation against Israel would involve “human shields.”

    This dismal coverage of the human shields question was not limited to the reporting on Al-Shifa. Throughout the genocide, corporate media have often treated the idea that Hamas routinely uses Palestinian civilians as human shields as an established fact, while pretending that Israel doesn’t do exactly that.

    Nor have media offered any proof of Hamas engaging in this practice in the post–October 7 US/Israeli rampage, as in an in-house Washington Post column (11/14/23) by Jason Willick, headlined “We Can’t Ignore the Truth That Hamas Uses Human Shields.” Hamas, he said, was “trying to increase” the number of dead Palestinian civilians.

    A Newsweek op-ed (5/23/24) from Fordham University philosophy professor John Davenport referred to what he called “the stark fact” that Hamas uses “ordinary Palestinians as ‘human shields.’” While voluminous evidence of US/Israeli crimes throughout the genocide was readily available (Middle East Eye, 10/20/23, 5/16/24), Willick and Davenport failed to marshal a single report from the UN or an NGO that substantiated their claim that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.

    Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (7/1/24) said that, in the months since October 7, “the Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale.” Haaretz (8/13/24) reported that “random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.”

    Still, US media commentators like Bret Stephens (New York Times, 9/3/24) and the Journal’s editorial board (10/7/24) were more interested in making uncorroborated claims that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields than in discussing Israel’s widespread, confirmed use of the practice.

    More recently, Haaretz (3/30/25) ran an article by an anonymous senior officer in the Israeli military detailing how “in Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.” The officer explains how no infantry force in the Israeli military goes into a house in Gaza before a human shield clears it, which means “there are four [human shields] in a company, 12 in a battalion and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”

    Blaming Palestinians for their own deaths

    Reuters: Israeli military changes initial account of Gaza aid worker killings

    Reuters (4/6/25) allowed a National Security Council spokesperson to claim without contradiction that aid workers killed by Israel were “human shields for terrorism.”

    Even after Haaretz published this account, the New York Times ran an op-ed (4/6/25) asserting that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” as if it were Hamas that kept a slave army of Palestinians for this purpose.

    Similarly, a Reuters report (4/6/25) on Israel’s March 23 massacre of 15 paramedics quoted US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes, “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism.” The piece didn’t bother pointing to the lack of proof for Hughes’ claim, nor did it inform readers that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields on a daily basis.

    In the same vein, an NBC News piece (4/7/25) on the paramedics atrocity included the sentence, “The White House on Sunday said Trump held Hamas responsible for the incident because Hamas uses ambulances and ‘human shields.’” Nothing in the article cast doubt on this unsubstantiated assertion, or noted that a senior Israeli military officer had just acknowledged (Haaretz, 3/30/25) that

    the highest-ranking personnel on the ground have known about the [Israeli military’s] use of [Palestinians as] human shields for more than a year, and no one has tried to stop it.

    To suggest that a meaningful portion of the Palestinians killed in Gaza can be attributed to Hamas using them as human shields—lack of evidence be damned—is to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, while reducing US/Israeli responsibility for the slaughter.

    The canard also demonizes Hamas, painting its leaders as brutal savages with no regard for any human life. That in turn rationalizes the US/Israeli assault on Gaza; the narrative suggests that Hamas are so brutal toward their own people that one should cheer for Israel to eradicate them, not only for Israel’s benefit, but ultimately for the Palestinians’—even at the cost of leveling Gaza and exterminating its people.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Black History Is American History’: CounterSpin interview with Tanya Clay House on erasing history

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Tanya Clay House about erasing history for the May 2, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    WaPo: Trump’s executive order targeted this museum. Many visitors question why.

    Washington Post (3/30/25)

    Janine Jackson: Historians, teachers, community leaders and racial justice advocates are rallying around the National Museum of African American History and Culture, as the Trump White House has set its destructive sights on it as part of the effort to erase Black history from US history, to claim that any accurate acknowledgement of Black people’s lives in this country “deepens societal, divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made.”

    We’ve heard this song before. There are few more radical ways to oppress people than to suppress their history, their experiences, their voices, to insist that only ever more wonderful things have happened in the United States, and that only that fairytale is acceptable to tell or to hear. The harm wrought—and, to be clear, intended—is not just to Black people, but to the very concept, the aspiration of multiracial democracy.

    Which is why the Freedom to Learn network, and its #HandsOffOurHistory campaign, comprise so many groups and communities. The coalition was convened by the African American Policy Forum, where our guest is senior strategist, and where I serve as a board member.

    Tanya Clay House has worked for years on supporting democracy by supporting communities of color’s right to vote, including work with the American Bar Association, the Hip Hop Caucus and the Kairos Democracy Project, as well as as an independent consultant. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tanya Clay House.

    Tanya Clay House: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

    Instagram: Kimberle Crenshaw takes the Uncovering Black History Challenge

    Instagram (4/30/25)

    JJ: I just saw Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, from the African American Policy Forum, doing a kind of video minute about Bruce’s Beach, a California property where Black families were living in the ’20s—too happily for the likes of their white neighbors, who had the city seize the land under eminent domain, saying it’d be used for a public park, and then leaving it undeveloped once they’d achieved the obvious goal of driving the Black people out.

    That’s just some of the flavor of this kaleidoscopic project. Tell us more about what #HandsOffOurHistory and Freedom to Learn are doing, and hoping to do.

    TCH: Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak about this. So we’re at a time—and I hesitate to say this is a critical time; it’s been critical for a long time—there are things that are occurring within our country that many maybe never thought would come back, because we thought we had at least evolved on a certain level to not engage in revisionist history, to not go backward towards the times when we are qualifying people based upon their skin color, that we are continuing to demean and to engage in actions that really undermine the value of people, culture, in order to stoke fear, in order to maintain power of, essentially, the white majority.

    Unfortunately, we are at that time point, at that place again, where we are essentially this generation’s civil rights movement. We have a coalition of organizations that convened about three years ago under the Freedom to Learn banner, in order to really speak out against the beginning stages of attempting to eradicate our history.

    Popular Info: Why the College Board watered-down its new course on Black history

    Popular Information (2/2/23)

    The push to eliminate African-American studies and pull out certain teachings, particularly Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s teachings, within African-American studies courses, this had moved through Florida and all the way up through College Board standards, and there was a galvanizing of organizations in order to push back on what we saw occurring, because it was undermining the ability of students to learn their history.

    So we came together three years ago, and then again last year under the same banner, because book bans had evolved, book bans across the country in every state, and we were really trying to raise the specter and bring it to people’s attention, what this is doing, coming after the culture, and coming after freedom of thought.

    And this was actually the playbook of Project 2025, and now, unfortunately, another year later, we are living Project 2025. We are living what that playbook, of not only the book ban, not only the erasure, the undermining of African-American studies courses, but the direct targeted attacks on all things diversity, equity and inclusion, which is really another way of targeting Blackness, and targeting those that are other, trying to other people, and saying that, in fact, this country is not inclusive; in fact, it is only that for the white majority.

    And so Freedom to Learn is really focused. We recognize that it can no longer just be a day—we were galvanizing on one day every year—but also to continue that drumbeat. But this year, we had a whole week, Freedom to Learn Week of Action. And it’s because of, you mentioned the executive order that is specifically targeting Black history, and the Black museum mentioned and called out is the National Museum for African-American and Culture, otherwise called the Black Smithsonian, here in DC, but also Black museums across the country.

    And so we are galvanizing and bringing people together to lift up all of the things that I’ve discussed, and to really focus on what this is doing to our country, and how it is completely undermining the freedom of thought, how it is essentially engaging in replacement theory, and how we are in need of a movement to ensure that we do not repeat the sins of our past.

    JJ: I get frustrated when news media say “the White House is seeking to undermine Black studies, Black museums and cultural institutions.” And, first of all, that that’s somehow in the interest of “ending divisions.” I don’t know how you even type the words that Donald Trump wants to end divisions.

    But then, the idea that somehow it’s only Black people who are harmed, or only Black people who care, when we’re talking about history and, as you say, freedom of thought in its essence. This is of interest, or should be of concern, to absolutely everyone.

    TCH: You’re absolutely right. Our slogan and its hashtag is #HandsOffOurHistory, because Black history is American history, it is all of our history, and it is crucial to understand how this country’s evolved. You can look at the failures of America in one way as, OK, these are the challenges, these are the problems, these are the atrocities that America has engaged in, but you can also say, it’s also what we’ve overcome, or are attempting to overcome, and move forward on.

    And so if you look at it only as the way that this administration is stating, that it’s a divisive concept, that is the fear of acknowledging the past, and where America has come from, and the ideals that they have been attempting to achieve. It’s not acknowledging all of the great evolution and the work that people have been engaged in, in order to achieve the ideals that are ingrained within our Constitution, that are ingrained within the American psyche, of freedom and liberty, freedom of thought, that people are created equal and have equal opportunity. In fact, this administration seems to be completely counter to that, and not wanting others, only wanting a certain segment of this population, to actually be free, essentially.

    And so that’s why they’re targeting, and stating that anything that interrupts or upsets that power dynamic of those that are currently in power, that therefore it’s considered divisive. And the first target right now, particularly, is Black history. And Black history, though, if you don’t understand and you don’t learn it, all people are at a disadvantage, because that is also a critical component of how it is that our civil rights infrastructure has been established, and how we ensure protections for all people, for women, for LGBTQ Americans, for Latinos, for Asians, for anyone who is not a white majority. So I think that simply declaring in a statement that it’s a divisive concept is ignorant, is the best that I can say at this point.

    USA Today: Who gets to write America's history? Activists prepare to battle Trump administration.

    USA Today (5/5/25)

    JJ: And I think that there are plenty of white people who also would say, We also want to learn the history of this country, the real history of this country. Please don’t speak in our name and say you’re protecting us from it, because it’s actually part of what white people need to learn, and want to learn as well.

    I don’t know if you have any particular thoughts about reporting. Apart from USA Today‘s Deborah Barfield Berry, and a lot of folks at a local level, I haven’t seen much attention to Freedom to Learn. But part of what I’m learning is how much you can grow and maintain healthy lines of communication outside and around the news media narrative. The Banned Books Tour that you referenced went straight to schools and campuses, and set up shop and spoke directly to people. But media coverage can still help or hurt in some ways.

    TCH: Yeah. We know that there has to be a groundswell in local communities as well, that it’s not going to be, as was said in a different context, “the revolution will not be broadcast.” We have to be on the ground, engaging in one-on-one contact, and that’s what we’re doing in many ways. The Freedom to Learn Week of Action this year is about getting into communities and giving people ways to engage at their local level, to obtain a digital library card that gives young people access to all of the books that have been banned.

    And that is hundreds, hundreds of books that have been banned. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, learning about Ruby Bridges, To Kill a Mockingbird. These are readings that I grew up on, learning and understanding America, and it really helped to gauge, and to direct how I understood, how this could be in the society. Our children now don’t have access to that.

    So we have the digital library cards that people can have there for free. We have every library. We’re partnering with them on sending letters to the editor, to your local papers, speaking to the fact that this is our history, Black history, it’s all of our history. That you’re actually engaging in revisionist history by trying to erase and not talk about what has happened in the past. Because if you do that, you’re not going to learn from it.

    Tonya Clay House

    Tonya Clay House: “This administration is intent on repeating the sins of the past, which is why they don’t want people to learn about what happened in the past.”

    And in fact, what we believe is happening is this administration is intent on repeating the sins of the past, which is why they don’t want people to learn about what happened in the past.

    We have other ways in which we’re also engaging. We’re telling people to make your own video. Like you mentioned, Dr. Crenshaw uplifted the historic sites that are in your own community, that you may not know about because things are being removed. It’s not just monuments, but historic land properties, artifacts as we’ve been hearing about, things that often are on loan in different museums. If you can lift that up, take a selfie of yourself, #HandsOffOurHistory. That’s the tagline.

    We’ve got a number of different ways in which we’re engaging and wanting people to uplift, but particularly on May 3, if you’re here in the DC area, we’re encouraging people to come join us, because we’re going to be gathering together on the steps of the John Wilson Building to speak to this issue of erasure, and how we’re going to reaffirm Black history. We have a Black history affirmation that we have on our Freedom to Learn website, and we have civil rights leaders from across the country and locally as well, as well as employees of the Smithsonian and others that are going to be speaking, faith leaders. We’re all coming together and we’re saying, hands off our history, and we want to show that we’re not going to allow this to happen, because this is all of our history.

    And so we do want everybody to take a moment. There are ways that everybody can do just one thing, at least something. And everybody may not be able to do the marches, or not be able to do, maybe, the video. But maybe you can get the digital library card, or maybe you can give money. There are different ways in which people can engage, and we’re trying to give you all the ways to help you do that.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ll end on that note of participation. We’ve been speaking with Tanya Clay House, consultant and senior strategist at the African American Policy Forum, among many other things. Tanya Clay House, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    TCH: Really appreciate it, thank you for having me.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Bartlett Naylor on Meme Coin Grift, Ashley Nunes on Public Land Selloff

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    Marketing Trump's $Trump meme coin: Donald Trump; Fight Fight Fight; Join Trump's Special Community

    $Trump marketing website.

    This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch.

     

    Landscape of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

    Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (photo: Judith Slein)

    Also on the show: Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. Ashley Nunes is public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. We hear from her this week about that.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Our Position on Palestine Is Not Fringe’:CounterSpin interview with Danaka Katovich on attacks on activists

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed CODEPINK’s Danaka Katovich about attacks on activists for the May 2, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Arrest of Code Pink's Medea Benjamin

    CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin

    Janine Jackson: It is misleading to portray public protest simply in photos of people being dragged off the street by law enforcement, because protest and dissent take many forms, some less visible than others. Still, the people in those photos have meaning for us, about being vocal and visible in frightening times. If standing up and speaking out loud in oppressive times were easy, well, there’d be less oppressive times, wouldn’t there? Whatever one’s imaginings about what they woulda, coulda done, the reality is that it is not a walk in the park to protest in person, knowing that you may face a lethally armed officer, tasked with grabbing you and throwing you in a cell, with the weight of the state behind them.

    The state also has many forms of attacks on protesters and protest, and those are not always so visible, either. All of that is in play right now, and here to talk about it is Danaka Katovich, national co-director of the group CODEPINK. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Danaka Katovich.

    Danaka Katovich: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.

    JJ: I know that you see what’s happening to CODEPINK as just a piece of a bigger issue, but maybe first tell us a little about what’s been happening to CODEPINK in the last few months.

    Common Dreams: Push Back Against Sen. Cotton’s McCarthyite Lies About CODEPINK: Women for Peace

    Common Dreams (3/27/25)

    DK: Yeah. I think this new wave started with Sen. Tom Cotton, who’s the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he was at a hearing, during a CODEPINK disruption of the hearing, he stated, like it was a fact, that CODEPINK is funded by the Chinese Communist Party. We’re not, but someone in such a high position of power saying that is difficult to navigate, scary; you wonder what they’re going to do next.

    And the very next day or two days later, Sen. Jim Banks, in a different Senate hearing, repeated and regurgitated the same lies about us, and asked Pam Bondi to investigate CODEPINK for these fake and not real ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

    And they’re doing that to—you know, we’re very in their face. We’re in Congress every single day, challenging them on the genocide in Gaza, and their support for the genocide in Gaza, and their constant willingness to ignore the American public. It’s their job to listen to the American public and represent us, but they don’t do that. And we’re very in their face, and they’re trying to intimidate us, and scare us into being quiet.

    JJ: MAGA couldn’t hate CODEPINK any more than they do, to the extent that they know you exist. So is the hope to isolate CODEPINK, even among other pro-Palestinian groups?

    DK: I don’t think so, to be honest. In my honest assessment, I think they are going after us because we’re a well-known group—online, at least—and we post everything that happens to us, and all the interactions that we have, to educate the public on what’s really going on in Congress. So I don’t think it’s to isolate us from the Palestine movement. If it is, it’s absolutely not working.

    Code Pink: I Have 2.1 Million Reasons

    CODEPINK (4/30/25)

    JJ: I sense that CODEPINK, along with other groups, understands that you have to talk around dominant media narratives. I just saw a message today talking about how simple it is to want a child born in Gaza to live. I think people can get explained away from that basic human understanding, told that politics is over your head and let smarter folks decide. But folks who don’t do organizing think maybe you just come up with a magic message, but it’s much more human to human than that, isn’t it?

    DK: Oh, absolutely. And that’s what’s really rooted me in this work, is our position on this is not fringe. A poll came out last week that said 70% of Democratic voters do not support sending weapons to Israel. That is so vastly different than what that poll would’ve been two years ago, or was two years ago.

    I’ve not had to read a million books—I mean, I have, but a lot of people haven’t read a million books—to have the opinion that Palestinians in Gaza, and children in Gaza, deserve every single right to dignity and life that any person on this Earth has.

    Because we’re seeing their faces, we’re hearing their voices. We see what they’re going through on our phones every single day. There’s no shortage of content coming out of Gaza that Palestinians have demonstrated their humanity in the worst situations of their life. And I think people don’t have to be even politically aware to not support what’s going on in Palestine.

    JJ: The expansive and transparently intimidating effort, the work that’s being applied against CODEPINK, to say you’re funded by Communist China, that’s meant to keep folks from listening to you, or thinking about what you have to say. But that intimidation could be applied to anyone that they designate they don’t want us to hear from. So it’s not like they’ve set themselves any guardrails. This is a bigger thing.

    CNBC: White House Blasts Amazon Over Tariff Cost Report: 'Hostile and Political Act'

    CNBC (4/29/25)

    DK: Yeah. What’s funny is this morning, before we did this interview, the Trump administration was doing a press conference about Amazon. Amazon said that they were going to post the prices for how the tariffs are affecting consumers, and the Trump administration and the press secretary, I can’t remember her name, said Amazon is partnering with a Communist China propaganda arm.

    JJ: Right. So it’s a go-to.

    DK: It’s literally whoever they disagree with, which is probably great for us, because they’re completely making their propaganda seem so pathetic and deluded.

    JJ: Right. But following from that, because it’s fascinating to me, in the way that MAGA and the right will just throw charges out there. And then when they’re disproven, they’ll say, Yeah, but they’re really still true.

    It reminds me of the way prosecutors will never accept a wrongful conviction: If he didn’t do what we sent him to prison for, he did something else. So we were still right to send him to prison.

    FAIR: NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well

    FAIR.org (8/17/23)

    And I think, at a certain point, an observer has to acknowledge that truth is not the point. It’s just us versus them. And I think a lot of folks lose the plot right there, because we don’t know how to operate in a system where truth doesn’t matter. So in the face of just blatantly false charges against you, how do you keep going forward, and help other folks go forward themselves?

    DK: I think one way we’ve done it is help people realize just how ridiculous it is, because they can say whatever they want, and they will continue to say whatever they want. They’re saying it as if it’s a fact. Even though, if any of this were true, they would’ve shut us down years ago, when they started bringing up these allegations. I think that is one way we approach it, is just making it as ridiculous as it is, and unserious as it is.

    JJ: Finally, we need a brave independent press corps right now, that could push back on these scurrilous attacks—scratch ’em, you can see their falsehood, but they’re part of attacks on democracy and on human rights. Corporate media—spotty, good things here and there. But in the main, I don’t see it.

    But of course, corporate media are not the only media. I wonder what your thoughts are, overall, on the state of journalism and protest, and just what you would like to see from reporters in this moment.

    DK: When Mahmoud was arrested by ICE agents, I think there was a different sort of pushback than there were on groups that are being attacked in such ways, like these vague and false claims about supporting terrorism, or supporting Hamas, or being funded by these foreign agencies or whatever. I think there was some pushback from even mainstream media. They were asking critical-thinking questions that I feel like they’ve been completely not doing for years and years.

    But when it’s a group, when it’s CODEPINK or all these other Palestine organizations, they don’t ask these critical-thinking questions that they’ve asked when it happens to individuals. So, when someone accuses a feminist organization in the US of being funded by a foreign government, I would like to hear them challenge that, because it’s a direct attack on civil society. We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and they’re trying to take us down a peg, and even mainstream media who claim to support women’s rights and all of these things don’t even question it at all. So I’d love to hear them actually be critical of the Trump administration in a way that’s not just benefiting their specific neoliberal values.

    Danaka Katovich

    Danaka Katovich: “Their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion.”

    JJ: And then, any final thoughts for activists who might be kind of afraid to go out in the street or to join an organization, because they feel targeted and fearful? What do you have to say to folks?

    DK: I would say the fear is the point of all of this. I fluctuated between being scared that they want to shut down CODEPINK… The thing that I come back to is, their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion. The point is fear. And I think if they’ve instilled fear, then they’re winning. And I think it’s OK to be afraid. I think it’s normal and human. But in this trajectory that we’re on, it will only get scarier to resist what is happening.

    JJ: And we’ll do it in community, yeah?

    DK: Absolutely.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Danaka Katovich. She’s national co-director at the group CODEPINK. Thank you so much, Danaka Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    DK: Thank you so much for having me on.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Jumping to Blame Renewables for Iberian Outage

     

    The world doesn’t know yet what caused the dramatic power outage on the Iberian Peninsula (BBC, 4/28/25). Nevertheless, the right-wing press both in the US and Britain quickly exploited it to dubiously suggest that the blame rested with Spain’s push for more renewable energy sources. The insinuation that clean energy is at fault has even infected outlets like the New York Times and AP.

    NY Post: Devastating blackout in Spain raises questions about reliance on solar power, wind power

    New York Post (4/30/25): “Experts have previously warned that Europe’s increasing reliance on renewable energy…could lead to blackouts and other supply issues.”

    The right-wing New York Post (4/30/25), while admitting that a final determination on the cause of the outage in Spain hadn’t surfaced, ran with the headline “Devastating Blackout in Spain Raises Questions About Reliance on Solar Power, Wind Power.” As the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid criticized the Spanish government’s response, it reminded its readers that that government is “socialist.” It cited “experts” four times to pin blame on “renewables,” while naming only one. That expert noted that solar plants’ lack of inertia—which, the Post explained, is something produced by “gas and nuclear power plants,” means that “imbalances must be corrected more quickly.” (Inertia is not a characteristic unique to non-renewable energy, as the Post suggests; hydroelectric energy, another popular renewable, uses turbines and produces inertia.)

    An op-ed by anti-environmentalists Gabriel Calzada and Fernández Ordóñez in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (4/30/25) said that “Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally.” They blamed “energy-transitionist ideologues” on the continent for the blackout, because they “forced in” renewables.

    Again, while admitting that the cause of the outrage had yet to be determined, they echoed the Post’s suggestion that renewable sources are by their nature “unreliable,” focusing on their lack of “inertia”:

    The greater the share of renewables vis-à-vis conventional power plants with synchronous turbines, the less inertia there is to cushion instantaneous load fluctuations in the grid.

    This causes the whole system to become “increasingly fragile, with higher risk of failure.”

    The far-right journal Compact (4/29/25) said renewable “sources, especially photovoltaic solar, can’t supply the requisite inertia the grid needs.” Admitting that the cause of the outrage was still unknown, it hoped the affair would repopularize climate-ravaging forms of power generation against woke wind farms and soyboy solar plants:

    Whatever the cause, this blackout could have a salutary impact on European energy policy if it dissuades countries from pursuing aggressive renewable energy policies that make power less reliable.

    The importance of inertia

    Energy Central: Overcoming Grid Inertia Challenges in the Era of Renewable Energy

    Energy Central (8/14/24): “While transitioning to a renewable-based power grid presents challenges, the benefits significantly surpass the risks.”

    The loss of power for Spain and Portugal, a major crisis reminiscent of the great northeast American blackout of the summer of 2003 (WABC, 8/14/23), has taught the world an important lesson about centrality of inertia in the electricity systems built around traditional energy sources. Gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants use giant spinning turbines that “store kinetic energy, which helps stabilize the grid by balancing supply and demand fluctuations,” explained Energy Central (8/14/24). “High inertia means the system can better withstand sudden disturbances, such as a generator tripping or a sudden surge in demand.”

    Solar and wind energy, which are in growing use in Iberia and seen as a clean alternative in an age of climate crisis, lack this feature, which means integrating them into energy grids requires alternative ways of addressing energy fluctuation problems. It’s something engineers have long understood, and have been addressing with a variety of technical solutions (Green Tech Media, 8/7/20; IET Renewable Power Generation, 11/10/20).

    In general, questions of inertia are an important concern of energy planners when it comes to balancing clean energy and the need to stabilize the grid. But they’re not the only way the grid is stabilized.

    A Spanish professor of electrical engineering explained in Wired (5/1/25) that both local “meshes,” which help distribute electrical flows, and interconnections with neighboring grids are crucial for preventing the kind of imbalance that apparently led to the Iberian blackout. But the latter has always been Spain’s “weak point,” because of the “geographical barrier of the Pyrenees” mountains. Rather than suggest a pullback from solar or wind, as right-wing media seem to pine for, experts told Wired the needed response was greater interconnection, and more storage mechanisms or stabilizers to account for the reduction in inertia.

    ‘Uniquely vulnerable to outages’

    NYT: How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable

    New York Times (4/29/25): “The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources.”

    But the anti-renewable drum beat from the right inspired similar reporting in more centrist corners. The New York Times (4/29/25) took a similar tone, under the headline, “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.” The article itself seemed to have an identity crisis, trying to paint the peninsula’s success in ramping up renewables as a false victory while at the same time acknowledging that it wasn’t just the renewable energy itself that caused the vulnerability:

    The incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.

    The article did also explain Spain’s relative lack of investment in necessary grid infrastructure and storage. But those who didn’t get past the headline would have come away with the same false impression about renewables as readers of the New York Post.

    The Times (4/30/25) doubled down in a follow-up piece the next day, saying, “The incident has raised questions about whether Spain and Portugal’s rapid shift to renewable energy left them more vulnerable to outages.”

    An AP (4/30/25) explainer, which was also picked up by the Washington Post (4/30/25), used phrases like “renewed attention” and “questions remain” to cast a vague haze over the role of the peninsula’s renewable energy:

    On Tuesday, there was renewed attention on Spain’s renewable energy generation. The southern European nation is a leader in solar and wind power generation, with more than half of its energy last year having come from renewable sources. Portugal also generates a majority of its energy from renewable sources.

    Questions remain about whether Spain’s heavy renewable energy supply may have made its grid system more susceptible to the type of outage that took place Monday. The thinking goes that nonrenewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, can better weather the type of fluctuations observed Monday on Spain’s grid.

    After sowing doubt about renewables, the AP wrote that Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, said “it was too early to draw a straight line between Monday’s event and Spain’s solar power generation.”

    ‘You’ve got to get the engineering right’

    Euro News: Fact check: Did wind and solar really cause Portugal and Spain’s mass blackout?

    Euro News (4/29/25): “Far from being the cause of the peninsula’s woes…the large percentage of renewable energy in Spain and the flexibility of hydropower systems enabled the nation to react and recover more quickly.”

    Though none of the outlets above seemed able to find them, some experts suggested neither solar power nor inertia were likely at fault. Euronews (4/29/25) said:

    Some experts have previously voiced concern that Spain’s grid needs to be upgraded to cope with the rapid integration of solar and wind. But others stress the unlikelihood of the mass blackout being down to the intermittent renewables, which the Spanish and Portuguese operators are by now adept at handling.

    Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables explains that renewable power plants with 2MW of power generation or more were disconnected because of a disturbance in the frequency of the power grid—as per national safety protocols.

    Essentially, the disturbance was “a consequence and not a cause,” it said in a statement. SolarPower Europe, UNEF and Global Solar Council also emphasise that photovoltaic power plants did not voluntarily disconnect; they were disconnected from the grid.

    The English edition of the Spanish daily El País (5/1/25) concurred, quoting Pedro Fresco, general director of the Valencia Energy Sector Association:

    The failure of a photovoltaic plant, however large, doesn’t seem likely to be the cause of the collapse of the entire electricity system…. Nor is it true that there weren’t enough synchronous sources at that time: There was nuclear, a lot of hydropower, some solar thermal and combined cycle power, and even cogeneration, coal and renewable waste… In fact, there was more synchronous power than at other times.

    Others pointed more to the grid itself. Reuters’ energy columnist Ron Bousso (4/30/25) said the “issue appears to be the management [emphasis added] of renewables in the modern grid.” The outage, he said,  “should be a stark warning to governments: Investments in power storage and grid upgrades must go hand in hand with the expansion of renewables generation.”

    The Guardian (4/29/25) also intervened, quoting a European energy analyst: “The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause.” Further, the paper quoted University of Strathclyde electrical engineer Keith Bell:

    Events of this scale have happened in many places around the world over the years, in power systems using fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro or variable renewables. It doesn’t matter where you are getting the energy from: You’ve got to get the engineering right in order to ensure resilient supplies of electricity.

    Experts say it could take months to determine the exact cause(s) of the outage (New York Times, 4/29/25).

    Exploiting the crisis

    Al Jazeera: Spain’s grid denies renewable energy to blame for massive blackout

    Spanish power company chief Beatriz Corredor (Al Jazeera, 4/30/25): ““These technologies are already stable, and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues.”

    The quickness of not only right-wing but also centrist outlets to blame solar and wind power for the debacle is in part rooted in Spain’s right-wing political opposition’s exploitation of the crisis, using it to bash the left-leaning governing parties and Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the nation’s energy company. Al Jazeera (4/30/25) quoted a spokesperson for the right-wing People’s Party:

    Since REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, we can only point to the malfunctioning of REE, which has state investment and therefore its leaders are appointed by the government.

    It’s easy to see why the People’s Party would politicize this. Just last year, the party fell under heavy criticism in Valencia, where the party is in local power, for its failure to act in the face of dire weather reports that led to massive flooding, killing more than 200 people (AP, 11/9/24). The national blackout has allowed the right to attempt to shift the anger toward the ruling Socialist Workers Party.

    But it’s also par for the course for the right-wing media to defend the conservative alliance with the fossil fuel industry, which is threatened by any move to address the climate crisis. The media’s jump to blame Spain’s renewables for a massive blackout looks a whole lot like their eagerness to (falsely) blame wind power for Texas’s 2021 blackouts (Media Matters, 2/19/21; FAIR.org, 2/26/21).

    While we may eventually know exactly what happened—likely to be a complicated mechanical explanation that should inform us how to better guard against future problems—propagandists know that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Taibbi Cites Government Attacks on Media to Defend Government Attacks on Media

     

    FAIR: Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook

    Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”

    The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.

    I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”

    It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.

    Public vs. state media

    Racket News: No, State Media and Democracy Don't Go "Hand in Hand." Just the Opposite

    Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”

    Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

    Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)

    FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.

    His words, not mine

    White House Wire: The Most Successful First 100 Days in Presidential History

    White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.

    Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:

    That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent masked police into the last independent TV station on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.

    I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.

    If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.

    Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:

    Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.

    He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.

    The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.

    A sloppy attack

    Annenberg: Public Media Can Improve Our ‘Flawed’ Democracy

    Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”

    Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for The Nation (4/15/25).

    Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.

    Taibbi continued:

    People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.

    I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.

    As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Hey NPR, Free Speech Isn’t Just a Vibe

     

    Green Card–holding students are being abducted from the streets by agents of the state for attending protests and writing op-eds. News outlets are being investigated by the FCC for reporting that displeases the president. Federal web pages are being scrubbed of a lengthy list of words, including “race,” “transgender,” “women” and “climate.”

    NPR: Freedom of speech is shifting under the Trump administration. We're exploring how

    “Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy Era?” NPR (Morning Edition, 4/7/25) asked—with the argument for the former position being that “conservatives are just, in general, much more willing to speak their mind.”

    NPR responded to this shocking government attack on free speech with a Morning Edition series on “The State of the First Amendment,” whose introductory episode’s headline (4/7/25) declared freedom of speech to be “shifting under the Trump administration”; it promised that the show would be “exploring how.”

    The wishy-washy language wasn’t a promising start, and the segment only went downhill from there, taking an “on the one hand/on the other hand” framing to an assault on core democratic rights.

    Host Leila Fadel explained: “All this week, we are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced?” After offering soundbites from people on “both sides” of this debate, she asked:

    Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fearmongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?

    It’s a vital question with a very clear and obvious answer—one that NPR, facing an investigation from the FCC into its corporate funding and a drive by Trump to end its federal funding, and laboring under ideological overseers installed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), refused to offer its listeners. (Trump signed a new executive order last night to attempt to defund NPR and PBS, accusing them of “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”)

    ‘Too early to tell’

    Leila Fadel

    NPR‘s Leila Fadel (4/7/25): “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?” (Photo: Mike Morgan/NPR)

    After airing Trump’s claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” Fadel offered brief descriptions of “attacks on the press” and actions that have “broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways.” (The first example: “Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration.”)

    The episode then took its balanced framing to an interview segment featuring two legal scholars, Lee Bollinger, former Columbia University president, and Jonathan Turley, a Fox News regular. Fadel introduced the two by noting that “they see the threats to [the First Amendment] in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump,” while “Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.”

    In her questioning of Turley, Fadel did rebut his claim that the Biden administration and social media companies colluded to censor conservative speech. She then brought up “actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech,” citing “college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza or Russia’s war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest.” She noted as well that “government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity.” She asked: “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?”

    It’s perhaps meant to be a tough question to make him admit that calling Trump a protector of free speech would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. (Turley responds, “Well, it’s too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.”) But Fadel’s language—”is censorship shifting?”—turns around and concedes the right’s false claims of censorship under the Biden administration (which she’d just rebutted!). Fadel and NPR offer only two ways of looking at the situation: Trump is increasing free speech, or censorship is just a swinging pendulum whose victims change as administrations change.

    The segment wraps up with Bollinger and Turley finding at least one point of agreement: that the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil violates, in Turley’s words, “part of the core protections that define us as a people.”

    ‘They feel more free’

    NPR: Freedom of speech is shifting under the Trump administration. We're exploring how

    NPR (4/7/25) framed the First Amendment question  as “who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

    The online version of the show (4/7/25), in which the audio transcript is condensed  into an article format, bent even further backwards to find balance. It explained that the series “will explore who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

    That exploration started by naming real censorship that has already taken place: “scrubbing reports and federal grant applications of words the Trump administration has banned,” fears that “participating in protests could lead to deportation,” an online portal where people can “file complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion lessons in class with the US Department of Education.”

    If this were a report on a foreign country, it’s hard to imagine NPR offering an “on the other hand” to that list of clearly authoritarian crackdowns on speech. But here comes the next paragraph, trotting out the obligatory balance:

    Yet plenty of others—including anti-abortion activists, the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty and members of university Republican clubs—say they feel more free today to express views without fear of a backlash now that President Trump is back in office.

    The article eliminates references to Turley and Bollinger, but includes two quotes. One is from a history teacher who feels afraid to answer student questions related to the Trump administration. That’s “balanced” by one from the president of the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, who says they have more members willing to “be outwardly and openly conservative than we did before the election.”

    Orwellian redefinition

    FAIR.org: New York Times’ Fear of Ordinary People Talking Back

    When you define the threat to free speech, as the New York Times (3/18/22) does, as “being shamed or shunned”—that is, criticized by others’ speech—it opens the door to suppressing speech in the name of free speech.

    This absurd and harmful false balance NPR creates is predicated on the idea that “free speech” can mean simply how unconstrained a person feels to speak what might be unpopular opinions, including the various forms of bigotry and disinformation that have been unleashed by the Trump administration. But free speech is not, in fact, about feelings; it’s about consequences. It’s one thing to feel less afraid that your peers will criticize or even yell at you for speaking your opinions on campus. It’s another to fear that expressing your opinions will bring down official sanction, up to and including banishment from the country.

    Free speech is not the freedom from “backlash” from those who disagree with your views, despite the MAGA movement’s best efforts to convince people of that—aided and abetted by many “liberal” elites and pundits who feel they have been “canceled” by left-wing criticism of their own (often bigoted) views. If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.

    NPR concluded its article, “[Trump’s] critics say his concern for free speech is only for speech his administration finds acceptable.” That is, in fact, the only way you can make sense of the claim that Trump stands for “free speech”—by defining it as the ability of the approved people to speak, while those who would criticize (and thereby “cancel”) them are silenced (FAIR.org, 3/4/25).

    The Trump administration is bringing the power of the state down on people who express opinions and ideas it finds objectionable. The consequences of that power, for both individuals and democracy, are quite dire. When NPR talks about “who feels more free to speak” and “who feels silenced,” it’s defining free speech the way MAGA wants it to be defined—as a vibe, not as a right. Ultimately, though, NPR‘s complicity in this Orwellian redefinition will not protect them from Trump’s vendetta.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here, or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Do Mob Wars Help Crime Victims?: Understanding media coverage of healthcare price battles

     

    Summit Daily: ‘What do we do?’ CommonSpirit hospitals no longer in-network for thousands of Coloradans with Anthem insurance

    The Summit (Colo.) Daily (5/2/24) amplified the anxiety health consumers felt in the face of providers’ and insurers’ threats.

    This time last year, tens of thousands of people in Colorado anxiously wondered if they’d have to find a new doctor or start using a different hospital. Contracts setting payment levels for Catholic Church–affiliated hospital chain CommonSpirit Health to be a member of preferred provider networks run by insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado were set to expire on May 1, 2024, and negotiations were a train wreck.

    CommonSpirit accused Anthem of trying to pay rates so low that its hospitals couldn’t afford to take care of patients, while Anthem shot back that CommonSpirit wanted rate increases at more than twice the rate of inflation (CBS KKTV 11, 4/30/24).

    Media coverage reached a fever pitch as the deadline approached. Without a new agreement, Coloradans covered by Anthem insurance plans would have to pay far more out of pocket to use CommonSpirit hospitals and the system’s affiliated doctors (Denver Post, 4/26/24). The potential consequences would be extreme in communities where CommonSpirit is a dominant provider, especially in the state’s rural and resort areas, where the company’s facilities are the only available option for miles around (KOAA, 5/1/24). “What Do We Do?” a plaintive Summit Daily headline (5/2/24) asked.

    The high-stakes negotiations dragged on for more than two weeks past the contract’s expiration, with the two corporate giants contending that the other side wanted dangerously low or unaffordably high rates.

    The eventual settlement was greeted with a mixture of relief and anger from patients whose care had been disrupted. La Plata County resident Christie Hunter, whose son Ollie suffers from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that weakens voluntary muscles, told the Durango Herald (5/17/24, 5/1/24) she was glad the two healthcare titans had settled, but angry that the dispute disrupted her family’s healthcare. The time spent looking for new providers “would have been much better spent trying to help my son, and get him feeling well enough to go to school.” Ollie’s first day at school after months of treatment and preparation was the day the Hunters received initial notice that they could lose access to his specialists.

    Although the high-stakes conflict was about money, the terms of the new five-year price deal remain secret.

    Performative hostage-taking

    This kind of performative patient hostage-taking has become standard practice in hospital rate negotiations across the US. At least four major network contracts in Ohio/Virginia, Connecticut, Texas and Missouri expired at the beginning of April alone.

    Media coverage usually captures the anxiety that patients like the Hunters experience at the disruption of critical medical relationships. Otherwise, the quality and depth of coverage varies widely. Some reporting fuels public hysteria to the benefit of the parties, while the best coverage provides critical national context and alerts audiences what to expect.

    To help FAIR readers understand what’s happening when these conflicts hit their communities, we’ve assembled a few lessons from the past few years, and principles that should frame local and regional media coverage.

    Think mob war

    These stories are best understood as economic warfare between gangsters dividing money already looted from the public. Insurers, who offer employers and patients nothing the government can’t do better and cheaper, fight with hospital corporations who wield monopoly power to negotiate the world’s highest prices for inpatient care, leaving millions of Americans saddled with unmanageable medical debt.

    Communicating with the public and political leaders through the media is a key negotiating strategy for both hospitals and insurance companies. Each side accuses the other of threatening patients’ access to doctors and hospitals. The corporations issue a deluge of press releases, statements and FAQ webpages to inform patients of pending changes to coverage, and the consequences for their financial, physical and mental health—all seasoned with a heavy dose of spin. The goal is to ratchet up public anxiety as the deadline approaches, and attach blame to the other side to win concessions.

    Negotiations receive intense local and regional media coverage, following the same script. Both sides publicize the looming deadline, and warn that patients may lose access to local hospitals and valued doctors. Insurers accuse hospitals of price-gouging, while hospitals insist that insurers want to pay them less than it costs to take care of patients.

    You’ll probably keep your doctor

    KFF Health News: Patients Suffer When Health Care Behemoths Quarrel Over Contracts

    KFF Health News (2/1/19) accurately characterized the antagonists in the rate disputes as “behemoths.”

    Outlets frequently catch on to the fact that they’re witnessing “a battle of Goliath and Goliath,” as Dallas-based D Magazine (4/1/25) framed a recent clash in Texas. But reporters and editors should also alert their audiences to the fact that the conflicts usually resolve themselves after a few weeks or months of widespread terror.

    Large local and regional insurers can’t run provider networks without major hospital systems, and hospital systems can’t afford to lose access to patients covered by major health insurers. As Georgetown University professor Sabrina Corlette told KFF Health News (2/1/19) during a 2019 dispute in California:

    When you have a big behemoth healthcare system and a big behemoth payer with tens of thousands of enrolled lives, the incentives to work something out privately become much stronger.

    This is what the market looks like 

    The US healthcare financing system relies on the mechanism of having private health insurance companies build networks that use financial and bureaucratic coercion to force patients to use hospitals and doctors within the network, instead of other providers. Insurers offer hospitals privileged access to the thousands of “lives” they cover in exchange for discounted rates. This is supposed to lower costs and improve the quality of healthcare.

    You can’t have networks with discounted rates without rate negotiations, which is why these high-stakes gang wars are so common and will continue. The degree to which these rate negotiations are central to the functioning of “market-based” healthcare is a critical piece of context for reporters, too often missing from coverage.

    In Colorado, for example, Pueblo Chieftain reporter Tracy Harmon largely followed the companies’ scripts in two stories (5/14/24, 5/20/24) on the Anthem/CommonSpirit fight, focusing on patients’ need for access and sourced almost exclusively to the two combatants.

    Summit Daily News reporter Ryan Spencer (4/14/24) offered some additional context, using public data to show that the CommonSpirit hospital in Summit charged rates at twice the statewide average, and “reported profit margins of 35% or more in 2020 and 2021,” according to a report by the state Division of Insurance. Neither Spencer nor Harmon made the critical policy point that the network rate negotiations are supposed to be the country’s primary cost control mechanism.

    It doesn’t work

    In Colorado, Durango Herald reporter Reuben Schafir (3/23/24) came closest to discussing the core policy problem illustrated by corporate collisions over hospital rates. A spokesperson for a consumer healthcare NGO told Schafir: “These negotiations are often a lose/lose situation for consumers. Even a timely agreement would likely result in higher healthcare costs.”

    In other words, the primary US cost control mechanism doesn’t work. Leaving prices to the outcome of mob wars has given the US the highest hospital prices in the world. Since hospital care remains the largest single element of national health spending, the failure of market-based hospital rate negotiations is one of the driving forces making the US an outlier as the costliest system in existence.

    Fort Worth Star Telegram: Blue Cross Blue Shield contract fallout. What can North Texas policyholders expect now?Read more at: https://www.star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article303406331.html#storylink=cpy

    MIT economist Jonathan Gruber told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (4/3/25) that insurer/provider conflicts illustrate why “the government should step in and regulate prices.”

    The Fort Worth Star-Telegram got this right. On April 1, contracts between Southwestern Health Resources (SWHR) and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas (BCBSTX) expired amidst the usual anxious media coverage (e.g., Dallas Morning News, 4/1/25; WFAA, 4/2/25; KDFW Fox 4, 4/1/25).

    A long Q&A-style summary in the Star-Telegram (4/3/25; non-paywall MSN text here) featured MIT economist Jonathan Gruber saying that “really the insurers and the providers are both bad guys when it comes to costs.” According to Gruber, markets have failed, and

    situations like these contract negotiations breaking down are good examples of why the government should step in and regulate prices that the private sector has failed to keep within reach of the average consumer.

    Gruber’s quote could well have been national news itself. Gruber was the intellectual architect of the Affordable Care Act, and it’s remarkable for an expert of his stature and influence to say categorically that markets have failed, and that government needs to regulate prices. Regardless, Gruber’s observation that market contracts between private insurers and hospitals have failed, and are likely to continue failing, is essential to understanding what’s happening when the healthcare mob wars come to your town.

    Washington gangsters agree

    As usual in mob wars, politicians bought by the combatants publicly wring their hands, while collecting millions of dollars in campaign assistance from each side and doing nothing to end the carnage. When the allegedly charitable Northeast Georgia Health System and insurer UnitedHealthcare ramped up their fear campaigns in 2023, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.) sent strongly worded letters to both parties, typically devoid of anything indicating whether and how Senator Warnock and colleagues intend to prevent this from happening again. The dispute was a rare one that ended without an agreement.

    Excerpt from Sen. Sen. Raphael Warnock's letter to healthcare executives

    The ultimate missing context for these stories is that for all their public antagonism, the insurance and hospital industries march in lockstep on the most important policy questions in the nation’s capital. The American Hospital Association and health insurers both spend millions of the dollars they get from premiums, and the rates exchanged under the terms of these contracts, to defeat Medicare for All, and make even modest partial reforms, like Gruber’s proposed price regulation, politically impossible.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Tanya Clay House on Freedom to Learn, Danaka Katovich on Attacks on Activists

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    Ruby Bridges. the first Black child to attend an all-white school in New Orleans.

    Ruby Bridges challenged US segregation in 1960.

    This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

    Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week.

     

    Arrest of Code Pink's Medea Benjamin

    Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin

    Also on the show:  Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: ‘Normal people don’t protest.’ In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: ‘Or else.’

    Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The Fact That She Had That Miscarriage Was Enough to Justify Arresting Her’: CounterSpin interview with Karen Thompson on criminalizing pregnancy

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Pregnancy Justice’s Karen Thompson about criminalizing pregnancy for the April 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    People: Why Was a Georgia Woman Jailed After Suffering a Miscarriage?

    People (4/11/25)

    Janine Jackson: “Why Was a Georgia Woman Jailed After Suffering a Miscarriage?” That’s the headline over an account of Selena Chandler-Scott, a 24-year-old woman who was treated by paramedics after a miscarriage on March 20 and arrested the 21st, charged with “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body.” Charges weren’t dropped until April 4.

    And the question of the headline remains, to which I’ll add another: Why was this story in People Magazine and not, say, the New York Times?

    Joining us now to talk about where this terrible story fits in the current landscape is Karen Thompson, legal director at the group Pregnancy Justice. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Karen Thompson.

    Karen Thompson: Hi, thanks for having me.

    JJ: There’s a single sentence in this People story that gave me chills: “Police investigated Chandler-Scott because she was 19 weeks into her pregnancy when she suffered her miscarriage.” That “because,” you know. But the DA says law enforcement “acted in good faith” by arresting her. Why is that? Why did she go to jail?

    KT: She went to jail because of an idea that fetuses have legal rights. She had a miscarriage at home. She did what most doctors tell folks who are experiencing a miscarriage to do, which is to stay at home. But because she did that, and because someone saw her disposing of those remains, the EMTs and the prosecutors decided that she was engaging in a crime. And why? Because that fetal anomaly, the fact that she had that miscarriage, was enough for them to justify arresting her. And that’s the basis of pregnancy criminalization, and what we’re seeing, not only in Georgia, but all around the country.

    JJ: So to be clear, this is not an aberration. It’s one of a number of cases. Listeners may have heard some of them, but I think for some people, they’re getting caught up in this “fetal remains” and the “disposal process.” But this is part of miscarrying. In other words, what are the laws that are relevant here?

    KT: I think that’s a really important place to start, right? First of all, let’s just think and talk about miscarriages. They are pretty common. I believe the number is three out of five pregnancies might end in a miscarriage, and that goes to show that this isn’t something that’s abnormal. It’s not something that is unknown to individuals who are pregnant. It’s a tragedy, but it’s a tragedy that occurs quite frequently.

    And so I think the saddest thing about this is that in this moment of loss, when she should have been given healthcare, and when she should have had a moment to grieve, she was instead facing a law enforcement response, a carceral response, to what is really a medical question and a health issue.

    JJ: What are the laws? There are laws governing, and I guess they differ state to state, but what are important laws around—what on earth is a person to do when they miscarry at home with fetal remains?

    KT: Well, it’s unfortunate, because Georgia did pass a fetal personhood law in 2019, and it has that law in its criminal code. And so what that means is that we’re still trying to figure out what prosecutions are going to be brought under that law. And even though Georgia has a specific infanticide law, that is any kind of homicide involving children, even though they have a law that exempts the conduct of a pregnant woman with respect to her unborn child, Georgia’s murder statute doesn’t have that same exception.

    And so although courts before the passage of that fetal personhood law declined to recognize fetuses as people for the purposes of murder, we don’t know where we are right now. And the fact that this poor woman was charged in this way is showing us that the laws that are on the books are now being expanded, and used in this method to criminalize pregnant women.

    JJ: I think they’re making use of the sort of secrecy and shame with which miscarriage can be surrounded. The very fact that people might not understand what happens when you miscarry at home has to do with silences around it.

    And I want to point out the fact that Pregnancy Justice has a resource called Unpacking Fetal Personhood that really talks you through these laws—where they come from, what they do and what they mean. And I would direct folks to that resource.

    As we record on April 24, I did do another search this morning. I still saw nothing from broadcast news, major dailies. And now it’s been a month in the past, so is it even “news’ anymore? I don’t know if these major outlets think that they have met their quota of reporting on efforts to control pregnant people, but what do you make of media attention in general to these laws, to their predicted and predictable impacts? How do you think journalists are doing on this?

    KT: I don’t think they’re doing great, to be honest, for the reasons that you said. I think that there are a lot of ways in which the attention is pulled to what is being framed as a crime. But what is not happening is the understanding that even this terrific news, which did get reported on, that the charges were dropped against Ms. Chandler-Scott, the bigger problem is that it doesn’t undo the very real harm and devastation that the charges bring in the first place.

    And what the media are doing by not reporting on the charges being brought, instead of the fact that they were dropped after pressure was brought to bear by the community, by the outrage of huge swaths of the United States population, that is the stuff that gets things going. But, unfortunately, it is the stuff that is always ignored by the media.

    And that’s not just within the reproductive justice space. We’ve seen it when it comes to racial equity, economic equity. There are places that fall out of the conversation because the issues that they foreground, the issues that they shine light on, are really hard for people to accept.

    And so my hope is that even in this really calamitous situation, Ms. Chandler-Scott is getting rest and privacy, but what it’s showing us is that we have to continue to talk about these cases. We have to continue to talk about what’s happening, and we have to hold space for women who are going through something that a lot of other women have experienced. We need to make sure that they are not feeling shame, that they know that they did not do anything wrong, and they deserve to get the medical help and the support that they need.

    JJ: I was struck by a number of stories, of what stories there were, they would end with, “We reached out to Ms. Chandler-Scott, and we haven’t heard back.” And I thought, “You think? You think maybe she doesn’t want to chat right now?” And what I wonder is, why not reach out to the police? Why not reach out to the DA and ask them why they did what they did, and demand answers from them, rather than trying to add human interest or color to the story by talking to someone who doesn’t have any reason to necessarily talk to you?

    KT: Right.

    JJ: Well, that’s my rant.

    And I’m just going to ask you, finally: Pregnancy Justice. It’s not just abortion rights; that’s part of it. Pregnancy justice is a more expansive term and concept, that’s not about separating out cases from one another. I’d just like to give you an opportunity, finally, to talk about what that broader understanding means. And then, are there particular policies and laws that you point to, that could meaningfully intervene right now? Just final thoughts.

    Pregnancy Justice's Karen Thompson

    Karen Thompson: “The thing that is important to know about pregnancy criminalization is that it doesn’t stay still.”

    KT: Pregnancy Justice, our entire mission is to advocate for those who are being criminalized because of their pregnancies, their pregnancy outcomes, like a miscarriage in this case, or stillbirth or abortion. But, as you noted, abortion cases are actually a tiny fraction of what we see, and, sadly, the vast majority of them involve people who are criminalized for behavior during their pregnancy that people don’t approve of, whether that’s substance use, or maybe not even getting prenatal care in a way that others would like folks to do.

    And so the thing that is important to know about pregnancy criminalization is that it doesn’t stay still. The laws that are being used to criminalize folks, as they were used here in the Chandler-Scott case, they’re not made, actually, to protect a child, but they’re being used against pregnant people in a way that is just harmful to pregnant people, and not actually helping or serving their pregnancies, or the fetus that the state is saying that they have interest to protect.

    So our work is to make sure that the truth about science, and the reality of giving rights and not stripping them from pregnant people, upholding bodily autonomy for folks who are experiencing pregnancy—all of those things are our focus, so that we can make sure that the law is doing what it’s supposed to do, and not spreading to just criminalize pregnant people, and socially control how they act and the decisions they make with their bodies.

    And, unfortunately, we’re up against a lot of laws, a lot of legislative pushes to make abortion a homicide, to say that any exposure in utero that might involve drugs, whether prescribed or not, is sufficient to charge somebody with murder if they have an adverse pregnancy outcome. All of these laws are percolating in at least 17 different states in the country.

    So my hope is that people will stay aware, that they will look at the resources, including the one that you just mentioned, on our website, and that we can start thinking about the ways in which what is happening now reflects a broader picture of trying to keep women out of public space, from having power over their own bodies to make their own decisions, and to understand where that fits into a bigger picture around criminal justice and incarceration in this country.

    JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice. They’re online at PregnancyJusticeUS.org. Thank you so much, Karen Thompson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    KT: Thanks so much for having me, and having this discussion.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘There’s Never Been a More Blatant Corporate Incursion Into the Public Sector Than DOGE’: CounterSpin interview with Jeff Hauser on DOGE infiltration

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser about DOGE’s infiltration for the April 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    American Prospect: DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans

    American Prospect (3/19/25)

    Janine Jackson: Trying to keep up with the myriad harms to people and processes coming from the Trump White House is difficult and dispiriting. But piecing out what’s happening from what’s threatened and what’s feared is crucial if we intend to resist. Helping us keep meaningful track of one piece of the work before us—the actions and impacts of the weird shadow power called the Department of Government Efficiency—is new work from our next guest.

    Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, where this work is housed. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jeff Hauser.

    Jeff Hauser: Thank you for having me.

    JJ: Tell us about the scope and the purpose of your work around DOGE, which I can barely bring myself to say. What does that project look like?

    Rolling Stone: Elon Musk’s History With the ‘Doge’ Meme His Govt. Office Is Named After

    Rolling Stone (11/13/24)

    JH: So you don’t think that government should be organized around metaphors from cryptocurrency scams?

    JJ: Oddly.

    JH: Yeah, we at Revolving Door Project tend to agree that that is not how we should organize our government.

    We, in general, track corporate influence in politics, with a particular focus on the executive branch. And there has never been a more blatant corporate incursion into the public sector than DOGE, which reflects the privatization of our domestic policy, and increasingly our foreign policy as well, by people who are not even bothering to give up any of their private sector ties, and actually join the government for a few years—which we’re not fans of; we believe in career civil servants. But these people aren’t even doing that much. They’re just continuing to run, say, Tesla and SpaceX while running large swaths of the government, and never having been put before the Senate for nomination.

    And so we are tracking what DOGE does, and we will continue to do so, even if we chase Elon Musk physically out of the government, as he scurries back to Tesla, potentially. But we know that he has inserted his people all across the government, and they are doing some of the worst things we’ve ever seen, and the government is breaking as a result. We’re going to track what they do, and who they do it to.

    Jeff Hauser

    Jeff Hauser: “They are doing some of the worst things we’ve ever seen, and the government is breaking as a result.”

    JJ: Well, yeah, because “revolving door,” you think, “Oh, someone, they work for an oil company, then they go work for a regulator, and then they go back to the oil company, and isn’t that a conflict, and isn’t that problematic?” But now the door is a blur. There’s no door there.

    JH: There’s just a gaping hole, and they have one foot on one side of the government, and they have one foot in the private sector at the same time, and they have one brain. And so you can bet which side they care about more, which has more meaning to them, the public interest or their private enrichment.

    JJ: And part of what I resent is the way it makes you feel quaint for saying, “Well, no, you’re not supposed to make laws and policies based on your own private enrichment.” It makes it seem as though that’s an old-fashioned idea. It didn’t start with Musk, in other words. “If you can run a company, you can run the country” has been a message that we’ve been hearing, unfortunately, for some time.

    JH: Oh, sure. I mean, it goes back. Even John F. Kennedy brought Robert McNamara into the government, and he became LBJ’s secretary of Defense, and the Vietnam War was a consequence. And Robert McNamara was actually a pretty serious individual, who ended up becoming reflective upon his many, many sins in government.

    But the Whiz Kids of the 1960s, they destroyed America’s credibility across the world. I’m not saying it was perfect before the 1960s, but they did real damage, and they were much more serious people than Musk. So you have less serious people doing something that even the serious people can’t do. This is the result.

    JJ: And you pointed out appointments, and I just saw this morning, Shawn Musgrave at the Intercept saying that Musk has now put a Tesla employee as a senior advisor at the FBI. And he’s also going to be at the Justice Department’s Justice Management Division. This is a guy who worked at Tesla. So it’s not just that there’s this weird rogue agency. They’re putting their people everywhere.

    Wired: Former Palantir and Elon Musk Associates Are Taking Over Key Government IT Roles

    Wired (2/12/25)

    JH: Yeah, they are increasingly not identifying their people as specifically DOGE, because they’re understanding that that makes them a bit of a legal vulnerability. And so they’re enmeshing their people as advisors and temporary employees in specific departments. But from published reports and from social ties, you can see that random engineers from Palantir, which is Peter Thiel’s panopticon, scary surveillance data-processing company—when you’re seeing all those people from Palantir across the government, whether or not you’ve identified them as DOGE, and we do have a list that we maintain of the people who are identifiably DOGE in the government. But some people who are their peers are now entering government, not exactly as DOGE, but we will monitor them as if they were DOGE, and monitor the privatization of government, and not allow them to change brand names just because the brand of DOGE is bad now and getting worse.

    Reuters: More than 200 lawsuits and many judicial setbacks in Trump's first 100 days

    Reuters (4/29/25)

    JJ: Right, right. And that’s the importance of the tracking, so that we are not simply overwhelmed and confused by different titles, and by connections that we might not be able to trace, we laypeople who aren’t making it our job, as you are.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling blocking deportations without due process was so welcome, and maybe surprising, and we are seeing judges pushing back against some of this in some places. And I just want to ask you, broadly, where do you see meaningful resistance to this phenomenon? Are the courts the place to look for this?

    JH: The courts cannot be relied upon on their own, for many reasons, including the makeup of the judiciary, and also just the nature of the judicial role in the United States, which has definitely always been more reluctant to be on the cutting edge of positive social change, then sometimes being a bulwark against positive change, as in the early 20th century.

    But it’s still better for the courts and judges to have some self-respect than to not. And so I think what you saw in the seven-judge majority this weekend is seven justices of the Supreme Court standing up for the notion that courts are real, and that when the issues of law are clear, the president doesn’t get to do just what they want just because they won a one-and-a-half percent popular vote plurality. Pushing back against these insults that are coming from Trump, they’re coming explicitly from JD Vance, and are coming from Pam Bondi’s Justice Department. Basically, these justices may not all be committed to doing the right thing for the right reasons, but they do have egos. They do believe in the institution of the judiciary, sometimes because it’s just so enmeshed with their sense of self. I think the courts can be helpful.

    But the courts are always going to do a better job if they think they are with the public and that they are speaking up for majorities, and against minorities or authoritarians seeking to grab power. So I think the more demonstrations we see, the more judges will do the right thing, and vice versa. So you can have vicious cycles and you can have virtuous cycles of resistance. And I think the more everyone does their particular job within our shaky democracy, the more likely we come out through the other side relatively OK.

    JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about one of the ways that folks understand what the public is doing. If you’re not at the demo, what are you doing? You’re reading about it in the paper.

    And I think it’s clear to most by now that the traditional media framing of balancing every Republican claim against a Democratic claim, and the best ideas are going to be right in the middle, that’s not appropriate, to put it mildly. If it ever was, it’s not today. And we have a White House that is promoting chaos, and that’s lying through its teeth. And that is a real challenge to reporters and reporting. And I just wonder, finally, if you think they’re, in general, rising to the occasion, and then what you would like to see.

    Guardian: Host of CBS’s 60 Minutes rebukes corporate owners Paramount on-air

    Guardian (4/28/25)

    JH: Sure. I don’t think they’re standing up to the moment, but we do have to recognize that the moment that they face is a very challenging one. I think about the Associated Press being denied full access at the White House because they continue to call the Gulf of Mexico by the name the Gulf of Mexico.

    And I’m sure your listeners and readers are well aware of that, but that sort of travesty, just think about it from the economic model of the Associated Press. They need their articles and photographs to be picked up around the world. Their access is a valuable aspect of how they run their organization. At least they are standing up for it.

    But then you’re seeing their peer organizations lacking any sort of solidarity. You’re seeing a lot of media organizations that are pursuing mergers for reasons unrelated to Trump, but are bending the knee to Trump because they want approval.

    I mean, the scary news about the 60 Minutes executive producer stepping down, that’s worrisome. That doesn’t mean 60 Minutes was a perfect program at any point in time, but that’s a sign that things are going wrong.

    What should the media do? They need to take the platitudes they say about the First Amendment seriously. If they’re going to be picked up and embraced by the public as institutions that are worth saving, they need to step up in this moment. This is the moment that you build up those reservoirs of credibility for. And if not now, when? So I’d like to think that they can sacrifice in the short run in order to come out as institutions worth saving, and potentially getting more reader support or viewer support in the future, because people believe in them, and they knew that they stood up when necessary, because right now that’s not happening. They are too fearful.

    JJ: Absolutely. I’m going to end on that note for now.

    We’ve been speaking with Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project. They’re online right where you’d look for them, RevolvingDoorProject.org. Jeff Hauser, thank you so much for joining us this week on Counter Spin.

    JH: It was so much fun. Thanks for having me.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Feds Threaten Wikipedia After Right-Wing Media Uproar

     

    WaPo: U.S. attorney for D.C. accuses Wikipedia of ‘propaganda,’ threatens nonprofit status

    Wikipedia editor Molly White told the Washington Post (4/25/25) that the Trump administration was “weaponizing laws to try to silence high-quality independent information.”

    The Trump administration is very upset with Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. Ed Martin, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter (4/24/25) to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent nonprofit, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”

    The letter said:

    Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.

    The letter threatened the foundation’s tax-exempt status, demanding “detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors,” the Washington Post (4/25/25) reported.

    Wikipedia has been attacked before by countries with censorious reputations. Russia threatened to block Wikipedia “because of its entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reported Euractiv (3/4/22), and the site has been blocked in China (BBC, 5/14/19). Turkey lifted a three-year ban on Wikipedia in 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 1/16/20).

    Martin’s letter indicates that the Trump administration is inclined to join the club.

    ‘Notice a theme?’

    New York Post: Wikipedia’s lefty slant measured in new study — but I’ve felt its bias firsthand

    Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post (6/25/24) that Wikipedia displayed “bias” because its article about her used to quote her tweet (6/30/14) about Hamas: “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”

    Right-wing media in the US have been complaining about Wikipedia for a while, displaying the victim mentality that fuels the conservative drive to punish media out of favor with the MAGA movement. Here are a few headlines from Pirate Wires, a right-wing news site that covers technology and culture:

    • “How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel/Palestine Narrative” (10/24/24)
    • “How Soros-Backed Operatives Took Over Key Roles at Wikipedia” (1/6/25)
    • “Wikipedia Editors Officially Deem Trump a Fascist” (10/29/24)

    “More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” reported the New York Post (3/18/25), citing the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. “Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors,” Post writer Bethany Mandel (6/25/24) alleged, citing research by the right-wing Manhattan Institute.

    Under the headline “Big Tech Must Block Wikipedia Until It Stops Censoring and Pushing Disinformation,” the Post (2/5/25) editorialized that the site “maintains a blacklist compendium of sources that page writers and editors are allowed to cite—and …which will get you in trouble.” The latter category, the Post claims, includes “Daily Caller, the Federalist, the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News and even the Post. Notice a theme?”

    (Wikipedia’s list of “perennial sources,” which are color-coded by reliability, marks numerous left-wing as well as right-wing sources as “generally unreliable” or “deprecated”; the fact that the Post implies only right-wing sources are listed is an indication that its reputation as “generally unreliable for factual reporting” is well-deserved.)

    ‘Stop donating to Wokepedia’

    Fox News: Media Wikipedia co-founder calls on Elon Musk to investigate government influence over online encyclopedia

    Early Wikipedia staffer Larry Sanger told Fox News (3/7/25) he wants the government to investigate government influence on Wikipedia.

    This hostility is amplified by one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, who accused the site of having a left-wing bias on Fox News (7/16/21, 7/22/21), although he has reportedly not been involved with the site since leaving in 2002 (Washington Times, 7/16/21). He even requested Elon Musk and the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to investigate possible government influence at Wikipedia (Fox News, 3/7/25). It’s an Orwellian situation, asking the government to use its muscle against the site on the grounds that it might have previously been influenced by the government.

    Musk, the mega-billionaire who bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and lurched it to the right (Guardian, 1/15/24; NBC News, 10/31/24), also has his problems with Wikipedia. Before he took on a co-presidential role in the Trump White House, Musk  (X, 12/24/24) posted, “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”

    The conservative Heritage Foundation is also gunning for Wikipedia. The think tank developed Project 2025, the conservative policy document guiding the Trump administration (Atlantic, 4/24/25) that has also called for tighter government control of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, it “plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic,” the Forward (1/7/25) reported. The paper speculated that the group was targeting “a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.”

    For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is of plenty evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction (American Prospect, 5/1/08; Guardian, 8/18/10; Bloomberg, 3/7/25).

    Capturing online media

    Verge: Wikipedia is giving AI developers its data to fend off bot scrapers

    AI’s heavy reliance on Wikipedia for training data (Verge, 4/17/25) means Wikipedia‘s point of view will largely shape the answers we get from AI.

    One might ask, “Who cares if Wikipedia is biased?” Lots of media are biased in one direction or another. And the notion that any nonprofit organization’s political leaning requires its status be investigated is ludicrous, considering that three of the organizations hyping Wikipedia’s alleged wrongdoing—the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and the ADL—have the same tax-exempt status. It’s hard to imagine the New York Post accepting a Democratic administration pressuring these groups to change their right-wing positions.

    Wikipedia remains popular, with some 4 billion visits a month worldwide. In addition to its lengthy entries, it’s a repository of outside citations that are important for researchers on a wide range of subjects. AI models heavily rely on Wikipedia articles for training—so much so that Wikimedia offers developers a special dataset to help keep the regular site from being overwhelmed by bots (Verge, 4/17/25).

    Wikipedia is being targeted by an administration that clearly wants to bring all of Big Tech and major online media under its ideological watch. So far, the right has made progress in capturing the giants in Big Tech and social media. Musk turned the site formerly known as Twitter into a right-wing noise machine (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; PBS, 8/13/24; Guardian, 1/4/25).

    “In recent months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of specific moves to signal that Meta may embrace a more conservative administration,” reported NBC News (1/8/25). Google donated $1 million to this year’s inauguration fund (CNBC, 1/9/25). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has grown closer to Trump (Axios, 2/27/25; FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

    At the same time, the administration is disappearing international students who voice disagreement with US policy (FAIR.org, 3/19/25, 3/28/25), seeking to defund public broadcasting (FAIR.org, 4/25/25), attacking academic freedom (Guardian, 4/27/25) and weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

    So it is fitting that this administration also wants to pressure Wikipedia into moving rightward. What differentiates an authoritarian regime from other right-wing administrations is that it doesn’t just establish extreme policies, but it seeks to eradicate any space where free thought and discussion can take place. The Trump administration’s actions against media and academia show he’s not just right-wing, but an authoritarian in a classic sense.

    The efficacy of Martin’s letter remains to be seen, but this is an attack on Wikipedia’s editorial independence. It will undoubtedly cause other websites and media outlets with nonprofit status to wonder if their content will be the next in the government’s crosshairs.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • As Israel Openly Declares Starvation as a Weapon, Media Still Hesitate to Blame It for Famine

     

    Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted that Republican officials "expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”

    Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted that Republican officials at Mar-a-Lago “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival.

    Of course, this was not the first time that senior Israeli officials had advertised their reliance on the war crime of forced starvation in the current genocidal assault on Gaza. On October 9, 2023, two days after the most recent launch of hostilities, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Two days after that, Foreign Minister Israel Katz boasted of cutting off “water, electricity and fuel” to the territory.

    And just this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proclaimed that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.” Following an April 22 dinner held in his honor in Florida at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Ben-Gvir reported that US Republicans had

    expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.

    Never mind that the hostages would have been brought home safely as scheduled had Israel chosen to comply with the terms of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas that was implemented in January, rather than definitively annihilating the agreement on March 18. It is no doubt illustrative of Israel’s modus operandi that the March 2 decision to block the entry of all food and other items necessary for human existence took place in the middle of an ostensible ceasefire.

    ‘Starved, bombed, strangled’

    CNN: USAID administrator says it is ‘credible’ to assess famine is already occurring in parts of Gaza

    A year ago, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) said it was “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.” 

    While Ben-Gvir’s most recent comments have thus far eluded commentary in the US corporate media, the roundabout media approach to the whole starvation theme has been illuminating in its own right. It has not, obviously, been possible to avoid reporting on the subject altogether, as the United Nations and other organizations have pretty much been warning from the get-go of Israel’s actions causing widespread famine in Gaza.

    In December 2023, for example, just two months after the onset of Israel’s blood-drenched campaign, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC scale, determined that “over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse).” The assessment went on: “Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) were in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) were in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).”

    A full year ago, in April 2024, even Samantha Power—then the administrator of the US Agency for International Development—conceded that it was “credible” that famine was already well underway in parts of the Gaza Strip. And the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that Gaza is “likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023”—its population being “starved, bombed, strangled” and subjected to “deprivation by design.”

    Disappearance of agency

    NYT: Gaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments

    Typically, even when outlets report sympathetically on hunger in Gaza, they fail to state clearly that it is the deliberate result of Israeli policy, as in this New York Times headline (6/25/24).

    None of these details have escaped the pages and websites of corporate media outlets, although the media’s frequent reliance on ambiguous wordiness tends to distract readers from what is actually going on—and who is responsible for it. Take, for instance,  the New York Times headline “Gaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments” (6/25/24), or the CBS video “Hunger Spreads Virtually Everywhere in Gaza Amid Israel/Hamas War” (12/5/24). Even news outlets that intermittently undertake to spotlight the human plight of, inter alia, individual parents in Gaza losing their children to starvation remain susceptible to long-winded efforts to disperse blame. (As of April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that 27 children in northern Gaza had already died of starvation and disease.)

    In an era in which news consumption often consists of skimming headlines, the phrasing of article titles is of utmost import. And yet many headlines manage to entirely excise the role of Israel in Gaza’s “hunger crisis”—as in CNN’s report (2/24): “‘We Are Dying Slowly:’ Palestinians Are Eating Grass and Drinking Polluted Water as Famine Looms Across Gaza.” Or take the Reuters headline (3/24/24): “Gaza’s Catastrophic Food Shortage Means Mass Death Is Imminent, Monitor Says.” Or this one from ABC News (11/15/24): “Famine ‘Occurring or Imminent’ in Parts of Northern Gaza, Experts Warn UN Security Council.”

    It’s not that these headlines are devoid of sympathy for Palestinian suffering. The issue, rather, is the dilution—and even disappearance—of agency, such that the “catastrophic food shortage” is rendered as transpiring in a sort of vacuum and thereby letting the criminals perpetrating it off the hook. Imagine if a Hamas rocket from Gaza killed an infant in Israel and the media reported the event as follows: “Israeli Baby Perishes as Rocket Completes Airborne Trajectory.”

    ‘No shortage of aid’

    NBC: Aid groups describe dire conditions in Gaza as Israel says there is no shortage of aid

    NBC‘s headline (4/17/24) gives Israel’s denial of a problem equal weight with aid workers’ description of Gazans’ desperate situation.

    Then there is the matter of the media’s incurable habit of ceding Israeli officials a platform to spout demonstrable lies, as in the April 17 NBC News headline “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.” The fact that Israel is permitted to make such claims is particularly perplexing, given Israeli officials’ own announcements that no aid whatsoever may enter the territory, while the “dire conditions” are made abundantly clear in the text of the article itself: “The Global Nutrition Cluster, a coalition of humanitarian groups, has warned that in March alone, 3,696 children were newly admitted for care for acute malnutrition” in Gaza.

    Among numerous other damning statistics conveyed in the dispatch, we learn that all Gaza bakeries supported by the UN World Food Programme closed down on March 31, “after wheat flour ran out.” Meanwhile, the WFP calculated that Israel’s closure of border crossings into Gaza caused prices of basic goods “to soar between 150% and 700% compared with prewar levels, and by 29% to as much as 1,400% above prices during the ceasefire.”

    Against such a backdrop, it’s fairly ludicrous to allow Israeli officials to “maintain there is ‘no shortage’ of aid in Gaza and accuse Hamas of withholding supplies.” If the press provides Israel with space to spout whatever nonsense it wants—reality be damned—where is the line ultimately drawn? If Israel decides Hamas is using wheat flour to build rockets, will that also be reported with a straight face?

    Lest anyone think that thwarting the entry of food into the Gaza Strip is a new thing, recall that Israel’s blockade of Gaza long predated the present war—although the details of said blockade are generally glossed over in the media in favor of the myth that Israel unilaterally “withdrew” from the territory in 2005. In 2010, the BBC (6/21/10) listed some basic foodstuffs—pardon, potential “dual-use items”—that Israel had at different times in recent history blocked from entering Gaza, including pasta, coffee, tea, nuts and chocolate. In 2006, just a year after the so-called “withdrawal,” Israeli government adviser Dov Weissglas outlined the logic behind Israel’s restriction of food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

    Fast forward almost two decades, and it’s safe to say that the “idea” has evolved; this is a genocide, after all—even if the corporate media refuse to say the word—and starvation is part and parcel of that. But on account of Israel’s extra-special relationship with the United States, US media have institutionalized the practice of beating around the bush when it comes to documenting Israeli crimes. This is how we end up with the aforementioned long-winded headlines instead of, say, the far more straightforward “Israel is starving Gaza,” a Google search of which terms produces not a single corporate media dispatch, but does lead to a January 2024 report by that very name, courtesy of none other than the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

    ‘Starving as negotiation tactic’

    NYT: Starvation Is Not a Negotiating Tactic

    Megan Stack (New York Times, 3/13/25): “Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding.”

    That said, there have been a few surprises. The New York Times (3/13/25), for example, took a short break from its longstanding tradition of unabashed apologetics for Israeli atrocities in allowing the following sentence to appear in a March opinion article by Megan Stack: “Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic.” In the very least, this was a vast improvement, in terms of syntactic clarity and assignation of blame, over previous descriptions of Israeli behavior immortalized on the pages of the US newspaper of record—like that time the Israeli military slaughtered four kids playing by the sea in Gaza, and the Times editors (7/16/14) went with the headline “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.”

    In the end, Israel’s starvation of the Gaza Strip is multifaceted. It’s not just about physically blocking the entry of food into the besieged enclave. It’s also about Israel’s near-total decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system: the bombardment of hospitals, the targeting of ambulances, the massacres of medical personnel (FAIR.org, 4/11/25). It’s about Israeli military attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and workers, including the April 2024 massacre of seven international employees of the food organization World Central Kitchen.

    It’s about Israel razing agricultural areas, wiping out food production, devastating the fishing industry and depleting livestock. It’s about Israel bombing water infrastructure in Gaza. And it’s about Israeli troops slaughtering at least 112 desperate Palestinians queuing for flour on February 29, 2024 (FAIR.org, 3/22/24)—which was at least a quicker way of killing starving people than waiting for them to starve.

    In his 2017 London Review of Books essay (6/15/17) on the use of famine as a weapon of war, Alex de Waal referenced the “physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide,” noting that “forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust.” It’s worth reflecting on the essay’s opening paragraph:

    In its primary use, the verb “to starve” is transitive: It’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: Today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase “man-made famine” as if such events were unusual.

    As for the current case of the Gaza Strip, US establishment journalists appear to be doing their best to avoid the transitive nature of the verb in question—or any subject-verb-object construction that might too overtly expose Israeli savagery. And by treating famine in Gaza as a subject unto itself, rather than a “technique of genocide,” to borrow de Waal’s words, the media assist in obscuring the bigger picture about this very man-made famine—which is that Israel is not just starving Gaza. Israel is exterminating Gaza.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Yemen Has Been a Place the US Has Seen Fit to Bomb With Little Public Discussion’: CounterSpin interview with Khury Petersen-Smith on Yemen distortions

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Khury Petersen-Smith about Yemen distortions for the April 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    PBS: Trump orders U.S. strikes in Yemen, promising 'lethal force' until Houthis stop sea attacks

    PBS (3/15/25)

    Janine Jackson: You could say that US news media focus on this country’s lethal military assault in Yemen was distorted by the revelation that operational planning was fecklessly shared with a journalist in a Signal group chat. Though the sadder truth might be that, without that palace intrigue, US media would’ve shown even less interest in the US visiting what Trump brags of as “overwhelming lethal force” on the poorest country in the Arab world.

    Most of what we’re getting are things like the April 9 parenthetical on PBS NewsHour, that the White House has reinstated emergency food aid to some impoverished countries, but “cuts will remain for war-ravaged Afghanistan and Yemen.” Yemen is presented as almost just a chess piece, a pawn in US designs in the Middle East, rather than a real place where real women, men and children live and die.

    Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us now by phone from Boston. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Khury Petersen-Smith.

    Khury Petersen-Smith I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you.

    JJ: What people may have specifically heard is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying:

    It’s been a devastating campaign, whether it’s underground facilities, weapons manufacturing, bunkers, troops in the open, air defense assets. We are not going to relent, and it’s only going to get more unrelenting until the Houthis declare they will stop shooting at our ships.

    NYT: Houthis Vow Retaliation Against U.S., Saying Yemen Strikes Killed at Least 53

    New York Times (3/16/25)

    Or that, translated into New York Times language:

    Some military analysts and former American commanders said that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.

    What context, information, history—what is missing from that snapshot that might help folks better understand what’s happening right now?

    KPS: Often, I want to take a big step back and go into history, even recent history, but actually, this time, let’s start with the immediate, and that statement from Hegseth. Because Hegseth is, I think, known for brash hyperbole and these wild statements. But in that statement, he was actually speaking with some precision when he said, We’re going to do this. We’re going to maintain this lethal policy until the Houthis declare that they will stop firing at US ships.

    And the reason that “declare” is an important word there is because the Houthis actually had stopped firing at US ships. When Israel entered its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the agreement that Israel then broke, and we are now—not “we” in the US, but people in Gaza—really dealing with the reality of another broken ceasefire, as Israel really tightens its grip on the Gaza Strip, but when Israel and Hamas entered that ceasefire agreement, not only did Hamas honor it, but the Houthis actually honored it in Yemen.

    Responsible Statecraft: Does the US military even know why it's bombing Yemen?

    Responsible Statecraft (3/21/25)

    So the immediate context for this latest round of vicious US bombing is that, actually, the Houthis were not firing at US ships. The Houthis had stopped their attacks. And it was the United States, really, that started the combat again, followed then by Israel, which then violated the ceasefire. So that’s a really important context, because it’s not the case that this US bombing came in response to an attack by the Houthis on US ships. Actually, the Houthis had agreed to stop fighting, and the US refused to take yes for an answer.

    JJ: Right. Maybe, for some folks, what is the nature of the Houthis embargo? What was the purpose of that? When did that start?

    KPS: Sure, and we can get into where the Houthis as a political force came from, but if we just go to the more recent history, in October 2023, the Houthis, which are effectively running much of Yemen, they framed their attacks on Israeli forces, on Israel and on global shipping through the Red Sea, in the context of solidarity with Palestinians, and as a response to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

    Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. It is adjacent to the Red Sea, and that maritime corridor is extremely important for global trade.

    Al Jazeera: Yemen’s Houthis target Israel-linked ships in Red Sea. Here’s what to know

    Al Jazeera (12/4/23)

    And so the Houthis were basically taking advantage of that position, of that location, and saying, Until Israel stops its bombardment of Gaza, global shipping will be affected by our armed attacks—and Israel can also expect military intervention on behalf of the Houthis. So that’s really some other context for where this has come from. And it should be noted that, in the same way that the Houthis honored the latest ceasefire, the previous ceasefire that Israel and Hamas entered in the fall of 2023, November 2023, was also honored by the Houthis—and by Hezbollah, by the way. So these forces, these regional forces outside of Palestine that have framed their armed actions as a response to the Israeli attack, they have honored the agreements that Israel has entered with the Palestinians when that has happened.

    JJ: That’s important to keep in mind, because Houthis and Hezbollah, and Hamas, are kind of tossed off in media as basically being a synonym for “terrorist.” You’re never offered any explanation, really, or rarely, of their role—with Houthis, in particular, their role within Yemen. It’s just as though these are kind of ragtag violent men.

    KPS: In many ways, that kind of description or that characterization of these different forces throughout the Middle East is an extension of the way that Israel and the United States portray Palestinians–that any Palestinian actions against Israel or against Israeli forces are devoid of context of the Israeli occupation, and that it’s driven by some kind of irrational hatred of Israel.

    FAIR.org: Media Hawks Make Case for War Against Iran

    FAIR.org (10/25/24)

    The other thing, in tandem with this notion of an ahistorical, decontextualized anti-Israel violence, is the notion that these are all proxies of Iran, that Iran is the puppet master in the shadows that’s pulling the strings of Palestinian forces like Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and the Houthis. And not only is that part of a campaign to demonize and really legitimize violence against Iran and throughout the region, but it also ignores the fact that these countries, of course, have their own national dynamics, and these forces have their own interests. Even if they have some alignment with Iran, they have their own interests.

    And so it’s worth noting that the cause of the Palestinian freedom struggle is very popular in Yemen. This is a country that has been divided by civil war. There’s divisions in Yemen, but one of the things that really unites the Yemeni population is the support for Palestinians. And so that’s another important piece of context when we think about why the Houthis have acted the way they have, and have framed their actions in terms of the Palestinian struggle.

    Middle East Eye: US air strikes on Yemen 'unconstitutional', advocacy groups say

    Middle East Eye (3/27/25)

    JJ: I think I’m going to bring us back to Iran in a second, but I just wanted to say, a number of groups recently have stated the reality that US airstrikes across Yemen since mid-March are unconstitutional acts of war that lack congressional authorization. Hegseth is out there saying, We tracked this guy and he went into his girlfriend’s building and then we collapsed it. Well, as Paul Hedreen wrote for FAIR.org, that’s a war crime. Why does it seem quaint, or beside the point, to note that the US is not officially at war with Yemen, that killing civilians, as the US has done and is doing, these are crimes, yes?

    KPS: Yes. There’s so many violations that are happening, but let’s start with the first one. It’s not only violations of international law that the US is committing by targeting civilian infrastructure, which it is doing in Yemen, it’s a violation of US law for the US to be effectively waging war against a country that it has not declared war against.

    And to answer your question about, there’s something that’s maybe strange about just pointing that out, I think that we have to look at at least the past 25 or so years, the so-called “War on Terror.”

    FAIR.org: How Media Obscure US/Saudi Responsibility for Killing Yemeni Civilians

    FAIR.org (8/31/17)

    From the start, US forces have been operating in Yemen. The US special forces have been operating there. The US has carried out cruise missile strikes in the early days of the “War on Terror.” And that has continued during the Yemeni civil war, which really involved a massive intervention, and, frankly, its own kind of war, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their bombardment of Yemen, which began in 2015.

    This was devastating. And the United States played such an essential role in supplying the airplanes, the bombs that those planes are dropping, but also intelligence. They did everything except drop the bomb themselves when Saudi Arabia was doing it. They supplied the targets, they supplied the planes, they supplied the bombs, to the extent that at that time in Congress, there was finally a real debate, where people like Ro Khanna and others said, Wait a minute. The US is effectively waging war here. Congress has not actually made a declaration of war. This is a violation of US law that President Trump, the first time, was carrying out.

    And so I think that all that context is really important, including, by the way, the bombing that President Biden did last year of Yemen. For many years, Yemen has been a place that the US has seen fit to bomb and otherwise do violence against, with very little public discussion in this country.

    FAIR: Media’s Top Meaning for ‘Proxy’ Is ‘Iranian Ally’

    FAIR.org (4/21/21)

    JJ: As your colleague Phyllis Bennis wrote, the US bombing of Yemen is always referred to in the media as bombing the “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger.

    I also think that carefully chosen phrasing, “Iran-backed Houthi rebels,” it sounds like it’s greasing the gears for a wider war.

    KPS: I think that’s absolutely right. The first thing to say, of course, is that these bombs have a devastating impact on civilian life, on the people of Yemen. There’s this US and Israeli notion that through so-called “targeted strikes,” and what they call “precision munitions” or whatever, that they’re just targeting who they call the “bad guys.” And again, still illegal even if you’re….

    JJ: Yeah. And then anyone else is a human shield.

    KPS: Right? Exactly. Even if the US was only targeting and hurting and killing combatants, it would still be illegal, according to US law.

    But for what it’s worth, that’s simply not the case. Civilians have suffered tremendously over these, again, more than two decades of various operations that the United States has supported. It’s been catastrophic.

    Khury Petersen-Smith, Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

    Khury Petersen-Smith: “There’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that.”

    And it’s just worth repeating that the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the destruction of Yemen’s infrastructure, the destruction of their sanitation facilities, the massive food insecurity that was caused, in particular, by the Saudi campaign of bombing—this was declared by the United Nations to be the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Subsequently, unfortunately—devastatingly—that crisis has been, on the global stage, eclipsed by the catastrophe in Gaza. But there’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that. So that’s the first thing that it’s important to say.

    But, again, the notion that there’s some evil Iranian puppet master pulling the strings ignores Yemen’s own history and politics. And I think that you’re absolutely right: it’s about setting up an escalation of US and Israeli violence that is targeting Iran, which, essentially, the US is preparing for. They’ve moved more ships and more personnel into the Middle East. They’re very open about threatening Iran. When they started this latest round of bombing of Yemen, the Defense spokesperson said that “we are putting Iran on notice.” So it’s a pretty thinly veiled threat toward Iran, and I think that we should take it very seriously. I think that for many  in the United States, it might be unimaginable for the US to have an open war with Iran, but I think that we are going to have to take these threats very seriously, and work to prevent it.

    CNN: White House national security adviser: Iran is ‘on notice’

    CNN (2/2/17)

    JJ: Let me just end on that note: What are the places for intervention? I am always sorry to sort of end with “call your congressperson,” but what are the levers that we have to work with, to prevent this slow-motion nightmare that we’re looking at? And then, also, what would you like to see journalists do?

    KPS: I think that it is important for people to put pressure on US officials. And of course that includes members of Congress, where, unfortunately, there’s quite a large degree of unity in Congress about attacking Iran. And that’s been true for a long time.

    In fact, the last time Trump was in office, there were members of Congress who were saying that Trump wasn’t going hard enough on Iran. This was during the era of so-called “maximum pressure.”

    So just challenging that consensus is extremely important. We should keep in mind that, in the early days of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, members of Congress could say what they have always said, which is: You may not like this Israeli operation, but A) Israel has this so-called “right to defend itself,” and B) this is what the American people want. And then they no longer were able to say that, because they were flooded with calls and demonstrations and so many messages saying that the majority of Americans actually opposed this. And that only grew as the situation went on.

    Voice of America: US Lawmakers Promise Iranian Opposition Group Tougher Action Against Iran

    Voice of America (1/27/17)

    And that kind of cleavage between US elected officials and the US population is important. It lays the basis for actually changing that policy. So getting that ball rolling around Iran, before things escalate, is extremely important.

    JJ: I appreciate that.

    What I have seen that is critical and probing on this has been independent reporting. And I guess that might be the place, obviously, to continue to look. But what would you like journalists to be especially looking out for, or especially trying to avoid?

    KPS: If I could say one thing to journalists who are doing their work right now, I would encourage them to please consider Iran and Yemen countries just like any other country. And countries that, when the people of these countries speak, know that there’s a diversity of opinions, as exists in every single society. And when the government speaks, they should take it seriously enough to evaluate it critically. And that’s true of any government.

    And, frankly, one of the things that I’m struck by, this persistent reality in US journalism, is that countries like Israel and United States, particularly when they speak on international questions, and particularly when we talk about Iran or Palestine or Yemen, US journalists afford this credibility to the US and Israel that they deny to Palestinians and Yemenis and Iran.

    When Israel bombs Gaza, and we hear the reports of how many people were killed, it’s still the case that American journalists use the Israeli language of saying “according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry,” as though US government agencies are identified with whatever political party happens to be in power at the moment. That’s simply not true.

    Associated Press: ‘Nobody was texting war plans.’ Hegseth denies that Yemen strike plans were shared with journalist

    Associated Press (3/25/25)

    The question is, why is there this kind of skepticism or cynicism, this notion that, well, this might not be a credible source, the government in Palestine, but the notion that the Israeli government or the US government, which have been shown to lie so many times—I mean, Pete Hegseth about this very episode, that our conversation is about, this scandal about sharing these plans on Signal, he lied directly to reporters.

    And so I really hope that instead of affording him whatever credibility US journalists have afforded government officials, which I have thoughts about that as well, certainly now, when one has lied directly to you, the media, I hope that you treat his statements with the appropriate amount of interrogation. And then take seriously the perspectives that are coming out of Yemen and Iran, which are interesting and should be evaluated with the same tools of journalism that you extend elsewhere.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Khury Petersen-Smith of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can find their work online at IPS-DC.org. Thank you so much, Khury Petersen-Smith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    KPS: I’m so grateful too. Thank you, Janine.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook

     

    NPR: Trump plans order to cut funding for NPR and PBS

    NPR CEO Katherine Maher (center) testifies in Congress against cuts to public broadcasting (NPR, 4/15/25).

    NPR (4/15/25) found itself having to write its own obituary recently when it reported that the “Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media, which includes NPR and PBS.”

    The White House declared in a statement (4/14/25) that

    American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.”

    It said the administration would ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion, or two years’ worth of approved funding, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federally created and funded organization that channels money to both national and local public broadcasters.

    ‘Finally get this done’

    Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69)

    Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69).

    Republicans have been threatening to defund public broadcasting since its inception. Fred Rogers, known for his children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, testified in support of PBS before Congress in 1969 in the face of attempted cuts to the fledgling CPB during the Nixon administration (PBS, 11/22/19).

    After the 2010 Republican congressional takeover, the House of Representatives under then–President Barack Obama voted to defund NPR and prohibit “public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR,” according to PBS (3/17/11). This came “a week after conservative activists secretly recorded an NPR executive making derogatory comments about Tea Party supporters,” leading to the “resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.”

    But even when Republicans have had full control of Washington, the GOP has backed down from destroying public broadcasting generally, recognizing the popularity of shows like Sesame Street with constituents—and the ease with which they have wrung content concessions from the networks.

    Indeed, while some right-wing critics seem truly opposed to public broadcasting, the repeated retreats from following through suggest that more of those critics preferred to simply use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right. (See FAIR.org’s critical coverage of NPR here and PBS here.)

    Times may be different now, though. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy book that guides much of this administration’s actions, says forcefully:

    All Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake…. The next conservative president must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.

    With Voice of America journalists fighting in court against the broadcaster’s closure (LA Times, 3/19/25; AP, 3/28/25), and the administration’s weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to chill speech of private and public broadcasters (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), the threat against PBS and NPR is very real.

    Unpopular cuts

    The right is loving the news. The New York Post (4/14/25) reported:

    The White House memo notes that NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called Trump a “fascist” and a “deranged racist”—statements that Maher told Congress last month she now regrets making—and cites two recent PBS programs featuring transgender characters.

    Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) applauded the plan Monday, tweeting: “NPR and PBS have a right to publish their biased coverage—but they don’t have a right to spend taxpayer money on it. It’s time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

    More broadly, however, the proposed cuts aren’t popular, as only “about a quarter of US adults (24%) say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS,” according to Pew Research (3/26/25), while a “larger share (43%) say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government.”

    Pie chart of CPB's budget

    Where CPB’s money goes (from its financial report).

    While the cut wouldn’t decimate NPR, which only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB, the impact on its member stations could be significant, especially in minor media markets. (And NPR also gets 30% of its funding from those member stations’ programming and service fees.) Seventy percent of CPB funding goes directly to local public radio and public television stations. As Maher explained on NPR’s All Things Considered (4/16/25):

    So the big impact would be on rural stations, stations in geographies that are quite large or complex in order to be able to receive broadcasts, where infrastructure costs are very high.

    This could result in “those stations really having to cut back services or potentially going away altogether.”

    The blow to public television, which faces higher costs and gets a much bigger chunk of its funding from the CPB, would be more dire—again, especially in smaller media markets. Both PBS NewsHour (4/16/25) and the New York Times (4/1/25) noted that Alaska Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate, could shutter entire stations in what is already a news desert.

    Even if Congress manages to muster the votes to block the rescission of funds for now, Trump’s knives are clearly out for public broadcasting. Earlier this year, Inside Radio (1/31/25) reported, FCC chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into

    whether NPR and PBS stations are violating the terms of their authorizations to operate as noncommercial educational stations by running underwriting announcements on behalf of for-profit entities.

    As FAIR (Extra!, 9–10/93) has long pointed out, the “underwriting announcements” on public broadcasting are commercials under a different name, and they violate the noncommercial promise of both PBS and NPR. But the Trump administration is not offering to increase public funding so these outlets can be less dependent on corporate sponsorship; to the contrary, it’s trying to take both federal and corporate money away in hopes of destroying public media altogether.

    Clamping down on dissent

    Annenberg: Public Media Can Improve Our ‘Flawed’ Democracy

    Victor Pickard (Annenberg, 3/16/22): “A robust public media system is beneficial—perhaps even essential—for maintaining a healthy democratic society.”

    One could look at this threat as part of Trump’s general distrust of major media and desire to seek revenge against outlets he believes have been unfair to him (AP, 12/14/24; Fox News, 4/14/25). Another way to look at the situation is that cuts to public broadcasting send a message to the Republican base that the administration is serious about reducing federal spending generally—a purely symbolic message, of course, since CPB funding amounts to 0.008% of the federal budget.

    But going after public broadcasters is also a part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark, all in the name of protecting the people from partisan reporting  (Political Quarterly, 3/28/24). That’s largely because strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand (Annenberg School, 3/16/22).

    In Argentina, President Javier Milei has moved to shut down media seen as too left-wing, including the national news agency Télam. The move was blasted by press advocates and trade unionists (Página 12, 3/1/24; Reason, 3/4/24). “Télam as we knew it has ceased to exist. The end,” a presidential spokesperson reportedly said last year (Clarín, 7/1/24).

    The Guardian (5/6/24) reported that journalists at the Italian state broadcaster RAI have struck “against the ‘suffocating control’ allegedly being wielded by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government over their work,” which included allegations that the network censored “an antifascism monologue that was due to be read on one of its TV talkshows by the high-profile author Antonio Scurati.”

    After Meloni took power in 2022, according to Le Monde (7/23/24), RAI,

    considered a bastion of the left, faced show cancellations, strategic personnel changes and program restructuring, all seen as part of a far-right cultural conflict under the pretext of promoting diversity.

    The union representing RAI journalists warned (La Stampa, 1/26/25) that the broadcaster’s editorial control has shifted from hosts to a shadowy new management, which “risk[s] wiping out the work that over 150 journalists have been doing for years in network programs.”

    The far-right Israeli government is pushing a bill to privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), which the nation’s attorney general warned threatened to silence criticism of the government and create a “chilling effect” on other media outlets (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24). The attack on Israeli public media comes as Netanyahu’s government has sought to curtail press freedom generally in Israel since the nation invaded Gaza in 2023 (Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24), including a government boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), and intensified military censorship of the press (+972, 5/20/24). The death toll among Palestinian journalists in the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon has been catastrophic (FAIR.org, 10/19/23, 5/1/24, 3/26/25).

    What these figures have in common with Trump is that they aren’t just extreme in their conservatism, they are actively opposed to democracy (New Yorker, 3/7/23; Foreign Policy, 12/9/23; Jacobin, 6/14/24).

    While the US right has no shortage of TV networks, radio shows, websites and podcasts, the attack on public broadcasters, widely regarded as Blue State media, tells the MAGA movement that the government is working to cleanse society of any remaining opposition to its illiberal takeover (CNN, 3/26/25). Trump’s move against PBS and NPR is in line with these other anti-democratic regimes, attempting the same kind of transition to autocracy. His administration is a part of a global authoritarian movement that wants less media, academia and other democratic institutions, because these can be incubators of critical dissent against the government and corporate elite.

    NPR and PBS don’t always live up to that mission. But cutting their ability to operate makes politics more opaque by limiting news consumers’ options beyond privately owned right-wing broadcasters. And that appears to be the point.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Jeff Hauser on DOGE, Karen Thompson on ‘Fetal Personhood’

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    This week on CounterSpin: Elon Musk reportedly told Tesla investors that he’ll be amping down his role with the Department of Government Efficiency to, one guesses, bring his big brain back into their service. Like the “War on Terror,” “DOGE” is a thing that was in part spoken into normalcy by the corporate press. Media seem ready to, if not embrace, to make respectful space for whatever hot nonsense is proffered—if it fits within their political template. In this case, it’s a thing—not officially a new Cabinet-level department, but acting like one—wildly powerful, yet utterly opaque and run by an unelected billionaire. DOGE sparked lawsuits about its legality from day one, but today’s news is about, legal or not, what it’s doing and how we can respond. The Revolving Door Project is tracking all of that; we hear from executive director Jeff Hauser.

     

    Also on the show: There’s no reason you need to know that Selena Chandler-Scott is a 24-year-old woman from Georgia who had a miscarriage last month; pregnant people lose those pregnancies routinely. You should know that Chandler-Scott was sent to jail for her miscarriage, and though later released, she won’t be the last. “Fetal personhood” may sound abstract or legalistic; but this case brings home vividly how granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses doesn’t “potentially” “open the door to,” but concretely, today, means undermining the rights of people who carry pregnancies, leaving them open to surveillance, suspicion and prosecution.

    US media seem uninterested in Chandler-Scott’s story and its implications, but we hear from Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pope Francis.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Politico Plays With Polling to Manufacture ‘Trump-Resistance Fatigue’

     

    Politico: California voters have Trump-resistance fatigue, poll finds

    Politico (4/16/25) finds “a disconnect between political elites”—i.e., its own subscribers—”and the electorate.”

    A recent Politico article (4/16/25) gave readers an excellent lesson in how not to report on a poll—unless the goal is to push politicians to the right, rather than reflect how voters are truly feeling.

    “California Voters Have Trump-Resistance Fatigue, Poll Finds,” declared the headline. The subhead continued: “From taking on Trump to hot-button issues, voters writ large embraced a different approach—although Democrats are more ready to fight.”

    From the start, the piece framed its polling results as showing the California “political elite” are out of step with voters, who are apparently tired of all this “Trump resistance” being foisted upon them. Reporter Jeremy White explained that “the electorate is strikingly more likely to want a detente with the White House,” and that “voters are also more divided on issues like immigration and climate change.”

    But problems with this framing abound, from its wrong-headed comparison to its skewing of the results, revealing more about Politico‘s agenda than California voters’ preferences.

    ‘Driving the state’s agenda’

    First of all, the poll in question—which the article never links to—surveyed two samples of people: registered California voters and “political professionals who are driving the state’s agenda.” Those “influencers” are a sample taken from subscribers to three of Politico‘s California-focused newsletters, which, the article explained, “included lawmakers and staffers in the state legislature and the federal government.” Presumably that sample also included many journalists, lobbyists, advocates and others who closely follow state politics.

    But in a country where the political right has overwhelmingly rejected reality- and fact-based news in favor of a propaganda echo chamber, one can safely assume that subscribers to Politico, a centrist but generally reality-based media outlet, will include vanishingly few right-wingers. In contrast, in a state where 38% of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, a representative sample of voters will necessarily include a significant number of Trump supporters. In other words, by sampling their own subscribers, Politico has selected out most right-wing respondents and created a group that is by definition going to poll farther to the left than the general voting public of California.

    On top of that, people subscribed to Politico‘s state-focused newsletters are highly informed about the policies being polled on. One of Politico‘s sources points this out, explaining that “they’re more aware of the factual landscape.”

    As polling expert David Moore (FAIR.org, 9/26/24) has explained, large segments of the voting public are disengaged and uninformed on most policy issues, so their opinions on survey questions that don’t provide a great deal of context are not terribly firm or meaningful. There’s very little reason, then, to compare policy opinions of California political professionals from Politico‘s subscription list with a cross-section of California voters, unless your purpose is to push lawmakers to the right.

    ‘Lower the temperature’

    And based on how they skew the polling numbers, that’s exactly what Politico appears to be trying to do here. Regarding the “Trump-resistance fatigue,” White wrote:

    The poll shows that while Democratic voters favor taking on Trump, the electorate broadly wants their representatives to lower the temperature. Forty-three percent of registered voters said leaders were “too confrontational”—a sentiment largely driven by Republicans and independents—compared to a third who found them “too passive.” A plurality of Democrats surveyed, 47%, wanted a more aggressive approach.

    This is what gives the piece its headline. But it conveniently leaves out all the voters who said state leaders’ level of confrontation was “about right”—a sizable 24%. In other words, 57%—a 14-point majority—either approve of their state leaders’ resistance to Trump, or want more of it, yet Politico manages to spin that into a headline about Trump-resistance fatigue.

    In general, how are California leaders engaging with Trump administration policies?

    The poll Politico didn’t link to.

    Turning to one of the “hot-button issues” the poll asked about, Politico told readers that “a plurality of voters is skeptical of legal immigration.”

    What the hell does that mean, you ask? White doesn’t say, except to note several paragraphs later that voters are “more likely to support reducing legal immigration” than the political elite are. Looking at the poll, it would appear to come from the question: “The US admits over a million legal immigrants a year. Do you think the number should be [increased, decreased, stay about the same]?”

    Forty-three percent of respondents said “decreased,” either “a lot” or “a little,” while 21% said “increased” and 36% said “stay about the same.” Technically, sure, a “plurality” want fewer legal immigrants (which isn’t exactly the same thing as being “skeptical” of legal immigration). But, just as with the “Trump-resistance fatigue” spin, this buries the majority opinion, which is not “skeptical,” being either fine with current levels of immigration or wanting to see more.

    On immigration, the article also reports:

    While a clear 60% of voters support the state’s “sanctuary” laws, which partition local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, policy influencers were 20 points more likely to support that policy.

    Again, that Politico subscribers in California poll to the left of voters is to be expected. That voters still support sanctuary laws by 20 percentage points despite the relentless onslaught of fearmongering from the Trump administration, as well as both right-wing and centrist media, about immigrants? That seems like important news—that Politico would apparently prefer to bury.

    ACTION ALERT: Messages to Politico can be sent here (or via Bluesky @Politico.com). Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

    Featured Image: Protesters gathered at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to protest the Trump administration on April 5, one of 137 “Hands Off!” demonstrations across California that day (Creative Commons photo: Lynn Friedman).

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Pope Francis Obits Omit Focus on Palestine

     

    Reuters: Gaza's Christians 'heartbroken' for pope who phoned them nightly

    Reuters not only had a stand-alone story (4/22/25) about Palestinians’ response to Francis’ death, but included his advocacy for Gaza in its main obituary (4/21/25).

    The obituaries for Pope Francis in the leading US newspapers ignored the late pontiff’s commitment to the Palestinian people and the acute suffering in Gaza in the last years of his life. Many of them ran separate pieces that highlighted Francis’ concern for Gaza and the response of Palestinians to his death, but they failed to mention these aspects of his papacy in the lengthy obituaries that summed up his life.

    Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936, Francis was the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to be pope. When he died at the age of 88, his leadership as a social justice pontiff was heralded widely.

    “For Francis, the poor are ‘at the heart of the Gospel,’ and throughout his pontificate, he affirmed this by deed and word,” said the Catholic magazine America (4/21/25). His liberal philosophy addressed many pressing issues, “from climate change to global poverty, war and violence, LGBTQ+ people and women’s roles in the church,” said Sojourners (4/21/25).

    Toward the end of Francis’ life, the head of the Catholic Church focused his attention on ongoing genocide in Gaza. “He used to call us at 7 p.m. every night. No matter how busy he was, no matter where he was, he always called,” George Anton, spokesperson for the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, told NPR (4/22/25). Reuters (4/22/25) ran the headline, “Gaza’s Christians ‘Heartbroken’ for Pope Who Phoned Them Nightly.” AP (4/21/25) called these communications his “frequent evening ritual,” noting that this “small act of compassion made a big impression on Gaza’s tiny Christian community.”

    Francis was generally sympathetic to addressing political and human rights for Palestinians, and under his watch the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine (BBC, 5/13/15). He “suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people” (Reuters, 11/17/24). In his final Easter message, issued the day before his death, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza to end a conflict that “continues to cause death and destruction, and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” (Truthout, 4/21/25).

    ‘Privileged a politicized version’

    NY Post: Pope Francis’ death puts major choice before his church

    As well as his call for an inquiry into charges of genocide in Gaza, the New York Post (4/21/25) didn’t like that Francis “took a very standard leftist line on President Trump, decrying his plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.”

    Not everyone in the press approved of this act of compassion when recalling his life and church leadership. In an editorial, the New York Post (4/21/25) criticized the “leftist” positions of the “deservedly beloved figure,” complaining that Francis “even went so far as to call for an investigation of Israel over its nonexistent genocide in Gaza.”

    When it came to Francis’ support for Middle East peace generally, the Jerusalem Post (4/22/25) said in an editorial, “Time and again, Israel expressed dismay at the Vatican’s tendency to elevate Palestinian narratives while brushing aside Israeli concerns.” It complained that “the Vatican’s posture under Francis consistently privileged a politicized version of the Palestinian story over the complex reality on the ground.”

    But rather than criticizing Francis’ attention to Gaza, the lengthy obituaries in the most prominent US newspapers ignored his advocacy for Palestinian rights entirely.

    ‘Excoriated modern-day colonizers’

    NYT: Francis, the First Latin American Pope, Dies at 88

    The New York Times‘ obituary (4/21/25) for Francis was almost 7,500 words long—but none of them were “Gaza.”

    The New York Times’ obituary (4/21/25), by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, did note that “he repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine.”

    It also reported that Francis’ travels included “focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.” It continued:

    In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.

    “No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,” Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan’s presidential palace. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!”

    Yet regarding his outspoken concern for Gaza, the Times found room for not a word.

    ‘Sometimes took controversial stances’

    WSJ: Pope Francis, Advocate for Economic and Social Justice, Dies at 88

    The Wall Street Journal (4/21/25) said Francis “sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice”—but his focus on Gaza could not be acknowledged.

    Obituaries at other major US newspapers also failed to include Francis’ Palestine focus. A lengthy obituary in the Washington Post (4/21/25), for example, noted that the pope’s first official trip was to the “Italian island of Lampedusa, a burdened way station for refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East,” a nod to the fact that he offered a home to migrants in need. But it didn’t mention Gaza.

    The Wall Street Journal’s obituary (4/21/25) didn’t say anything about the topic either, though it said that Francis

    made a priority of improving ties with the Islamic world, washing the feet of Muslims on Holy Thursday, visiting nine Muslim-majority countries and insisting that Islam was, like Christianity, a religion of peace.

    The same is true with AP‘s obituary (4/21/25), which likewise commented instead that he “charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.” USA Today’s obituary (4/21/25) said Francis “sometimes took progressive or controversial stances on pressing issues, such as same-sex couples and climate change,” but it didn’t bring up Gaza.

    By contrast, it was not hard to find references to Gaza in Francis’ obituaries in major non-US English-language outlets. The British Guardian (4/21/25) noted, “During his recent period in hospital, he kept up his telephone calls to the Holy Family church in Gaza, a nightly routine since 9 October 2023.” The Toronto-based Globe and Mail (4/21/25) included Palestine in a list of war-ravaged places Francis prayed for, and devoted most of a paragraph to his nightly Gaza calls.  Reuters (4/21/25), headquartered in London and owned by Canada’s Thomson family, noted that Francis’ last Easter Sunday message “reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—a conflict he had long railed against.”

    Though the major US obituaries all ignored Gaza, the same outlets published separate articles on Francis and Gaza. USA Today (4/21/25) ran “Pope Francis Used Final Easter Address to Call for Gaza Ceasefire.” The Wall Street Journal (4/23/25) had “Pope Francis Kept Up Routine of Calling Gaza Until the End.” For the New York Times (4/22/25), it was “Even in Sickness, Pope Francis Reached Out to Gaza’s Christians.” AP (4/21/25) offered “Pope’s Frequent Calls to a Catholic Church Made Him a Revered Figure in War-Battered Gaza,” an article that appeared on the Washington Post‘s website (4/21/25).

    These stand-alone pieces are welcome, and spotlight the importance of the Gaza crisis to Francis. But the official obituaries in these major outlets are meant to stand as a permanent record of Francis’ life and career. By relegating Francis’ compassion for Palestine to sidebars, as though it were only of transient interest, US outlets eliminated a central aspect of his papacy from that record.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Lab Leak: The Official Conspiracy Theory That Still Gets You Credit as a Free Thinker

    WSJ: Time for Accountability on the Covid Lab-Leak Coverup

    Mike Gallagher (Wall Street Journal, 4/15/25) insists the “scientific elite…should have come clean about the pandemic’s laboratory origin.” His evidence for such an origin? “Western intelligence agencies…favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

    For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.

    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

    The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:

    Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.

    ‘Finally comes clean’

    NYT: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

    “In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 3/16/25) they were treated like kooks and cranks.” In fact, the theory got a respectful hearing from outlets like the Washington Post (4/2/20,  4/14/20), ABC (5/3/20) and CNN (5/3/20); see FAIR.org (10/6/20). 

    Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly US, one German).

    Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”

    Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) ​​said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”

    The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.

    It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the US went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”

    Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.

    Government talking points

    Science: House panel concludes that COVID-19 pandemic came from a lab leak

    Science (12/3/24): “The committee’s 520-page report…offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case.”

    In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”

    Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered

    a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.

    The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”

    The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently  reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that

    Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    ‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’

    GCRI: Most Experts Believe Natural ZoonoticOrigin More Likely

    According to a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (2/24), epidemiologists and virologists believe a natural zoonotic origin for Covid is far more likely than a lab leak.

    Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.

    The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:

    Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.

    It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.

    More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).

    Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Khury Petersen-Smith on Yemen Distortions

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    Nation: Bombing Yemen: Signalgate Deserves to Be a Major Scandal

    The Nation (3/27/25)

    This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:

    We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.

    Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.

    There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.

    When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

    We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.