NPR (2/1/25) investigates how a politician who surrounds himself with fellow billionaires can “work for the working class.” NPR‘s suggestion: tax cuts for the very wealthy.
“Can Trump’s Second Act Work for the Working Class While Giving Back to His Super Donors?” asks NPR.com (2/1/25). The answer, from NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, is a resounding—maybe!
Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox:
Today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.
After a meandering tour of US history from Andrew Jackson to William Jenning Bryan to Ross Perot, Elving concludes: “We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.” Huge, if true!
Elving’s evidence that Trump is a “populist”—or at least has a populist lurking inside him—is remarkably thin, however:
Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys—what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.”… With his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.
Trump “made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall,” Elving notes. And he “used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president,” which “connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim.” Elving suggests that this is the sort of thing populists do.
But when it comes to offering examples of actual populist policies from the first Trump administration, Elving admits that there aren’t many to speak of:
If Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.
In fact, says Elving, “Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities,” with “his main legislative achievement” being “the passage of an enormous tax cut…that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth.” For genuine journalists, for whom politicians’ actions are more significant than their words, that would be the most meaningful predictor of what Trump is likely to do going forward.
But Trump’s second term, Elving suggests on the basis of nothing, could be quite different: “As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day.” Such as? “The renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government.”
So—a restoration of the same tax cuts that “greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth”? That how NPR thinks Trump in his second term “can serve what are plausibly called populist causes”?
All hail the unmistakable symbiosis!
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.
FEATURED IMAGE: NPR depiction of candidate Donald Trump as a tribune of the working class.
Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about the attack on immigrants for the January 24, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The Trump administration surprised none but the gullible by coming out of the gate with a spate of hateful, discriminatory and anti-democratic measures. Immigrants—that’s to say, mainly brown and Black immigrants—have been in the sights of those who oppose the democratic project for years now. But with Day One orders and directives threatening roundups and mass deportations and curtailing sanctuary, the new White House looks to be defining “terrorizing people” as policy.
I wonder if major news media, day in and day out, reported immigration, not through politicians trying to outdo one another with hysterical claims, and perverse stunts like buses out of town, not through pundits whose ignorance of history and economics is matched only by their indifference to human rights, but instead through the voices of immigrants and their communities and advocates, would we be where we are today?
Silky Shah is executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.
Silky Shah: It’s great to be back with you. Thanks for having me.
JJ: The Department of Homeland Security’s directives to rescind the Sensitive Locations Memo is so exemplary of the comic book cravenness: “There is no safe place. This chaotic routing out of human beings, this is really what we want to do.” If people don’t know, or if they somehow think this is about isolating criminal actors, what should we understand as some of the key and foreseeable impacts of this slew of orders on communities, whether or not they or a family member is ultimately actually deported?
SS: I think the whole intention here is to cause fear and instability in people’s lives, and the strategy of forced attrition, forced self-deportation. So it’s like a combination of all the different orders that have been put in place. Some of them are being blocked, like the birthright citizenship order, again, [it’s] just to cause panic in people, but it’s very much unconstitutional. And there’s other things that people are filing litigation against.
But we have a lot of the system in place already. There are thousands of ICE agents and thousands of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agents, and they’ve already started doing roundups, and we’ve seen that across the country.
But we also know they work really closely with law enforcement at every single level, at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level. And so much of what people have done for many years to protect communities is by doing that work to get ICE out of those particular locations, out of churches, out of schools, out of hospitals, and also do that work to make it so that ICE and police aren’t collaborating, because that’s actually how we saw a lot of people funneled into deportation proceedings, and into the detention system, especially during the Bush and Obama years.
For many years, we’ve been doing that, and everything this administration is trying to do is to undo a lot of that work, so that they can target people more easily. And so even now, we’ve seen that they’ve directed DoJ to start potentially looking into prosecution for states and counties and cities that aren’t complying, which is also going to be challenged.
But I think that is the intent. The intent is to undo so much of the work we’ve done to protect immigrant communities and stop the really severe deportations we’ve seen.
JJ: You’re sort of touching on it, but it seems worth pulling out: Elite media won’t do it, but we can, ourselves, shift this idea that Democrats are by definition anti-Republicans, and that we’re really in a Trump versus anti-Trump situation. And it’s not to ignore partisan dynamics, but just to recognize bad ideas, whoever is pushing them.
SS: Yeah, I think one thing that was so challenging for us, coming into 2025, we were all bracing ourselves for what was going to happen a few days ago on January 20, but already, within the first days of the year, we saw the Democrats, both in the House and the Senate, capitulating and now officially passing the Laken Riley Act, which Trump is going to sign soon. And it’s really disturbing, because it’s a bill that was really created around a moral panic which exacerbates all these questions and scapegoats immigrants as the problem, around this really horrific tragedy, but saying, “Oh, we’re going to apply these really harsh policies to all immigrants because of this one incident,” which we saw in the ’80s with the story of Willie Horton. And then that was one of the things, of the many things, that led to the US being one of the world’s leading incarcerated and the growth of mass incarceration.
And now we’re seeing that again, where Democrats are capitulating because of the moral panic that was created around this one incident, and saying that immigrants are the problem, and equating them with criminality.
And I think that is something that was really hard to stomach, to see how much the Democrats accepted this really harsh bill that will require mandatory detention for people who are just charged with theft-related crimes. It would expand the number of people who would be forced to be in detention without any due process, without any ability to stand before a judge, “These are the reasons why I shouldn’t be in here.”
And so we are really, really concerned, especially, that so many Democrats capitulated on this. It’s the same old story. It’s the moral panic that they capitalize on to gain political legitimacy. And then we see these really harsh policies in place that just balloon incarceration, balloon policing.
JJ: Yeah, and it’s such a circle, because, for example, Associated Press, in reporting the House approving Laken Riley, notes matter of factly, well, yes, there was this crucial faction of 46 “politically vulnerable” Democrats who joined with Republicans. Why are they politically vulnerable? Because of this situation in which they feel themselves being pushed to align with Republicans in order to stay in office, which apparently is job one, and job only, for many folks.
SS: And one of the things around that that’s so frustrating is that part of the reason they are feeling the need to do that is because the Democratic Party has really failed to offer any countervision to the Republicans, failed any countervailing vision. In fact, Harris ran a campaign where she was positioning herself as more hardline than Trump on immigration, and that opened up space for us to be in this place.
And so I think that is really one of the most important lessons right now is that, no, we have to offer something else. We have to not just throw immigrants under the bus, as the Democrats did in this election cycle, that have led us to this point, and enabled Trump and all of these other Republicans to move these policies. And yeah, no, I think absolutely there’s no question that the Democrats also deserve equal blame for where we’re at.
JJ: Right. I’m going to bring you back in a second to what we can be for, but I did want to step out and just say: A key part of your concern and your work is that, for many people, because it’s how media frame it, the idea is, “Well, in one way or another, we’re going to catch lawbreakers, or even spread a net that catches up some folks who aren’t breaking the law, but then we’re going to…do something with them.” And the story sort of ends there. And I wonder, what does your understanding of the actual immigrant detention system as it exists tell you about that as a solution, that maybe most people don’t even know?
SS: The thing about detention is that it exists to warehouse immigrants. That’s what it exists to do. And whether they have had interaction with the criminal legal system or not—yes, many people have, some people haven’t, some people are there because they’re seeking asylum. But it tells you that’s the bigger picture of the US, again, being so committed to incarceration, still having some 2 million people in jails and prisons and detention centers. And what we saw for many, many years is the growth of these systems, because there was this incentive to have some economic viability for rural communities. There was a prison boom that happened, and there was also the destruction of the welfare state, and many people being caught up in the system. And so people became more and more eligible for prison time. There was longer sentences, truth in sentencing and mandatory minimums and all these things where we balloon the system. And all those things started applying to immigration, and that’s what we saw with the detention system.
And even to this day, when we try to make the case against immigrant detention and local officials can conveniently say, “Well, actually, we hear you. We don’t think people should be in detention because they’re just awaiting a hearing on their immigration case, or they’re awaiting deportation,” but then they’re still hesitant to end the contract, largely because they are still getting federal money to hold people in the detention system.
Even if they have a private prison in their community, they might be getting a dollar a day to hold a person in that facility. And so there are a lot of perverse incentives to the system, that include both the private prison industry, but also county jails, and just the way law enforcement works across the country. And so I think that’s a really important piece of it.
And the other thing I would say is that there’s just this constant lie that’s told to us, that immigration is a issue of public safety and national security. And of course now we’re hearing this a lot, in what the executive orders have put out.
But it’s not true, actually. Immigration is about labor, of course. And I think that’s going to become more of an issue as the crackdown happens, and people feel the impacts of losing that labor. But also, it’s about family relationships, and it’s about seeking refuge. And so we have to go back to that conversation of what is immigration about? What can we do instead of reinforcing these ideas that people are lawbreakers? Well, what does that mean in the context of the law right now, and how has the system changed to round up and warehouse more and more people, mostly people who are Black and brown?
JJ: Right? Well, we are seeing and we will see a lot of rightful and righteous “against” energy, and I wonder, what can we be for? What ideas can we shape conversations around that both resist the worldview of the MAGA set and their media enablers, but also maybe have nothing to do with them? What are some other ideas that can be coherent that we can work around, going forward?
Silky Shah: “Moving more away from the scarcity mindset, and making conditions for people in the US better, I think is going to be an important part of our strategy to make the case for immigration.”
SS: I think what was so evident about how the 2024 election worked out was, and largely part of the reason that the Democrats capitulated, was that, actually, Gov. Greg Abbott, of my home state of Texas, really, really played the game, and positioned immigrants as a problem. A lot of people focused on Trump, but I think Abbott, with the scheme where he was bussing migrants to cities like New York and Chicago, and “bringing the border” to those cities, it exacerbated and revealed all the fractures in the social safety nets that exist in those places, especially in light of the pandemic, and how there was more of a housing crisis. There’s obviously an opioid crisis. There’s so many other things that communities are negotiating. And because there was that anxiety in those places and that fear around economic insecurity, immigrants became a really easy scapegoat.
And so from my perspective, I think, again, this goes back to this question of the Democrats failing to offer any countervailing vision. It wasn’t just on immigration, but it was just generally [not] offering something about, what is the public good and what can we do for people and how can we help people? And how do we get to a place where people aren’t feeling nervous about paying rent, and anxious about all the other things, and the price of goods in the grocery store, and all the other things that were happening? And how can we make sure that Democrats are responding?
And so I think, from my perspective, we’ve had a lot of conversations with people on the ground, especially in light of the fact that people are worried about a detention center closing down and not having those jobs. It’s like, “Well, what is the economy you want in those communities? What is a just transition to that? What are more healthy economies than having incarceration or a military base or something like that?” And so moving more away from the scarcity mindset and making conditions for people in the US better, I think is going to be an important part of our strategy to make the case for immigration.
Also, of course, even I think sometimes this continues to get lost, as the root causes of migration aren’t always a part of the conversation. And so also, what is the role of the US, and the US across the world, and how have they exacerbated these conditions, and what can we do around that?
JJ: I wanted to just draw out one point of information, which is that just because the US outsources detention to Mexico, for example, doesn’t mean it’s not on our watch, right? That’s just as a point of information.
SS: Yeah. I think actually the last time I talked to you, it was after a really big fire that happened in one of the facilities on the other side of the border in Mexico. And I think that’s the reality, is that, in so many ways, Mexico absolutely has the second-highest rate of detention in the world. And it might look a little bit different, I think, in the US context, because it’s been such a society that’s obsessed with imprisonment. We have detention centers that actually are mostly jails or former prisons that are used, but I think there you might have different types of facilities.
But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that externalization that we’ve seen is also on the US. So it’s not just that they’re doing it here, but they’re doing it abroad. I think the concern for us, we’ve done some research on this, is that when you have a detention center close to a location, so for instance in Southern California, in San Bernardino County where the Adelanto Detention Center is, when it was built and started holding people in 2010, 2011, I believe, San Bernardino County ended up having the second-highest ICE arrests in the country. And so just by having the capacity there, more people are going to get detained. And so that’s a lot of the reason why we do the work to shut down detention centers, to stop expansion here. But I do absolutely agree that a lot of our work also needs to be making sure that the US is not just outsourcing a lot of the same policies and tactics to other parts of the world.
JJ: Finally, even as the internet connects us in many ways, there’s still this atomism in modern US life, and we’re inundated with this notion that, to put it very crudely, success means starting your own thing, inventing something new and selling it. And that whole mindset works against the collective action that we need so much now, and that we know works.
Detention Watch Network, as the name suggests, is a coalition, and that formation shapes the work. And that seems very much like a way forward. It’s less media-friendly: “So many voices, so many groups, who do we quote?” But that kind of work, coalitional work, is really where we need to be, don’t you think?
SS: For so many years, it’s been organizers and lawyers, people who are detained, their family members, policy folks in DC, all of them coming together, and we’ve actually won a lot of our campaigns in the last many years. Some 20 detention centers are no longer in use, because of local and state and federal-level campaigns to stop their use. And a lot of that is because a lot of different people from different sectors came together, and ordinary people in their communities, who’ve said, “No, we don’t want this.”
And so I think that’s absolutely true. There is no single way, and I’m so grateful to all the people who are doing litigation to stop those executive orders right now.
And I also know that ICE already has the tools it needs to target people. And so we have to do work at all the different levels, and make sure we’re doing everything we can to protect communities.
We also saw recently that ICE finally started putting out announcements about how they’re going to expand detention. They’re saying they’re going to build four new 10,000-bed facilities, which is just absolutely unheard of, but we’re doing the work to research that, figure that out, and do everything we can to block those. And we blocked it before, and I think we can do it again.
And so just holding onto that spirit of resistance, and knowing that this is going to be a tough time, but also there’s a lot of people who are ready to do the work, and to make sure we can protect our communities as much as possible.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. Follow their work online at DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Silky Shah, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Tech billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration: Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and X‘s Elon Musk (image: C-SPAN)
This week on CounterSpin: You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultzpouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “moniker constantly is unfair”: “Yes, I have billions of dollars—I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks.”
The delusion that a billionaire “earned” every penny of it, or that it is shared equitably with workers, may be special to billionaires, but the broader notion—that “the government only helps some people; other people do it on their own” is conveyed throughout corporate media’s narrative, even as it’s corrosive to an understanding of democracy, much less the fight for it. The increasing influence of not merely the rich, but the super rich, on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one. Yet somehow, elite media seem less and less interested in it.
We’ll talk with David Kass, executive director of the Americans for Tax Fairness campaign, about that on this week’s show.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Trump’s illegal funding freeze, immigration raids and the Gaza death toll.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Thomas Friedman has what Edward Said (Village Voice, 10/17/89) called “the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism.”
It is not often that I check the New York Times Opinion page to see what the paper’s three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and mansion-dwelling foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman is up to. After all, I feel I’ve already exceeded my quota for masochism by wasting a full year of my life writing a book about the man, source of such ideas as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace, and that Iraqis needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for the 9/11 attacks—an event Friedman himself admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.
Employed in various posts at the United States’ newspaper of record since 1981—including as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem—Friedman has just entered his 30th year as foreign affairs columnist. His imperial imperiousness and pompous dedication to Orientalism came under fire from the get-go from none other than Edward Said, who remarked in a 1989 Village Voice intervention (10/17/89), titled “The Orientalist Express”:
It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner…. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility.
Noting that Friedman had “internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity,” Said called our journalist out on his habit of offering “advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him.” Had everyone been paying attention, they would have learned Friedman’s “moronic and hopelessly false dictum”—Said’s words—according to which “the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.”
Just for the hell of it, I checked up on Friedman on January 21, the day after Donald Trump’s reinauguration. Sure enough, there was his very first column of 2025, headlined: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” In other words, it was the latest version of how much better everyone could be doing if they paid attention to the self-appointed secretary of humanity.
‘Reborn as a strong region’
Friedman (New York Times, 1/21/25) counsels Trump: “The more credibly we threaten” Iran, the more likely you will get a Nobel Peace Prize.
You couldn’t ask for a more Orientalist ambition than “remaking” the Middle East, and Friedman has various suggestions for Trump on that front. First, he instructs the president that “your interest is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into a US-led alliance with our other Arab partners”—which basically boils down to rewarding the party that has since October 2023 been conducting straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip with a normalization of relations with Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia, whose bloodthirsty ruler Mohammed bin Salman has long occupied a special place in Friedman’s heart.
Friedman continues with his roadmap:
Gaza, like the West Bank under the Oslo agreement, should be divided into Areas A and B for a four-year transition period. Eighty percent would be Area A (under the international force/Palestinian control), and 20% (basically the perimeter) would remain under Israeli military control until Israel’s security is assured.
Never mind how the old Oslo Accords panned out—the 1993 US-brokered agreement that was supposedly designed to pave the way for Israeli/Palestinian peace and Palestinian self-governance, i.e. a two-state solution. Friedman might do well to revisit his own assessment in 2000 that “the Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense,” and that “Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for more settlements is going on to this day—seven years into Oslo.”
Friedman warns Trump that
the Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives, or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.
Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that Friedman has at last gotten something right, rest assured that the drone-happy terrorists to which he is referring are not in fact the Israelis—despite the Israeli military’s established chilling expertise in said field.
‘Birth pangs of a new Middle East’
Friedman claimed that in Iraq, the US was “a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts” (Jacobin, 7/26/12).
As for the alleged necessity that the Middle East “be reborn,” murderous obstetrics have long factored into the United States’ Orientalist approach to Arab and Muslim regions of the world; just recall then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s favorable assessment of Israel’s summer 2006 slaughter-fest in Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
That particular assault, which killed approximately 1,200 people in 34 days, was subsequently invoked by Friedman in 2009 as a positive precedent when Israel was once again ravaging the Gaza Strip. Declaring that Israel’s decision in 2006 to “exact enough pain on the civilians” of Lebanon was “not pretty, but it was logical,” Friedman prescribed the same “logical” approach to Gaza—to hell with the pesky Geneva Conventions, as well as Friedman’s own ostensible opposition to, um, terrorism.
Of a piece with the whole rebirth-by-mass-killing theme is the Orientalist exploitation of infantilizing terminology. And in that realm, too, Friedman has long excelled, including in his repeated references to Afghanistan—a nation decimated by the US with Friedman’s enthusiastic encouragement—as a “special needs baby.” Then there was the time he complained that the US was “babysitting a civil war” in Iraq—a baby-sitting job that, mind you, happened to have been unleashed by the very 2003 US invasion extensively cheer-led by Friedman, who in 2002 argued that such a war was the “most important task worth doing.”
As I note in my book, Friedman’s reliance on childish condescension is
merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator and parent/babysitter.
As is the case with the 2006 “birth pangs” and the current Middle East that Trump has now been tasked with rebirthing, the Arab/Muslim world is often portrayed as having not even yet made it into infant form, instead awaiting violent expulsion from the imperial womb—as in Friedman’s eloquently cogent 2012 proclamation that Syria was in need of a “well-armed external midwife.”
‘Animal Planet’
As FAIR (2/6/24) noted, “The comparison of official enemies to vermin is a hallmark of propaganda in defense of genocide.”
Of course, Friedman’s Orientalist repertoire goes beyond infantilizing rhetoric and fetal fantasies. There was that time in 1988 that he decided that Palestinians could be collectively referred to as Ahmed—“I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands”—after which Noam Chomsky questioned whether journalists could also be promoted to chief diplomatic correspondent at the New York Times by suggesting that Hymie or Sambo be given a seat in the bus.
And just last year in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Friedman undertook to outdo himself with a column headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” which as I observed at the time would have already been sufficiently grotesquely bonkers had the Israeli military establishment not taken the liberty of classifying its Palestinian victims as “human animals.”
The column hosted some nonsensical babble about parasitoid wasps and sifaka lemurs, along with the following information about our columnist’s investigative modus operandi: “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.”
Anyway, Friedman is now clearly the best candidate to help Trump “Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” No matter that Friedman purports to be at odds with Trump’s nasty worldview; the two conveniently share a haughty and snotty antagonism vis-à-vis those “animal planet” parts of the world that need a “well-armed external midwife” as a mission civilisatrice.
If only Friedman himself could be rebirthed into something more human.
New York‘s headline (1/28/25) was accurate—but was it “riveting storytelling”?
When President Donald Trump ordered an unprecedented freeze on all federal grants and loans, a few news outlets responded with at least some degree of appropriate alarm and scrutiny.
“Trump’s Massive Power Grab,” read the headline for Politico‘s Playbook newsletter (1/28/25). “Trump’s Blatantly Illegal Funding Freeze Causes Nationwide Chaos,” announced the headline over a column by New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore (1/28/25).
The order, both sweeping and confusingly worded, called for a halt to disbursement of federal funds that Congress has already authorized. The memo required all such funding to be reviewed to make sure it aligns with Trump’s “policies and requirements,” including his barrage of executive orders. (After a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, the White House rescinded it.)
The memo specifically highlighted “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal.” But no funding was excluded from the freeze, aside from Social Security, Medicare and “assistance directly received by individuals.”
Politico described “the first big question” as being: “Is this legal?” The answer provided by most legal scholars appeared to be, “hell, no.”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the information offered by some in corporate media—with the multibillionaire-owned Washington Post among the worst offenders.
‘Democrats contend’
The New York Times (1/27/25) offered its readers agnosticism: “It is uncertain whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress.“
As competent and useful reporting explained, Trump has long declared his interest in impoundment, or the executive’s ability to cancel funding that Congress has approved. It’s something presidents had done on occasion in the past, but Richard Nixon took it to an extreme, attempting to cancel billions in federal spending. Congress responded by passing the Impoundment Control Act in 1974, which requires congressional permission for presidents to impound funds (Forbes, 1/28/25).
In other words, there’s been a clear law on the books for over 50 years that expressly prohibits what Trump was attempting here. It should have been an easy call for journalists, then, to answer Politico‘s basic and central question. Some failed this basic task.
The New York Times report (1/27/25), while raising the question of the move’s legality in paragraph four, didn’t even attempt to answer it, only offering a quote from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who argued, “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.“ The article gave readers no other information by which to judge “whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress.”
In its follow-up on the state-led lawsuit to challenge the funding freeze, the Times (1/28/25) briefly described the Impoundment Control Act, but then wrote that “Democrats contend” that Trump can’t unilaterally block funds that have already been approved, as if it were simply a partisan claim whether the law just described exists.
At Axios, co-founder Mike Allen’s brief report (1/28/25) didn’t even address legality, taking the “Why it matters” of Trump’s memo to be that it
will provide the administration with time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of funding for those programs consistent with the law and Trump’s priorities.
‘Generally allowed under the law’
The Washington Post‘s first takeaway (1/28/25): “The feared disruption highlighted the extent of the new Trump administration’s determination to target long-standing functions of the federal government.”
But the Washington Post took craven reporting to another level. In its report on the directive (1/28/25), by reporters Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage and Emily Davies, the Post‘s headline and lead focused on the “confusion” in Washington. After describing the order and what it appeared to target, the reporters’ first attempt to make meaning of the order came in the eighth paragraph: “The feared disruption highlighted the extent of the new Trump administration’s determination to target long-standing functions of the federal government.”
The president tried to usurp Congress’s power of the purse by fiat, and the Beltway paper’s biggest takeaway was that it “highlights” the Trump administration’s “determination”—not to shred US democracy, but to “target long-standing functions of the federal government.”
But it gets worse. It took another eight paragraphs (that’s the 16th paragraph, if you’re counting) to find the Post‘s first mention of Politico‘s No. 1 question—is this legal? That came in the same Schumer quote the Times used, about how these expenditures “are not optional; they are the law.”
And the Post quickly cast doubt on that idea:
The order’s legality may be contested, but the president is generally allowed under the law to defer spending for a period of time if certain conditions are met, according to budget experts.
The article went on to note that the order “may not have given sufficient grounds under the law to pause the funding,” and that a “left-leaning” expert says that “pausing it over policy disagreements is not legal.” Meanwhile an expert from a “bipartisan” group was offered to argue that Trump “should be legally able to pause the money temporarily,” even if there might be some formal hoops to jump through to extend it.
In other words, the Post‘s framing of the story gave the impression that the memo was “confusing,” but probably mostly legal.
This comes shortly after the announcement of the Post‘s new mission statement, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” which owner Jeff Bezos hopes will expand the Post‘s conservative audience (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). As for holding the powerful to account? Well, you might want to look to a media outlet not owned by a toadying oligarch.
ACTION:Please tell the Washington Post not to downplay illegal actions when they are committed by a president its owner is trying to curry favor with.
CNN (6/10/24) on Tren de Aragua: “The scale of its operations is unknown, but crimes attributed to alleged members of the gang have worried elected officials.”
A CNN headline (6/10/24) last June menacingly warned readers about the United States’s latest dial-a-bogeyman, guaranteed to further whip up anti-immigrant vitriol in the country and justify ever more punitive border fortification: “This Is the Dangerous Venezuelan Gang Infiltrating the US That You Probably Know Nothing About But Should.”
The gang in question was Tren de Aragua, which formed in Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, and spread to various South American countries before allegedly setting its sights on the US. Now the organization that you probably knew nothing about has achieved such a level of notoriety that President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day of returning to office, declaring the group (along with other regional drug cartels and gangs) to be a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Although there is approximately zero evidence of a smoking gun on the old terror front, the corporate media are doing their best to bring fantasy to life. And as usual, it’s the average refuge seeker who will suffer for it.
‘Invading criminal army’
Fox News (12/20/24): “The vicious gang has taken advantage of a lax southern border under the Biden-Harris administration, with many of its foot soldiers swarming the US and unleashing hell on unsuspecting communities.”
In the course of educating its audience about the little-known peril last year, CNN quoted a March letter to then-President Joe Biden from a group of Republican congressmembers, led by Florida’s Marco Rubio and María Elvira Salazar (incorrectly identified by CNN as Ana María Salazar). The letter sounded the alarm that the “invading criminal army” Tren de Aragua was positioned to “unleash an unprecedented reign of terror” across the US.
Rubio—the xenophobic son of Cuban immigrants to the United States and Trump’s new Secretary of State—took to social media (X, 6/17/24) to declare that Tren de Aragua was already “causing terror across America as a result of President Biden’s open border policy.” Rubio linked to Salazar’s post from the same day, in which she cast the outfit as a “vicious gang that the dictator Maduro is dumping into America through our open southern border”—a reference to current Venezuelan president and US enemy extraordinaire Nicolás Maduro. Maduro has himself accused the exiled right-wing Venezuelan politician Leopoldo López of being behind the gang.
Of course, the fact that Biden deported more migrants than Donald Trump did during his first term undermines the whole “open border” argument. Then again, racist propaganda has always been more useful than reality in crafting US policy. In July, the Biden administration bowed to pressure from Rubio et al. and designated Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization, thus elevating the gang “you probably know nothing about but should” into a supposed existential threat to the homeland.
In the months following the designation, the US corporate media fell into line with breathless reports on the “bloodthirsty” Tren de Aragua, as Fox News (12/20/24) put it in a December would-be exposé on how the gang has allegedly “immersed itself among the general population in the sanctuary city” of New York. As per Fox’s calculations, “many” of Tren de Aragua’s “foot soldiers” have also busied themselves by “swarming the US and unleashing hell on unsuspecting communities.” The article vaguely accused the gang of “all sorts of violent crime,” including (nonfatal) shootings of police officers and “gun smuggling into migrant shelters.”
‘Feared criminal organization’
“Its widening presence in the United States has become a political lightning rod for Republicans,” the New York Times (9/22/24) reported, “as they seek to blame the Biden administration’s border policy for allowing criminals into the country”—and the Times was happy to help them out by running a feature on a group responsible for 50 arrests nationwide, in a country that arrests 7 million people a year.
But it’s not just the predictable likes of Fox News that have permitted the Tren de Aragua hype to fuel a general persecution of migrants by implying that migrant shelters are gang hotbeds and that any undocumented person could be an “immersed” foot soldier. In back-to-back items in September, the New York Times (9/22/24, 9/23/24) explored how, in New York City, Tren de Aragua—a “feared criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, human smuggling and the drug trade”—is “believed to recruit Tren de Aragua members arriving in the United States from inside the city’s migrant shelters,” where gang members also reportedly “live, or have lived.” According to New York City police,
one of the largest challenges…is how quickly gang members have blended into the city’s fabric, not just among asylum seekers in shelters, but also by posing as delivery drivers on mopeds, in some cases transporting firearms inside food delivery packs.
The Times reported that Tren de Aragua members are said to “have similar identifying marks,” such as tattoos with clocks, anchors or crowns, as well as “Michael Jordan brand clothing and Chicago Bulls apparel.”
Given the widespread popularity of such apparel among certain demographics, and the NYPD’s notorious track record of racial profiling and selective stop-and-frisk harassment, such wardrobe analysis is a pretty good recipe for the further trampling of civil liberties. I myself have observed a disproportionate affinity for Jordan and the Chicago Bulls among young Venezuelan refuge seekers I personally know, all of whom happen to be quite opposed to Tren de Aragua—for reasons including the blanket vilification of Venezuelan immigrants that has attended the hullabaloo over the gang.
But what, precisely, does Tren de Aragua’s “unprecedented reign of terror” consist of? Well, the Times tells us that the NYPD
says the gang has primarily focused on snatching cellphones; retail thefts, especially high-end merchandise in department stores; and dealing a pink, powdery synthetic drug, known as Tusi.
Plus, in June, a 19-year-old Venezuelan migrant who might have been affiliated with Tren de Aragua was accused of shooting two police officers, who survived.
‘Expanding its deadly reach’
Wall Street Journal (9/12/24): “Tren de Aragua members are difficult to identify and track because they have entered the US through the southern border”—as opposed to gang members who are either homegrown or entered through the Canadian border, who are apparently easy to identify and track.
A September Wall Street Journal article (9/12/24), headlined “A Venezuelan Gang Is Expanding Its Deadly Reach to the US,” similarly warned that Tren de Aragua is
accused of robberies at Macy’s, Sunglass Hut and upscale stores, and moped-riding gang members also have been blamed for snatching phones from unsuspecting pedestrians.
While it is certainly shitty to have your phone stolen, it is quite a bit less “deadly” than the behavior exhibited by many police officers in the US, who can’t seem to kick the habit of killing Black people and Native Americans.
Never mind, too, that there are plenty of things it’s more rational to be afraid of in the land of the free than Tren de Aragua, such as the regularity of mass shootings in schools and the lethal for-profit healthcare system. A 2023 University of California, Riverside paper published in the Journal of the AMA (4/17/23) found poverty to be the fourth leading cause of death in the United States—hence the political utility, perhaps, of distracting Americans from actual problems with visions of marauding Venezuelan gangbangers.
Tempered by disclaimers
CBS New York (11/24/24): “Undocumented criminals as young as 11 years old are carrying out retail robberies and committing crimes on scooters.”
In reporting on Tren de Aragua, many media outlets purport to temper their sensationalism with the disclaimer that they are not in fact participating in a universal indictment of migrants. A November CBS New York intervention (11/24/24) on Tren de Aragua’s alleged attempts “to recruit children from migrant families” in shelters, while “blend[ing] in with the asylum seekers who began to arrive in the Big Apple in 2022,” held the following information until the very last line: “[Police] say it’s important to know that only a small portion of the migrant community is committing the majority of the crimes.”
In the midst of its own fearmongering, the New York Times (9/23/24) cautioned that “it’s important to note that overall crime in New York City has gone down as the number of migrants in the city has gone up.” NBC News (6/12/24) buried the observation that “criminologists have consistently found that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans” at the tail end of its June rant on “‘Ghost Criminals’: How Venezuelan Gang Members Are Slipping Into the US.”
In the NBC piece, journalists Laura Strickler, Julia Ainsley, Didi Martinez and Tom Winter complained that “the cases involving the Tren de Aragua gang show how hard it is for US border agents to vet the criminal backgrounds of migrants from countries like Venezuela that won’t give the US any help” in providing individual criminal records. The huffiness of such statements might be amusing, were the US itself not guilty of a quite lengthy criminal background in Venezuela itself; ongoing US sanctions against the South American nation are literally deadly, and in 2017–18 alone reportedly caused more than 40,000 deaths, according to a study by the Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Sanctions are also a keydriver of the migration from Venezuela to the US. But the preponderant role of US efforts to financially asphyxiate Venezuela in fueling mass Venezuelan migration is not a subject corporate media like to dwell on (FAIR.org, 6/13/22)—and even less, it seems, in reporting on their new favorite bogeyman. A fleeting reference to the relevance of US machinations appears in the Wall Street Journal piece on the “deadly reach” of Tren de Aragua:
The gang is looking for better opportunities than those in Venezuela, where the economy has capsized under Maduro’s rule, leading to hyperinflation and poverty made worse by US sanctions.
Given that poverty and economic oppression are traditionally known to be driving forces behind gang membership, the sanctions factor would seem to merit a bit more journalistic investigation—that is, were the US politico-media establishment interested in explaining criminal phenomena rather than casting gang members as organically and inexplicably savage.
The New York Times (9/22/24) lamented that, as Venezuela’s economic woes intensified, Tren de Aragua “began to profit off the millions of fleeing Venezuelans, exploiting, extorting and silencing vulnerable migrants.” Of course, such opportunities for profit would not exist if not for the twin US policies of sowing havoc worldwide while simultaneously criminalizing migration—but, again, revealing to readers how the world works is not the objective here.
‘Violent animals of MS-13’
Justin Anderson (FAIR.org, 7/22/18): The growth of MS-13 “from a small street gang in the US to a transnational criminal organization…provides an illuminating case study of how US foreign policy choices can backfire spectacularly.”
The media’s decontextualized coverage of Tren de Aragua brings back memories of the apocalyptic hype surrounding the presence in the US of the predominantly Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, which reached a peak during Trump’s first term and was aided by apparent mediatic amnesia as to how it was that MS-13 came to exist.
As Justin Anderson wrote in a 2018 article for FAIR (7/22/18), the gang had “become a major scapegoat for Donald Trump and right-wing media in rationalizing harsh immigration policies.” Anderson wasn’t exaggerating; that same year, the White House released a handy memo titled “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13,” in which the word “animals” appeared no fewer than nine times—as though a country responsible for bombing and otherwise terrorizing civilians across the globe were the arbiters of humanity. But as Anderson detailed, media coverage of the immigration debate largely obscured the fact that MS-13 was “Made in USA” in the first place.
Indeed, the origins of MS-13 are pretty straightforward. Once upon a Salvadoran civil war, which killed more than 75,000 people from 1979–92, the US in typical fashion backed the right-wing military that was ultimately responsible—along with allied paramilitary groups and death squads—for the overwhelming majority of “serious acts of violence,” as per the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador.
Fleeing this violence, many Salvadorans ended up in Los Angeles and environs, where the going was not exactly easy, either; as Anderson noted, LA
In the Salvadoran community, gangs formed as a means of communal self-defense.
Following the end of the civil war, the US decided to deport a mass of prison-hardened gang members back to a country it had just helped destroy, where the ensuing US-backed neoliberal assault left many Salvadorans with few options for economic and social survival aside from gang membership. The double whammy of neoliberal violence and gang violence in turn fueled more US-bound migration, and voilà: Enter the “violent animals of MS-13” to make xenophobia great again, and justify any and all sociopathic border-fortification measures.
As Anderson pointed out at FAIR, the media could scarcely be bothered to delve into such relevant history—although
one article in the DC Metro Weekend section [of the Washington Post] (6/14/18) did mention immigration in relation to the civil war, but only in the context of where to get some tasty Salvadoran food in Maryland.
Perhaps some future article on Venezuelan arepa establishments will offer an insight or two as to Washington’s outsized hand in Venezuela’s decimation. In the meantime, a 2023 infographic on the “deadly consequences” of US-led sanctions on the country—published by the Venezuelanalysis website, using statistics from the US Government Accountability Office, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and other sources—revealed that coercive economic measures had thus far made some 2.5 million people food insecure. As of 2020, more than 100,000 deaths were attributed to sanctions.
‘Total elimination’
As with fabricated claims that immigrants were eating pets, the idea that Tren de Aragua had taken over a Colorado housing project didn’t have to be true to have a political impact (Washington Post, 9/6/24).
At an October rally in New York, Trump announced that, if elected president, he would “expedite removals of Tren de Aragua and other savage gangs like MS-13, which is equally vicious.” Earlier that month, he had expanded on rumors that Tren de Aragua had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver: “I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered.”
Now that America is safely back in Trump’s hands, a surge in Tren de Aragua–centered propaganda will no doubt facilitate his pledge to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.” The brand-new designation of Tren de Aragua, MS-13 and other outfits as foreign terrorist organizations was accompanied by Trump’s declaration that it is the “policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination of these organizations’ presence in the United States”—whatever sort of action, military or otherwise, that may entail. The accompanying media offensive will surely be streamlined with the help of the reductionist “terrorist” label that has now been added to the linguistic arsenal.
Meanwhile, over on the frontlines of the invasion in Aurora, the Washington Post reported in September (9/6/24) that “some tenants” of the apartments in question had
held a news conference…and disputed the notion that the gang has taken over the complex. Instead, they said, the problem is that the apartment block has fallen into disrepair and is infested with bedbugs, cockroaches and rats.
The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)
Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”
The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”
Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.
For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?
It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Shadi Hamid (Washington Post, 1/16/25): “Donald Trump might seem like a madman. But it turns out that might be a good thing—at least for the moment.”
Many leading US media outlets were quick to attribute the suspension of hostilities in Gaza to incoming president Donald Trump’s intervention. Ariel Kahana argued in the Wall Street Journal (1/15/25) that “Trump Forced Netanyahu to Make a Deal With the Devil”—Satan, in this formulation, being Hamas, as opposed to the parties responsible for more than 15 months of genocide. In the Washington Post (1/16/25), a Shadi Hamid column contended that “Trump’s ‘Madman Theory’ Worked in Gaza When All Else Failed.”
Other coverage highlighted how Trump’s team coordinated with the Biden administration in its final weeks. The Journal (1/15/25) foregrounded the “pointed debate over who deserves the credit” while the New York Times (1/15/25) marveled at the “remarkable collaboration between President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump, who temporarily put aside mutual animosity to achieve a mutual goal.” The Post (1/18/25) emphasized
how incoming and outgoing administration teams with little ideological affinity—and considerable political enmity—embarked on a virtually unprecedented collaboration to seal the ceasefire deal.
I ran a search using the news media aggregator Factiva and found that the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal ran a combined 19 articles containing the words “Gaza” and “ceasefire” in the five-day period from when the ceasefire was agreed upon, January 15, until it took effect on January 19. Yet these newspapers consistently ignored other crucial features of the environment in which the ceasefire came together.
‘Heavy losses on Israeli forces’
Foreign Policy (4/9/24): The Biden administration warned Israel not to “get bogged down in an endless quagmire with no way out.”
A major overlooked factor is that Israeli occupation forces faced fierce resistance from Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza. Israeli media and former Israeli officials have described Israel as being in a “quagmire” in Gaza (Haaretz, 8/15/24, 9/16/24). International media reached the same conclusion (Irish Times, 4/7/24; Foreign Policy, 4/9/24).
As it became likely that a ceasefire would come to pass, Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel (1/14/25) wrote that
until a deal is signed, Israel is bleeding in Gaza…. The number of fallen soldiers in the area has risen to 15 in less than a week. It’s not just that time is running out for the hostages. Soldiers, too, are dying without any clear reason in a prolonged operation in Northern Gaza….
In practice, despite the heavy losses sustained by Hamas, it is clear that the operation has not yielded decisive results. The fighting in Jabaliya has subsided, but an estimated several dozen active [Palestinian fighters] remain there. A similar number are also active in Beit Hanoun and have managed to inflict relatively heavy losses on the Israeli forces.
Despite using nearly apocalyptic force against Gaza and inflicting incomprehensible suffering on its civilian population, the US/Israeli alliance could not vanquish Palestinian resistance forces, and Israel was forced to absorb substantial casualties.
However, the 19 Journal, Post and Times articles make only one mention of Israeli losses in Gaza. That occurred in the final sentence of a Post article (1/15/25), which read, “[Israel] says 405 soldiers have been killed during its military operation in Gaza”—a figure that cannot be verified because the Israeli military is secretive and censorious (+972, 5/20/24).
Economic toll
CNN (10/4/24): “As the conflict spills over into the wider region, the economic costs will spiral too.”
Other costs were also exacted from Israel. For months, 68,000 Israelis living near the Israel/Lebanon armistice line have been evacuated from their homes because of rockets Hezbollah has fired, which the group consistently said it did to pressure Israel into a Gaza ceasefire. Although Hezbollah has stopped since it signed a “ceasefire” with Israel (that Israel has ignored—FAIR.org, 1/9/25), Israelis have not gone back to their homes in the north, and are not expected to until March at the earliest (Haaretz, 1/1/25).
None of the 19 Journal, Times and Post pieces I examined make any reference to these almost 70,000 Israelis who have been driven from their homes by the Palestinians’ Lebanese allies.
The drawn-out genocide exacted economic costs on Israel as well. In October, CNN (10/4/24) said that Israelis’ living standards are declining and that, prior to the events of October 7, 2023,
the International Monetary Fund forecast that Israel’s economy would grow by an enviable 3.4% [in 2024]. Now, economists’ projections range from 1% to 1.9%. Growth [in 2025] is also expected to be weaker than earlier forecasts…. Inflation is accelerating, propelled by rising wages and soaring government spending to fund the war….
The conflict has caused Israel’s budget deficit—the difference between government spending and revenue, mostly from taxes—to double to 8% of GDP, from 4% before the war….
To shrink the fiscal hole, the government can’t rely on a healthy flow of tax revenue from businesses, many of which are collapsing, while others are reluctant to invest while it’s unclear how long the war will last.
A Reuters headline (10/15/24) the next day noted that Israeli GDP growth for April–June 2024 had to be “Revised Down to 0.3% as Gaza War Takes Economic Toll.”
Nevertheless, the 19 Journal, Times and Post articles in my data set contained zero references to Israel’s economic problems.
‘Costs piling up for importers’
New York Times (12/11/24): Yemeni attacks on cargo traffic in the Red Sea were “one of the most significant challenges that shipping has faced in a long time.”
Along similar lines, the Yemeni group Ansar Allah (usually referred to in Western media as the Houthis) has been intercepting commercial ships in the Red Sea since October 2023, promising to stop once there is a Gaza ceasefire. Ansar Allah’s commandeering the vessels has had a substantial impact on the global economy. A Defense Intelligence Agency report said that Red Sea shipping usually accounts for 10–15% of international maritime trade, and container shipping through those waters declined by roughly 90% from December 2023 to February 2024.
A December 2024 article in the New YorkTimes (12/11/24) explained that Ansar Allah’s actions forced shipping companies to take a route “that is some 3,500 nautical miles and 10 days longer.” While “Western-led naval fleets were sent to the Red Sea…the attacks continued, and commercial vessels have, for the most part, stayed away.”
According to the report, “the costs are piling up for importers,” as shipping “rates have surged,” and economists say that “the Houthi attacks have contributed to inflation around the world.” The Times said that “the cost of shipping a container from China to a West Coast port in the United States is up 217% over 12 months.”
Meanwhile, AP (1/3/25) reported that “Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have all but shuttered an Israeli port in the city of Eilat.”
Nor have Ansar Allah’s activities been limited to the seas. As AP pointed out:
In recent weeks, missiles and drones from Yemen have struck nearly every day…setting off air raid sirens in broad swaths of Israel…. The rocket fire is posing a threat to Israel’s economy, keeping many foreign airlines away and preventing the country from jump-starting its hard-hit tourism industry.
The 19 Gaza ceasefire articles in the Journal, Times and Post said nothing about the economic and military impact of Ansar Allah’s operations.
An accounting of the ceasefire is incomplete if it excludes how anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist forces in the Middle East thwarted US/Israeli designs for over 15 months, levying considerable battlefield and financial losses. Palestinians are protagonists in their own history, whether the US media like it or not.
This week on CounterSpin: Those with a beating heart can see the horror of Trump’s plans to deputize wannabe vigilantes to denounce community members they suspect “don’t belong here,” to send ICE into schools and churches to round folks up—police records or no—and ship them to detention centers, to ride roughshod over time-honored concepts of sanctuary. But on immigration, as on other things, corporate news media have shaped their narrative around right-wing frames, such that immigration itself is now not a human rights story, or even an economic one, but yet another story about “their” crimes and “our” safety. Sure, it serves racist xenophobes and will harm all of us, but: horrible crimes attachable to brown and Black people? You don’t have to ask the press corps twice! It was bad enough when the narrative was about distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants; we’ve now gone beyond that to “all immigrants” vs. “everyone else”—and if MAGA is now driving that train, elite media have been fueling it up for years.
We’ll talk about the attack on immigrants—and about the resistance to it—with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of oligarchs and the Washington Post‘s new mission statement.
Elon Musk was not the first supporter to celebrate a Trump victory by evoking Nazi Germany (PBS, 11/22/16).
There’s something about the start of a Trump presidency that makes grown men do strange things, like heiling Hitler.
Eight years ago, after Trump’s first election, white nationalist Richard Spencer couldn’t resist flashing a Nazi salute as he addressed a rally just blocks from the White House (PBS, 11/22/16).
This time around, a more prominent Trump supporter gave a Nazi salute in a bigger forum. “I never imagined we would see the day when what appears to be a Heil Hitler salute would be made behind the presidential seal,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler wrote on Twitter/X (1/20/25).
Nadler was referring to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s major patron. Having spent over $275 million backing Trump, Musk secured a speaking slot at Trump’s Inauguration Day rally at Capital One Arena.
Addressing the crowd from the same podium Trump would soon speak from, Musk gave a passionate Nazi salute. Then he did it again.
‘A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute’
The New York Times (1/20/25) reported “speculation” that Musk had given a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration.
The New York Times (1/20/25) described the moment:
[Musk] grunted and placed his hand to his heart before extending his arm out above his head with his palm facing down. After he turned around, he repeated the motion to those behind him.
“My heart goes out to you,” Musk then said. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”
The Times story was headlined, “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture.”
But speculation wasn’t needed. “Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,” wrote journalist Lenz Jacobsen. His story for the German newspaper Die Zeit (1/21/25) is headlined “A Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute.”
NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat was no less certain. “That was a Nazi salute—and a very belligerent one too,” she wrote on X (1/20/25).
Ben-Ghiat was commenting on a widely shared video posted by PBS’s NewsHour, which reported that “Musk gave what appeared to be a fascist salute.”
In a sign of the dangers that lie ahead for media, particularly public media, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gave Musk a pass for his racist salute, and instead took aim at PBS for posting video of it. Greene wrote on X (1/20/25):
I look forward to PBSNewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds.
We will be in touch soon.
Meanwhile, the axe has already fallen on a Milwaukee meteorologist. CBS 58—whose call letters, coincidentally, are WDJT—dropped Sam Kuffel the day after she posted about Musk’s salute on her personal Instagram account (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1/22/25). Over a picture of Musk, Kuffel’s post read: “Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration.”
‘The actual truth’
The idea that “Western Jewish populations” are “pushing…dialectical hatred of whites” is at the core of Nazi ideology. Musk declared it “the actual truth” (X, 11/15/23).
Reared in apartheid South Africa, Musk is no stranger to extremism. Like many on the far right, a favorite target of Musk’s is George Soros, the Jewish billionaire who funds lefty candidates and causes.
Much of Musk’s criticism centers around Soros’ supposed role in the racist “great replacement theory,” whose proponents allege that Soros is funding waves of immigration that are meant to deliberately dilute the white population in order to reshape society and its politics. This conspiracy has been cited by white nationalists who have perpetrated deadly attacks in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo.
Soros is bent on “destroying Western civilization,” says Musk, who after making his Nazi salute thanked Trump’s supporters for assuring “the future of civilization.”
Musk has endorsed explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories. He responded “You have said the actual truth” (X, 11/15/23) to a user who posted:
Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.
Trump, of course, is also fluent in far-right ideology. His first wife, Ivana, said Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed (ABC, 12/20/23). As president, after white nationalists romped through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” in 2017, Trump famously said that some of them were “very fine people.”
And Musk isn’t just backing Trump; he’s also voiced support for far right candidates in Europe. “He has made recent statements in support of Germany’s far-right AfD party and British anti-immigration party Reform UK,” reported the BBC (1/21/25), which noted Musk’s “politics have increasingly shifted to the right.”
‘Musk stirs controversy’
Megan McArdle (Washington Post, 1/21/25) argues that democracy requires us to pretend that those who openly promote Nazi ideology are not actually doing so.
The only word my wife could utter as she handed me her phone Monday night was “watch.” And we did. Again and again, with our stomachs in knots.
My only comfort was knowing that Musk would be excoriated in the coming news cycle. But when I searched our hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, all I saw was a headline that read, “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.”
The post consisted of a one-minute video of Musk’s “high-energy speech,” and left out the jaw-dropping part: Musk, head on, eagerly giving a Nazi salute for all the world to see. The Post video only showed Musk’s second, comparatively lackluster salute, with his back to the cameras.
By late Tuesday morning, the Post had uploaded a new video that included a straight-on shot of Musk’s first salute, but under the anodyne headline: “Elon Musk Stirs Controversy Over Hand Gesture at Trump Rally.”
By Tuesday night, the Post had finally published its own story, as well as republished an AP story. The latter began:
Right-wing extremists are celebrating Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a speech Monday, although his intention wasn’t totally clear.
Meanwhile, Post columnist Megan McArdle claimed Musk’s salute may have been nothing more than “an awkward attempt to embody what he said next: ‘My heart goes out to you.’” In her column—headlined “The Missing Context From the Elon Musk Salute” (1/21/25)—McArdle wrote that Musk “made other awkward gestures” in his speech:
That may just be how he moves when he’s excited. Musk has said he is mildly autistic, and even high-functioning autistic people struggle with reading, and sending, accurate social cues.
A mogul with prime seating
Jeff Bezos (X, 1/20/25) posted this close-quarters view of Donald Trump’s inauguration, declaring himself “excited to collaborate.”
For the Post, its weak coverage of Musk’s salute comes at a time when the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has been busy supplicating himself before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/22/25).
Just ahead of the election, Bezos personally killed the Post’s endorsement of Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). Since Trump’s win, Bezos and the company he founded, Amazon, have lavished Trump and his family with millions of dollars. And the Post recently spiked a drawing by Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, which depicted Bezos and other tech billionaires groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).
That groveling is what enabled Bezos to view Trump’s inauguration up close. “Donald Trump did everything but invite the tech moguls to join him in taking the oath,” wrote the Post’s Ruth Marcus (1/20/25):
The scene—moguls with prime dais seating inside the cozy Rotunda, while lawmakers and governors and other luminaries were relegated to watching on screens—could not have been more revealing.
Amid Bezos’s politicking, the Post is in freefall, hemorrhaging talent and readers—yet another gift to Trump.
‘Pure propaganda’
Zeit Online (1/21/25) masked an image of Musk’s gesture in deference to Germany’s anti-Nazi laws.
Musk, notably, hasn’t denied that he made a Nazi salute. Instead, he’s lashed out on X (1/21/25, 1/22/25), the platform he owns, blaming the “pure propaganda” media and “radical leftists” for stirring up controversy. Musk also wrote on X (1/20/25) that “the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
But as Vanity Fair’s Kase Wickman (1/21/25) noted, “people weren’t calling him Hitler”:
They were saying that he made a gesture that people who really dig Hitler typically make. It would be very easy to just plainly say that that wasn’t the intention, but Musk just let that pass.
Still, Musk has defenders, most notably Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (X, 1/23/25) and the Anti-Defamation League. The latter claimed Musk “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” Let’s all “take a breath,” the ADL posted on X (1/20/25).
Despite billing itself as a defender of civil rights and the final arbiter on antisemitism, the ADL has long prioritized its right-wing agenda above all (In These Times, 7/21/20).
With its defense of Musk, “ADL opted to gaslight,” Haaretz’s Ben Samuels wrote on X (1/21/25). Samuels’ recent story (1/21/25) is headlined “Musk’s ‘Fascist Salute’: US Jewish Establishment Failed Its First Test With Trump 2.0.”
Much of US corporate media also failed that first test.
In its message declaring the platform unavailable, TikTok played to Donald Trump’s vanity by saying it was “fortunate” to have his assistance.
So here we are. After both houses of Congress approved it, the president signed it and government attorneys successfully argued for it in federal court, the ban on TikTok went into effect for a few hours, which for some might have seemed like an eternity.
The law bans the social media platform used by 170 million Americans unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it. While the ban took effect the day before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, the site was restored as Trump vowed to extend the app’s life by 90 days (AP, 1/19/25).
I have covered the move to ban TikTok for years (FAIR.org, 8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23, 3/14/24, 9/27/24), so I’ll summarize the problem: Anti-China hysteria (and Israel boosterism) led lawmakers in both parties to allege that TikTok harvests user data—which sounds sinister, but is actually par for the course with social media. A ban would hurt millions of people who rely on the app for their personal business and for news consumption, and would set a terrible anti–free speech precedent, forcing us all to ask what other foreign-owned media products could also face federal censorship.
Commercial realities
For the Hollywood Reporter (1/18/25), what made TikTok unique was that it “allowed any user, regardless of their social clout or level of fame, to reach millions at the click of the button.”
While many have rightfully protested the ban, it surely wasn’t any left-wing outcry that has caused Trump, who originally started the anti-TikTok sentiment (NPR, 8/6/20), to attempt to save the app’s life in the US.
Shutting down the platform would negatively impact a number of important US business sectors, including the music industry (Guardian, 1/18/25) and advertising (Adweek, 1/3/25). Small businesses, often lauded as the purest form of American entrepreneurialism in the conservative imagination, are acutely at risk (CBS News, 1/17/25); imagine upstart companies several decades ago losing their phone or mail service.
By 2023, TikTok was playing a major role in our economy. Thousands of retailers came to rely on TikTokShop to reach customers, and by the following year TikTok was just as much of an ecommerce platform as a social network. TikTok claims it contributed $24.2 billion to the GDP in 2023, and supported some 224,000 American jobs, according to Oxford Economics, a research firm.
The state wanted to curb people’s access to Chinese apps, yet the ban fails to do that, as many TikTok users flocked to another Chinese app, RedNote (Global Times, 1/14/25; Slate, 1/16/25). (The right has alleged, with little or no evidence, that TikTok is used to advance Chinese state ideology—Fox News, 7/31/23; Free Press, 1/5/25).
‘Warm spot’ for TikTok
TikTok restored service on January 20 (Reuters, 1/20/25), but as of January 23, the app was still unavailable from Google and Apple‘s app stores.
Trump, ever the vain showman, found his own success on the app (Reuters, 6/3/24). “Trump has said he has a ‘warm spot’ for TikTok and has vowed to ‘save’ a platform on which his campaign generated ‘billions of views,’” reported USA Today (1/15/25). TikTok’s CEO is feeding Trump’s ego at an opportune time in hopes that Trump could save the app (Washington Post, 1/16/25).
Others on the right are seeing the problems with banning TikTok. The Murdoch-owned New York Post (1/18/25) ran an op-ed saying, “just because the anti-TikTok legislation is legal”—the word the authors are looking for is constitutional, not legal, but you get the idea—“doesn’t necessarily make it wise.” It reminded readers, “We must also grapple with an uncomfortable truth: Despite its Chinese Communist ties, TikTok became an unlikely bastion of free speech during the 2024 election season”—in contrast to “Meta’s Orwellian content moderation.”
Former GOP Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher, a key architect of the ban, took to the Wall Street Journal (1/9/25), also Murdoch-owned, to defend the ban in a piece called “Congress Didn’t Ban TikTok,” which smelled more like last-minute damage control than a policy victory lap.
In other words, after federal lawmakers spent hours pushing through the ban and arguing for it in media outlets, and lawyers used precious resources to craft careful arguments in the court, it was all a waste of time.
TikTok could still go dark
Some US investors who hope to take over TikTok in a gun-to-the-head sale say that they don’t need to buy the algorithm—a claim some social media observers find dubious (CNN, 1/9/25).
But free speech advocates shouldn’t celebrate just yet. First of all, this could very well be merely a delay in a ban, rather than long-term preservation of the platform. TikTok could very well go dark eventually.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, whose acquisition of Twitter (now known as X) has crushed free speech on that platform (El País, 5/24/23), created a cesspool of bigotry (Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; Guardian, 9/5/24) precipitated the site’s overall decline (Nieman Reports, 1/31/24; CNN, 9/5/24; NBC News, 11/13/24), is a potential buyer for TikTok (Bloomberg, 1/14/25). Such a move would consolidate social media under far-right billionaire control.
On Trump’s own social media network, Truth Social (1/19/25), Trump said of a future deal to save TikTok: “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to stay up.” Translation: state control. As is always the case with Trump, it’s hard to say how much he believes this.
Many believe it is unlikely ByteDance would spin off TikTok to another party. “ByteDance would prefer to shut down TikTok rather than sell it if the Chinese company exhausts all legal options,” Reuters (4/26/24) reported, citing several sources, as this would be tantamount to selling its trade secrets to rivals. It would also be
impossible to divest TikTok with its algorithms, as their intellectual property license is registered under ByteDance in China and thus difficult to disentangle from the parent company.
“Separating the algorithms from TikTok’s US assets would be an extremely complicated procedure,” Reuters said.
Power to censor
Putting the lie to the Supreme Court’s claim that the anti-TikTok law was “content agnostic, the New York Post (1/17/25) pointed to the platform’s “enormous potential to sway public opinion” as a “prime reason” to force a takeover.
The bipartisan ban on TikTok impacts any app with ties to its Chinese company ByteDance, so other less popular apps, like the video editor CapCut, are also feeling the pinch (USA Today, 1/19/25). The ban’s power to censor is still very much in effect.
Even if Trump simply chooses not to enforce the ban against TikTok, the law remains on the books, and the Supreme Court has provided politicians with judicial justification that free speech concerns can be subverted if you say the words “national security” and “foreign adversary” enough times (New York Times, 1/17/25). With journalists already fearing how Trump might retaliate against the press (FAIR.org, 11/14/24), this Supreme Court precedent will be another legal arrow in the executive branch’s quiver.
RedNote’s popularity has already put it in the crosshairs of the national security state. CBS News (1/16/25) reported that an unnamed US official said “RedNote, just like TikTok, could face an ultimatum to divest, or be banned.” Capitalizing on US government anxiety about RedNote, the Global Times (1/17/25), owned by China’s Communist Party, said, “Those malicious hypes won’t deter the momentum of positive engagement between Chinese and the US netizens.” It’s a cheeky little jab at anti-China demagogues, but that attitude could only encourage more US censorship of anything deemed in control of Beijing.
The lesson of this episode is that jingoistic paranoia is a dangerous disease. The New York Post editorial board (1/17/25), as if channeling George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, said the US “must not kowtow to the commies and let China retain control of the company or its app.” The Post and other Trumpists clearly want Washington to snatch TikTok from ByteDance to kick dirt in China’s face in a would-be show of hegemonic dominance.
More tariffs, and war talk about so-called Chinese control of the Panama Canal, have negative consequences for everyday Americans (CounterSpin, 1/10/25). For example, the impending tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China could mean higher prices for consumers (CNBC, 1/20/25), especially for generic drugs (NBC News, 11/22/24), and they could alienate the US from global cooperation to “improve the resilience of supply chains, decarbonize production patterns, or increase workers’ rights” (Center for American Progress, 12/18/24).
And, of course, one of the prime victims of anti-Communist fervor has always been free speech; think HUAC and McCarthyism. TikTok has a little more time, and could remain a media service for millions of Americans after all, but the battle to defend free speech under the second Trump administration is just beginning.
As the Washington Post faces a staff rebellion and plummeting subscription rates, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has introduced a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
The Washington Post‘s new slogan, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” is “meant to be an internal rallying point for employees,” the New York Times (1/16/25) reported.
The new path forward, as introduced in a slide deck to staff by Suzi Watford, the paper’s chief strategy officer, demands that the paper “understand and represent interests across the country,” and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation” (New York Times, 1/16/25). It will do this as “an AI-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.”
This appears to mean shifting resources toward opinion, specifically opinions from the right. According to the New York Times report:
Bezos has expressed hopes that the Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding the Post’s audience among conservatives.
The Post has already begun to consider ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. An adviser to the Post, Lippe Oosterhof, has conducted brainstorming sessions about a new initiative that would make it easier to receive and publish opinion writing from outside contributors.
How AI is meant to play into this is unclear.
The Post already has more columnists than you can shake a stick at. This new direction sounds like the Foxification of the Washington Post, a move away from any attempt to hold the powerful to account, toward inexpensive clickbait punditry.
‘Make money’
The red area represents the proportion of Jeff Bezos’s total wealth that would be required to cover the Washington Post‘s losses for a year.
Watford’s slide deck presented three pillars of the Post‘s new model: “great journalism,” “happy customers” and “make money.” The Postlost roughly $77 million in 2023. (It also lost some 250,000 subscribers after Bezos killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris—FAIR.org, 10/30/24.)
In order to make money, its new “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (yes, that’s what the Post slide deck apparently called it) is to reach 200 million “paying users.” The paper currently has about 3 million subscribers, making it an “audacious” goal indeed. As the Times pointed out, even if the Post could achieve the impossible task of monetizing every visit to its website, no major corporate media outlet has been getting more than 100 million monthly unique visits—paying and non-paying—outside of the spike in traffic around the election.
Back in 2019, the Post was claiming 80–90 million unique visitors per month. Those visits peaked in November 2020 at 114 million, but quickly and steadily dropped after Biden’s inauguration. The Post stopped posting its audience numbers online after January 2023, when they were down to 58 million.
Of course, most online corporate media have been struggling. The thing about the Post is that its absurdly wealthy owner, the second-richest person on Earth, can easily afford to lose $77 million a year. That’s 0.03% of Bezos’s current net worth.
‘We are deeply alarmed’
Guardian (1/15/25): “The plea from staff…comes a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees…roughly 4% of the publication’s staff.”
No doubt the Post needs help. Just days before the new mission statement was revealed, over 400 staff members signed a letter to Bezos asking for a meeting (Guardian, 1/15/25). The letter read:
We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent.
Bezos’s response—a slide deck about “riveting storytelling” on “an AI-driven platform” that prioritizes churning out opinions to draw in conservatives—is hardly likely to ease the mind of any serious journalist at the paper.
Nor is trying to “expand the Post audience among conservatives,” while still paying lip service to “great journalism,” likely to solve the Post‘s problems. As CNN‘s former CEO Chris Licht discovered (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), you can’t do good journalism while trying to appeal to both sides in the context of an increasingly radical right, because that side demands acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories that are incompatible with actual journalism.
When Bezos bought the Post (Extra!, 3/14), he assured the paper’s employees that “the paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” That sentiment was repeated in Watford’s slide deck this week. But Bezos’s actions in the past months—including the killing of the Harris endorsement, Amazondonating $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund and paying Melania Trump $40 million for her self-produced documentary, and, most recently, Bezos appearing onstage with other multibillionaires at Trump’s inauguration—make clear that the principle is as meaningless to Bezos as the slogan that debuted after Trump’s first election: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
That slogan will continue to adorn the front page for the time being, perhaps in the hope that readers searching for an actual news organization that holds those in power to account will be fooled into subscribing.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Ten months before the 2024 election, high-profile news outlets were already sounding the alarm: If Trump were to win another term, widespread fatigue, despair and activist burnout would probably minimize resistance.
Exhaustion and burnout are real phenomena that pose a significant challenge to political movements (Psychology Today, 6/24/20). But articles that focus on feelings of burnout, and exclude or downplay questions of changes in strategy amid shifting conditions, often have the effect—and occasionally the goal—of making everyday people seem and feel less powerful than they are.
A year ago, Politico‘s Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) was predicting that a Trump victory might “be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”
Politico writer Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) noted a year ago that the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory “sparked a burst of activity that profoundly altered Washington”:
Donations to progressive advocacy groups soared. Traffic to political media spiked. Protests filled the calendar…. But now, as a second Trump term becomes an increasingly real possibility, there’s no consensus that anything similar would happen in January 2025.
While acknowledging that the post-2016 burst of activity had profoundly altered Washington, Politico warned Trump opponents that pioneering new strategies would only get them so far, since passivity in the face of a second Trump term “has as much to do with psychology as it does with the tactics or organizational skill of the activist class.”
Humans “respond to a sudden threat with a fight-or-flight instinct,” Schaffer observed, and for many, “the string of jolts that accompanied the first Trump months of 2017—the Muslim ban, the firing of James Comey, Charlottesville—spurred an impulse to fight.” The same was unlikely to be true of a second Trump win, he speculated, because for many it would amount to proof that fighting back “wasn’t enough,” and could “just as easily be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”
Good journalists don’t pretend an energetic and cohesive resistance exists when it does not. But presenting opposition to authoritarians like Trump as pointless, ineffectual and doomed is journalistically irresponsible and historically illiterate, particularly when it’s clear that the initial backlash to Trump had an effect (New York Times, 12/18/17).
‘A weary shrug’
After the election, Politico again predicted a muted response to Trump’s second term. A Politico EU story (11/13/24) characterized the 2024 Trump resistance as “flaccid” (“Toto, we’re not in 2016 anymore,” read the subhead), and proclaimed that while Trump’s 2016 win had “sparked a global revolt,” his recent triumph has been “met with a weary shrug.”
The outlet suggested that Trump’s latest win had been inevitable—
part of a broader, inexorable rightward trend on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving a dejected liberal left to helplessly scratch their heads as the fickle tide of political history turns against them.
Which might leave anti-Trump readers wondering: Don’t humans have a role to play in turning history’s tide?
After the election, Politico‘s Schaffer (11/15/24) presented the exodus from the far-right X (formerly Twitter) as a sign that “the post-election progressive ferment that in 2016 gave us the resistance is going to be a lot quieter this time.”
A couple of days later, Schaffer (Politico, 11/15/24) wrote a column headlined “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.” Noting a decline in critical coverage of Trump, Schaffer wrote that for a nation
wondering whether the return of Trump will drive an immediate return of the public fury and journalistic energy triggered by his first win, it makes for an early hint that the answer will be: Nope.
Where Trump’s first victory “triggered Blue America’s fight instinct,” he added, “the aftermath of this year’s win is looking a lot more like flight.” The question of why so many Americans are now in “fight or flight” mode went largely unexamined. Schaffer’s main takeaway was that Blue America cannot credibly blame a “feckless pre-election press” for “bungl[ing] the coverage” of the race this time around, as if alarmist corporate media coverage of crime, immigration, the economy and transgender issues didn’t contribute to Trump’s narrow victory in 2024.
He also faulted the initial resistance to Trump for being “organized around issues of identity,” citing as examples the 2017 Women’s March, the backlash to the Muslim ban, the 2017 counter-protest against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and the 2020 racial justice protests. But the fact that the Women’s March drew people of all genders, most participants in the 2020 racial justice protests were white, and Black Lives Matter may have been the largest protest movement in US history suggests that many Americans find issues of “identity” galvanizing rather than alienating.
And it is likelier that direct threats to people’s lives—say, those posed by mass deportations and abortion bans—will inspire more re-engagement than vague appeals to issues like preserving democracy.
Reformulated opposition
Truthout (11/16/24): “As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge.”
It’s true that while Trump’s 2016 victory came as a horrific shock to millions, in part because Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win, the outcome of the 2024 election was less surprising, since no candidate seemed assured of victory. But torpor is just one aspect of an unfolding story; opposition to Trump’s agenda is not muted so much as it is being reformulated in response to changing conditions.
Thousands continue to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide, despite elite media outlets’ and universities’ war on free speech and student protesters. Two days after the 2024 election, more than 100,000 people joined a call organized by a coalition of 200 progressive groups, including the Working Families Party, Indivisible, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action, and thousands signed up for follow-up actions.
As it did in and after 2016, Trump’s recent election has spurred thousands to join organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, to which I belong. Public support for organized labor remains extremely high—70% of Americans approve of labor unions—and the US continues to experience an uptick in militant labor actions, including recent strikes at major companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Finally, many organizers are focused on developing strategies to combat Trump policies, like mass deportations, as soon as he attempts to impose them.
‘Get somebody else to do it’
“How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions,” might have been a more appropriate headline for this New York Times piece (11/20/24).
The New York Times has also been obsessed with the allegedly neutered 2024 resistance. “In 2017, [anti-Trump voters] donned pink hats to march on Washington, registering their fury with Donald J. Trump by the hundreds of thousands,” reporter Katie Glueck (2/19/24) wrote, adding, “This year, [they] are grappling with another powerful sentiment: exhaustion.”
Weeks after the election, the paper published “‘Get Somebody Else to Do It’: Trump Resistance Encounters Fatigue” (11/20/24). The subhead read, “Donald J. Trump’s grass-roots opponents search for a new playbook as they reckon with how little they accomplished during his first term.”
In the piece itself, reporter Katie Benner offered a balance of voices of both the exhausted and the motivated, accompanied by a fairly nuanced assessment of the situation facing the anti-Trump resistance, describing “a sharp global reversal in the power of mass action” that may be partly due to governments’ authoritarian drift and declining willingness to change course in response to public pressure. But the paper’s headline writers erased that nuance and the role of repression, leaving only a sense that activists are personally failing. As headlines go, “How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions” might have been more accurate.
In December, New York Times columnist and Trump critic Charles Blow (12/18/24) offered weary progressives absolution: “Temporarily Disconnected From Politics? Feel No Guilt About It.” Though he cautioned that it would be “a mistake for anyone to confuse a temporary disconnection for a permanent acquiescence,” he suggested that there were, at the moment, few ways to fight back.
After all, Blow wrote, “there is very little that average citizens can do about the way the administration takes shape”—seeming to forget that cabinet members must be confirmed by the Senate, which is an elected representative body. Even efforts to counter Trump’s agenda led by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he noted, are “largely beyond the involvement of average citizens.” (That would probably be news to the ACLU, which is often seeking volunteers, and always seeking donations.)
Even columnists like Blow, who has called Trump an “aberration and abomination,” are apparently more interested in chronicling progressive fatigue than in contending with two troubling shifts noted by the New York Times: a global decline in the power of mass action, and self-proclaimed champion of democracy President Joe Biden’s refusal to respond to the majority of Americans who oppose Israel’s war.
When large groups of Americans cannot sway their leaders via forceful dissent, mass action or electoral campaigns—when participating in politics feels, and often is, useless—some degree of disengagement is inevitable.
‘In no mood to organize’
The Washington Post (11/10/24) presented the mood of today’s activists: “I’m feeling like I want to curl up in the fetal position.”
The WashingtonPost (11/10/24), under the headline, “A ‘Resistance’ Raced to Fight Trump’s First Term. Will It Rise Again?” noted in its subhead that some who had been a part of that resistance were “exhausted and feeling hopeless,” and “say they need a break.” The piece described an activist, who’d been “shocked into action” by Trump’s 2016 victory, as “in no mood to organize” in 2024. Although many had been “jolted” into opposing Trump in 2016, today’s resistance leaders “must contend with a swirl of other feelings: exhaustion, dejection, burnout.”
Yet despite their exhaustion, ordinary people around the country and world are still organizing, because they know how much worse things can get if they don’t—and because it’s their bodies, families and communities on the line. Having seen how hard it is to make change, even when a policy or cause has majority popular support, it’s no wonder that some are taking a short- to long-term break from politics.
This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Timesrolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.
Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries—fossil fuels and insurers—are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman. We’ll hear that conversation on this week’s show.
Also on the show: Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities, by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about China trade policy for the January 10, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US/China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like “more Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel”—later followed, quaintly, by “a lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”
But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who, a source says, “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, Friedman says, “we will be toast.”
The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts,” i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.
Okay, it’s very Thomas Friedman. But how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally?
Dean Baker is senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where Beat the Press, his commentary on economic reporting, appears. He’s the author of, among other titles, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He joins us now by phone from Utah. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dean Baker.
Dean Baker: Thanks for having me on, Janine.
JJ: We will talk about news media, of course, but first, there is Trump himself. It’s not our imagination that Trump’s trade ideas, his actions and his stated plans—about China, but overall—they just don’t make much consistent or coherent sense, do they?
DB: Obviously, consistency isn’t a strong point for him, but it does obviously matter to other people. So before he is even in office, he’s threatening both Mexico and Canada. It wasn’t even that clear, at least to me, maybe they got the message what he wants them to do, but if they don’t stop immigrants coming across the border with fentanyl, then he’s going to impose 25% tariffs—I’m going to come back to that word in a second—on both countries.
Now, we have a trade deal with both countries—which, as far as I know, and he certainly didn’t indicate otherwise, they’re following. And it was his trade deal. So what exactly is he threatening with? He’s going to abrogate the trade deal he signed four years ago, because of what, exactly?
And they actually have cooperated with the US in restricting immigrants from coming across the border. Could they do more? Yeah, well, maybe. Canada tries to police fentanyl. So it’s not clear what exactly he thought they would do. Now he’s just said he wants to annex Canada anyhow, so I guess it’s all moot.
But the idea of making these threats is kind of incredible. And, again, he’s threatening, coming back to the word tariff, because a lot of people, and I think including Donald Trump, don’t know what a tariff is. Tariffs are a tax on our imports, and I’ve been haranguing reporters, “Why don’t you just call it a tax on imports?” I can’t believe they can’t use the three words, one of them is very short, instead of tariff, because a lot of people really don’t understand what it is.
And the way Trump talks about it, he makes it sound like we’re charging Canada or Mexico or China, he’s imposing his tariff on, we’re charging them this money, when what we’re actually doing is, we’re charging ourselves the money.
And there’s an economics debate. If we have a 25% tariff on goods from Canada, how much of that will be borne by consumers in the US? How much might be absorbed by intermediaries, and how much might be the exporters in Canada? In all cases, it’s not zero, but almost all, and there’s a lot of work on it, finds that the vast majority is borne by consumers here.
So he’s going to punish Canada, going to punish Mexico by imposing a 25% tax on the goods we import from them, which I think to most people probably wouldn’t sound very good, but that is what he’s doing, and it’s kind of a strange policy.
Now, getting to China, I’m not sure what his latest grievance is with China. I’m sure he’s got a list. But he’s talking about a 100% tax on imports from China, and following on the Friedman article, China is at this point, I’m not going to say a rich country, in the sense that, if you look at the average income, it is still considerably lower than the US, and you have a lot poor people in rural areas in China. But in terms of its industrial capacities, it’s huge, and it actually is considerably larger than the United States. So the idea that somehow he’s going to be bringing China to its knees, which seems to be what he thinks—I’m not going to try and get in his head, but just based on what he says, that seems to be what he thinks—that’s a pretty crazy thought.
JJ: And, certainly, we have learned that tariffs are a misunderstood concept by many in the public, and some in the media, as well as some in political office. But that whole picture of Trump threatening to pull out of a deal, in terms of Canada and Mexico, that he made himself, all of that sort of stuff gets us to what you call your “best bet for 2025,” which is improved and increased trade relations between Europe and China. Let’s not be surprised if that happens, for the very reasons that you’re laying out about Trump’s inconsistencies.
Dean Baker: “Trump is saying he doesn’t care about whatever agreements we have, including the ones he signed.” (image: BillMoyers.com)
DB: Basically, Trump is saying he doesn’t care about whatever agreements we have, including the ones he signed. And this has been the way he’s done business throughout his life: He signs a contract, and he doesn’t make good on it. So he has contractors that do things for him, build a building or put in a heating system, whatever it might be. He just says, “no, I’m not going to pay you, sue me.” And maybe he pays half, maybe he pays nothing. He’s prepared to go to court, and spend a lot of money on lawyers. It’s come to be the pattern that most people, including lawyers, insist on getting paid in advance, because they know if they do their work and then come to collect from Trump, they’re not going to get it.
And that’s his approach to international relations as well. So treaties don’t mean anything to him.
And we could have lots of grounds for being unhappy with China. They have a bad human rights record. I’m not going to try to defend it. I don’t think anyone would try to defend it. There are other things you could point to that are not very pretty about China, but just from the standpoint of doing business, they largely follow through on their commitments. Trump doesn’t.
So from the standpoint of Europe, if you want to have trading partners that are reasonably reliable, and won’t pull things out of the air and say, “I want you to do this, I want you to do that,” China looks a hell of a lot better than the United States.
JJ: And so we shouldn’t be surprised, or immediately begin assigning nefarious intentions to European countries who would rather make a deal with China, at this point, than with the US under Trump. It doesn’t make them sketchy or anti-US, necessarily.
DB: That’s right. I mean, I don’t really think they have an alternative, in the sense he takes pride in it. He seems to, at least he says, “I like to be unpredictable.” Well, that’s fine, but if you’re a company in Germany and France, you’re trying to plan for the next five years, ten years: Where’s your market? Where should you build a factory? Where should you look to expand your business? You don’t want to deal with someone who changes everything every day of the week. So China just looks much better from that point.
And also, again, we’re talking about respect for international law. We just saw Donald Trump yesterday saying he doesn’t care about NATO. He’s threatening military force against Greenland and Denmark, implicitly also Canada and Panama, kind of incredible.
So, in that sense, this is not a guy who respects commitments. So I think it’s just kind of common sense from the standpoint, if I were operating a major business in Europe, I would certainly be looking much more to China than the United States right now.
JJ: I did want to say I was hipped to that Friedman piece by CODEPINK’s Megan Russell, who wrote about it, and she had trouble with the idea, among others, that China’s investment in its manufacturing was a recent development that was solely in response to Trump toughness. And that’s what led to what he’s calling their “Sputnik moment.” What do you make of that claim?
DB: Well, first off, the investment in manufacturing is longstanding. Because, I saw the Friedman piece, I assumed he was referring to their move into high tech. I think he’s, again, I don’t have access to the inner workings of China’s leadership, I think he is almost certainly exaggerating the extent to which its move was a response to Trump, but they did certainly recognize that they were dealing with a different world with Donald Trump in the White House than Obama, previously.
But the hostilities to China, I mean… Obama, the last couple years of his administration, at least, he was selling the Trans Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that we ended up not completing, as a way to isolate China. I don’t recall if he used that term. “Marginalize” China, I think that was the term they had used.
So the fact that the United States was becoming increasingly anti-China, or hostile to China, that began under Obama. Trump clearly accelerated that. I’m quite sure China would have moved in a big way into high tech in any case, but I suspect this was an accelerant there, that they could say, “Here’s more reason to do it.”
But they’ve been increasing the sophistication of their manufacturing and their technical skills for a long time. They have many, many more computer scientists, engineers, go down the list, than we do. So the idea that it wouldn’t have occurred to them that it’d be good to develop high-tech industries—no, that wasn’t Trump.
JJ: Let me ask you to just unpack, to the extent you feel like it, the big idea that we get from the US press, which is that, No. 1, China is worrisome. Their economy’s growth is inherently troubling and dangerous to the US. And, No. 2, we should consequently insist on, among other things, trade policy that is “tough” on China, somehow, and that will be good for “us.” I mean, there can be nuance, of course, but that seems like the frame a lot of outlets place their China trade coverage within: China is inherently frightening and dangerous to the US, and so we have to somehow use trade policy to beat them back. How useful is that framing?
DB: I think it’s very wrong-headed in just about every possible way. Obviously, the US has been the leading economy in the world for a long time, so we would always say, well, other countries should recognize that we grow together, so that by having access to cheaper products, better technology, they benefit, trade benefits everyone. That’s the classic story, and economists have been pushing that for centuries. And there’s more than a little bit of truth to that. And that continues to hold true when we talk about China.
So the idea that somehow China growing wealthier is a threat to us is, to my view, kind of wacky. Now, you could raise military issues, and there can be issues, but as far as the economics of it, we benefit by having China be a wealthier country. And we could—I just was tweeting on this—China is now selling electric cars, which are as good as most of the cars you’d get here, for $15,000, $16,000. I think it’d be fantastic if we can get those.
I’m sympathetic to the auto industry, particularly the people in the UAW. I mean, those are still some good-paying jobs. But, damn, you’re looking at Elon Musk, who is charging $40,000 for his cars. I don’t drive an electric car, but I’ve heard people say that the Chinese cars are every bit as good as his cars, and they’re less than half the price. We can’t buy them, though; we have a 100% tariff on them.
So this idea that we’re going to compete—why don’t we talk about cooperating? Why don’t we look for areas where we can cooperate?
And there are clearly some big ones. The two obvious, to my mind, are healthcare and climate. If we had more sharing of technology, think of how much more rapidly we could develop our clean technology, clean industries, electric vehicles, batteries, if we had shared technology more freely.
And in terms of healthcare, again, the pandemic’s not ancient history. If we had shared all of our technology, first and foremost vaccines, but also the treatments, the tests, we could have been far more effective containing the pandemic earlier, and probably saved millions of lives.
And that would apply more generally, obviously, going forward. Hopefully we won’t have another pandemic like that, but we obviously have a lot of diseases we have to deal with, and sharing technology and healthcare would be a fantastic way to do it. But that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda right now. Almost no one is talking about that, from anywhere in the political spectrum, and I just think that’s incredibly unfortunate.
I’ll also add—obviously, I have material interest here—that if you talked about sharing technology, our drug companies might not get patents, and might not make as much money, and they’re not happy to see that. But if the point is to advance public health—and also, for that matter, of the economics; we waste a lot of money on drugs with the current structure—sharing technology would really be a great thing to do.
And I’ll also throw in one more point. This is obviously speculative, but if we want to talk about promoting liberal democracy, seems to me having more contact with people in China, having our technicians or scientists working side by side with them, developing better technology, better ways to deal with disease, better ways to advance clean energy—that’s a really good way to try and influence views in China, because the odds are that a lot of scientists, the technicians who are going to be working side by side with people in the United States are going to be brothers and sisters and children and parents of people who were in the Communist Party, people who were actually calling the shots there.
So when we first opened up to China, allowed them into the WTO in 2000, there was a line that was pushed by proponents of that, saying, “Oh, this is the way to promote democracy.” And I and others said, “I don’t quite see that. We’re going to promote democracy by having people work in shoe factories for two bucks an hour? I don’t quite see that.” And that doesn’t seem to have been the case.
But I think it’s a very different story if we say, “We’re going to have your best scientists working side by side with our scientists, and if you believe in liberal democracy, if you really think that’s a good thing, I think there’s a good chance that will rub off.” So that’s speculative, but I’d like to see us try.
JJ: And I think that’s where a lot of people’s heads are at. A lot of people have family in other countries. They just see things in a global way. It’s weird to be talking, in 2025, it lands weird to talk about “foreign adversary nations,” and how we have to have “trade wars,” in part because of what you’re saying, the positive aspect of working together, in particular by sharing technology, but also it lands weird because Boeing isn’t at war with China. There are conflicts, in other words, but as you’re explaining, the lines aren’t drawn where media suggest they are, at national borders. So that misrepresentation of who the fight is between is part of what obscures these more positive visions.
DB: Yeah, exactly. And Boeing’s at war with Airbus, too. No one’s suggesting—well, I shouldn’t say that; Trump might be suggesting—but most people wouldn’t say that France and Germany are our enemies because Airbus is competing with Boeing. That’s a given. They’re going to compete.
And, again, I’m enough of an economist, I’ll say we benefit from that. So if Airbus produces a better plane, I think that’s great that we’re going to fly on it. If it’s a more fuel-efficient, safer plane than what Boeing has, that’s fantastic. Hopefully Boeing will turn around and build a better one next year.
But it’s supposed to be, we like a market economy. At the end of the day, I do think a market economy is a good thing, so we should think of it the same way with China.
And, again, there are conflicts. Europe subsidizes the Airbus. No one disputes that. China has subsidies for its electric cars. And those are things to discuss, to work out in treaties, but it doesn’t make them an enemy.
JJ: And it doesn’t improve our understanding of our own interest, as individuals, in what’s going on, to have there be this kind of “us and them,” when media are not breaking down exactly who the “us” are. And if we had, in this country, a policy where we wanted to protect workers, or we wanted to ensure wages, well, nothing’s stopping us from doing that on its own.
I think we can expect all of this to amp up, as Trump finds utility in identifying enemies, everywhere and anywhere, that call for conquering, in such ways that enrich his friends. But to the extent that that bellicosity is going to show itself in economic policy, are there things you think we should be looking out for in coverage, being wary of, things to seek out as antidote to maybe the big story that we’re going to be hearing about the US and China?
DB: First and foremost, I am declaring war on the word “tariff.” Given the confusion that word creates, I don’t understand how any reporter could in good faith use the term, at least without adding in parentheses, “taxes on imports,” because it’s not a difficult concept.
And, again, I’m an economist. I’ve known what a tariff is. Obviously many people do know what a tariff is, but the point is a lot of people don’t. So taxes on imports, taxes on imports, taxes on imports. When Donald Trump says he wants to tariff someone, he’s saying he wants to put a tax on the goods we import from them; that’s what he’s doing. And that’s not an arguable point. That’s simply definitional. So that’s one thing, front and center.
The second thing, I really wish people would understand what’s at stake. And the reporting, I think, does not do a good job of it. And when we talk about putting taxes on the imports, particularly with China, that we’re making items that would otherwise be available to us at relatively low cost, at ridiculously high cost.
So cars first and foremost, but we’re doing with the batteries from China, a lot of other things. If we’re concerned about global warming, we should want to see this technology spread as quickly as possible.
I wrote a piece on this a while back. So let’s say that the US had a plan to subsidize the adoption of clean technologies around the world. We’d all applaud that, wouldn’t we, say that was a great thing. Well, China’s doing that, and we’re treating them like it’s an act of war.
So, again, I’m sympathetic to auto workers. I have a lot of friends over the years who were auto workers, and I respect enormously the United Auto Workers union, but it’s not an act of war for them to make low-cost cars available to us.
And just the third thing, when we talk about protectionism, I’ve made this point many, many times over the years. The most extreme protectionism we have are patent and copyright protections. These are government-granted monopolies.
Now, I understand they’re policies for a specific purpose. They promote innovation, they promote creative work, understood. But they’re policies, they’re protectionism, they’re not the market.
And that’s something we should always be aware of, in trade and other areas, even domestically; we’re raising the price of items that are protected enormously, and treating this as just the market. So drugs that cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars, almost invariably cost $10, $20, $30 in the absence of patent protection.
And people should understand that this is a really big deal. It’s a big intervention in the market, and also a huge source of inequality. I like to make the joke, Bill Gates would still be working for a living—he’d probably be getting Social Security now, he’s an old guy—but he’d probably still be working for a living if the government didn’t threaten to arrest anyone who copies Microsoft software without his permission. And it really does make a big difference, and it’s literally never discussed.
So those are some items. I can give you a longer list, but those would be my starting point.
JJ: All right, then; we’ll pause at your starting point, but just for now.
We’ve been speaking with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their work, and Dean’s Beat the Press commentary, at CEPR.net. Dean Baker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
CBS Evening News (1/13/25) cited Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example of how climate disruption is making wildfires more destructive.
The devastation of the ongoing Los Angeles fires is an alarm going off, but also the result of society having hit the snooze button long ago (Democracy Now!, 1/9/25; CBS, 1/13/25). Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California (NPR, 11/8/23), in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.
“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear,” the Nature Conservancy (7/9/24) said. “Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons.”
The scientific journal Fire Ecology (7/24/23) reported that “climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States.”
Now we are watching one of America’s largest cities burn. It’s a severe reminder that the kind of disruption we experienced in the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020 is the new normal under climate change.
The right-wing media, however, have found a culprit—it’s not climate change, but Democratic Party–led wokeness. The coverage demonstrates once again that the W-word can be used to blame literally anything in the Murdoch fantasyland.
‘Preoccupation With DEI’
Alyssia Finley (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/25): “A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans.” Another cynic might wonder if the Journal publishes smears without evidence as part of its business model.
“Megyn Kelly sounded off on Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Karen Bass,” the New York Post (1/8/25) reported. Former Fox News host Kelly said “that the officials’ preoccupation with diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs distracted them from the city’s fire-combating duties.”
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (1/12/25) echoed the charge: “Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response, but they illustrate the government’s wrongheaded priorities.” In other words, the paper didn’t have evidence to blame the fires on firefighter salaries or department diversity, but decided to insinuate as much anyway.
Other conservative journalists were more direct, like CNN pundit Scott Jennings, who went on CNN NewsNight (1/8/25) to assert:
As a matter of public policy in California, the main interest in the fire department lately has been in DEI programming and budget cuts, and now we have this massive fire, and people are upset.
As the Daily Beast (1/9/25) noted, “His response was part of a Republican kneejerk reaction that included President-elect Donald Trump blaming ‘liberals’ and state Gov. Gavin Newsom.”
The Washington Post (1/10/25) reported that Trump-supporting X owner Elon Musk
has been inundating his 212 million followers with posts casting blame for the blazes on Democrats and diversity policies, amplifying narratives that have taken hold among far-right activists and Republican leaders.
Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, blamed the LA devastation on the “woke religion” (New York Post, 1/9/25).
“There are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs—and more women firefighters isn’t one of them,” moaned National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry (New York Post, 1/15/25). “Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters.”
Blaming gay singers
Mentioned by Fox News (1/10/25): $13,000 allocated to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs. Not mentioned by Fox News: a $126 million boost to the LAPD budget.
Fox & Friends (1/9/25, 1/9/25) blamed the city’s Democratic leaders and the fire chief for the destruction. Fox NewsDigital (1/10/25) said:
While Los Angeles officials were stripping millions in funding from their fire department ahead of one of the most destructive wildfires in state history, hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to fund programs such as a “Gay Men’s Chorus” and housing for the transgender homeless.
You may notice the shift from “millions” to “hundreds of thousands”—the latter, obviously, can’t explain what happened to the former. What can far better explain it is that the city focused much more on funding cops than firefighters (Intercept, 1/8/25). The mayor’s budget plan offered “an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LA Fire Department” (KTTV, 4/22/24). KABC (1/9/25) reported more recent numbers, saying the “fire department’s budget was cut by $17.6 million,” while the “city’s police department budget increased by $126 million,” according to the city’s controller.
And in 2023, the LA City Council approved salary increases for cops over objections that these pay boosts “would pull money away from mental health clinicians, homeless outreach workers and many other city needs” (LA Times, 8/23/23). The cop-pay deal was reportedly worth $1 billion (KNBC, 8/23/23).
LAFD cuts under Mayor Bass were, in fact, big news (KTTV, 1/15/25). Fox overlooked the comparison with the police, one regularly made by city beat reporters who cover public safety and city budgets, and went straight to blaming gay singers.
Crusade against ‘woke’
Contrary to the Daily Mail‘s headline (1/14/25), former California first lady Maria Shriver Maria Shriver did not “tear into LA’s woke leaders”; rather, she complained about LA’s insufficient funding of public needs.
Or take the Daily Mail (1/14/25), a right-wing British tabloid with a huge US footprint, whose headline said former California first lady “Maria Shriver Is Latest Celebrity to Tear Into LA’s Woke Leaders.” But the story went on to say that Shriver had decried the cuts to the LAFD, citing no evidence that she was fighting some culture war against women firefighters.
Shriver, the ex-wife of actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was pointing the finger at austerity and calling for more public spending. In other words, Shriver was siding with LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who had complained that city budget cuts had failed her department (CNN, 1/12/25). The Mail’s insistence on calling this a crusade against “woke” is just another example of how tediously the conservative media apply this word to almost anything.
While these accusations highlight diversification in the LA firefighting force, the right never offers real evidence that these hiring practices lead to any kind of hindering of fire response, as University of Southern California education professor Shaun Harper (Time, 1/13/25) noted. If anything, the right admits that miserly budgeting, usually considered a virtue in the conservative philosophy, is the problem.
Equal opportunity disasters
These talking points among right-wing politicians and their sycophants in the media serve several purposes. They bury the idea that climate change, driven by fossil fuels and out-of-control growth, has anything to do with the rise in extreme weather. They pin the blame on Democrats: LA is a blue city in a blue state. And they continue the racist and sexist drumbeat that all of society’s ills can be pinned on the advancement of women and minorities.
There is, of course, an opportunity to look at political mismanagement, including the cutbacks in the fire department. But natural disasters—intensified by climate change and exacerbated by poor political leadership—have ravaged unwoke, Republican-dominated states, as well, meaning Democrats don’t have a monopoly on blame.
Hurricane Ian practically destroyed Sanibel Island in Florida, a state that has been living with Trumpism for some time under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Hurricane Helene also ravaged that state, as well as western North Carolina, a state that went to Trump in the last three elections. Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas’ largest city, Houston, and the rest of Texas has suffered power outages and shortages, due to both extreme cold and summer spikes in energy demand.
Climate change, and the catastrophes it brings to the earth, does not discriminate against localities based on their populations’ political leanings. But conservative media do.
Metastasizing mythology
Ari Paul (In These Times, 8/31/15): “The more progress made in racial and gender diversity, the more white male firefighters will denounce the changes and say that increased diversity is only the result of lowering standards.”
Meanwhile, real firefighters know what the real problem is. The Western Fire Chiefs Association (3/5/24) said:
Global warming pertains to the increased rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, largely caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. These practices emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures over time. Recent data on fire and trends suggests that global extreme fire incidents could rise by up to 14% by the year 2030, 30% by 2050, and 50% by the end of the century. The impact of global warming is seen particularly in the western United States, where record-setting wildfires have occurred in recent years. Fourteen of the 20 largest wildfires on record have been in California over the past 15 years.
Conservative media can ignore all this, because the notion that cultural liberalism has tainted firefighting isn’t new. I covered efforts to diversify the New York City Fire Department as a reporter for the city’s labor-focused weekly Chief-Leader, and I saw firsthand that the resistance to the efforts were based on the idea that minority men weren’t smart enough and women (white and otherwise) weren’t strong enough (PBS, 3/28/06; New York Times, 3/18/14; In These Times, 8/31/15).
What I found interesting in that case was that other major fire departments had achieved higher levels of integration, and no one was accusing those departments of falling behind in their duties. At the same time, while the FDNY resisted diversification, the New York Police Department, almost worshipped by right-wing media, embraced it (New York Post, 9/8/14, 6/10/16).
This racist and sexist mythology has metastasized in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus for years. With Trump coming back into power, these media outlets will feel more empowered to regurgitate this line of thinking, both during this disaster in LA and in the disasters ahead of us.
The Washington Post (1/3/25) argued that “serious accountability is possible” in Israel—by which it meant that Ariel Sharon once had to change his cabinet job after he let thousands of civilians be murdered.
In two instances in the past couple of weeks, the Washington Post has acknowledged criticisms made by FAIR activists and others. Post editors may not be backing down, but they are hearing you.
The first response was a Washington Post editorial (1/3/25) headlined “Readers Disagreed With Us on Israel and the ICC. Here’s Our Response.” This was an attempt to defend an earlier Post editorial, “The International Criminal Court Is Not the Venue to Hold Israel to Account” (11/24/24), which had been the subject of a FAIR Action Alert (11/26/24) and widespread criticism elsewhere (e.g., X, 11/25/24).
The centerpiece of the Post‘s defense of its editorial that said the ICC should not hold Israeli leaders responsible for war crimes was its claim that “serious accountability is possible, even probable,” from Israel’s own institutions.
Oddly, the evidence the paper offered for this was that after the IDF allowed right-wing Lebanese militias to slaughter thousands of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee in 1982, Israel formed a commission to investigate the mass murder, and as a result, then–Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was made to resign from his post. This outcome was widely viewed as “show[ing] Israelis were willing to hold their top leaders to account,” the Post wrote.
The Post did not note that while stepping down as Defense minister, Sharon remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio, held one cabinet ministry after another throughout most of the 1980s and ’90s, and became prime minister of Israel from 2001–06. If that’s the Post‘s best example of Israelis “hold[ing] their top leaders to account,” hopes that anyone will face real justice in Israel for the war crimes against Gaza are very slim.
‘Extra careful…when it comes to our owner’
One of a dozen cartoons (Greater Quiet, 1/7/25) drawn in solidarity with the muzzled Ann Telnaes—this one by Ted Littleford of the New Haven Independent.
Post editorial page editor David Shipley made another retort to a criticism in a FAIR Action Alert (1/7/25) in an internal memo published by the media news site Status (1/10/25). Along with many others (e.g., Pennsylvania Capital-Star, 1/10/25), FAIR had criticized Shipley and the Post for killing a cartoon that lampooned billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos’ obsequious relationship with Donald Trump, leading to the resignation of cartoonist Ann Telnaes.
FAIR’s Pete Tucker said it was “bizarre” for Shipley (New York Times, 1/3/25) to claim that he spiked Telnaes’ cartoon because an earlier column mentioned in passing Bezos dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Shipley claimed that his only bias was “against repetition”—as if the Post, like other papers, doesn’t routinely run cartoons on topics that columnists are also writing about. FAIR cited examples from recent weeks of Post cartoons that echoed Post columns.
In his memo, Shipley seemed to acknowledge this line of criticism: “It’s obviously true that we have published other pieces that are redundant and duplicative.” He admitted that he was being “extra careful,” and that his “scrutiny is on high when it comes to our owner.”
He defended this approach as necessary “to ensure the overall independence of our report.” By “exercising care” in coverage of their owner, “we preserve the ability to do what we are in business to do: to speak forthrightly and without fear about things that matter.”
In other words, if the Post doesn’t watch how it talks about Bezos, he might stop subsidizing it to the tune of 0.04% of his net worth annually—and then the paper won’t be able to talk “about things that matter.”
As if anything matters more than the nation’s most powerful oligarchs forming an alliance with Trump.
Janine Jackson interviewed Rising Up!‘s Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders and Friends‘ Laura Flanders about independent media and the year ahead for the January 3, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent reporting, that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us that believe that US society needs to change.
New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a metaphorical fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much-needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism?
We’ll talk about that today with two people who are and have been doing—not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it, and the role it can play.
Between Donald Trump’s overt threats to use his power to go after his media critics, and many corporate news media’s evidenteagerness to preemptivelysubmit, we are in dark days for journalism, and the public’s right to know, and debate, and decide, that good journalism feeds.
The notion that the Chinese character for crisis combines that of danger and opportunity is not really precise etymology, but you can see why that concept has resonance. If we don’t use this time, both to do hard-hitting, smart, independent reporting, and to think deeply about the keystone place independent reporting occupies in a society with democratic aspirations, well, what are we up to? And how do we engage audiences in the collaborative work of that independent, even dissident, reporting?
Sonali Kolhatkar is a journalist, activist and artist. She’s host and executive producer of the radio show Rising Up! With Sonali, author of the book Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine, among myriad other things.
Laura Flanders is also many things, including the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders and Friends, formerly the Laura Flanders Show, airing on PBS stations around the country. She’s author of books, including Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Change in America, and Real Majority, Media Minority: The High Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting. And she is the founding host and producer of CounterSpin.
They both somehow found time to join me now by phone from various parts of the country. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Thank you.
Laura Flanders: It’s great to be with you.
JJ: I think we can start by saying we’re staggered. I think that’s fair to say. It isn’t that we didn’t anticipate the possibility of another emboldened Trump administration, but that doesn’t mean we had our heads around it.
And I just want to ask you both, how do you, first, address questions of, “Well, you’re the media expert, so what now?” Are we allowed to say, “I don’t know”? How do you see your responsibilities to audience, many of them keenly vulnerable and underserved right now? Do you feel like there’s something you’re supposed to be saying or doing in this moment? Sonali, I’ll ask you first.
SK: Sure. For me, I am looking at it in the way that I think many Americans are looking at it, but aren’t seeing articulated in the mainstream media, which is that this election was not as much a win for Donald Trump and the Republican Party as much as it was a loss for the Democratic Party. It is, over and over again, the Democratic Party—which claims to uphold the ideals that most Americans adhere to, which is the politics of compassion—[that] let us down, and let us down so badly that people are just alienated from the political system.
And so for me, as a journalist, I tend to want to try to go to where young people are. We are playing with their future, right, so what are young people thinking about these days? And I also try to understand the cultural moments that we’re living in, and how we shape culture.
I write about narrative, I think about narrative a lot. So young people are, for example, really, really cheering on the alleged shooter of a health insurance CEO, which you would think might be a bizarre turn of events. But if you look at the situation they’re living in, it makes sense. And young people are culturally in a different place than, certainly, the old guard, and they are hungry for a shift in politics.
And so, for me, I see myself as a journalist thinking about how we win that cultural change, how we start overwhelming the pro-billionaire culture that comes both from politicians, both Democrats and Republicans alike, and our mainstream media. How do we overwhelm that with a narrative that’s centered on collective liberation, which is where a lot of young people are, with a narrative that’s centered on: We are all free when we pool our resources together and fight for one another, and really center justice in our work, whether it comes to fair wages, union representation, healthcare, good jobs, solving the climate crisis, and so on. And so my job as a journalist, is to be part of that cultural conversation that I think we desperately need.
Laura Flanders: “What is important…is that we report on those stories in a way that also gives people some sense of what can be done and is being done.”
LF: I would simply add that I think part of our responsibility, or a large part of what I seek to do, is to provide a contrast to the commercial, corporate, for-profit media. So where, for example, we see our mainstream (so-called) media emphasize people over policy, and love breaks rather than continuities, and situations rather than systems. I think our job is to look at the policies that are playing out in our political system, not just the people, the players, who’s up and who’s down, what’s the success of this candidate versus that one, but which policies are working in which ways, what systems are in place that are leading us to this moment, not just this crisis or that one, prompted by this or that in the last two cycles, perhaps, but ongoing systems, particularly of inequality.
And I think in this last election, we had a lot of discussion of the economy, and you had the sort of pro–Democratic Party media berating American voters for not understanding that the economy was better than they thought it was. You had American politicians doing the same thing. Whereas the reality is, you’re looking at a half century of barely any movement when it comes to most people’s wages. And I think what is important about that is that we report on those stories in a way that also gives people some sense of what can be done and is being done, which is not to make up things, but to report on the ground.
In the end of the last year, we saw extraordinary strike action by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers, right during the holiday season. And, again, kind of like that sympathy for Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the healthcare CEO, right beneath the surface is this level of fury at the way things are, and a willingness, even, to act, not always the most well-guided, but willingness and interest in acting.
And if those stories don’t get covered, and we’re only covering what’s happening in Washington, then I think we’re always in this kind of, I don’t know, forward/back, high/low, mood-shift, personality-driven news cycle that doesn’t leave much of a place for real-life people’s engagement. And I think our job is to try to keep people engaged.
JJ: I’m just going to draw you out on that a little bit, because I’ve asked Laura this before: What’s so funny about peace, love and solutions journalism? When you show groups that are, for instance, winning workplace victories, blocking supermarket mergers, increasing minimum wages, they’re developing mutual aid networks that are working around dominant institutions, I don’t understand why some smart leftists think that that’s unserious, or that that’s Pollyanna as news coverage. I just don’t get it.
LF: Well, one of the problems with our human brain chemistry, which apparently responds much better to negative news than to positive, it just has a bigger endorphin rush response to the negative, because we believe we have to act, the fight or flight. So we have biology to deal with. But we also have corporate bias.
And I think it is up to us to figure out how to make some of those good news stories, or at least those engaged activists, democracy stories, as exciting and as inspiring as the rest. And I think we have seen that. I mean, let’s face it, the Amazon warehouse organizers became, for a moment at least, kind of popular heroes. We’ve seen an excitement around the revitalization of the labor movement, which isn’t only personality-based.
Part of the problem, though, is that our media structures, our most influential media institutions, are in the hands of those who are threatened by exactly that kind of organizing. So are the best marketing and media manipulation minds going to be brought to those stories? That’s our struggle.
At the end of the day, we are in a competition for attention, an attention economy, and people like us, Sonali and I, for all of our good intentions, simply don’t have the same kind of resources for bells and whistles that the networks have.
So I don’t want to plead, it’s not a cop out, but we need to exercise special creativity, I think. And you’ve put your finger on exactly the problem: The algorithms don’t work for us, and we have to figure out how to address that.
JJ: Sonali?
Sonali Kolhatkar: “It’s not as much about likes and clicks and algorithms, as much as it is about actually solving the problem.”
SK: I have a bit of a controversial take on this as well. I mean, definitely in full agreement with what Laura said, but let me go a little bit further, and I feel like I’m in the right environment to say this right now with you, which is I think that we have a failure on the left, in left media, because we’ve witnessed this kind of bro-ification of left media that whips up anger. We have the sort of Joe Rogans of the left, too. A lot of dudes, many white dudes, some brown dudes, who will whip up the anger, will feed and fuel the cynicism, because it gets them the clicks, and gets them the follows, and feeds their ego. It doesn’t actually emphasize the solutions, because the solution would mean that maybe they aren’t as necessary anymore.
And I find a huge difference in the way in which communities of color and journalists of color and women journalists are covering solutions, and covering the problems of our world through a solutions lens, because the urgency for us is so real. We’re on the front lines. It’s not as much about likes and clicks and algorithms, as much as it is about actually solving the problem. And I really do feel like we have a reckoning that needs to happen even in the left media.
LF: I love that. And I just want to add that it is nothing controversial to say there’s still some white patriarchy out there that’s holding us back. Totally agree.
JJ: Absolutely. I want to ask you both, were there particular conversations or things or groups or work that you engaged in 2024 that surprised you, or that fortified you for the road forward, or that made you feel like, here’s some sustenance, and just what inspired you in the last year that you think is good to talk about and think about now?
LF: I have to say, and maybe this is controversial, but I have been moved by the determination and insistence of the anti-Zionist movement in this country to continue to raise their voice, to continue to protest genocide in their name, to continue to take to the streets, and to take the media to task, against all the odds, and in spite of the ocean of negative coverage and negative policing that they’ve been subject to.
So I will say I’ve been inspired, I won’t say excited and made happy by, because not enough has changed at the level of policy, and the killing and dying continues at an absolutely unacceptable rate. But I think for a conversation that has been so slow and coming, that fury around the war against all things and places Palestinian, it seems, has been persistent, determined and, as I said, kind of against the odds. So it gives me both courage and determination. If they can do it, I can do it too.
SK: Ditto. One hundred percent. Especially seeing young folks on campuses.
I have really felt inspired by an abolitionist framework that so many, mostly Black women, have led our country into, but it is not getting enough attention. And an abolitionist framework has really helped me see and apply a lens to the world that I feel like we need to shift towards.
So the conversations that I’ve had, which will be interviews published in this book coming out next year, were with people who are doing very, very critical frontline work, and are connecting the dots between racial capitalism and how law enforcement are basically enforcers of racial capitalism, and how in order to achieve collective liberation, we need to address policing and prisons, and move all that money out of the enforcement of racial capitalism into a just world, into collective solidarity, into having an equity economy–and that’s really what an abolition framework is. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that when activists have said “defund the police,” that’s the tip of the iceberg, and there’s 90% of the iceberg below water that involves moving money out of the architecture of death-making institutions, as Mariame Kaba says, and into the public education we desperately need, and public healthcare, publicly funded healthcare, and higher minimum wages and good jobs and all of those things that Americans want.
And having that abolitionist framework has opened my mind up, and I feel like the time has more than come. We need to take this lens and apply it to everything, to defund the military and fund the things that make us safe, which applies to Palestine, right? Defund the police and prisons and apply it to healthcare, the whole conversation around corporate CEOs and how they’re enriching themselves off of people’s misery. An abolitionist framework can apply to everything.
So I’m really inspired by that. That’s my resolution for 2025, is to really start talking in those terms. Because I think when we have the holistic view of the world and how the economy works, we address systemic racial injustice, we address gender injustice, we address corporate CEO billionaires making off with all of our money. So that’s the thing that inspires me now.
JJ: That leads me onto a question that’s kind of a behind-the-scenes question, for listeners. But between us as producers, so much of what we want to do is to bring different people into conversation, to say that the folks, the talking heads, you see on TV are not the only folks you need to hear from. There are a lot of other folks doing important work who have things to say. But we know that those folks aren’t the folks who are waiting by the phone to get on the media, and there’s more work involved in getting those voices into the conversation.
I just wonder, is there anything that either of you would like to say to listeners, like, this goes on behind the scenes, this is part of the work of doing independent reporting. Are there gears and switches that you’d like to just let folks in on, in terms of this work that, obviously we are thrilled to do, but it’s different than just showing up somewhere with a microphone.
LF: I’ve been thinking a lot about how the future looks, and how this moment looks, and my next season of the show, and all the rest. And you mentioned at the very beginning, you referred to the kind of preemptive submission of some of the most powerful media in our world, the Disneys of the world, to the oligarchs of the Trump administration. And that kind of anticipatory obedience by the most powerful has been chilling to observe. It’s been chilling, in part, because I think the way that I do my work is to plug into a lot of the networks that I’ve been lucky to be part of over the years.
I mean, none of us does this work alone. Media, as I’ve constantly said, is a plural noun, and if the commercial media’s job is to deliver eyeballs and ears to the advertisers, then ours is to deliver people to each other.
So it’s all about relationship-building, it’s about showing up, it’s about not being in the studio, it’s about being in relationship both to the audience and to the issues, and increasingly to the ever-expanding ecosystem of independent media makers, who are out there. They may not be the bros sounding off behind their computers, but in almost every community these days, there are independent grassroots media who are making their voices heard, who are covering what is happening regionally and locally.
And I think our unique position, Sonali’s and mine and yours, Janine, is that we exist in that middle space between the grassroots and local and the national discussion. So I think that my job is very much, how do we bring those stories that are percolating at the local and regional level into the national debate, into the national discussion, or just to a national audience, and not so as simply to sort of show how great we are, but to showcase the extraordinary wealth of talent and intelligence that exists just about everywhere.
And I raised that in relation to the anticipatory obedience of the powerful, because I have my fears for those journalists who are operating as independent agents at the local level, independently, perhaps, as solo “content creators,” trying their best to create their own brand, which is what so many of them now think is their future, standing alone against the tide. That’s a scary place to be in this moment.
So I’m not answering perhaps the “how” question as much as the “what I think is important” question, and that is for all of us to share the word, as widely as we can, that everybody needs to support their local media creators and the media that they consume, that they benefit from. Whoever it is, pay your pledge, pay your subscription.
The other way we spend most of our time is trying to raise money. I’m not going to complain, but it’s part of the package, and it’s how we survive. So I’m hoping the audience will look around and say, “Who do I want to really support?” If only by sharing, if only by liking, if only by spreading the word.
JJ: One thing that both of you do that not everyone does, including in independent media, is look around the world. We often hear about Americans this and the US that, when we know that so many of us were born elsewhere, have family elsewhere, are connected to people outside these shores. It seems like it’s only US corporate media who don’t acknowledge that we are one interconnected world, and I feel like that’s an important thing that independent journalism contributes, right, is that beyond-the-US worldview. How important is that?
LF: Very. I used the word sanctuary before, and I think as much as we have to think about sanctuary for others who want to come to the United States, I think often of the sanctuary that I find reading the media of other places, covering stories elsewhere. At the same time, though, I will say, in these times, it’s not just sanctuary. It’s kind of solidarity, as we communicate with journalists in Brazil or Hungary or India, and get their experience of what they’ve been through, dealing with their own version of this kind of concentration of power, these oligarchs, this sense of authoritarianism rising.
We all do need to understand that we are in the same boat, and there are things we can learn from one another, and there’s sanctuary we can give to one another. But, yeah, we are not alone on this bus, and that is both a comfort and concern at times. But it would be insane of us, and we would be ignoring a lot of important intelligence and creativity, to focus only on one little bit of this planet, even though our corporate media would have us believe we’re the most powerful and important piece of the planet ever to be born.
SK: It’s weird. I think I used to feel that way more so than I do now, because I feel like our country has become a bunch of mini-countries. For example, just the whole conversation on healthcare in America: If you go on TikTok, and you see the celebrations of Luigi Mangione, there’s a whole bunch of people from other countries, including in the Global South, who are posting comments being sorry for us as Americans, being sorry for us and going, “Oh, you poor things. I’m happy to pay 25% taxes, because I know that my healthcare and everybody’s healthcare is getting covered.”
And I do feel that there are huge swaths of this country that are utterly ignored by mainstream media, by left media. We have an incarcerated population of 1.2 million Americans that are just written off, and we forget to cover them. We have populations of immigrants who are undocumented, and that’s where, first, the globalist view also comes in, that are just written off. We have populations of very, very poor people who are just barely getting by, who never make the consideration.
And so I feel like some on the left I feel aren’t paying enough attention to everything that’s happening in the United States, and we’re focused sometimes even more on the horrible impact that our weapons are having in other countries, as rightfully we should be paying attention, but we’re not also effectively enough linking the dots, to how the money for those weapons is devastating our cities, because we’re just not spending money on them. Actually, I want to see more US coverage in a way that compares us to other nations, and points out how terribly off we are.
LF: To echo what Sonali said before, in 2016, last time in the first Trump administration, I went off and started reporting on cooperative economics as a model of resistance to fascism in Spain, in Greece, you name it. This time, I’m staying right here. There are a lot of models to report on right here in the US, and we’re going to be doing a lot of that. So I’d be excited to check in with you all, maybe, I don’t know, 12 months from now, what do you think?
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders. You can find their work, their shows, their books—existing and forthcoming—online, as well as on radio and public TV, and I will be putting up links to everything on FAIR.org. Sonali Kolhatkar, Laura Flanders, thank you so much for helping us look into the new year and for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SK: Thank you so much, Laura and Janine, and thanks, Janine, especially for having us on.
LF: Thank you so much, Janine—and Sonali, what a pleasure to be on with you.
Remember when the exuberant yelling of Gov. Howard Dean was enough for corporate media to declare him unfit for the presidency (Extra!, 3–4/04)?
Remember January 2004, when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean yelled in a pep talk to supporters after the Iowa caucus, and elite media declared that his “growling and defiant” “emotional outburst” was patent evidence of unacceptability? Having already declared Dean too excitable—“Yelling and hollering is not an endearing quality in the leader of the free world,” said the Washington Post (8/2/03)—media found verification in the “Dean scream,” which was played on TV news some 700 times, enough to finish off his candidacy (Extra!, 3–4/04). As Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin Group (1/23/04) scoffed: “Is this the guy who ought to be in control of our nuclear arsenal?”
Fast forward to the present day, when Donald Trump states, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
And today’s journalistic response looks like a CBS News explainer (1/8/25), headed “Why Would Trump Want Greenland and the Panama Canal? Here’s What’s Behind US interest.” It’s simple, you see, and not at all weird. “Greenland has oil, natural gas and highly sought after mineral resources.” And you know what? “Western powers have already voiced concern about Russia and China using it to boost their presence in the North Atlantic.”
In an effort to make Trump’s proposal seem rational, CBS (1/8/25) offered a map that made Greenland look like a chokepoint on the all-important Dalian/Rotterdam sea route. In fact, Greenland is more than 1,500 miles from Eurasia—greater than the distance between Boston and New Orleans.
CBS tells us Trump is “falsely alleging” that the Panama Canal is being “operated by China,” but then adds in their own, awkward, words, “China has also denied trying to claim any control over the canal.” Takeaway: who knows, really? Believe what you want. PS—you’re Americun, right?
The New York Times (1/2/25) assured us that,” Trump’s Falsehoods Aside, China’s Influence Over Global Ports Raises Concerns.” The story made it obvious that Chinese companies in charge of shipping ports is inherently scary—what might they do?—in a way that the US having 750 military bases around the world never is.
The message isn’t that no one country should have that much power; it’s that no country except the US should have that much power. That assumption suffuses corporate news reporting; and China threatens it. So whatever China does or doesn’t do, look for that lens to color any news you get.
Three vehicular attacks in public areas shocked the world this past holiday season. First was the attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, which killed six people and injured dozens (Reuters, 1/6/25). Then there was the New Year’s attack in New Orleans’ French Quarter, killing at least 14 people and injuring more (CNN, 1/2/25). A suicide car explosion outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day only killed the attacker, but injured bystanders (NBC, 1/1/25).
In the German case, the Saudi-born suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, had a history of dark social media posts, including a declaration of far-right, anti-Islamic positions. In New Orleans, the killer, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who did not survive the attack, declared his support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In Las Vegas, the suspected suicide bomber, former Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, left behind chaotic anti-government, pro-Trump rants.
Corporate media framed these attacks differently, focusing on Jabbar’s Islamist beliefs but downplaying Abdulmohsen and Livelsberger’s political stances. The right-wing press, predictably, did this to an extreme.
‘The US homeland isn’t safe’
Washington Post (1/3/24): “Islamic State…is still a potent source of radicalization.”
In the New Orleans case, the New York Times (e.g., 1/2/25, 1/4/25) focused on Jabbar’s Islamic radicalization and support for ISIS, using these facts in the leads and sometimes headlines. “New Orleans Attacker Was ‘Inspired’ by ISIS, Biden Says,” read the headline of an early Times report (1/1/25).
The Washington Post did the same, in articles like “Attacker With ISIS Flag Drives Truck Into New Orleans Crowd, Killing 15” (1/2/24) and “Inspired by ISIS: From a Taylor Swift Plot in Vienna to Carnage in New Orleans” (1/3/24).
Jabbar is believed to have acted alone (Wall Street Journal, 1/2/25), although he was clearly inspired by the notorious entity. Because both he and the Las Vegas attacker had served many years in the US military, the incidents raised questions about mental health for active service members and veterans (The Hill, 1/4/25). Jabbar’s brother speculated that mental health issues could have been at play (ABC, 1/2/25).
Yet the acronym ISIS still loomed large in the news stories and headlines, and it is clearly one that can spark fear in the hearts of news consumers.
‘Puzzled over the motive’
Reporting on the Germany attack, CBS (12/30/24) highlighted the possibility of mental illness, not the suspect’s far-right views.
Just as the “Islamic radicalism” framing can whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, where a notorious Islamophobe is set to become president, the Magdeburg suspect’s Saudi origin has explosive potential in Germany’s polarized political moment. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has used the situation to advance its anti-immigrant agenda (Al Jazeera, 12/23/24; Le Monde, 12/24/24). But there’s a twist: Abdulmohsen held and voiced similar political views to the AfD’s.
The New York Times (12/22/24) and the Washington Post (12/21/24), to their credit, did put this fact up top in their coverage. But elsewhere, the coverage was more muddled, focusing more on the possibility of mental illness rather than Abdulmohsen’s professed extremism.
CBS (12/30/24) coverage of the attack placed suspected mental illness in its headline and lead; it wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that we learned that the suspect “has in the past voiced strongly anti-Islam views and sympathies with the far right in his social media posts,” and showed “anger at Germany for allowing in too many Muslim war refugees and other asylum-seekers.”
NPR’s All Things Considered (12/23/24) began by talking about how the far-right AfD is using the attack to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the country’s snap election. It wasn’t until about halfway through that the story acknowledged that police “say, if anything, the suspect claimed, especially on social media, to be an anti-Islamist.”
In other words, coverage of the New Orleans attack centered Jabbar’s professed devotion to ISIS, while coverage of the German attack downplayed Abdulmohsen’s politics, treating them as part of a constellation of factors, including possible mental illness, that could have contributed to the bloodshed.
‘No ill will toward Trump’
A Newsweek headline (1/4/25) declared the Las Vegas attack “not politically motivated”—despite the suspect’s expressed hope that his actions would inspire “military and vets [to] move on DC starting now…to get the Dems out of the fed government.”
The same journalistic approach used in the Magdeburg case was taken when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. While that juxtaposition might make it easy to assume that this was some kind of anti-Republican terrorism, that would be incorrect, according to Talking Points Memo (1/4/25): Documents left by Livelsberger, the truck’s driver who died in the blast,
denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.
TPM lamented that news headlines “report only that [Livelsberger] warned of national decline and bore ‘no ill will toward Mr. Trump,’ in the words of one of the investigators,” rendering his political motives vague and outside of the central framing.
For example, an AP article (1/3/25) said only that Livelsberger’s “letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, societal problems and both domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine,” and that he believed the US was “‘terminally ill and headed toward collapse.’”
ABC‘s report (1/4/25) addressed Livelsberger’s support for the president-elect seven paragraphs in. CNN (1/4/25) gave one line in passing to Livelsberger’s support for Trump, Musk and Kennedy. Using a quote from one former Department of Homeland Security official, Newsweek (1/4/25) declared that the attack in Las Vegas was “not politically motivated.” A piece in The Hill (1/2/25) on “extremism in the military” started by citing Jabbar and Livelsberger as examples, but while it described Jabbar’s Islamacist views, it said only that “less is known about the motivation of Livelsberger.”
Fox News (1/2/25) did acknowledge that Livelsberger’s uncle said of him, “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” but it is buried after many other details. Interestingly, it was the New York Post (1/2/25) who directly framed Livelsberger as a super-macho Trump lover, while a long Wall Street Journal piece (1/2/25) on Livelsberger published the same day detailed the man’s personal life with hardly a mention of his political beliefs.
‘War on Christmas’
The Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) tied the German attack into the “war on Christmas” the Murdoch empire has been pushing for two decades.
The US right-wing press was far worse. After the New Orleans attack, Fox News (1/2/25) featured guests who warned that more Islamic terrorism could be on the way, because the attack “could embolden the terrorist organization to radicalize more Americans.”
“It occurred just days after a pro-ISIS outlet called on Muslims to wage Islamic jihad in the US, Europe and Russia,” the right-wing network (1/1/25) reported.
“One obvious message is that the forces of Islamic radicalism haven’t gone away,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/1/25) wrote. “They are still looking for security weaknesses to exploit for mass murder, and the US homeland isn’t safe from foreign-influenced or -planned attacks.”
Meanwhile, Abdulmohsen’s right-wing, anti-Islamic politics didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) from giving column space to neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes, who cited the incident in a piece titled “Why Jihadists Wage War on Christmas (and Other Holidays),” with the subhead, “They despise celebrations not sanctioned by Islam, and see Christmas as a crime against Allah.”
The New York Post (1/2/25) did something similar, allowing Douglas Murray—a younger, British version of Pipes—to cite the German attack in a piece called “From College Campuses to Afghanistan, We Let Islamic Terrorism Rise Again.”
It simply didn’t matter to these Murdoch outlets that Abdulmohsen shared Pipes’ and Murray’s politics. He is Saudi and he committed a crime in Europe, therefore he must be the second coming of Osama bin Laden.
Right-wing terror on the rise
Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to chide Democrats for talking about right-wing terrorism—ignoring the Las Vegas attack the next day that aimed to get Americans to “rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy.”
Meanwhile, Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to say that the Biden administration had focused too much on right-wing extremism over ISIS threats:
Democrats and liberal media outlets were focused on hyping up terror threats linked to white supremacy while downplaying threats from jihadist terrorist groups like ISIS prior to the New Orleans terrorist attack.
There’s a reason right-wing violence has been in the spotlight, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (6/17/20) noted a few years ago:
Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57%—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25% committed by left-wing terrorists, 15% by religious terrorists, 3% by ethnonationalists, and 0.7% by terrorists with other motives.
The Anti-Defamation League (1/15/23) reported that “right-wing extremist terror incidents in the US have been increasing since the mid-2000s, but the past six years have seen their sharpest rise yet.” The ADL noted that “right-wing terror attacks during this period also resulted in more deaths (58) from such attacks than any of the previous six-year periods since the time of the Oklahoma City bombing,” the white supremacist attack that remains the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history.
A report from the National Institute of Justice (1/4/24) said the “number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
Clearly right-wing political violence remains a threat that requires attention. The handling of the recent vehicle attacks illustrates, however, that corporate media’s instinct is to look away.
This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like: “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.” (Later followed quaintly by: “A lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”)
But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who a source says “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, “we will be toast.”
The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts”—i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.
AP (12/1/24) declares that “a tense ceasefire holds,” following the corporate media rule that violence only counts when it’s directed against Israelis.
Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement at the end of November that required both sides to refrain from attacks on each other. The terms also included a mutual pullback from southern Lebanon after 60 days.
Despite the deal, Israel has subsequently launched repeated strikes on Lebanon against targets it claimed were Hezbollah, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians. The violations began immediately, with Israel attacking journalists and vehicles mere hours after the deal was signed.
Within a week of signing the deal, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israel had violated the ceasefire around 100 times, killing 15 people. Shortly after these initial strikes, Hezbollah launched two strikes into the disputed border zone that it called an “initial defensive and warning response” to Israel against continued ceasefire violations. These strikes did not kill or injure any Israelis. Despite this, Israel responded by continuing its ceasefire violations, killing more and more, bringing the post-ceasefire death toll to more than 30.
Despite the overwhelming number of Israeli attacks in the post-ceasefire period, news audiences have heard that a “tense ceasefire holds” (AP, 12/1/24). Media repeatedly reported on these violations as both sides “trading” or “exchanging” fire (New York Times, 12/2/24; AP, 12/3/24; NBC, 12/3/24; Semafor, 12/4/24; Financial Times, 12/3/24; Wall Street Journal, 12/3/24). While technically accurate, such reporting frames both sides as equally culpable in violating the ceasefire, allowing media to avoid acknowledging that Israel that Israel is by far the primary and more consistent violator.
Defending violations
CBS‘s featured guest (12/3/24) insisted that attacks on Lebanon were just Israel “do[ing] what has to get done.”
Other media went further, fully defending rather than just downplaying Israel’s ceasefire violations. CBS (12/3/24) uncritically reported Israel’s justification for its part of the “back-and-forth violence,” telling audiences that the strikes were on “sites that had been used to smuggle weapons from Syria into Lebanon after the ceasefire agreement.” CBS said Israel’s claims about weapon smuggling “rais[ed] questions about whether the reprieve is really an opportunity for Hezbollah and its allies to regroup,” implying that Israel was justified in preventing such a possibility.
CBS‘s guest was Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the hawkish, pro-Israel Washington Institute. He framed the ceasefire as entirely one-sided, suggesting that Hezbollah was unlikely to abide by the ceasefire agreement and that therefore Israel “would enforce this in their own way,” again implying that that would be justified, rather than being itself a violation of the ceasefire.
“This is the post–October 7 world for Israel,” Matthew Levitt told CBS. “They’re not waiting for anybody else to do what has to get done.”
The New York Times (12/3/24) explained away the one-sided violations in a story headlined “Why Israel and Hezbollah Are Still Firing Amid a Ceasefire.” The subtitle read:
Some violations of the truce, and some amount of violence, are to be expected, analysts say, and do not necessarily mean the deal will collapse and war will resume anytime soon.
The Times stumbled over itself to justify Israel’s attacks, writing that “the Israeli military said it had carried out strikes to enforce ceasefire violations.” It did not attempt to explain what it means to “enforce” a “violation.”
‘Exchanged strikes and accusations’
“A Tenuous Ceasefire Holds” is how the New York Times (12/27/24) described Israeli attacks that have killed 30 Lebanese people.
Since these initial reports, the “both sides” framing has continued. A month into the truce, the subhead of a New York Times article (12/27/24) read, “Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged strikes and accusations of breaches,” despite the body of the text overwhelmingly detailing Israeli, not Hezbollah, attacks. The Times described Israel’s “series of strikes” and “extensive operations in dozens of villages.”
The Times implicitly justified the airstrikes by saying that “most of them” were on “Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Lebanon.” As FAIR (11/9/24) has written, referring to urban neighborhoods as “strongholds” is an effective way to prepare audiences for attacks on civilians.
The Times also justified Israeli attacks on Lebanese villages during the ceasefire by uncritically repeating Israel’s stated justification that the IDF “was dismantling tunnels, confiscating weapons and surveillance systems and demolishing a Hezbollah command center.”
‘Cover for continued aggression’
Drop Site (12/4/24): “The framing of the deal…essentially allow[s] for Israel to continue its military assaults while demanding Hezbollah cease all its operations.”
Israel’s continued aggression despite the ceasefire is not surprising. The country has a long history of violating ceasefires while playing the victim. In this conflict, Israel’s violation was anticipated by all sides. Before the deal was inked, Israel signaled its intention to violate the ceasefire by demanding the “right to strike” freedom of action in the event of a ceasefire. The Jerusalem Post (12/1/24) reported that “sources hinted that under certain conditions, the IDF’s presence in southern Lebanon might extend beyond 60 days.” The US assured Israel that they would support Israel in this scenario (Antiwar.com, 11/27/24).
Maryam Jamishidi, an international law expert at Colorado Law School, told Drop Site (12/4/24):
It basically gives Israel very wide latitude to do what it wants, while completely restricting Hezbollah’s ability to act…. Israel likes to use negotiations, likes to use diplomacy, as cover for continued aggression and continued violations of law. And I think this is probably one of the most egregious, because it is framed as a ceasefire agreement.
The media silence makes it easier for US officials to deny reality while continuing to pay for Israel’s military aggression. Despite Israel’s continued violations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed that the ceasefire is holding. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself under the ceasefire, but when asked about that same right for Lebanon, he demurred, saying he would not go “down a slippery slope of hypotheticals,” and that “these situations are not totally comparable.”
‘We have to conquer and destroy’
“We have to fight the taboo of the border that was established by France and England 100 years ago,” a settler leader told +972 (12/12/24). “We have to settle everywhere.”
Israelis are exploiting the lopsided ceasefire to create facts on the ground that will be difficult to reverse. As the IDF continues to raze villages and advance into the buffer zone, Israelis are setting up camps in preparation for future settlement.
Israeli Magazine +972 (12/12/24) reviewed the Whatsapp chats of an Israeli group founded to advocate settlement in Southern Lebanon. One member of the group made their goals clear: “We have to conquer and destroy. As much as possible, and as quickly as possible.”
A member of the Israeli settler movement for Lebanon explained to Haaretz (1/2/25) that this has been a longstanding goal for the movement: “Everything we know now we also knew before the war—that this is our land…. We don’t need to apologize.” Such sentiments rarely appear in media aimed at US audiences.
The “both sides” framing is allowing Israel to muddy the waters, and justify its presence in southern Lebanon. Israel is now openly threatening to stay past its 60-day deadline, claiming that Israel will be “forced to act” against Hezbollah for supposedly not fulfilling the ceasefire’s requirements. Despite overwhelming Israeli violations, the pro-Israel media bias obscures who is responsible for continued fighting.
Fox News (12/11/24) labels Luigi Mangione as a “CEO murder suspect and Ivy League graduate.”
How do murder suspects get their media nicknames? Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been called the “CEO killer” or some variation by ABC (12/24/24) and some of its affiliates (KABC, 12/20/24; KGO, 12/24/24). The name makes sense, as the victim’s stature and the place of his murder—a hotel where a company-related meeting was to take place—was the aspect of the crime that made it sensational news. This is similar to how Theodore Kaczynski became the “Unabomber,” because his targets were universities and airlines.
Yet right-wing media are using a seemingly mundane feature of Mangione’s life—his college degree from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania—to call him some variation of the “Ivy League killer.”
This label serves a few purposes for Republican-aligned media. Clearly, it is meant to deflate the sympathy for Mangione. Coding Mangione as an Ivy Leaguer also codes him as a leftist, occluding what appear to be his much more politically heterodox views; it paints him as an out-of-touch rich kid, rather than an anti-establishment renegade with whom Americans of all walks of economic life might relate.
It would appear that the right-wing press are taken aback by the growing sympathy the American public has with Mangione (Forbes, 12/12/24; Washington Post, 12/18/24; Newsweek, 12/21/24), a result of widespread anger against health insurance companies who inflate their profits through denial of care, high premiums and delaying medical services with cumbersome administrative bloat (AP, 9/12/22; KFF, 3/1/24; Gallup, 12/9/24; Marketplace, 12/13/24).
Focusing on Mangione’s education rather than the target of his attack, the “Ivy League” angle also seeks to turn the resulting policy discussion from one about the broken healthcare system to one about the education system. It promotes the right-wing narrative that academia is full of Marxist professors who indoctrinate vulnerable youngsters with revolutionary ideas, that Mangione is responding not to the objective reality about America’s healthcare crisis but to rhetoric that’s been wrongly instilled in him and many others—and that, therefore, the lesson of this shooting is that the US education system must be reformed by the incoming Trump administration.
‘Morally perverse positions’
New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino (12/14/24) argues for using the IRS to punish private schools that tolerate views he disapproves of.
Numerous articles in the New York Post (12/9/24, 12/10/24, 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/18/24, 12/23/24) make mention of Mangione’s “Ivy League” education. Columnist Charles Gasparino lamented in the Post (12/14/24) that a Penn professor posted on social media support of Mangione. Gasparino wrote that while students there pay “$85,000 a year to be brainwashed with leftism,” big school endowments are the primary “funding source of the progressive indoctrination we have in the college classroom.” The solution, then, is that Trump should go after university endowments’ tax breaks, so that they’re forced to lay off indoctrinating professors.
Princeton undergraduate and pro-Israel activist Maximillian Meyer (New YorkPost, 12/19/24), who wrote that Thompson’s killing was “rationalized as resistance by a privileged young person with two Ivy League degrees,” likened the attacks on the health insurance industry on his campus to student sympathy with Gazans: “To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed,” he wrote.
“The students who are celebrated as our nation’s most brilliant are often adopting the most morally perverse positions,” Meyer continued. He blamed the “moral equivocation” of educational institutions, and warned that “the reckoning, from elementary school on up, must begin now.”
‘Protect vulnerable young minds’
Scott Walker (Washington Times, 12/12/24): Mangione “sadly personifies the problems in our country’s education system these days…an ardent anticapitalist, a hate-filled opponent of corporations and private healthcare and a proponent of climate change alarmism.”
At the Washington Times (12/12/24), former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made the same point under the headline “College Grad’s Arrest Shows Elite Education Breeds Hate, Not Tolerance”:
The situation on most college campuses since the Covid-19 pandemic has gone from liberal bias to outright indoctrination. Students are not taught how to think critically, but to hate America and abhor those with views that are not 100% aligned with their left-wing agenda… We must hold educators and institutions accountable for pushing these dangerous ideologies on our children and grandchildren. We must also protect vulnerable young minds from anti-American narratives and teach them to respect the values that have made our nation great.
UnHerd (12/10/24), a relative newcomer to Britain’s oversized world of pearl-clutching Tory media (Guardian, 10/28/23; Bloomberg, 9/10/24), attempted to situate Mangione in history, saying “members of the murderous Red Army Faction in Seventies Germany were almost all university graduates”; Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers “was the son of a CEO and graduate of the University of Michigan, a so-called ‘public Ivy.’”
Fox News similarly hyped up Mangione’s “Ivy League” pedigree, regularly applying the label to him in its headlines (e.g., 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/16/24, 12/23/24). “Ivy League Murder Suspect Acted Superior, Did Not Expect to Be Caught: Body Language Expert” read one Fox headline (12/13/24), desperately signaling to its audience that Mangione is not a real man of the masses.
‘Spoiled rich kid’
Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told Newsweek (12/16/24) Mangione showed his “true colors” by hiring a lawyer. It’s not clear who Coffindaffer thinks Mangione should have used as a role model; Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Daniel Ellsberg all had private lawyers.
This theme occasionally bled outside right-wing media borders. Newsweek (12/16/24) made an entire article out of a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) by a former FBI agent, Jennifer Coffindaffer, who called Mangione a “spoiled rich kid” because he hired a high-priced defense attorney. “If Luigi truly believed his rhetoric, he would have gone with the public defender,” Coffindaffer avered, and therefore he’s “a hypocrite, not a hero.”
As FAIR (12/11/24, 12/17/24) has noted, centrist establishment papers like the Washington Post and New York Times, along with Murdoch outlets like the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Fox News, have all used space to shame those with grievances against health insurance companies. They’ve told readers and viewers that, contrary to available evidence and a mountain of lived experience, the situation isn’t that bad, and we should simply accept the system for what it is.
But the right-wing media’s focus on Mangione’s education and family background is an irrelevant ad hominem attack that is meant not only to distract their audience from the well-founded reasons why so many sympathize with the shooter, but to redirect their anger toward the country’s education system, which has for so long been in the right’s crosshairs.
Janine Jackson: Welcome to The Best of CounterSpin 2024. I’m Janine Jackson.
This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us, in part, by showing how elite news media are clouding them. It’s not to say big media always get the facts wrong, but that what facts they point us toward day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners and sponsors, at the expense of the rest of our lives and our futures.
An important part of the work we do as producers and as listeners is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and to stay in conversation. As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the mediawatch group FAIR.
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2024 included many reasons for public protest, which our guest reminded is both a fundamental right and a core tool for achieving other rights. Journalist and activist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent.
Chip Gibbons: “There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech.”
Chip Gibbons: And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.
There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.
It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.
But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.
In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.
So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.
And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that, even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.
And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.
Svante Myrick: “They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote.”
Svante Myrick: Especially after the 2020 election, led by Donald Trump, state legislators—people who are not household names, folks that you won’t often see on CNN or MSNBC—state legislators are taking their cues from Donald Trump and passing dozens and dozens…. I just came from Utah, where yet another law was passed that makes it harder to vote.
Utah used to have very good voting laws. Everybody got a ballot in the mail. You could just fill it out, send it back in. You had weeks and weeks to do it. They just repealed that. Why? Is it because Donald Trump lost Utah? No, it’s because the state legislators are trying to curry favor with a president that just, frankly, does not want everyone’s vote to count.
And if it’s OK, if I just say what probably is obvious to many of your listeners, but I think it deserves to be said: They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote. I’m a Black American, and I just know for a fact that this Trump-led faction of the Republican Party would love for Black Americans’ votes not to be counted. And I know that because they are moving with almost surgical precision to disenfranchise people like me and my family.
JJ: I am surprised when people are surprised that people don’t vote. While I lament it, I see the fact that some people just don’t see a connection between this lever they pull, and the policies and laws governing their lives. I see that as an indictment of the system, and not of the people.
And so I wanted to ask you to talk about what we’ve seen labeled “low-propensity voters,” and different responses, like what People For is talking about, responses that are better than saying, “These people are so dumb, they don’t even know how to vote their own interests.”
SM: And that’s so well said. Certainly our system has failed in many ways. But extreme right-wingers have also been waging an 80-year war, maybe longer, to convince Americans that government does nothing for them, that their representatives don’t improve their lives. And so when they do things like starve schools and school budgets, starve road budgets so that there are potholes in the street, and try to shrink government down to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub, they make sure it is dysfunctional, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, they break the system, and then say, “Hey, see, government, it can’t work at all. Why bother? Why bother to vote at all?”
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JJ: Though it’s dropped from many outlets’ radar, police violence continued in 2024, but so did efforts to reimagine public safety without cops at the center. Monifa Bandele is an activist with Movement for Black Lives, as well as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She talked about a new report mapping police violence.
Monifa Bandele: “We actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”
Monifa Bandele: Black people are just like any other people, right, all over the world. And so, for a long time, people had no idea what options there could be, what alternatives there could be, for community safety other than policing.
It’s not just presented in our policies and what we see on the streets, we’re fed a daily dose of it in our larger popular culture. The police shows, the true crime series. All of your favorite actors at some point have been on the policing shows, or even if it’s shows about “gangsters” or “criminals,” it really has what we call this copaganda—which is police propaganda—storyline, which ultimately says, you need police, you need vigilantes, you need this tough-on-crime entity in order to have some semblance of safety in your community.
So I’m actually really proud and impressed in the Black community, because what our report shows is that, even though we are really bombarded, millions and millions of dollars are spent to convince people that this is the only way that you can get safety, and people have lived their entire lives only experiencing this one model, that large portions of our community are really questioning that, and are really listening to folks who are saying: “Hey, we actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”
And this is something that, while we do it sometimes in our buildings and in our tenant associations or in our families, this could be scaled up community-wide. This could be scaled up citywide, statewide, nationally, where we actually figure out and get to the root of violence. You prevent most of it from happening, because you have the right mechanisms in place. And then when people are in crisis, and may cause harm to themselves or others, we combat that by giving them what they need to not be in crisis in that moment.
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JJ: Immigration stayed critical in 2024, but we didn’t hear much from folks particularly on the US southern border who don’t support aggressive unto lethal state responses. Aron Thorn joined us from the Rio Grande Valley. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Aron Thorn: “The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection.”
Aron Thorn: I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.
The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.
And so something that does not often show up in these stories, that is particularly pertinent right now, is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.
And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.
What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?
As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.
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JJ: Media Matters took a look at coverage of climate disruption, finding that, where there were some improvements, they just didn’t match the severity of the crisis. Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters.
Evlondo Cooper: “Even the best coverage we see…there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis.”
Evlondo Cooper: We look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.
So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.
JJ: Yes, absolutely.
Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”
EC: Totally.
JJ: And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”
EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”
But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.
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JJ: The oft-heard phrase “crisis of journalism” means different things to different people. This year, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ran an article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm.” It was co-authored by our guests, Collette Watson, co-founder of the group Black River Life, and Joe Torres, senior advisor at the group Free Press. The two are co-founders of the Media 2070 project.
Colette Watson: “What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm.”
Collette Watson: What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.
When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.
We know that from that earliest root, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.
Joseph Torres: “We’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy?”
Joseph Torres: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.
At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.
These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized. What are we creating that’s different?
***
JJ: Throughout the year, more and more entities declared Israel’s violent assaults on Palestinians a genocide. But how did elite US media talk about it? Greg Shupak of the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and author of The Wrong Story: Palestine Israel and the Media, talked with CounterSpin.
Gregory Shupak: “Genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like.”
Gregory Shupak: First of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: Yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story. But there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.
In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savagebarbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.
***
JJ: As we all reeled from the presidential election results, I talked with FAIR’s own editor, Jim Naureckas, and senior analyst Julie Hollar, for some thoughts about how we got here.
Jim Naureckas: “Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of.”
Jim Naureckas: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”
And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.
Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.
And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done—or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.
And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.
Julie Hollar: “Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward.”
Julie Hollar: I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority—although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them—but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.
So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.
And by not doing that at all—and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.
But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around—well, I’m getting ahead of myself—and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.
Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.
And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.
***
JJ: That was FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas. Before them, you heard Greg Shupak, Collette Watson and Joe Torres, Evlondo Cooper, Aron Thorn, Monifa Bandele, Svante Myrick and Chip Gibbons, just some of the voices it’s been our pleasure to bring you this past year.
The cartoon that was rejected by the Washington Post, definitely not because it portrayed Post owner Jeff Bezos in an unflattering light.
When Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist, submitted a draft sketch shortly before Christmas, she must have known she was stirring the pot.
But after watching a parade of Big Tech CEOs jet down to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage—and millions of dollars—to Trump, a cartoon depicting these groveling billionaires must have seemed natural, even if it included her own boss, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Post since 2013.
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote in a Substack post (1/3/25) announcing her resignation from the Post, where she’s worked since 2008. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”
Telnaes’ post went further, criticizing media owners like Bezos for abandoning their responsibility to safeguard the free press “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”
In addition to Bezos, the other billionaires Telnaes depicted bowing before Trump were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
And lying prostrate beneath these men was Mickey Mouse, Telnaes’ apparent nod to the cowardly $16 million settlement Disney-owned ABC recently offered Trump (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).
‘Bias against repetition’
Somehow the Washington Post running a column by Adam Lashinsky (12/30/24) about MAGA’s internecine battles over H-1B visas didn’t prevent it from publishing a cartoon on the same theme the next day (12/31/24)—or another one the next week (1/4/25).
The unenviable job of ensuring a thin-skinned Bezos wasn’t embarrassed by a cartoon in his own newspaper fell to Post opinions editor David Shipley. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in a statement justifying his killing of Telnaes’ cartoon:
My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.
It’s bizarre to argue that a regular cartoonist’s work should be killed because the paper published a column—or even two!—with similar content. Even so, we can only find one recent Post opinion column addressing Bezos’ efforts to curry favor with the president-elect (12/18/24).
What’s more, a search of the Post’s “latest cartoons” shows the paper has no problem publishing cartoons on the same topic as opinion pieces. Recent examples include Republicans’ difficulties finding a speaker (1/2/25, 1/4/25), Republican infighting over H-1B visas (12/30/24, 12/31/24, 1/4/25) and controversy over Biden’s death penalty commutations (12/23/24, 12/26/24).
Outside of opinions, the Post has run a few recent stories on the efforts of Big Tech executives, including Bezos, to mollify Trump (12/13/24, 12/19/24, 12/31/24).
Aside from repetitiveness, deputy opinions editor David Von Drehle offered another reason for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon. “I didn’t think it was a very good cartoon. It seemed pretty ham-handed to me,” Von Drehle told Post media critic Erik Wemple (1/6/25).
Wemple’s blog post also disclosed that Post executive editor Matt Murray wants the paper to stop covering its own problems. “I did set a policy that broadly we should not cover ourselves,” said Murray, who claimed his change was made weeks ago and wasn’t “specifically tied to the cartoon.”
Von Drehle’s denigrating comment about Telnaes’ cartoon only appeared in Wemple’s blog, not in a Post news story. In fact, amid the swirling controversy, the Post hasn’t written a single original news story on the spiked cartoon, only running an AP story (1/4/25) on the topic.
Exodus of talent
“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility,” wrote Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) in a column that did just that.
Following the rejection of her cartoon, Telnaes resigned, marking just the latest departure from the storied paper.
“The Post is shedding talent at an unprecedented rate,” observed media journalist Oliver Darcy (Status, 1/6/25), who earlier noted (1/2/25): “Eventually treating employees with little respect has consequences.”
The growing exodus comes in the wake of Bezos spiking the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in late October—a move he took to curry favor with Trump (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).
Amid the ensuing backlash—in which 300,000 Post readers reportedly canceled their subscriptions—Bezos scapegoated Post reporters for his craven action, claiming their untrustworthiness had forced him to abandon the paper’s longstanding practice of issuing presidential endorsements. “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” was the headline accompanying Bezos’ self-serving op-ed (Washington Post, 10/28/24).
Ingratiation ratcheted up
Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 12/4/24) said he hopes to persuade Donald Trump that the press is “not the enemy”—in part by giving him a $1 million donation.
After Trump’s win, Bezos ratcheted up his ingratiation, saying Trump has “grown in the past eight years” and is now “calmer.” Bezos also told the New York Times’ Dealbook conference he’s “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, and hopes to work with him (Washington Post, 12/4/24).
“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”
Bezos also trekked down to Mar-a-Lago, gifts in hand—just as Telnaes depicted. In addition to ponying up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund, Amazon is also broadcasting the inauguration live on Amazon Prime, an in-kind donation worth another $1 million (BBC, 1/4/25). Meanwhile, Amazon will release a new documentary on Melania Trump, who’s an executive producer of the film; Bezos’ company reportedly paid $40 million for the rights (Puck, 1/7/25).
Bezos didn’t become the second-richest person alive by prioritizing civic responsibility. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
Meanwhile at the Post, the paper today “started laying off roughly 4% of its work force” (New York Times, 1/7/25).
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Sentencing Project’s Richard Mendel about coverage of youth crime for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Some listeners may know the Sentencing Project for their work calling out racial disparities in sentencing associated with crack versus powder cocaine, and mandatory minimums. A recent project involves looking into another factor shaping public understanding and public policy around criminal justice—the news media. In this case, the focus is young people.
“The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’: How Misinformation Is Undermining Youth Justice Policy in Baltimore” has just been released. We’re joined now by the report’s author. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us now by phone from Prague. Welcome to CounterSpin, Richard Mendel.
Richard Mendel: Thanks for having me.
JJ: Before we get into findings, what, first of all, is the scope of this study? What did you look at, and then, what were you looking to learn, or to illuminate?
RM: We’ve been seeing, just anecdotally, a big increase in fearful reporting, sensational reporting, about youth crime over the last few years. And we, luckily, in this country had a very long period of almost continually declining youth crime rates, from the mid-’90s to 2010 or so, and continuing positive trends.
And then we saw some increase nationally in the murder rate, and young people took part in that, in 2020 and 2021. But there’s really been an epidemic of scary and problematic reporting, we saw across the country.
We decided to look in depth at how media is covering youth crime, and we decided to pick one jurisdiction, and we looked in Baltimore, but I think that a lot of the findings would probably be seen in other places, too. And what we did was we looked at many of the major outlets, the four main local TV news stations, as well as the Baltimore Sun, and an online paper, a prominent one in Baltimore, called the Baltimore Banner.
We just looked at all their crime coverage to see, first of all, what share of crime coverage is focusing on young people. And then, of the crime, what are they saying about the trends in youth crime, and how are they presenting their information? And that’s what we did, and we found really alarming results.
JJ: Let’s get into it. What were some of the key things revealed by the research?
Richard Mendel: “Young people in Baltimore…are 5% of arrests..and yet almost 30% of the stories that identified the age of the offenders focused on young people.”
RM: What we found is that young people in Baltimore, according to the Baltimore Police Department, are 5% of arrests in the Baltimore area, and yet almost 30% of the stories that identified the age of the offenders focused on young people. One station, more than a half of them focused on young people, and really creating a misimpression in the public that the young people are responsible for most of the crime, or a huge portion of it, when it’s really just not true.
Also, a lot of the coverage indicated a spike in youth crime, which really is not supported by the data; the trends are mixed. Some of the findings, in some areas, there are areas of concern, but overall, things are still trending downward, mostly. And just a lot of the rhetoric around young people, really using the sensationalistic, fear-inducing rhetoric to describe their role in crime.
So it was really creating a false impression among the public, presumably, that youth are responsible for a lot of very dangerous crime, and creating a crisis atmosphere in the legislature this year in Maryland to do something about this perceived problem, which is really a creation of the media rather than the fact.
JJ: Before we talk about impacts, I would just note that part of the way that media can just paint a picture about crime rates rising when they are not, or that doesn’t match the reality, is they don’t use numbers. They don’t use statistics, they just kind of tell stories. That was part of what you found, is that they didn’t use data to back up these claims.
RM: In many cases they didn’t. And in other cases, they cherry picked them—there’s overall arrest, there’s arrest for this, there’s arrest for that. And they, in many cases, just focused on the couple of crime categories where the crime rates were going up, and made a huge deal out of that, while ignoring all the other crime categories where youth offending was down. It’s a combination of not reporting, not using data, or not using data in responsible ways.
JJ: Well, of course the point is not just to say that this is inadequate and bad journalism, which it is, but these media problems and the story that they tell have effects.
RM: For certain. And I think that the Baltimore example is an extreme example. One of the stations in the area made a crusade out of highlighting as much as they can, and in as fearful ways as they can, almost every instance of youth offending. And more than half of the stories on that station were about youth. Many of them were long. And each incident was then followed by going back to show frightening video of previous incidents, and just over and over again, and many assertions that youth crime is out of control. And a banner headline behind the anchors on that station, “City in Crisis,” whenever they were looking at youth crime stories. So it was really just a fearmongering approach.
And it really affected the legislature this year. At the beginning of the Maryland legislative session, the Senate president, at a news conference, said that we need to do something about youth crime this year, because of a “perception problem.” And he even acknowledged that youth are responsible for less than 10% of the crimes, and that they’ve addressed it two years previously, in a comprehensive bill to update their approach to youth justice, that was a two-year study commission, and they really followed the evidence.
And this time, they created a policy environment that was very much crisis-driven, and there were no hearings, there was no expert testimony, there was no process, other than backroom discussion, and come up with something to solve the perception problem created by the media, not to address real problems in the real world.
JJ: I just want to draw you out just on precisely that point, because corporate media frame questions of crime, or of court-involved people, as a problem, a scandal, a controversy. And it has to be a perennial, unsolvable problem, or that boilerplate story goes away. But the reality is, we do know what works to reduce youth crime and to promote public safety. So please talk a bit more about that.
RM: Yes, all of the evidence shows that detention and incarceration lead to bad outcomes. Comparable young people, if they’re based in detention, versus allowed to remain free pending their trial, and if they’re incarcerated following their trial, they do worse than young people who remain in the community.
And it just makes sense. Disconnecting young people from school, disconnecting them from their family, and instead surrounding them by other troubled young people, and disrupting their natural adolescent development, it’s not a good approach. And the results show it, that the recidivism is much higher if you’re punitive towards them. And just involving them in the system, arresting them, disrupting their educations and getting a record like that, really leads to worse outcomes for young people. And the kids who were diverted from the system, again, do much better.
JJ: And so that diversion, what can that look like? It’s not just, don’t do what you’ve been doing, but there are things that have been tried and that have shown success, right, in terms of diverting young people?
RM: Some of diversion programs just connect young people to positive mentors in the community, and there’s a very promising approach of restorative justice, in which the young person meets with the persons that they’ve harmed, and makes apologies, and together craft a solution for the young person to have restored some of the harm that they’ve caused. That leads to much, much higher victim satisfaction, which is an important goal of the justice system, which the traditional system does terrible at, and also leads to better outcomes for the young people.
JJ: Finally, I’m not sure how much media coverage you can expect on the report, though media do love to talk about themselves. But I wonder what audiences you do hope to get this work in front of, and what are just some of the recommendations or things that you would hope folks would take away?
RM: We had three goals in terms of the report, and first is to influence media themselves, just to help them see the impact of their current practices. And I think that most reporters are well-intentioned, but I think that they maybe don’t understand the impact of their current approach. And we’re trying to show them there’s some better ways to cover this issue, in terms of the proportion of coverage focused on young people, in terms of presenting trends in fair and accurate ways, in terms of showing the impacts of not having the knee-jerk “more punishment is safer,” because the actual research shows the opposite. So that’s one audience.
Another audience are political leaders that have a responsibility to pursue policies that really do produce the best long-term safety, and not to succumb to pressure created by media narratives like the ones that we’ve seen in Baltimore and around the country.
And the third is to provide a tool for advocates around the country, people who care about this, that there’s ways of pushing back against irresponsible or misleading or imbalanced coverage in the media. And to do studies like this and show, “Hey, the picture that’s being presented is not accurate.” And make sure that the people in the community know and that the political leaders in that community know and that the media in that community know the negative, scary picture that you’re painting isn’t the reality. And the punitive solutions that are being suggested in response to this made-up problem are going to make things worse rather than better.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Richard Mendel, senior research fellow at the Sentencing Project. You can find the report, “The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’” on their website, SentencingProject.org. Richard Mendel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Announcing their hiring of Ben Smith, New York Times editors (1/28/20) declared, “Ben not only understands the seismic changes remaking media, he has lived them — and in some cases, led them.”
In a time of downsizing and consolidation, Ben Smith has had a journalistic career many would envy. He became famous as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, a rising media giant that raised $19 million last year. (This “replac[ed] the money it had received from the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried,” the New York Times reported—5/24/23).
These two adventures bookend his two-year stint as the “Media Equation” columnist at the New York Times, from March 2020 through January 2022. During his entire tenure there, Smith held an undisclosed amount of stock options in BuzzFeed, creating a conflict of interest for him and the Times, which both consistently waved away (Slate, 10/15/21). “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company,” Smith explained on several occasions (here 9/26/21).
But from his influential perch, Smith did, of necessity, cover BuzzFeed’s competitors, frequently critically, putting his investment’s rivals and potential rivals in a bad light. Buzzfeed started out as pure internet culture, a website offering entertainment and quizzes. But it expanded into hard news, thus competing with others in that new media mold, like the nodes of the Gawker empire.
Smith’s stake in BuzzFeed exceeded $7 million, according to FAIR’s sources—a strikingly large material interest in a company whose competitors Smith regularly covered, underscoring the ethical concerns about both Smith’s coverage and the Times’ willingness to ignore its own ethical guidelines.
‘Well above my Times salary’
With a considerable financial stake in online media, Ben Smith could have different reasons from the rest of us for freaking out about Substack (New York Times, 4/11/21).
Smith (New YorkTimes, 10/17/21) covered sexual harassment allegations at Axel Springer as the Berlin-based multimedia company was looking to grow its footprint in the US media market—making it a potential competitor to BuzzFeed.
In a critical piece (New York Times, 4/11/21) about the self-publishing platform Substack, which includes heavy investment from venture capitalist and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, Smith wrote:
Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform the Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back—media types often overvalue media writers.
Smith appears to be putting his cards on the table here, but readers have no way of knowing that his financial interest in BuzzFeed far eclipsed the salary he was getting from the Times or was offered by Substack, a new media product that competed against the very company, BuzzFeed, he was invested in.
Smith (New YorkTimes, 4/18/21) also pooh-poohed Bustle’s growth with Mic and Nylon, and its eye on restarting Gawker, in part because Bustle bet on advertising revenue, which Smith maintained was destined to flow overwhelmingly to Google and Facebook (later rebranded as Meta).
A month later, Bustle rebranded in preparation for its IPO (Axios, 5/11/21)—an initial public offering to investors. A month after that, Hollywood Reporter (6/30/21) noted that BuzzFeed was one of a number of media companies, including Bustle, that were looking to go public in order to shore up investments. Once again, readers should have had a clear understanding that Smith was writing about an entity that was competing for venture capital with the outlet he had major holdings in.
Downfall of a high-flying startup
A story by Smith in the New York Times (9/26/21) contributed to the downfall of the media startup Ozy—a company that Buzzfeed under Smith’s leadership considered buying.
The most interesting example of Smith’s conflict of interest is the case of Ozy Media. Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC and CNN anchor, attracted lots of attention when he launched Ozy, raising $5.3 million in its early days (Venture Capital Post, 12/28/13), reaching up to an enormous $20 million investment from Axel Springer (USA Today, 10/6/24). Watson and his media child were riding high—for a time.
Smith (New York Times, 9/26/21) was the first journalist to raise questions about the veracity of Ozy’s claims to investors. Less than two years later, Watson was arrested for fraud (Wall Street Journal, 2/23/23), and the operation was no more (Variety, 3/1/23). He and the company were ultimately found guilty in a New York City federal court earlier this year, “in a case accusing them of lying to investors about the now-defunct startup’s finances and sham deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey” (Reuters, 7/16/24). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison (AP, 12/16/24).
Smith’s reporting on Ozy was considered momentous, leading to the downfall of a high-flying media startup. But Smith was not a disinterested journalist when he went after Watson and Ozy. Late last year, Ozy sued Smith, BuzzFeed and Semafor for allegedly stealing Ozy’s trade secrets (Reuters, 12/21/23); in the initial complaint, Ozy’s legal team said that Smith was interested in BuzzFeed acquiring Ozy as early as 2019.
‘Sizable material stake’
It is also through this case that we have a better understanding of Smith’s financial interest in BuzzFeed during his time as a Times media columnist. According to FAIR’s sources, the prosecution obtained financial records from BuzzFeed in discovery that document how much stake Smith has had in the company over time. FAIR has not seen this sealed document; however, David Robinson, a business scholar at Duke University who served as an expert witness for the defense, did see it.
In an April filing in the case, Robinson noted that in Smith’s original report about Ozy, he disclosed that “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.” But, Robinson noted:
Columnist Benjamin Smith had, at the time of that article’s writing, an ownership stake in BuzzFeed in the form of stock options. Those options would become valuable if BuzzFeed went public later in 2021 in an initial public offering (IPO). In an IPO, options holders, such as Smith, are able to convert their options at the then-anticipated IPO price of $10 per share.
Analyzing BuzzFeed’s capital table, I calculated the number of Ben Smith’s outstanding split-adjusted shares. I then computed, for each option grant, the stock price minus the option exercise price multiplied by the number of options for each option grant, to arrive at the proceeds that Ben Smith would net upon selling his options. I estimate that Ben Smith’s options had an expected value of approximately $23,468,268.64.
On January 4, 2022, the New York Times announced that Smith had left the paper to start a new media company, one [that] “would aim to break news and offer nuance to complex stories, without falling into familiar partisan tropes.”
In a phone interview with FAIR, Robinson clarified that, since he issued this testimony, he revised his calculations based on BuzzFeed’s capitalization table. This reduced his estimate of Smith’s stake to $7.4 million, still a princely sum—and a valuation that he said, to his knowledge, hasn’t been challenged.
“I think he had a clear sizable material stake in BuzzFeed in the time when other corporations’ decisions were immediately impacting the value of BuzzFeed,” Robinson told FAIR. “I’m simply trying to bring to light the bias that seems to be apparent.”
A flexible deadline
The New York Times‘ rules about financial conflicts cite as an example, “a reporter responsible for any segment of media coverage may not own any media stock”—and make clear that that includes options.
That Smith had a conflict of interest does not mean that all or indeed any of the reporting he published about BuzzFeed‘s rivals was untrue or unjustified. (Some of the outlets he criticized, like Substack and German media giant Axel Springer, are ones I’ve also critiqued at FAIR—3/4/21, 11/5/21). The problem with Smith’s conflict of interest is that it gave him a financial incentive to encourage the decline of these particular outlets. Times readers can’t know whether, or how much, this incentive factored into his journalistic decisions—especially as the scale of the conflict was not made clear to those readers.
Moreover, the Times has clear rules about stock ownership. Its ethics guidelines say:
No staff member may own stock or have any other financial interest in a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage that he or she provides, edits, packages or supervises regularly.
In several early columns, Smith included disclaimers about the conflict. In a column (5/3/20) on union organizing in newsrooms that mentioned his experience at BuzzFeed, for instance, Smith included this disclosure:
I agreed with the Times when I was hired that I wouldn’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column, beyond leaning on what I learned during my time there, because I retain stock options in the company, which could bring me into conflict with the Times’ ethics standards. I also agreed to divest those options as quickly as I could, and certainly by the end of the year.
But this deadline was quietly extended—and BuzzFeed went public right before he left the Times (Vox, 12/6/21). It appears that he never wrote directly about BuzzFeed, but Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) noted that as the end-of-year deadline came and went, Smith’s columns stopped mentioning any sort of deadline by which he would divest. When Peters inquired with the Times, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said Smith’s deadline was extended until February 2022—two years after he was hired.
BuzzFeed went public in December 2021. Smith left the Times to start Semafor in January 2022.
Rhoades Ha told FAIR that Smith’s deadline was extended “due to the pandemic,” and that he “disclosed the options when relevant in that period.”
Smith and the media desk at Semafor did not respond to requests for comment.
A really big deal
Pointing out that it’s “bad for readers to have a media columnist whose motives they cannot absolutely trust to be disinterested,” Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) wrote that Smith “probably shouldn’t be writing about such a broad swath of digital media.”
Peters (Slate, 10/15/21) reported that neither Smith nor the Times explained why Smith stopped putting a divestment deadline on the investment disclosures in his columns. Further, he said:
Neither Smith nor Rhoades Ha responded to separate questions about why, exactly, the Times extended Smith’s divestment deadline, or whether the shifting deadline had anything to do with BuzzFeed’s plans to go public. But an SEC filing from July pertaining to BuzzFeed’s proposed SPAC merger—and an amended filing dated October 1—describes a 180-day post-merger lockup period during which certain stockholders and options holders are prohibited from transferring their shares.
The Times is not offering a sufficient answer. For one thing, it ignores the scope of Smith’s reported stake. Had he stood to gain a few thousand dollars from his former media employer while working on the media beat, big deal (sarcasm). But millions? Big deal (not sarcasm).
And there seems to be a betrayal of the spirit of the Times’ own codes about conflicts of interest when the deadline was extended for him; if the paper can bend the rules on the media beat, where else could it bend the rules? When FAIR told Robinson that the Times confirmed that the Smith’s deadline to divest had been extended, he countered, “What good is a stop sign if you tell people they’re free to run through it?”
“Given that he was a senior executive, it stands to reason he’d have a significant stake in the company,” Robinson said of Smith and BuzzFeed. “I just think it’s not appropriate for him to be writing about the company’s competitors.”
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Yanni Chen about the appellate court TikTok ruling for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: As we record on December 18, we’ve heard that the Supreme Court will address TikTok’s challenge to the federal law that was set to ban the platform in the US on January 19, unless they divest from Chinese ownership. The New York Times yesterday noted:
Lawmakers said the app’s ownership represented a risk because the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies would allow it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans, or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred.
A DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an earlier challenge from TikTok, ruling that the measure was justified by what were called “grave national security threats.” The judges, the Times reported, were united in accepting the US government’s arguments that “the Chinese government could exploit the site to gain access to users’ data to spread covert disinformation.”
Well, one can practically hear the buzzing in the heads of anyone who has used social media, ever: “Access to our data? No way! Disinformation? You don’t say.” We are in medias res, but what’s at stake, not even so much for TikTok as a company, as for its 170 million US users’—and really everyone’s—ability to access information we want and need, and our rights within those spheres?
Yanni Chen is policy counsel at the group Free Press, who’ve been working on this. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Yanni Chen.
Yanni Chen: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.
JJ: The fact that the rhetoric around the TikTok ban relies on phrases like “foreign adversary nation” doesn’t make it sound very 21st century, for a start, but the statement that we aren’t offered evidence that the thing being charged is happening, shouldn’t that at least raise questions about this move, and what else might be going on?
YC: I think absolutely, and that’s one thing that we found pretty troubling about the opinion in general. The court goes through and says that either intermediate or strict scrutiny, which are the higher of the two levels of constitutional analysis that is afforded to constitutional claims, applies here. And they say the highest scrutiny that the court applies, strict scrutiny, this law passes that, and then they don’t cite any evidence that the government didn’t provide publicly. They don’t substantiate it.
And so I think one thing that we have trouble with is the idea that the court can find that a law passes strict scrutiny with a clearly viewpoint-based angle, and not provide even a shred of evidence. And this opens up the door for further precedent, for further laws to be put on the books without that kind of substantiation either.
JJ: I’m going to ask you about that viewpoint angle, but I just want to say it early, in case it gets missed: We lose by making this a solely Trump thing. It’s not that he’s not as weird and dangerous as he is, but this TikTok ban, this proposed ban, doesn’t just map neatly onto a Trump agenda, does it?
YC: No, this is a bipartisan bill that passed overwhelmingly on both sides, by both the House and the Senate. I think it was justified mostly by national security concerns, but the committee hearings were closed doors. So the public doesn’t really know exactly what there is.
And as we’ve discussed before, there isn’t much public information to substantiate anything that we’re talking about. There’s no public evidence of the kind of content manipulation that TikTok is being accused of participating in.
JJ: I would just draw you out on that, because the Times report tells me that Judge Sri Srinivasan said, yes, Americans might lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community and even a means of income, but national security threats, blah blah blah. But then also:
Because the record reflects that Congress’s decision was considered consistent with longstanding regulatory practice and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas, [therefore] we are not in a position to set it aside.
And I wanted to hear how you respond to the idea that this has nothing to do with suppressing viewpoints, and it’s consistent with longstanding practice.
YC: Yeah, I’ll take the last one first. What Judge Srinivasan was alluding to with longstanding regulatory history on foreign control in communications, he’s talking about the broadcast space and the FCC. But broadcast and the FCC is kind of a special realm within the First Amendment, justified by bandwidth scarcity, or the amount of waves that are available to be used. So it receives, actually, a different level of First Amendment protection than other fora. So that’s one distinction.
And then also, certainly, the government and regulators can put in place restrictions for foreign control, but that doesn’t mean that they can do it in any way possible. So just because the government has that power with respect to some broadcasting does not mean that they have the power here. Remind me of the first part of that question, too.
JJ: What do we make of Judge Srinivasan’s contention that this conclusion, this ruling, has nothing to do with an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas? Now I think we can all say that it will, in effect, suppress particular messages or ideas, but this is trying to say, well, that’s not what it’s trying to do, so we shouldn’t address it in that way.
YC: Yeah, I think that position requires ignoring a lot of the statements that lawmakers said themselves. You have lawmakers on the record making statements about the type of content that not only TikTok is pushing, but US users are creating, that they take issue with. So you have to ignore all of the statements of the people who wrote the law themselves to get to that position. It’s hard to really swallow.
JJ: The statement that we’re not being offered evidence, actually, that what is being charged is happening—that should raise questions. But also in this context of where, US listeners, we hear all about the free market, the market responds to what people want, so banning an outlet isn’t a thing that should go down easy, generally speaking. And wouldn’t the government need to show that its stated goals could not be achieved any other way, other than banning this outlet? Shouldn’t they have to show that?
Yanni Chen: “It singles out a single app without really providing any justification why, and then they just say, ‘Congress picked this one.’”
YC: Yeah. So that’s actually the exact requirement of strict scrutiny, is that it needs to be the most tailored, or the narrowest restriction possible, to achieve the need that the government wishes to accomplish. So, yes, I think, formally and on the books, that is the requirement. And I think the application is where you see some problems.
And I think what you’re seeing, also, between the majority opinion’s application of strict scrutiny and Judge Srinivasan’s intermediate scrutiny dialogue, is that I think it is relatively clear that strict scrutiny does apply, because it is clearly a viewpoint-based restriction. It singles out a single app without really providing any justification why, and then they just say, “Congress picked this one.” That’s the definition of speaker discrimination. So you have that, but then you kind of have to do a backend to make it fit strict scrutiny and pass strict scrutiny. So you’re seeing some mental gymnastics happen in that logic.
And then, the other side of that, you have Judge Srinivasan, who says, “No, no, no, this is intermediate scrutiny.” And I think one reason, at least, motivating this is that strict scrutiny is a very high bar to meet, and most laws should not really pass it, just by definition of what that test is. And so having a law on the books that passed strict scrutiny does create risk of that precedent I talked about earlier, of creating bad law, where a flimsy application of strict scrutiny could lead to more laws passing strict scrutiny where they shouldn’t.
So that is one justification for applying intermediate scrutiny, but then making the law fit such that intermediate scrutiny is the right application, or the right test, then it strikes people as odd too, because it doesn’t actually do that. It is a law that requires a strict scrutiny test.
JJ: And I think it’s just weird, as a layperson, to hear, “Oh, we’re not trying to ban TikTok,Tiktok’s fine, we just need them to sell to a buyer that the US approves of.” I just feel like that lands weird, in terms of common sense, to folks.
YC: And that is something that was brought up in the litigation too. TikTok did raise the issue that, functionally, this divestment requirement would be a ban, and it’s kind of dealt with relatively, in a flip manner, in the decision itself. So you have Judge Ginsburg saying, “270 days, there’s plenty of time to meet a divestment requirement.” We just bypass the idea that it is something that you can’t do.
And the court does say, “Well, we can’t let the Chinese government set the standards for our requirements as the US government.” But what we’re talking about is the First Amendment. And the First Amendment applies to what the US government can do to US entities, and its citizens and Americans more broadly.
JJ: It just lands so weird to folks who are accustomed, at this point in 2024, to consuming news from around the world, from not unfettered, but relatively open access to media outlets from different countries, from different perspectives. It just sounds strange.
But part of the reason that this maybe has more legs than it might is that people do see a problem with platforms collecting their data, with using algorithms to push certain messages and to hold back others. And the question has to do with whether a wholesale ban of one platform is really the way to address that, or really how should we address that? If we were really concerned about privacy and targeted disinformation, what are some other responses that we might be looking at?
YC: Yeah, so TikTok is, as you recognize, not the only platform that collects too much data. Meta, certainly Google, other companies track data; they use it, they sell it, they sell it abroad, they sell it here and they sell it to governments. So TikTok is not a unique case.
So I think one thing at Free Press that we advocate for is wholesale data privacy protection, across the market, rather than targeting a single platform, and not only targeting a single platform, but taking it off the market. Because even if your concern is data collection by the Chinese government, in TikTok’s case, the Chinese government can still buy US user data through other intermediaries. So it doesn’t really make sense to cut people off from access from this single source—particularly, as you mentioned, people’s livelihoods depend on this platform, people really generate a sense of community through it—instead of addressing that larger issue. So I think there have been plenty of advocates for federal privacy law that is broadsweeping, but we can’t seem to get congressional momentum on that, where we can on a law that is, in at least some part, rooted in xenophobia.
JJ: And sinophobia, absolutely, which I think we’re going to be dealing with, anti-China—not “going to be dealing with,” we already are. Everything China is bad. It has a very musty feel about it, and I feel we’re in for a lot more of it.
YC: Yeah.
JJ: Finally, it feels a little bit like flailing. It feels a little bit like closing the barn door after the horses are out.
I mean, technology allows us to find news sources. Humanity makes us care about people, even if they are designated “official enemies.” Curiosity impels us to learn about what’s going on beyond our shores, and judgment helps us see what is weird disinformation, and what is news we can use. So the moment feels like people are far out in front of corporations and politicians. And I just want to ask you, finally, what hopeful thoughts you have about this.
YC: Hopeful thoughts? I mean, I do think that what you mentioned about, from a layman’s standpoint, that this strikes as odd. I do have a lot of hope that it seems like people are understanding that there’s something not right with this decision, and not right with this law. There was something not transparent about it in the first place. This is targeting a specific company, and how it affects our dialogue and our community, so that gives me a lot of hope that people aren’t taking what the court has said here as a wholesale endorsement of the law, and taking it for what it’s worth.
I think that that’s been something that’s really heartening, and I think that it puts the power in the people, and that will be even more important moving forward, where, as you mentioned, information like this is important, and it has a democratic value. And in closing that off here, we put ourselves in line with some of the more repressive governments that do this, and we legitimize that further, as the United States doing this as an example for other countries. So having the civilians, and people who aren’t in government necessarily, sense that there’s something wrong here is definitely heartening.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Yanni Chen; she’s policy counsel at Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net, and they also have a YouTube channel where you can find their recent webinar on this, breaking down the TikTok ban. Yanni Chen, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Laura Flanders and Friends (10/20/23)
This week on CounterSpin: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism—that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us who believe that US society needs to change.
New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism?
We talk about that this week with two people who are and have been doing not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it: Sonali Kolhatkar, from Rising Up! With Sonali, and Laura Flanders from Laura Flanders and Friends.
Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.
Journalist Gary Webb (1955–2004)
In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.
But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed
as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.
Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.
Decade-long suppression of evidence
Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97): “Besides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper’s specific pieces of evidence.”
And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”
As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post
ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).
As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”
‘Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors’
In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/96) declared pompously that “a piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths—the one about the CIA and crack being just one.” Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery—where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.
Furthermore, much of the CIA’s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency’s mind-control program MKUltra comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, described in an interview with NPR (11/20/20) how MKUltra
was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
In 2012, NBC Newsreported on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the “sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.” In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?
Connecting the dots
Peter Hart (FAIR.org, 5/20/13): “If accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that US media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated.”
The question remains, however, as to why Webb underwent such a vicious assault when, at the end of the day, Contra drug-running was no more nefarious than anything else Washington was up to in the Americas. Objectively speaking, reports of the infliction of “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaraguan civilians should have raised the same alarms, and prompted as extreme an establishment backlash, as narco-activity by CIA mercenaries. Plus, the whole Iran/Contra scandal should have already alerted Americans to their government’s propensity for lying—not to mention violating its own laws.
Around the same time that the US was enabling Contra crimes, of course, it was also backing genocide in Guatemala, facilitating mass slaughter by the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups, and nurturing Battalion 316, “a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun (6/13/95) put it. In December 1989, the US went about bombing the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, killing up to several thousand civilians and earning the area the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”
While Contra drug-running thus cohered just fine with imperial foreign policy, it seems that Webb’s fundamental crime was connecting the dots between US-backed wars on civilians abroad and the US war on its own domestic population, which continues to disproportionately target Black communities. After all, under capitalism, all men are not created equal, and the institutionalized overlap of racial and socioeconomic inequality partially explains why African Americans have a lower life expectancy than whites—and how we’ve ended up in a situation in which white police officers regularly shoot unarmed Black people.
But there we go again with those “bizarre” conspiracy theories.
Now, two decades after Webb’s death, the US government obviously hasn’t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad—including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power’s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever.
