Category: zSlider

August 2, 2023

‘People Have to Be Able to Access the Asylum Process, Regardless of Manner of Entry’ – CounterSpin interview with Melissa Crow on asylum restrictions

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies‘ Melissa Crow about the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions for the July 28, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin3230728Crow.mp3

CBS News (7/26/23)

Janine Jackson: A typical headline, this one from CBS News, reads, “Judge Rejects US Asylum Restrictions, Jeopardizing Biden Policy Aimed at Deterring Illegal Border Crossings.” So something is “jeopardized” that was aimed at “deterring” something “illegal.” CBS Morning News announced that a federal judge

blocked a new Biden administration policy aimed at reducing illegal crossings at the US/Mexico border. The policy took effect in May and it seemed to be working. In June, the number of crossings plummeted.

Whether the goal is “deterring” or “reducing” may shift your vision a bit of what a policy “working” entails, though the unexamined nature of the word “illegal” remains constant.

And CNN echoed many others in labeling the ruling, most importantly, a “major blow” to the Biden administration.

What does the ruling from a California Northern District Court say, and what lives—besides Biden’s political one—are at stake? We’re joined now by Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Melissa Crow.

Melissa Crow: Thanks so much, Janine.

JJ: What policy is it that the district court judge ruled unlawful, and where did that policy come from?

MC: It is a rule promulgated by the Biden administration that is inaccurately termed “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways.” The rule essentially makes people ineligible for asylum if they transited through a third country on their way to the United States, unless they did one of three things: They applied for and were denied protection in a country of transit; unless they applied for and obtained parole under a certain DHS-designated program; or unless they obtained an appointment through the CBP One mobile app to present at a port of entry at a particular time.

There are some very narrow exceptions, but they generally don’t apply in practice.

US District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar

JJ: So District Court Judge [Jon] Tigar ruled that that was unlawful, and on what grounds did he make that ruling?

MC: On three separate grounds. First, the judge found that the rule is contrary to law, for pretty much the same reason that both the District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that prior Trump-era restrictions that were very similar were also illegal.

The Immigration and Nationality Act provides that anyone who enters the United States, regardless of their immigration status and regardless of their manner of entry, should be able to apply for asylum. This rule flies in the face of that protection.

The second ground is that the rule is arbitrary and capricious. Essentially, Judge Tigar saw through the government’s smokescreen of all of these so-called lawful pathways, and he himself in the decision noted a number of situations where people wouldn’t be eligible for any of the alleged pathways that the rule supposedly provides.

And then the CBP One appointment requirement, it is just a condition that the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t include, and Congress never envisioned this kind of a barrier to applying for asylum in the US.

The third basis on which the judge found it to be illegal is that the government failed to comply with the required notice and comment procedures under the Administrative Procedure Act. They only provided 30 days for comment, as opposed to the usual 60 days.

And it’s a really complicated rule. I can vouch for the fact that many advocates didn’t sleep much during those 30 days, and certainly would’ve done an even more comprehensive job in commenting on the flaws in the rule if they’d had more time.

JJ: That’s very interesting. It’s almost as though it was kind of being pushed through.

CNN said, without elaboration, “Administration officials have rejected the comparison to Trump-era rules.” That’s true as a sentence; they have rejected those comparisons. But it sounds like, hmm, that doesn’t necessarily square with reality. There is a lot of similarity here.

MC: There is absolutely a lot of similarity. We’ve referred to it in the past as a mashup of the Trump-era entry ban and transit ban on asylum.

JJ: Let me just ask you, it sounds like you’ve answered it, but maybe just to tease it out: The phrase “illegal crossing” appears in every story. We’re trying to deter, we’re trying to reduce, we’re trying to curb “illegal crossings.” Is that a useful phrase?

Melissa Crow: “It doesn’t matter if you come in at a port of entry or between ports of entry, you are still entitled to apply for asylum in this country.”

MC: It is not a useful phrase. As I said, Section 1158 of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides a right to apply for asylum, regardless of an individual’s manner of entry. And that is why the initial Trump-era entry ban, and the entry ban implicit in this rule, are in violation of law. It doesn’t matter if you come in at a port of entry or between ports of entry, you are still entitled to apply for asylum in this country.

JJ: I wonder where Texas Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales got the factoid that he tossed off on Face the Nation, saying that, “Right now, nine out of ten people that come over illegally do not qualify for asylum.”

In context, he was saying that Texas troopers pushing children back into the Rio Grande is very terrible, but in general, attention there is sort of barking up the wrong tree, and we really ought to be talking about something else. But where does he get that nine out of ten number?

MC: I honestly don’t know where he gets that nine out of ten number. I’d be very curious to know. And I would emphasize that the asylum process is supposed to be based on case-by-case adjudication. So either an asylum office or an immigration judge would need to listen to the facts of the case of any of those children, or anyone else who’s seeking asylum in this country, before they can decide if the claim is meritorious.

JJ: Reporting evinces nowadays an implicit acceptance of the goal of border management, keeping things “under control,” keeping immigrants’ efforts to enter from “surging.” The way we’re to understand that the US is doing things right is if there are just fewer people trying to enter. It seems that a goal that we didn’t necessarily buy into is now implicitly in the background of everything we read and hear.

MC: That is not what the Immigration and Nationality Act says, and we seem to be prioritizing efficiency over the law, quite frankly.

JJ: You have suggested that instead of defending this policy, and it looks like the administration is going to appeal this ruling, the administration should instead be taking steps towards a fair and humane process. What would be some of the key elements of that fair and humane asylum process?

MC: It should of course be premised on case-by-case adjudication, as we just discussed, but it has to comply with the law. People have to be able to access the asylum process, regardless of manner of entry, regardless of status.

And one thing that I would note is that we know that the Department of Homeland Security can reallocate resources when they need to. We saw it in the family detention context—which was also illegal, I would argue. But we saw facilities where the government housed families pop up almost overnight.

We see it when they send more asylum officers to the border, or more immigration judges are assigned to hear border cases. Customs and Border Protection is one of the most well-resourced law enforcement agencies in the country. And if they want to process more asylum seekers at the border, they absolutely have the ability and the capacity to do that.

So I think a critical piece of good border policy has to be reallocation of resources in a way that enables them to comply with the law.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Thank you so much, Melissa Crow, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MC: Thanks so much for your interest in these critical issues.

The post ‘People Have to Be Able to Access the Asylum Process, Regardless of Manner of Entry’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 1, 2023

How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths – A review of Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible

(New Press, 2023)

Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.

FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”

One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.

Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”

Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own. If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars

Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).

As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling

Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”

As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012, 90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery. In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

The post How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 31, 2023

Humans Might Be About to Break the Ocean? Don’t Stop the Presses

The Guardian (7/25/23) notes that scientists have said a collapse of the AMOC “must be avoided ‘at all costs.’”

When a new peer-reviewed study (Nature Communications, 7/25/23) announces that a crucial Atlantic Ocean circulation system, a cornerstone of the global climate, may collapse as quickly as two years from now, you’d think news outlets might want to put that on the front page.

The AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) moves warmer water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where it cools, sinks and returns down the US East Coast. Its collapse would be a “climate tipping point” with, as the British Guardian (7/25/23) explained,

disastrous consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa. It would increase storms and drop temperatures in Europe, and lead to a rising sea level on the eastern coast of North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

The study, published by an open-access affiliate of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, used new statistical methods, rather than new observations, to make its prediction, which contradicts the IPCC’s latest assessment. The IPCC (6/14/19) deemed a full collapse this century “very unlikely,” but it relied on data that only went back to 2004. The new study, the Guardian reported, “used sea surface temperature data stretching back to 1870 as a proxy for the change in strength of AMOC currents over time.” The study projected the collapse of the ocean system between 2025 and 2095, with 2050 the most likely date, without sharp reductions in global carbon emissions.

Some climate scientists are cautious about the new study, suggesting that more observational data is needed to say the collapse could happen so imminently (Grist, 7/26/23). But as climate scientist Jonathan Foley argued (Twitter, 7/27/23), though the study doesn’t offer certainty, the consequences are so dire that “the only prudent reaction to this is to work to address climate change, as quickly as possible, to avoid these kinds of impacts.”

“I really wish that journalists and editors took this as seriously as scientists do, and reported it loudly and accurately, taking the time to get the facts right,” Foley wrote. “The planet is in trouble, and we need to have the best possible information.”

Unfortunately for the planet and those who inhabit it, corporate media would rather look the other way, at worst, and offer scary clickbait headlines with few connections to actionable policy at best.

‘Try all that we can’

What the Wall Street Journal (7/25/23) was reporting instead.

At the Washington Post, editors put the news on page 12 (7/26/23). That’s nearly the same place it put news of the last dire report about the AMOC two years ago (8/6/21), which didn’t put a timeline on the collapse, but suggested it was much closer to a tipping point than previously expected. In the Post‘s 2021 report, the study author was quoted: “It’s one of those events that should not happen, and we should try all that we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.” Yet the lack of urgency evinced by news media make that kind of swift and dramatic action next to impossible.

The Wall Street Journal, the favored newspaper of the business crowd, didn’t even bother to cover the report, despite the massive economic implications of an AMOC collapse. It did, however, find room on its front page that day for a story headlined “The Manpri Summer: How Men’s Shorts Got So Long.”

NPR (7/27/23) focused more on the importance of the timing of the collapse than on the collapse itself, under the headline “Why It’s So Important to Figure Out When a Vital Atlantic Ocean Current Might Collapse.” The article presented the story as primarily a debate over the timing of the collapse, with the upshot being that “crucial tipping points in the climate system are incredibly hard to predict.” NPR applied the term “urgent” twice to the idea of doing more climate research, with “rapid action to limit how much the planet warms” added the second time, almost as an afterthought.

‘Plausible we’ve fallen off a cliff’

The New York Times (7/26/23) was the only leading paper to put the AMOC study on its front page—though not in the top right corner reserved for the most important story of the day; that was “Legacy Admission at Harvard Faces Federal Inquiry” (7/26/23).

The New York Times (7/26/23) was one of the only major outlets to put the news on its front page, with a well-reported piece by Raymond Zhong. It also did better than many, mentioning “human-driven warming” in the second paragraph, and paraphrasing a scientist that “uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it.” That scientist, Hali Kilbourne, was given the last word:

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

Yet even here, no connections were made to concrete policy options, and no policy experts or activists were quoted to offer them.

The only other front-page US newspaper mention FAIR could find in the Nexis database was in the Charleston Post & Courier (7/25/23), which similarly made no connections to policy.

In the context of a summer of extreme climate events, including unprecedented heatwaves, ocean temperatures and wildfires, we desperately need a media system that treats the climate crisis like the five-alarm fire that it is, and demands accountability from the politicians and industries—not least the fossil fuel industry—driving us off the cliff.

Featured Image: The Guardian‘s depiction (7/25/23) of the AMOC system.

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

Fans of Cluster Bombs Dominate WaPo’s Opinion Section

The Washington Post (6/23/22) describes its opinion section as a platform for articles that “provide a diversity of voices and perspectives for our readers.” Yet as the US and its allies pour military aid into Ukraine, escalating the already bloody conflict with ever-more deadly new weapons, the paper’s opinion pages begin to look less like a platform for diverse voices and more like a cheerleading squad for the military/industrial complex.

Post opinion journalism abounds with pieces advocating the sort of “light side vs. dark side” moral rhetoric characteristic of corporate media’s war coverage (FAIR.org, 12/1/22). A consequence of this binary worldview is the tendency to present the deployment of increasingly horrific means, like President Joe Biden’s recent decision to arm Ukraine with US cluster munitions, as essentially just and necessary to achieve the West’s always-noble ends.

From war crime to ‘correct call’

Cluster munitions are a type of ordinance which can leave unexploded “bomblets” around for decades. Almost 50 years after the end of the US government’s war of aggression against Laos, unexploded cluster bombs continue to kill and maim innocent people—frequently children.

These weapons are rightly so reviled that, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then–White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to the possibility that Russia had already begun using cluster munitions against Ukraine by calling it “potentially a war crime.” Even so, US cluster munitions have arrived in Ukraine, and are now being used by Kyiv (Washington Post, 7/20/23).

Washington Post editorial (7/8/23): “Mr. Biden made a tough but correct call this week…sending Kyiv thousands of cluster munitions, which are expected to help Ukrainian forces break through heavily entrenched Russian lines.”

Advocating for escalation, a Post editorial headlined “NATO’s Annual Summit Could Define a Decade of Western Security” (7/8/23) argued that NATO needs to “step up their game” in order to meet the threat of Putin’s regime in Moscow. It called Biden’s decision to arm Ukraine with cluster munitions a “tough but correct call.” The editorial board explained:

Their use is banned by some major NATO allies, because dud bombs left behind on the battlefield pose a threat to civilians. But Russia has used them intensively in Ukraine, and the Biden administration is legally required to export only shells that have a very low dud rate.

“Some” major allies? Out of the 31 NATO member states, the US finds company with only seven others in its refusal to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions. More than two-thirds of NATO countries, including “major” allies like Canada, Britain, Germany and France—and every European country west of Poland—have signed.

The editorial board cites the fact that the cluster munitions being sent by the US have a “very low dud rate,” and will therefore pose less of a risk to civilians. The Pentagon claims that the munitions it is sending have a dud rate of 2.35%; even if that’s accurate, it exceeds the 1% limit the Pentagon itself considers acceptable.

According to the New York Times’ John Ismay (7/7/23), a failure rate of 2.35% “would mean that for every two shells fired, about three unexploded grenades would be left scattered on the target area.” There is reason to believe that the true dud rate may be much higher—possibly exceeding 14%, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning.

Ends justify the means?

Max Boot (Washington Post, 7/11/23): Ukrainian officials have “balanced the risks of civilian casualties from unexploded ordnance against the risk of not being able to expel the Russian invaders, and they have decided that the latter is a greater concern than the former.” In other words, sometimes you have to destroy the separatists to save them.

Another Post op-ed, by columnist Max Boot (7/11/23), headlined “Why Liberals Protesting Cluster Munitions for Ukraine Are Wrong,” illustrates the “ends justify the means” rhetoric so pervasive in discourse over the war in Ukraine.

Boot acknowledged the devastating impact of cluster munitions, noting that “in Laos alone, at least 25,000 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the US bombing ended.” He added:

Such concerns led more than 100 nations—but not the United States, Russia or Ukraine—to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions abolishing the use of these weapons.

Of course, the United States is notorious for isolating itself from the rest of the world when it comes to the signing of international treaties—as the Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Boot is a senior fellow, has shown. The US signed but failed to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (which has 178 state parties) and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which has 189 state parties). It refused to even sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (which has 164 state parties).

Boot cited the probability that the dud rate of US cluster munitions is much higher than the given 2.35%, but immediately downplayed this fact on the basis that

Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders, whose relatives, friends and neighbors are in the line of fire, are more mindful of minimizing Ukrainian casualties than are self-appointed humanitarians in the West watching the war on television.

In other words, the Ukraine government should be allowed to decide how many Ukrainian civilians are acceptable to kill. This is a dubious principle even when you aren’t talking about a war against separatists; in the areas where the weapons are likely to be used, a large minority to a majority of the population identifies as ethnically Russian. Is the Iraqi government the best judge of how many Kurdish civilians are all right to kill?

“Using cluster munitions has the potential to save the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers,” Boot claimed, despite the fact that these same US munitions have a history of killing both civilians and US personnel alike.

Moreover, Boot argued,

cluster munitions remain a lawful instrument of warfare for countries that haven’t signed the 2008 convention, and Kyiv has shown itself a responsible steward of all the Western weaponry it has received.

Setting aside international norms, even countries who have not joined the cluster munitions convention must respect the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas. That makes cluster munitions used in such areas illegal—yet “responsible steward” Ukraine has already used its own cluster munitions in the city of Izium, predictably resulting in civilian casualties (Human Rights Watch, 7/6/23).

‘Running out of options’

Josh Rogin (Washington Post, 3/2/23): Sure, cluster bombs are ” highly indiscriminate and especially dangerous to civilians,” but “those are concerns Ukrainians don’t have the time or luxury to parse.”

Meanwhile, Post columnist David Ignatius (7/8/23) approvingly quoted National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan touting the deployment of cluster munitions as giving Ukraine a “wider window” for success, with no mention of any arguments against them. Ignatius later stated in his biweekly Q&A (7/17/23) that he was compelled by the Ukrainians’ reported “moral argument” for cluster bombs.

The Post’s sole “Counterpoint” piece (7/7/23) on cluster munitions, authored by Sen. Jeff Merkley and former Sen. Patrick Leahy, justly pointed out the “unsupportable moral and political price” of supplying Kyiv with cluster munitions. Unfortunately, the Post didn’t seem to have much time for such considerations, with the only other traces of criticism within the opinion section being found amidst the letters to the editor.

This was true even months before Biden made his decision. A March piece by columnist Josh Rogin (3/2/23) framed the weapons as a sort of necessary evil as the Ukrainian forces are “running out of options.” Rogin referred to concerns from human rights groups and deemed the use of cluster munitions as “not to be taken lightly,” but did not dwell on these concerns, arguing, similar to Boot, that “more innocent lives will be saved if Ukrainian forces can kill more invading Russians faster.” Rogin concluded: “Because it is their lives on the line, it is their risk to take, and we should honor their request.”

In total, the Post has published five pieces in its opinion section (including Ignatius’ Q&A) that take a direct stance in favor of arming Ukraine with US cluster munitions, and only one opposed to it. Meanwhile, a recent poll by Quinnipiac University concluded that 51% of Americans disapprove of the president’s decision, while only 39% approve (The Hill, 7/19/23).

With so much preference for escalation and so little toward military restraint, one thing seems clear: There aren’t many Einsteins in the Washington Post op-ed section.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

The post Fans of Cluster Bombs Dominate WaPo’s Opinion Section appeared first on FAIR.

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

Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section

      CounterSpin230728.mp3

Houston Chronicle (7/11/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Listeners may have heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in some parts of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing and harm those that try. As revealed by the Houston Chronicle, Texas troopers have been ordered to push people back into the river, and to deny them water. The cruelty is obvious; the Department of Justice is talking about suing.

But there are other ways for immigration policy to be inhumane. Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions (which look a lot like Trump’s asylum restrictions) are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed. We learn about that from a participant in the case, Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

      CounterSpin230728Crow.mp3

New York Times (10/23/17)

Also on the show: In October 2017, the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why the Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers,” that began, “By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called the Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper.” In January 2022, the Times bought the Athletic for $550 million, saying that “as a stand-alone product…the Athletic is a great complement to the Times.”

It’s now July 2023, and the New York Times has announced it’s shutting down its sports desk, outsourcing that reporting to…the Athletic. Dave Zirin joins us to talk about that; he’s sports editor at The Nation, host of the Edge of Sports podcast, and author of many books, including A People’s History of Sports in the United States.

      CounterSpin230728Zirin.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Europe’s economy.

      CounterSpin230728Banter.mp3

The post Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section appeared first on FAIR.

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

Legacy Admissions Are Actually the Opposite of Affirmative Action

No, AP (7/1/23), built-in advantages for well-connected students are not kind of like positive steps to remedy discrimination, except that they benefit white people.

A recent NPR headline (7/24/23) declared: “Affirmative Action for Rich Kids: It’s More Than Just Legacy Admissions.” The accompanying story explained: “Affirmative action for minority kids may now be dead. But a blockbuster new study, released today, finds that, effectively, affirmative action for rich kids is alive and well.”

Likewise, a Vox headline (7/25/23) reported that “Affirmative Action for White College Applicants Is Still Here.” A Daily podcast (7/27/23) from the New York Times is headlined “Affirmative Action for the 1 Percent,” explaining “just how much elite colleges admissions in the US systematically favor the rich and the superrich.” New York magazine’s Eric Levitz (7/25/23) wrote about “Why Elite Colleges Do Affirmative Action for the Rich.”

These articles helpfully expose the hypocrisy of an educational system that continues to favor the wealthy and privileged—and of a Supreme Court that feels the need to bar attempts to remedy this situation. But these headlines’ play on “affirmative action” reflects the right wing’s use of the term to mean “unfair advantage”; they only work if the term signifies an arbitrary, unjustified preference.

What affirmative action actually is, the way it’s been used for over 60 years now, is a proactive response to structural discrimination, particularly the persistence of racism in education. Is that what legacy admissions are? No, they’re the opposite of that. Then how are they “affirmative action for the rich”?

This trope only makes sense if you’re actually against affirmative action, and against legacy admissions, too—like John McWhorter, who wrote the New York Times op-ed “End Affirmative Action for Rich White Students, Too” (2/1/23). He’s comparing a thing he doesn’t like to another thing he doesn’t like, so that works.

But you can’t defend the fairness of affirmative action by using it as a label for something that’s obviously unfair.

Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

The post Legacy Admissions Are Actually the Opposite of Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ – CounterSpin interview with Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name

Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Kevin Minofu about Say Her Name for the July 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3

Janine Jackson: Like most powerful exercises, it’s a simple one. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw asks audience members to stand as she lists names of Black people killed by law enforcement in this country, and to sit when they hear a name that they don’t recognize.

(Haymarket Books, 2023)

For Eric Garner, George Floyd, Michael Brown, most of the crowd—whatever crowd it is, students, academics, the general public—stay standing. But when it gets to Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, it thins and thins. And by the time it gets to Rekia Boyd and Michelle Cusseaux, generally everyone is seated.

Is that because Black women’s deaths via the same state-sanctioned violence that kills Black boys and men are less compelling? Are the victims less worthy? Or do they somehow not matter?

It’s hard to tease out and to talk about what’s happening. But if we genuinely want to address racist police violence, and bring all of us into the imagined future, we have to have the conversation.

The Say Her Name project from the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve, has worked to lift up the names of women, trans women and girls killed by law enforcement on and off duty, and to talk about how their murders are the same as, and different from, police murders of Black men and boys.

That project is now reflected in a book, Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence, out this week from Haymarket Books.

Joining us now is Kevin Minofu, senior researcher and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kevin Minofu.

Kevin Minofu: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be on. I’m very grateful for you making the time and, yeah, great to be on the show.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, as you and I both know, the Say Her Name project encompasses activism, art, research and writing, and support for families. But the heart of it, the radiating center, is still this really simple thing: “Say her name.” Why is that so meaningful?

KM: I think in describing that, it’s kind of useful to go back to the origins of the movement, because people are always interested in how it developed. People have probably heard about it, but oftentimes may be confused about its history.

Atlantic (12/4/14)

And so Say Her Name developed around December 2014, during the protests that were ignited in New York City after the acquittal of the police officer who had killed Eric Garner, at the march where thousands of protesters from across the country of all ages and all races joined together and were standing up against police violence against Black people, and mentioning the names of men who had been killed by police violence.

In the context of that protest, the African American Policy Forum were, at the protest, trying to uplift the names of women who had been killed by police violence. And so in the process of being part of that activity, we were saying the names of these women, saying their names out loud, and looking at the looks of lack of recognition, of confusion, from the other participants at this protest.

And I think that was emblematic of the erasure of these stories, and the ways in which by saying the names of these women, we were speaking them into existence in people’s minds, into people’s memories, and making them understand a problem that up until then they hadn’t been able to see.

JJ: There’s a thing that we talk about, the loss of the loss, which is, there’s a horror that happens, obviously, when somebody is killed by police, and where you understand that it’s emblematic of the worthlessness of Black lives, in terms of law enforcement in this country.

But when it’s a Black woman or a trans woman or a girl, and then it doesn’t get acknowledged, there’s a deeper level of loss there. And that’s kind of what this project is about.

Kevin Minofu: “Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.”

KM: Exactly. As we’ve always described it, there’s the immense loss of what it means for a person to lose a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, in their families. These are women who all had incredibly full lives, lots of them had children, were all loved by family members and their communities. So there’s that loss that everyone who’s been through grief or has lost someone unexpectedly will suffer.

And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them. So the police officers that we entrust with the safety of our communities and in our neighborhoods and in our cities are the people who are responsible for taking away these lives.

And then once we understand that loss, there’s the secondary loss that the family members are burdened with, which is the loss of their loss. Their loss is not legible to people. People don’t recognize that this is something which is a tragedy. People don’t recognize that that’s something which is a problem.

People don’t recognize the injustice of being killed if you are, in the case of one of the women, Miriam Carey, who was killed while driving with her 18-month-old child by the Secret Service in front of the White House. If you were killed like India Kager, who was also driving with her son in Virginia Beach, and killed in a hail of bullets. If you were killed in the context of your own home, over what was an outstanding traffic violation, like Korryn Gaines.

So an inability for the general public to see the horror of these deaths, and the loss that those deaths mean for the family members that survive, is what we like to term the loss of the loss, and why this book is such a big intervention to try and publicize and get that loss into the public’s attention.

JJ: And to inform the conversation about state-sanctioned police violence against Black people.

But I just want to say, let me just intercede early: I want us to dispense early with the idea that Say Her Name is somehow an invidious project. And I think some listeners might be surprised to hear, but we know that this project has been met with the idea that if you are uplifting the names of Black women and girls who have been killed by police, that somehow that means you don’t think it matters that Black men and boys have been killed by police.

LA Times (7/21/23)

But I will say, having done a lot of looking into media coverage of the issue, very early on, we absolutely saw the question of state-sanctioned police violence as a question about police killing Black men and boys.

And to the extent that women were in the conversation, they were mothers and wives and sisters of Black men who were the victims of state violence. And so let’s just address the fact that this is not about saying that Black men and boys are not also [affected].

KM: I think that’s a very vital thing to add. Thanks for making that, Janine, because the whole impetus of this campaign is stating that we need to expand the scope of our politics, not just replace the names that we include. So we’re not just replacing Black women and Black men in the conversation, but understanding that we need to have a gender-inclusive understanding of police violence.

So of course we know that, across racial groups, that men are killed more often, Black men are killed more than any other race and gender group. But we do know that Black women represent about 10% of the female population in the United States, yet account for one-fifth of all women killed by the police. And more so, research suggests that three out of five Black women who are killed by police are unarmed.

So there’s a particular vulnerability to being a Black woman that exacerbates the chance of being in a deadly and a lethal police encounter that other women don’t face, and even a lot of men don’t face as well.

So being able to speak about that is able to make us understand how we should be able to hold the death of George Floyd in conversation with the death of Breonna Taylor, which happened only a couple months before George Floyd was killed. So that is the point and impetus of our project.

JJ: And also, a problem that is not named is not studied, is not addressed, and then it’s easier for people to say it’s not really a problem, because we don’t have any data on it. So part of this is just to actually collect some numbers and to say this is happening.

AAPF (7/15)

KM: Absolutely. The kind of driving mantra of our work, and our broader work of the Policy Forum, is that we can’t fix the problem that we can’t see, that we can’t name.

And so maybe to give a bit of background, this book is building on work that we did in 2015, which was the inception of our Say Her Name report.

The Say Her Name report then looked at the ways in which Black women were killed. So, for example, driving while Black is something that we have a context for and understanding for, from looking at the history of how people commonly understand police violence.

But looking at, for example, how often Black women who are in a mental health crisis are killed, that expanded the scope of how we understood police violence, because not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.

So giving ourselves these frames for understanding the ways in which this problem occurs, both gave us a comparison to link it back to the ways in which we commonly understand it, and also expanded the scope for how we want to respond to the crisis.

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. There is a narrative, which maybe some listeners are not privy to or don’t understand, but there is a dominant narrative in which Black men who are killed by police are victims of state violence, but Black women who are killed, eh, what did they do to get themselves killed?

And so introducing both the mental health vector, but just, there’s meaning in saying that it’s both the same—racist police violence is similar—and then there are also distinctions. And if we don’t pay attention to them, then we can’t address them.

News 5 Cleveland (11/11/22)

KM: I think part of that work has been, there’s a policy intervention that is required, of course, there’s legislation both across the country and in certain states that needs to be effected to change this, but a big part of this is also just a narrative shift.

So it’s how the media report on the ways in which Black women are killed, or decline to report on them at all. And I think the Breonna Taylor example is indicative of that. The fact that Breonna Taylor was killed in March, and very little was made of the fact at the time, on a national scale, and then a few months later, that’s when her name joined that conversation.

The fact that Tanisha Anderson was killed only a few days before Tamir Rice was killed by the same police department.

The ways in which the media can, frankly, just do their job better, to make sure that we have a more capacious and broader frame of police violence, and are able to tell the stories of these women in a way that doesn’t show deference to the narratives that emanate from police sources, and shows the full beauty of their lives.

JJ: So important. To come back to the book, specifically, this book is not just a book. It’s meant to be a tool. It’s not meant to just sit on a shelf.

And Fran Garrett, who is the mother of Michelle Cusseaux, who was killed by law enforcement, she talks in the book about how things are actually different based on the work around Say Her Name, and how the mental health response in her community, which happens to be Phoenix, Arizona, but now mental health wellness orders are handled differently, and it’s not necessarily law enforcement that comes first to your door.

So the book is a way of also encouraging action. It’s not just documentation of sad things; it’s about how to make things different.

YouTube (9/24/21)

KM: Absolutely. At the heart of the book—and I would encourage all your listeners to go out and get it at a bookstore near you, and online—at the heart of the book is the Say Her Name Mothers Network. The Say Her Name Mothers Network was formed not long after the inception of the Say Her Name movement, and it represents mothers, daughters, sisters, family members who have lost women to police violence.

And that community has existed, and has existed as a source of advocacy, a source of community. It’s connected them to women across the country, from Virginia to California, from New York to Texas.

It shows that there is a community out there, and through this community, and then particularly through storytelling, artivism, using art to disrupt popular narratives, we released a song with Janelle Monáe, who also wrote the forward for the book, called “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout).”

And that’s designed to just—all of these narrative interventions are the seeds for what becomes policy and actually becomes change. It’s a historical project that Black people have been doing in this country since our arrival. And it’s the Black feminist legacy that brings this book into fruition.

JJ: And then, just on media, I think some listeners might think, well, media are covering police violence against Black women, and what they might be thinking about is these terrible, wrenching videos, or these just horrible images of Black women being abused by law enforcement.

And we want to be careful about this, because I think for a lot of people, that might look like witnessing, that might look like seeing what’s happening, but that can’t be the end of the story.

And certainly for journalists, the responsibility of reporters—but also for all of us—is to not just look at it, but to do something about it. And I wonder if you were talking to reporters or thinking about journalism generally, what would be your thoughts about what would be actually righteous response to what’s happening?

Salon (10/28/15)

KM: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, of course, we live in an age of spectacle, and there is still a great spectacle to Black suffering. And the visibility of that, that has increased with the internet and social media, has been important in being able to document abuses and violence across the country.

But the story can’t end there. It can’t end there, just that particular moment. If this was a camera shot, the camera needs to be expanded to look at the dynamics of the communities, the relationship between police forces and these communities, and the patriarchal relationship between the male police officers and women, the racialized relationship between a police force which has been designed to serve white interests and Black communities.

And so to do the vital work of understanding what led to that situation, what led to the Black girl being violently dragged out of a classroom, or beaten for swimming, or killed in a part of the misguided war on drugs. To understand that broader story is the vital work of journalism that we need at the moment, and the vital work that is actually going to save lives.

JJ: Do you have any final thoughts, Kevin Minofu, about this importance and the place of this intervention in the public media conversation about Say Her Name, and about police violence against Black women?

KM: The Say Her Name book, as I said, features different interviews with members of the Say Her Name Network. And so just hearing those stories and actually getting behind a news story and learning about the lives that should have been is really important for everyone to be able to contextualize and humanize the women that form part of the network and this broader movement.

And looking at the ways in which the knowledge that is being lifted up here is vital to us understanding racism, sexism, and at the same time, being cognizant of the fact that that is the precise knowledge which at the moment a backlash to what is termed wokeness across the country is attempting to erase.

I can imagine that the content of the Say Her Name book would inflame the sensitivities of various conservatives and right-wing people that are attempting to silence our ability to speak about our circumstances, because they don’t want us to change it.

So in this context of that environment, reading this book, sharing it with your communities, letting people know about the problem, letting people know that to truly respond to structural racism, to racial injustice, we have to have a gender-expansive, gender-inclusive understanding of it…. I think that’s the work, that’s the mission of Say Her Name.

And we’ve been very grateful to be supported by the public so far. We’ve seen the movement grow, but there’s still so much work to be done, and that’s the work that we’re excited to continue.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. You can learn more about this work on the website AAPF.org. Thank you so much, Kevin Minofu, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KM: Thanks, Janine.

The post ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Twisting Statistics to Fake the Collapse of Europe

Unjustified doomsaying is one of corporate media’s favorite pastimes. And they often practice this hobby in their economic coverage of Europe. Corporate outlets commonly warn of crumbling European economies, contrasting the supposed misery of social welfare states with the United States.

“Europe in many ways is collapsing,” claimed Fox‘s Laura Ingraham (7/21/22). “Life for normal, working people there is increasingly miserable.”

Around this time last year, Fox News‘s Laura Ingraham (7/21/22) claimed that “Europe in many ways is collapsing.” The continent, alleged Ingraham, is “a total basket case” with life for “normal working people” becoming “increasingly miserable.” From this premise, she launched into a triumphalist monologue:

Even with all of our problems [in the United States], our economy is still stronger… still more resilient than Europe’s. Now, in 2021, our GDP was about $23 trillion or so. The GDP for the entire EU, which has…27 member states, was just over $17 trillion.

The Financial Times (6/19/23) used the same statistics to reach a parallel conclusion regarding American supremacy. “Europe has fallen behind,” asserted chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman, and “cannot compete with” the United States. The proof? Gross domestic product.

In 2008, the EU and the US economies were roughly the same size. But since the global financial crisis, their economic fortunes have dramatically diverged.

Rachman then approvingly quoted Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who said:

In 2008 the EU’s economy was somewhat larger than America’s: $16.2 trillion versus $14.7 trillion. By 2022, the US economy had grown to $25 trillion, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8tn. America’s economy is now nearly one-third bigger. It is more than 50 per cent larger than the EU without the UK.

Using the wrong yardstick

The Financial Times (6/19/23) bills itself as “the worldʼs leading global business publication,” but it hopes that its readers don’t know what exchange rates are.

But these statistics are misleading. Both Fox and the Financial Times strategically use nominal GDP figures, which are based on how much it would cost to buy all of a nation’s outputs on the world market. This is a measure that makes Europe look good in 2008, when it took a record-high $1.47 to buy one euro, and makes the US look much better in 2022, when you only needed $1.05 to buy a euro.

To compare living standards, however, you need to use what’s called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) GDP. This adjusts for the fact that exchange rates are not always a true measure of a currency’s domestic purchasing power; it’s PPP that tells you how much a given nation can purchase in total goods and services, which is what determines its standard of living.

According to World Bank data adjusted for purchasing power, the US and EU have roughly equivalent GDPs: $25.5 trillion vs. $24.3 trillion. Include Britain as well, and Europe’s economy is nearly $2.5 trillion larger than the US’s.

This adjustment also reverses the supposedly diverging trends cited by the Financial Times. Standardizing price levels reveals that the European Union actually grew faster than the United States from 2008 to 2022. In terms of how much Europeans can actually buy, its GDP expanded by nearly 14% over the period, whereas the United States only grew 12.5%.

No, they’re not worse off

The Wall Street Journal headline (7/17/23) gets it completely backwards: In terms of actual purchasing power, European economies are growing faster than the US.

That didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal (7/17/23) from slamming Europe’s ostensibly sluggish growth rates. Under the headline, “Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off,’” reporter Tom Fairless condemned the continent where “an aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth”:

Life on a continent long envied by outsiders for its art de vivre is rapidly losing its shine as Europeans see their purchasing power melt away.

The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine. Spaniards are stinting on olive oil. Finns are being urged to use saunas on windy days when energy is less expensive.

But to back up these claims about the supposedly worsening living standards of Europeans, the Journal uses wages measured in dollars—looking, once again, from the cherry-picked year of 2008 to 2022. If Europeans traded in the euros they earned for dollars, they would have done very well in 2008, and much worse in 2022—but this is completely irrelevant to how many domestic products (like red wine and olive oil) Europeans can buy. To gauge that, you need to use PPP, and that measure shows that European purchasing power is definitely not “melt[ing] away.”

Beyond buying

According to US News, the US has a similar quality of life to European countries with roughly half the per capita GDP.

Of course, GDP itself is only a rough proxy for standard of living. It merely sums the market value of final goods and services produced within a country in a given year. This means an ambulance ride, which can cost thousands in the United States, would boost GDP by that amount. But, of course, overcharging for essential medical services makes the average person’s life worse—not better.

To attempt a broader comparison of well-being across countries, the United Nations created the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index—a measure that combines income, education and life expectancy, and accounts for how these are distributed among the population. Every nation in the top 10 is European. The United States doesn’t appear until No. 25—tied with Cyprus. It comes in below even Malta and Estonia, which are hardly Europe’s richest locales.

US News & World Report’s annual Quality of Life ranking tells a similar story. Using a composite of access to essentials, civic freedom and more, the company lists which “countries treat their citizens” best. European countries occupy seven of the top eight spots, with Canada the only exception. Of the top 20, a whopping 16 are in Europe. The United States lands at No. 21—sandwiched between Portugal and Poland.

‘Green policies killing Europe’

Yet corporate media outlets readily ignore these facts and run with the narrative that Europe is dying. The ultimate target of this campaign is not the continent itself. Rather, the attacks on Europe are really about discrediting social democracy and progressivism more broadly.

We can see this by noting what these hit pieces blame for Europe’s supposed economic death. Fox, for example, took particular aim at environmentalism. “Green policies,” it says, “are killing Europe.” The Journal claimed “popular healthcare services and pensions” are unfit “for fixing the problem” of European decline. The Journal further suggested that high tax rates are intolerably squeezing increasingly poor European consumers—a veiled call for austerity.

Let none of this skewed coverage convince you that progressive social policy is a failed experiment. The reports of Europe’s death are greatly exaggerated. By relevant metrics, it remains a better place to live than the United States.

The post Twisting Statistics to Fake the Collapse of Europe appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘You Are Exacerbating the Racial Wealth Gap Through the Use of Subsidies’ – CounterSpin interview with Arlene Martínez on corporate subsidies

Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Arlene Martínez about corporate subsidies for the July 14, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230714Martinez.mp3

Good Jobs First (7/6/23)

Janine Jackson: Under a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act, some factories making batteries for electric vehicles will each receive more than a billion dollars per year from the US government. That’s along with some $13 billion in state and local economic development incentives that factories making electronic vehicles and batteries are slated to receive.

But as Good Jobs First calls out in their new report on the subject, called Power Outrage, there are no requirements for the jobs promised—and considered key to this deal—to be permanent jobs, or even that they provide market-based wages or benefits.

We have a press corps that considers it due diligence to critically examine every dime the government offers to struggling people. But huge economic subsidies to profitable corporations are a no-comment given, no matter how not needy the grantee, and no matter how opaque the process.

There’s just little sense of any need to follow up on a government, or “taxpayer,” gift to those who we are told are the doers, the makers, the job creators. This crucial but under-examined economic phenomenon is Good Jobs First’s topic all the time. And a new report, the first in a series, takes an angle on the impact of subsidies that you pretty much never hear.

Good Jobs First (6/12/23)

Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, and author of the recent report “How Economic Development Subsidies Transfer Public Wealth to White Men.” She joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Arlene Martínez.

Arlene Martínez: Hi, thanks for having me.

JJ: We see subsidies, or what you call “mega deals,” going to folks like Amazon, companies that don’t need a lift, they don’t need community support, and they don’t give back, necessarily, when they get it.

The racial unfairness is part and parcel of that. And yet I feel like, every day, we learn how irreducible white supremacy is, how it doesn’t stir into anything else and just disappear. So what did you find, and why do you think it matters?

AM: Yeah, Good Jobs First has a subsidy tracker, which looks at economic development subsidies that have gone to companies. And we have a special category called “mega deals,” as you mentioned. And those mega deals are the biggest of those deals, anything that’s $50 million or above. So I took a look at the top 50 of those, so we’re talking all billion-dollar deals and up, very extravagant packages that go to some of the biggest well-known companies in the world.

And what we saw is that most of those companies were run by white men. And in cases when they weren’t white men, they tended to be born outside of the United States, and then there were just two women, who were also white.

So we talk a lot about this transfer of wealth, and really what you’re doing is taking a community’s very precious, limited resources and directing it towards some of the biggest, most profitable companies in the world, which isn’t what subsidies were ever meant to do in the first place; they were supposed to incentivize development that wouldn’t have otherwise taken place. And that’s just not what we’re seeing here.

So what you’re really having is, you are exacerbating this racial wealth gap through the use of subsidies. We thought we should be explicit about who the winners were.

JJ: Right. You hear, well, OK, these are big companies and they provide a lot of jobs, and a lot of those jobs might go to people of color, or to women, so we can’t help that they’re big. What about that?

Boondoggle (6/16/22)

AM: That’s one of the very popular myths, we would say, we hear quite a bit: Well, these are big companies. They produce a lot of jobs.

But the truth is, that’s not what actual research shows, which is that these companies aren’t producing any type of special, extra amount of jobs. And, in fact, a lot of times they’re just simply taking jobs from smaller companies.

I think Amazon is a great example of this. Their online presence and their warehouse workers mean that a lot of the retail jobs that used to exist have been cannibalized. So it’s really just been a transfer of jobs, in a lot of cases.

And some of those times they’ve gone from good industries to really poorly paid warehouse workers, where Black and brown workers tend to be holding the poorest-paid, most dangerous jobs.

JJ: I remember talking with Dorothy Brown about tax policy, and just saying that there’s a way that, broadly, race can be related to economic outcomes, but somehow when we’re talking about policy-making, it’s not factored in.

And she was saying that people would say, race doesn’t affect tax policy, because we don’t have any data that connects that. So what you don’t study is invisible to you, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

And, similarly, with the case of subsidies, if you don’t think the impacts of these big subsidies are race-related, or have impact that is meaningful in terms of race, well, then, I guess you don’t see it. But that doesn’t mean those impacts don’t exist.

ProPublica (6/8/21)

AM: That’s right. And Dorothy Brown, we had a conversation, and one of the points that I’ve heard her make is ProPublica, which has done a series of really damning, amazing reporting around some of the tax returns of some of the wealthiest people in the world, and just how much they’re avoiding paying taxes.

And one of the points she makes is, look at the list. They’re all white people, and yet ProPublica doesn’t take that extra step to say, by the way, the people who are avoiding paying taxes, who aren’t paying what everyone else is paying, are the richest people in the world, who are white. So I think she does a good job of doing that.

JJ: Calling attention to that impact, which, if you don’t see it, you don’t have to see it, but there it is.

AM: And I was a reporter before I joined Good Jobs First, and I remember one of the stories I was writing about was, there was, of course, a budget shortfall, as there often are in these local communities that we cover; I was a local reporter.

And the first thing on the chopping block really was a boxing gym and a library and a community center in a very heavily Latino neighborhood in the city. And it was, of course, disproportionately used by, well, that city’s Latino population.

And it wasn’t these other things that were being cut; police and fire were being fully funded. Those are both professions that tend to have, again, high populations of white men who occupy those positions, and are being paid some of the highest salaries in a community.

So, yes, I think there is a need, and communities benefit from, really, that conversation becoming a lot more explicit than it’s been.

JJ: Absolutely. Part of, I guess, what galls me about news media’s sort of soft, blurry attention to subsidies is, and I said it to Greg LeRoy last year, we don’t look to corporate news media first for critical examinations of corporate capitalism, but they do present themselves as watchdogs of the public interest, and especially of public spending. We hear about the “cost to taxpayers” a lot.

And so, if that’s true, I feel like minimally, the secrecy around public subsidies to companies like Amazon ought to be compelling stuff, and yet somehow they don’t get broken open often, and the impact and the follow-up on communities just doesn’t seem to be the kind of catnip to reporters that you would think it would be.

Arlene Martinez: “The scrutiny that we give every spending dollar that seems to come out of a city budget is not at all applied in the same way to companies.”

AM: Yeah, and it’s amazing how the scrutiny that we give every spending dollar that seems to come out of a city budget is not at all applied in the same way to companies, and company behaviors and company press releases. Their word is taken at face value, and as if somehow it’s more legitimate, when they’re questioning every nickel and dime that’s coming out of a community.

I remember covering a county museum that was looking to get some money, and there was city council meeting after city council after city council meeting about whether this museum should get a million dollars over five years, or whatever the case was, whereas other communities, and we write about these a lot, they will approve a $300 million subsidy behind closed doors, with no one knowing about it. And it’s touted as a good thing for the community.

So I think there increasingly is more scrutiny on things like these subsidies, and people really are starting to question more whether this is really the best way that communities should be spending that money. But there is something interesting about the way that corporations and companies are reported on with such a trust that isn’t given to government, for example.

JJ: And I just want to say finally, Good Jobs First is very much about involving everyone in the process. And you referenced subsidy trackers that you have. They’re accessible for folks who are reporters or not reporters. You try to make data or databases available to folks who want to follow the money.

AM: Yes, we have databases that we’ve purposely made fully accessible. We don’t even ask for your email, and you can look up a company. So if a company comes to your community and says, “We need some money to expand our operations,” or to even open, you can look to see where else has this company gotten money, and what did it deliver for the money that it’s gotten in other places.

Good Jobs First

Or you can look at a company in our violation tracker and say, “What’s its record on corporate conduct?” Because we have all types of misconduct records in there to say, if the company has a long track record of cheating workers or harming the environment or cheating consumers, you can say, “Is this the kind of company that this city should be investing in?”

So yes, we do try to make these databases very accessible and easy to use. We’re trying to do the research for you, for journalists.

JJ: Right? Well, if journalists won’t use it, then the public can use it and work around the press corps. I mean, the point is to get it done, right?

AM: That’s right. That’s right. And we are thrilled that every day we get some kind of outreach, whether it’s a grassroots community group, an individual who said, “I saw this, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” So they go to their city council, then they can question what’s going on, or whoever their official might be. And so always thrilled when we see that.

I would just add, I made this point earlier, but communities have a certain amount of money, and the money that’s being spent is precious. And there are things that actually do lift up communities, and those are excellent public schools, and they’re communities with parks that take care of their natural resources, and safe communities.

And when communities invest in those types of things, people want to live in those kinds of communities. And the companies want to be where those people are, where those workers are.

So the real wins that we see that communities do, is when they invest in those things that truly lift up people from the bottom up, rather than showering a corporation with a billion dollars and hoping somebody at the very bottom of that funnel can use it to lift themselves to a better place.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Arlene Martínez. She’s deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, online at GoodJobsFirst.org. Arlene Martínez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AM: Thanks for having me.

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July 24, 2023

‘Ill-Equipped,’ ‘1950s’ Pentagon Needs an Expensive Upgrade, Media Insist

“There are no laptops at meetings in the Pentagon,” Navy official John Kroger warned (Wired, 8/20/20). “There are no whiteboards, either.“

Despite its immense power, the Pentagon is a relic of decades past.

Such was the argument by Navy official John Kroger, writing for Wired (8/20/20). Commenting on the daily operations of the Defense Department, Kroger depicted a workplace bereft of modernity: no WiFi, scant cell signals, workflows of “a glacial pace,” and a “hermetic closure” to talent from the private sector, amounting to a “retrograde” “1950s environment,” unprepared to sustain 21st-century national security.

Kroger’s warning wasn’t the first of its kind, nor was it the last. News outlets routinely caution that the US Department of Defense—the largest government agency of the world’s wealthiest country, with an $858 billion budget that can be exceeded with impunity—is sclerotic and inefficient. The only remedy, they tell their audiences, is billions more dollars’ worth of improvements to management systems, personnel, and weapons and intelligence technology.

‘Backward’ superpower

With such an antiquated Defense Department, the argument goes, the US will be “ill-equipped” (Wired, 5/2/22) for future war, trailing its most formidable adversaries.

Foreign Policy boosted this view in an op-ed (10/25/21) that described the Pentagon as a “living museum” plagued by “backward” working conditions. The piece, penned by fellows at the Truman National Security Project and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (both of which count weapons manufacturers among their top funders), pleaded for a program of modernization to help the DoD adapt to “the evolving character of war and an ongoing reframing of national security,” and counter “an increasingly aggressive China and a stubbornly revanchist Russia.” Without a comprehensive upgrade, the piece asserted, the United States would “at best muddle through the challenges it faces.”

The Pentagon “remains burdened by the strict adherence to slow, sequential processes,” Zachery Tyson Brown complained in Foreign Policy (10/25/21), “while more contemporary workplaces have learned that parallel, simultaneous, and asynchronous methods dramatically speed their delivery of value.”

Politico (6/27/23) echoed these concerns when it bemoaned the Pentagon’s “endless struggle with AI,” reporting that “the military needs more AI technology, faster.” According to the piece, the DoD can’t keep up with the tech industry’s pace of military technology development, imperiling “American dominance” as China ascends. Citing “defense pundits,” the article promoted additional funding for autonomous weapons and surveillance, among other forms of contemporary warfare, framing the Department’s request for $1.8 billion in AI research and development funding as modest: “a record, but still just a fraction of the nearly $900 billion defense budget.”

Considering the enormous sum—which grows considerably every year—at the Pentagon’s disposal, one might question the notion that the US military is underresourced or in imminent danger of being militarily eclipsed. In 2022, for instance, the US outspent the next ten highest-spending countries combined on war preparation, accounting for 39% of the world’s military expenditure that year. (China, whose population outnumbers that of the entire Western Hemisphere, came in second at 13%, with Russia in third at 4%.)

Additionally, available data—even from US-based institutions—indicate that the US far outspends China and Russia on defense-related AI research and development.

Georgetown University’s Center for Security & Emerging Technology found that the US planned to devote $5 billion to military AI for fiscal year 2020, compared to estimates ranging from $0.3 billion–$2.7 billion for China in 2018. “The numbers directly oppose the prevailing narrative” that the US was losing the “so-called AI arms race,” reported MIT Technology Review (12/5/19). Though publicly accessible information on Russia’s spending is limited and of questionable accuracy, sources like Defense One (4/4/18) and the RAND Corporation placed Russia’s total AI spending at $12 to $36 million annually in 2017 and 2018.

But failing to include such pertinent context—let alone moral critiques—about global government spending continues media’s long history of presenting a “lagging empire” narrative that frames the US as a floundering underdog in need of additional defense funding (FAIR.org, 9/1/15). “To keep up with China, the Defense Department is trying to lure private capital,” reported the Wall Street Journal (3/26/23), in yet another example. One of the article’s sources, a co-founder of a “national security innovation” center at Stanford University, likened China to “Silicon Valley,” and the US to a “Detroit auto maker,” concluding: “That’s not a fair fight.”

‘Struggling’ weapon-makers

High-tech systems are “getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine,” the New York Times (5/21/23) reported, “earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field.”

In order to strengthen their case, some media shine a spotlight on the military startups aspiring to sign lucrative DoD contracts, characterizing firms that seek to facilitate mass violence throughout the world as hapless victims of a hamstrung bureaucracy.

Financial Times (3/17/22) advocated for tech businesses that “struggle to break into the Pentagon,” suggesting they’re being deprived of the long-term software contracts they deserve. The paper went further, tacitly supporting Silicon Valley founders’ accusations of “innovation theater,” which FT defined as “paying lip service to the importance of disruptive technology while holding back the vast bulk of their budgets for traditional, large-scale programs from incumbent contractors.”

More recently, the New York Times (5/21/23) lamented the Department’s apparently inadequate catalog of contracts with scrappy, enterprising military-systems companies. Assessing the military-industrial complex as “lumbering” and the DoD as “risk-averse,” the Times portrayed a Pentagon too conservative with expenses, requiring “years of planning and congressional funding decisions” before it would buy enough product to keep afloat startups that specialize in logistics, weapons technology and intelligence.

Among the casualties, according to the Times: Primer and Capella Space, both of which laid off employees while awaiting decisions from the Pentagon. (Both Primer and Capella, bankrolled in part by billionaire Thomas Tull, have raised approximately $250 million.) “Many other tech start-ups struggl[e] to pay bills” while in the same holding pattern, the Times added.

Recruiting more ‘nerds’

Wired (5/2/22): “Technology is fundamentally changing the nature of war, and the US needs to adapt in order to maintain its edge.”

Keen on Silicon Valley’s technical expertise, media in some cases propose that the Defense Department be awarded additional funding to attract and hire tech workers from the private sector.

Wired (5/2/22) exemplified this with the disconcertingly twee headline, “To Win the Next War, the Pentagon Needs Nerds.” Echoing Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, the piece fretted that the Pentagon lacked the talent to develop cutting-edge war technology, in part because the DoD couldn’t “compete” with the salaries offered by the private sector.

Years earlier, Wired (2/16/19) presented this thesis in an opinion piece urging the Pentagon to lure tech workers away from high-paid, prestigious posts at such Silicon Valley staples as Google, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Apple. Its author, consultant and “futurist” Amy Webb, made her prescriptions plain:

The government can allocate significant funding—several billion to start—for basic and advanced research in AI. It can use some of that money for better compensation packages, to build capacity among existing staff, and to fund projects allowing the tech giants and public sector to start working much more closely together.

Conveniently enough, as of June 2023, the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act would give the DoD a record $886 billion, highlighting “increased funding for cutting-edge technologies,” including “the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.” It seems that Webb’s—and much of corporate media’s—wish has come true.

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July 21, 2023

Projects to Shift Media Further Rightward Get Kid Glove Treatment From Centrist Press Journal

Quill is the magazine of the oldest press organization in the United States, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), which describes itself as having “roughly 6,000 members” and being “the nation’s most broad-based journalism organization.” It features a five-page story in its current issue (Summer/23) headlined “Refreshing the Pool: Right-Leaning Organizations Keep the Conservative Press Pipeline Flowing.”

Quill (7/11/23) presents at face value the rationalization offered by right-wing billionaire-funded projects as to why journalism needs to be pushed farther to the right.

The piece, touted on Quill‘s cover, is a largely uncritical and superficial look at efforts to push journalism further to the right.

It begins with Corey Walker, who “didn’t major in journalism” and only “took one journalism class” at the University of Michigan, but “got more journalism experience and training through Campus Reform and the College Fix, organizations that help students prepare for careers in conservative media.”

“Walker graduated in 2021 and is now a reporter at the Daily Caller, a conservative digital publication co-founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson,” the piece went on:

Although he considers himself a conservative, Walker says he has always kept his political leaning out of his stories, a practice he says was reinforced during all of his journalism training and at the Caller. Besides, he said, so many issues pushed by liberals are so wacky, they don’t need an editorial comment for news consumers to see how outlandish they are.

The piece says: “Campus Reform and the College Fix are among several organizations that help connect a pool of fresh, young journalists with right-leaning views—such as Walker—to jobs in conservative media.”

The story unquestioningly echoes the right-wing critique of corporate media:

Administrators at the organizations say the news ecosystem is too entrenched with liberal journalists working for news outlets that promote liberal ideology while underplaying, ignoring or misrepresenting conservative perspectives on stories those on the right care about.

There’s no skeptical perspective included to point out that corporate media routinely report major news topics like crime, the economy and military intervention through conservative frameworks.

Don’t follow the money

Inside Higher Ed (2/6/17) noted that College Fix touted Betsy DeVos’s nomination to be education secretary without noting that her son is on the board of the site’s parent organization.

There is also no following the money that finances Campus Reform and the College Fix, and the other organizations involved in right-wing media training.

For example, in 2017, Inside Higher Ed (2/6/17), a website that provides “news, analysis and solutions for the entire higher education community” and has “more than 2 million monthly readers,” investigated the involvement of the family of Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration education secretary, in College Fix. It reported:

Her son sits on the board of directors of the Student Free Press Association, a non-profit group that runs the [College Fix] site…. Federal tax forms for the Student Free Press Association list five directors for 2015…. One of them is Rick DeVos, one of Betsy DeVos’s sons…. Tax documents show the DeVos family has donated money to a conservative fund that in turn has donated large sums of money to the Student Free Press Association.

This is the Donors Capital Fund, which, Inside Higher Ed continued,

gave $265,600 to the student Free Press Association in 2014. That was more than half of the $482,729 in total revenue the group disclosed that year…. “Donors Capital Fund only supports a class of public charities firmly committed to liberty,” the fund says on its website. “These charities all help strengthen American civil society by promoting private initiatives rather than government programs as the solution to the most pressing issues of the day.”

Illuminating information could have been found if Quill had looked into sources of funding for right-wing media training. But the piece by Rod Hicks, director of ethics and diversity at SPJ, instead quotes those who are in it, often making dubious assertions:

The organizations want to make sure the next generation of right-leaning journalists is prepared to enter the job market ready to compete for positions at both conservative and mainstream outlets. The training they provide stresses the basic tenets of journalism, such as accuracy, fairness and balance. Some strongly discourage students from writing commentary, at least for now.

‘Mainstream media failures’

Emily Jashinsky (Quill, Summer/23): “The failure of the mainstream media is a failure of liberal ideology.” (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

What about Fox News, a leader among conservative media in dispensing misinformation? “Critics have long complained that Fox News airs false and misleading content,” the article acknowledged:

Fox declined to comment to Quill on those characterizations, but Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath that some network hosts gave viewers false information alleging the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

There is no elaboration on the multi-million dollar-lawsuit against Fox for serial lying.

Instead, there is a line: “It is not perplexing to Emily Jashinsky why conservatives trust Fox more than they do the mainstream press.” (Jashinsky is director of one of the conservative media training grounds, the National Journalism Center. There are internships four days a week, and “Friday is training day.”) She says:

What we study is mainstream media failures, and the bulk of those tend to be from the left, not from the right. We come from a belief that, fundamentally, the failure of the mainstream media is a failure of liberal ideology.

Quill has occasionally published critical pieces on right-wing media, such as one in 2018 headlined “Sinclair’s Mandates Threaten Independent, Local Journalism” (4/3/18) or an interview (9/15/20) with Brian Stelter on his 2020 book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. But the current issue of Quill offers, at best, a softball from an organization, SPJ, which says: “We build public trust in the media and greater accountability in the profession…”

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July 21, 2023

‘What Californians Really Need Is Community-Centered, Truly Local and Responsive Journalism’ – CounterSpin interview with Florín Nájera-Uresti on preserving journalism

Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press Action’s Florín Nájera-Uresti about preserving journalism for the July 14, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230714Martinez.mp3

Janine Jackson: Headlines suggest the California Journalism Preservation Act is a pretty good thing: “Help Democracy by Helping Newspapers” and “What Stories Go Unreported When a Local Newspaper Fades?” evoke concern with the very real loss of local news and of journalism jobs, and the societal harms that come with that.

LA Times (6/7/23)

And “Making Google and Meta Pay for News They Profit From,” “Your Local Newspaper Does the Work; Big Tech Reaps the Ad Dollars,” “Meta Threatens to Pull News Posts From Facebook, Instagram if California Bill Becomes Law,” and “California Lawmakers Advance Journalism Bill, Resist Big Tech Bullying.”

Well, they all suggest that the legislation found the right enemies. So why do advocates like our guest think that it’s good news, really, that the act in its current form has been shelved for the moment?

Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Florín Nájera-Uresti.

Florín Nájera-Uresti: Thank you, Janine. Happy to be here.

JJ: Let me just ask you, what did the California Journalism Preservation Act, also known as Assembly Bill or AB886, what did it say it would do, and why is it that, at least in its current form, you don’t think it would get us there, and might even take us somewhere worse?

Florín Nájera-Uresti: “There is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists.”

FN: So the California Journalism Preservation Act is a bill that was designed to create a mechanism that would allow news outlets to extract payments from Big Tech companies, including search engines that feature content linking to their news sites. And so there was a lot of excitement around the bill for that reason.

Unfortunately, due to the mechanism of the bill as a link tax, the intended outcome was unlikely to be achieved, and there is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists.

This bill was modeled in many respects after the Federal Journalism Competition Preservation Act, which was recently reintroduced in Congress after failing to pass in the last session. The CJPA, the California version of the bill, differs from the proposed federal bill in that it creates an even more explicit link tax, where payment is based directly on the number of online impressions of links to news sites on social networks and search engines.

And because of this current approach that rewards clicks, it creates more of an incentive for the production of clickbait and low-quality journalism, in addition to altering the way the open internet works.

So the bill as drafted fails to consider the news and information needs of Californians, and instead of uplifting the production of civic information as a public good, it creates a giveaway to the bill’s most vocal proponents, which include large corporate media outlets, conglomerates. And these are the folks who have actually stopped investing in local news, and are responsible for a majority of the mass layoffs in local newsrooms.

Neiman Lab (4/20/22)

JJ: So when you say “link tax,” I think that’s something that might be a new phrase to people. That really was going to be, if a search engine or if Facebook links to a local news story, they were going to be taxed on that? I mean, is it as direct as it sounds?

FN: Yeah, that’s right. So the bill, as it was written, would essentially tax the number of impressions, or the amount of times a link is shown on social media sites and search engines.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the content of the publisher’s website is available on the social media or search engine site, but simply that it is linked to it, perhaps with a short snippet or a headline.

JJ: And then what turned up in pretty much all of the articles that I read was, with this tax—and we can talk about in a second who is going to be considered a journalistic outlet that can even get in this process—but the big selling point, as far as news coverage, was the proceeds from this tax, 70% of them, were going to be spent on “news journalists…and maintaining or enhancing the production and distribution of news or information.”

Free Press (4/23/23)

That, on its face, sounds good. And 70% sounds like a good number, but it wasn’t clear how that was going to work.

FN: Yeah, it’s exactly like you said. It seems like a very attractive point of the bill, but unfortunately, this provision that at first seems to hold publishers accountable for hiring more journalists or increasing salaries—salaries to the journalists that they already employ, actually, through regular accounting practices—could easily result in an extremely difficult way to track where these funds are spent.

Policy initiatives such as these rarely have this desired impact, because money is fungible, and it’s extremely difficult to ensure that these funds are spent according to the purpose or intent of this legislation.

JJ: I think language is so formative here. Like, bigger picture, including with the federal legislation, there’s a difference between “Let’s shore up our existing newspapers” and “Let’s meet the information needs of the community.” Obviously, there can be overlap or confluence there, but those are really two different goals, aren’t they? And they entail different processes.

FN: Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re trying to get at. What we want to uplift in our communities, and what Californians really need, is community-centered, truly local and responsive journalism, not just propping up an industry that the ad-supported market is already not supporting.

So what we want to see is the increase of this public good, and that’s where policy intervention should come in.

JJ: We often hear—and particularly with, as you know, the very imperfect work of legislative politics—we often hear not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes something starts out not great, but you work with it, and it gets better.

But we also know that inadequate or wrongly directed reform efforts can make it harder, then, for better ones to advance. People sort of feel like, well, we already tried that, or they just get issue fatigue.

So it seems important to say, with regard to this, that this is not just saying no to this, it’s the fact that we actually have better alternatives, right?

El Tímpano (6/2/23)

FN: Absolutely. And, fortunately, in our work partnering and working with local stakeholders and community newsrooms across the state, like El Tímpano, the coalition of local newsrooms known as LION Publishers, and other individuals, including local journalists, we know that there are much better alternatives to consider.

Our work in New Jersey and elsewhere has shown us that lawmakers can pass really innovative legislation that can actually lead to more informed communities, more reporters on the ground, and sustainable, independent and community-rooted locally.

JJ: And I always think, every time I talk about fighting privatization or making something public, making institutions more public or more accountable, it’s not just an outcome—it’s a process.

And I know that this is part of what you’ve been trying to say, is that it’s not like we’re going to make something for the community and then give it to them. People have to be involved in the earliest stages of creating something, so that it is accountable.

FN: Yeah. And we are in a position where lawmakers can really listen to the concerns of local news advocates and communities that have actually suffered due to the absence of this quality coverage.

So we really hope to work with both our communities and lawmakers in this next phase of the legislative process, to make sure that these folks are heard, and that this results in well-designed policy that actually achieves the goals we’re setting out to achieve.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Florín Nájera-Uresti, California campaign organizer for Free Press Action. You can track their work online at FreePress.net. Florín Nájera-Uresti, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

FN: Thank you for having me, Janine.

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July 21, 2023

Covering ‘Racist State’ Backlash—but Not the Reality That Israel Is a Racist State

Media coverage mainly focused on the politics of calling Israel a “racist state” (Daily Beast, 7/19/23) rather than on the question of whether Israel was racist.

When Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D.–Wash.) called Israel a “racist state” at the Netroots Nation conference, corporate media dutifully covered the political backlash—but scrupulously avoided evaluating the veracity of Jayapal’s statement.

Addressing activists who interrupted a panel to protest panelist Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s refusal to support a bill protecting Palestinian children, Jayapal said:

As somebody that’s been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstrations, I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us, that it does not even feel possible.

Republicans immediately jumped on the statement, working to cast the Democratic party as antisemitic for as many news cycles as possible (Daily Beast, 7/19/23). Top Democrats swiftly rebuked Jayapal, distancing themselves from her remarks and declaring that “Israel is not a racist state.”

Jayapal offered a lengthy apology, explaining, “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” but rather that

Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.

Reporting the push-back

A Washington Post article (7/17/23) quoted no one but US officials, making claims about Israel that many human rights experts would dispute.

Most major US news outlets covered the blowup over Jayapal’s statement. But astonishingly few took the obvious and necessary journalistic step of factchecking it.

NPR (7/17/23) discussed the events under the headline, “Top House Democrats Reject Rep. Jayapal’s Comments Calling Israel a ‘Racist State.’” CNN (7/16/23) went with “Top House Democrats Rebuke Jayapal Comments That Israel Is a ‘Racist State’ as She Tries to Walk Them Back.” The Washington Post‘s version (7/17/23) ran under the headline, “Democrats Push Back on Rep. Jayapal’s Description of Israel as ‘Racist State.’”

NPR characterized her words as “controversial.” The Post and CNN quoted top Democrats calling the remarks “unacceptable,” and CNN added a quote from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz calling them “hurtful and harmful…wholly inaccurate and insensitive.”

Both NPR and CNN briefly mentioned that progressive Democrats have “concerns” about “human rights” in Israel, but offered no further information about them.

‘System of domination’

But, of course, progressive Democrats aren’t the only ones with concerns about human rights or racism in Israel, and Jayapal didn’t come up with the “racist state” characterization out of thin air.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International (2/22) have condemned Israel’s apartheid system, which Amnesty defines as a “system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.”

In 2021, Human Rights Watch (4/27/21) published a lengthy report spelling out its determination that Israel had committed crimes of apartheid against Palestinians, which is defined under international law as

an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

HRW explained, for those inclined to split hairs, that this applies to Palestinians because under international law, “race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories.”

Earlier the same year, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (1/12/21) released a report declaring Israel an “apartheid regime.”

Amnesty International (2/1/22) followed the next year, publishing a 280-page report titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians” that declared that

Amnesty International concludes that the State of Israel considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group.

These reports came about after Israel in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status that declares Israel is the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” and that “the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”—in other words, that Israel is not a nation-state for its Palestinian residents, whether accorded citizenship or not, and that Palestinians subject to Israel’s control have no right to self-determination.

As B’Tselem explained in its report:

It is true that the Israeli regime largely followed these principles before. Yet Jewish supremacy has now been enshrined in basic law, making it a binding constitutional principle—unlike ordinary law or practices by authorities, which can be challenged. This signals to all state institutions that they not only can, but must, promote Jewish supremacy in the entire area under Israeli control.

Jayapal’s statement, therefore, that Israel is a “racist state” has clear grounding in international law, as multiple respected human rights organizations have documented.

‘Certain subjects are taboo’

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor (7/19/23) was one of the few commentators who cited Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International‘s positions on Israel. But even he softened their critique, writing that they saw Israeli discrimination against Palestinians “as akin to apartheid.”

But in the flood of coverage, mentions of any of the human rights organizations that have designated Israel an apartheid state were extremely rare—and only came after Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib highlighted them in a speech on the House floor against a House resolution declaring Israel “not a racist or apartheid state.” At publication, a Nexis search of US news sources found 474 articles and transcripts since July 15 that mentioned Jayapal and “racist state.” Only 24 of those mentioned Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or B’Tselem.

The New York Times (7/18/23) quoted Tlaib saying, “Israel is an apartheid state,” and noted that in her speech she cited “determinations from United Nations officials, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounted to apartheid.” This was followed with three sources calling the “racist state” characterization “contrary to the facts,” “false” and “hateful.”

The Hill (7/18/23) offered a brief article about Tlaib’s comments, and the Washington Post‘s follow-up article (7/18/23) mentioned them as well.

Opinion columns in Newsweek and the Post were noteworthy standouts. Both noted the human rights organizations’ designations and explored the political context beyond the current theatrics. Ishaan Tharoor’s Post column (7/19/23), headlined “It’s the Republicans, Not the Democrats, Who Are Radical on Israel,” focused on the contradictions of growing US public support for Palestinians as the GOP moves radically rightward on Israel/Palestine foreign policy.

The Newsweek column (7/18/23), by Omar Baddar, offered the only forceful defense of Jayapal’s remarks FAIR could find in establishment media. Under the headline “Rep. Jayapal Was Right: Israel Is a Racist State,” Baddar argued: “We cannot live in a functioning democracy and make informed policy decisions if certain subjects are taboo, and if acknowledging reality in them is derided.”

Newsweek diligently countered Baddar’s column with another (7/18/23) under the headline, “No, Israel Is Not a ‘Racist State’.”

When Amnesty released its report last year, the New York Times refused to even mention the report for 52 days (FAIR.org, 5/23/23). When journalist Katie Halper, in her new co-host position at Hill TV, recorded a political commentary about the human rights reports titled “Israel IS an Apartheid State,” the Nexstar Media outlet killed the segment and axed Halper (FAIR.org, 10/7/22). That we could find even one critical piece in the wake of Jayapal’s comments in an establishment publication was surprising, given the strong taboo against criticism of Israel that cuts across outlets.

But it’s lamentable that when the controversy at hand is a politician calling Israel a “racist state,” most of US media can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that the human rights community has weighed in on this question in the affirmative.

Featured Image: MSNBC (7/18/23)

The post Covering ‘Racist State’ Backlash—but Not the Reality That Israel Is a Racist State appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 21, 2023

Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name

      CounterSpin230721.mp3

(Haymarket Books, 2023)

This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them. But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others. It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum.

      CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls.

      CounterSpin230721Banter.mp3

The post Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 19, 2023

CNN Town Halls Do Democracy No Favors

After its embarrassing town hall with Donald Trump, which helped precipitate the downfall of chair and CEO Chris Licht (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), CNN has doubled down on the format—at least for Republican candidates. Since Trump’s May 10 appearance, the network has featured GOP candidates Nikki Haley (6/4/23), Mike Pence (6/7/23) and Chris Christie (6/12/23), with more promised. Curiously, however, no offers to Democratic or third party candidates have been announced, which prompts the question: What purpose do these town halls serve?

In the case of the Trump town hall, CNN‘s decision appeared to be entirely self-serving. Having worked to move the network rightward, Licht had led CNN to “its historic nadir,” as described in the Atlantic (6/2/23), in terms of both ratings and newsroom morale. The Trump town hall was meant to be the “big win” that would turn those things around.

Of course, the plan backfired. Trump had a field day, spewing lies and trampling over and insulting host Kaitlan Collins to the wild cheers of the crowd. The entire affair read as a giant campaign rally sponsored by CNN, aided by the floor manager’s instructions to the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not. While immediate ratings spiked (Axios, 5/11/23) they then plunged even further (TV Insider, 5/16/23), as the network’s reputation immediately suffered and morale hit rock bottom. Licht was soon given the boot (FAIR.org, 6/8/23).

‘In the public’s interest’

CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (5/11/23) suggested that critics of the Trump town hall were upset because “maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office.”

But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper (5/11/23) would have you believe the network was actually putting democracy and the public interest first. He went on the air in a huff to accuse the network’s many critics of trying to stifle debate and refusing to face disagreeable realities. “Many of you felt CNN shouldn’t have given [Trump] any platform to speak,” he scolded. “Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”

Fellow anchor Jake Tapper agreed. Speaking on a New York magazine podcast (On With Kara Swisher, 7/10/23), Tapper argued that the town hall format for Trump was “in the public’s interest.”

Some outside of CNN stepped in to defend the outlet’s decision as well. The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd (5/13/23), for instance, wrote that “the task is to challenge Trump and expose him, not to put our fingers in our ears and sing ‘la, la, la.’” She approvingly quoted former Obama adviser David Axelrod:

It strikes me as fundamentally wrong to deny voters a chance to see candidates, and particularly front-running candidates, answering challenging questions from journalists and citizens in open forums…. You can’t save democracy from people who would shred its norms by shredding democratic norms yourselves.

But these specious arguments are easily dispensed with. What democratic norms require offering a serial liar a town hall stuffed full of supporters, in which the audience is instructed that applause is welcomed but booing is forbidden? In what way does that serve the public interest?

After four years of the Trump presidency and the democracy-shaking transition out of it, CNN would be hard-pressed to find a living soul who doesn’t know exactly who Trump and his supporters are and how they can be expected to behave. That the town hall was devoid of thoughtful policy discussions but replete with insults and falsehoods should have surprised no one. And despite her efforts, CNN‘s Collins had no chance of pinning down Trump in any useful way on any of his lies or contradictions in such a format.

Platform for falsehoods

CNN.com (6/4/23) assured readers that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley “correctly cited a variety of facts and figures”—as though this were a noteworthy thing for a politician to do.

But the problem goes beyond Trump. Trump’s challengers have all broken with the former president to some degree, though few will risk alienating his followers by forcefully denouncing his lies. Still, they represent a slightly more reality-based GOP than Trump, such that their town hall appearances might be expected to meet the extremely low bar of not being as filled with disinformation as Trump’s.

Yet CNN‘s own factchecks of its subsequent GOP town halls showed Haley, Pence and Christie were permitted numerous falsehoods without real-time challenge by their journalist hosts.

Haley, for instance, claimed that crime is at “all-time highs” (judged by CNN factcheckers—6/4/23— to be “not even close to true”), that Roe v. Wade made “abortion anytime, anywhere for any reason” the law of the land (“not true”), and that the US “is very good when it comes to emissions,” while the Chinese and Indians “are the problem” (seriously misleading, as the US is second to China in total current emissions, with India well in third place; the US has much higher total historical emissions, and much higher per capita emissions, than China or India).

Tapper, the host, did not push back against any of these claims.

Or take Pence’s town hall, in which he announced that inflation is “at a 40-year high” (nope—”the inflation rate has fallen for 10 straight months,” noted the CNN fact check—6/7/23), that the Trump/Pence family separations began “under Obama” and Trump and Pence simply “continued” it (“not true at all”), and that their administration “reduced CO₂ emissions beyond what the previous administration had committed to just through American innovation, through expanding American energy and natural gas.” (That one CNN didn’t factcheck, but it’s terribly false.)

Host Dana Bash did not challenge any of these statements, either.

Town halls for GOP only

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was given a town hall of his own by CNN (6/12/23), despite having the support of approximately 1 in every 40 likely Republican primary voters.

In contrast to its apparent policy of handing out GOP town halls like candy, CNN has announced no plans to give any Democratic candidates town halls. While Biden has the power of incumbency that the GOP field lacks, he does have at least two announced challengers: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Marianne Williamson. Meanwhile, Cornel West has declared a presidential run with the Green Party.

Kennedy and Williamson, with recent polling averages of 14.6% and 5.6% respectively among Democratic primary voters, have been polling higher than either Haley (3.5%) or Christie (2.3%). (Pence’s latest average is 6.0%.)

But Kennedy, whose campaign seems to be driven largely by right-wing funders and media as a spoiler (see FAIR.org, 6/29/23), is an outspoken conspiracy theorist on issues ranging from vaccines to the climate crisis to 5g networks. Williamson, a self-help author with mostly progressive politics, long encouraged doubts on vaccines and anti-depressants (Vox, 7/31/19), though she has since at least partially rejected those positions.

CNN‘s Tapper, despite his full-throated support for the CNN Trump town hall, has declared that he would not host a town hall with Kennedy because of his conspiracy theories. (Upstart NewsNation—6/28/23—did give Kennedy such an opportunity, the only network so far to do so.)

One of the worst possible ways

Biden may not traffic in conspiracy theories or attempt the level of dishonesty Trump revels in, but his claims regularly require factchecking as well. Virtually all politicians’ claims do—and our corporate media have never been up to the task (FAIR.org, 8/24/20). But live, single-candidate town halls before a strictly friendly audience are indisputably one of the worst possible ways for news outlets to help the public make an informed choice at the ballot box.

Holding a politician accountable to the facts across the universe of possible topics is a herculean task for a journalist in the best of circumstances, and impossible in a town hall format that’s set up more like a campaign rally than a serious journalistic forum. In 2020, Donald Trump’s strategy of overwhelming interlocutors with lies rendered even the debate format essentially useless (FAIR.org, 10/2/20)—and that was with an opponent and a respectful audience.

The public needs to understand the candidates they’ll be choosing from next year, which means news outlets must offer them a platform. But the kind of platform offered is crucial. In the Trump era, town halls simply don’t offer the tools necessary to hold politicians accountable, whether that politician is Trump or Kennedy, DeSantis or Biden.

Good journalism demands one-on-one encounters with the candidates, with incisive questions that speak to people’s actual needs and concerns, and real-time factchecking (or a taped format with factchecking provided prior to airing). If candidates can’t agree to a platform that can hold them accountable, they don’t deserve to have a media platform at all.

ACTION ALERT: Messages to CNN can be sent here (or via Twitter @CNN). 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: Donald Trump and Kaitlin Collins at a CNN town hall (5/10/23).

Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

The post CNN Town Halls Do Democracy No Favors appeared first on FAIR.

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

As Skies Turn Orange, Media Still Hesitate to Mention What’s Changing Climate

Grand Central Terminal under the haze of smoke from Canadian wildfires linked to human-caused climate change. (photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA)

Skies on the US’s East Coast turned an apocalyptic orange in early June, as wildfire smoke from Canada blew south. On Wednesday, June 7, New York City’s air quality ranked the worst in the world, with an Air Quality Index rating of more than 400 out of 500—deemed “hazardous” for any individual.

Scientists expect forest fires to increase with the advance of climate disruption—mainly driven by fossil fuel consumption. Hotter, dryer weather, an increase in the type of brush that fuels these fires, and more frequent lightning strikes all contribute to this outcome (NOAA, 8/8/22; UN, 2/23/22; PNAS, 11/1/21; International Journal of Wildland Fire, 8/10/09).

Short-term exposure to fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke can cause nose, throat and lung irritation, as well as worsening underlying conditions like asthma and heart disease. Over months or years, this exposure can increase chances of chronic bronchitis, as well as hospital admissions and deaths due to conditions like lung cancer and heart disease. In Delhi, India, which typically has the worst air quality in the world, pollution takes an average of nine years off residents’ life expectancy (Democracy Now!, 6/8/23).

With a sepia hue and the smell of a campfire engulfing the East Coast, the immediate effects of human-caused climate change seemed as concrete as they had ever been. But on US TV news, viewers were more likely to hear climate denial than reporting that made the essential connection between fossil fuel consumption and worsening wildfires—if they heard mention of climate change at all.

A minority mentioned climate

Searching the Nexis news database for transcripts from June 5–9 on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC, FAIR found 115 news segments that mentioned the forest fires and their effect on air quality. Of those 115 segments, only 44 (38%) mentioned climate change’s role.

(FAIR defined a “segment” as any portion of a news show that discussed the wildfire pollution. Brief top-of-show or pre-commercial mentions that previewed segments airing later in the show were counted as part of the segments they referred to. When shows included more than one segment covering wildfire pollution, each was counted separately.)

Outlets varied widely in attention to the wildfire pollution issue: The broadcast outlets ranged from 20 segments at CBS to 10 at ABC and three at NBC. Among cable outlets, CNN had 55 segments, Fox had 23 and MSNBC four. (Note: Nexis relies on outlets to submit content, and submission policies vary among outlets.)

At MSNBC, it was mentioned in three out of four segments (75%), and in two out of three segments (67%) on NBC. Climate change was mentioned in 48% of segments at Fox, 40% at ABC and CNN, and 10% at CBS.

Even when outlets mentioned climate change, the detail and usefulness of the information varied greatly.

Only seven wildfire pollution segments (6% of all 115 segments) named or even alluded to fossil fuels—by far the largest contributor to climate change—in a way that did not engage in climate denial. By disconnecting climate change causes and consequences, media outlets shield the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who aid and abet them from accountability, and avoid discussions about urgently needed action.

Passing mentions

Of the 44 segments that mentioned climate change in relation to wildfire pollution, 10 did so only in passing, with no detail as to how, exactly, climate change increases the risk, severity and duration of such fires.

For instance, CNN Tonight (6/6/23) referred to the air quality in New York City as a “climate crisis,” but went no further into discussing how the broader climate crisis is exacerbating events like these.

CNN’s Poppy Harlow (This Morning, 6/8/23) remarked on how “important it is that we focus on climate change and all that is happening,” but said nothing else to direct the audience’s focus in that direction.

ABC also had two passing mentions, as when World News Tonight (6/7/23) aired a soundbite from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre describing the smoke as “yet another alarming example of the ways in which the climate crisis is disturbing our lives and our communities.” Then the segment ended.

Though a passing mention is better than no mention at all, tossing in the term “climate change” does very little to help audiences understand how climate disruption exacerbates events like these, or to explain the human causes of the climate crisis. This silence deprives viewers of any conversation about potential climate solutions or mitigations, leaving them only with confusion and fear.

Climate denial

Fox‘s Jesse Watters (6/7/23) used the wildfire pollution as an opportunity to mock electric cars—and rival CNN.

Ten segments in the study period engaged in outright climate change denial, either mocking or attempting to debunk climate change with pseudo-science. These segments were less helpful than not mentioning climate change at all, actively discouraging people from taking action to ameliorate the climate catastrophe.

CNN aired an interview with Mike Pence (CNN Live Event, 6/7/23), who claimed climate change isn’t happening “as dramatically as the radical environmentalists like to present,” and that the solution is “expanding American energy and natural gas.” He faced no pushback for his scientifically illiterate response.

But Fox led in climate disinformation, with nine denialist segments. Jesse Watters (6/7/23) offered a typical example:

A liberal in Canada goes camping, starts a forest fire, smokes out America, and they tell us to pay Elon Musk. But, is manmade global warming causing Canadian forest fires? Why don’t you open a history book, and you’ll learn about New England’s Dark Day. It happened in 1780, long before the Industrial Revolution. Dark clouds stretched from Maine to New Jersey, blotting out the sun…. That dark cloud in 1780 was from Canadian wildfires, 240 years ago. Can’t blame that on climate change. Everybody was riding horses.

And you might be surprised to find out, over the last 100 years, there have been less wildfires, not more. The Wall Street Journal says in the early 1900s, about 4% of land worldwide burned every year. By 2021, that was down to 2.5%. So, instead of obsessing over climate change, they should take a look at forest management and making sure Canadian campers listen to Smokey the Bear.

The Wall Street Journal op-ed (10/27/21) Watters cited is by a climate denialist, and misleadingly only takes into account the metric of land burned, ignoring factors like the severity and frequency of more recent fires, and the likelihood of land burned trending back upward (WWF International, 2020). The World Resources Institute (8/17/22) found that forest fires burned nearly twice as much tree coverage globally in 2021 than it did in 2001.

Forest fire ‘hysteria’

Fox‘s Laura Ingraham (6/9/23) brought on former TV weather forecaster Anthony Watts to use the climate crisis to bash the left.

Blaming fires solely on poor forest management despite clear links to climate change was a common tactic at Fox (The Five, 6/7/23; see Media Matters, 6/9/23). Laura Ingraham (Ingraham Angle, 6/9/23) argued that because forest fires are “so normal that Canada’s government website has a page…devoted to educating the public about them,” that concern over these out-of-control fires is “hysteria.”

In reality, Canada is having its worst-ever wildfire season (Bloomberg, 6/7/23). In early June, more than 200 wildfires burned across Canada, accompanied in some areas by record heat. More than half were out of control (Washington Post, 6/3/23).

Earlier in the week (6/7/23), Ingraham’s guest, Steve Milloy of the conservative, climate-denying Energy and Environment Legal Institute, claimed that “there’s no health risk” from wildfire smoke (not true), and that there are no public health emergencies in countries like India and China due to their low air quality. (Also a lie—air pollution was responsible for nearly 18% of deaths in India in 2019, and causes an estimated 2 million deaths in China per year.) He argued that wildfire smoke is “natural” and “not because of climate change.”

Fox also applied its typical red-scare tactics, saying climate concern is “about socialism” (Hannity, 6/7/23), and that “the climate crazies are trying to use a Canadian forest fire as yet another excuse to take your freedom, take your power and take your money” (Ingraham Angle, 6/7/23).

Meanwhile, Fox misled viewers that mainstream media coverage of the fires was rife with discussions about the climate crisis. On The Five (6/7/23), Greg Gutfeld complained: “So, already, the media is blaming climate change. ABC is connecting it to climate change. USA Today asked if the fires were actually caused by climate change.”

If only centrist corporate outlets were as committed to offering climate crisis context as Fox is to promoting climate change denial.

Explanatory mentions

CNN climate correspondent Bill Weir (6/7/23) offered perhaps the most thorough explanation of how the climate crisis worsens wildfires.

Twelve other segments that mentioned climate change offered slightly better than a passing mention, explaining things like how a warmer and drier climate exacerbates these fires, or how events like these will worsen as the climate crisis continues. But these segments did not allude to the reality that climate change is caused by people.

Some of these segments included the sparest of explanations, as when ABC’s Rob Marciano (World News Tonight, 6/7/23) briefly mentioned “climate change with the extra warmth” amplifying the fires, and potentially contributing to weather systems that kept the smoke hanging over the northeastern US.

Three mentions (The Lead, 6/8/23; Situation Room, 6/8/23; CNN Newsroom, 6/9/23) were of the same brief soundbite, from Daniel Westervelt, anti-pollution adviser to the US State Department, warning, “With increasing climate change and increasing warming, we can expect more and more of these kind of wildfires to continue.”

CNN climate correspondent Bill Weir (Erin Burnett Outfront, 6/7/23) offered perhaps the most thorough explanation of how the climate crisis worsens wildfires, demonstrating the connection to the melting ice in the Arctic:

The Arctic, the northern top of the planet, has been warming up four times faster than the rest of the planet. When I do those reports, I can almost hear the viewers’ eyes glazing over. Like, what do I care about what happens in the Arctic?

This is directly related to that. There was a heat anomaly in May over Canada, looked like a giant red blob of paint where they had temperatures in the high 90s, way sooner than is normal, that dries things out, one lightning strike sets that off like a tinderbox. And that’s why there’s over 100 fires burning in central Quebec.

And then the weather patterns connect us. Now, we’re breathing the results of a climate in crisis.

Weir went on to briefly mention the “cost of doing nothing”; however, he was referring entirely to the economic impact of people not being able to leave their homes on poor air quality days. While he thoroughly explained the connection between a warming planet and devastating wildfires, he did not elaborate on the human causes—nor the human solutions—to the climate crisis.

Human-caused—but how?

MSNBC‘s All In (6/7/23) acknowledged that humans were changing the climate—but didn’t say how.

Five of the 44 segments that mentioned climate change did point to human responsibility for climate change, either directly or by mentioning the need to reduce emissions. But these segments did not reference fossil fuels, which are the main way humans are changing the climate and the major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Thus Fox (Special Report, 6/7/23) aired a soundbite of New York City Mayor Eric Adams saying, “We must continue to draw down emissions,” without remarking on Adams’ comment.

On CNN Newsroom (6/9/23), climate scientist Zeke Hausefather said briefly, “I hope it will serve as a wake-up call that we need to cut emissions and reduce the impacts of this going forward.”

Other segments that described or alluded to the climate crisis as human-caused without mentioning fossil fuels included CNN‘s Lead (6/7/23), MSNBC‘s All In (6/7/23) and CNN This Morning (6/8/23).

The fossil fuel distinction is important, especially because the industry has spent billions to confuse the public on its environmental impact. In the early 2000s, a PR firm for BP coined the term “carbon footprint,” diverting the blame of the climate crisis onto individual citizens and away from these greedy corporations. We can sip our iced coffee out of paper straws all we want, but unless the world’s economies immediately and drastically cut fossil fuels, the planet is headed to far exceed the 1.5°C rise scientists have warned about (Amnesty International, 3/20/23).

Acknowledging ‘Addiction to oil’

Joy Reid (MSNBC, 6/7/23) put the blame squarely on the world’s “unrelenting dependence on oil.”

All of the segments that took the crucial next step of connecting the wildfires to fossil fuel emissions—seven in all—appeared on cable news networks.

On MSNBC’s The Reidout (6/7/23), host Joy Reid called out the world’s “unrelenting dependence on oil,” warning that

we will suffer the consequences, as the planet we live on and that our children and grandchildren will inherit becomes even more dangerous to live in.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben appeared on CNN Newsroom (6/8/23) to link the poor quality of New York’s air to the dire situations facing people across the world as a result of fossil fuel–driven pollution:

It’s terrible in New York right now, and we shouldn’t make light of it. But it’s precisely how most people across much of the world live every single day. That’s why nine million people a year—one death in five on this planet—comes from the effects of breathing fossil fuel combustion.

Beyond fear-mongering, McKibbon offered a solution:

The good news is we have an easy fix. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. We should be in an all-out effort to move to renewable energy and to save energy so we don’t have to use as much of it.

In another segment that day, CNN Newsroom (6/8/23) discussed the American Lung Association’s report that stated 90,000 lives would be saved if the US could electrify its vehicle fleet by 2050. “That doesn’t account for the prevalence of wildfire smoke now more common on a planet heated up by fossil fuels,” CNN chief climate correspondent Weir reported.

This data was mentioned in two other CNN segments (Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, 6/7/23; CNN Newsroom, 6/8/23).

Elsewhere, Weir (This Morning, 6/8/23) attributed India’s poor air quality to coal burning, unchecked motor regulations and the burning of agricultural fields.

And on his MSNBC show (Alex Wagner Tonight, 6/7/23), Alex Wagner called out Republican efforts to defend a household source of fossil fuel emissions even as the wildfires demonstrated the dire effects of unchecked climate disruption:

House Republicans had an agenda item on the topic of air quality, but it had nothing to do with combating climate change. They were taking a vote on protecting gas stoves.

Solutions-based journalism

Author and activist Genevieve Guenther (Democracy Now!, 6/30/23) told journalists, “You need to connect the dots from what you’re reporting to the climate crisis, and then through the climate crisis to the use of fossil fuels that is heating up our planet.”

When the best mainstream TV news outlets have to offer during an environmental and public health crisis is seven mentions of the key cause that needs to be urgently addressed, there’s little for the public to gain.

In a recent segment on Democracy Now! (6/30/23), Genevieve Guenther, author and director of End Climate Silence, emphasized the importance of these connections, advocating for all reporters to be educated on the climate crisis, regardless of the beat they cover. “You need to connect the dots from what you’re reporting to the climate crisis, and then through the climate crisis to the use of fossil fuels that is heating up our planet,” she said.

It is necessary to go beyond cursory headlines to name what is responsible, not to further fear and complicity, but because doing so allows us to offer solutions. We live in a time where, despite Big Oil’s tireless efforts to confuse the public, renewable energy is cheaper—and by many measures, more efficient—than fossil fuels (ASAP Science, 9/9/20).

A 2022 study shows that news framing that centers credible responses to climate problems were associated with confidence in one’s ability to make changes and more support for collective action (Environmental Communication, 11/11/22). If apocalyptic air enveloping major news headquarters hundreds of miles away from record-setting fires doesn’t prompt these necessary conversations, what will?

Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton and Brandon Warner

The post As Skies Turn Orange, Media Still Hesitate to Mention What’s Changing Climate appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
July 14, 2023

FTC Chair’s Efforts to Curb Corporate Power ‘Raise Questions’—From Corporate America

The New York Times (7/11/23) says a loss in court for the Federal Trade Commission “raises fresh questions” about Chair Lina Khan’s strategy to rein in monopolies. But it doesn’t make clear those questions are coming from the monopolies she wants to rein in.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lost a key antitrust case on July 11 after a federal judge rejected the agency’s move to halt Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of video game holding company Activision Blizzard.

FTC Chair Lina Khan has argued that, win or lose, the mere act of taking tech behemoths to court would be a partial victory by signaling the pressing need to update antitrust laws for today’s digital economy (New York Times, 12/7/22). But the Times‘ Cecilia Kang (7/11/23) wrote that the latest rulings “raise questions” about Khan’s strategy, with “critics…speaking out more loudly.” As to which critics are raising these questions, the Times buries the lead.

The three critical voices, representing a “tide of criticism,” as the Times described it, represent industry and the right. Adam Kovacevich, chief executive of Chamber of Progress (identified as “a tech trade group”), is quoted, “All these court losses are making their threats look more like a paper tiger.” Chamber of Progress lists among its “partners” companies like Amazon, Google and Meta, each of which have been sued by the FTC on several occasions for monopolistic business practices. The group has been outspoken against government antitrust efforts.

Ashley Baker of the Committee for Justice, identified by the Times as “a conservative think tank,” added that the FTC has “crossed the line to being reckless with the cases they are bringing.” Baker is more relevantly identified as the founder of the Alliance on Antitrust, described by Washington Monthly (5/25/21) as “an organization dedicated to pushing a pro-monopoly line on Republicans.” The Alliance’s member organizations, the Monthly reported, “receive financial support from Big Tech,” as well as “from monopolistic corporations in other sectors such as oil and gas, Big Ag, telecom, banking and pharmaceuticals.”

And Anthony Sabino said, “She’s trying to change a century’s worth of antitrust law overnight, and that’s not necessarily wise.” He’s identified as “a professor of business and law at St. John’s University”—but he’s also a corporate lawyer with a specialty in antitrust law. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t think strengthening antitrust regulation is “necessarily wise.”

The Times made minimal effort to point out the monetary incentives or ideological biases of the people it quoted who supposedly represent growing criticism of the FTC.

Of the four experts quoted in this piece, only one of them is not immediately critical of Khan: Eleanor Fox, a professor emeritus at New York University’s law school, who is inserted at the very end of piece, saying that the FTC chair “is only an outlier in the US, not globally.”

Indeed, other developed countries and blocs are taking a more active role in litigating the US’s Big Tech firms over antitrust concerns. Last month, the European Union charged Google with violating the bloc’s antitrust laws (New York Times, 6/14/23).

‘Disregard for ethics’

Bloomberg (6/16/23) didn’t note that the ethics advice Khan rejected was coming from an official who owned tens of thousands worth of Meta stock.

Framing the current FTC leadership as extremist is important because, as the Times noted, Khan had to appear July 13 at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. The Republican-led panel, according to its own website, was to investigate “examine mismanagement of the FTC and its disregard for ethics and congressional oversight under Chair Lina Khan.”

That supposed “disregard for ethics” has nothing to do with any monetary conflict, which has plagued the FTC for generations and soured the agency’s reputation (The Hill, 12/6/18; Vice, 5/23/19). Instead, according to internal documents from ethics officials obtained by Bloomberg (6/16/23) last month, Lorielle Pankey, FTC’s designated ethics official, had recommended Khan recuse herself from the agency’s 2022 review of Meta. Khan, Pankey noted, had made comments in the past calling on the FTC “to block any future acquisition by Facebook”—though Pankey acknowledged that Khan’s decision not to recuse “is not per se a federal ethics violation” (CNBC, 6/16/23).

To put it simply, this ethics official thought the optics of Khan handling Meta’s case were bad because, as a public figure, she has said that antitrust laws should apply to Big Tech —a position that most Americans have agreed with for quite some time (Vox, 1/26/21). Nonetheless, the “issue” has been seized on by the establishment corporate media, pro-corporate Republicans and companies, like Meta (Reuters, 2/2/23) and Amazon (New York Times, 6/30/21), that feel that Khan’s public statements that the law should apply to them constitute some kind of inherent bias.

Bloomberg (6/16/23) quoted Republican former FTC Chair William Kovacic decrying Khan’s rejection of Pankey’s advice as “playing with fire.” The Wall Street Journal (6/18/23) published yet another editorial criticizing Khan—part of a pattern that has seen an attack on Khan in the Journal an average of once every 11 days over the past two years (FAIR.org, 6/23/23). And the right-wing Washington Examiner (6/28/23) explicitly called for a congressional inquiry into the FTC ethics concerns—a call to action that was quickly heeded.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal (6/30/23) noted that Pankey’s financial disclosures show that she holds between $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock—a not-insignificant stake in a company under her purview. But it’s the official who committed the ethical breach of promising to break up Big Tech monopolies who faced congressional grilling—because in Washington, as in corporate media, standing up to corporate power is the real scandal.

The post FTC Chair’s Efforts to Curb Corporate Power ‘Raise Questions’—From Corporate America appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 14, 2023

Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation

      CounterSpin230714.mp3

Good Jobs First (7/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report.

      CounterSpin230714Martinez.mp3

Free Press

Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs.

      CounterSpin230714Najera-Uresti.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs.

The post Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation appeared first on FAIR.

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

Media Push Doom and Gloom in Face of Historic Progressive Recovery
“Recession” and “inflation” have dominated headlines (Reuters, 12/7/22); “recovery,” “jobs,” not so much.

By a wide range of metrics, the US is in the midst of a historic economic rebound. In January of this year, the unemployment rate hit a 53-year low of 3.4%. Two months later, prime-age (25–54) employment surpassed its pre-recession peak, putting to shame the sluggish job growth that followed the Great Recession of 2007–09, when it took a full 12 years for prime-age employment to return to its pre-recession level.

Low-wage workers, meanwhile, have seen major gains, far outpacing their real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth during previous business cycles.

The blight on this recovery has been a surge in inflation, though that hit its high point in the summer of 2022, and inflation has been falling ever since. As international data highlight, this problem has been globally shared, not US-specific.

And even here, the US has not fared too poorly. Despite having at first higher inflation than other rich countries, the US now has the lowest inflation of any G7 country. All the while, its recovery, as measured by real GDP, has been the strongest.

While the United States remains a deeply unequal country with relatively high levels of poverty, , looking at key indicators valued by the media points to a remarkably strong recovery in the face of significant headwinds. As the progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/10/23) recently put it:

Everyone knows damn well that if Donald Trump was in the White House and we had the same economic situation, he would be boasting about the greatest economy ever all the time. Every Republican politician in the country would be touting the greatest economy ever. And all the political reporters would be writing stories about how the strong economy will make it difficult for the Democrats to beat Trump in the next election.

What recovery?

“It’s a total mystery,” snarks Mark Copelovitch (Twitter, 6/7/03), on “why does everyone think the economy is so terrible.”

If you were a casual consumer of the news over the last couple years, you may not have heard much about these success stories. You may, in fact, think that everything has suddenly gone wrong all at once.

And it would be hard to blame you. In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative.

News articles, for instance, have focused overwhelmingly on inflation. Mark Copelovitch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been tracking this trend for the last couple years. His most recent update, which he posted in early June, shows that, since the start of 2022, the word “inflation” has appeared in the headline or subheading of more than 17 times as many articles as the words “unemployment” and “jobs” (both of which are metrics associated with the strong recovery) combined.

Also notable: Over the same time period, the word “recession” has shown up in the headline or subheading of ten times as many articles as has the word “recovery.” Strange, considering there was no recession in 2022, and there has been no recession this year so far. Instead, the recovery has chugged along nicely.

On television, the story has been much the same. According to data from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, “inflation” (which has been unusually high during this period) has garnered more than six times as much attention as “unemployment” (which has been unusually low) across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

Over the same period, “recession” and “recovery” have been mentioned roughly the same amount on these channels, a more balanced outcome than in the case of news articles, but still promoting a misleadingly dreary picture of the economy. Strikingly, recession was discussed far more in 2022 than in 2020—almost three times as much. The difference? In 2020, there actually was a recession. In 2022, there was none.

If we look more broadly at the television coverage of positive aspects of the economy versus negative ones, we see that the negative has taken priority. Back in 2021, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress found that, over a one-month period,

the terms “inflation” and “prices” garnered 50% more screen time on CNN and MSNBC than mentions of these terms: “unemployment,” “employment,” “wages,” “jobs,” “jobless,” “consumer spending,” “GDP,” “income,” “stock market,” “wage growth,” “job growth” and “economic growth” combined.

Using this same framework, if we look at the Biden presidency so far, we see that “inflation” and “prices,” which point to troubles, have continued to draw more attention than the rest of the terms, which point to the strong recovery. Across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, “inflation” and “prices” have gotten 32% more screen time than the other terms combined over this period.

Economic disinformation

Unsurprisingly, this negative coverage has been driven primarily by right-wing media. Of the three outlets considered, Fox had by far the most disproportionate focus on inflation. MSNBC was the only one with more coverage of the positive parts of the recovery than inflation. It’s worth noting, though, that CNN and MSNBC together still had more coverage of inflation than the recovery over the full period, so this negativity isn’t solely a right-wing phenomenon.

Nevertheless, if we hone in on specific terms, right-wing media continue to lead the pack in economy-bashing. For instance, on Fox, “inflation” has gotten nine times as many mentions as “unemployment” during Biden’s presidency. On CNN, the ratio is more like six-to-one. And on MSNBC, it’s four-to-one. During this period, Fox‘s inflation panic has reached the level of absurdity, with the outlet in one case emblazoning “Empty Shelves Joe” over an old photo taken in a Japanese supermarket after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Fox has been a leader in recession hype as well. Its coverage has included such headlines as:
- “Fox & Friends Hosts on Biden Admin Denying US Is in Recession” (7/29/22)
- “White House Denying Recession Is a ‘Reach’: Kudlow” (7/29/22)
- “Biden Adviser Deflects From Economic Recession” (7/28/22)
- “US Economy Reports Second Quarter of Negative GDP, Signals Official Recession” (7/28/22)
These headlines are economic disinformation. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which determines when recessions have officially occurred, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” Notice that this is not the definition Fox offered: two quarters of negative GDP growth.

The NBER did not end up declaring a recession in 2022, despite real (inflation-adjusted) GDP shrinking at a 1.6% rate in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second, because other economic indicators at the same time were pointing to continued expansion: Consumer spending was strong and employment was booming. GDP growth for the entire year ended up being a 21st century–normal 2.1%. But, you know, Fox is never one to let the facts get in the way of their feelings.

Quacking like a recession

CNN (7/26/22) turned to Larry Summers for an economic prognosis–who earlier this year was saying it would take a year of 10% unemployment to quickly contain inflation.

The hysteria has not all been Fox-driven, of course. CNN has often been more than happy to join the doom-and-gloom brigade. In July of 2022, for instance, it ran a piece (7/26/22) headlined “If It Looks Like a Recession and Quacks Like a Recession…” that opened:

Is the United States heading for a recession? Or is the economy already in one? It —almost—doesn’t matter.

For many Americans, it already feels like a recession.

Recession, no recession? I don’t know. But the vibes, they’re way off, man.

CNN’s television content from around the same time was no better. News banners from the last week of July included:
- “Biden Dismisses Recession Fears as Inflation Plagues Americans” (7/28/22)
- “Consumer Confidence Slumps Amid Inflation Sting, Recession Fears” (7/26/22)
- “Biden Downplays Recession Fears Ahead of Key Economic Report” (7/25/22)
The last of these flew under a graphic showing 64% of Americans believed that the US economy was in a recession. It wasn’t–but where could they have gotten the idea that it was?

One segment from the same week (7/25/22) featured an image of dollar bills with a red line trending downwards, and the words “Critical Week” underneath. In the segment, an anchor warned that

two negative quarters in a row [of GDP growth] could be viewed as a sign of a recession. And on Friday, new numbers on the country’s historically high inflation will be released.

Armageddon!

On inflation, CNN somewhat infamously ran a segment on rising milk prices that included the line: “A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it’s $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that’s a lot of money.”

As Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 11/24/21) commented at the time, leaving aside the absurdity of focusing on a family of milk-hoarders rather than a typical family:

Where did [CNN] find milk prices going up by 80 cents a gallon, or slightly over 40%? The Consumer Price Index shows that milk prices are up 4.0% year over year. There are differences for types of milk and by region, but it’s hard to imagine that there is anywhere in the country where milk prices have risen by 40% over the last year.

Contextualizing inflation

Caution: Questioning the inflation narrative can get you attacked by right wing media (Fox News, 12/4/22).

MSNBC has been the outlier among these major outlets, with a much more balanced approach to discussing the economy. The outlet has run segments contextualizing the inflation situation and criticizing the over-reaction of some to more quickly rising prices.

For instance, in late 2021, Chris Hayes (11/11/21) brought on progressive journalist Ryan Cooper to discuss “the American obsession with the price of gas,” as the banner put it. Another host, Ali Velshi (10/22/22), has emphasized that inflation is a global problem, not one caused primarily by US policies. And anchor Joy Reid (Mediaite, 11/3/22) has sharply criticized Republican fearmongering over inflation, sparking widespread backlash from right-wing media (Fox, 12/4/22, 12/4/22; Daily Mail, 12/4/22; Washington Examiner, 12/4/22).

This is not to say that MSNBC has not engaged in any sort of over-the-top fretting about inflation. Its coverage (11/13/21) of food prices in the run up to Thanksgiving in 2021, for one, put inflation fears front and center:

This year items on your Thanksgiving dinner table are going to be more expensive due to inflation. Experts say that it is at its highest level in over 30 years. But it’s not just food. The cost of your energy bill is on the rise, too. In fact, over the past year, natural gas has increased 130%. Oil, that’s up 59%. And a gallon of gas, that’s risen nearly 54%.

But even in this case, the host then brought on Rep. Ro Khanna to discuss progressive responses to inflation, including investing in a green transition to protect people from the volatility of gas prices, and increasing government support for the working class.

The doom-and-gloom approach to economic news, then, has had exceptions. But the overall skew, across news articles and television coverage, has clearly been negative. Even a more liberal outlet like MSNBC has been highly focused on the negative economic indicators: It has given “inflation” four times as much screen time as “unemployment” during Biden’s presidency; it also featured “recession” 26% more often in the non-recession year of 2022 than in the recession year of 2020. Though MSNBC may give more context about the full picture, woes remain in the foreground.

The negativity effect

This negativity bias has clearly had an effect on how people feel about the economy. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco have reported a spike in the percentage of people who report hearing news about inflation, and a concomitant spike in the negativity of that news. According to their analysis, this news has in turn played a significant role in heightening fears of higher inflation continuing for longer.

Meanwhile, with all the worrying over a recession in the media, Google searches for the term “recession” skyrocketed in 2022, over and above how much they rose during 2020, when there was an actual recession.

In this environment, any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings. In the wake of the Covid recession, in May 2020, Trump’s disapproval on this measure hit 51%. Biden’s most recent rating is a full 16 points worse, at 67% disapproval. This despite a much stronger economy than in May of 2020—the unemployment rate, for one, is nearly 10 percentage points lower now.

If we want to understand how progressive policy is undermined by a media owned by the wealthy, the experience of the last several years offers a case study. In the wake of robust government intervention in 2020 and 2021 that cut inequality and boosted incomes, especially for those at the bottom, inflation-mania has taken over in the media.

Inflation is being covered more than it was previously, which is eminently reasonable. But inflation and recession fears have also completely overshadowed coverage of a historically strong recovery, which is not so reasonable. To the average news consumer, the natural conclusion is likely: This recovery doesn’t seem to be going so well. And the takeaway regarding the massive government stimulus that propelled the recovery? Maybe we shouldn’t do that again.

FEATURED IMAGE: Fox News headline (7/29/22): “America in Recession.” (No, it wasn’t, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.)

The post Media Push Doom and Gloom in Face of Historic Progressive Recovery appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 13, 2023

Media Push Doom and Gloom in Face of Historic Progressive Recovery
“Recession” and “inflation” have dominated headlines (Reuters, 12/7/22); “recovery,” “jobs,” not so much.

By a wide range of metrics, the US is in the midst of a historic economic rebound. In January of this year, the unemployment rate hit a 53-year low of 3.4%. Two months later, prime-age (25–54) employment surpassed its pre-recession peak, putting to shame the sluggish job growth that followed the Great Recession of 2007–09, when it took a full 12 years for prime-age employment to return to its pre-recession level.

Low-wage workers, meanwhile, have seen major gains, far outpacing their real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth during previous business cycles.

The blight on this recovery has been a surge in inflation, though that hit its high point in the summer of 2022, and inflation has been falling ever since. As international data highlight, this problem has been globally shared, not US-specific.

And even here, the US has not fared too poorly. Despite having at first higher inflation than other rich countries, the US now has the lowest inflation of any G7 country. All the while, its recovery, as measured by real GDP, has been the strongest.

While the United States remains a deeply unequal country with relatively high levels of poverty, , looking at key indicators valued by the media points to a remarkably strong recovery in the face of significant headwinds. As the progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/10/23) recently put it:

Everyone knows damn well that if Donald Trump was in the White House and we had the same economic situation, he would be boasting about the greatest economy ever all the time. Every Republican politician in the country would be touting the greatest economy ever. And all the political reporters would be writing stories about how the strong economy will make it difficult for the Democrats to beat Trump in the next election.

What recovery?

“It’s a total mystery,” snarks Mark Copelovitch (Twitter, 6/7/03), on “why does everyone think the economy is so terrible.”

If you were a casual consumer of the news over the last couple years, you may not have heard much about these success stories. You may, in fact, think that everything has suddenly gone wrong all at once.

And it would be hard to blame you. In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative.

News articles, for instance, have focused overwhelmingly on inflation. Mark Copelovitch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been tracking this trend for the last couple years. His most recent update, which he posted in early June, shows that, since the start of 2022, the word “inflation” has appeared in the headline or subheading of more than 17 times as many articles as the words “unemployment” and “jobs” (both of which are metrics associated with the strong recovery) combined.

Also notable: Over the same time period, the word “recession” has shown up in the headline or subheading of ten times as many articles as has the word “recovery.” Strange, considering there was no recession in 2022, and there has been no recession this year so far. Instead, the recovery has chugged along nicely.

On television, the story has been much the same. According to data from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, “inflation” (which has been unusually high during this period) has garnered more than six times as much attention as “unemployment” (which has been unusually low) across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

Over the same period, “recession” and “recovery” have been mentioned roughly the same amount on these channels, a more balanced outcome than in the case of news articles, but still promoting a misleadingly dreary picture of the economy. Strikingly, recession was discussed far more in 2022 than in 2020—almost three times as much. The difference? In 2020, there actually was a recession. In 2022, there was none.

If we look more broadly at the television coverage of positive aspects of the economy versus negative ones, we see that the negative has taken priority. Back in 2021, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress found that, over a one-month period,

the terms “inflation” and “prices” garnered 50% more screen time on CNN and MSNBC than mentions of these terms: “unemployment,” “employment,” “wages,” “jobs,” “jobless,” “consumer spending,” “GDP,” “income,” “stock market,” “wage growth,” “job growth” and “economic growth” combined.

Using this same framework, if we look at the Biden presidency so far, we see that “inflation” and “prices,” which point to troubles, have continued to draw more attention than the rest of the terms, which point to the strong recovery. Across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, “inflation” and “prices” have gotten 32% more screen time than the other terms combined over this period.

Economic disinformation

Unsurprisingly, this negative coverage has been driven primarily by right-wing media. Of the three outlets considered, Fox had by far the most disproportionate focus on inflation. MSNBC was the only one with more coverage of the positive parts of the recovery than inflation. It’s worth noting, though, that CNN and MSNBC together still had more coverage of inflation than the recovery over the full period, so this negativity isn’t solely a right-wing phenomenon.

Nevertheless, if we hone in on specific terms, right-wing media continue to lead the pack in economy-bashing. For instance, on Fox, “inflation” has gotten nine times as many mentions as “unemployment” during Biden’s presidency. On CNN, the ratio is more like six-to-one. And on MSNBC, it’s four-to-one. During this period, Fox‘s inflation panic has reached the level of absurdity, with the outlet in one case emblazoning “Empty Shelves Joe” over an old photo taken in a Japanese supermarket after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Fox has been a leader in recession hype as well. Its coverage has included such headlines as:
- “Fox & Friends Hosts on Biden Admin Denying US Is in Recession” (7/29/22)
- “White House Denying Recession Is a ‘Reach’: Kudlow” (7/29/22)
- “Biden Adviser Deflects From Economic Recession” (7/28/22)
- “US Economy Reports Second Quarter of Negative GDP, Signals Official Recession” (7/28/22)
These headlines are economic disinformation. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which determines when recessions have officially occurred, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” Notice that this is not the definition Fox offered: two quarters of negative GDP growth.

The NBER did not end up declaring a recession in 2022, despite real (inflation-adjusted) GDP shrinking at a 1.6% rate in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second, because other economic indicators at the same time were pointing to continued expansion: Consumer spending was strong and employment was booming. GDP growth for the entire year ended up being a 21st century–normal 2.1%. But, you know, Fox is never one to let the facts get in the way of their feelings.

Quacking like a recession

CNN (7/26/22) turned to Larry Summers for an economic prognosis–who earlier this year was saying it would take a year of 10% unemployment to quickly contain inflation.

The hysteria has not all been Fox-driven, of course. CNN has often been more than happy to join the doom-and-gloom brigade. In July of 2022, for instance, it ran a piece (7/26/22) headlined “If It Looks Like a Recession and Quacks Like a Recession…” that opened:

Is the United States heading for a recession? Or is the economy already in one? It —almost—doesn’t matter.

For many Americans, it already feels like a recession.

Recession, no recession? I don’t know. But the vibes, they’re way off, man.

CNN’s television content from around the same time was no better. News banners from the last week of July included:
- “Biden Dismisses Recession Fears as Inflation Plagues Americans” (7/28/22)
- “Consumer Confidence Slumps Amid Inflation Sting, Recession Fears” (7/26/22)
- “Biden Downplays Recession Fears Ahead of Key Economic Report” (7/25/22)
The last of these flew under a graphic showing 64% of Americans believed that the US economy was in a recession. It wasn’t–but where could they have gotten the idea that it was?

One segment from the same week (7/25/22) featured an image of dollar bills with a red line trending downwards, and the words “Critical Week” underneath. In the segment, an anchor warned that

two negative quarters in a row [of GDP growth] could be viewed as a sign of a recession. And on Friday, new numbers on the country’s historically high inflation will be released.

Armageddon!

On inflation, CNN somewhat infamously ran a segment on rising milk prices that included the line: “A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it’s $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that’s a lot of money.”

As Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 11/24/21) commented at the time, leaving aside the absurdity of focusing on a family of milk-hoarders rather than a typical family:

Where did [CNN] find milk prices going up by 80 cents a gallon, or slightly over 40%? The Consumer Price Index shows that milk prices are up 4.0% year over year. There are differences for types of milk and by region, but it’s hard to imagine that there is anywhere in the country where milk prices have risen by 40% over the last year.

Contextualizing inflation

Caution: Questioning the inflation narrative can get you attacked by right wing media (Fox News, 12/4/22).

MSNBC has been the outlier among these major outlets, with a much more balanced approach to discussing the economy. The outlet has run segments contextualizing the inflation situation and criticizing the over-reaction of some to more quickly rising prices.

For instance, in late 2021, Chris Hayes (11/11/21) brought on progressive journalist Ryan Cooper to discuss “the American obsession with the price of gas,” as the banner put it. Another host, Ali Velshi (10/22/22), has emphasized that inflation is a global problem, not one caused primarily by US policies. And anchor Joy Reid (Mediaite, 11/3/22) has sharply criticized Republican fearmongering over inflation, sparking widespread backlash from right-wing media (Fox, 12/4/22, 12/4/22; Daily Mail, 12/4/22; Washington Examiner, 12/4/22).

This is not to say that MSNBC has not engaged in any sort of over-the-top fretting about inflation. Its coverage (11/13/21) of food prices in the run up to Thanksgiving in 2021, for one, put inflation fears front and center:

This year items on your Thanksgiving dinner table are going to be more expensive due to inflation. Experts say that it is at its highest level in over 30 years. But it’s not just food. The cost of your energy bill is on the rise, too. In fact, over the past year, natural gas has increased 130%. Oil, that’s up 59%. And a gallon of gas, that’s risen nearly 54%.

But even in this case, the host then brought on Rep. Ro Khanna to discuss progressive responses to inflation, including investing in a green transition to protect people from the volatility of gas prices, and increasing government support for the working class.

The doom-and-gloom approach to economic news, then, has had exceptions. But the overall skew, across news articles and television coverage, has clearly been negative. Even a more liberal outlet like MSNBC has been highly focused on the negative economic indicators: It has given “inflation” four times as much screen time as “unemployment” during Biden’s presidency; it also featured “recession” 26% more often in the non-recession year of 2022 than in the recession year of 2020. Though MSNBC may give more context about the full picture, woes remain in the foreground.

The negativity effect

This negativity bias has clearly had an effect on how people feel about the economy. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco have reported a spike in the percentage of people who report hearing news about inflation, and a concomitant spike in the negativity of that news. According to their analysis, this news has in turn played a significant role in heightening fears of higher inflation continuing for longer.

Meanwhile, with all the worrying over a recession in the media, Google searches for the term “recession” skyrocketed in 2022, over and above how much they rose during 2020, when there was an actual recession.

In this environment, any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings. In the wake of the Covid recession, in May 2020, Trump’s disapproval on this measure hit 51%. Biden’s most recent rating is a full 16 points worse, at 67% disapproval. This despite a much stronger economy than in May of 2020—the unemployment rate, for one, is nearly 10 percentage points lower now.

If we want to understand how progressive policy is undermined by a media owned by the wealthy, the experience of the last several years offers a case study. In the wake of robust government intervention in 2020 and 2021 that cut inequality and boosted incomes, especially for those at the bottom, inflation-mania has taken over in the media.

Inflation is being covered more than it was previously, which is eminently reasonable. But inflation and recession fears have also completely overshadowed coverage of a historically strong recovery, which is not so reasonable. To the average news consumer, the natural conclusion is likely: This recovery doesn’t seem to be going so well. And the takeaway regarding the massive government stimulus that propelled the recovery? Maybe we shouldn’t do that again.

FEATURED IMAGE: Fox News headline (7/29/22): “America in Recession.” (No, it wasn’t, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.)

The post Media Push Doom and Gloom in Face of Historic Progressive Recovery appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 12, 2023

‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’ – CounterSpin interviews on climate resistance

The July 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin included portions of two archival interviews Janine Jackson conducted on resisting climate disrupters. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230707KaufmanBozuwa.mp3

HuffPost (3/4/21)

Janine Jackson: We think of pipelines and coal mines as arenas of the fight over climate policy, but another battlefield, rarely in the spotlight, is buildings. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the US, and about the same proportion of greenhouse gasses produced.

There’s an obvious social gain in adapting buildings to climate realities, making them not just energy efficient, but future-proofed against predictable weather events.

Many cities were working on building codes to reflect that need, until industry groups said, “Not so fast.”

CounterSpin heard about this largely under-the-radar story in March 2021 from Alexander Kaufman, senior reporter at HuffPost and co-founder of the nonprofit environmental news collaborative Floodlight.

After explaining that the International Code Council, or ICC, is a not-especially international consortium of industry and government groups that sets baseline model codes for different buildings, Kaufman moved on to what was going on in cities like Minneapolis.

Alexander Kaufman: “Once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back.”

Alexander Kaufman: Every three years, there is a vote on what is known as a “model energy code,” the International Energy Conservation Code. And this is a broad set of requirements and mandates around how thick insulation needs to be in certain zones, and what kind of windows are best to preserve energy within the building. And every year, there was a relatively low turnout of government voters who would have the final say on what made it into that model code. It was a pretty wonky topic; few governments were fully aware of their ability to participate.

And what happened is that in 2018, two things converged: Both there was this growing frustration with the fact that the last two rounds of codes had made really meager improvements on energy efficiency overall, about 1% each time, and there was the UN’s IPCC report, which really laid bare just how little time was left to dramatically slash planet-heating emissions and keep climate change within a relatively safe range.

And, as a result, you had groups like the US Conference of Mayors, and other campaign organizations that try to push a lot of sustainability policies through cities, organize their members, which include virtually every city over 30,000 residents in the US, to get together and register eligible city officials to vote in the process that took place in late 2019, which would set the codes that are set to come into effect for 2021.

And it was a huge success; they had record voter turnout. They had hundreds of new government officials voting in the process, and overwhelmingly voting for more aggressive measures to increase energy efficiency. Some of the improvements, going up from that 1% improvement the last time around, went as high as 14% for some residential buildings.

Likewise, they approved new measures that would essentially bring this entire national building code in line with what many cities across the country are already doing to prepare for a low-carbon future: requiring the circuitry for electric appliances, or electric vehicle chargers, be included automatically in buildings, because it’s much more expensive to add those things after the fact.

What ended up happening, once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back. And those industry groups include the National Association of Home Builders, one of the largest trade groups in the country, representing developers and construction companies, and the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, which has a lot at stake in the potential transition away from gas heating and cooking.

They rallied, and first questioned the eligibility of the voters to cast ballots in this election at all. And when it became clear that the voters who did vote were totally eligible under the ICC’s rules, they decided instead that they wanted to stem this from ever happening again, and proposed that, instead, this code, the energy code, is put through a separate process, known as a “standards” process, whereby there is no government vote at the end. It’s done entirely through these bureaucratic channels, where there’s no risk that government voters are going to buck with what the industry is comfortable with. And this is ultimately what they succeeded in making happen.

JJ: That was reporter Alexander Kaufman recounting an at once inspiring and very frustrating story of how far fossil fuel companies will go to thwart the public will in the effort to harm public health.

***

Of course, at the root, fights over responding to the climate emergency are fights over power, and accountability, and power. Resistance includes new visions, new models of how we run energy systems.

In the fall of 2019, the word “unlivable” was being used to describe California in the midst of wildfires and power outages. Our guest, and others, saw, at the core, not just climate crisis, but a private utility system that’s not incentivized to address it.

Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate and Energy Program at the Democracy Collaborative, filled us in on some relevant history of Pacific Gas & Electric.

Johanna Bozuwa: “This is a huge opportunity…to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate.”

Johanna Bozuwa: There’s a lot of history that’s here, in terms of PG&E not investing in its grid for so many years, and really putting shareholder profits ahead of the infrastructure that we now have, which has created this concept of the “new normal.” But it also doesn’t have to be. I mean, having these power shutoffs come on again and again? Governor Newsom has even said, these are incredibly not surgical. They are doing blanket shut-offs, because they’re afraid of liability.

But they’re also not providing the infrastructure that communities need to actually make it through these. So their phone lines are off, you can’t get on to their website, and there’s only a generator station for every county. And so that’s just showing that this is not just them taking precautions, this is them severely mismanaging a situation in which people are losing their power, and losing access to maybe life-sustaining medical apparatuses as well.

JJ: And you point to history. They aren’t just any utility that is being forced to deal with climate disruption; there’s more that we should know about the role they’ve played vis-à-vis climate change, isn’t there?

JB: Oh, yes, definitely. And the Energy and Policy Institute had a really important exposé. We hear a lot about “Exxon knew” and “Shell knew” on the news. But utilities knew too; they were part and parcel to the climate disinformation campaigns that have happened in the past and have sowed disinformation. And PG&E was a part of that as well.

So PG&E is not a good actor in this situation; they are the ones that were able to make money off of fossil fuels for so many years, and stopping action on climate change for years as well. And now they are paying the price, with their own infrastructure that they failed to invest in, so that it was ready for the new climate that they had, in part, given us.

JJ: Alternatives are not just possible; they are, as you write, “waiting.” So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the idea of public utilities.

JB: Yeah, absolutely. So I advocate that PG&E should be transitioned into public ownership, because it can eliminate some of those warped incentives that are associated with monopoly, investor-owned utilities that operate our energy systems. And we can move towards a situation in which a public good is provided by a public service. So by moving to a public institution, we are going to have, hopefully, a more accountable utility, whose shareholders and stockholders are us. It is the people who are living in California, and not the shareholders who are hundreds of miles away.

You talk a lot about the media; it’s been really interesting for me to look at some of the coverage that’s been happening around the investors that are circling PG&E right now. They’re saying, “Oh, we’ll take it over,” these venture capitalists like Paul Singer, who has been in bed with the Koch brothers for years, investing in anti-climate sentiments. And we see the same thing with Berkshire Hathaway, which is another major utility company that has been trying to stop distributed solar across the United States, just the type of resiliency we need for California.

But there are other options that are on the table right now, and they’re in action. San Francisco just put in a bid to municipalize their area, so that they could take back the grid, so that they could be in charge of their own destiny.

And similarly, San Jose, one of the biggest cities that PG&E provides service to, is saying, actually, you know what we should do? We should create a cooperative utility so that it is beholden to the people of California, and we’re taking over PG&E at the statewide level.

CounterSpin (10/18/19)

JJ: As we discussed when we talked about public banks on this show with Trinity Tran a few weeks ago, the word “public” isn’t like pixie dust; it doesn’t automatically make things work in a better way. But public utilities would have certain criteria about being democratized, about being decentralized, about being equitable. It’s not just a goal, in other words, but a way to get there, and who is involved in the process.

JB: Absolutely. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does provide us this opportunity to have more recourse. There is a history of public ownership in the energy sector. But we have the ability to design into that institution things like decentralization, things like equity, things like a democratized system, and build upon what we’ve seen work in the past, and also where we’ve seen public utilities historically fail.

This is a huge opportunity for California to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate, and how they’re going to ensure that they actually are creating a resilient California.

JJ: That was Johanna Bozuwa. We’ll end with that idea, of not only fighting climate disrupters, but visioning past them as well. We can call on news media to support that effort, but we can’t wait for them.

The post ‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 10, 2023

‘It Felt Like a Wasted Opportunity to Hold Oil Executives to Account’ – CounterSpin interview with Emily Sanders on how not to interview an oil CEO

Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about how not to interview an oil CEO for the July 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230707Sanders.mp3

ExxonKnews (6/29/23)

Janine Jackson: A chummy interview of Chevron CEO Mike Wirth by CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin saw the goal of mitigating the devastating harms of climate disruption pitted against the evidently equally important goal of making Wirth more money.

Conceding that many people around the world are desperate for an end to the fossil fuels driving the catastrophe, including supposedly Wirth himself, Sorkin added, “At the same time, I think it would be impossible for you not to want your business to grow.”

So there’s your frame: the life and health of people and the planet on the one hand, endless corporate profiteering on the other. Only question is, how do we balance them?

Chevron has caused the most energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in the last several decades. They took in over $35 billion just last year. But when Sorkin gets its head honcho in a chair, he makes jokes about golf and asks the polluter what he “makes of” climate activists.

You won’t be surprised to hear that our next guest offered that conversation as exemplar in a recent piece titled “How (Not) to Interview an Oil CEO.” Emily Sanders is editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity and founder of ExxonKnews, where that piece appears. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

Emily Sanders: Hi, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: While this friendly chat, at something called the Aspen Ideas Festival, was especially infuriating, it wasn’t unique. Some of the problems with it show up in other media, which is I guess what prompted you to write this piece.

Emily Sanders: “The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.”

ES: Yeah, mainstream media has had a very hard time connecting climate change to oil companies, and their decades of pollution and deception about the harms caused by fossil fuels.

And when you see coverage of deadly heat waves and wildfire smoke, for instance, there’s often no mention of things like how the major oil companies are still spending millions every year lobbying to delay the transition to renewable energy, or how Chevron, the world’s most polluting investor-owned oil company, is currently pouring even more money into increased fossil fuel extraction and production, after making record profits last year.

So it’s also not a coincidence that mainstream media is so far behind on this. The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.

And that goes back to at least the ’80s and ’90s, when oil companies began placing ads and advertorials, or ads disguised as news editorials, in major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post that downplayed the reality of climate change.

And even today, as we learned from last year’s congressional investigations and hearings into the industry’s disinformation, companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell are still running advertisements that look like articles in the country’s biggest news outlets, promoting things like algae and so-called natural gas as climate solutions. So they’ve really used the veil of journalistic credibility to help disguise their misleading and deceptive advertising for quite a while.

And we’re seeing that not just with advertising, but with some reporters themselves still failing to name the source of climate inaction, and still unable or unwilling to recognize and call out disinformation, sometimes even parroting fossil fuel industry framing about how we can’t move off oil too quickly, or how Big Oil is working on ways to solve climate change, despite that they’re causing it, without actually challenging those misconceptions.

FAIR.org (11/18/22)

It’s not everyone, and some have gotten better, but it’s certainly still a major problem. And I think we saw that last week with this CNBC interview. And what was particularly disorienting about that interview, I think, was just how divorced from reality it felt at this current, increasingly dire moment of climate emergency.

We have all the evidence now of Chevron’s duplicity. And while this interview was happening, millions of the rest of us in the United States were trapped inside, because of extreme heat or toxic wildfire smoke. That somehow was just not mentioned at all in the interview.

There was no mention of the dozens of communities that are suing Chevron and other oil companies to hold them accountable, including one lawsuit filed just a week before the interview took place, by Multnomah County in Oregon, for a heat dome that killed 69 people a couple of years ago.

And last year’s House Oversight investigation into Big Oil’s ongoing disinformation campaigns and their efforts to delay climate action weren’t mentioned. So there was so much missing context and so many questions that didn’t get asked, so much misinformation that went just completely uncorrected.

And unfortunately that’s nothing new, but it’s really frustrating and infuriating when you have an actual CEO of one of the world’s most polluting and powerful companies sitting in the room, getting treated as if he were a legitimate “thought partner” who’s just trying to balance his business priorities with concerns about the climate. It felt like a real wasted opportunity to hold him and other oil executives to account.

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth

JJ: And as you’ve outlined, we can understand reasons why that doesn’t happen. You point to advertising and that long history of advertorials, and then you go even further back, and there are interlocking directorates of fossil fuel and corporate media industries. They’re on one another’s boards.

So even though we might call for hard-hitting, tough, interrogative reporting, we do understand the pressures that make that unlikely to happen, and the pressures that make it so much more comfortable to have the kind of jokey, “aren’t we all in this together” conversation that we saw between Sorkin and Wirth.

I want to follow up on one point, which is that the least—the least and most, our standards have dropped so far—but you would hope that when the person you’re talking to straight-up lies…. We’re not talking about industry PR deception, but Wirth himself saying things that were false in this conversation and that Sorkin didn’t even follow up on.

ES: Yeah, we heard Wirth tell some flat-out whoppers, like he said the clean energy system is only about 1% built, but actually, last year, renewable energy made up 21.5% of total electricity generation in the US, and that number could be a lot higher if the oil companies got out of the way. But Sorkin just let that one slide.

There were so many other pieces of disinformation, and really actually great examples of the many different ways that oil companies lie and mislead in this interview. And all of those have been exposed in lawsuits, in congressional investigations, journalistic investigations and academic research.

So you would hope that Sorkin would’ve been prepared to challenge them, and that’s what we really need to see from more journalists going forward.

JJ: So you touched on this, but it seems like part of the obfuscation in media is suggesting that various weather events have such multiple complex causes that it’s just impossible to link them directly to fossil fuels.

And you talked about wildfires, which of course they’re much on the mind right now, and I know that fossil fuel lobbyists are working furiously to make sure that people do not associate those orange skies with fossil fuel emissions. And I can already see the memes, like, “Wildfires cause more pollution than fossil fuels, but you aren’t fighting trees!” You can already see the desire to have people disaggregate wildfires and particulates from fossil fuel emissions. So what should we be keeping in mind there?

Scientific American (6/3/22)

ES: There’s actually a growing field of what’s called attribution science, or science that’s able to link specific companies’ emissions to worsening patterns of extreme weather, and even individual weather events.

And, actually, a recent study published by researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists found that more than a third of recent wildfires in the Western US and Canada can be attributed to 88 specific fossil fuel and cement manufacturing companies.

So we’re even seeing more and more of the climate lawsuits against Big Oil citing this type of research as evidence of the damage these companies knowingly caused, like this last lawsuit in Multnomah County cited scientific studies that said the heat dome would’ve been virtually impossible without climate change.

So these companies can say it’s complicated, just like cigarette companies said you couldn’t prove smoking caused cancer, and that there were so many other potential factors involved, but I think the science overwhelmingly tells us a different story.

JJ: You head up the cleverly named ExxonKnews. I wonder if you could tell us, finally, what the goals of that project are. What would, as they say, put you out of business?

ES: I think the goals of that project are to look at the ongoing disinformation that’s coming out of the fossil fuel industry, especially so that other journalists and members of the media, and anybody else who has the opportunity to challenge an oil executive on a global stage or a national stage, can do so armed with the information they need to expose the oil industry for their continuing deception and contribution to the climate crisis.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity, and founder of ExxonKnews, online at ExxonKnews.org. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thanks so much for having me.

The post ‘It Felt Like a Wasted Opportunity to Hold Oil Executives to Account’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 7, 2023

NYT Worries Brazil Goes Too Far to Fight Far Right

Describing the differences in how Brazil and the US treated candidates who tried to seize power after losing the election, the New York Times (7/1/23) highlighted “widespread claims of overreach” in Brazil, noting criticisms that the Brazilian system is “prone to more abuse” and that its courts may be “in a repressive mode.”

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted on June 30 of the first of 16 charges of election fraud levied against him in Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, and sentenced to an eight-year ban from running for political office.

A July 1 New York Times article, headlined “Why Bolsonaro Was Barred in Brazil but Trump Can Run in the US,” does a fine job of explaining the differences in the two nations’ electoral systems. However it also further develops a narrative it has been building since Brazil’s 2022 election season of an authoritarian court system that engages in judicial overreach to persecute political enemies.

To an average news consumer who hasn’t paid much attention to the last eight years of Brazilian history and is unfamiliar with Brazilian law, the Times’ claims that courts may be overstepping their boundaries may look legitimate. When compared to the way the Times portrayed the Lava Jato (or “Car Wash”) anti-corruption investigation, and its political persecution of (then former) President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and other members of the leftist Workers Party, however, it looks like as though the Times is using its traditional double standard of going soft on right-wing extremists while portraying leftist Latin American governments as authoritarian.

Judicial abuses of a ‘hero’

The New York Times (8/25/17) depicted Judge Sergio Moro as “the face of the national reckoning for Brazil’s ruling class.”

In 37 New York Times articles published between January 2015 and April 2018 about the US DoJ-backed Lava Jato operation, which culminated in Lula’s illegitimate election-year arrest, judicial overreach was barely alluded to at all.

One rare reference occurred in Simon Romero’s 2016 article “Tempers Flare in Brazil Over Intercepts of Calls by Ex-President ‘Lula’” (3/17/16). Twenty-four paragraphs into the piece, after labeling now-disgraced Lava Jato Judge Sergio Moro as a “hero,” and giving space to his allies to falsely claim it isn’t illegal in Brazil to wiretap a standing president and leak the conversations to the press, a voice of criticism creeps in:

“He was not acting as a judge,” said Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University and one of the creators of the legislation covering freedom of speech and privacy on the Internet. “He was acting as a politician. That’s what concerns me.”

This voice of reason, however, is immediately debunked in a subsequent paragraph quoting conservative law professor Fernando Castelo Branco, “I don’t think there was a single illegal act in what Judge Sergio Moro did.”

The same day of the Times article, Moro submitted a 31-page apology to the Brazilian Supreme Court for illegally leaking the conversation, but this was skipped over by the New York Times. Nor did the Times cover the episode when he broke the law again by wiretapping all telephone conversations in Lula’s defense lawyers’ law firm for 30 days, sharing the conversations with the prosecution team so that it could preemptively map out and develop strategies against future motions from the defense team.

Shortly after Moro admitted to breaking the law, a group of his cronies in Brazil’s TRF-4 regional court in Porto Alegre made an unprecedented ruling, allowing the Lava Jato investigation to operate outside of the law. The New York Times didn’t identify this as a warning sign of judicial overreach, however, as it continued to publish article after article praising Lava Jato. This led up to Lula’s April 2018 arrest for “indeterminate acts of corruption,” based on one coerced plea bargain testimony with no material evidence.

Lula was released from prison, due a finding of illegal forum-shopping for a sympathetic court, and his convictions were reversed and all pending Lava Jato charges dropped due to collusion between the judge and prosecutors. The Times nevertheless failed to engage in any self-criticism on its role in normalizing the presidential candidate’s arrest and Bolsonaro’s subsequent rise to power.

Crimes on live TV

Making false claims about the electoral system in Brazil can get you banned from selections—maybe especially when it’s done in front of dozens of foreign diplomats (Guardian, 7/19/22).

Both-sidesing Lula’s FBI-backed political persecution and Bolsonaro’s guilty verdict as examples of judicial overreach is an act of bad faith. Unlike Lula—who was declared guilty during an election year, based on a single witness with a coercive plea bargain, by a judge who went on to serve as justice minister for his electoral opponent—Bolsonaro committed the crimes he was convicted of on live national television.

In a publicly funded event inside the president’s official residence, over 100 foreign officials were subjected to a slide show presented by Bolsonaro, during which he attacked the integrity of Brazil’s electoral system without providing any evidence to support his claims. Three months before the elections, at a moment when he was trailing Lula in double digits in the polls, millions of people watched him on TV Brasil and in his social media accounts, as he claimed that his enemies were going to defraud Brazil’s electronic voting system. In Brazil, this constitutes abuse of authority, election fraud and misuse of public funds.

Bolsonaro’s guilty conviction in the electoral court has opened the door to a federal audit that could result in him being charged for the estimated R$12,000 in public funds he spent to host the event, and a criminal investigation that could result in jail time.

‘Going too far?’

After Brazil’s Supreme Court investigated associates of a business leader who called for a coup against Lula, the New York Times (9/26/22) reported that, “according to experts in law and government, the court has taken its own repressive turn.”

Judicial overreach in Brazil never seemed to bother the Times when it was used in a kangaroo court procedure against Brazil’s largest progressive political party, but one week before the 2022 presidential elections it insinuated that right-wing extremist President Jair Bolsonaro and his followers were the real victims, with “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?” (9/26/22). It continued in January with “He Is Brazil’s Defender of Democracy. Is He Actually Good for Democracy?” (1/22/23), which ran with the subhead:

Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, was crucial to Brazil’s transfer of power. But his aggressive tactics are prompting debate: Can one go too far to fight the far right?

Why would the New York Times wait to complain about judicial overreach until a leftist government in Latin America attempts to enforce the rule of law to punish people guilty of fomenting a neofascist military coup? Brazil’s case is hardly unique. After the Nicaraguan government began prosecuting participants in the failed 2018 right-wing coup attempt that left 253 people dead, the New York Times (3/2/23) compared the government to Nazi Germany. When Bolivian courts ordered the arrest of the leader of the 2019 right-wing coup, during which police massacred dozens of nonviolent protesters, the Times (6/10/22) raised concerns about “politicians’ use of the justice system to target opponents.”

Bolsonaro’s close ties to Donald Trump and Steve Bannon created the first convergence of interests between the Brazilian left and the US Democratic Party in decades, leading the Biden administration to quickly recognize Brazil’s election results and support Lula’s inauguration in January. However, a series of moves Lula has taken since then—from refusing to send ammunition to Ukraine, to giving the red-carpet treatment to Nicolas Maduro, to de-dollarization plans for trade with China—must have some people in the State Department thinking about the possibilities of fostering another coup in Brazil.

This is where the New York Times‘ “judicial overreach” narrative can be helpful. If the US does decide to move in that direction, Times readers are already being groomed for an “authoritarian Latin American strongman” narrative.

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

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 7, 2023

Emily Sanders on How Not to Interview an Oil CEO, Kaufman & Bozuwa on Fighting Climate Disrupters

      CounterSpin230707.mp3

Common Dreams (7/5/23)

This week on CounterSpin: The Earth recorded its hottest day ever July 3, with an average global temperature of 17.01°C. The record was broken the next day, with 17.18°C. Common Dreams‘ Jake Johnson (7/5/23) collected international responses, including a British scientist calling it a “death sentence for people and ecosystems”; and reported (7/5/23) IMF estimates that world governments dished out nearly $6 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2020, and those giveaways are expected to grow. At Truthout (7/3/23), Victoria Law wrote about extreme heat’s impact on the incarcerated, including people in their 30s dropping dead in prisons with inadequate cooling systems. One source described his cell: “No air gets in and no air escapes.”

Public Citizen (6/16/23) points to House Appropriations Republicans, larding spending bills with “poison pill” riders that fuel the crisis and block alternatives. And a database from the new climate group F Minus reveals how many state lobbyists hired by environmental groups also lobby for fossil fuel companies, entrenching those influence peddlers in state capitols with a veneer of respectability, even as public opinion of fossil fuels plummets.

Orange skies burning over many parts of the US may not be the rockets’ red glare, but they’re signs of war nonetheless. The battle is less well understood as a fight between humans and climate change, as one between those who want to forcefully mitigate disastrous impacts and those who want them to continue, for the simple reason that it’s making them rich. There is no way to fight climate disruption without fighting climate disrupters—this week on the show.

Emily Sanders watched appalled as CNN‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin (6/26/23) “interviewed” Chevron’s Mike Wirth recently, leading her to write “How (Not) to Interview an Oil CEO” for ExxonKnews (6/29/23). She’s editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity; we’ll ask her about that.

      CounterSpin230707Sanders.mp3

And: When media illustrate pushback against the fossil fuel industry, it generally looks like activists with signs; but there are myriad points of resistance, at different levels of community, offering multiple ways forward—but all of them in the same direction. In 2021, HuffPost reporter Alexander Kaufman discussed attempts of local representatives to have a say in building codes, and industry’s reaction. Democracy Collaborative‘s Johanna Bozuwa joined us during 2019’s California wildfires and power outages, to explain the potential role of public utilities in the climate crisis.

      CounterSpin230707Kaufman&Bozuwa.mp3

The post Emily Sanders on How Not to Interview an Oil CEO, Kaufman & Bozuwa on Fighting Climate Disrupters appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 6, 2023

‘Huge Majorities Vote in Favor of Abortion Access and Reproductive Freedom’ – CounterSpin interview with Taryn Abbassian on Dobbs’ anniversary, with archival interviews on the forced-birth ruling

Janine Jackson interviewed NARAL’s Taryn Abbassian about one year post Dobbs for the June 30, 2023, episode of CounterSpin, which also included archival interviews on the forced-birth ruling. This is a lightly edited transcript.

      CounterSpin063023.mp3

Janine Jackson: The Supreme Court has just, as we record, dismantled affirmative action in college admissions, part of a concerted right-wing campaign to sabotage multiracial democracy. We will certainly talk about that going forward.

The US public’s belief in and support for the Supreme Court has plummeted with the appointment of hyper-partisan justices whose unwillingness to answer basic questions, or answer them respectfully, would make them unqualified to work at many a Wendy’s, and the obviously outcome-determinative nature of their jurisprudence.

Key to that drop in public support was last year’s Dobbs ruling, overturning something Americans overwhelmingly support, and had come to see as a fundamental right: that of people to make their own decisions about when or whether to carry a pregnancy or to have a child. The impacts of that ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support. We’ll hear from Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL.

Also on the show: Meaningful, lasting response to the Dobbs ruling requires more than “vote blue no matter who,” but actually understanding and addressing the differences and disparities of abortion rights and access before Dobbs, which requires an expansive understanding of reproductive justice. CounterSpin has listened many times over the years to advocates and authors working on this issue. We’ll hear a little today from FAIR’s Julie Hollar; from Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity; and from URGE’s policy director, Preston Mitchum.

That’s coming up this week on CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR.

***

      CounterSpin063023Abbassian.mp3

It’s been a year since the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections, and the avalanche of consequences is still growing.

They include, of course, restricting people’s access to abortion—some 20 states have passed either bans or very restrictive policies—but also hampering the ability to access a range of pregnancy-related and general healthcare.

One professor of health law was quoted saying, “It’s like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb into public health.”

The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was anticipated, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we were ready. So what have folks been doing, and what needs to be done to address its devastating effects? And what role can media play?

We’re joined now by Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL. Welcome to CounterSpin, Taryn Abbassian.

Taryn Abbassian: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Most people will have a general sense, but, as always, things look different depending where you are and who you are. So if you’re trying to explain the impacts of the Dobbs ruling—expected, unexpected—where do you even start?

TA: As you alluded to, a lot of this isn’t unexpected. We anticipated this happening, and unfortunately a lot of the things we were worried about, we are seeing play out.

You mentioned that 20 states have already eliminated and restricted access to abortion. Folks are being forced to travel hundreds of miles, in some cases, when they’re pushed completely out of their reach in their states.

And there’s just all kinds of instances in the news that we’re hearing about horrific situations that folks who are trying to access care are having to experience.

And again, it’s just like you said, it was not a surprise, but we are facing the realities of that every day, and countless stories about how pregnant people are being denied abortion access, and being denied lifesaving care in the case of miscarriages and all sorts of medical complications.

And it’s devastating, but we as always at NARAL are working really hard to push back and do what we can in the wake of the decision. And we’ve just had the one-year anniversary, and we haven’t stopped working since that decision was handed down last year, both in the states and at the federal level, and just doing what we can, organizing and trying to get folks tuned in and working together to hold the line and protect the access we can, and expand it in the places where we can expand it.

JJ: People are changing decisions about where they’re going to live, about where they’re going to go to college or where they’re going to practice medicine. I’m not sure that everyone really understood how deep and wide this was going to be.

TA: Yes, of course. We just saw some polling recently that tons of young people, and we know young people are with us more than ever, and young people are our strongest cohort of support, and they’re making these big decisions about where they’re going to live, where they’re going to study, where they’re going to take their lives as adults, and they’re having to think about these things that, a generation ago, they weren’t having to think about.

And it’s very disappointing, but it also, again, as you mentioned, it’s a bright spot, they’re making these considerations. Young folks are tuned in, they’re paying attention to this, they know about the impact that this is having on their lives, and they’re deciding accordingly.

We obviously wish they weren’t having to have these forced choices and difficult decisions around just access to basic medical care. But we know folks are engaged, and are doing what they can to mitigate the effects of the decision last year.

JJ: We know that a right is meaningless if you can’t exercise it, which is why we’ve always distinguished between the right to abortion and abortion access. And we know that there were problems even before Dobbs. People on public assistance, for example, Roe was not meaningful to them. So lifting up those disparities, including racial disparities, geographic, economic—it seems more important now than ever.

Taryn Abbassian: “When you put it to the voters, when you ask folks whether they want to protect reproductive freedom, they resoundingly say yes.”

TA: Yes. And, again, I think abortion gets put in this hole of being a very political issue, and it’s politicized unlike any kind of other medical care. And what we like to talk about at NARAL, and focus on in our work, is that we want to talk about the people. We want to talk about the human beings that are being affected by this lack of access.

We want to center the folks that are most impacted: Women of color and low-income women, and folks that already have a hard time accessing care, are the ones that are going to be disproportionately affected by this, and we want to center those voices and center those sorts of stories as we try to push back on what’s happening, and the harm that this decision is causing, day in and day out.

JJ: I want to talk about responsive federal policy, but let me just draw you out a little bit about the state level; what’s happening there? I saw a quote from a nurse practitioner in Pennsylvania, who said, “There’s always a temptation to go somewhere that’s going to be idyllic”—”idyllic,” but you know—but “Pennsylvania needs people like us who care enough to stay here and fight.” And there is pushback at the state level, isn’t there?

TA: Of course. And I think we saw that right out the gate after the Dobbs decision; we saw in Kansas an overwhelming show of support for abortion access, abortion rights, reproductive freedom.

And we’re seeing that, even though there’s a lot of states right now moving to restrict or eliminate access, there are a lot of states that are doing a lot of great, proactive work to try to make sure abortion access and reproductive freedom is accessible to folks.

And so what we’ve seen over and over again, in red states and purple states and obviously in blue states, that when voters are asked directly about abortion, how they feel about it, what they want to do in terms of protecting it, overwhelmingly, huge majorities vote in favor of abortion access and reproductive freedom.

We see that every time, almost every battle we’ve had since the Dobbs decision, when we’ve asked voters directly about where they stand on abortion, it’s in favor of more access, broader freedom.

So, unfortunately, our opposition knows this, and we see in a lot of places where we’re seeing ballot initiative thresholds changing, and things like that.

They know that when voters are being asked to give their input and voice their opinions about abortion, they know it’s popular. And so instead of just allowing the will of voters to stand, a lot of folks are pushing to change rules in some of these states. And we’re fighting back and fighting against those changes as well.

So it’s a lot of battles happening in a lot of different states, but we’ve seen time and time again, when you put it to the voters, when you ask folks whether they want to protect reproductive freedom, they resoundingly say yes.

JJ: And have for many years. That leads to the next question: Do we need a federal response, or what role could that play vis-a-vis state policy?

Vanity Fair (6/23/23)

TA: Certainly federal response would be great. We have great allies in President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. We endorsed them just last week, and they’ve been a huge ally to us and real fighters for reproductive freedom.

Of course, we’d love to see some sort of federal protection and codification of Roe, and we really need a pro–reproductive freedom Congress to do that.

And so again, a lot of the work we do is in organizing, it’s in getting out the vote, it’s in motivating young people and talking to folks about the stakes so that they know how important it is, and that their votes make a difference when it comes to this stuff. So certainly federal protections would be great.

We’ve already seen Republicans, they claim that they would leave this to be a state issue, they’re already working to put in place federal bans, and talking about that, and using that as a litmus test for their 2024 candidates.

So certainly that would be ideal. And we need to put in the work to build a Congress that can deliver that, because that ultimately is to make sure that it’s not going to be dependent on what state you live in, or what state you’re nearby, to be able to access care. We want folks around the country to have the medical care that they need.

JJ: Absolutely.

TA: The GOP is using all the tools at their disposal, and we need to do the same.

JJ: That brings me to the question about media, because I think reporting sometimes gives us a picture of a “divided country.” The New York Times last year said Dobbs was plunging the country “back into the contentious debate over abortion,” but as you’ve just said, it’s not like half the country supports abortion rights and half opposes it.

But media sometimes get into this kind of both-sidesing. And I wonder what you think would be—you’ve talked about centering human beings, which I think is the key, but are there other things or thoughts that you have about what media could stop doing, or could start doing?

Gallup (6/14/23)

TA: Yeah. As you’ve alluded to, the media play a really fundamental role in this discussion about abortion care, and we’re thrilled that more folks than ever are talking about it and engaging in this since the Dobbs decision.

But as you said, it’s not a 50/50 issue. I think unlike any other part of healthcare, medical care, it’s presented as this political, divisive, 50/50 issue, when we know it’s not the case. And we know over and over again, based on public research and polling and our own internal research, that the majority is with us.

Eight in ten Americans consistently show that they are supportive of reproductive freedom and abortion access. And we know this, and the anti-abortion movement can say whatever they want about the support that they have, or the fact that this is a really divisive issue, but we know it’s not.

We don’t want the coverage being driven by the politicians and the talking points of this side and that side divisiveness. It’s about the people that are being impacted by this.

And, ultimately, we want to remind people that this is a healthcare issue. It’s a medical issue. Folks should be free, no matter where they live, to make these really important decisions about pregnancy and about parenthood and all sorts of things with their loved ones and with their doctors.

It should not be this political battle where politicians get to weigh in on it, especially given how we see, over and over again, that it’s unpopular: Folks don’t want politicians making those decisions.

JJ: And I’ll just say, finally, I was talking to Jessica Mason Pieklo last July about Dobbs, and she was saying it’s a different kind of ruling in terms of reproductive rights, that it’s more outcome-determinative.

And so it requires a different kind of approach, in a way, that it needs really a full-force fight. It’s not necessarily—obviously, legal issues are important, but at the same time, we recognize something bigger happening here.

TA: Yeah, of course. And, again, like you said, the media play a huge role. We of course love that there’s a lot of discussion around this issue, and there’s more chatter about it than ever before. But we also know that some of this charged rhetoric is not helpful.

And what it really comes down to is that the voices of people being affected are what’s important, and not the opinions of politicians who are trying to divide us on this topic.

JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL. Their work is online at ProChoiceAmerica.org. Taryn Abbassian, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TA: Thank you so much. It was great to be with you.

***

      CounterSpin063023DobbsDecision.mp3

JJ: The overturn of Roe v. Wade was expected. Here’s a bit of our conversation with veteran reporter Jessica Mason Pieklo from Rewire News Group, July of last year.

Jessica Mason Pieklo: “For the conservative legal movement…it doesn’t matter what the law says. They will find the outcome that they are looking for, and work the law backwards to make it fit.”

Jessica Mason Pieklo: Within the legal movement, both the conservative and progressive legal movements, prior to the Dobbs decision, really since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, there was, in the courts, a more honest debate over what the state could or could not do, in terms of regulating pregnancy and childbirth and those outcomes.

And that was under the Planned Parenthood v. Casey framework. That was the great abortion compromise that the Supreme Court came up with as a way to save Roe and settle this debate, so to speak, for the ages.

And what happened as a result of the political campaign to take over the courts, and to really move this issue away from the will of the people and into a minoritarian space, is that the Dobbs decision is a perfect reflection of that. It cherry-picks history, it cherry-picks the law, and it really just comes to a conclusion that was predetermined by Sam Alito and the other conservative justices on the court.

And I think that’s the one thing that I really hope folks understand, that is really different with this iteration of the Roberts Court, and what we will see amplified moving forward, is that for the conservative legal movement, it is outcome-determinative. So it doesn’t matter what the law says. They will find the outcome that they are looking for, and work the law backwards to make it fit.

JJ: Well, that seems seismic, and something that we would hope that journalism would recognize, and not simply try to stuff this new reality into an old framework. And I wonder what you as a reporter make of the way—and I know it’s all in medias res; they’re trying to figure it out, as we all are—but what do you make of the way media are addressing…. What you’re saying is, this is not the same. We have to address this differently. Are media rising to that challenge?

JMP: There are fits and starts. I think that, along with the general public, there is an understanding within more mainstream and Beltway media that the institutions are failing in this moment, whether it’s the political leadership, whether it’s our institutions like the Supreme Court, they are failing.

And our entire democratic experiment in this country is at risk right now. And my concern is that that realization is starting to dawn a little too late for folks who really have the ability to do something about it.

But I do remain hopeful that folks are seeing the moment for what it is. I think the shift that we saw in some of the conversation around the court when the Dobbs opinion was leaked in May—and then the follow-up opinion actually being released and not changing substantively at all—I think what’s been really interesting to see is how how the leak happened, and then the final opinion came out and there weren’t really any changes, even some of the most egregious parts of the opinion that media latched onto, about a steady domestic supply of infants, for example, that’s still in the final opinion, right?

So I think as the dust settles and truly how extreme the reality is, I do think they’re starting to latch onto it.

I worry, though, that media has ingrained habits. And that is one of the areas where, in three months from the Dobbs decision and in six months from the Dobbs decision, I’m concerned that journalists who don’t cover this issue and the Supreme Court on the regular will fall back into habits that they know, just because that’s what we all do as humans, right? We just fall into our old habits.

I’m concerned that we’ll see that in the media as well, and a return to treating abortion as a political issue to be resolved in statehouses and in Congress, as opposed to a human rights crisis that is unfolding in this country right now.

***

JJ: In May 2022, CounterSpin spoke with FAIR senior analyst and managing editor Julie Hollar in the wake of the advance leak of the Dobbs ruling, when elite media were evincing some strange priorities about the impact of this monumental change.

Julie Hollar: “When the right was ramping up state-level campaigns, and laws to restrict abortion access…we saw a sharp drop-off in national media coverage of abortion.”

Julie Hollar: I think you have to ask what’s the priority here for the corporate media in their coverage. And if you look, the day that this leak happens, it’s obviously front-page news. It’s at the top of the nightly newscasts. And, yes, they talk about what’s the impact going to be for people in this country, but the priority here, the top of the show, the first story that they tell, is about the leak itself, who might’ve done this, what is the impact on the Supreme Court, the relationships between the justices and their clerks. That’s story No. 1.

And then story No. 2 asks, what are the consequences for others? But even there, when you watch the nightly newscasts, it wasn’t exactly, “What’s the impact on people who might get pregnant?” It’s: “What is the impact on the clinics who serve them? What is the impact on the pro-choice and the anti-choice movements?” I didn’t see the people themselves who would be most impacted getting interviewed on these shows.

So I think, yes, there is some coverage of that impact. It is downplayed, and it is sandwiched in between all of these other stories that are distracting attention from what is really the heart of what’s going on here.

JJ: And then even a finding within a finding, I thought it was interesting in the piece that you wrote about the initial coverage of this leaked ruling, that one place when the question was asked, what’s going to happen to, they said to the women, many of them low-income, who every year get abortions in states like Mississippi, Texas, places like that—the one time that was asked, it was asked of the leader of an anti-choice group.

JH: Exactly, who gave a very reassuring answer: “Oh, we will step up our efforts to take care of those people, and make sure the outcomes are good.”

Well, you know what, that’s not a satisfactory answer, because that’s not what’s going to happen. You know, there could be some “stepping up,” and what’s really going to happen is, all of the research has shown, that there will be more people dying, there will be greater poverty. There will be worse health outcomes all across the board for people.

JJ: I think that we have seen news media acknowledging that an overturning of Roe v. Wade will launch myriad other efforts at the state level. They talk about these “trigger bills,” but at the same time, these things didn’t come out of nowhere, they’ve been building for years. And when you looked last year at coverage of these state campaigns, it seemed like media were not acknowledging them appropriately as they were brewing.

JH: Not at all, not at all. The first four-and-a-half months of last year, there were hundreds of state-level restrictions introduced in state legislatures. Many of them passed, and the national media just simply ignored them, for the most part. You got a few mentions here or there, very short, nothing in depth. Nothing at all that gave a sense of the scale of what was going on.

And it’s not just last year. I feel like I’ve been writing this article since I started at FAIR, which was quite some time ago. I wrote this article 10 years ago, when the right was ramping up state-level campaigns, and laws to restrict abortion access. And we saw a sharp drop-off in national media coverage of abortion exactly when these things are happening.

So the media will pay attention when there’s a huge blockbuster story, like the Supreme Court leak. But during the steady drip-drip of what’s been happening for years, for decades, they’ve been just completely missing.

***

JJ: In January 2021, CounterSpin heard from Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE, Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity.

Kimberly Inez McGuire: “That’s the first piece, is just saying the word ‘abortion.’ It’s not a bad word. It’s a word that’s saved people’s lives and helped shape better futures.”

JJ: Framing is powerful, which is why I appreciate the way that you at URGE and others describe legal abortion as “the floor, not the ceiling,” as part of that expansive understanding of reproductive justice. Can you talk a little bit about how we talk about abortion, and why it matters? What are you trying to do with that “floor, not the ceiling” phrase?

Kimberly Inez McGuire: Absolutely. So I think there’s a few key pieces here. One is about how we show respect to people who have had abortions. And first and foremost, those who have had abortions deserve the dignity of recognition. We need to use the word “abortion.” We need to talk about abortion as necessary healthcare and as a social good. Anything less, honestly, disregards and disrespects the one in four women in this country who have sought out this healthcare. So that’s the first piece, is just saying the word “abortion.” It’s not a bad word. It’s a word that’s saved people’s lives and helped shape better futures.

The other piece around “the floor, not the ceiling” is: For people with economic resources, what is a legal right on paper has so much more meaning than for people who are blocked because of economic barriers, because of racial barriers. So we look at something like abortion access: Even before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was illegal across large swaths of the country, the reality is that women of means have always been able to get abortions; that has always been the reality for people with money.

The vision for reproductive justice is not just, you have a theoretical right to abortion if you can fight your way through all of the muck and the restrictions. Reproductive justice means that if you’ve decided to end a pregnancy, you can do so safely, with dignity, without upending your family’s economic security, and without being subjected to, frankly, misogynist hate speech and stigma.

***

JJ: And finally, in May of 2021, we followed up with URGE’s policy director Preston Mitchum. Here he’s responding to my question about media coverage that presents abortion as a “cultural issue,” as though it were “soft,” as opposed to a “serious” issue like economics—though it’s hard to imagine anything more central to economic life than the ability to decide whether to have a child.

Preston Mitchum: “We’re talking about the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

Preston Mitchum: Exactly. And what it does is, it continues to drive a wedge that shouldn’t be a wedge. When we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about life-saving treatment that people actually need: It’s medical care, it’s healthcare. And all statistics show that abortion care is in many ways safer than giving birth.

And so those are statistics and facts that many people, unfortunately, who are driving this “culture war” narrative don’t want people to believe or understand, but it’s true. And, unfortunately, what it does is undermine the necessary conversation we must have around reproductive health, rights and justice, especially reproductive justice, right?

So, of course, reproductive justice is more than abortion; it’s comprehensive. We’re talking about the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Abortion access is a critical part of maintaining reproductive justice for Black folks, for Indigenous folks, for Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities. And we must center it on the work where people can create a future for themselves, where every person can make their own decisions with dignity, with autonomy and with self-determination.

And you’re absolutely right: When media coverage and narrative is about “culture war,” it creates this idea that only some people should have abortion access, that the people who do want abortion access are the people who are against what is actually the moralistic framing of this country.

And it creates this divide of good and bad. Abortion is not about good or bad; abortion is about access and creating the families and the communities that we want, that we can see, and that can survive in the system that we have today.

JJ: That was Jessica Mason Pieklo from Rewire, Preston Mitchum and Kimberly Inez McGuire from URGE, as well as FAIR’s own Julie Hollar.

The post ‘Huge Majorities Vote in Favor of Abortion Access and Reproductive Freedom’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

NYT Reluctant to Fault Israel for West Bank Aggression

The New York Times (6/22/23) describes the Israeli government allowing settlers to attack Palestinians as a “loss of control.”

Under Israel’s most right-wing government to date, illegal settlements continue to encroach on Palestinian land like “concrete kudzu.” This is no surprise. With Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, acting as the de facto authority over the West Bank since February, news media anticipated a swift crackdown on Palestinian freedom and state-building aspirations in the territory. This came to a head in recent weeks as Israel relaxed settlement rules, and expedited planning for more than 4,000 new colonial houses in the West Bank.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller issued a press statement on June 18 decrying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s updated West Bank settlement policy, citing “such unilateral actions” as a hindrance to peace and de-escalation. When the US, which has proclaimed its “unwavering…commitment to Israel’s security” (US State Department, 3/26/22), singles out Israel as an aggressor, there must be a clear violation.

Despite this official US condemnation, the New York Times seems reluctant to hold Israel accountable for the unprecedented settler brazenness that has come to characterize the Netanyahu administration. In her article “Spiraling Violence in the Occupied West Bank Signals a Loss of Control” (6/22/23), Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner attempted to explain the deluge of bloodshed—most keenly felt by Palestinians—following heightened Israeli antagonism in the West Bank. Yet the Times muddied this lopsided power dynamic by engaging in distortion and both-sidesism—framing recent events in the Occupied Territories as “an explosive mix” of Palestinian and Israeli aggression alike.

Avoiding ‘apartheid’ label

B’Tselem (1/12/21), Israel’s leading human rights group—along with Amnesty International (2/1/22) and Human Rights Watch (4/27/21)—describes Israel/Palestine as an apartheid regime. But it’s not a word you’ll see in New York Times news coverage of Israeli violence.

Amnesty International notes that the development of colonial settlements “contravenes fundamental rules of international humanitarian law.” While the Times raises the illegality of Israel’s new expansionist policy (once, in passing), it fails to elaborate on the consequences of settlement—namely, the entrenchment of apartheid governance.

The human rights community is in agreement about the state of Palestinian civil rights under Israeli occupation. A Human Rights Watch Report (4/27/21) deplored the “systematic oppression” of Palestinians in the West Bank, asserting that the separate and unequal treatment of Palestinians compared to Israeli settlers constitutes apartheid. Amnesty International and B’Tselem both substantiate HRW’s claim.

US elite media’s antipathy for labeling Israel an apartheid state, despite consensus among prominent human rights groups, is a trend that has been observed by FAIR (5/23/23):

Since apartheid is the overriding condition that leads to Israel’s violent outbursts, and since the US has vigorously supported Israel for the last 60 years, US media should be putting it front and center in their coverage. Omitting it allows Israel to continue to portray any violence from Palestinians as a result of senseless hostility, rather than emerging from the conditions imposed by Israel.

The Times’ exclusion of key apartheid terminology obfuscates the power dynamics underpinning recent acrimony in the West Bank. Kershner instead opts for murky descriptors of the occupation like “conflict,” “tension,” “clash” and “melee,” which conceal the power asymmetry between the Israeli military apparatus and the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories.

‘Reprisal attacks’

The New York Times frequently frames violence by the Israeli government and Palestinian resistance in starkly different terms, as these headlines from consecutive days (6/19/23, 6/20/23) attest.

While the Times’ employment of nebulous words misrepresents the Israeli occupation as a symmetrical “conflict,” Kershner took the distortion one step further when she seemingly situated Palestinians as the primary aggressor.

“The killing of the four Israelis at Eli set off waves of reprisals on Tuesday and Wednesday by Israeli extremists who rampaged through Palestinian towns and villages,” reported the Times. The expression “reprisal” implies that settler terrorism is justified, or at least understandable, as a retaliation against Palestinian-led assaults. Kershner mobilized the word “reprisal” four times in the article—in every instance referencing Israeli attacks.

Palestinians were not offered the dignity of self-defense language. The Times detailed the events leading up to the June 20 shooting near the settlement town of Eli (a colonial community that is illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention): “The violence this week began with a deadly Israeli raid on Monday into the northern West Bank city of Jenin.” Several sentences later, the article continued: “A day later, Palestinian gunmen killed four Israeli civilians, including a 17-year-old boy, near the Jewish settlement of Eli.”

Nowhere did the Times suggest that the shooting came as a “reprisal” against the initial Israeli raid in Jenin, which left six Palestinians dead. Yet CNN (6/21/23) revealed that Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the Eli attack, defended it as a “natural response” to the raid.

Asymmetrical conflict

The Washington Post (12/29/22) began with an active-voice lead: “Israeli forces killed more Palestinians in the West Bank in 2022 than in any year since the United Nations began systematically recording fatalities in 2005….”

When the media depict Israeli assaults as counter-attacks, retaliations or “reprisals,” while refusing to extend the same vocabulary to armed Palestinian actions, it weaves an insidious narrative that Israel is a perpetual innocent defending itself against ceaseless Palestinian aggression, even when the numbers paint a different picture.

Twenty-seven Israelis were killed in 2022, while the figure was seven times higher for Palestinians. Out of the 204 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces last year, 146 hailed from the West Bank. This led the Washington Post (12/29/22) to declare 2022 the “deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians in nearly two decades.” Among the factors cited for the spike in fatalities was increased settler assaults in the Occupied Territories.

The Times article mentioned the jump in the Palestinian death toll—which continues in 2023, with at least 137 West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinians killed by Israeli fire so far (PBS, 6/24/23)—but failed to acknowledge the stark numerical disparity between Israeli and Palestinian victims. This context is vital to debunking the pervasive notion that Israel is constantly on the defensive.

Anti-Palestine media bias is even more blatant when compared to coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A Toronto Star article by Joseph Krauss (3/29/22) argued that many in the Middle East “see hypocrisy in the Western embrace of Ukraine.” News media have lauded Ukrainian fighters as “brave” (Forbes, 3/2/22), anti-imperial (Washington Post, 2/24/22) and “heroic” (Bloomberg, 3/19/22). But, as a Washington Post opinion piece (4/28/22) noted:

When it comes to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, these same outlets often fail to name the aggressor at all. Ukrainian civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks are called “brave,” but 14-year-old Qusai Hamamrah was depicted as posing an immediate threat after armed Israeli soldiers claimed he threw a Molotov cocktail at them.… Newsrooms cannot pick and choose which state-sanctioned violence is legitimate.

This double standard creates a media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and others are doomed to be the victims of “reprisal” attacks. It tells the world that West Bank Palestinians living under apartheid have no right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements and ballooning settler hostility.

‘Helpless’ Israeli military

Times of Israel (6/26/23): “At times, off-duty soldiers participate in the attacks as well, complicating matters further.”

After illegal settlers rampaged through Palestinian communities—torching 15 homes, 60 vehicles and countless crops—Israel’s military chief, police chief and head of the Shin Bet internal security agency denounced the onslaught as “nationalist terrorism” that must be staved off. Yet the Times article seemed convinced that Israeli forces are incapable of quelling settler belligerence: “The Israeli forces, despite their overall control of the territory and a spate of similarly destructive settler reprisals in February, appear helpless in preventing it.”

Helpless? Or uninterested? Amid Israel’s rightward shift, a permissive environment toward illegal settlement has cultivated Israeli military apathy in the face of settler violence. As the Times of Israel (6/26/23) divulged:

In recent years, there have been numerous documented cases of IDF soldiers standing by as settlers attacked Palestinians. In other cases, such as in recent days, IDF soldiers have not been present at all, only arriving after the fact and then clashing with the local Palestinian population. Soldiers are legally permitted—even required in some cases—to intervene to prevent violent attacks, regardless of nationality.

The Times’ use of the word “helpless” to describe Israeli forces, even though the military possesses the legal permission, tactical know-how and manpower to halt settler attacks, minimizes official Israeli responsibility as West Bank Palestinians continue to suffer under occupation. In a troubling statement, Miloon Kothari, member of the UN Human Rights Council–mandated Commission of Inquiry (Reuters, 6/20/23), contended that rising settler hostility has become “the means through which [Israeli] annexation is ensured.”

Shortly after the Palestinian attack near Eli, Netanyahu announced that in “response to terror” (Haaretz, 6/21/23), an additional 1,000 illegal housing units in the West Bank would be fast-tracked. When uncritical stories like Kershner’s are the norm, it’s unlikely anyone will hold Israel accountable for the chaos that will predictably follow.

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

The post NYT Reluctant to Fault Israel for West Bank Aggression appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 30, 2023

Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine

Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13). The weapons industry is a major contributor to these idea factories; a recent report from the Quincy Institute (6/1/23) demonstrates just how much influence war profiteers have on the national discourse.

Quincy Institute (6/1/23): “The vast majority of media mentions of think tanks in articles about U.S. arms and the Ukraine war are from think tanks whose funders profit from US military spending.”

The Quincy Institute—whose own start-up funding came mainly from George Soros and Charles Koch—looked at 11 months of Ukraine War coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, from March 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023, and counted each time one of 33 leading think tanks was mentioned. Of the 15 think tanks most often mentioned in the coverage, only one—Human Rights Watch—does not take funding from Pentagon contractors. Quincy’s analysis found that the media were seven times more likely to cite think tanks with war industry ties than they were to cite think tanks without war industry ties.

With 157 mentions each, the top two think tanks were the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both of these think tanks receive millions from the war industry. The Atlantic Council has long been the brain trust of NATO, the military organization whose expansion towards Russia’s borders was a critical factor in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Both think tanks receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies which have already been awarded billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts as a result of the war in Ukraine.

CSIS was revealed in a New York Times expose (8/7/16) to produce content that reflected the weapons industry priorities of its funders. It also “initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations” of military funders.

Think tank media mentions related to US military support for Ukraine (Quincy Institute, 6/1/23).

In addition to showing think tanks’ enormous influence, the Quincy report highlights how difficult it is to trace just how much war industry funding these think tanks receive, and exactly whose interests they represent. “Think tanks are not required to disclose their funders,” study author Ben Freeman wrote, and “many think tanks list donors without indicating the amount of donations and others just list donors in ranges (e.g., $250,000 to $499,999).”

While the study was not aimed at establishing a causal connection between weapons industry funding and the think tanks’ positions, it acknowledges that funding typically plays a major role in shaping the institutions. “Funders,” Freeman wrote, “are able to influence think tank work through the mechanisms of censorship, self-censorship, and perspective filtering.” In other words, people with points of view antithetical to the funders likely would not last long in these think tanks.

No compromise with Russia (Atlantic Council, 2/6/23) means no end to the Ukraine arms money flowing to Atlantic Council donors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.

Causal or not, there is a marked correlation between war industry funding and hawkish positions. “Think tanks with financial ties to the arms industry often support policies that would benefit the arms industry,” the report noted. For example, one Atlantic Council article (2/6/23) advocated against “any compromise with the Kremlin,” while another, titled “Equity for Ukraine” (1/16/23), argued that Ukraine has a “right to destroy critical infrastructure in Russia and plunge Moscow and other cities into darkness.”

Earlier this year, the president of the American Enterprise Institute—fifth on the list, with 101 mentions—was cited numerous times in the Wall Street Journal (e.g., 1/20/23, 1/25/23) arguing that “tanks and armored personnel carriers are essential,” and agreeing to provide them will “let Ukraine know that it can afford to risk and expend more of its current arsenal of tanks in counteroffensive operations because it can count on getting replacements for them.” AEI (6/9/23) has gone so far as to suggest that the US give tactical nuclear weapons to Ukraine, something that could easily escalate to all-out nuclear war.

The Quincy Institute did not find a single instance in which a media organization disclosed the fact that its source received funding from the war industry, obscuring how interested parties may be shaping coverage or promoting policy recommendations that directly benefit their funders.

The study found that for the few think tanks that receive little or no Pentagon contractor funding, positions on the war are dramatically different. With less influence from the war industry, the study found, these organizations emphasize “expository rather than prescriptive analysis, support for diplomatic solutions, and a focus on the impact of the war on different parts of society and the region.”

Human Rights Watch, which takes no war industry money, “was agnostic on the issue of providing US military assistance to Ukraine,” and instead “focused on human rights abuses in the conflict.” The Carnegie Endowment, which receives less than 1% of its funding from that industry, was never quoted advocating an increase in military spending or weapons sales during the Ukraine War.

One critical way that corporate news media manufactures consent for US foreign policy is by carefully selecting the sources and voices that they present, and narrowing the spectrum of debate. While this can take the form of uncritically repeating pronouncements from government officials, this research demonstrates that there are more subtle ways in which media outlets can push a corporate/state agenda under the guise of independent journalism.

The post Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 30, 2023

Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later

CounterSpin230630.mp3

(CC photo: Ted Eytan )

This week on CounterSpin: The US public’s belief in and support for the Supreme Court has plummeted with the appointment of hyper-partisan justices whose unwillingness to answer basic questions, or answer them respectfully, would make them unqualified to work at many a Wendy’s, and the obviously outcome-determinative nature of their jurisprudence. Key to that drop in public support was last year’s Dobbs ruling, overturning something Americans overwhelmingly support and had come to see as a fundamental right—that of people to make their own decisions about when or whether to carry a pregnancy or to have a child. The impacts of that ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support. We hear from Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL.

CounterSpin230630Abbassian.mp3

Also on the show: Meaningful, lasting response to Dobbs requires more than “vote blue no matter who,” but actually understanding and addressing the differences and disparities of abortion rights and access before Dobbs, which requires an expansive understanding of reproductive justice. CounterSpin has listened many times over the years to advocates and authors working on this issue. We hear a little this week from FAIR’s Julie Hollar; from Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity; and from URGE’s policy director, Preston Mitchum.

The post Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
June 29, 2023

Boosting RFK Jr., Murdoch Pushes 2024 Rightward

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of a slain presidential candidate and nephew of a slain president, best known for his discredited anti-vaccine views (Scientific American, 1/11/17), is carrying on his family tradition of seeking high political office. As President Joe Biden’s approval numbers appear to slide (Politico, 5/7/23) with the general election still more than a year away, Kennedy sees an opening in the Democratic field.

Unlike many of his cousins, Kennedy doesn’t have political experience, and no one can identify who his political base might be. A recent poll (The Hill, 6/16/23) gave Kennedy the support of 15% of Democratic primary voters, with 21% of respondents having a positive view of him. CNN research (press release, 5/25/23) found that the biggest driver of support for RFK Jr. is the name “Kennedy.”

Rolling Stone (6/23/23): Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential bid ” is awash in support from Donald Trump’s allies in MAGA World, conservative media, and some of the Republican-donor elite.”

It’s a big deal to challenge an incumbent president in the primary—Kennedy’s other uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, tried and failed in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. But unlike his uncle, Robert lacks the progressive bona fides that gave Ted a reputation as a liberal lion.

Naomi Klein (Guardian, 6/14/23) documented that Robert Kennedy has turned against some of his own policies on fighting climate change, has embraced free-market solutions on the environment, and is enthusiastically supportive of the Israeli government. The founders of Heal the Divide, a new Kennedy Super PAC, “have a deeply pro–Donald Trump bent—including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos and Herschel Walker” (Rolling Stone, 6/23/23).

That’s on top of the big business support behind RFK Jr. that betrays his populist facade. Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is backing Kennedy (The Hill, 6/5/23), while venture capitalists/podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya are planning to hold a Bay Area fundraiser for him (Axios, 6/8/23). CNBC (6/21/23) reported that Kennedy “has another wealthy backer in his corner: veteran Wall Street executive Omeed Malik.”

Musk, crypto and Reaganism

Accordingly, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is doing its best to keep Kennedy’s ambitions afloat. Despite their reputation for supporting Republicans, Murdoch’s outlets have also seen conservative Democrats in primaries as vehicles for pushing the general political center of gravity to the right (FAIR.org, 3/12/21, 7/16/21).

Robert Kennedy (New York Post, 6/22/23) says, “I am not and have never been anti-vaccine”—but he’s also said of vaccination (Science-Based Medicine, 6/12/23), “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

For starters, Murdoch’s New York Post (6/22/23) featured a long interview with Kennedy that mostly acted as campaign public relations. It started off with a rejection of the label “anti-vaccine,” a common trick Kennedy uses that Klein debunks in her Guardian article. He claims that he is carrying on the liberal torch of his father and uncle, but everything he says sounds to the right of Richard Nixon.

“I like Elon Musk because he supports freedom of speech,” Kennedy said, playing to Musk’s right-wing following. The Post doesn’t challenge this statement with the fact that Twitter under Musk’s watch “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments” (El Pais, 5/24/23), or that Musk is also known for silencing and attempting to silence critics of Tesla (CNBC, 6/15/23; Yahoo! Finance, 6/22/23) and left-wing activists (Intercept, 11/29/23).

Kennedy also gave an approving nod to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency—a favored commodity among conservatives—and said his administration would sparingly regulate crypto, even though crypto mining has enormously detrimental environmental impacts.

Kennedy has been a more vocal advocate for the shady asset market elsewhere, as he “delivered a keynote address at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami this year” (The Street, 5/26/23). He vowed to defend “the self-custody of Bitcoin,” and “said he would prevent Bitcoin from being regulated as a security.”

His broader economic message to the Post was pure Reaganism: “I will not raise the tax burden on Americans.” While that line sounds ecumenical, the subtext for a conservative media audience is that he will not address the chronic underpayment of taxes by the richest in order to fund services for the rest of us.

Crediting Trump

Kennedy told Fox (6/8/23) that Biden administration “policies were being dictated not because they made sense, but because they were antithetical to what Donald Trump had said.”

Fox News (6/8/23) said Kennedy

believes President Trump deserves some credit for his immigration policy platform… Kennedy also said the pattern of President Biden and top Democrats reversing one Trump policy after another may have reached the point of “pettiness” versus empirical benefit.

The Murdoch-owned network (6/7/23, 6/7/23, 6/8/23) trumpeted Kennedy’s border visit, as he attacked Biden’s supposedly pro-immigration policies from the right: “It is not anti-immigrant bigotry to demand an immigration system that keeps out criminals.”

The network reached out to celebrities big and small, like Alicia Silverstone (6/8/23) and Aaron Rodgers (6/21/23), to prop up Kennedy’s legitimacy. Fox News host Geraldo Rivera (6/3/23) invoked his pedigree as impeachable: “The Kennedys are the epitome of American royalty. They have that casual elegance, that kind of preppy chic. They are so admirable in so many ways.”

The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s more respectable outlet, has offered more skepticism (6/22/23) of Kennedy than the Post or Fox, but still insists (5/30/23) that he’s a strong contender and that Biden must prepare for him. And the Journal tried to tone down his extremism, framing it as some sort of battle cry of the Little Guy, with Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (6/25/23) blaming media favoritism toward “progressive beliefs” and “disparate treatment” of right-wing claims for his rising appeal. (Finley claimed preposterously that “most of his claims about vaccine dangers aren’t any kookier than those that he and his green allies have made about fossil fuels.”)

Happy vehicles

For the Washington Free Beacon (5/19/23), Kennedy getting “about 20% support” demonstrated his “surprising strength in the polls among Democrats.” Yet when 20% of Republican respondents picked Paul Ryan over Trump in a hypothetical 2020 primary challenge (The Hill, 11/20/18), that showed that “GOP voters would overwhelmingly support [Trump] against several intraparty rivals.”
Of course, other right-wing outlets are happy to serve as vehicles for someone running as a kind of MAGA Democrat. The Federalist (6/20/23) liked his anti-vaccine campaign, and the Washington Beacon (5/19/23) chided “establishment Democrats and left-wing publications” who “ridiculed Kennedy’s first round of good polling.” Kennedy sat for a friendly interview with self-consciously contrarian UnHerd (5/3/23), although the interviewer expressed concern that Kennedy’s rhetoric is “divisive.”

But the Murdoch outlets carry a lot of weight in US politics. And these outlets—which have complained about a parade of wokeness, liberal district attorneys and socialist lawmakers—are clearly worried that the left flank of the Democratic Party has become too emboldened. At the same time, Murdoch’s empire wants to do anything it can to weaken Biden’s chances for reelection.

For Fox News and the New York Post, lifting up RFK Jr., who is buoyed by nothing more than the good luck of being born a Kennedy, challenges Biden from the right. Even if Biden wins the primary, and the general election, these outlets have done their part to keep the US political discourse moving toward market capitalism.

The post Boosting RFK Jr., Murdoch Pushes 2024 Rightward appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ – CounterSpin interview with Nancy Altman on GOP’s Social Security assault

Janine Jackson interviewed Social Security Works’ Nancy Altman about the latest Republican attack on Social Security, for the June 23, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230623Altman.mp3

New York Times (1/27/88)

Janine Jackson: A piece for FAIR cited a New York Times article describing the federal budget deficit as

overwhelmingly a consequence of American military outlay and entitlement programs such as Social Security, together with the nation’s unwillingness to pay the taxes needed to finance the expenditures.

Here’s the thing: That scaremongering about the runaway cost and unmanageability of Social Security, the like of which you may have heard very recently, is how I introduced our next guest in 2018.

And here’s the other thing: The New York Times article cited in that piece, which was written for FAIR by veteran Times reporter John Hess, came out in 1988.

It isn’t just that corporate news media get things wrong about Social Security, it’s that they stubbornly get the same things wrong–maybe most importantly, presenting it as a contentious issue in this year’s budget battles, when in fact the fight over Social Security is an ideological one, with many on one side and few on the other, that’s been going on since the program began.

The budget blueprint released by the House Republican Study Committee last week provides a new opportunity to trot out misinformation, and a new chance to combat it.

Strong Arm Press (2018)

We’re joined now by Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and author of, among other titles, The Truth About Social Security: The Founder’s Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies, and Common Misunderstandings. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.

Nancy Altman: Thank you so much, and what you just said, in your intro, is a zombie lie, is that Social Security is adding even a penny to the deficit. So I’m so glad we’re going to have this conversation.

JJ: Let’s start right there. I keep reading, “set to be insolvent in 2033,” right? As though Social Security is a building on fire.

So let’s leap right into those myths, because I know that some folks are going to say: “Oh, so you’re saying there’s no problem. You’re saying that Social Security doesn’t require any support.”

There’s so much misunderstanding about what the questions actually are, and then how we might respond to them. So have at it.

NA: I think you’re exactly right to talk about it: Is this a building on fire, or is it, down the road, you have to put your children through college, so you got to think about putting aside some money for their college education?

I think it’s much closer to the latter than the former. It’s not that nothing should be done. In fact, I think the program should be expanded. I think we’re facing a retirement income crisis, and the solution is expanding Social Security.

But just to put a few of the myths to rest–and you’re exactly right, the problem is that the media keeps misreporting this over and over again.

I smiled when you talked about the 1980s, because I started working on this program in the mid-1970s. I was involved with the so-called Greenspan Commission in 1982. At that time, I was told, oh, there’s a crisis, we can’t afford this program, and all these greedy old people. And you– I was young at the time–you’re not going to get your benefits.

Well, all that happened was I aged, and now my children and grandchildren are being told they’re not going to get their benefits because I’m greedy. And all that is is the passage of time.

So here are the facts. Social Security is a defined-benefit pension plan that provides life insurance, disability insurance and retirement annuities. And it does so extremely efficiently. It spends less than a penny of every dollar it spends on administration. More than 99 cents is returned in benefits. It’s extremely efficient.

It also is extremely responsibly managed. Every year, there are about 40 actuaries of the Social Security Administration. And just like any private insurance company, they are looking at longevity and birth rates and wage growth and all kinds of factors to make sure that Social Security can always pay its benefits.

Nancy Altman: “The opponents of Social Security have latched onto this unsurprising, manageable shortfall, and talked about the building’s on fire.”

It doesn’t just project out 10 years or 20 years, but for three quarters of a century, 75 years. And whenever you project out so far, sometimes you’re going to show unintended surpluses. Sometimes you’re going to have unintended shortfalls.

And what the actuaries have been telling us is that there is a shortfall, quite manageable. It’s now about a decade away. So we’ve got plenty of time to bring in additional revenue.

If Congress were to do nothing, Social Security could still pay 75% of promised benefits, 75 cents on the dollar.

But of course, we want it to pay 100%, because these are earned benefits. And there are many proposals, including many in Congress, that restore Social Security to long-range balance.

But the opponents of Social Security have latched onto this unsurprising, manageable shortfall, and talked about the building’s on fire. And they’ve been talking this way since the program began, really.

JJ: And that’s what I want to get at, because it’s so funny the way that the proffered solution always turns out to be cuts, and yet that’s being presented as saving the program. There’s a perversity there that says, we need to burn the village to save it.

NA: Exactly. If Congress doesn’t act, there may be some cuts in the future. So let’s make the cuts now. It’s really like, wait, what? I thought we were trying to prevent the cuts.

I call it a solution in search of a problem. The solution is, we’ve got to cut benefits. But, people will say, everybody’s living longer. We’ve got to cut benefits by raising the retirement age.

And I’ll point out, well, certain people are in physically demanding jobs, certain minorities, they’re not living longer. In fact, their life expectancies are going down.

Oh well, then, we’ve got to cut benefits cause it’s unfair to them. It’s like, wait, what?

And really, what is behind this is that, from the beginning, there’s been people who have opposed Social Security. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, in a private letter to his brother, which you can find online, said that they are a tiny splinter group, their numbers are negligible, but they are stupid, he says.

They tend to be the very wealthy, who think they can just self-insure and don’t want to pay any money towards the common good. Now, they used to be quite honest, and they’d call Social Security “socialism.” The problem is that the American people appreciate what Social Security provides. And so they always lost.

Then, starting somewhere in the ’70s, their tactics changed, unless they all disappeared, and it’s hard to believe that happened; they say, “No, we love Social Security, but we can’t afford it.” And they make it a point about affordability.

Let me put the affordability question in context. Social Security currently costs about 5% of gross domestic product. At the end of this century, year 2100, it’s going to cost about 6% of gross domestic product. That’s what we’re fighting about, this 1% increase in gross domestic product.

Now, when the Covid epidemic hit, we spent more than 1% on all the ways to combat that. After the 9/11 attacks, we spent more than 1% on increasing military spending.

And, in fact, if you even just look at the Baby Boom, and these costs are because the Baby Boom is moving into its retirement years, and there was a baby bust following up and so forth, that when the Baby Boomers hit kindergarten, we spent more than 1% of GDP on increased classrooms and hiring teachers and so forth.

And those three, the Covid, the 9/11 and even Baby Boomers entering kindergarten, were surprises to policy makers. This was not a surprise.

JJ: We’re hearing how we can’t afford this and we can’t afford that. And you have to ask, cui bono, because certainly even in this Republican Study Committee plan, not everyone is tightening their belt. Not everyone is rallying around and suffering together. There are some folks who are spared from what we’re being told is meant to be a shared social cost.

Common Dreams (6/15/23)

NA: And in fact, not even are they spared, they’re benefiting. The same Republican Study Committee budget, which calls for increasing the retirement age, slashing middle-class benefits, privatizing Medicare, transforming it into a premium support, which is just giving people a coupon and telling them to go out on the market–at the same time that they’re really hitting the middle class and working class, they’re giving tax cuts to billionaires. That makes no sense.

If you look at how people did during the worst part of the Covid pandemic, so many people lost income, lost jobs, lost their lives, but the billionaires increased their wealth substantially.

So there’s no question that there are ways and there are proposals out there that are not undue burdens to anyone. They require the very wealthiest, those earning millions and billions of dollars, to pay what I would consider their fair share, and at the same time expand benefits.

But what the Republican Study Committee, which makes up about 70% of the House Republicans, and what Republicans in the Senate also are calling for, is exactly what you’re saying: belt tightening for those who are middle class and working class, and big gifts to those who are the wealthiest.

And that makes absolutely no sense, and is not what the American people want. So there’s a real debate going on, but one side, 80% of the American people favor, which is no cuts and let’s expand and make the wealthy pay more.

And the other side, which is, let’s go behind closed doors and cut benefits, but not have our fingerprints on them. That’s what makes the debate so hard, because it’s got to be transparent for everyone to see.

JJ: I want to point out one thing, that you have also indicated, because media and many people often shorthand Social Security with “benefits for seniors” or “programs for the elderly.” And I just want us to tip the fact that Social Security deeply impacts the lives of many disabled people as well, and they’re often erased in media debates. But certainly if this budget were to go forward, disabled people would really feel the brunt.

NA: First of all, I’m so glad you raised that, because Social Security is also the nation’s largest children’s program; because of the survivor benefits and the family benefits, more children benefit from Social Security. The benefits are by no means generous, but they are extremely important when a breadwinner dies or becomes so disabled that they can no longer work.

And you’re exactly right that disability insurance is an extremely important part of the program. And the Republican Study Committee really goes after the disability insurance part, makes it harder to get benefits, makes it harder to keep getting those benefits. It is really hostile to that group. So I’m so glad you raised that.

And the point is that Social Security, one of the many reasons I think it’s so popular, it really embodies basic American values. And it is this idea of, we’re united, we all contribute. The idea is that it’s insurance against the loss of wages. You don’t get benefits unless there’s a work record. But if you’re 30 years old and you walk out in the street and get hit by a truck, God forbid, and can no longer work again, you get benefits for the remainder of your life.

If you have young children and instead of just becoming disabled, you are killed, your children will get benefits until age 18. Now they used to get them until 22, and many of us think that should be restored, or even higher. Normally parents will help their children finance their college educations, but if the parent is gone, though, then the rest of us step in.

So you’re exactly right that this is a program that benefits all of us, and even indirectly–many children receive benefits directly, but they also often live in families where they’re living with their grandparent, their grandparents, getting Social Security. It really is a family program, and I think that’s part of the reason it’s so well-supported.

New Press (2021)

JJ: Just finally, and briefly, “Social Security Works” is the name of the group. It’s the title of the book you co-authored with Eric Kingson. And I really like that verb there: It works. It works to do, as you’re just saying, real things for real people.

And it’s countering this idea that you get every time you pick up the paper, which is that it’s broken, that Social Security is broken or failing or struggling.

And I know it’s just words, but it seems so crucial, because in news media, Social Security is a problem, but actually Social Security is a program that works that we just need to keep working.

NA: Exactly. And in fact, I consider it even more than that. I consider it a solution. Private pensions have largely, in the private sector, disappeared. 401Ks have proven inadequate for most people, other than the very wealthy.

The one part of our retirement income system that does work is Social Security. It’s the most universal. It’s portable from job to job. It’s very fair in its distribution. It’s extremely efficient. Its one shortcoming is that its benefits are too low, which is why we need to expand it.

But you’re exactly right. There’s an elite media view that is very hard to shake. As you say, you could go back decades, and you’ll see the same articles. Somehow, it’s a problem, it’s a drain, it’s unaffordable, it’s this, it’s that. When, actually, it’s extremely efficient. It works extremely well. Indeed, it’s a solution. We should build on it, because it works so well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nancy Altman from Social Security Works. They’re online at SocialSecurityWorks.org. Nancy Altman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NA: Thank you so much for having me.

The post ‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.