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  • NYT Says More Worker Suffering Needed to Bring Inflation Down

     

    Good news: Inflation is down! Way down, actually: It came in at 4% in May, after peaking at just over 9% last summer.

    But don’t get too excited. The New York Times is here to tell you that inflation is still a problem, and more suffering for the working class is the solution.

    In a recent episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (6/20/23), reporter Jeanna Smialek argued that the Fed may have more work cut out for itself. Discussing why inflation declined over the past year, she noted that it’s mostly the result of supply issues resolving. But inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% target:

    The part of inflation we’re worried about now is the part that’s not going to come down just because of a return to normal or because of luck, but the part that is going to require Fed policy.

    In other words, only the Fed can tame inflation.

    ‘Standard of living…has to decline’

    Fed Chair Paul Volcker

    Fed chair Paul Volcker: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline.”

    In the standard account, this is a key lesson of the last major period of high inflation that the US faced. Referred to as the Great Inflation, this era lasted from 1965 through 1982, and was finally brought to an end by Fed chair Paul Volcker.

    After assuming leadership of the Federal Reserve in 1979, Volcker announced, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline.” He then proceeded to curb inflation through a brutal campaign against the working class.

    The Volcker approach was, of course, not the only available method for slowing price increases. As the progressive economist James Galbraith (Medium, 6/17/23) wrote recently, the US has dealt with inflation differently in the past. During World War II, for instance, the government established the Office of Price Administration, which kept inflation in check through price controls (Guardian, 12/29/21).

    These were “abolished…in 1946, over popular protest,” and were later intellectually repudiated by economists and policymakers in favor of anti-government and pro-business ideology. As Galbraith puts it, “From this, the entire charade of dumping responsibility for ‘fighting inflation’ on the central bank emerges.”

    ‘Springing for that Jacuzzi’

    NYT: Powell Admires Paul Volcker. He May Have to Act Like Him.

    Volcker is “best remembered for waging an aggressive—and painful—assault on the swift price increases that plagued America in the early 1980s,” writes the New York Times (3/14/22). “The approach worked.”

    This charade has continued for decades, and has taken on renewed force in the last couple of years in the face of high inflation, with little to no pushback from corporate media. As current Fed chair Jerome Powell prepared for a new war on inflation in the spring of 2022, for instance, the Times (3/14/22) ran the headline: “Powell Admires Paul Volcker. He May Have to Act Like Him.”

    The piece, by Smialek, acknowledged that a Fed campaign against inflation comes with risks, but it gave Volcker the final word:

    Maintaining confidence that a dollar will be able to buy tomorrow what it can today “is a fundamental responsibility of monetary policy,” Mr. Volcker wrote in his 2018 memoir. “Once lost, the consequences can be severe and stability hard to restore.”

    Nowhere in the article was there any questioning of the idea that the Fed should be at the helm of inflation-fighting—that perhaps there’s an alternative, one less painful for the majority of the country. Instead, the unspoken assumption is that this is all the Fed’s responsibility. But that’s an assumption, a highly ideological one, not an unbending law of nature.

    Now, more than a year into the Fed’s campaign of interest rate hikes, the Times is continuing with the reportorial line that the Fed must be the one to bring down inflation. According to this line of reasoning, inflation must be tamed at the cost of lower incomes. That is the main channel through which Fed policy (i.e., interest rate hikes) works.

    Smialek knows this. She may choose to obscure the class dynamics of this approach by talking (6/20/23) about how rate hikes make people less “comfortable springing for that Jacuzzi bathtub and taking on the slightly higher rent that comes alongside it.” (You know, the classic dilemma faced by low-wage workers, who are disproportionately hit by rate hikes.) But, at the end of the day, she does recognize that raising rates is about reducing people’s incomes and thus their spending power. She just doesn’t seem to have an issue with that; it’s a necessary cost of the inflation-fighting business.

    ‘Not as good as 2%’

    NYT: Is the Inflation Battle Won? Not Yet.

    The good news, for the New York Times (6/21/23) is that “there are early signs that a labor market slowdown is underway…. Jobless claims have climbed in recent weeks.”  The bad news: “Hiring has remained robust, and the unemployment rate low.”

    And she wants everyone to know that, if we’re really serious about taming inflation, more could be required. Towards the end of the podcast, Daily host Michael Barbaro asked Smialek:

    Inflation is down overall quite a bit. But we’ve learned that a lot of it—the stuff we feel the most—isn’t truly the result of Fed policy, which is an important thing to understand…. But, Jeanna, if I’m a consumer, how much do I really care about what caused this relatively positive situation?…. Aren’t I just pretty happy that all of this stuff has happened?

    Smialek’s response:

    Sure. And, reasonably, you would be. But if you’re a consumer, you also don’t want this to be temporary. And 4% inflation is better than 9%, but it’s still not as good as 2%, which is what it used to be. So I think that that’s the thing to keep in mind.

    Interest rate hikes are the implied method for getting inflation back down to 2%, which is the Fed’s target level. But other commentators have a very different take on what remains to be done to contain inflation. Galbraith (Medium, 6/17/23), for one, sees historically high profit margins as the remaining issue that could keep inflation persistently elevated. The solution here, in his view, is strategic price controls. These would cap prices charged by companies in particular industries, taking away the companies’ ability to keep pushing prices up at rapid speed and instead forcing them “to focus, as they should, on quality and quantity.”

    Smialek doesn’t so much as mention this alternative approach. In a follow-up article (6/21/23) the day after the podcast, she instead focused on the question of how much interest rates will have to raise unemployment to bring inflation down to the 2% target. She ended the piece by quoting Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Obama adviser, who asserted, “People have been so crazily premature to keep declaring victory on inflation.”

    Just two paragraphs earlier, Furman had suggested that unemployment (the Fed’s favorite tool for lowering incomes and slowing price increases) might need to reach 10% to tame inflation. Whether it would be irresponsible to throw something like 10 million people out of work so that a loaf of bread costs $2.55 next year rather than $2.60 was not questioned.

    An arbitrary target

    Inflation During the 1980s

    As Neil Irwin wrote for the New York Times (12/21/14) almost a decade ago in an article about the origins of the 2% inflation target, “Inflation…hovered in the range of 3 to 4% through the mid-1980s, hardly remembered as an economic nightmare.” More specifically, in the wake of the Fed’s aggressive anti-inflation campaign in the early 1980s, inflation stabilized at 3.7% from 1983 through 1985, and registered an average level of 3.6% from 1983 through the end of the decade. (Author’s calculations based on data from the St. Louis Fed.)

    Even more glaring is that Smialek never once acknowledged, in the podcast or the follow-up article, that the 2% target is largely arbitrary, not based in economic law. Or that, when Volcker tamed inflation, he stabilized it at close to 4%, not 2%.

    Also not mentioned: Very mainstream economists, including the Times’ own Paul Krugman, have said recently that 2% is actually too low, and that a bit more inflation would be preferable (Financial Times, 11/28/22; New York Times, 12/2/22). Krugman, in fact, wrote decades ago:

    One of the dirty little secrets of economic analysis is that even though inflation is universally regarded as a terrible scourge, efforts to measure its costs come up with embarrassingly small numbers.

    For instance, studies have found that inflation doesn’t start to have a negative impact on growth until it is well above 4%.

    From Smialek’s article and her podcast appearance, you would have no idea about any of this. But you would have the strong impression that a major jump in unemployment could be required to get the situation under control.

    The effect, if not the goal, of this style of reporting is to narrow the conversation and create the appearance that there is no alternative to what the Federal Reserve is doing. In the Times’ narrative, inflation is a problem that must be tackled, and the only way to do so is through lowering incomes and potentially jacking up unemployment.

    This narrative may appeal to the paper’s upper-class readership, who are generally insulated from the worst effects of rate hikes. For the poor and working class, a deeper understanding of inflation might be welcome—and for people looking for an understanding of how economic policies affect different groups, it’s necessary.

    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 Says More Worker Suffering Needed to Bring Inflation Down appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘What the Government Permits You to Know—That’s Not a Democracy’ – CounterSpin revisits interviews with Daniel Ellsberg

     

    CounterSpin interviewed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg many times over the years; in the wake of Ellsberg’s recent death, Janine Jackson revisited some of those interviews for the June 23, 2023, episode. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230623Ellsberg.mp3

     

    NYT: Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92

    New York Times (6/16/23)

    Janine Jackson: Daniel Ellsberg died June 16, aged 92. The New York Times obituary, by Robert D. McFadden, used its first establishing sentence to reference Ellsberg’s “sobbing anti-war epiphany on a bathroom floor.” And it ended that lead with the statement that “the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.”

    You don’t have to be a linguist to sense the suggestion that the disclosure did the plunging, and not the crimes themselves.

    Elite media’s respectful obituaries of Ellsberg have had something just a bit off—allowing, if not encouraging, the idea that Ellsberg somehow, however well-intentioned, made a bad thing worse.

    It’s anyone’s guess how elite media square their supposed honoring of Ellsberg with their hagiography of undying goblin Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg, based on the exact actions the press now suggest they salute, the “most dangerous man in America.”

    And certainly don’t ask how their respect for Ellsberg relates to their collective sniffing at living whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.

    Corporate media would like you to glide past their not-coherent stance on whistleblowers, how they can accept trophies for printing their revelations while consigning them to invisibility, and worse, for revealing them.

    Daniel Ellsberg had questions about that, and we should keep those questions alive.

    Here’s Daniel Ellsberg on CounterSpin in September 2009. Host Peter Hart asked if having decided to risk his career and his life, he had tried going through political channels, and was it the blockage there that sent him to the press?

    Time: Pentagon Papers: The Secret War

    Time (6/28/71)

    Daniel Ellsberg: That is why I went to the press. That was a mistake on my part, in a way, because I should have done that right from the beginning.

    But it seemed to me that congressional hearings were called for on this, in part because the Pentagon Papers don’t entirely speak for themselves, or don’t tell the whole story, in the sense that what’s written down, even in top-secret form and in eyes-only memos and so forth, doesn’t represent, by any means, the whole truth that’s in the minds of the people who signed those reports. You really have to have interviews, or you have to talk to these people.

    A lot of it doesn’t get written down, precisely because it might leak—and I don’t mean leak to the public; it might leak to the other service, or to Congress, or to people who controlled your budget…the real enemies, in some ways. So a lot of that doesn’t get written down at all.

    I’m very aware, in other words, of the limitations of documents, even when it’s as extensive as the Pentagon Papers.

    What I didn’t realize was that Congress just wasn’t going to grab that issue, perhaps even then, unless the public created a fire there, and there was a public interest.

    I think Neil Sheehan, for example, was nervous, as late as 1971, in the spring, that I would insist on getting this material out first through Congress. And he felt that wouldn’t be the most effective way to do it, and he was right about that. Now, I would’ve deferred to that if he’d made it clear at the point.

    But as it was, when the Pentagon Papers came out, on June 13, ’71, I was still in the process of trying to encourage Senator Gravel, or before him, Pete McCloskey of the House, Senator Mathias. I’d finally given up on Senator McGovern at that point, and Senator Fulbright.

    My advice right now, for people who feel that we’re heading toward an abyss, for example, in Afghanistan, and if they know—I feel sure people do know in the Pentagon—that the 45,000 we’ve heard as the upper limit of what General McChrystal may ask for is by no means the ceiling on the numbers that the president has heard.

    That has not leaked to the public at all. No official, not even on anonymous sources, have said what I’m sure is being discussed right now in the Pentagon.

    JJ: Let’s talk more about the current landscape, because certainly, for those who did not live through the history of the Vietnam War, I think they would be very struck by the press’s reaction at the time.

    Seventeen papers picked up parts of the Pentagon Papers. It was featured on the evening newscasts for weeks. And I think, for many people, it would be almost impossible to imagine the media system of today reacting in quite the same way to a story of that magnitude. What do you think?

    Attorney General John Mitchell with Richard Nixon

    Attorney General John Mitchell with President Richard Nixon

    DE: Nixon, of course, created what could be called a firestorm on that one, for about a month, by two unprecedented actions, mainly the first—it was the first injunction in our history. The First Amendment was actually written to prevent another Peter Zenger case, in the colonial administration, of prior restraint, of stopping a newspaper from actually printing news, for any grounds whatever.

    And so no one had ever tried to do that before. In fact, when Nixon, on the tapes, we hear him asking John Mitchell, who wants an injunction, have we done this before? Mitchell says, oh, sure, lots of times. Which shows what you get when you make your campaign manager your attorney general. He was a bond lawyer, basically. So that was an incredible error on his part.

    Well, by the injunction, challenging the press on this, that created the story.

    Had I not had enough copies—which I’d made at my wife’s behest, actually, to get on with it, and to make enough copies so that the FBI couldn’t get all my copies away from me—that gave me extra copies, so that when there was one injunction after another, which actually I had not foreseen, I had extra copies to give other newspapers.

    WaPo: Court Rules for Newspapers, 6-3

    Washington Post (7/1/71)

    So you then had an event, unprecedented, I think, not only in the press, but in any institution of any country, before or since: You had a wave of civil disobedience among major institutions, 19 newspapers, 17 after the Washington Post and the Times, defied the attorney general and the president, who were telling them that this wasn’t just an ordinary crime, they called it treason. They used the word “treason,” that it would damage our national security if they printed another page.

    And publisher after publisher, following the lead of the New York Times and the Post, which gave them a strong feeling that they were on the right track here, but they followed their own judgment and said, we don’t think this will damage the national security, whatever the president says, and they defied him.

    JJ: In 2005, CounterSpin‘s Steve Rendall talked to Ellsberg about Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, but also about the core role of whistleblowers.

    DE: To the extent that sources can be punished, as was attempted in my case—or which Vanunu experienced here—obviously the intent of that is to close down information from people who are not authorized to give it, which is to say real news, real information. Otherwise you’re left with handouts and an account of government decision-making that is simply what the government wants you to know, or permits you to know.

    Daniel Ellsberg as depicted in New York Times obit

    Daniel Ellsberg: “Journalists and the public have an extreme interest in protecting the ability of people inside the government to give information without authorization.”

    And that’s not a democracy. That’s basically, you’ve got a monarchy or a dictatorship in that respect in foreign affairs. And that’s pretty much what we would have if we had the total control over sources.

    So journalists and the public have an extreme interest in protecting the ability of people inside the government to give information without authorization. That is, information that their bosses would find embarrassing because it would reveal crimes or errors or misjudgments or lies.

    That’s mainly the kind of thing that they’re above all interested in keeping secret. And it’s what the public needs to know in order to hold them accountable and to exert any real democratic control over foreign policy.

    JJ: In an article for CounterPunch in 2006, Daniel Ellsberg said:

    I would not have thought of copying the Pentagon Papers, risking a possible lifetime in prison, without the example of thousands of young Americans who were doing everything they could to oppose a wrongful, hopeless war. They showed civic courage.

    And, Ellsberg added, “Courage is contagious.”

    The post ‘What the Government Permits You to Know—That’s Not a Democracy’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Millennials Moved Right’: NYT Cherry-Picks Data to Bolster Political Folklore

     

    NYT: Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.

    The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn (6/1/23) demonstrates how to select two data points that match your preconceived hypothesis.

    New York Times polling analyst Nate Cohn (6/1/23) claimed, “Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.”

    His piece was a rebuttal to an article last December by John Burn-Murdoch (Financial Times, 12/30/22), who argued that “Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics.” How? “Generations of voters…are no longer moving to the right as they age.”

    That “oldest rule in politics,” as Burn-Murdoch writes, or what Cohn refers to as “political folklore,” is the notion that as people age, they naturally tend to become more conservative.

    There are many ways to frame that notion, which has been attributed to several different leaders over the centuries, such as John Adams, Edmund Burke, Victor Hugo, King Oscar II of Sweden, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill. Here is one phrasing: “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.”

    ‘Not necessarily stunning’

    New York Times: Republican Voting Share in Presidential Elections, by Age

    Cohn’s initial piece (6/1/23) left out the strong shift toward the Democrats of voters born before 1960—which would have undermined his claim that “voters become more conservative as they get older.”

    Cohn referenced the truism as an explanation for his finding that three groups of millennials (those born in 1980–84, 1985–89 and 1990–94) all voted more Republican in 2020 than they did in 2012. In addition, he wrote, not only those groups, but three older cohorts of voters—those born in 1965–69, 1970–74, and 1975–79—also shifted toward the Republican Party in 2020.

    Just after presenting these figures, Cohn wrote: “It’s not necessarily a stunning finding. Political folklore has long held that voters become more conservative as they get older.”

    Well, yeah. The folklore has been around a long time. But cherry-picking data to support this preconceived notion does not a persuasive case make.

    Cohn’s analysis relied on just two data points: pre-election polls archived at the Roper Center for the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections. Cohn tried to make it seem more elaborate by noting that his analysis relied on “thousands of survey interviews.” That could mean just two polls, or an average of several polls from 2012 and 2020, which would indeed include thousands of respondents. But the limiting factor is that it’s still just two data points. Cohn excluded the 2016 presidential election, and ignored altogether any voting contests other than the two presidential elections. To call it superficial is to be kind.

    Had he compared instead, say, the 2016 election with 2020, it’s likely his conclusions would have been reversed. Biden’s popular vote margin was more than twice as large as Clinton’s, which suggests that in the interim, most age groups had either moved toward the Democratic Party or remained static.

    Clarifying the analysis

    NYT: Fox, Trump and Millennial Movement

    Asked in a follow-up column (6/14/23) if it’s just about Obama being more popular among young people than Biden, Cohn says, “With this data, it’s hard to know.” Yes, that’s the problem of only comparing two points! He does acknowledge that John Kerry in 2004 did slightly worse than Obama and slightly better than Biden with older Millennials.

    Two weeks after his millennial article, Cohn (New York Times, 6/14/23) implicitly acknowledged that the folklore he cited earlier didn’t apply to older voters. Some of his readers had asked the obvious question: How did Biden do better in 2020 than Obama in 2012 if all those cohorts of voters under 50 shifted toward the Republican Party in 2020? After all, Biden received 51.3% of the vote to Trump’s 46.8%, a 4.5 point margin. Obama won by 51.1% to 47.2%, a difference of 3.9 points.

    Lo and behold, it turns out that one factor explaining Biden’s better performance was antithetical to the conventional wisdom. Cohn explained:

    Mr. Biden fared much better than Mr. Obama among voters born before 1960—those who were at least 60 years old in 2020 or 52 in 2012. These cohorts lurched to the left between 2012 and 2016, and yet again between 2016 and 2020.

    Lurching to the left is not what that “oldest rule in politics,” or “folklore,” predicts older voters would do. Older people aren’t supposed to lose their brains as they age, and revert to having only a heart.

    How is it that Cohn did not alert the reader to that inconsistency in his original article? “Because of the scope of the article,” he wrote, “we didn’t show every age cohort.” Essentially, the left-lurching oldsters did not fit the preconceived theme like the right-sliding youngsters. So…leave them out of the analysis.

    What Cohn’s findings revealed was not some perennial pattern in American politics, but rather an unusual change over one time period—when younger voters tended to switch toward the Republican presidential candidate, and older voters were more likely to switch to the Democratic candidate. By itself, without any context, this observation hardly provides us any useful information.

    A 50-year study

    The notion that liberal young people become conservative old people is at best a vague prediction. What, after all, does it mean to be liberal or conservative?

    The underlying assumption in Cohn’s (and Burn-Murdoch’s) pieces is that the Democratic and Republican parties provide the liberal-to-conservative spectrum that undergirds the folk saying. But there are many other measures that seem more relevant to what it means to be liberal and conservative than voting choices between two dominant political parties.

    In most issues polled over 50 years,

    In most political issues polled over 50 years, opinion has trended in a progressive direction for all age cohorts (Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter/21).

    Two years ago, Michael Hout, a New York University sociologist, published a report in Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter/21) that examined US attitudes and behavior on a wide variety of measures, including questions on race, gender, sexuality and personal liberty. Data came from the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been conducting national surveys of Americans since 1972. As the news release from NYU (12/9/21) noted:

    Americans’ attitudes and behaviors have become more liberal overall in the past 50 years, and have taken a decidedly liberal tilt since the 1990s….

    Hout considered [283] variables—attitudes, beliefs and behaviors—from 1972 to 2018 and the age of the respondents by dividing them into 32 cohorts, each spaced two to three years apart. The analysis included Americans born as early as 1882 and as late as 2000.

    Overall, the data showed that each cohort is more liberal, on balance, than the one that came before it. Specifically, 62% of variables analyzed were more liberal in the more recent birth cohorts than they were in the oldest ones, relative to when a particular attitude or belief was measured by the survey; by contrast, only 5% were more conservative.

    Moreover, each cohort itself became more liberal during the studied period. Within cohorts, recent measurements—those within the last decade—were more liberal than in last three decades of the 20th century in 48% of the variables, and more conservative in only 11% (Note: The rest of the variables either had no political lean [e.g., the importance of getting along with co-workers] or did not change [e.g., views on abortion and gun control]).

    More liberal with age

    Three Generations (CC photo: lacitadelle)

    Looking at survey results over time debunks the notion that the views of each generation shifts to the right over time. (CC photo: lacitadelle)

    Perhaps the most interesting finding relating to the political folklore that people become more conservative as they age is in the observation that within cohorts—each age group of two to three years—people became more liberal over time with 48% of the questions asked, and more conservative with just 11%.

    But if Americans are becoming more liberal, why are Republicans continually competitive with Democrats? The short answer is that, as Hout notes, “many of the liberal trends in the GSS are not factors in elections.”

    Parties choose the issues they run on, avoiding those where a widespread consensus exists. Republicans no longer run (at least directly) on opposition to gay marriage, for example, given the progressive trend on this issue. Nor are most Republicans explicitly proposing racial segregation in housing or schools, or demanding that women remain in the home—all of which are issues where public opinion has moved sharply to the left.

    Along with suggesting a more expansive definition of political labels, the main value of Hout’s study is to debunk the notion that there is some inherent tendency for people to become more conservative as they age. If anything, the data suggest that over the previous half century, most Americans have become more liberal with age—at least as measured by the many attitudes, beliefs and behaviors surveyed by the GSS.

    No one knows if that trend might change over the next 50 years. But one thing is for certain: It’s time to put that old folklore to rest.

    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 ‘Millennials Moved Right’: NYT Cherry-Picks Data to Bolster Political Folklore appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • WSJ Attacks Antitrust Champion Lina Khan Every 11 Days Since FTC Appointment

     

    WSJ: The Many Abuses of Lina Khan’s FTC

    Among Khan’s “many abuses” (Wall Street Journal, 2/14/23): She hasn’t recused herself from decisions involving Facebook even though she has expressed the opinion that Facebook is too big.

    One important way to get a finger on the pulse of the US power elite is to pay attention to the business press. The Wall Street Journal, the US’s top-circulation newspaper,  is well-known as the voice of the financial establishment. In the Biden years, one of its ongoing obsessions is publishing screeds against Lina Khan, chair of the president’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

    The American Economic Liberties Project is currently tracking Journal articles that mention the FTC chair with a new tool called the “Wall Street Grumble.” These range from full-length attacks on Khan to sentence-long side-swipes. By AELP’s count, the Journal has published an attack on Lina Khan once every 11 days. As AELP notes:

    The Journal also regularly publishes pieces that insert Chair Khan into seemingly unrelated or tangential issues, including blaming her for last year’s baby formula crisis, urging the Congressional China Select Committee to investigate her efforts to hold Big Tech monopolies accountable, and suggesting that she supports the World Economic Forum’s “No Grow” proponents.

    For example, after the FTC decided to block the merger between medical distributor company Illumina and medical testing company Grail, a Journal op-ed declared (4/27/23): “Lina Khan Blocks Cancer Cures.” Grail does not in fact cure cancer, nor would blocking the merger bar its technology from the market. The FTC challenged it on the grounds that since Grail’s technology requires Illumina’s systems to function, the merger could prevent similar technologies under development from competing.

    Here is a small sample of other sensational headlines from the Journal:

    • “The FTC’s Antitrust Collusion” (2/23/23)
    • “Lina Khan’s Non-Compete Favor to Big Labor” (1/8/23
    • “The Many Abuses of Lina Khan’s FTC” (2/14/23)
    • “Lina Kahn Is Icarus at the FTC” (7/13/21)
    • “Lina Khan’s Power Grab at the FTC” (7/5/21)
    • “‘Hipster’ Antitrust Goes Beltway at the FTC” (1/17/23)

    ‘Khan is effective’

    WSJ: Lina Khan’s Power Grab at the FTC

    By “power grab,” the Journal (7/5/21) means that Khan recognizes that competition is about more than just price—even if Republicans don’t.

    David Dayen is the editor of the American Prospect, one of the few DC-focused magazines that regularly covers the obscure regulatory fights that shape corporate America. He told FAIR that he hasn’t seen a regulatory official endure this level of right-wing backlash in 50 years. The last time, he said, the target was Michael Pertschuk, the FTC chair under Jimmy Carter. As with Khan, Pertschuk effectively wielded the tools of government against corporate power. Dayen says the coincidence “says something about how the business community fears a muscular presence at that agency.”

    Khan provoked discussion as a law student with her famous law review note, “The Amazon Antitrust Paradox” (Yale Law Journal, 1/17), which outlined how lax enforcement of antitrust laws allowed behemoths like Amazon to dominate the economy and stifle competition. While size and market power were the original markers of a monopoly, Khan argued, since the 1980s, the standard for anti-competitive behavior has focused on “consumer welfare.” This has been narrowly interpreted to mean lower prices for consumers, while the competitiveness of the market, quality of products, effects on choice and other important impacts on the consumer experience are omitted from analysis.

    Limited antitrust enforcement often fails on these narrower grounds as well (firms without a competitor usually increase prices over the long term—as, indeed, Amazon has, as it’s consolidated market share). But this reinterpretation of antitrust as being just about consumer prices has allowed courts to ignore obvious anti-competitive mergers, and has allowed our economy to consolidate into a few big players.

    Khan’s return to tradition marked a paradigm shift in antitrust discourse. She continued to make waves when Biden appointed her to chair the Federal Trade Commission, one of the most important bodies for antitrust enforcement. Kahn’s more aggressive stance against big business has elicited retaliation, in the form of a public campaign against her in the biggest US paper. “I think the crusade indicates that Lina Khan is effective, and corporate America doesn’t want that effectiveness to spread,” said Dayen.

    Antitrust vs. democracy 

    While it doesn’t often grab headlines, corporate consolidation looms large over many problems facing Americans today. As Dayen wrote in his 2020 book Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power:

    WSJ: Lina Khan Is Icarus at the FTC

    The Wall Street Journal (7/13/21) is Ahab in the editorial office.

    There are four major airlines, four major commercial banks, four major companies that deliver phone, wireless, cable and internet services. One company controls most web search; one company controls most social media; one company controls about half of all e-commerce. Handfuls of firms dominate virtually every aspect of food and agricultural production, media, military equipment, medical supply and regional hospital management.

    When enormous chunks of every industry are controlled by a small number of firms who increasingly dominate the government and its policy, these companies and their shareholders are effectively an unaccountable oligarchy.

    While the Biden era is full of gloomy headlines about the state of the country, the world of antitrust is one of the few areas of the government where serious positive developments are being reported. After lobbying from progressive groups, the administration began making appointments that signaled a serious intention to revive the government’s antitrust activity. His first summer in office, Biden signed a sweeping executive order designed by anti-monopoly professor Tim Wu. The order outlined 72 different actions that would reorient stagnant regulatory bodies to promote competition.

    In addition to Khan and Wu (who has since left government), Biden hired antitrust lawyers like Jonathan Kanter who are considered part of the “New Brandeisian” movement—named for Progressive Era anti-monopoly Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

    Khan’s FTC is taking on major issues like anti-worker noncompete agreements, personal data collection and commercial surveillance. With Kanter at the DoJ, the government has successfully blocked the merger between publishing giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. In the background, lawsuits against Big Tech companies are making their way through state and federal courts across the country, some aimed at reversing some of the enormous number of Silicon Valley mergers and breaking up monopolistic online platforms.

    Dayen suggests that effects of the New Brandeisians may be rubbing off on other departments, citing the recent hiring of Jen Howard at the Department of Transportation. Even a modest increase of antitrust activity causes massive ripples through corporate America, as the threat of enforcement deters anti-competitive activity.

    The attacks from the business press demonstrate that corporate America is used to having a government that refuses to govern. As Dayen says, the shift “scares the living daylights out of the interests represented at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The fear is palpable with each hastily written op-ed.”

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    FEATURED IMAGE: American Economic Liberties Project

    The post WSJ Attacks Antitrust Champion Lina Khan Every 11 Days Since FTC Appointment appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Nancy Altman on GOP Social Security Attack, Daniel Ellsberg Revisited

          CounterSpin230623.mp3

     

    Republicans

    New Republic (6/14/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: 70% of House Republicans belong to the Republican Study Committee, which just released a budget that calls for curtailing programs supporting racial equity and LGBTQ rights, natch—and also for increased cuts and access hurdles for Social Security and Medicare. It’s a tale as old as time, how some people want to take resources explicitly designated for seniors and disabled people and funnel them to rich people, in supposed service of “saving” those popular social programs. We’ve been asking for debunking of that storyline for years now from Nancy Altman, president of the group Social Security Works, and author of books, including The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble. We’ll get some more debunking this week, because when it comes to Social Security, it seems everything old will always be new again.

          CounterSpin230623Altman.mp3

     

    Daniel Ellsberg

    Daniel Ellsberg (CC photo: Christopher Michel)

    Also on the show: Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died last week at the age of 92, and elite media did that thing they do, where they sort of honor someone they discredited in life, burnishing their own reputation as truth-tellers while still somehow dishonoring the practice of truth-telling—of the sort that afflicts the comfortable. CounterSpin spoke with Ellsberg many times over the years. We hear just some of those conversations this week on the show.

          CounterSpin230623Ellsberg.mp3

     

    The post Nancy Altman on GOP Social Security Attack, Daniel Ellsberg Revisited appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • As Venezuela Mends Ties With Latin Neighbors, Western Media Turn Up the Propaganda

     

    Venezuela’s Maduro government has slowly and steadily regained its diplomatic standing in recent years, overcoming US endeavors to turn the country into a pariah state as part of its regime-change efforts.

    WaPo: Brazil’s Lula promised to save democracy. Why is he embracing Maduro?

    Reading coverage of Venezuela in outlets like the Washington Post (5/30/23), it’s good to remind yourself that Nicolás Maduro is president because he got the most votes.

    Nevertheless, Washington remains hell-bent on ousting the democratically elected Venezuelan authorities, and has kept its deadly sanctions program virtually intact. And Western media, which have cheered coup attempts at every step of the way (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 5/2/22, 6/4/21, 4/15/20, 1/22/20), remain committed to endorsing US policies to the bitter end.

    This commitment was on full display recently when President Nicolás Maduro was hosted by Brazilian President Lula da Silva, in a major blow against the campaign to isolate Venezuela. Lula added insult to injury by condemning what he called the “narrative” of authoritarianism and lack of democracy that had been built around Venezuela to justify sanctions and regime change.

    The Western media establishment’s initial reaction was straight from the five stages of grief. The New York Times, with its unenviable Venezuela reporting record (FAIR.org, 3/26/19, 5/24/19), was in denial, not reporting on the meeting at all. The Financial Times (6/4/23) had a depressed tone, citing the fading hopes of a return to”free and fair elections” in the wake of the Brasilia meeting. The Washington Post (5/30/23) flared in anger, claiming that by hosting Maduro, Lula had betrayed his promise to “save democracy.”

    The reporting around the latest developments saw corporate pundits showcasing a full array of journalistic con artistry to defend their “narrative,” including dubious sources, inaccurate conclusions and dishonest context.

    Undemocratic references

    Corporate media’s effort to dismiss Maduro’s legitimacy is heavily built around the use of negative labels. For example, “authoritarian” appears almost like an auto-fill suggestion at this point, given its prevalence (Financial Times, 6/4/23; BBC, 5/30/23; Reuters, 5/29/23; AP, 5/30/23; Washington Post, 5/30/23; Bloomberg, 5/31/23). Outlets like the Economist (6/1/23) and the Miami Herald (6/3/23) go straight to “dictator.”

    Economist: Lula cosies up to Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat

    The Economist (6/1/23) countered Lula’s defense of Maduro by pointing out that Venezuelan president “in 2020 had a $15 million bounty placed upon him by the United States government for ‘narco-terrorism’”—as though Donald Trump putting prices on foreign leaders’ heads discredits anyone but the United States.

    Another dishonest hallmark is casting aspersions on Maduro’s 2018 reelection, with a varied array of labels that go from “disputed” (Financial Times, 6/4/23) and “contested” (BBC, 5/30/23) to “condemned/regarded as a sham” (Le Monde, 5/30/23; Bloomberg, 5/29/23), all the way to “viewed/declared as fraudulent” (Washington Post, 5/30/23; Economist, 6/1/23). We have tackled the unsubstantiated “fraud” claims in previous posts (FAIR.org, 1/27/21, 5/2/22, 1/11/23).

    To challenge Maduro’s recognition as Venezuela’s democratically legitimate leader, Western outlets were willing to platform the most undemocratic voices. Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, was used as a yardstick on Maduro’s legitimacy. Numerous sources repeated that the far-right leader had “banned” the Venezuelan president from entering the country (BBC, 5/30/23; Reuters, 5/29/23; Al Jazeera, 5/29/23; AP, 5/29/23).

    This framing is odd, given that Venezuela closed its border with Brazil in February 2019, six months before Bolsonaro’s “ban,” in anticipation of a large-scale operation to violate Venezuelan territory. It’s not as though Maduro had been eager, anyhow, to visit a country that didn’t recognize his government—to attend the Rio Carnival, maybe?

    What makes it more remarkable is that many of the same outlets have previously described Bolsonaro as a threat to democracy, given his attacks against the country’s elections and his supporters mimicking the “January 6” playbook in the Brazilian capital (Washington Post, 9/30/22; Financial Times, 9/28/21; BBC, 8/12/22).

    The Washington Post (5/30/23) saw no issue in quoting Bolsonaro’s son, a Brazilian senator, despite the numerous accusations of corruption against Flávio Bolsonaro, and Brazil’s electoral authorities fining him for spreading fake news in the 2022 presidential race.

    And if there is a character with arguably worse democratic credentials than the Bolsonaro clan, that is former judge and Bolsonaro Justice Minister Sergio Moro. His leading role in the “Operation Car Wash” judicial proceedings has been publicly exposed as unethical and politically motivated, designed to put Lula under arrest and bar him from running in 2018. Still, a number of outlets were happy to simply quote him as an “opposition senator,” who criticized Lula for “hosting a dictator” (BBC Mundo, 5/30/23; Al Jazeera, 5/29/23; Le Monde, 5/30/23, AFP, 5/29/23)

    Marred journalism

    AP: Brazilian president’s support of Venezuela’s leader mars unity at South America summit

    North American readers would have no way of knowing from this AP article (5/30/23) that one of the two featured critics of Lula—Chilean President Gabriel Boric—joined Lula’s call for an end to US sanctions against Venezuela.

    Lula’s meeting and joint presser with Maduro were followed by a summit of South American presidents in Brasilia the next day, the first of its kind in many years, with the goal of kickstarting the regional integration agenda.

    Corporate pundits were ready to use Maduro’s presence and Lula’s statements to spin and downplay the meeting, claiming that they had “marred the unity” (AP, 5/30/23), “proven divisive” (AFP, 5/31/23), “clouded the summit” (Bloomberg, 5/30/23) or caused “divergent views” (Reuters, 5/30/23).

    The reports relied on public comments from Uruguay’s Luis Lacalle Pou and Chile’s Gabriel Boric, who disagreed with the “narrative” comments but distorted them, making it sound like Lula was claiming that issues like migration or human rights violations were made up. Bloomberg went as far as saying the meeting “made little progress on any substantive issues” as a result of Lula backing Maduro.

    However, there are plenty of elements that contradict the media’s precooked conclusions. First off, Lacalle and Boric were only two of the 12 heads of state present. Second, all the representatives, including the two critics, signed the final “Brasilia consensus,” which, among other things, called for an integration roadmap within 120 days (Venezuelanalysis, 6/1/23).

    Finally, there was also a careful cherry-picking of Boric’s statements. From the outlets mentioned above, Reuters and AP chose not to mention the Chilean president’s call for US and EU sanctions against Venezuela to be lifted. It would have been more accurate to headline that the summit had found unity in opposing sanctions.

    Furthermore, none of the outlets referenced Boric saying he was “happy to see Venezuela return to multilateral instances” where problems can be jointly solved.

    Whitewashing sanctions

    CEPR: The Human Consequencesof Economic Sanctions

    The most relevant part of the Brazil summit for readers in the Global North was its strong stand against US sanctions—yet press reports went out of their way to downplay this opposition. (See CEPR, 5/23, for an overview of sanctions’ human cost.)

    Though opposition to US sanctions were a key issue, stressed in the summit declaration (which refers to them as “unilateral measures”), Lula’s speech and even Boric’s comments—corporate media did their best to downplay or sometimes endorse the deadly unilateral measures.

    The mentions of sanctions were virtually devoid of context, be that detailing what US sanctions entail (an oil embargo, trade hurdles, loss of access to financial markets, etc.), referencing studies on their impact (more than $20 billion in yearly losses, over 100,000 estimated deaths), or mentioning criticism from UN experts, multilateral organizations or, most recently, a group of Democratic House members (Venezuelanalysis, 5/11/23).

    The measures that groups like the Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research class as “collective punishment” against the Venezuelan people were described as sanctions “on [Maduro’s] government” (BBC, 5/30/23; Washington Post, 5/30/23) or against “Maduro and his inner circle” (AFP, 5/31/23).

    Equally misguided were some attempts to justify the punishing coercive measures, with the BBC (5/30/23) stating that they were a response to a “crackdown on opposition activists,” and the Associated Press (5/30/23) reporting they were intended to “get Venezuela to liberalize its politics.” Even US officials have stated on the record that sanctions are meant to “accelerate the collapse” of the Maduro government (Voice of America, 10/15/18)—evoking President Richard Nixon’s command to “make the economy scream” in Salvador Allende’s Chile.

    The Financial Times (6/4/23), to its credit, admitted openly that sanctions were “intended to force regime change in Caracas.” It then proceeded to inaccurately claim that the Biden administration has “shifted away” from Trump’s “maximum pressure,” when the only difference thus far is a limited license granted to the oil giant Chevron, which places all sorts of hurdles for the Venezuelan state to receive revenue.

    Endorsing exceptionalism

    WaPo: The United States can no longer assume that the rest of the world is on its side

    Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria (6/2/23), while accepting the framing that Maduro is a “dictator,” recognizes that many countries “don’t believe the United States when they hear it speak in favor of a rules-based international order…. America applies rules to others but breaks them itself in its many military interventions and unilateral sanctions.”

    The Financial Times piece also brought up another common feature of foreign policy pieces: the full endorsement of US exceptionalism. It cited former State Department official Thomas Shannon blaming Lula for having “really undermined the approach that the Biden administration has” by hosting his Venezuelan counterpart. Somehow the Brazilian leader was expected to get Washington’s blessing before meeting the president of a neighboring country.

    In a similar vein, Bloomberg (5/31/23) accused Lula of “undermining Brazil’s power to influence its neighbors” by presenting Maduro as “a kind of champion of democracy.” The second part is patently false, as Lula made no judgments of Venezuela’s democracy. Instead, he sought to make the point that it was “inexplicable” for Venezuela to be targeted because “another country does not like” its government.

    The Brazilian leader’s noninterference stance is in line with past comments. For example, in August 2022, the very same Bloomberg (8/22/22) reported Lula saying he wanted Venezuela to be “as democratic as possible,” while demanding that the country be treated with respect.

    As for Lula undermining Brazil’s influence, the claim is based on the delusion that he will only be respected in the region if he does the US’s bidding. Corporate journalists ought to read Fareed Zakaria’s Washington Post column (6/2/23), where he is somehow surprised to find out that the US “can no longer assume that the rest of the world is on its side.”

    Corporate media have been given plenty of chances to take note of a world where more countries are pursuing independent foreign policy paths. The Brasilia Summit was a great example, with leaders betting on regional integration and opposing unilateral measures. The ensuing coverage has shown that Western outlets will stop at no length to defend Washington’s agenda, even if that means reheating debunked narratives, platforming the most extremist characters, making up controversies and whitewashing deadly sanctions.

    The post As Venezuela Mends Ties With Latin Neighbors, Western Media Turn Up the Propaganda appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ‘Intentional Storytelling Is a Way We Can Fight for a Better World’ – CounterSpin interview with Sonali Kolhatkar on the power of narrative

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Rising Up‘s Sonali Kolhatkar about the power of narrative for the June 16, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230616Kolhatkar.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: Most of us have a memory about a time someone judged us based on things they heard about people “like us.” They couldn’t, if only for a moment, see us as an individual, because that view was clouded by hundreds of tales they’d heard about people with our skin color, or clothing, or physical ability.

    Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice

    (City Lights, 2023)

    And most of us can also recognize that our vision of people we don’t know has been shaped by stories we’ve been told. It’s not a giant leap to see how that can affect our political choices and possibilities.

    Narrative is a tricky and significant thing, and the subject of a lot of important new work, including that of our guest today.

    Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of the daily radio and TV program Rising Up With Sonali, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. Her new book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, will be published this month by City Lights, and she joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Sonali Kolhatkar.

    Sonali Kolhatkar: It’s such an honor to be with you, Janine. Thank you for having me.

    JJ: It’s my pleasure. I’ve been hearing about the importance of narrative in social justice spaces for a few years now, and I want to ask you to clarify, because it sounds “soft”; it sounds like meta-phenomena. You can think, well, let’s change facts on the ground, and then we’ll talk about what stories we tell about them.

    So I want to ask you to just respond, how do we define narrative, and how do you situate that within what else needs to happen?

    SK: Those are great questions, and it is a new front in organizing, and I’m really glad it is, because as a journalist for a few decades now, I have seen the power of how narrative shifts culture, and how culture then shifts policy.

    We’d like to think, especially on the left, that if there is a wrong that needs to be righted, that all we have to do is make the case to the right people ardently enough, and it’ll happen. But unfortunately, it doesn’t happen that way. And we find ourselves, especially today, at a time when white supremacy is so resurgent, and so it really was important for me to explore this idea of how our narratives are shaped.

    Sonali Kolhatkar (photo: Amanda McIntosh)

    Sonali Kolhatkar: “I have seen the power of how narrative shifts culture, and how culture then shifts policy.” (photo: Amanda McIntosh)

    And it’s kind of a simple thing, because it’s all around us. As human beings, it is extremely natural for us to have an idea of how our world works based on all of the things that we have been exposed to from childhood in storytelling, whether it’s through mass media, the TV shows we watch and the movies that we watch; whether it’s in the communities we live in, and so the people we interact with; classes we took in school, or the college courses we took—all of that shapes our view of the world.

    And so narrative, this idea that intentional storytelling, which is how I define it, shapes our worldview, is a very important way in which we can fight for a better world.

    And for journalists like me, that is where I am most comfortable, because I engage in narrative work every single day.

    The mainstream media like to think that there’s this myth of objectivity, but what they’re doing is, they’re bringing in the narratives that they have internalized to every story that they write, instead of identifying the narrative, or even trying to change the narrative.

    So we have had racist narratives, narratives promoting racist stereotypes, for so many years. In my book, I look through the history of Hollywood, I look at the right-wing shock jocks of the kind that FAIR has been analyzing for years, and how they perpetuated racist narratives, and kept the culture of the United States, a nation built on white supremacy, kept that ideology alive in the hearts of far too many Americans.

    But our nation is changing demographically, and in order to fulfill the promise of democracy, people of color need to be seen as full human beings. And that’s where narrative work to upend racist narratives, and replace them with racial justice narratives, comes in.

    So a lot of organizations are doing that work. A lot of storytellers are now doing that work.

    I look at how independent media has offered a counterpoint to mainstream media for years, and changed narratives.

    I look at how Hollywood is being infiltrated by new progressive, independent filmmakers of color, who are finally getting the space, albeit still not commensurate with population, to tell their own stories, and to tell the stories of people of color, so that we are seen as full, complex human beings.

    I delve into critical race theory and college education, and upending narratives through storytelling in print, and even social media.

    And finally, face-to-face conversations, how we can really come together as a country. And I don’t want to sound too idealistic. As someone who has been looking at social justice issues for many years, in fact, it’s been hard to not be too cynical.

    But in doing the research and writing this book, I found myself really feeling more hopeful, because what’s happening is as the demographic shifts are happening in this country, people of color are finally starting to feel less marginalized by speaking up, speaking out and rising up—take a look at the title of the book!

    So that’s what I think about as narrative, and I really hope your listeners, and Americans all around us, start to see narrative work as important work that is a critical part of social justice work.

    JJ: It’s really just naming something that’s happening all the time. I think that it’s undeniable, how language and how framing can change opinions.

    Years ago, when I was talking about affirmative action, there was research saying that when you talk to people about “affirmative action,” they’re for it. If you talk to people about “preferential treatment,” they’re against it.

    On a very basic level, it’s about the words we use. It’s about the language we use to frame and set up situations that we’re talking about.

    So if we can bring it up to the present day, when you talk to people—and you explore this in the book—about “diversity,” that’s one thing; when you talk about “equity”… It’s about what pictures those words call up in people’s brains, and the idea that that is actually important and worth paying attention to.

    SK: Yeah, I mean, context matters so much, right?

    Like, say, take the simple slogan “Black Lives Matter.” For the independent media, when we covered this movement when it first started 10 years ago, it was not something that our audiences were jarred by, because our audiences had already been conditioned to understand that Black lives have not mattered in American history. But to an audience that has been exposed only to Fox News, or, for that matter, even just CNN, “Black Lives Matter,” if they really didn’t want to accept that the country is white supremacist, sounded like Black folks asking for preferential treatment, as if that term meant Black lives matter more than everyone else’s.

    So context matters, history matters, and that’s where the independent media comes in.

    Race Forward: Why We Should Drop The I-Word

    YouTube (10/28/15)

    And words matter. So there was a campaign by ColorLines magazine, which I write about in the book, to pressure media outlets to stop using the word “illegal” when referring to undocumented immigrants.

    In fact, so many outlets were, and some still do, refer to undocumented people as “illegals,” not even “illegal people,” but “illegals,” right, which is a dehumanizing term. And when you can dehumanize people, then it justifies treating them as second-class citizens, treating them as less than human.

    And so changing that language, which at that time was not seen as a really important part of work, but that ColorLines pushed for, did help to change the narrative on seeing undocumented immigrants as people, as human beings.

    And Associated Press changed their language, and you started to see that culture shifting. It doesn’t mean that we’ve won rights for undocumented folks, but it means that we are on our way to doing so, and we have to keep pushing.

    So yeah, words matter, and I’m really glad you brought that up: the “I-word,” as it’s been called, right?

    And there’s so many other words, you can look around, and one of the things I want to do with my book is help readers and listeners identify narrative around them.

    When you are watching a movie, a Hollywood film, to be able to look at it with a critical mind and say, that’s a white supremacist narrative, that’s a white savior complex, a common trope. Wow, here’s a movie where the men have all the speaking parts, and women are props, or people of color are props.

    And it’s telling the stories of white folks from white perspectives, because the writers are white, the executive producers are white, and people of color, women, who are marginalized in the stories are marginalized then in our culture as well. So we want people to be able to see those things more clearly for themselves, and then commit to changing them.

    JJ: And to recognize that, as much as you might think words are words and reality is reality, there is a way that changing the conversation can actually change the facts on the ground.

    It’s a dialectic, of course, but there is a back and forth between—if you’re comfortable calling people “illegals,” you’re going to have a certain kind of political conversation.

    And just to remove that from the conversation does actually have a material effect. I think that’s important.

    Independent: Copaganda: Why film and TV portrayals of the police are under fire

    Independent (7/9/20)

    SK: Absolutely. Content shapes culture and culture shapes content. They work hand in hand.

    And one of the other things that I point out in my book, even though we may not think of it as a narrative around race, I have a whole chapter on it, because I feel so strongly about it. It’s called copaganda.

    It’s not a phrase that I came up with, but it’s a phrase that racial justice activists have used for a long time, and that is: mass media narratives that portray police as the good guys. It’s something that we see in Hollywood all around us: The police are the good guys. When they do bad things, they are the exception rather than the rule.

    And that’s the kind of pervasive, insidious cultural bedrock that then lays the foundations for pouring one-fourth to one-third of city budgets into police budgets.

    When people say “defund the police,” what they really mean is take money out of police budgets and put them into the things that actually matter. And Hollywood is a huge obstacle to the defund movement, because Hollywood continually portrays police as noble, as do-gooders. And so it sounds jarring, to those who buy into that narrative, to hear “defund the police.” And if we start to change the culture on it, we can start to change the policy on the ground.

    JJ: One of the things about the book that I appreciate is the naming of names. So often corporate media, or just the broader culture, seem to come to an idea and swallow it whole, as though they created it. And, sadly, writers sometimes too, act as though things sprang full-grown from their heads.

    That ignores and erases all of the people, all of the organizations that have been working on those ideas forever. And in your book, you name a lot of people, you name a lot of groups, and it’s not just about giving credit where credit is due, it’s also about contributing to our understanding of how social change happens.

    If you don’t support the roots, the tree is going to blow over. So naming groups that have been doing this work, naming media organizations, naming social justice organizations, it just seems so important, and it’s one of the things that I assume you’re doing as a choice in the book.

    SK: Absolutely. Look, I’ve been a broadcast journalist, before a print journalist, for a long time. And so the way I did journalism was providing a platform for other people to tell their stories, in a way that furthered my agenda, which is social justice—and our common agenda, because the people that I interview with, by and large, are social justice warriors—and so helping to offer them a platform, helping to shape the conversation, to best showcase the important work that they’re doing.

    So writing a book based on two decades of interviewing folks, I absolutely wanted to name the names and showcase and quote from the people that have taught me about this work.

    It was important for me at the very end of the book to have a list of resources, of organizations like FAIR that are doing narrative work, organizations whose work I grew from in writing the book, and who I hope will get all of the love that they deserve from readers, who can walk away thinking, OK, these are the organizations that I want to look to for understanding narrative work, and maybe participating in narrative work.

    So that is absolutely important, and I’m sure I’ve left out several, but there are so many, and they’re growing in number, which is what I’m really, really excited about, is that there are more and more organizations that are growing in number that are doing narrative work, that are actively incorporating, into their day-to-day activism, how they can shape the culture.

    It’s not enough anymore to just have a press person or a communications department. So, for example, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in LA made a film that showcases the work that they’re trying to do humanizing immigrants.

    And I interviewed Angelica Salas on my show about that film, and I write about it. It’s called America’s Family. I write about it in the book, how organizations are incorporating narrative work into their actions so that they can change the culture, alongside the policy-shifting that they’re trying to achieve.

    Yes! Magazine: Together With Earth

    Yes! (Spring/15)

    JJ: I want to talk about Yes! Magazine, which I’ve been reading for years. So much of the content of left or independent media is framed in conflict, and framed about the enemy: Here’s how the bad guy operates. We need to know this. Oh, here’s what the bad guy did today.

    And it’s very important. It’s important to know. And at the same time, I so appreciate space given to talking about the people and the places that are day-to-day addressing and resolving the problems that plague us.

    But what is sometimes called “solutions journalism” is considered soft or unserious somehow. And I’ve talked about this with my former colleague, Laura Flanders, whose show is about spotlighting people who are making things work, who are solving problems collectively.

    And I just always think, what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding? I feel that more of media could be given to people who are making it work.

    SK: Yeah, it’s one of the many reasons why I decided to join Yes! Magazine. It is very traumatizing, and feeding cynicism, to engage in crisis journalism, the disaster journalism.

    It’s something that gets the attraction of people, which is why a lot of journalists do it. It’s easy to fuel fear and use fear-based journalism. And, indeed, there’s so much wrong in the world that you never run out of things to cover that are kind of depressing.

    I found, as a journalist, I was experiencing sometimes secondary PTSD, because my job was to not look away. My job was to look at the injustices, examine them.

    When I transitioned to Yes! Magazine a couple of years ago, it was with the intention of trying to focus on the things that people are doing that are very concrete and the challenges that they face, how they’re realizing the solutions to the problems of the world, because those solutions have always been there as well. They just haven’t gotten the attention they’re due, because they aren’t sexy, they don’t attract the right kind of attention.

    And beyond peace, love and understanding, they are very, very concrete solutions. So, for example, I just returned from a three-day trip to Atlanta, where Yes! Magazine partnered with the Decolonizing Wealth Project on a conference focused on reparations.

    Twenty years ago, reparations for Black folks was seen as a pipe dream, as an idea too radical to be taken seriously.

    Randall Robinson wrote about it, and then eventually Ta-Nehisi Coates, many years later, wrote about it, and they helped shift the culture to where the idea of reparations now is not so far-fetched, or not seen as so radical. There’s congressional legislation around it.

    And Yes! Magazine was there, because we were covering all of the people that are helping make reparations a reality. We were talking to the members of the California Task Force on Reparations. We were talking to folks who are doing narrative work to make reparations possible.

    And to me, that’s not just hopeful, it’s essential. If we don’t know what we’re fighting for, then what are we doing fighting against something, right?

    It’s so important for us to know the end goal that we can realize.… X, Y and Z are trying it out on this side of the country; maybe this other organization can try a version of that, to see the models of what’s working, so that we can realize our just world. That’s essential. And so that’s why I love working at Yes!.

    JJ: And then, also, just internationally, which is something that US media often ignore. We are one world, but corporate news media hide that fact like it’s their job. And the world kind of looks like the board in a game of Risk in news media.

    But if we’re looking at other examples, and other things that we can look to, and people we can be in community with, an international focus is also part of that.

    SK: Absolutely. Unfortunately, our corporate journalists have internalized the narrative of national security officials. They’ve internalized the narrative that it’s America versus the rest of the world, instead of people in the United States, and how they can be similar to or different from or engage with people in other countries, and distancing themselves from the national security considerations of government officials is very, very difficult for corporate media to do.

    But, yeah, for independent media, for media outlets like Yes! Magazine, it’s essential, because there’s so much more that unites us than divides us. Climate change affects all of us. Racism affects all of us. Misogyny and patriarchy affect all of us. The rights of children are important to all of us.

    And so, yeah, learning from one another is absolutely essential to undermine the injustices perpetrated by power structures. And so that bottom-up journalism, and the bottom-up activism, is where we really need to keep reminding ourselves to focus.

    JJ: And then, finally, it’s so important to have spaces where you can have this kind of conversation, where you don’t have to agree with everything that’s said, but you have to preserve a space to have the conversation, as imperfect as that space may be.

    So I guess I’ll just, finally, ask you to do whatever shout-out you have for independent media, and what you hope the book will do in terms of how it lands with folks.

    SK: Oh, thank you so much for that. Folks can check out my show, RisingUpWithSonali.com, where I do a weekly broadcast. If you go to RisingUpWithSonali.com, you can not only see the interviews I do every week, but also more information about the book, where you can get a copy of the book.

    It’s really important. I really hope folks go out and support independent publishers and writers like myself. It’s a small, very readable book; it’s, I hope, quite inexpensive.

    I’ll be doing a speaking tour throughout the country, with a book launch in Berkeley at the Berkeley Public Library on June 28, which I hope folks can come out to.

    I have lots of events in Southern California, where I’m based, also some in Seattle and Houston coming up, and so I really hope people can come out, have a conversation with me, have a conversation with someone else, check out YesMagazine.org.

    And I’m plugging FAIR. Check out FAIR’s work, please. It was such a resource for me, and it has been such a resource for me for 20 years. I rely on outlets like FAIR and, no, Janine did not pay me to say that.

    So please do support your local, independent media as well, wherever you are, your local bookstores. It’s important that we do that.

    JJ: We’re all in it together. We’ve been speaking with Sonali Kolhatkar, host and executive producer of the daily radio and TV program Rising Up With Sonali, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine.

    Her new book Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice is out this month from City Lights. Thank you so much, Sonali, for joining us this week on CountersSpin.

    SK: Thank you.

    The post ‘Intentional Storytelling Is a Way We Can Fight for a Better World’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Sonali Kolhatkar on the Power of Narrative

          CounterSpin230616.mp3

     

    Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice

    (City Lights, 2023)

    This week on CounterSpin: The stories news media tell are something different than the facts they report. The facts may say what happened where; the stories tell us who’s the hero and who’s the villain, how important the fight is, and whether we should care about the ending. It’s not always easy to discern, but it’s critical—which is why narrative has been taken up as an important tool by folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tell ourselves and one another.

    Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of the daily radio and TV program Rising Up With Sonali, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. Her new book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, will be published this month by City Lights. She joins us this week on the show.

          CounterSpin230616Kolhatkar.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of work requirements.

          CounterSpin230616Banter.mp3

     

    The post Sonali Kolhatkar on the Power of Narrative appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • WaPo Mad That Debt Ceiling Deal Didn’t Cut Social Security

     

    WaPo: In Washington, a minor debt deal is worthy of major admiration

    The Washington Post (6/1/23) holds that the debt deal was “minor” because its cuts come from “a relatively small range of discretionary budget items, rather than structural change to the real drivers of debt and deficits: health care and retirement programs.”

    If there’s one thing the Washington Post doesn’t like about the debt ceiling deal—which expanded work requirements for food stamp recipients (FAIR.org, 6/9/23) and took a knife to social spending more broadly—it’s that it didn’t cut Social Security.

    As the editorial board (6/1/23) lamented, following the passage of the debt ceiling bill in the House of Representatives:

    Most of the projected roughly $1 trillion in savings over 10 years comes from proposed spending caps on a relatively small range of discretionary budget items, rather than structural change to the real drivers of debt and deficits: healthcare and retirement programs.

    In other words, why are we doing these little tweaks when we should be screwing over seniors?

    This is the message the Post has been promoting for the last few months. With a looming showdown over the debt ceiling, the paper owned by one of the world’s richest men saw an opportunity. While various commentators were pushing the Biden administration to attempt to side-step negotiations and unilaterally bypass the debt ceiling, the Post evidently thought to itself, why not take advantage of this situation to remind Congress that it needs to cut Social Security? ‘Cause, you know, the elderly are a real pain in the budget.

    On March 9, the Post editorial board kicked off a new series with an article (3/9/23) headlined “The United States Has a Debt Problem. Biden’s Budget Won’t Solve It.”

    The premise was suspect from the start: If the US does have a debt problem, it’s really hard to see it. This is how Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained the situation a couple of years ago (emphasis in original):

    Let’s assume for the moment that the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] projections are accurate. In that case, in 30 years, US debt will reach 195% of GDP. In other words, there is some possibility that the US debt level, three decades from now, will be less than that of Greece now and more than 50% of GDP below the level that Japan has sustained, with absolutely no difficulty, for the last decade. If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.

    Nevertheless, the premise that the federal government has a debt problem is so taken for granted in corporate media that the Post felt little need to defend its claim. Instead, it turned its attention to criticizing the shortcomings of Biden’s proposed budget. This plan would generate around $3 trillion in net savings over the next decade, primarily through higher taxes on the rich. In response, the Post’s wise council muttered in unison: Not enough! Their preferred savings would be closer to $8 trillion. And, the council announced, they would be gifting the readership with “the solutions…in an upcoming series of editorials.”

    Sparing the super-rich

    WaPo: Social Security needs fixing. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be painful.

    The Washington Post (3/16/23) proposes “fixing” Social Security in ways that won’t be painful at all to the very wealthy.

    The first two pieces focused on the programs the board later faulted the debt ceiling bill for failing to cut: Social Security and Medicare.

    For Social Security, the Post (3/16/23) outlined a plan to keep the program solvent for the next 75 years. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, this could be fully accomplished by hiking taxes on high earners. Gradually removing the cap on payroll taxes, which currently prevents taxation of earnings over $160,200, would plug around 72% of the projected shortfall through 2096. And a tax on investment income would cover another 56% of the shortfall, meaning the two together would cover costs with money left over.

    But why would Jeff Bezos’ paper argue for plugging the deficit through higher taxes on himself and his buddies? Instead, the Post editorial opted for some more modest tax increases—most amusingly, subjecting 90% (rather than the current 84%) of wages to payroll taxation, which would hike taxes somewhat on higher earners, but would mostly leave the wealthiest be.

    Meanwhile, the Post was quite pleased to offer up some benefit cuts. The most impactful would be to slow benefit growth for the top half of earners (so hitting the top 50%—as of 2021, anyone with a wage over $37,586—with cuts, rather than more seriously targeting the rich). But two others would reduce spending substantially as well.

    First, raising the retirement age—which is a misnomer, because what is being proposed is not changing the age at which you can retire; instead, you would be able to retire over the same range of ages, only with a lower benefits at each age (Extra!, 12/12). This is more accurately described as “cutting benefits.”

    People's Policy Project: Life Expectancy and Social Security Full Retirement Age by Year

    As the Social Security retirement age has been rising, US life expectancy has been dropping  (People’s Policy Project, 2/27/23).

    And, though the Post references gains in life expectancy in its advocacy for increasing the retirement age, life expectancy in the US has actually been falling even as the official age of retirement has been rising. In 2000, when the “full retirement age” was 65, people in the US lived an average of 76.8 years. Over the next 21 years, as that retirement age approached the target of 67 years, life expectancy dropped to 76.4 years. This hasn’t prompted calls in establishment media for lowering the retirement age, however.

    Second, the Post would tie cost-of-living adjustments, which shield benefits from the effects of inflation, to a different measure of inflation, called chained-CPI (FAIR.org, 12/19/12). Using this measure would mean benefits would be increased more slowly over time, leading to cuts for all Social Security recipients, with the oldest recipients being hurt the most. This would harm not just seniors but the millions of disabled workers who rely on Social Security as well.

    These cuts are, of course, completely unnecessary. But pushing Congress to inflict unnecessary hardship is a celebrated tradition at the Post (FAIR, 2/24/23).

    Hands on Medicare

    WaPo: A fiscally responsible government cannot keep its hands off Medicare

    The Washington Post (3/23/23) calls for “modest sacrifice from beneficiaries”—and quietly rejects Biden’s proposed tax increase on income over $400,000 that would require a modest sacrifice from its owner.

    The Post’s suggested reforms to Medicare are less objectionable, though the headline leaves something to be desired (3/23/23): “A Fiscally Responsible Government Cannot Keep Its Hands Off Medicare.”

    The main cost savings come from reforming Medicare Advantage (the insurance industry carve-out within Medicare), cracking down on excess payments to hospitals, and applying an investment tax to a broader base. Some savings do come from increasing Medicare beneficiaries’ cost-sharing burden, but the added hardship here doesn’t come close to that of the cuts to Social Security benefits.

    What’s notable is that the Post never once mentions Medicare for All in its discussion of containing healthcare costs, though transitioning to this sort of system would be much more effective at containing costs than anything the Post outlines. One study conducted by Yale epidemiologists “found that Medicare for All would save around 68,000 lives a year while reducing US healthcare spending by around 13%, or $450 billion a year.” If we’re talking about cutting costs, why’s that not in the discussion?

    The best support is less support

    Social Security and Medicare may have been at the top of the list of the Post’s targets. But the board didn’t stop there. Its next piece (4/3/23) took the bold step of calling for cuts to veterans’ disability benefits. As the board put it, “If we owe our veterans every support, we also owe them a measure of fiscal responsibility.” In other words, we owe our veterans every support, including less support.

    Veterans weren’t too pleased with this editorial, with one writing in a letter to the editor (4/6/23):

    Go ahead—tell the soldier who is missing both legs that it’s just too expensive to compensate him for his disability. Tell the Marine with burns over 60% of her body that her service-connected disability is hurting the national debt.

    The next piece (5/4/23) called for reducing subsidies to wealthy farmers, not an unreasonable request, but not one with much of an impact on the national debt either. The Post cobbled together a little over $100 billion worth of savings in this piece, or about 1/72th of the $7.2 trillion in total savings it wants to see.

    The board followed that up with an editorial (5/25/23) advocating cuts to the military budget, in welcome contrast to another major newspaper’s recent whining (Wall Street Journal, 6/2/23) about reducing it. Exactly how much the Post wants to cut is unclear, but the piece does seem to suggest savings in the range of several hundred billion dollars.

    ‘Looking in the wrong place’

    WaPo: Politicians keep looking in the wrong place to fix the debt problem

    The Washington Post (5/31/23) says that “budget experts across the political spectrum” agree that we need to cut Social Security—citing a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute as its lone example.

    In the final installment (5/31/23) of its series before the signing of the debt ceiling legislation, the Post expressed its frustrations with the shortcomings of the negotiations between Republicans and Democrats. Its first paragraph contained the core message:

    The top expenses worsening the national debt in the years to come are the rising costs of Social Security, Medicare and interest. Unfortunately, President Biden and congressional leaders refuse even to discuss these key drivers.

    As the Post opined further down, Social Security and Medicare are precisely the sort of programs “where the bulk of the change should occur.”

    That doesn’t mean the Post sees no room for changes to other spending—it puts forward other ideas for cuts in this piece, including rescinding student debt forgiveness—but the board is clear on the point that this is not where the real meat is. The headline says it all: “Politicians Keep Looking in the Wrong Place to Fix the Debt Problem.”

    This sort of reasoning—that growth in the national debt means we need to cut Social Security—doesn’t have any basis in hard economic truths. It’s the reflection of the pro-rich ideology of a paper owned by a billionaire. More than that, though, it’s a predictable outgrowth of the sort of rhetoric pushed by the media more broadly.

    The New York Times, for instance, has repeatedly emphasized that Social Security and Medicare will be the major factors in federal debt going forward (FAIR.org, 5/17/23).

    After legislators cemented a deal to raise the debt limit, the Times ran an article (6/2/23) with the headline “The Debt-Limit Deal Suggests Debt Will Keep Growing, Fast,” which reported, “Early in the talks, both parties ruled out changes to the two largest drivers of federal spending growth over the next decade: Social Security and Medicare.” Would it be at all surprising if a person read this piece and got the impression that spending on retirement benefits is out of control?

    The Times at least has Paul Krugman (3/10/23) to point out that the rising costs of these programs can be addressed without cutting benefits. But at Bezos’ paper, calls for cuts are on full blast. Because if money can’t buy happiness, it can at least buy a media outlet dedicated to defending your wealth.

    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 WaPo Mad That Debt Ceiling Deal Didn’t Cut Social Security appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Despite Legalization, the People Harmed the Most Are Not Able to Benefit’ – CounterSpin interview with Tauhid Chappell on cannabis justice

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association’s Tauhid Chappell about cannabis justice for the June 9, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230609Chappell.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: As media critics, we encourage people to write letters to the editor, noting that even if your letter doesn’t run, it may help another letter with a similar point get in. Because a paper that gets one letter may not feel obliged to represent that view, but if they get 20, they may figure they should run one.

    NYT: Legalizing Marijuana Is a Big Mistake

    New York Times (5/17/23)

    All of which is to say, the New York Times must have got a boatload of letters scoffing at columnist Ross Douthat’s sad sack May 17 piece about how legalizing marijuana is a big mistake, not least because his opposition to it is making people call him a “square.”

    Unsurprisingly, Douthat isn’t being a principled contrarian, just obfuscating. As noted by Paul from Washington and Jeff from Queens and Peter from Boston, he sidesteps comparative mention of legal drugs like alcohol or tobacco, and dismisses decades of society-wide harms of racist enforcement of anti-marijuana legislation by saying cops who used weed as a pretense to stop and frisk Black people will just find other reasons, so: so much for that.

    For the Times columnist, it all comes down to the wicked weed as “personal degradation,” which, in 2023, sails like a lead balloon.

    There is an informed, good-faith conversation to be had about the impacts of marijuana legalization, and especially the effort to see some of the benefits of this newly legal market, in some places, go to those most harmed by its illegality.

    Our guest works on precisely these intersections. Tauhid Chappell is a founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association, and also a project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project, focusing on that program’s Philadelphia initiative to reimagine how local newsrooms approach coverage of crime, violence, and the criminal justice and carceral systems.

    He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tauhid Chappell.

    Tauhid Chappell: Thanks for having me.

    JJ: So Douthat’s column was headlined “Call Me Square, but Facts Show the Error of Legalizing Weed,” which, OK, the invocation of “facts” is a rhetorical device: You all are vibing, but I’m a grownup who only traffics in facts. It’s a frankly boring tactic that people use to discount the humanity of others and think they’re doing something.

    But I love a good fact as much as the next guy. So, in terms of public opinion, in terms of reported social harms, in terms of the information that we do have, would an observer say that marijuana legalization, where it has happened, has been a big, dangerous mistake?

    TC: No, in fact. I am happy to say that, because legalization, for both medical and adult use, has been around, especially on the West Coast, in places like Colorado, Washington, Oregon and California, we are now starting to see the long-term studies of the impact of legalization.

    CNN: Recreational marijuana legalization tied to decline in teens using pot, study says

    CNN (7/8/19)

    There has been a fear that teen use is going to go up. That’s been debunked by the studies on these various states over the last decade of legalization. There’s been fear about higher road rage, or higher traffic accidents, due to being “under the influence of cannabis.” That’s also been debunked. There’s been ongoing fear about marijuana use being some sort of gateway into harder drugs. That has been debunked, and we’ve also seen a decrease in opioid use in states that have legalized cannabis for medical use as well.

    And so there has been a lot of reefer madness that continues to point at unscientific, non-peer-reviewed data that does not actually support the ongoing fears that people continue to fearmonger across the country. We have a plethora of data, a plethora of government-backed studies as well, to show that the legalization of marijuana has been nothing but a net positive overall.

    JJ: Let me ask you another side of information: Are people still being arrested for marijuana possession? Because media would tell me that it’s all the Wild West, and that’s why we might think about putting the genie back in the bottle, but it’s not exactly the case.

    Tauhid Chappell

    Tauhid Chappell: “Incarceration, especially for Black Americans, still has not significantly decreased, despite legalization of marijuana.”

    TC: Yeah. In states such as New Jersey—and we’re pulling from data from the West Coast, because they’ve legalized longer, as well—we have seen an overall decrease in arrests for cannabis possession. But that does not mean that Black people are not still being disproportionately targeted for cannabis. We are still seeing that across the country.

    In fact, the ACLU did a wonderful report that shows that incarceration, especially for Black Americans, still has not significantly decreased, despite legalization of marijuana.

    And an example of this is in Pennsylvania, where medical marijuana is legal. However, if you are not a medical marijuana–registered patient in the state, and you are not in a city like Philadelphia or Harrisburg or Pittsburgh which has decriminalized cannabis possession—if you are caught with marijuana with you, and you’re not a medical marijuana patient, you still could be criminalized and potentially incarcerated from police if you step out of those decriminalization areas.

    So that’s to say, yes, overall we are seeing a positive decrease in arrest, but that does not mean that Black people are still not being disproportionately targeted for marijuana use or possession.

    JJ: I know that you have a Philadelphia focus. Are there things that are happening right there that are emblematic, that you think point to larger issues? What’s going on in Philadelphia that you think is useful to think about?

    TC: We’ve noticed that municipalities, ultimately…. When it comes to cannabis legalization, the state will create, usually, sometimes broad categories of how the cannabis markets should be rolled out.

    But municipalities, at the very local level, determine what types of cannabis businesses they can allow in their cities, right? They have zoning ordinances, they have permits, they have specific locations that businesses can and can’t operate.

    And so something that I encourage everybody, especially those that are interested in getting into the industry, is to start educating your council members, your county commissioners, because this is something that’s completely new to them.

    Many of them have never been exposed to marijuana as a legal business. Many of us have gone through decades and generations of marijuana as a harmful drug, it’s a narcotic….

    And so to see this become legalized, where there are actual business and economic considerations? Many people, especially lawmakers and politicians, still don’t have enough information to make the best decisions on how to make an accessible and equitable and friendly cannabis market, where people can be participants without the fear of any sort of retribution or incarceration.

    So education, education, education. Philadelphia, specifically, we had just a big primary where we are going to have a new mayor coming up this year. That means more education for them, because they may be the mayor that has to oversee legalization in their city. They’re going to have to figure out what types of cannabis businesses they’re going to want to allow in Philadelphia, who should have those licenses to operate, and where should they be able to operate, and what types of support should they be receiving.

    So municipality to municipality, you have varying levels of education. Some mayors embrace legalization. They’re excited for it. They want to see the financial returns of these new businesses.

    Others are very much NIMBY, not in my backyard. They’re still afraid of it. They still think it’s going to create a drug market in their backyard.

    And so we have a lot of level-setting to do at the local level.

    WaPo:Trump’s pick for attorney general: ‘Good people don’t smoke marijuana’

    Washington Post (11/18/16)

    JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about journalism. A million years ago, except it was actually January 2018, I talked with Art Way from Drug Policy Alliance, and this is at a moment where Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, was saying, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

    And we had a Kansas State representative, Steve Alford, who said—in 2018, not 1918—that we need to remember why marijuana was outlawed, which was because

    African Americans, they were basically users, and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because of their character makeup, their genetics and that.

    So there’s obviously an opinion shift, a culture shift happening, but in terms of media, what would you like to see, new questions asked, new ways of approach? What would you like to see in terms of media coverage of the issue?

    TC: There are three people that I like to point to as really good examples of good reporters asking tough questions, holding politicians accountable, calling out agencies that are supposed to be doing the job of rolling out legalization, but have not.

    One of them is the former Boston Globe journalist Dan Adams, who covered the Massachusetts legalization for years. Great reporter.

    NJ.com: Black members on N.J. cannabis commission dissatisfied with Big Weed social justice promises

    NJ.com (10/11/22)

    Jelani Gibson, who is the first Black reporter in a traditional newspaper to cover cannabis. He works for NJ.com. He holds the state accountable, asking a lot of politicians, asking a lot of regulators questions about expectations, realities, what the law has said and what has actually happened pertaining to the law.

    And then, from a national perspective, Mona Zhang from Politico does a great job in analyzing how different governments are trying to address the ongoing inequities that we see in cannabis legalization.

    And I think that continues to be a point that we need to emphasize, is that despite legalization, the people who have been harmed the most are either still locked up, or being released but not being supported into the reentry of society, and they’re not able to benefit from the true legalization, which is being able to legally run their own cannabis operation and be supported in that too.

    So I would love to see more media reporting on the ongoing inequities, and the solutions that other municipalities and states are trying to do to rectify the situation. I think more awareness of that is going to lead to a lot more, I guess, inspiration for cannabis advocates and stakeholders to bring these solutions to their lawmakers and politicians in the respective localities.

    JJ: All right. I suspect we’ll speak with you more in the future. Tauhid Chappell is founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association, as well as a project manager for Free Press. Thank you so much, Tauhid Chappell, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    TC: Thanks for having me. Appreciate everything that you do. Truly an honor to be included in this interview.

     

    The post ‘Despite Legalization, the People Harmed the Most Are Not Able to Benefit’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ – CounterSpin interview with Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer about the Kids Online Safety Act for the June 9, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: Louisiana just banned abortion at six weeks, before many people even know they’re pregnant, while also saying 16-year-old girls are mature enough to marry.

    PBS: Some lawmakers propose loosening child labor laws to fill worker shortage

    PBS NewsHour (5/25/23)

    Arkansas says there’s no need for employers to check the age of workers they hire. As one state legislator put it, “There’s no reason why anyone should get the government’s permission to get a job.”

    And Wisconsin says 14-year-olds, sure, can serve alcohol. Iowa says they can shift loads in freezers and meat coolers.

    Simultaneously and in the same country, we have a raft of legislation saying that young people should not be in charge of what they look at online. Bone saws: cool. TikTok: bad.

    The way this country thinks about young people is odd, you could say. “Incoherent” would be another word.

    When it comes to the online stuff, there seem to be some good intentions at work. Anyone who’s been on the internet can see how it can be manipulative and creepy. But are laws like the Kids Online Safety Act the appropriate way to address those concerns?

    We’ll talk about that now with Evan Greer, director of the group Fight for the Future. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Evan Greer.

    Evan Greer: Thanks so much for having me. Always happy to chat.

    Cyberscoop: Fight over Kids Online Safety Act heats up as bill gains support in Congress

    Cyberscoop (5/2/23)

    JJ: Let’s start specifically with KOSA, with the Kids Online Safety Act, because it’s a real piece of legislation, and there are things that you and other folks are not disputing, that big tech companies do have practices that are bad for kids, and especially bad for some vulnerable kids.

    But the method of addressing those concerns is the question. What would KOSA do that people may not understand, in terms of the impact on, ostensibly, those young people we’re told that they care about?

    EG: Yeah, and I think it’s so important that we do start from the acknowledgement that big tech companies are doing harm to our kids, because it’s just not acceptable to pretend otherwise.

    There is significant evidence to suggest that these very large corporations are engaging in business practices that are fundamentally incompatible with human rights, with democracy, but also with what we know young people, and really everyone, needs, which is access to online information and community, rather than having their data harvested and information shoved down their throat in a way that enriches companies rather than empowering young people and adults.

    And so when we look at this problem, I think it is important that we start there, because there is a real problem, and the folks pushing this legislation often like to characterize those of us that oppose it as big tech shills or whatever.

    It’s hard for me not to laugh at that, given that I’ve dedicated the better part of my adult life to confronting these big tech companies and their surveillance-capitalist business model, and working to dismantle it.

    But I think it’s important that we say very clearly that we oppose these bills, not because we think that they are an inappropriate trade off between human rights and children’s safety. We oppose these bills because they will make children less safe, not more safe.

    And it’s so important that we make that clear, because we know from history that politicians love to put in the wrapping paper of protecting children any type of legislation or regulation that they would like to advance and avoid political opposition to.

    It is, of course, very difficult for any elected official to speak out against or vote against a bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, regardless of whether that bill actually makes kids safer online or not. And so what I’m here to explain a bit is why this legislation will actually make kids less safe.

    It’s important to understand a few things. So one is that KOSA is not just a bill that focuses on privacy or ending the collection of children’s data. It’s a bill that gives the government control over what content platforms can recommend to which users.

    Conversation: What is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

    Conversation (6/24/19)

    And this is, again, kind of well-intentioned, trying to address a real problem, which is that because platforms like Instagram and YouTube employ this surveillance-advertising and surveillance-capitalist business model, they have a huge incentive to algorithmically recommend content in a way that’s maximized for engagement, rather than in a way that is curated or attempting to promote helpful content.

    Their algorithms are designed to make them money. And so because of that, we know that platforms often algorithmically recommend all kinds of content, including content that can be incredibly harmful.

    That’s the legitimate problem that this bill is trying to solve, but, unfortunately, it would actually make that problem worse.

    And the way it would do that is it creates what’s called a broad duty of care that requires platforms to design their algorithmic recommendation systems in a way that has the best interest of children in mind.

    And it specifies what they mean by that, in terms of tying it to specific mental health outcomes, like eating disorders or substance abuse or anxiety or depression, and basically says that platforms should not be recommending content that causes those types of disorders.

    Vanity Fair: 22 Republican States Sue Biden Admin for the Right to Discriminate Against LGBTQ+ School Kids

    Vanity Fair (7/28/22)

    Now, if you’re sticking with me, all of that sounds perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn’t we want to do that? The problem is that the bill gives the authority to determine and enforce that to state attorneys general.

    And if you’ve been paying attention at all to what’s happening in the states right now, you would know that state attorneys general across the country, in red states particularly, are actively arguing, right now today, that simply encountering LGBTQ people makes kids depressed, causes them to be suicidal, gives them mental health disorders.

    They are arguing that providing young people with gender-affirming care that’s medically recommended, and where there is medical consensus, is a form of child abuse.

    And so while this bill sounds perfectly reasonable on its face, it utterly fails to recognize the political moment that we’re in, and rather than making kids safer, what it would do is empower the most bigoted attorneys general law enforcement officers in the country to dictate what content young people can see in their feed.

    And that would lead to widespread suppression, not just of LGBTQ content, or content related to perhaps abortion and reproductive health, but really suppression of important but controversial topics across the board.

    So, for example, the bill’s backers envision a world where this bill leads to less promotion of content that promotes eating disorders.

    In reality, the way that this bill would work, it would just suppress all discussion of eating disorders among young people, because at scale, a platform like YouTube or Instagram is not going to be able to make a meaningful determination between, for example, a video that’s harmful in promoting eating disorders, or a video where a young person is just speaking about their experience with an eating disorder, and how they sought out help and support, and how other young people can do it too.

    In practice, these platforms are simply going to use AI, as they’ve already been doing, more aggressively to filter content. That’s the only way that they could meaningfully comply with a bill like KOSA.

    And what we’ll see is exactly what we saw with SESTA/FOSTA, which was the last major change to Section 230, a very similar bill that was intended to address a real problem, online sex trafficking, that actually made it harder for law enforcement to prosecute actual cases of sex trafficking while having a detrimental effect for consensual sex workers, who effectively had online spaces that they used to keep themselves safe, to screen clients, to find work in ways that were safer for them, shut down almost overnight, because of this misguided legislation that was supposed to make them safer.

    Evan Greer

    Evan Greer: “This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need, which is resources, support, housing, healthcare.”

    And so we’re now in a moment where we could actually see the same happen, not just for content related to sex and sexuality, but for an enormous range of incredibly important content that our young people actually need access to.

    This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need, which is resources, support, housing, healthcare. Those are the types of things that we know prevent things like child exploitation.

    But unfortunately, lawmakers seem more interested in trampling the First Amendment, and putting the government in charge of what content can be recommended, than in addressing those material conditions that we actually have evidence to suggest, if we could address them, would reduce the types of harms that lawmakers say they’re trying to reduce.

    JJ: Thank you. And I just wanted to say, I’m getting Reefer Madness vibes, and a conflation of correlation and causality; and I see in a lot of the talk around this, people pointing to research: social media use drives mental illness. 

    So I just wanted ask you, briefly, there is research, but what does the research actually say or not say on these questions?

    EG: It’s a great question, and there’s been some news on this fairly recently. There was a report out from the surgeon general of the United States a couple weeks ago, and it is interesting because, as you said, there is research, and what the research says is basically: It’s complicated. But unfortunately, our mainstream news outlets and politicians giving speeches don’t do very well with complicated.

    CNN: Social media presents ‘profound risk of harm’ for kids, surgeon general says, calling attention to lack of research

    CNN (5/24/23)

    And so what you saw is a lot of headlines that basically said, social media is bad for kids, and the research certainly backs that up to a certain extent. There is significant and growing evidence to suggest that, again, these types of predatory design practices that companies put into place, things like autoplay, where you just play a video and then the next one plays, or infinite scroll, where you can just keep scrolling through TikToks forever and ever, and suddenly an hour has passed, and you’re like, “What am I doing with my life?”

    There is significant evidence that those types of design choices do have negative mental health effects, for young people and adults, in that they can lead to addictive behaviors, to anxiety, etc.

    There’s also evidence in that report, that was largely ignored by a lot of the coverage of it, that showed that for some groups of young people, including LGBTQ young people, there’s actually significant evidence to suggest that access to social media improves their mental health.

    And it’s not that hard to understand why. Anyone who knows a queer or trans young person knows online spaces can provide a safe haven, can provide a place to access community or resources or information, especially for young people who perhaps have unsupportive family members, or live in an area where they don’t have access to in-person community in a safe way. This can be a lifeline.

    And so, again, there is research out there, and it is important that we build our regulatory and legislative responses on top of actual evidence, rather than conjecture and hyperbole.

    But, again, I think what’s important here is that we embrace the both/and, and recognize that this is not about saying social media is totally fine as it is, and leave these companies alone, and we can all live in a cyber-libertarian paradise.

    That’s not the world we’re living in. These companies are big, they are greedy, they are engaging in business practices that are doing harm, and they should be regulated.

    But what we need to focus on is regulating the surveillance-capitalist business model that’s at the root of their harm, rather than attempting to regulate the speech of young people, suppress their ability to express themselves, and take away life-saving resources that they need in order to thrive and succeed in this deeply unjust and messed-up world that we are handing to them.

    JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Evan Greer. She’s director of Fight for the Future. They’re online at FightForTheFuture.org. Evan Greer, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    EG: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

    The post ‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NYT on Ukraine’s Nazi Imagery: It’s ‘Complicated’ 

     

    The New York Times continued its line of downplaying—or even celebrating—Nazis in Ukraine with a piece (6/5/23) that sought to explain away the frequency of Nazi symbols in photographs of the Ukrainian military. The Times commented that such imagery put “Western journalists” in a “difficult position,” noting that a Ukrainian press officer said journalists had asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi insignia before being photographed.

    The headline read: “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” The chief concern, per the Times subhead, was the worry that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine “risks fueling Russian propaganda.”

    ‘Complicated relationship’

    NYT: Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History

    For the New York Times (6/5/23), Ukrainian use of Nazi imagery raises fears that it will help “Russian propaganda.”

    At issue was “the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.” The relationship is “delicate,” the Times says, because of Putin’s stated war aims of de-Nazification.

    Times reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff dismisses the idea that Ukraine needed de-Nazification on the grounds that, despite its “acceptance” of Nazi symbols in many cases, current President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. This weak argument is made weaker, given that, regardless of his heritage, it is well-documented that Zelenskyy sits at the center of a power structure in which far-right, neo-Nazi forces are a key constituency.

    Igor Kolomoisky, one of Zelenskyy’s key supporters, was even a backer of the Azov Battalion—a group, once described by the Times (3/15/19) as a “neo-Nazi paramilitary organization,” that has been integrated into the Ukrainian military.

    None of this justifies an illegal invasion. But it is clear that important facts have been deliberately suppressed or omitted within the US press (FAIR.org, 1/15/22), impairing readers’ understanding of the conflicts’ sources and possible resolutions.

    The relentless threat of being labeled “Putin apologists” has created a chilling effect at even the highest liberal establishment organizations. Per the Times:

    Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.

    The Times story acknowledged that journalists are worried about reporting reality, noting that at one point, according to a Ukrainian press officer, journalists from an unnamed outlet had soldiers remove Nazi symbols before they were photographed. This is a serious allegation of journalists knowingly distorting their portrayal of reality for explicitly political reasons.

    Pioneering the Holocaust

    Emblem of the 2nd SS Panzer Division (left) compared with those of the Azov Battalion (center) and Azov Regiment (right).

    As the Azov Battalion (center) became Ukraine’s Azov Regiment (right), it preserved its insignia’s evocation of the Nazi SS’s wolfsangel symbol (left).

    The Times did find someone credentialed to legitimize running cover for Nazis:

    Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere.

    “The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth.”

    The distinction drawn between how Nazi symbols were used in Ukraine as opposed to “other parts of Earth” suggests that Nazism in Ukraine was somehow more benign than in other places. To the contrary, Ukraine was where the mass slaughter of Jews was pioneered, with an estimated 1.5 million people killed there, or one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust. These killings were largely carried out by Ukrainian nationalist militias; survivors of these units that participated in the Holocaust were granted veteran status by Ukraine in 2019, making them eligible for government benefits (Kyiv Post, 3/26/19).

    The CIA’s Nazis

    The Nation: Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret

    The story of Nazism in Ukraine is very much an American story as well (The Nation, 3/28/14).

    As part of his defense, Kozlovskyi references the postwar anti-Soviet struggles of these Ukrainian nationalists:

    Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence during and immediately after World War II.

    Kozlovskyi and the Times omit the fascist character of this “struggle for independence.” Though it is rarely acknowledged today, the United States had a robust policy of training and equipping former Nazis in Western and Eastern Europe—by no means “unique to Ukraine”—to act as anti-Communist paramilitaries.

    Ukraine saw former SS and Nazi intelligence units receive support from the CIA as part of the nationalist movement against Communism. The Nazis we see in Ukraine today are direct descendents of these networks and organizations.  Even if the Times refuses to reference this history, these symbols have their roots explicitly in US-backed Nazi movements, making their defense of the current Nazis all the more egregious.

    Like many facts in this war, the Ukrainian Nazi problem and its origins have been relegated to the memory hole by US corporate media (FAIR.org, 2/23/22). What’s striking is just how common it was for establishment press to acknowledge Ukraine’s Nazi problem before the war began—with the issue even recognized by the US Congress.

    However, as the Times reporting has reinforced, US journalists have decided that being on the right team in this war is more important than presenting an accurate picture of events to their audience. This latest Times piece underscores the role journalists play in manufacturing consent for US policy on this and many other fronts, even if it means rehabilitating Nazi paramilitaries.

    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.

    FEATURED IMAGE: New York Times photograph of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a patch that incorporates the Nazi Totenkopf symbol.

    The post NYT on Ukraine’s Nazi Imagery: It’s ‘Complicated’  appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food

     

    WSJ: The GOP’s Progress on Work and Welfare

    The Wall Street Journal (5/30/23) calls it a “mistake” that “veterans and the homeless” are exempted from work requirement for food vouchers: “These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.”

    After holding the economy hostage for months, some Republicans are going through a bit of a depressive slump. “We got rolled,” is how one Republican congressmember (Roll Call, 6/6/23) described the outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations. “It was a bad deal.”

    But don’t cry too much, guys! The Wall Street Journal is here to cheer you up, and remind you that, though you didn’t get all the austerity you wanted, you did get to hurt the poor a bit. Maybe not as much as you wanted, but life’s not always fair, is it?

    As the Journal’s editorial board (5/30/23) recently wrote: “One reason the deal is worth passing: The provisions on work and welfare are incremental progress the GOP can build on.”

    Most centrally, the bill included an expansion of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”) for adults without a disability or children, raising the maximum age for those subject to work requirements from 49 to 54.

    The editorial’s takeaway:

    A major difference between the two political parties these days is that most Democrats favor a culture of dependency. The GOP’s task, which is popular with voters, is to rebuild a culture of work. The debt-ceiling bill starts to do that, which is one reason to support it.

    Vulnerable people

    CBO: Work Requirements andWork Supports for Recipients of Means-Tested Benefits

    CBO (6/22): “Work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid have reduced benefits more than they have increased people’s earnings.”

    It’s an odd statement to make when employment for prime-age workers (those between 25 and 54) is at its highest level in more than two decades, thanks in large part to the Democrats’ decision to go big in their Covid relief package in the spring of 2021. And it’s particularly odd when you consider the utter lack of evidence for the idea that expanding work requirements for food vouchers will increase employment in any significant way.

    As Shawn Fremstad has summarized for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the available evidence on the specific work requirement that is being expanded under the debt ceiling legislation

    tells a relatively consistent story about its impacts. There is no question that the work test reduces access to SNAP food vouchers among vulnerable people with few resources. On employment, the best read of the evidence is that it has no impact on employment, or only a very small one.

    In its 2022 analysis of the existing literature, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office similarly reported:

    SNAP’s work requirement has probably boosted employment for some adult recipients without dependents but has reduced income, on average, across all recipients. Earnings increased among recipients who worked more, but far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits because of the work requirement.

    So basically we can expect the new work requirements to definitely take food vouchers (in other words, food) away from a bunch of people—perhaps 225,000—and maybe slightly increase employment. Oh, yeah, they could also worsen physical and mental health, and increase reliance on food banks. Is that what rebuilding a culture of work looks like?

    Twisted logic

    The Journal apparently greets these outcomes with a grin, as the kind of “incremental progress the GOP can build on.” And it salivates for more. Reaching peak evil, the editorial board bemoans:

    One mistake in the debt deal is that the food-stamp work requirement exempts veterans and the homeless. These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.

    Notice the twisted logic here: Allowing people minimal access to food resources (SNAP benefits for a single person max out at $281 a month) is an indulgence that harms them. On the other hand, imposing punitive measures on people, forcing them to prove that they’re working a certain amount each month, that’s actually helping them. It’s teaching them the value of hard work, giving them dignity. Because the real problem is that these people just haven’t had enough of a fire lit under their ass. How do you address homelessness? Just threaten the unhoused with starvation, and I guess everyone left after that just deserves to be homeless.

    The unspoken premise is that people need to prove their worth to have access to food. Rather than having food guaranteed as a basic human right, people should be threatened with starvation. That way they’re insecure, and willing to accept the first job that comes around, no matter how bad the conditions and pay. That a major newspaper takes this editorial line is horrifying—though, given that the Journal is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch, unfortunately not surprising.

    ‘Unemployment too attractive’

    WSJ: Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal

    In the United States, which has more than 200,000 people living on the street, “public policy has made unemployment too attractive,” according to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley (5/23/23). 

    And the Journal isn’t just showing up for the celebration, either; it’s been hard at work pushing to cut people off from government benefits for a while. In one earlier piece (5/24/23), the editorial board lashed out at states for exempting too many people from already-existing SNAP work requirements. In another (5/17/23), it invoked the old lazy welfare recipient trope, whining that government assistance through programs like SNAP shouldn’t be “a permanent sinecure in return for doing nothing.”

    As the debt ceiling drama unfolded, the paper published a slew of anti-poor essays arguing for increased hurdles to accessing government assistance:

    • “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23)
    • “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23)
    • “Work Requirements Still Work” (5/29/23)
    • “Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996” (6/2/23)

    By far the most absurd was “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23), by columnist Jason L. Riley, which included some incredible lines, like:

    Asking something of people on the dole is perfectly rational, but liberals in Washington have long prioritized making the poor comfortable over helping them out of poverty.

    And:

    Too many healthy adults are opting out of work because public policy has made unemployment too attractive.

    And, for the ending:

    Mr. McCarthy is right to assume that most people don’t want their tax dollars being used by the government to subsidize laziness. I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Work harder: Millions of welfare recipients are depending on you.” So are a lot of liberals in Washington.

    It would be hard for the Onion to come up with a more perfect caricature of conservative mean-spiritedness. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that sticker is still proudly plastered on Riley’s bumper.

    Remarkably misleading numbers

    WSJ: Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’

    A Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/23) declared Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirements a success because people on Medicaid in the state got jobs—at a time of rapid economic growth. A more serious look at the impact of the requirements “found no evidence that low-income adults had increased their employment” (Health Affairs, 9/20).

    Meanwhile, another op-ed points to where the Journal believes the debt ceiling deal fell short. In “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23), Nick Stehle of the Foundation for Government Accountability holds up Arkansas’s experience with Medicaid work requirements to argue for a federal expansion of such work requirements. Stehle throws out some remarkably misleading numbers to suggest that Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas reduced dependence by boosting employment and incomes: “Tens of thousands went back to work, and more than 14,000 boosted their incomes enough to leave Medicaid entirely.”

    But people move on and off Medicaid each year because of changes in job status and earnings. What matters is whether the work requirements led to any increase in employment that wouldn’t have happened in the absence of the requirements. A thorough 2020 analysis (Health Affairs, 9/20) found that they did not: “Work requirements did not increase employment over 18 months of follow-up.” The added hurdles were incredibly effective at reducing enrollment, though—18,000 people lost coverage while they were in effect. And they were great at aggravating all sorts of hardship, with disenrolled individuals struggling much more with medical bills and delays in care than people who were able to stay enrolled.

    The Journal was totally fine with printing Stehle’s shoddy, propagandistic analysis, handing the microphone to the vice president of communications of a group known for peddling junk science. But the paper seemed to realize that the likelihood of getting its way on Medicaid work requirements was slim, and it didn’t push the policy much in editorials. In one piece (5/17/23), the editorial board advised, “Now Republicans can hold firm, and even if Mr. Biden won’t agree on Medicaid, they can bank the incremental wins and build on the progress later.” In another (5/24/23), it wrote, “If Democrats can’t abide work in return for free healthcare, they should at least be willing to fix the work loopholes in food stamps.”

    The obvious question, though, is: Why should there be any condition for “free” healthcare (i.e. healthcare paid for through progressive taxes)? Why shouldn’t it be a basic right guaranteed to all? It’s not like we can’t afford it.

    The same goes for food. Why shouldn’t we guarantee decent nutrition to everyone by ensuring that the worst off have enough money to pay for food? Again, it’s not like we can’t afford it. The progressive economist Dean Baker has estimated that reducing the pay of the five highest-paid CEOs by half would generate savings equal to the entire SNAP budget, and that waste in the financial sector eats up at least six times as much money as the SNAP budget each year.

    Rigged: Gains from restructuring markets, in units of SNAP spending

    A host of progressive reforms to markets, outlined by the economist Dean Baker in his 2016 book Rigged, would generate savings that would dwarf the SNAP budget.

    For a reader of the Journal, this thinking must appear outlandish. Because what’s common sense in the pages of the paper is not basic decency, but general disdain for poor people, and extreme skepticism of their worthiness of any sort of governmental contribution to their well-being. By teaching people to celebrate the imposition of work requirements on a new cohort of SNAP-eligible adults, rather than being outraged by a blatant attempt to increase hunger and insecurity, the Wall Street Journal is doing little more than feeding hatred of the poor.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food

     

    WSJ: The GOP’s Progress on Work and Welfare

    The Wall Street Journal (5/30/23) calls it a “mistake” that “veterans and the homeless” are exempted from work requirement for food vouchers: “These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.”

    After holding the economy hostage for months, some Republicans are going through a bit of a depressive slump. “We got rolled,” is how one Republican congressmember (Roll Call, 6/6/23) described the outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations. “It was a bad deal.”

    But don’t cry too much, guys! The Wall Street Journal is here to cheer you up, and remind you that, though you didn’t get all the austerity you wanted, you did get to hurt the poor a bit. Maybe not as much as you wanted, but life’s not always fair, is it?

    As the Journal’s editorial board (5/30/23) recently wrote: “One reason the deal is worth passing: The provisions on work and welfare are incremental progress the GOP can build on.”

    Most centrally, the bill included an expansion of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”) for adults without a disability or children, raising the maximum age for those subject to work requirements from 49 to 54.

    The editorial’s takeaway:

    A major difference between the two political parties these days is that most Democrats favor a culture of dependency. The GOP’s task, which is popular with voters, is to rebuild a culture of work. The debt-ceiling bill starts to do that, which is one reason to support it.

    Vulnerable people

    CBO: Work Requirements andWork Supports for Recipients of Means-Tested Benefits

    CBO (6/22): “Work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid have reduced benefits more than they have increased people’s earnings.”

    It’s an odd statement to make when employment for prime-age workers (those between 25 and 54) is at its highest level in more than two decades, thanks in large part to the Democrats’ decision to go big in their Covid relief package in the spring of 2021. And it’s particularly odd when you consider the utter lack of evidence for the idea that expanding work requirements for food vouchers will increase employment in any significant way.

    As Shawn Fremstad has summarized for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the available evidence on the specific work requirement that is being expanded under the debt ceiling legislation

    tells a relatively consistent story about its impacts. There is no question that the work test reduces access to SNAP food vouchers among vulnerable people with few resources. On employment, the best read of the evidence is that it has no impact on employment, or only a very small one.

    In its 2022 analysis of the existing literature, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office similarly reported:

    SNAP’s work requirement has probably boosted employment for some adult recipients without dependents but has reduced income, on average, across all recipients. Earnings increased among recipients who worked more, but far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits because of the work requirement.

    So basically we can expect the new work requirements to definitely take food vouchers (in other words, food) away from a bunch of people—perhaps 225,000—and maybe slightly increase employment. Oh, yeah, they could also worsen physical and mental health, and increase reliance on food banks. Is that what rebuilding a culture of work looks like?

    Twisted logic

    The Journal apparently greets these outcomes with a grin, as the kind of “incremental progress the GOP can build on.” And it salivates for more. Reaching peak evil, the editorial board bemoans:

    One mistake in the debt deal is that the food-stamp work requirement exempts veterans and the homeless. These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.

    Notice the twisted logic here: Allowing people minimal access to food resources (SNAP benefits for a single person max out at $281 a month) is an indulgence that harms them. On the other hand, imposing punitive measures on people, forcing them to prove that they’re working a certain amount each month, that’s actually helping them. It’s teaching them the value of hard work, giving them dignity. Because the real problem is that these people just haven’t had enough of a fire lit under their ass. How do you address homelessness? Just threaten the unhoused with starvation, and I guess everyone left after that just deserves to be homeless.

    The unspoken premise is that people need to prove their worth to have access to food. Rather than having food guaranteed as a basic human right, people should be threatened with starvation. That way they’re insecure, and willing to accept the first job that comes around, no matter how bad the conditions and pay. That a major newspaper takes this editorial line is horrifying—though, given that the Journal is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch, unfortunately not surprising.

    ‘Unemployment too attractive’

    WSJ: Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal

    In the United States, which has more than 200,000 people living on the street, “public policy has made unemployment too attractive,” according to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley (5/23/23). 

    And the Journal isn’t just showing up for the celebration, either; it’s been hard at work pushing to cut people off from government benefits for a while. In one earlier piece (5/24/23), the editorial board lashed out at states for exempting too many people from already-existing SNAP work requirements. In another (5/17/23), it invoked the old lazy welfare recipient trope, whining that government assistance through programs like SNAP shouldn’t be “a permanent sinecure in return for doing nothing.”

    As the debt ceiling drama unfolded, the paper published a slew of anti-poor essays arguing for increased hurdles to accessing government assistance:

    • “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23)
    • “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23)
    • “Work Requirements Still Work” (5/29/23)
    • “Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996” (6/2/23)

    By far the most absurd was “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23), by columnist Jason L. Riley, which included some incredible lines, like:

    Asking something of people on the dole is perfectly rational, but liberals in Washington have long prioritized making the poor comfortable over helping them out of poverty.

    And:

    Too many healthy adults are opting out of work because public policy has made unemployment too attractive.

    And, for the ending:

    Mr. McCarthy is right to assume that most people don’t want their tax dollars being used by the government to subsidize laziness. I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Work harder: Millions of welfare recipients are depending on you.” So are a lot of liberals in Washington.

    It would be hard for the Onion to come up with a more perfect caricature of conservative mean-spiritedness. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that sticker is still proudly plastered on Riley’s bumper.

    Remarkably misleading numbers

    WSJ: Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’

    A Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/23) declared Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirements a success because people on Medicaid in the state got jobs—at a time of rapid economic growth. A more serious look at the impact of the requirements “found no evidence that low-income adults had increased their employment” (Health Affairs, 9/20).

    Meanwhile, another op-ed points to where the Journal believes the debt ceiling deal fell short. In “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23), Nick Stehle of the Foundation for Government Accountability holds up Arkansas’s experience with Medicaid work requirements to argue for a federal expansion of such work requirements. Stehle throws out some remarkably misleading numbers to suggest that Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas reduced dependence by boosting employment and incomes: “Tens of thousands went back to work, and more than 14,000 boosted their incomes enough to leave Medicaid entirely.”

    But people move on and off Medicaid each year because of changes in job status and earnings. What matters is whether the work requirements led to any increase in employment that wouldn’t have happened in the absence of the requirements. A thorough 2020 analysis (Health Affairs, 9/20) found that they did not: “Work requirements did not increase employment over 18 months of follow-up.” The added hurdles were incredibly effective at reducing enrollment, though—18,000 people lost coverage while they were in effect. And they were great at aggravating all sorts of hardship, with disenrolled individuals struggling much more with medical bills and delays in care than people who were able to stay enrolled.

    The Journal was totally fine with printing Stehle’s shoddy, propagandistic analysis, handing the microphone to the vice president of communications of a group known for peddling junk science. But the paper seemed to realize that the likelihood of getting its way on Medicaid work requirements was slim, and it didn’t push the policy much in editorials. In one piece (5/17/23), the editorial board advised, “Now Republicans can hold firm, and even if Mr. Biden won’t agree on Medicaid, they can bank the incremental wins and build on the progress later.” In another (5/24/23), it wrote, “If Democrats can’t abide work in return for free healthcare, they should at least be willing to fix the work loopholes in food stamps.”

    The obvious question, though, is: Why should there be any condition for “free” healthcare (i.e. healthcare paid for through progressive taxes)? Why shouldn’t it be a basic right guaranteed to all? It’s not like we can’t afford it.

    The same goes for food. Why shouldn’t we guarantee decent nutrition to everyone by ensuring that the worst off have enough money to pay for food? Again, it’s not like we can’t afford it. The progressive economist Dean Baker has estimated that reducing the pay of the five highest-paid CEOs by half would generate savings equal to the entire SNAP budget, and that waste in the financial sector eats up at least six times as much money as the SNAP budget each year.

    Rigged: Gains from restructuring markets, in units of SNAP spending

    A host of progressive reforms to markets, outlined by the economist Dean Baker in his 2016 book Rigged, would generate savings that would dwarf the SNAP budget.

    For a reader of the Journal, this thinking must appear outlandish. Because what’s common sense in the pages of the paper is not basic decency, but general disdain for poor people, and extreme skepticism of their worthiness of any sort of governmental contribution to their well-being. By teaching people to celebrate the imposition of work requirements on a new cohort of SNAP-eligible adults, rather than being outraged by a blatant attempt to increase hunger and insecurity, the Wall Street Journal is doing little more than feeding hatred of the poor.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Justice, Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act

          CounterSpin230609.mp3

     

    Cannabis farmer

    (image: PCBA)

    This week on CounterSpin: This country has a long history of weaponizing drug laws against Black and brown communities. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Concerns are justified about what the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana means for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization. We hear about that from Tauhid Chappell, founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association and project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project.

          CounterSpin230609Chappell.mp3

     

    Children using a computer

    (CC photo: Janine Jackson)

    Also on the show: Lots of people are concerned about what’s called the “digital well-being” of children—their safety and privacy online. So why did more than 90 human rights and LGBTQ groups sign a letter opposing the “Kids Online Safety Act”? Evan Greer is director of the group Fight for the Future. She tells us what’s going on there.

          CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3

     

    The post Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Justice, Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • CNN Needs More Than a New CEO—It Needs a New Model of Journalism

     

    Atlantic: Inside the Meltdown at CNN

    “There has to be a source of absolute truth,” then–CNN CEO Christ Licht told the Atlantic (6/2/23)—but also denounced “the media’s habit of marginalizing conservative views.”

    After less than a year, Warner Bros Discovery has ousted CNN chair and CEO Chris Licht. The move comes after the network has suffered dismal ratings, layoffs, an embarrassing town hall with Donald Trump and, most recently, a withering 15,000-word profile of Licht in the Atlantic (6/2/23).

    But don’t hold your breath hoping for a better CNN with Licht’s departure.

    Licht was recruited by Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav after Warner Media merged with Discovery Inc in 2022 to create a new parent company for the network. As FAIR wrote at the time of the merger (2/17/22), libertarian billionaire John Malone, an influential board member and stakeholder at Discovery, had been vocal about his desire to see CNN become more like Fox News. And Zaslav had said he wanted to distinguish CNN from cable news “advocacy networks” (Wall Street Journal, 4/14/22).

    After Licht took the helm, he quickly axed the network’s most outspoken Trump critics, including longtime media reporter Brian Stelter—who had also pushed back forcefully and publicly (CNN, 2/7/22) against Malone’s characterizations of CNN as a place that did not “actually have journalists.”

    FAIR (8/25/22) called Licht’s ouster of Stelter and cancellation of his long-running show, Reliable Sources, “the first evidence of a shift away from critical journalism at CNN, at a critical time.”

    ‘Democracy itself’ at stake

    NYT: The Education of CNN’s Chris Licht

    In the New York Times (12/18/22), Licht denounced “uninformed vitriol, especially from the left,” and referred to the middle of the political spectrum as “normal” people.

    Last December, the New York Times (12/18/22) published a fawning profile of Licht that presented him as a competent idealist just trying against tough odds to make the world a better place. The piece opened:

    When Chris Licht told his boss, Stephen Colbert, the host of the CBS program Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in February that he had been offered the chief executive job at CNN, Mr. Colbert was blunt: “Definitely don’t go do that.”

    But for Mr. Licht, nothing less than democracy itself was at stake. He argued he could make CNN a news channel that people trusted, as opposed to one that monetized partisan combat.

    Licht complained to the Times:

    The uninformed vitriol, especially from the left, has been stunning…. Which proves my point: so much of what passes for news is name-calling, half-truths and desperation.

    It’s not clear exactly what Licht was referring to, but “name-calling, half-truths and desperation” certainly would seem to be appropriate characterizations of the May event he orchestrated that marked the beginning of the end for his tenure.

    With “democracy itself” at stake, Licht decided to give Donald Trump a town hall event stocked with supporters, in which little effort was made to rein in the presidential candidate’s lies and insults. The outcome? As the Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta put it, “The only one who wasn’t angry, it seemed, was Trump, most likely because he’d succeeded in disgracing the network on its own airwaves.”

    ‘Speaking hard truths’

    Yahoo: CNN’s Ratings Dropped Below Newsmax 2 Days After Trump Town Hall

    The Trump town hall fiasco drove CNN‘s ratings down below even those of the far-right conspiracy theorists at Newsmax (Yahoo, 5/16/23).

    But it wasn’t Licht’s poor journalistic ethos that got him fired. His ouster could be attributed more to his inability to turn around CNN‘s tanking ratings, and to gain the confidence of his staff (CNN Business, 6/7/23). Those failures are little surprise. CNN‘s ratings are evidence that there is little audience for journalism that treats right-wing lies respectfully while not fully buying into them—and little enthusiasm from the journalists being asked to perform that act.

    On the contrary, Licht’s approach to journalism aligns neatly with too many other news execs (and reporters) who see themselves as non-ideological truth-tellers, pushing back against left and right in the service of democracy. (“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” anyone?) Yet they bend over backwards to both-sides every issue and avoid any appearance of anti-Republican bias, while forcefully rejecting what they see as a creeping “wokeism” on the left.

    From the Atlantic:

    Licht insisted that his media critiques were not ideological; that he was rebuking not a liberal slant on the news, per se, but rather a bias toward elite cultural sensibility, a reporting covenant in which affluent urban-dwelling journalists avoid speaking hard truths that would alienate members of their tribe. When we returned to the question of covering transgender issues—specifically, the science around prepubescent hormone treatments and life-altering surgeries—he suggested that the media was less interested in finding answers and more worried about not offending perceived allies.

    “We’ve got to ask tough questions without being shouted down for having the temerity to even ask,” Licht said. “There is a truth in there, and it may not serve one side or the other. But let’s get to the truth. Some of this is right, some of this is wrong; some of this is wrong, some of this is right.”

    If Licht’s take sounds familiar, it’s because it’s quite similar to the New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s defense of his paper’s misleading trans coverage. Sulzberger suggested (CJR, 5/15/23) that the paper’s high-profile articles that boosted misleading anti-trans narratives were likewise getting at what is “true” and “important,” and that “suppressing” unsupported anti-trans viewpoints would make the paper “overtly political.”

    ‘Do not virtue signal’

    A. G. Sulzberger

    Like Licht, New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger (CJR, 5/15/23) seems most concerned about not alienating a right-wing audience that has basically no trust in what his outlet says.

    The Atlantic profile continued:

    He paused. “And I will add, this is where words matter. You immediately force some people to tune out when you use, like, ‘person capable of giving birth.’ People tune out and you lose that trust.” He took another pause. “Do not virtue signal. Tell the truth. Ask questions getting at the truth—not collecting facts for one side or collecting facts for another side. Ask the tough questions. It’s an incredibly sensitive, divisive issue of which there is a Venn diagram that this country can agree on, if we get there with facts.”

    Again, Licht echoes Sulzberger. A “greater journalistic risk” than both-sidesing, Sulzberger asserted (CJR, 5/15/23), is “to actively embrace a journalistic one-sideism to signal that they are on the side of the righteous.” Better to include bigoted, false and/or conspiratorial viewpoints, these brave leaders suggest, than to “signal” that you’re taking the other side by excluding them.

    Both men seem to believe that, while gaining trust is vital for news outlets, the trust they need to gain is from a sector of the public that supports election lies and conspiracy theories—not the sector deeply skeptical of a corporate media system that found a Trump candidacy “damn good” for their bottom line. And the people with ultimate power in our media system seem more concerned about bigoted victims of criticism than about victims of bigotry.

    Licht’s journalistic perspective is hardly a disqualifier for corporate news leadership; it’s closer to a job requirement. As long as corporate media continue to emphasize  appearing unbiased against an increasingly radical right, and on being “tough” on the left rather than holding the powerful to account, their purported goals of saving democracy and gaining public trust will both be equally out of reach.

     

     

    The post CNN Needs More Than a New CEO—It Needs a New Model of Journalism appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Southern Discomfort: Attacks on Freedom Need Condemnation

     

    Asheville Blade: It's not illegal for the press to cover a story

    The Asheville Blade (3/29/23) covers the arrest of one of their journalists, Veronica Coit (with a graphic created by another arrested journalist, Matilda Bliss).

    Two recent cases in the South have raised fears that journalists and activists who use their constitutional rights against police power will be targeted by the state. Worse, establishment media don’t seem terribly troubled by this.

    In North Carolina, Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit, two reporters from the progressive Asheville Blade, were convicted of “misdemeanor trespassing after being arrested while covering the clearing of a homeless encampment in a public park in 2021.” The judge in the case “said there was no evidence presented to the court that Bliss and Coit were journalists, and that he saw this as a ‘plain and simple trespassing case’” (VoA, 4/19/23).

    They’re appealing the conviction (Carolina Public Press, 5/17/23; NC Newsline, 6/2/23), and they have a good bit of support. In April, Eileen O’Reilly, president of the National Press Club, and Gil Klein, president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, denounced the reporters’ conviction, saying that they “were engaged in routine newsgathering, reporting on the clearing by local police of a homeless encampment” (PRNewswire, 4/20/23). Available evidence, they said, “shows Bliss and Coit did not endanger anyone or obstruct any police activity,” adding that they “were arrested while reporting on a matter of public importance in their community.”

    Dozens of other press advocates, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (5/3/23), PEN America (4/25/23) and the Coalition for Women in Journalism (4/19/23), have blasted the convictions.

    ‘Anti-establishment views’

    AP: 3 activists arrested after their fund bailed out protestors of Atlanta’s ‘Cop City’

    The house of two of the Atlanta defendants is “emblazoned with anti-police graffiti in an otherwise gentrified neighborhood” (AP, 5/31/23).

    In Atlanta, the assault on protesters against “Cop City”—a planned project that would devastate scores of acres of forest land on the city’s south side for a massive military-style security training complex—amped up when Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Atlanta police “arrested three leaders of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has bailed out [anti-Cop City] protesters and helped them find lawyers” (AP, 5/31/23).

    The three were charged with money laundering and charity fraud. The “money laundering” consisted of transferring $48,000 from their group, the Network for Strong Communities, to the California-based Siskiyou Mutual Aid—and back again. The “fraud” amounted to the defendants reimbursing themselves for expenses like building materials, yard signs and gasoline. Deputy Attorney General John Fowler seemed to get closer to the actual reason for the prosecution when he said the defendants “harbor extremist anti-government and anti-establishment views” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/2/23).

    When news broke about the arrests, Atlanta activist and journalist circles were abuzz with fears and questions (Atlanta Community Press Collective, 5/31/23). There must be more to the story, right? These people couldn’t simply be arrested for providing bail and legal support—that would be absurd. What next: arresting defense attorneys?

    The judge in the case has shared such skepticism, freeing the three on bond despite pressure from the state attorney general not to, and expressing “concerns about their free speech rights and saying he did not find the prosecution’s case, at least for now, ‘real impressive’” (AP, 6/2/23).

    Tensions around Cop City are already high. Its projected cost has doubled (Creative Loafing, 5/29/23), dozens of protesters have been hit with domestic terrorism charges (WAGA, 3/5/23) and an autopsy for an activist killed by police “shows their hands were raised when they were killed” (NPR, 3/11/23).

    The recent arrests have only raised the temperature. Not long after the three activists were granted bail, the Atlanta City Council “voted 11–4 after a roughly 15-hour long meeting” to approve the project, “sparking cries of ‘Cop City will never be built!’ from the activists who packed City Hall to oppose the measure” (Axios, 6/6/23; Twitter, 6/6/23).

    ‘Is she real press?’

    Slate: The Details of the Atlanta Bail Fund Arrest Are More Horrific Than First Described

    Slate (6/1/23): “The state’s intention to criminalize dissent could not have been clearer.”

    The Atlanta arrests have received considerable press attention. Slate (6/1/23) and the Intercept (5/31/23) wrote pieces highlighting the severity of the charges. The Asheville case, despite considerable outcry from press advocates, hasn’t had much attention outside left-wing and local press, with the surprising exception of a report on Voice of America (4/19/23), a US government–owned network.

    What neither of these cases has received is an outcry from major newspaper editorial boards or network news shows, calling attention to their violation of constitutional rights—although the Atlanta arrests did get a news story in the New York Times (6/2/23) that included condemnations from civil liberties groups. (MSNBC published an op-ed denouncing the arrests on its website—6/3/23.) At FAIR, I have rung the alarm that journalists for both mainstream and small outlets have faced arrests (3/16/21) and extreme police violence (9/3/21). These incidents are part of that trend.

    In the Asheville instance, Judge James Calvin Hill was already hostile toward the reporters’ First Amendment claims, as he questioned whether they were actually journalists (Truthout, 6/1/23). “She says she’s press,” a police officer said in court of Coit, to which Hill responded: “Is she real press?”

    The Asheville Blade is a small, scruffy left-wing outlet; are we to assume that courts will determine what constitutes a journalistic outlet based on budget, size of distribution, popularity and political orientation?

    In the case of the Atlanta arrests, coverage often carried photos of the activists’ Eastside house, painted purple with anti-police signage and graffiti. This hippie vibe might not be the image Atlanta’s powerful business class wants to project as the commercial center of the South; the Atlanta Police Foundation includes support from some of the city’s top corporations  (New Yorker, 8/3/23), including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot—and Cox, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s parent company.

    The Journal-Constitution, the major local paper, has run pieces (5/8/21, 1/25/23, 3/8/23) in favor of Cop City and other aggressive anti-crime tactics. Its editorial board (8/21/21) declared, “There’s no time to waste in moving to replace the city’s current, dilapidated training grounds,” because “criminals will continue to ply their trade, exacting a cost in property, public fears and even lives.”

    Needless to say, this is not the way the Asheville Blade writes about police issues. But that shouldn’t matter, because constitutional rights, by their definition, are not supposed to discriminate.

    Concern for freedom—elsewhere

    NYT: In Rare Victory for Media, Hong Kong Court Overturns Conviction of Journalist

    The New York Times‘ concern (6/5/23) for a persecuted journalist is not so rare—at least when the persecutors are official enemies.

    We live in a media environment (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 11/17/21, 3/25/22) where we must constantly endure think piece after think piece about whether conservative college students are safe from ridicule if they come out against nonbinary pronouns, or if a comedian has suffered a dip in popularity because their schtick is considered “unwoke.” Governments actually trying to imprison people for exercising their constitutional rights somehow don’t generate the same sense of alarm in establishment media.

    Unless, of course, those governments are abroad, in official enemy nations. The New York Times (6/5/23) prominently reported a “rare victory for journalism amid a crackdown on the news media in Hong Kong” after a court “overturned the conviction of a prominent reporter who had produced a documentary that was critical of the police.” When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia, this was naturally covered, not just by his own paper (3/31/23) but its rivals as well (New York Times, 5/23/23; Washington Post, 5/31/23).

    If our media really cared about the future of free discourse in contemporary America, and the state of freedom of speech and association, Atlanta and Asheville would be the focus of the same sort of media attention.

    The post Southern Discomfort: Attacks on Freedom Need Condemnation appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The History of Affirmative Action Has Asian-American Influence All Over It’ – CounterSpin interview with Jeff Chang on Asian Americans and affirmative action

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed cultural critic Jeff Chang about Asian Americans and affirmative action for the June 2, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230602Chang.mp3

     

    ACLU: Meet Edward Blum, the Man Who Wants to Kill Affirmative Action in Higher Education

    ACLU (10/18/18)

    Janine Jackson: After the Supreme Court failed to find that Abigail Fisher had been denied admission to the University of Texas due to racial discrimination against white people, anti-equity activist Ed Blum announced that he “needed Asian plaintiffs” to further the mission of eliminating affirmative action policies from college admissions.

    That’s the short version, and the basic context for the cases Blum’s group, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., is bringing against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, cases the Trump-stacked Court will likely rule on in June.

    Affirmative action has always been a difficult topic for a press corps more comfortable talking about individual racists than systemic white supremacy, and worlds more happy to gesture towards buying the world a Coke than to unpack the particulars of what actually needs to happen to get to anything like equity or reparation for marginalized people.

    So these are things we should look out for in the coverage we may see on the Court’s possible upcoming ruling.

    Jeff Chang is a writer and cultural critic, and author of, most recently, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, and of course 2005’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He was a co-founder of the Student Coalition for Fair Admissions, organized at UC Berkeley in 1987, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jeff Chang.

    Jeff Chang: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.

    Guardian: Asian Americans spent decades seeking fair education. Then the right stole the narrative

    Guardian (4/13/23)

    JJ: People may see that Asian Americans are being used here in this fight, and kind of used as a wedge between Black people and white people, and they may understand that stereotypes are being employed to advance an anti–equal opportunity argument. But I still think that folks might not understand the subversion or the distortion that this all represents of Asian Americans’ historical role in the creation, in the beginning, of affirmative action policies.

    And in your super useful April piece for the Guardian, you talk about this erased history. Would you fill us in on some of that missing history?

    JC: First of all, Asian Americans have been consistently polling in favor of affirmative action, by really two to one. And that’s, I think, a fact that’s often overlooked in media coverage of Asian Americans’ perspectives on affirmative action.

    The history of affirmative action has Asian-American influence all over it. If you look at the post–World War II period and this rising period of civil rights, Japanese-American civil rights leaders were working alongside African-American leaders in arguing for equal opportunity and affirmative action.

    And they were doing it in the context of looking at reparations, which were eventually granted the Japanese-American community for what had been done to them in terms of incarcerating them during World War II.

    But all the way through the 1960s, what you see is steady and powerful advocacy on the part of Asian Americans to have them included in programs around equal opportunity.

    American Progress: Gaps in the Debate About Asian Americans and Affirmative Action at Harvard

    Center for American Progress (8/29/18)

    And what we begin to see in the universities is this bearing fruit in the 1970s and the 1980s. What you see, though, is by the 1980s, because of immigration, there’s a much larger population of Asian-American students who are applying for elite universities.

    And so at that time, universities begin to quietly, and sometimes loudly, take Asian Americans off of equal opportunity programs, despite the fact that there are a number of Asian-American ethnicities, such as Filipino Americans and Southeast Asian Americans, who were still deeply underrepresented.

    And, of course, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders continue to be deeply underrepresented in college admissions and university admissions all across the US.

    So at that particular time, what we also see is a surge of applications from this new generation of immigrants, and universities are also experiencing concern from white alumni about the competition that these Asian-American immigrants, this new generation, is providing against their sons and daughters at elite universities, where, in the past, legacy admissions have preserved their entitlement to slots at universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

    So in the beginning of the ’80s, what we begin to see is this plateauing of the number of Asian Americans who are actually admitted to these universities, and community advocates in the Asian-American community begin to get really concerned, because the number of applications is still skyrocketing, but the number of admissions is plateaued.

    SF Gate: Activism will always be part of professor's life / Ling-chi Wang has history of breaking down barriers

    SF Gate (5/3/06)

    And so there’s this huge gap that they want to explore. And when they do, especially at UC Berkeley, under the leadership of a group of community leaders there and a professor named Ling-Chi Wang, they find that there have been a number of different types of changes that have been made in the admissions process that have actually discriminated against Asian Americans disproportionately and excluded them from admissions.

    And as studies pop up all across the country at Brown University, at UCLA, at a number of other universities around the country, folks begin to find the same kinds of things happening.

    JJ: And then the idea that there could be anti–Asian American bias in college admissions, but that that is not due to affirmative action policies, here’s where the conflation occurs, and where the co-optation of the narrative occurs.

    JC: That’s exactly right. What Asian Americans are arguing for at this particular point is a sense of fairness in what is supposed to be meritocratic competition between white and Asian students for these slots.

    Affirmative action is a completely different track, and students are judged for affirmative action by a different set of standards, because of the importance of increasing diversity in these elite universities. That’s what the Supreme Court has ruled, over and over again.

    And really, actually, if we go back, affirmative action was begun as a remedy for historic discrimination. And so that’s the way that I think a lot of communities of color are seeing the need for these affirmative action programs, despite the fact that before the court, the only justification for affirmative action programs now, because of the Bakke case in 1978, is this idea of “diversity.”

    Now, getting to a lot of different types of things, but the main point here is to note that the Supreme Court, by getting rid of the historic discrimination standard for affirmative action programs, has moved to this much lighter…

    JJ: Mushier.

    JC: …much more white-friendly idea of diversity. That is the main justification now before the law for these affirmative action programs to exist.

    But what happens with Asian Americans is, you have Asian Americans here aiding diversity, right? And at the same time, you have white admissions officers, in order to please white alumni concerned about their children getting into these universities, tweaking the system, so that Asian Americans are less competitive in comparison to white candidates, in this supposedly pure, meritocratic, color-blind system.

    JJ: Absolutely. And when I hear “diversity” as a goal, it sounds to me like a perk for white people, like sprinkles on the sundae. White people deserve to be on top, but to be surrounded by and “learn from” the people they’re on top of.

    Diversity is something that is a good thing; and this just leads directly to–and listeners may know this, but it doesn’t appear, particularly, in a lot of media conversations–you hear Harvard’s very “competitive,” and Asian people and Black and brown people are fighting for spots at Harvard. And it’s like, those are the spots that are left over after we get through ALDC. And maybe you could explain what that is.

    New Yorker: The Sad Death of Affirmative Action

    New Yorker (11/4/22)

    JC: First, to go back, the main question becomes “who is diversity for?” And the diversity standard really was developed by Harvard as an alternative justification for the equal opportunity programs that they were instituting in the 1960s and the 1970s, as an alternative to recognizing that, historically, they’d excluded women, they’d excluded non-Protestant people–Catholics and Jewish people–and that this was really a way for them to preserve a sort of elite student body that they wanted to sculpt in their own image.

    And so we have to kind of go back to that. We have to mention that, we have to note that, when we’re talking about the programs that we’re talking about now.

    And what they created, at the same time, was this notion of legacy admits, right? The technical term for it are ALDC admits, and this includes athletes, legacy admits, the Dean’s preferred lists, children of faculty and staff.

    These are all preferential treatment slots that were given out, even before equal opportunity programs had come into play in the 1960s. This is, again, to preserve privilege and wealth for a certain class of folks.

    And even now, when we look at white admissions to Harvard, 43% of them are noncompetitive ALDC admits. And so the idea of preferential programs being just for Black and brown students, for poor students, that’s a recent development.

    Even now, right, we’re talking about the large proportion of white students being admitted to Harvard via preferential treatment.

    Jeff Chang

    Jeff Chang: “We’d be going back a century or more in time, to a period in which campuses were less diverse than we could even imagine.”

    And so now, when we talk about what should these classes look like, and we have a case before the Supreme Court which would basically make it impossible for elite universities to be able to bring in students who are not white, we have a situation in which we’re solving a problem that’s just for elite universities, and, in fact, inflicting that on the rest of society. And the results would be disastrous.

    The results would be the resegregation of higher education. We’d be going back a century or more in time, to a period in which campuses were less diverse than we could even imagine at this particular point.

    JJ: And not to put too fine a point on it, but I think when people hear about Ed Blum and plaintiff-shopping and knowing that, oh, on the other days of the week, he’s opposing voting rights, he is obviously, and his group, are clearly not really concerned about equity across difference.

    But even besides that consider-the-source argument, if this case wins in the Court, it really doesn’t mean anything extra good for Asian Americans. The people who are nominally the plaintiffs here, the cases themselves don’t have anything in particular to do with Asian Americans, in terms of their likely outcome.

    JC: We’re talking about a group that calls itself Students for Fair Admissions. And the important thing to note is that they’ve never produced any students in any of the testimony, and they’ve never presented any Asian Americans in their testimony. And so that goes to tell you, at least on the surface….

    JJ: It’s not a class action, it’s not a class action.

    JC: It’s not a class action suit. And the other thing to note is that, look, there’s more Asian Americans who are enrolled in San Francisco City College than there are in the entirety of the Ivy Leagues.

    And so if the argument here is that this is going to support opportunity for Asian Americans in the main, that’s not the case. We’re talking about a small number of Asian Americans who are applying to this elite university, in numbers below a thousand, probably, every year, or in the low thousands, probably, across the Ivy Leagues every year. So, very much not the majority of Asian Americans.

    JJ: And that leads me to media coverage, because, media are certainly tossing around, and we can expect more of it, just “Asian American” as a term, as though they’re a monolith, and that there was nothing of particular value in exploring different communities.

    And I just wonder, what would you ask for from media in terms of addressing this? I mean, maybe hope for, maybe dream of, but what would good coverage look like?

    JC: Yeah, I think good coverage would include this long, long history that Asian Americans have had of participating in arguing for equal opportunity programs, for affirmative action programs, for civil rights programs.

    It would be much more, I think, realistic about the way that Asian Americans actually feel about affirmative action in this particular moment in history, which is that they support it. And I think it would be much fairer about looking at what the real needs are of Asian Americans across the board.

    Asian Americans are standing against Ed Blum and his anti–affirmative action cohort, because they know that what’s best is equal opportunity for all, right?

    And I think that that’s something that is really downplayed in the media, where there’s a focus instead on the minority of Asian Americans who have been advocating against affirmative action, and against desegregation in public schools and public high schools in a select number of cities on the coast.

    And so that, I think, would be a much more realistic view of where Asian Americans stand in relationship to this issue.

    JJ: So it has to do with who they talk to, really.

    JC: Yeah. And I think it also has to do with the lack of understanding of what Asian Americans have been through historically in the US, and how our communities have been shaped. And so it’s really part of a larger thing about representation of Asian Americans in our true light, in our full humanity.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jeff Chang. You can find his piece, headed “Asian Americans Spent Decades Seeking Fair Education. Then the Right Stole the Narrative,” online at TheGuardian.com. Jeff Chang, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    JC: Thank you so much.

     

    The post ‘The History of Affirmative Action Has Asian-American Influence All Over It’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • For Media, Giving in to Debt Limit Blackmail Was a Triumph of Bipartisanship

     

    When Congress passed the debt ceiling deal hammered out by President Joe Biden and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, centrist media celebrated.

    If we had anything like a responsible White House press corps, we never would have gotten to this point. Treating the Republican gambit—demanding deeply unpopular policy measures in exchange for allowing the government to pay off debts Congress had already authorized—as anything other than economic hostage-taking gave it the legitimacy the party needed to stick with it without fear of massive political blowback (CounterSpin, 5/5/23).

    Instead, the press corps we have gave three cheers for bipartisanship.

    ‘Complaints on either side’

    NPR: Don't believe the hype: Low-key lawmakers helped avert a debt ceiling crisis

    NPR (6/1/23): “For one night, the pragmatists won.”

    NPR‘s Domenico Montanaro (6/1/23) hailed the compromise in a piece headlined, “Don’t Believe the Hype: Low-Key Lawmakers Helped Avert a Debt Ceiling Crisis.” A paean to “pragmatists,” the article argued that

    it will be those who eschewed the wings of their parties—which have some of the most vocal, attention-getting members—who averted a potentially calamitous, first-ever US debt default.

    Call them perhaps the Silent Middle Majority.

    Montanaro offered a both-sides framing of the deal:

    There were plenty of well-founded complaints on either side—on the left, worries about increased work requirements that could hurt people in poverty, nervousness about the environmental impact of sped-up energy permits; on the right, continued head-shaking about what they see as out-of-control spending and debt, now topping $30 trillion.

    But in the end, two-thirds of House Republicans and more than three-quarters of Democrats voted for the bill for a total tally of 314–117.

    It’s an analysis that simply assumes the validity of the premise that some sort of deal needed to be worked out to begin with: If a hostage-taker complains that their demands have only partially been met, how well-founded is that complaint?

    And on top of the false premise, Montanaro has to stretch to make both sides’ “complaints” seem at all comparable, matching the left’s “worries” and “nervousness”—about harming people and the environment—to the right’s “what they see as” problems. But there’s solid research behind the “worry” that work requirements exacerbate hardship (CBPP, 3/15/23), and speeding up energy permits is intended to increase fossil fuel production (American Prospect, 6/2/23), which is precisely what must be halted to stave off the worst of climate change outcomes.

    And however much right-wing politicians shake their heads about the debt, it’s journalists’ duty to point out the disingenuousness of a party that runs up debt via tax cuts, and then pretends to favor fiscal responsibility when it comes time to pay the bills (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).

    ‘Far-right and hard-left…in revolt’

    NYT: Why Spending Cuts Likely Won’t Shake the Economy

    New York Times (5/29/23): “Some economists say the economy could use a mild dose of fiscal austerity right now.”

    The New York Times also luxuriated in the outpouring of bipartisanship, with chief White House correspondent Peter Baker (5/28/23) reporting that Republicans’ success in holding the economy hostage “bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is the one figure who can still do bipartisanship in a profoundly partisan era.” He added, though, that the deal “comes at the cost of rankling many in his own party who have little appetite for meeting Republicans in the middle.”

    Another piece, by congressional reporter Catie Edmondson (5/31/23), presented the deal as “a broad bipartisan coalition” in support of “a critical vote to pull the nation back from the brink of economic catastrophe”:

    With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks.

    When the Times reports that the “far right” and “hard left” both oppose something, that’s a sure sign that the paper thinks it’s a good thing. Another front-page piece in the paper, by Jim Tankersley (5/29/23), went out of its way to argue that not only was it good that the White House made a deal, but that, all in all, it was a good deal:

    Economists say the agreement is unlikely to inflict the sort of lasting damage to the recovery that was caused by the 2011 debt ceiling deal—and, paradoxically, the newfound spending restraint might even help it.

    “The economy could actually use a mild dose of fiscal austerity right now,” Tankersley reported economists were saying; the cuts will throw people out of work, so the Federal Reserve won’t have to. In the 23rd of 25 paragraphs, after presenting the Republican argument that the deal “will help the economy by reducing the accumulation of debt,” the reporter acknowledged that the cuts “will affect nondefense discretionary programs, like Head Start preschool, and…new work requirements could choke off food and other assistance to vulnerable Americans.”

    ‘Centrists’ vs. ‘fringes’

    WaPo: A Washington surprise: Centrists push back against fringes in debt deal

    The Washington Post (5/30/23) reported that “Biden and McCarthy have each struggled at times to balance governing responsibly with appeasing their party’s base voters”—making it clear that it thought giving in to McCarthy’s threats to torpedo the economy was the responsible thing to do.

    The Washington Post (5/30/23) seemed practically giddy at the deal: “A Washington Surprise: Centrists Push Back Against Fringes in Debt Deal.”

    In the piece, White House bureau chief Toluse Olorunnipa found a way to equate Republicans willing to blow up the economy if they weren’t given policy concessions—ones they didn’t think they could achieve through legislation—with Democrats who insisted that government debts simply had to be paid:

    For weeks, conservative Republicans warned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy not to back down from sweeping spending cuts, saying anything else would be an unforgivable betrayal. Liberals implored President Biden to abandon the debt ceiling talks altogether, insisting the Constitution enabled him to simply ignore Republican demands.

    But in the end, the two leaders opted for a middle-of-the-road settlement, aiming to coalesce center-right and center-left lawmakers around the idea that an imperfect deal was preferable to a historic default that could devastate the economy. It was the first significant test for the Biden/McCarthy era of divided government, and if a theme emerged, it was the unmistakable reassertion of the political center.

    “Both sides were initially sounding very ardent about an inflexible position,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Yet both sides ultimately blinked—and that is what American politics is all about.”

    Winners and losers

    In all of the coverage, one consistent theme was the compulsion to declare winners and losers. Some outlets picked one side or the other: “House Passes Debt Ceiling Bill in Big Win for McCarthy,” judged the Hill (5/31/23), and USA Today (6/2/23) similarly had “McCarthy Gets Win Passing Debt Deal.” “Apostle of Bipartisanship: Why US Debt Ceiling Deal Was a Victory for Joe Biden,” explained the British Guardian (6/1/23), while the Washington Post (6/1/23) had a more confusing “Biden Won on the Debt Ceiling. Why Doesn’t He Want It to Look That Way?”

    USA Today: Debt ceiling plan passes Senate. Who wins? Everyone, and here's why.

    USA Today (6/1/23) acknowledged in passing that the deal would hurt people with student loans and those who need nutritional assistance, among others—but they won too, apparently.

    Others declared both dealmakers victorious. Politico‘s popular Playbook newsletter (6/1/23) ran with “How McCarthy and Biden Both Won the Debt Deal.” The Washington Post (6/1/23) simply offered the two sides’ own declarations: “Sidestepping Crisis, Biden and McCarthy Claim Victory in Debt Deal.” Another USA Today piece (6/1/23) made the bold claim, “Debt Ceiling Plan Passes Senate. Who Wins? Everyone, and Here’s Why.”

    In a different twist, CNN (5/30/23) offered its perspective on which companies were “winners” in the deal—leading off with Equitrans Midstream, the lead developer of the Mountain Valley Pipeline project that Sen. Joe Manchin forced into the agreement.

    It also included lending company SoFi, which would profit from an end to the student loan repayment freeze included in the deal, and H&R Block and TurboTax, which are expected to benefit from the deal’s cuts to the IRS. This curtailment will likely stymie the agency’s plan to develop a free electronic tax filing system, which would have rendered those tax preparers’ offerings much less profitable.

    CNN‘s “winners” begin to suggest who some of the “losers” are in this deal. It preserves tax cuts for the wealthy and funding for the Pentagon, while cutting the rest of discretionary funding, forcing more work requirements on recipients of public assistance, fast-tracking fossil fuel projects and weakening environmental protections—all great for corporations and wealthy political donors, and terrible for most people. But both major parties agreed to inflict this damage—and that in itself makes it good news for establishment media.

     

    The post For Media, Giving in to Debt Limit Blackmail Was a Triumph of Bipartisanship appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Border Crisis’ Means Migrants Coming—Not Migrants Dying

     

    As the pandemic-era border policy known as Title 42 ended last month, news outlets spent a great deal of time caterwauling about a “border crisis” and a “surge” that never materialized. But when an actual migrant child died in custody at the border, media concern was conspicuously muted, demonstrating once again that centrist media’s definition of a “border crisis” has less to do with human lives and more to do with partisan politics.

    Title 42, an ostensible public health measure initially invoked under President Donald Trump, allowed the US government to expel migrants without due process or access to asylum (AP, 5/12/23). Though experts and even some judges declared it both illegal and inhumane, the Biden administration had continued the policy for all migrants except for unaccompanied youth (FAIR.org, 3/25/21). But when President Joe Biden announced an official end date to the federal Covid-19 public health emergency—May 11—Title 42 was scheduled to end with it.

    ‘Mobs and even rioters’

    Time: Why the U.S. May Be Days Away From a Border Crisis

    Time (5/8/23) reported that “on Thursday, May 11, one emergency will officially end and another may begin”—but what that new emergency might be was never spelled out.

    The nativist right was predictably apocalyptic about the coming border policy change. Fox News, which mainstreamed the Great Replacement Theory with its regularly scheduled fearmongering about invading migrants (FAIR.org, 5/20/22), even put a doomsday clock on the lower-right corner of its screen for maximum effect.

    The New York Post (5/12/23) ran a lengthy piece promoting frenzied warnings about potential “mobs and even rioters,” including the Border Patrol union’s assessment that without Trump’s border policies in place, “the American public is going to suffer,” and its prediction that “nobody except the cartel thugs is prepared for what’s about to hit us.”

    But some centrist outlets played up a looming “surge” as well. On May 11, CBS   Evening News warned that “the clock is ticking.” Time (5/8/23) offered the headline  “Why the US May Be Days Away From a Border Crisis.” The article began, “At 11:59 pm on Thursday, May 11, one emergency will officially end and another may begin.” The emergency that’s officially ending, of course, would be the Covid-19 public health emergency; the one that “may begin” was an imagined border emergency precipitated by the US removing one controversial tool from its immigration policy toolkit.

    The Time piece never quite spelled out exactly what that “emergency” might be beyond “a surge of people” attempting to cross the border, though it did quote a press release from Republican Sen. Thom Tillis warning of “catastrophic fallout at the border” without a Title 42–like policy in place.

    ‘Going to be chaotic’

    NY Post: DHS chief expects ‘surge’ at the border next month when Title 42 ends

    Right-wing outlets like the New York Post (4/18/23) were delighted to hear Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeating their language.

    Such coverage was due in no small part to the Biden administration’s own framing of the situation. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas described the federal government’s sending of troops to the border with the same “surge” language media used (ABC, 5/5/23): “What we are seeing is an operation that was stood up in 72 hours by the United States Border Patrol to address a surge.” Biden himself prepared the public for the worst: “It’s going to be chaotic for a while.”

    But, while no one could have predicted exactly what would happen when Title 42 ended, the policies Biden had announced to replace Title 42 certainly appeared draconian enough to prevent the kind of migration apocalypse that media outlets anticipated (WOLA, 5/9/23). Biden planned to return to Title 8—normal US immigration law—but also introduced several new policies to make seeking asylum more difficult.

    For instance, migrants now must show that they sought and were denied asylum in every country they passed through on their way to the US (a slightly modified version of Trump’s transit ban). They also must book an elusive appointment through the glitchy new CBPOne app, or be blocked from entering the US for five years.

    While border apprehensions did increase in the days leading up to May 12, there was no massive “surge” after Fox‘s clock reached zero. Instead, border encounters actually dropped.

    ‘Barbaric and cruel’

    Source NM: Asylum officers rushing migrants through screenings, advocates say

    Title 42 “is being replaced with restrictive and harsh policies that are going to make it very difficult for asylum seekers to be able to have a fair chance at seeking asylum in the United States,” an immigrant advocate told Source NM (5/12/23).

    While the Post‘s “mobs and rioters” never materialized, it’s clear there continues to be a crisis at the border—a humanitarian crisis that will not be resolved by the end of Title 42 (FAIR.org, 3/25/21, 5/24/21). Source NM (5/12/23) reported that immigration rights advocates expected due process to continue to be subverted for those seeking asylum, “sacrificing protection in the name of speed.”

    A delegation of rights groups (Human Rights First, 5/18/23) that visited the border as the new policies were implemented called them “barbaric and cruel” and expressed “grave concerns” that they

    will endanger the lives of people seeking asylum, discriminate against many of the most vulnerable people seeking asylum, and vastly complicate asylum adjudications down the road.

    Human Rights Watch (5/11/23) similarly warned that Biden’s new set of policies

    will almost certainly lead to a rise in the already record number of migrants dying at the United States southern border, enrich criminal cartels, and return refugees to likely harm.

    ‘Crisis’ defined

    One aspect of the humanitarian crisis continues to be the inhumane conditions at CBP detention centers. In one extreme example, eight-year-old Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez died in Border Patrol custody in Texas on May 17.

    CBS: Migrant mother requested aid three times the day her 8-year-old daughter died in U.S. border custody

    “She cried and begged for her life and they ignored her,” Anadith Reyes’ mother said of Border Patrol agents (CBS, 5/22/23).

    The girl had been taken into CBP custody, along with her parents and siblings, eight days earlier after crossing the border, and had been diagnosed with influenza a few days later. (Migrants are not supposed to be held more than 72 hours.) The day of her death, her mother brought her to a medical unit three times, where she said agents refused to take Anadith to a hospital (Newsweek, 5/20/23).

    This happened only a week after 17-year-old Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza died on May 10, in CBP custody in Florida.

    A search of the Nexis news database found Anadith’s name mentioned on air twice across all major outlets: once on MSNBC (All In, 5/23/23) and once on the CBS Evening News (5/22/23). A search of Time‘s website for “Anadith” turns up no results.

    The New York Times put border stories on its front page eight times in the three weeks starting May 5, the day Mayorkas warned of a “surge,” but the story of Anadith’s death never made it to the paper’s front page. At the Washington Post, border stories made front-page news six times during that period; as at the Times, the child’s death was not among them.

    That lack of concern reveals corporate media’s true priorities. What is the “crisis” at the border if not the death of a child?

    The post ‘Border Crisis’ Means Migrants Coming—Not Migrants Dying appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Jeff Chang & Jeannie Park on Asian Americans and Affirmative Action

          CounterSpin230602.mp3

     

    NBC: How Asian-led student groups are continuing affirmative action fight at Harvard and UNC

    NBC (11/2/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media have never been the right place to look for thoughtful, inclusive consideration of affirmative action. For them it’s an “issue,” a political football, rather than a long effort to address the real historical and ongoing discrimination against non-white, non-male people in multiple aspects of US life.

    But when it comes to the role that anti-discrimination, pro-equity efforts have had on Asian-American communities, there are particular layers of mis- and disinformation that benefit from exploring. Listeners will know that Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions. It looks like the Supreme Court will rule on a watershed case this month. We talk about it with writer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, among other titles.

          CounterSpin230602Chang.mp3

     

    We also hear some of an earlier discussion of the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. vs. Harvard that CounterSpin had with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

          CounterSpin230602Park.mp3

    Transcript: “This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans”

    The post Jeff Chang & Jeannie Park on Asian Americans and Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • WSJ Says Corporate Profiteering Is Good, Actually

     

    Greed is good, actually. At least that’s the journalistic line the Wall Street Journal has decided to take, with a recent headline (5/25/23) reading, “‘Greedflation’ Is Real—and Probably Good for the Economy.”

    To refresh your memory, “greedflation” is the idea that corporate profiteering has contributed to inflation—a thesis that was, up until recently, generally downplayed or outright ridiculed by the media (New York Times, 1/3/22, 6/11/22; Bloomberg, 5/19/22, Washington Post, 5/12/22). As Axios (5/18/23) summarized earlier this month, however:

    Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka “greedflation,” is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press.

    The change in tenor was captured by Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein on Twitter (5/26/23):

    Twitter: The idea that corporate profits contribute to inflation went from conspiracy theory to real and probably good

    As recently as February, the Wall Street Journal (2/14/23) had completely ignored the role of corporate profiteering in a piece on rising prices for breakfast staples, blaming supply shocks instead. Writing for FAIR (2/21/23), Luca GoldMansour pointed out that the piece completely ignored strong evidence of price gouging by egg producers.

    Now, in a piece by columnist Jon Sindreu, the Journal is changing its tune by recognizing the importance of profiteering. But instead of criticizing the practice, it’s celebrating it.

    ‘A bit of corporate greed’

    WSJ: Growth in US unit prices during selected periods, by contribution

    The Journal (5/25/23) provided a useful graph showing that corporate profits have contributed far more to price increases than in the past. Businesses have enjoyed historically high profit margins over the last several years, as supply shocks have provided them with ready excuses to hike up prices with little resistance from consumers.

    In the column, which was published in the paper’s “Heard on the Street” section, Sindreu argues:

    A bit of corporate greed may be helping the fight against recession…. Yes, inflation may be higher as a result of corporations flexing their pricing muscle. But it is probably also the reason why the recession everyone expects always seems to be six months away.

    All this amounts to is a sleight of hand. As Sindreu admits towards the end of the piece, what’s actually saved the economy from a downturn is not corporate profits, but “the surprisingly strong spending patterns seen during and since the pandemic.” People keep spending money; the economy keeps chugging along.

    You might say that exceptionally high corporate profits are a reflection of this strong spending—in which case spending would still be the reason why we have avoided a recession, and high profits would just be an outcome of that spending—but even that is misleading.

    As Sindreu notes, “Companies, which in normal times are wary of angering customers with big price changes, seem to have seized on the excuse of generalized inflation to shield their margins.” Basically, in an environment where inflation is rising, and where outlets like the Journal (2/14/23) are portraying price increases as simply the result of “a perfect storm” of issues wreaking havoc on supply, companies suddenly have more wiggle room to raise prices without pushback from consumers. The result has been a more substantial surge in profit margins than we would have seen had companies not had ready excuses for their price hikes (Bloomberg, 3/9/23).

    Thus, rather than simply being an indicator of a strong economy, the high profit margins we have seen throughout the pandemic years have reflected companies’ success in capitalizing on well-publicized supply shocks to redistribute consumers’ income to themselves—aided and abetted by a media eager to insist that no such thing was happening.

    Extorting billions

    Bloomberg: How ‘Excuseflation’ Is Keeping Prices — and Corporate Profits — High

    A business owner tells Bloomberg (3/9/23) that any national news event can be “an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers.”

    This point is made firmly by the advocacy group Farm Action in its January 2023 letter to the Federal Trade Commission on price-gouging by egg producers. After examining the evidence that supply issues could not explain the more than doubling of egg prices between 2021 and 2022—crucially, the fact that “the industry’s quarterly egg production experienced no substantial decline in 2022 compared to 2021”—the group’s letter concludes:

    In the end, what Cal-Maine Foods and the other large egg producers did last year—and seem to be intent on doing again this year—is extort billions of dollars from the pockets of ordinary Americans through what amounts to a tax on a staple we all need: eggs.

    And this sort of profiteering is not limited to the egg business; other industries have adopted the strategy of jacking up prices and seeing what the consumer will accept. Take Wingstop, which has continued pushing up prices for wings even as the price of wholesale wings has declined. As Bloomberg (3/9/23) notes, “The chain’s profit margins are up, and its stock has soared almost 250% from the low it hit during the depths of the Covid-sparked market rout in early 2020.”

    That is greedy. It’s hard to see how it’s good for the economy.

    ‘Investors should push back’

    Sindreu wants the wealthy to be able to defend themselves against claims that they have been rewarded excessively in the midst of inflation:

    As for the political optics, investors should push back against notions that income distribution is the simple result of a power struggle between capital and labor. Profit margins need two to tango: Corporations have successfully increased prices only because—unlike in the 1970s—the rest of the economy has kept spending.

    You see: If companies successfully dupe consumers into accepting price increases above and beyond their cost increases, while media spread word of supply chain issues and downplay the possibility of corporate profiteering, then who’s really at fault? Forget all that talk about class struggle, let me introduce you to victim-blaming.

    Profits good, wage growth bad

    WSJ: Wage Growth Has Slowed, but Still Pressures Services Inflation

    The Wall Street Journal (3/2/23) sees wage growth as bad, even though it’s much more closely tied than profits to the consumer spending that it says is saving the economy—because the paper sees itself as being on Team Owner and not on Team Worker.

    Notably, the way the Journal has decided to frame profit growth in this piece is completely different from how it and the rest of the media tend to frame wage growth. In the case of profit growth, the Journal tells us it’s actually good, because it’s supposedly helping stave off recession.

    In the case of wage growth, by contrast, the media has consistently told us it’s bad, because it pushes up inflation:

    • “Wages Grow Steadily, Defying Fed’s Hopes as It Fights Inflation” (New York Times, 5/5/23)
    • “Cooler Hiring and Milder Pay Gains Could Aid Inflation Fight” (Associated Press, 1/6/23)
    • “The Jobs Market Is Still Hot. And That’s a Problem.” (Politico, 10/7/22)
    • “The Red-Hot Labor Market Still Isn’t Cooling Off. The Fed Has Its Work Cut Out.” (Barron’s, 7/8/22)
    • “Worker Pay Is Rising, Complicating the Fed’s Path” (Washington Post, 4/28/23)
    • “Wage Growth Has Slowed, but Still Pressures Services Inflation” (Wall Street Journal, 3/2/23)

    But profit growth has also pushed up inflation. And while it’s true that wage growth has contributed to inflation (in a very mild way), wage growth has also helped stave off a recession, and has done so in a much more obvious way than profit growth has.

    Strong consumer spending—the very factor that, by the Journal’s own admission, is preventing an economic downturn—has been possible partially due to strong wage growth. Rising wages give people greater purchasing power, which they can then exercise to keep the economy afloat. On the other hand, rising profits, at least in the context of the last couple years, have facilitated a redistribution of income away from consumers, draining them of purchasing power.

    But the Journal says, Never mind that! Profit growth good. Wage growth bad. Why? Because high profit growth helps prevent a recession. (Forget about the fact that it’s also pushing up inflation.) And high wage growth drives up inflation. (Forget about the fact that it’s also helping prevent a recession.) See if you can spot the contradiction.

    Maybe greed is good. Maybe the Journal has things exactly right. Maybe a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch isn’t siding with his fellow billionaires over the vast majority of its readers.

    Or maybe not.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    FEATURED IMAGE: The Wall Street Journal (5/25/23) illustrated its defense of “greedflation” with a photo of an outlet for Ralph Lauren, which raised prices an average of 12% despite already sky-high profit margins.

    The post WSJ Says Corporate Profiteering Is Good, Actually appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ – CounterSpin interview with Eric Thurm on the writers’ strike

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the National Writers Union’s Eric Thurm about the Hollywood writers’ strike for the May 26, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230526Thurm.mp3

     

    More Perfect Union: Poll: The Public Overwhelmingly Supports the Writers’ Strike

    More Perfect Union (5/22/23)

    Janine Jackson: Whenever workers find their employment conditions, or those of their coworkers, so difficult or dangerous, so precarious, or simply so unfair that they make the decision to withhold their labor in order to effect change, it’s a big deal, sometimes a life-altering one for individuals, and sometimes a sea change for an industry. But folks who have never been in that situation don’t always understand it, and some don’t try.

    What looks like public support for the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America may stem from the fact that it centers on the people who write the TV shows and movies that help many of us get through this thing called life.

    But does that mean it includes an understanding of the role that power, and the balance of power, plays in all labor actions? That could definitely be an added benefit, no matter the particular outcomes here.

    Eric Thurm is the campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. His explainer on the writer’s strike appeared recently in GQ, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Thurm.

    Eric Thurm: Thank you. Happy to be here.

    GQ: All About the Writers Strike: What Does the WGA Want and Why Are They Fighting So Hard for it?

    GQ (5/5/23)

    JJ: Labor actions in various industries are definitely perceived differently, by the broader public and by the news media that report on them. I think that difference stems, in part, from just a lack of consistent worker-centered journalism generally, but also from this idea of just, well, if you make more money than I do, I can’t see your beef.

    In the case of writers, it goes up a notch; as with athletes, “You make money doing something fun.” It becomes almost, “How dare you?”

    And there’s a lot wrong with that, but part of it is this laser focus on money. Pay is central, often, and why wouldn’t it be? That’s the literal currency of valuing work. But labor actions are virtually always about something more than that.

    So take your time, if you would, and break down, particularly, those behind-the-scenes industry specifics that we as outsiders might not see, but should see, as the central issues in what looks like an important strike.

    ET: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that there are a couple of things that are driving the strike. One of them is that, for all that there is a popular perception that writers get paid extremely well, that increasingly is not the case.

    And in the same way that it is, like you mentioned, for athletes or for actors or for a lot of other highly visible professions, there is a very small number of people at the top who basically have a winning lottery ticket, and just get paid extremely well.

    But in order to even have a chance at winning that, you have to spend a lot of time in the trenches, with much worse working conditions, often even less pay, with a lot less stability, and in particular, an original source of stability, and the reason that a lot of people have been able to make a career as writers is because of something called residuals, which basically is an amount of money that you get paid when something that you worked on and are credited on gets used in another context.

    Slate: This Writers’ Strike Isn’t a Rerun

    Slate (5/4/23)

    So that’s why, if you ever have heard people talk about syndication, or getting to a hundred episodes: If you wrote, let’s say, one episode of Friends, and when that gets to the point where it just is on TBS all the time, you get a check every time it airs.

    And that functions as an additional bit of stability, particularly because even people that have been successful often have very long periods without working, just because of the nature of the industry.

    And that safety net, I think as safety nets for people in all industries are being slowly dismantled, or as bosses are trying to dismantle them, that is a safety net that a lot of writers don’t have anymore, especially because the residual payments for streaming are basically nothing.

    So in theory, you could write something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are watching on Netflix or Hulu or something, and you will see no additional money from that.

    JJ: I think viewers understand that we’re watching media differently today. I can watch a whole series that took months or years to create in a weekend. And I’m like, well, that’s that.

    As media critics, we don’t blame the people, but there are things that we don’t see that could be useful for us to understand. And I think residuals is definitely one of those.

    And then, also, you write about something called a mini-room, like it has to do with the pipeline of how you grow and get work as a writer, that I don’t see, just watching TV, but is very meaningful for the quality of what I see.

    LA: The Writer’s Guild of America Strike: An Explainer

    Los Angeles (5/5/23)

    ET: Totally. And that’s something that if you, like me, are a big nerd about this sort of thing, you start to notice people’s names popping up in different contexts and credits of things. And if you pay a lot of attention, you start to see that pipeline. But for a lot of people, it definitely isn’t visible.

    So basically a mini-room essentially means a writer’s room that has fewer writers in it, and is convened for less time. There are supposed to be basic minimums in the WGA contract, and there are the minimum basic agreements that stipulate if you are making this type of TV show, you have to have this number of writers, and they have to be employed for X amount of time.

    And that is also an additional source of stability, but it also is how people learn the business, and how people learn how to produce, or how to eventually make their own shows.

    So if you are the new writer, which in a lot of respects is still kind of a misnomer, because by the time somebody gets staffed on their first room, if they’re working in TV, it’s very possible, if not likely, that they have been grinding away at a lot of other things for a long time.

    But once you get that credit, you spend time around the showrunners and the people that are more senior to you, who know a little bit more about the industry, and you observe them.

    A lot of the time writers will go to set to supervise on episodes that they wrote, which can be really important for a lot of reasons, both because it is useful training for the writer, but also because a lot of decisions get made on a snap basis on set, and the writer is the person who knows where the show is going, where the show has been.

    Vince Gilligan

    Vince Gilligan (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

    I think people have this assumption that everybody knows everything about the overall plan of the show at any given moment, but if you’re the director or the cinematographer or even some of the actors, you don’t know that. And so things that might feel disjointed to people, if you’re watching something that, for example, has a mini-room, would probably actually be much better and make more sense if there had been a writer on set to be like, “Actually, this is where we’re taking it. Let’s make a decision that’s more in line with the overall creative direction.”

    And that also is how people learn all the ins and outs of this stuff. And without having that, there just is no way for people to get better at their craft, or to develop any of the skills that people need to have in order to make any of the stuff that we like.

    Just to give one example: Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and this stuff that people really like, worked for quite a while on The X-Files, and wrote a bunch of episodes, and produced some of the episodes, and then eventually ran this very brief spinoff.

    And you can really see how those careers develop. People don’t emerge out of nowhere knowing how to run the small army that is a TV production.

    JJ: It also sounds just a little bit like a lot of other workplaces, where management says, “Ooh, if you work 40 hours, you get benefits….so we’re just going to book two people for 20 hours.” It sounds like evading valuing people.

    And one of the things that you wrote in the GQ piece was, “Emerging technologies will continue to be a tool for companies seeking to reduce the amount they pay workers (or to get rid of them entirely).”

    And I just think that’s another issue where people are kind of shadow-informed, halfway informed. It’s not that writers hate technology, obviously, or hate AI, or don’t understand it, but it’s another part of the power relationship here.

    Eric Thurm

    Eric Thurm: “Essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”

    ET: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I talked about a little bit in the piece is that technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts, because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.

    And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.

    And so of course the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.

    And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying as much as possible to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.

    WaPo: The WGA strike is part of a recurring pattern when technology changes

    Washington Post (5/30/23)

    And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.

    I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.

    Literally, just the day before we’re having this conversation, HBO Max rebranded as just Max, and apparently they have changed the way that movies and TV and everything show up on their site, so that it just says “creators,” and that will include producers and directors and some other people, and you don’t really know who did what, rather than saying, this was directed by this person, and this was written by this person.

    And I think that that attempt to obfuscate things, and make it harder to understand the people who are actually creating something, is the entire point of how the studios are trying to handle this, and part of why they’re so interested in AI.

    Counterspin: Starbucks ‘Workers and Consumers Have the Same Foe’

    CounterSpin (4/7/23)

    JJ: I think a lot of folks would actually be maybe a little surprised, and certainly disheartened, to know that bosses in creative industries act a lot like bosses in every other industry. The response has been, essentially, you’re lucky to have a job, you ungrateful whelp. There’s a line of people just like you I could hire tomorrow. And then, also, I thought we were all friends!

    This is the line that Starbucks gives baristas who go on strike. There’s a lot of similarities across industry that might be more important than the differences. And yet nobody asks the CEOs, “Aren’t you a creative? Isn’t this a labor of love for you?”

    This sort of general societal understanding, which I blame news media a lot for, is that a strike is an interruption in a natural order of things, and the workers who go on strike are to blame for any disruptions or harms that come from it.

    ET: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely true. And you could have long conversations, or write whole books, about the attempt of capital and bosses and corporations to make their profit-extracting mechanisms look like these very cuddly or friendly things.

    I think there’s, like you’re saying, a real direct line to bosses saying, “Oh, we’re all a family here, and we don’t want a union”—that’s somehow a third party, even though it’s just the workers—”coming between us and our little family.”

    Deadline: WGA’s Minimum Staffing Demands Were A Key Sticking Point In Failed Contract Talks, But It Wouldn’t Be The First Guild To Require Them

    Deadline (5/8/23)

    And even in the context of these negotiations, one of the things that the writers are asking for is these more concrete minimums for staffing, in terms of numbers of writers and the amount of time that people are in rooms. And the studio response was to say, this is an unfair or arbitrary quota that is, and I think this is the direct quote, “counter to the creative nature of our industry.”

    And it’s like, OK, you’re not the people making the creative decisions. And if you were, right, I would love to see what these people came up with, if they had to try to write a whole season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something.

    And it’s funny, I think that that actually is something that comes out of, or is impressed into a lot of, not just news media, but entertainment media. I don’t really know exactly how to fully extricate these things, but I do think that it’s quite telling that one of the dominant forms of media, that makes the most money and gets the most push behind it, is the workplace sitcom, the central thesis of which is that your coworkers are supposed to be your family.

    And it’s extremely rare to see anything like that, where anybody really talks about the material conditions of people in the workplace.

    Jacobin: The Red Scare Scarred the Left — But Couldn’t Kill It

    Jacobin (3/11/22)

    JJ: That’s a great point.

    ET: That’s a kind of bugbear of mine. And I am cautiously optimistic about what will come out of the strike, and what will come out of what I think is a much more increased labor consciousness among people, both in these creative industries, but also more broadly.

    When I was growing up, and I think that for quite a long time, the dominant Hollywood depiction of labor is, oh, union bosses, corruption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that we’ve heard a million times.

    And I think that in a lot of respects, that really is a lingering effect of the Red Scare, and a lot of purges of people in creative fields. And it does feel like there’s been at least some recovery, or attempts to change that.

    Even something like Riverdale, this adaptation of a previously existing IP that’s a kind of silly CW teen soap, had a really fantastic subplot in one of the most recent seasons, where Archie from Archie Comics forms a union, and they have all these conversations about solidarity, and about the importance of music and labor formation, and this stuff that I would never have expected to see even two or three years ago.

    WaPo's Megan McArdle: The Hollywood writers strike could have lasting impact

    Washington Post (5/16/23)

    JJ: I’m going to ask you one final and also hopeful question on that. I did want to just kind of cram in this Washington Post piece that fits this template that we’re talking about, that was talking about the last Hollywood writers’ strike, which you referenced, in 2007–08.

    And the Post piece said that that strike

    cost writers and other workers an estimated $772 million, while knock-on effects did more than $2 billion in damage to the broader California economy. Promising shows were hamstrung, promising movies were shot with half-finished scripts, promising careers were cut short.

    And if that wasn’t enough, the piece went on to say that because of those darn strikers, TV was forced to go to reality shows and, yep, Donald Trump. So I guess the idea was, maybe think about that when you’re supporting striking workers?

    I don’t even think this piece was meant to be mean, but it was such the template of “the labor action causes damage, the labor action causes hurt, and what went before it was somehow not causing damage, and not causing hurt.” And so you’re supposed to be mad at the interrupters.

    And I just want to attach that, though, to the idea that we know that many journalists have internalized the idea that they aren’t workers, they’re independent contractors. They’re just individuals doing a job, and unions are kind of icky, and who needs solidarity until it happens to you. All of which is just to say that you see change there, besides the landscape, you see change in that mindset among writers, among journalists, a change in the idea that, no, we’re not workers, no, we don’t need to band together. You see something different happening there.

    NYT: Gawker Media Employees Vote to Form a Union, and the Bosses Approve

    New York Times (6/4/15)

    ET: Yeah, definitely. That’s something that has been really heartening for me. I’ve been in and around digital media for a little over a decade now, which feels really wild to say, but the beginning of that period, I was in college, and I had no real understanding of a lot of these issues. And I definitely, I think if you had asked me, I really did feel, oh, I’m lucky to be here.

    In the intervening years, and especially since Gawker unionized in, I think, 2015, the rush of solidarity, and the proliferation of unions across digital media, has been really powerful.

    And I think that that has been both enormously meaningful for the people that are doing the work, and then getting a lot of people who, like I think you said, would not have ordinarily thought of themselves as workers to see themselves as such.

    It also has created this broader awareness that I think has led to much better journalism in the last few years, even places like Vice or the Washington Post or Business Insider, and these people who were able to get jobs where they can cover this stuff.

    And I think that there are a lot of reasons why, a lot of lines you can draw between the strength of these unions and the ability to produce this kind of coverage. But that also has led, I think, to a much stronger sense of worker solidarity across the industry.

    So I am really involved in the Freelance Solidarity Project, which organizes freelancers across digital media as a division of the National Writers Union. We have done a lot to organize in parallel with, and supporting, people who are facing similarly precarious conditions.

    And I think that a lot of people, who before would have been like, “I exist above things, and I would never think of myself as being in the same position as someone who has a gig-based job,” I think now people are a lot more aware of the similarity of those positions, and a lot more thoughtful about what’s driving that precarity, and what we can do to stop it, which also is something I think that you see as the WGA strike plays out right now.

    A lot of people who are unionized with IATSE, which is the union that represents most below-the-line crew and production staff, a lot of IATSE workers have refused to cross picket lines. And all of these things are part of what makes production possible, and it’s part of why so many shows have had to shut down.

    The economic damage that you reference, that this Washington Post article is talking about, not only is it caused by the bosses, but it also is the direct result of people being able to stand in solidarity and say, we are not going to allow this thing to continue to happen.

    And it’s been really heartening to me to see so many people say, “I am so amazed by the Teamsters standing with us. If they have to go out this summer, we’re going to be right there.” I think that’s so great.

    JJ: It sounds like you’re saying, better solidarity among workers leads also to better creations and better work.

    ET: I sure hope so.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Eric Thurm. He’s campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union; they’re online at NWU.org. He’s a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, FreelanceSolidarity.org, and you can still find his explainer on the ongoing writer strike at GQ.com. Eric Thurm, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    ET: Thank you.

    The post ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ – CounterSpin interview with Cody Bloomfield on anti-activist terrorist charges

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Cody Bloomfield about activists being charged with terrorism for the May 19, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230519Bloomfield.mp3

    Janine Jackson: Resistance to the militarized police training complex known as Cop City has been happening since its inception, when Georgia authorities overruled community opinion to create the facility, being built on Atlanta’s South River Forest in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter actions, that includes an area for explosives training and a whole “mock city” for cops to practice suppressing urban protest.

    FAIR: Cop City Coverage Fails to Question Narratives of Militarized Police

    FAIR.org (3/27/23)

    In January, police killed the environmental activist known as Tortuguita in a hail of bullets, while they, an autopsy revealed, sat cross-legged with their hands up. The medical examiner ruled it homicide.

    There isn’t more you can do to someone protesting your actions than kill them, but authorities are trying to ruin the lives of many others with domestic terrorism charges that call for many years in prison. The state actors behind Cop City, if you somehow can’t see it, are engaging in the overt employment of the very overreaching, harmful powers activists are concerned the facility will foment.

    Cody Bloomfield is communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They join us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Cody Bloomfield!

    Cody Bloomfield: Thank you so much for having me, and I’m dismayed by what’s happening in Cop City, but always appreciate the opportunity to bring this news to more folks.

    JJ: Absolutely.

    Cop City: ‘People Have Been Protesting Against Cop City Since We Found Out About It’

    CounterSpin (3/24/23)

    Well, Atlanta organizer Kamau Franklin told CounterSpin a few weeks back that the land that Cop City is going to be on was promised to the adjacent community, which is 70% Black, as a park area, and there was going to be nature trails and hiking. And then when the idea of Cop City arose from the Atlanta Police Department, the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, all of those plans were scrapped immediately, without any input from that adjoining community, and they went forward with this idea.

    Just to say, people didn’t suddenly start protesting Cop City recently, and they didn’t do it because they saw something on social media. This project has been over and against the community—and the environment, not that they’re separate—since the beginning. So just to say, the context for the bringing of these charges of domestic terrorism against activists, it’s not that activists are suddenly engaged in something new and especially dangerous that is calling for this response.

    CB: Yeah, so the occupation of Cop City has been going on for over a year, and we see from the very outset that there has been police resistance to these protests. Very early on, back in 2021, activists told me that during the pandemic, they couldn’t show up in person to city council meetings, because all of the meetings were being held remotely, and so they decided to do a banner action outside of one of the city council member’s homes during the decisions to approve Cop City. They dropped the banner outside of someone’s house, and then they were arrested by police, and they were hauled to jail for the crime of being a pedestrian in the roadway. This was all the way back in 2021.

    Then people started camping in the forest, also way back in 2021. The first arrest for domestic terrorism didn’t happen until December 2022, and at that point, people were being arrested for just using the forest. Like in December, there were reports that someone had been arrested who was just going on a hike, who wasn’t part of the occupation.

    Intercept: Police Shot Atlanta Cop City Protester 57 Times, Autopsy Finds

    Intercept (4/20/23)

    But in December was when the police crackdown began in earnest, and the people who had been camping for months were arrested for things like sleeping in a hammock with another defendant, [which] was used as evidence, as was First Amendment–protected activities, including being a member of the prison abolition movement. And that’s when the escalated stage of repression really began.

    And this repression accelerated in January, when police again stormed the encampment, and murdered Tortuguita, and issued more domestic terrorism arrest warrants. Then there were the subsequent protests over the killing of Tortuguita in Atlanta, and still more people were charged with domestic terrorism.

    And all that was a lead-up to a mass mobilization that the activists called for the first week of March, in which many people came from out of state and around the world to protest. But what a lot of the media’s been missing is, they focused on the week of action and saw in the list of arrestees many people from out of state, they’re missing that this out-of-state solidarity was just the tip of the iceberg of months and years of local organizing.

    JJ: Right, and I bring it up in part to say that I think that folks who are distanced from it might fall to that line of, if only folks would protest in “the right way,” you know, without breaking anything. And so it’s important to understand that even when folks did things like banner drops and petition drives, they already were being abused and harassed for that style of protest.

    But domestic terrorism, that’s deep, that’s serious. How loose are the rules for applying these charges? This is talking about perhaps 20 years in prison for people. There have to be some legal definitions around the charge of domestic terrorism, don’t there?

    CB: Yes, and it’s really interesting, actually. Some states don’t even have domestic terrorism statutes, because most crimes that you could prosecute as domestic terrorism, you could also prosecute under existing statutes. Like, the Georgia law was passed in response to Dylann Roof’s massacre in a Black church, but they could have decided at that juncture to prosecute mass murder and prosecute these murders independent of the statute. But they decided that for subsequent events like this, they wanted the domestic terrorism statute, and they passed a very broad statute.

    Time: Georgia Is Using a Domestic Terrorism Law Expanded After Dylann Roof Against ‘Cop City’ Protesters

    Time (5/4/23)

    The Georgia statute defines domestic terrorism as something that endangers critical infrastructure, and this critical infrastructure can be publicly or privately owned. It can be a state or government facility. And as long as someone’s acting with the intent to change or coerce the policy of government, that can count as domestic terrorism.

    Now, this statute stands out from the national landscape of domestic terrorism statutes—again, some states don’t even have them, and they seem to be doing fine—and in most other states that have domestic terrorism statutes, the statutes address things like weapons of mass destruction, or they at least require for someone to have died as a result of the alleged terrorism. The Georgia statute doesn’t.

    And you might notice, in the part about altering or changing the policy of government, that’s precisely what a lot of protest is intended to do. And protest intended to change the policy of government, that happens to take place in conjunction with critical infrastructure, which they’ve been arguing that Cop City is, opens up activists for being charged with domestic terrorism.

    Now, this is a very serious statute. It has a mandatory minimum of five years in prison, going all the way up to a maximum of 35 years in prison. So that alone might be enough to dissuade some activists from showing up to protest. And it’s worth pointing out here that among the people charged with domestic terrorism during the March week of action, some people say that they were only going to attend a music festival, which would have been, at most, misdemeanor trespassing. But when people came back from a march in which they burned bulldozers, which is defined as critical infrastructure that’s there to build Cop City, they went into a crowd, police started to make arrests at random. So some people who by all accounts were not involved in burning the bulldozers, who simply showed up for Stop Cop City solidarity activism and a music festival, were charged with a really serious statute.

    And then most were held in jail for over a month, and so then their whole lives were disrupted; they’re faced with this intimidating statute that will take a lot of money and a lot of time to fight, all to dissuade people from becoming activists.

    We worry a lot about the chilling effect around these sorts of things in the civil liberties community. It’s often something we talk about in very hypothetical terms, but around this was a rare instance where I saw the chilling effect in practice. There was a group that reached out to me about possibly going down to protest, and I felt like I had to give the heads-up that these domestic terrorism arrests are happening somewhat at random, and the activists ultimately decided not to go down. They decided the risk of protesting was simply too high.

    And that’s what charging domestic terrorism is intended to do. It’s intended to make the risk of protesting too high, so that people will just stay home, so that people will stay quiet.

    AP: Students protest after N.C. law student banned from university over APD training facility arrest

    AP (4/13/23)

    JJ: Absolutely, and we should note that the harms don’t necessarily have to come from law enforcement or in the form of prison. We have seen people coming back from protests being, for example, kicked out of school. So this is something that is hovering over them, even if they don’t wind up in prison.

    CB: Yeah, and recently we’ve heard reports of a loss of access to financial institutions for some of the defendants. So far we’ve heard that Chase Bank, Bank of America, Venmo and US Bank have withheld access to banking for certain domestic terrorism defendants. Also a few people had Airbnb accounts closed. As you mentioned, there was the law student who was unable to return to school. So these charges, even though they have not seen their day in court, have not been proven in court, are already having detrimental effects on the activists.

    JJ: I want to bring you back to this “outside agitator” line, which ought to ring bells for lots of folks. To be clear, the public rejection of hyper-policing is being used as a reason for more hyper-policing. And then the fact that people are recognizing, well, this isn’t just Atlanta, this isn’t just Georgia, this is something that can come to me. That is itself being used as more reason.

    Truthout: Atlanta’s “Stop Cop City” Movement Is Spreading Despite Rampant State Repression

    Truthout (3/26/23)

    And your Truthout piece cites the Atlanta police department’s assistant chief saying, “None of those people live here,” speaking of activists:

    None of those people live here. They do not have a vested interest in this property, and we show that time and time again. Why is an individual from Los Angeles, California, concerned about a training facility being built in the state of Georgia? And that is why we consider that domestic terrorism.

    What the actual heck, there?

    CB: Yeah, it’s an extremely striking quote, mostly because it’s just a lie that any part of the statute depends on who’s in-state versus out-of-state. And we look at the history of activism, and activists have always traveled to be where they’re most needed. Throughout the civil rights movement, people frequently crossed state lines. There was the whole Freedom Rider movement.

    And whenever there’s international solidarity or national solidarity, we always see this narrative of “outside agitators” being used to discredit the entire movement. It’s seen as mysterious outside actors driving the movement, instead of solidarity that starts where the negative thing is happening, and expands outwards from there.

    It’s an incredibly frustrating narrative, and it’s frustrating to see people with state power repeat this narrative, especially when the actual charges have no relation to that.

    Cody Bloomfield

    Cody Bloomfield: “whenever there’s international solidarity or national solidarity, we always see this narrative of ‘outside agitators’ being used to discredit the entire movement.”

    JJ: Absolutely, and, you know, it hardly needs saying, Cop City itself is not a wholly local enterprise, is it?

    CB: No, Cop City is designed to be a training facility for police across the country, and with the interconnected systems of policing, of intelligence-gathering, we see that Cop City is an everywhere problem, as is all policing. And to charge that only people within a specific mile radius should have anything to say about it is absurd.

    JJ: Part of this kind of repression of activity involves suppressing information. And that has involved the overt harassment of reporters, Truthout’s Candice Bernd and others, for example, but it also involves suppressing information itself about what is going on. And I understand you at Defending Rights & Dissent have been working on the transparency front of what’s happening here.

    CB: Yeah, so we, from a FOIA release to Pilsen Books in Chicago, we know that, at least from the federal intelligence perspective, they’re very much seeing the Stop Cop City movement as national. When some of the Defend the Atlanta Forest folks went on tour, talking about resistance to Stop Cop City elsewhere, the FBI decided to spy on an anarchist bookstore that was holding the event, and they went through the social media of the event organizers, they went through the social media of the bookstore, and created intelligence files.

    And we think that that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There hasn’t been a lot of transparency around what sort of intelligence is being gathered on these activists. Given that they’re charged with domestic terrorism, we expect that quite a lot of evidence has been acquired against them, much of it likely open source and First Amendment-protected. The line in one of the arrest warrant affidavits sent out to a defendant being a member of the prison abolitionist movement gives some hint that they’re likely surveilling a lot of social media. But we don’t know the full extent of surveillance that’s happening here.

    Unicorn Riot: FBI Bookstore Spying in Chicago Eyes Abortion Rights, Cop City, Anti-Development Activists

    Unicorn Riot (4/13/23)

    And it’s worth pointing out, if we talk about surveillance, that surveillance on its own can also be a form of repression, especially for vulnerable activists who might be worried about protesting as a person of color, who might be worried about having an existing FBI file, the prospect of being surveilled might alone dissuade them from engaging in activism. But we don’t know the full landscape of that surveillance.

    So Defending Rights & Dissent, along with, recently, Project South, have filed a new round of Freedom of Information Act requests, and open-record requests, targeted at looking at just how much the state is surveilling these activists, and what kind of evidence and intelligence is being collected.

    And so far we’ve just been stonewalled. They’ve only responded to one query, which was about the Atlanta Police Foundation, and they said, oh, it’s like hundreds of thousands of emails; you need to refine your request. And then we refined our request and haven’t heard from them since.

    So we anticipate having to litigate all these requests, which is ridiculous, because under the federal statute, under the state statute, there is a dedicated amount of time in which they’re supposed to give us this information. They’re supposed to be about transparency, and they just haven’t been in this case.

    Indiana Herald-Times: What the Media Got Wrong About 'Cop City' Protests in Atlanta Increasingly Clear

    Indiana Herald-Times (5/5/23)

    JJ: This is exactly where one would hope for the powers of journalism and independent journalism to move in, to use their heft to get at some of these questions, and yet in terms of larger corporate media—there’s been a ton of terrific independent reporting on this—but larger corporate media….

    You know, I saw a piece by Eva Rosenfeld in the Indiana Herald Times in which she was talking about the over-acceptance of the police narrative on certain things, but also asking about big framing questions. Why are media not asking, for example, “Why is a $90 million investment intended to fight crime better spent building a mock city than investing in real communities?”

    Too often we see big media zeroing in: Did this person actually break a window? Rather than pulling back and saying, wait a minute, is property more important than human beings? What is actually happening here? I’m wondering what you make of big media’s approach to this story.

    CB: Yeah, every second that we spend in the media litigating about whether or not people should have burned down a bulldozer, or whether or not people had the right to go camping, is another moment we’re not spending talking about the substantive issues here. And I think, as soon as the domestic terrorism charges came down, the whole conversation became about whether or not the activists were domestic terrorists, which was a reasonable line of argument, but totally missed the story of an anti-democratic lack of accountability permeating throughout Cop City. From when city council ignored 70% of public comments in opposition to Cop City to recently, when they were charging other people with intimidation of an officer for handing out flyers, trying to do public education, this whole movement to build Cop City has been profoundly undemocratic, and we lose that when we spend time focusing on what crimes protesters may or may not have committed.

    Appeal: Why Atlantans Are Pushing to Stop ‘Cop City’

    Appeal (12/8/21)

    JJ: Personally, I want to say that I feel like, you know, “know your rights” is a very important thing for individuals to know, what their rights are in given situations. And yet it’s not so satisfying to say, I know my rights, and they’re being violated right now. We can’t really individualize protest—which it seems like is so much the effort of those who oppose it, to separate us and to say, “do you, Janine Jackson, really want to show up at this protest?”

    CB: Yeah, and that’s why, especially in fighting these prosecutions, movement solidarity will be so important. We saw, after the January 20 protests against the inauguration of Trump, an attempt by prosecutors to engage in kind of conspiratorial thinking, and to paint protesters with a broad brush, and protesters were really successful in trying to fight this as a bloc, and insisting on taking cases to trial, where many of them were thrown out. Prosecutors gave up on a lot of the charges, and so that was a success of movement organizing.

    And I think here that we have to have that same sort of solidarity. Because you might know your rights, and go to this music festival, and you’re charged with domestic terrorism anyway. It requires solidarity against an overwhelming onslaught of police repression, and that’s something that’s really hard to do. But despite how much the police talk about protesting the right or wrong way, when they’re defining protesting the “wrong way” as being from out of state, and policing the “right way” as shooting unarmed civilians and making arrests at random, the “know your rights” framework kind of goes out of the window, and it has to be about solidarity.

    JJ: I just want to end by saying that I really appreciated the emphasis of the headline that Truthout put on your March piece, which was “Atlanta’s ‘Stop Cop City’ Movement Is Spreading Despite Rampant State Repression.” In other words, it’s scary, very scary, what’s happening, but we do recognize that they’re amping up because we’re amping up, and so it isn’t the time to falter.

    And I really just appreciated the idea that this is still happening. Folks are scared, and they should be scared, and yet they’re doing it anyway. And the more we stand together, the less scared we need to be.

    CB: Yes, it’s been really inspiring to see activists who continue to undertake this fight, who are willing to fight these cases in court, who are willing to look for where Cop City analogs are occurring in their local spaces. Like, there’s people beginning to protest in Pittsburgh. There’s people who are beginning to say, everywhere is Cop City, and looking at the effects of police militarization in communities. And I think what Cop City has done is, despite all the repression, is giving people a sense of how to fight this, and that they can fight this, and for that it’s really important.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Cody Bloomfield, communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. And you can find their piece, “Atlanta’s ‘Stop Cop City’ Movement Is Spreading Despite Rampant State Repression,” at Truthout.org. Cody Bloomfield, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    CB: Thank you.

     

    The post ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Underexposure Exposed

     

    If you’re working for establishment media covering an official enemy of the United States, your main job is to convey to your audience that such places are dystopias, where everyone is miserable and whatever economic punishment Washington imposes on them can’t make things any worse.

    The problem is that many of these enemies are tropical countries that often have sunny weather and lush greenery. If you run a realistic photo of such places, people might get the idea that things don’t look so bad there, and could even start wondering whether the living hell described in your text is a completely accurate portrayal.

    That’s why corporate media have hit on a simple trick: If you want people to think that a country resistant to US leadership is a festering doomscape, just underexpose the hell out of your photographs.

    So when the New York Times (12/5/20) covers an election in Venezuela, it sets the scene with a photo that looks like this:

    Whereas, when you take the same image and run it through the automatic exposure adjustment filter of a popular photo editor (in this case PicMonkey), you get this:

    When the Times (4/3/19) showed Venezuelans protesting on a bridge to Colombia—a bridge that was the focus of heavy anti-Maduro propaganda efforts (FAIR.org, 2/9/19)—the photo would have originally looked something like this:

    New York Times photo of a protest in Venezuela, exposure adjusted

    But thanks to the magic of digital editing, the sunshine-soaked protest could be drenched in shadow, the better to convey the oppression the demonstrators were struggling against:

    underexposed New York Times photo of a Venezuelan protest

    Or say you have a photo essay (New York Times,  11/27/20) on a mother and son displaced from Colombia to Venezuela by the Covid pandemic. You want to run a photo of the boy in Venezuela with the caption, “

    Exposure-adjusted New York Times of a child in a field in Venezuela

    There’s an easy solution: Just turn down the brightness until it looks like the photo was taken during a total eclipse of the Sun, and you’ve got the image as it appeared in the Times:

    The Times uses this trick a lot in covering Venezuela (see FAIR.org, 3/26/19, 12/19/20), but it works just as well in other countries—either enemy nations, or maybe nations that just have enemies within them. Here’s the image that illustrated a Times piece (4/30/23; see FAIR.org, 5/12/23) on Brazil with the classic red-baiting headline, “If You Don’t Use Your Land, These Marxists May Take It.”

    Underexposed New York Times photo of land in Brazil

    Naturally, you don’t want that photo with exposure properly adjusted, because that would give the impression that the (perfectly legal) land reform the Times is describing was taking place in a land that’s not under a Mordor-like permanent shadow:

    New York Times photo of land in Brazil, exposure-adjusted

    While the New York Times is the king of underexposed photos, it’s far from the only outlet to turn down the brightness in pursuit of propaganda. The Atlantic (2/27/20) ran a piece about Venezuela by Anne Applebaum, explaining how its “citizens of a once-prosperous nation live amid the havoc created by socialism, illiberal nationalism and political polarization,” that was accompanied by this photo:

    Underexposed Atlantic depiction of a crowd in Venezuela

    If it had run the photo with a normal exposure, Venezuela would have seemed to have at least 50% less havoc:

    Atlantic photo of a crowd in Venezuela, exposure-adjusted

    The Wall Street Journal (8/10/22) ran an article about lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where serious concerns about the environment stand in the way of efficient extraction of resources by multinational corporations (FAIR.org, 8/23/22)—or, as the Journal put it, public companies “risk mismanaging the resource in a region where state-run firms have long been mired in corruption and nepotism.” The piece was headed by a photo of one of the evaporation ponds from which lithium is extracted:

    Wall Street Journal depiction of lithium production in Bolivia

    Deserts, of course, are typically bright, sunny places—but running a realistically lit photo of a lithium mine isn’t going to give the reader the proper image of a location “mired in corruption”:

    Wall Street Journal photo of lithium production in Chile, exposure-adjusted.

    Back when China was still trying to wipe out Covid, Reuters (12/20/21) ran a piece about daily coronavirus cases in China falling from 102 to 81. Though this was a tiny fraction of the number of Covid cases at the time in the US–which recorded some 241,000 new cases that December 20–we were still supposed to read this as bad news, which you can tell because the accompanying photo looked like this:

    Underexposed Reuters image of China

    As opposed to a normally adjusted version of the photo, which has a much less ominous tone:

    Reuters image from China with exposure adjusted

    While the darkening technique is usually used on photographs from official enemy nations, it can also be used with internal enemies. When the New Yorker (9/13/15)  ran a profile by film critic Anthony Lane of then–British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which compared him to “the class grouch, making trouble but never headway,” someone who makes “you all roll your eyes whenever he raises his hand, because you know what’s coming next,” it was accompanied by this image:

    Underexposed New Yorker image of Jeremy Corbyn.

    With an ordinary exposure applied to the photo, Corbyn doesn’t look nearly so much like someone whom you would naturally shun:

    Exposure-adjusted New Yorker photo of Jeremy Corbyn

    It’s easy to see how this basic processing of images serves these outlets’ ideological needs—exploiting the crude association between dark and bad. (Remember in 1994 when Time magazine darkened OJ Simpson’s skin when they put his mugshot on the cover after his arrest?) But applying this sort of distortion is inherently unethical, since the basic principle of photojournalism is that photos are supposed to convey reality and not political spin. As the Code of Ethics of the National Press Photographers Association spells out:

    Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.

    If ethics alone aren’t enough to deter establishment media from such distortion, they should consider how much uglier photographs are when they’re steeped in unnecessary murk. Again and again, when I adjusted the brightness on obviously underexposed photos, it rescued the images from the one-dimensional cartoons they were run as, revealing detail, atmosphere, humanity. The properly exposed photos provided views of real people in real places—but, of course, if your intention is to publish propaganda, that’s the last thing you want.

    The post Underexposure Exposed appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Eric Thurm on the Hollywood Writers’ Strike

     

     

    GQ: All About the Writers Strike: What Does the WGA Want and Why Are They Fighting So Hard for it?

    GQ (5/5/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that owners who make their money off the efforts of those workers are not to be questioned.

    It’s a weird presentation, whether it’s baristas or dockworkers or TV and movie writers. As we record on May 25, the Writers Guild strike is on its 23rd day, and having the intended effect of shutting down production on sets around the country.

    Eric Thurm wrote a useful explainer on the WGA strike for GQ. Thurm is campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. We hear from him about some behind-the-scenes aspects of the strike affecting what you may see on screen.

          CounterSpin230526Thurm.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of San Francisco.

          CounterSpin230526Banter.mp3

     

    The post Eric Thurm on the Hollywood Writers’ Strike appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China

     

    AP: TikTok content creators file lawsuit against Montana over first-in-nation law banning app

    “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” a lawsuit argues (AP, 5/18/23).

    There is an emerging consensus in US foreign policy circles that a US/China cold  war is either imminent or already underway (Foreign Policy, 12/29/22; New Yorker, 2/26/23; New York Times, 3/23/23; Fox News, 3/28/23; Reuters, 3/30/23). Domestically, the most recent and most intense iteration of this anti-China fervor is the move to ban the Chinese video app TikTok, which is both a sweeping assault on free speech movement and a dangerous sign that mere affiliation with China is grounds for vilification and loss of rights.

    Several TikTok content creators are suing to overturn “Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights,” on the grounds “that the state doesn’t have any authority over matters of national security” (AP, 5/18/23). TikTok followed up with a lawsuit of its own (New York Times, 5/22/23). The app is banned on government devices at the federal level and in some states (CBS, 3/1/23; AP, 3/1/23), but the Montana law is the first to bar its use outright.

    Momentum for a wider ban

    USA Today: Lawmakers announces bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok in the US

    Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), a congressmember seeking to ban TikTok nationally, called the app “digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans” (USA Today, 12/13/22).

    Republicans see this as momentum to push other state bans. Lawmakers of both major parties are pushing legislation that “would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of a ‘country of concern,’ like China and Russia,” a move that would ban TikTok in the US (USA Today, 12/13/22). Such a sweeping ban is popular among voters, especially among Republicans (Pew, 3/31/23; Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23).

    The reason for the swift action is the app’s Chinese ownership. Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) said, “Having TikTok on our phones is like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over America” (Twitter, 2/28/23)—a reference to one of the most overblown news stories of 2023 (CounterPunch, 2/7/23; FAIR.org, 2/10/23). FBI Director Christopher Wray (CNBC, 11/15/22) told Congress of his “national security concerns” about TikTok, warning that

    the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations…. Or to control software on millions of devices…to potentially technically compromise personal devices.

    The New York Times (3/17/23) reported that the

    Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.

    Social spying hypocrisy

    Al Jazeera: US says China can spy with TikTok. It spies on world with Google

    While US lawmakers railed against the possibility that TikTok might be used by China to spy on US users, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the “US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else.”

    The funny thing here is that if the US government is worried about social media being used for surveillance, it should look inward. The Brennan Center (8/18/22), which is suing for Department of Homeland Security records on its use of social media surveillance tools, notes that “social media has become a significant source of information for US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” The civil liberties organization notes that “there are myriad examples of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants.”

    Even as Congress mulls a ban on TikTok, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the Biden administration is seeking “the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta and Apple to facilitate untrammeled spying on non-US citizens located overseas.” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Washington the power to snoop on the social media conversations of users both foreign and, through the use of so-called “backdoor searches,” domestic. While many governments spy, the Qatari news site pointed out, “Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet.”

    “They’re making a big stink about TikTok and the Chinese collecting data when the US is collecting a great deal of data itself,” Seton Hall constitutional law expert Jonathan Hafetz told Al Jazeera. “It is a little bit ironic for the US to sort of trumpet citizens’ privacy concerns or worries about surveillance. It’s OK for them to collect the data, but they don’t want China to collect it.”

    Accordingly, the Biden administration is demanding the platform be sold to rid itself of Chinese ownership, insisting that failure to do so would result in a nationwide ban. The New York Times (3/15/23) said this stance “harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.” In 2020, FAIR (8/5/20) raised the possibility that Trump would leverage anti-Chinese sentiment to go after the app, but now a Democratic administration could finish what Trump started.

    Don’t assume the president is bluffing, either; FAIR (7/1/21) reported that the Biden administration, citing “disinformation” as a reason, “shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine,” a list that included Iranian state broadcaster Press TV.

    An orchestrated campaign

    WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

    Facebook parent company Meta paid a GOP consulting firm to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

    TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a for-profit tech company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. ByteDance disputes that it has the ability to track US citizens (CNBC, 10/21/22), and the Chinese government denies that it pressures companies to engage in espionage (New York Times, 3/24/23). But TikTok, like other for-profit social media platforms, routinely collects data on users to sell to advertisers (MarketWatch, 10/25/22; CBC, 3/1/23).

    Global Times (3/24/23), published by China’s Communist Party, declared that the “witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’s technological innovation is going downhill.” “The political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility,” the paper added.

    The party paper (3/1/23) acknowledged that TikTok still has a profit “gap with Google, Facebook, etc.,” but maintained that “its growth momentum is rapid,” and thus “directly threatens the advertising revenue of several major social networks in the US.” The paper said that “if the US does not go after TikTok and curb its growth in the relevant market, several leading US high-tech and networking companies” would feel a competitive sting.

    Chinese state and party media have hyperbolic tendencies, but this accusation of a financial motive for opposition to TikTok isn’t far-fetched. In fact, the Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that

    Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

    The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

    Such a move might seem comically cynical, but it’s working. Corporate anti-competitive power has joined an alliance with Cold War fears about the Chinese to influence US policy, to the extent that the government is contemplating censoring media now available to 80 million Americans. (By comparison, CNN.com reportedly has 129 million unique monthly visitors in the US, the New York Times brand has 99 million and FoxNews.com has 76 million.)

    Unprecedented silencing

    Pew: More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites

    A growing share of TikTok users are regularly getting news from the site (Pew, 10/21/22)—”in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.”

    A media silencing of that magnitude seems unprecedented; the Biden administration’s seizure of Middle Eastern media websites is troubling, but Press TV isn’t as central to US life as TikTok is. “In just two years, the share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022,” Pew Research (10/21/22) reported, which stands “in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.” TikTok has announced plans to share its ad revenue with its content creators (Variety, 5/4/22), and the platform played a role in the rebounding of US post-pandemic tourism markets (Wall Street Journal, 5/8/23).

    TikTok has argued that bans would hurt the US economy (Axios, 3/21/23), although the nation’s top lawmakers are unmoved by this (Newsweek, 3/14/23).

    The urge to cleanse the media landscape of anything related to China has been roiling at a smaller scale for some time. Rep. Brian Mast (R.-Fla.) wants to ban Chinese government and Communist Party officials from US social platforms (Mast press release, 3/22/23; Fox News, 6/14/22) because, as he said in a press statement, “Chinese officials lie through our social media.” Singling out the sinister duplicity of Chinese officials overlooks the reality that mendacity among politicians is a universal cross-cultural phenomenon.

    The Trump administration required “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government, granting them a designation akin to diplomatic entities,” affecting “Xinhua News Agency; China Global Television Network, previously known as CCTV; China Radio International; the parent company of China Daily newspaper; and the parent company of the People’s Daily newspaper” (Politico, 2/18/20).

    In an effort to paint the Democratic Socialists of America-backed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) as some sort of shadowy foreign agent, Fox News (2/2/23) ran the headline, “AOC, Other Politicians Paid Thousands in Campaign Cash to Chinese Foreign Agent.” But buried in the clunky language of the news story is the fact Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians, including at least one Republican, simply ran campaign ads in Chinese-language newspapers owned by Sing Tao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper company. Candidates routinely buy ads in ethnic media to reach voters, but Fox offered this innocuous campaign act as evidence of Chinese treachery within our borders.

    Fear of an Asian menace

    Guardian: DeSantis signs bills banning Chinese citizens from buying land in Florida

    Gov. Ron DeSantis presents Florida’s discrimination against Chinese nationals as a move to counter “the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida” (Guardian, 5/9/23).

    It’s worth remembering that fear of an Asian menace in the United States led to the nation’s first major immigration restrictions (CNN, 5/6/23) and mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (NPR, 1/29/23; FAIR.org, 2/16/23). It continues to lead to racist murder (CNN, 6/23/22) and other anti-Asian crimes (Guardian, 7/21/22).

    “Inflammatory rhetoric about China can exacerbate the sense that Asian Americans are ‘racialized outsiders,’” Asian-American advocates said during the Covid pandemic (Axios, 3/23/21). Florida’s recent ban on property ownership by Chinese nationals (Guardian, 5/9/23) shows that the impulse to scapegoat is alive and well.

    If official fears about TikTok collection of user data—which is central to the business model of all major US social media companies—can override First Amendment guarantees and deprive Americans of a major communication platform, then one has to ask what more the states and the federal government that are already frothing with anti-China hysteria are willing to do next.

    In this sense, the people suing to keep TikTok available in Montana aren’t simply fighting for their access to a content platform, but are repelling a political impulse that in the past has led us to blacklists and McCarthyism. Let’s hope these video makers are victorious.

    Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

    The post Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The Character Assassination of San Francisco

     

    CNN: Can the City Be Saved?

    CNN (5/14/23) aired a special report on “What Happened to San Francisco?”—although what mainly happened to the city is that it became the target of right-wing attacks.

    CNN has joined the media chorus decrying the death of San Francisco with a one-hour special (Whole Story, 5/14/23). On an episode hosted by Sara Sidner, the network declared that “the city by the bay is now at the forefront of the nation’s homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction crises,” while some “residents worry Northern California’s largest municipality could become a so-called failed city.”

    The narrative of San Francisco’s demise has been building for some time. In the corporate press, the closure of a Whole Foods (Newsweek, 4/11/23; ABC, 4/12/23; New York Times, 4/30/23) is like the moment Afghans clung to a US Air Force plane as the nation fell to the Taliban. The story of this store’s exit is more complicated than criminal activity (48Hills, 4/11/23)—but no matter, the narrative holds that permissive policies protecting the homeless have allowed a zombie army of criminals to exert control over the city, countered only by a police force that can do nothing, Democratic politicians fearful to act and tech bosses cowering in fear.

    CNN has had some more reasonable coverage of the city in the past, placing its crime statistics in a national context (4/7/23) and a fuller picture of why a much-hyped Nordstrom closure had less to do with crime and more with general retail trends (5/3/23).

    But in the lead-up to the documentary, CNN (5/14/23) also told a heart-wrenching story about a San Francisco mother who lamented that the city’s policies led her son into drugs. She may genuinely feel that way, but that doesn’t make it so: West Virginia leads the nation in drug deaths (CBS, 8/2/22), with more than three times the per capita rate of California; why is there no media drumbeat against Gov. Jim Justice?

    ‘No one is safe’

    Fox: Reporter calls San Francisco 'worse than the third world' due to drugs, homeless problems

    A local ABC reporter’s hyperbolic comment to CNN (5/14/23) becomes a Fox News headline (5/15/23)—because it’s San Francisco.

    It’s normal for the Rupert Murdoch–owned press (Fox News, 5/11/23, 5/15/23; Wall Street Journal, 5/3/23; New York Post, 5/4/23) to obsess about San Francisco falling apart. Tucker Carlson, formerly Fox News’ most-watched host and a San Francisco native, ran a weeklong special on the city called “American Dystopia” (Fox News, 1/6/20), which Media Matters for America (1/13/20) described as “dehumanizing homeless people.”

    But this trend is embraced by the more centrist corporate press, too. The New York Times gave space to venture capitalist Michael Moritz (2/26/23) to lament the excesses of Democratic governance and repeatedly eulogize the city’s retail establishments (12/17/22, 2/9/23, 4/30/23).

    When tech boss Bob Lee was fatally stabbed “in an enclave of high-rise condominiums,” the Times (4/7/23) took at face value statements from fellow tech bosses about how he was the victim of the out-of-control anarchy allowed by progressive leaders. As it turned out, Lee was likely the victim of sex-and-drug-fueled, tech boss–on–tech boss violence (New York Post, 5/12/23, 5/14/23).

    In another example of media outlets showing their hand, CBS (4/7/23) reported, “A brutal and brazen attack on former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani” left “him battling for his life and neighbors on edge.” The person who had attacked the former commish was unhoused, fueling the sentiment that the streets were filled with roving sociopaths targeting people of all ranks, including civic leaders. Along with the Lee killing, “both violent assaults have ignited an intense debate over safety in the city.” The New York Post (4/7/23) highlighted the attack as evidence that “no one is safe” in San Francisco.

    NYT: Stabbing of Cash App Creator Raises Alarm, and Claims of ‘Lawless’ San Francisco

    The New York Times (4/7/23) presented the stabbing of tech exec Bob Lee as a symbol of “deepening frustration over the city’s homelessness crisis”—before another “tech leader” was arrested for his murder.

    But as with the Lee story, the media assumptions were premature. Video evidence later revealed that Carmignani had attacked the homeless man with bear spray and that the homeless man acted in self-defense, although Carmignani disputed this (CBS, 4/26/23; CNN, 4/27/23; LA Times, 5/11/23). In fact, lawyers for the homeless man in the case “alleged that Carmignani may be involved in other incidents in which homeless people were sprayed in the Cow Hollow and Marina District neighborhoods” (NBC, 4/27/23).  Carmignani also has his own checkered past: he resigned from his commissioner post “one day after he was arrested in connection with an alleged domestic violence incident” (SFGate, 9/24/13).

    At the Atlantic (6/8/22), Nellie Bowles—a California heiress (SF Chronicle, 10/28/21; LA Times, 6/14/22), former New York Times writer, and a participant in the conservative and lucrative anti-woke propaganda network (Daily Mail, 11/5/21)—brought an out-of-touch upper-class perspective to a San Francisco she, like CNN, called a “failed city.” Her heart no doubt bleeds for suffering people on the street, but she placed the blame on a regional culture of permissiveness:

    This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan, blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism. The roots of this belief system reach back to the ’60s, when hippies filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment. Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes.

    ‘Failed city’

    Atlantic: How San Francisco Became a Failed City

    San Francisco’s homicide rate has dropped by half since the early 2000s—prompting the Atlantic (6/8/22) to run an essay on “How San Francisco Became a Failed City.”

    The casual use of the phrase “failed city” is insulting hyperbole. The analogous term “failed state” was popularized in an early ’90s Foreign Policy article (Winter/92–93), which defined the “failed nation-state” as one “utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community”—a definition that seems designed to invite intervention by said “community.” (See University of Chicago Law Review, Fall/05.) A failed state is a technical term for a place, due to internal mismanagement and external pressure, where civil society has broken down amid collapse in central governance. There is no major world body that considers the loss of a Nordstrom store (SF Chronicle, 5/3/23) a valid metric of societal meltdown.

    But even if we forgive journalists for their flexible poetic license, the media narrative that San Francisco stands outside the US norm runs contrary to reality.

    Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that the highest rates of drug overdose mortality are in West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Kentucky, with California far behind. US Department of Agriculture research shows that the highest poverty states are Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico and Mississippi. Forbes’ list (1/31/23) of the most dangerous cities cites New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis and Memphis (as well as Mobile and Birmingham, Alabama), but not San Francisco. San Francisco/Oakland does appear on the list of cities with the highest homelessness rates—but seven cities have higher rates, including New York City, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

    Surreal media narrative

    KQED: Unhoused San Francisco Residents Sue City Over Displacement, Rights Violations

    Toro Castaño (KQED, 9/27/22) on homeless “sweeps”: “A lot of things they’re taking are warm clothes, warm jackets, blankets, things that you need just to survive.”

    It’s a surreal media narrative for Zal Shroff, a senior attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, who recently helped win an injunction against what the group calls the city’s discrimination against homelessness. “On paper, the city has 3,000 shelter beds for 8,000 unhoused people,” he told FAIR, noting that while residents may be frustrated with street homelessness, there are often few places for the homeless to go.

    “There is no avenue for an unhoused person to seek shelter. You can only get it after you’ve been harassed by police and beg for it,” he said. “You can’t go to the police and ask, they have to threaten you with citation and arrest, and then maybe they’ll ask to see if there is a shelter bed.”

    Despite the media narrative about the city’s lawlessness, LCCRSF’s summary of the lawsuit states—and so far, one court agrees—that the city’s unhoused population are subjected to “brutal policing practices that violate [their] civil rights.” As Toro Castaño (48Hills, 9/27/22), who was homeless in the city from 2019 to 2021, told the court, “I was harassed by San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and Department of Public Works (DPW) staff several times a week for the entirety of the two years I was homeless.” He noted in the court papers that while living on the street in May 2020, he was “harassed by police officers from the Castro beat every day for five weeks.”

    KQED (9/27/22) noted that “Castaño had his belongings taken from him by the city four times during the pandemic, according to the complaint,” and that “while Castaño was unhoused, he said he was asked to move nearly every day.”

    As Sarah Cronk, an unhoused person said in court papers, “If the City does not have adequate shelter or housing for us, then it should not be harassing us.” She and her partner “are just trying to scrape by and build as much of a life for ourselves as possible—with both dignity and safety,” Cronk said, but the city government “makes that impossible for us.”

    This is hardly the “lunatics are running the asylum” image the media would have the public believe is the case.

    For Shroff, the situation is frustrating, because while the injunction is meant to stop police harassment of the homeless while encouraging more affordable housing and shelter services, in the city’s narrative, his organization is calling for outright anarchy (SF Chronicle, 1/23/23; Law360, 4/26/23). “That’s the narrative that’s out there and is winning the day in the press,” he said, “which is interesting, because we’re winning this case.”

    Myth of soaring crime

    San Francisco CA Murder/Homicide Rate 1999-2018

    San Francisco did have a high murder rate in the early 2000s, but it has since fallen dramatically, to close to the US and California averages.

    And then there’s the mythology of the city’s soaring crime. As the San Francisco Standard (12/22/22) reported, the city’s “crime totals cratered in 2020 when the city hunkered down for the first waves of Covid,” and then rose again. But “crime in San Francisco has not yet increased to pre-pandemic levels—with a few key exceptions.”

    The online news outlet said crime rates “have fallen tremendously since peaks in the 1990s, which mirrors trends in cities across the country,” and that the “city’s most recent crime spikes came in 2013 for violent crime and 2017 for property crime.” (To put this admission into perspective, the Standard is financed by the aforementioned Michael Moritz.)

    SFGate (1/7/22) also noted that violent crime rates in San Francisco matched national trends, and were not national outliers. Despite ideas of the city’s lawlessness and left-wing calls to “defund the police,” the “San Francisco Police Department budget increased overall by 4.4% from 2019 to 2022” (KGO-TV, 10/13/22), and Mayor London Breed has called for “a $27 million budget supplemental to fund police overtime citywide” (KGO-TV, 3/8/23). The right blamed the property crime spike on former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, but with his recall (FAIR.org, 7/11/22), there is no longer a George Soros–backed boogeyman to hold up as a scapegoat (The Hill, 6/9/22).

    SFGate: San Francisco Bay Area has the fastest growing economy in US, report says

    Oddly enough, the “failed city” has “the fastest growing economy in US” (SFGate, 11/16/22).

    And while it is true that the city’s population has decreased (SF Chronicle, 1/26/23), the housing market is still hot, “with rents returning to pre-Covid levels, and a median one-bedroom there now priced at $3,100 a month, up 14% and the highest in two years” (Bloomberg, 7/26/22). The city’s tourism economy is currently booming, after the pandemic hurt the sector (SF Chronicle, 3/21/23). The city’s unemployment rate had been sitting at a low 2.9% (KPIX-TV, 3/10/23; SF Chronicle, 4/21/23) and has only recently spiked—not because of some progressive City Hall policy, but thanks to nationwide layoffs in the locally concentrated tech sector (SF Chronicle, 4/21/23). One report (SFGate, 11/16/22) showed that the “San Francisco Bay Area led the country in economic growth in 2022, with a 4.8% increase in GDP.”

    The skyrocketing wealth is connected to the homelessness problem, Schroff said. While there is a mythology that street homelessness in San Francisco is the result of outsiders traveling there for the services and the mild weather, Schroff notes that LCCRSF research has shown that a bulk of unhoused people are long-time area residents who cannot find shelter.

    The group’s lawsuit said “San Francisco failed to meet state targets for affordable housing production between 1999 and 2014—ultimately constructing 61,000 fewer very low-income units than needed.” From “2015 to 2022, the city only built 33% of the deeply affordable housing units it promised, and only 25% of actual housing production went to affordable housing.”

    “The mental health services and the drug addiction services are robust, but that doesn’t solve that two thirds of unhoused people are reporting that they can’t find affordable housing,” Schroff said. “There is no exit option.”

    American Gomorrah

    NY Post: How ‘woke’ policies turned Downtown San Francisco into an urban drug-den

    New York Post (10/15/22): “San Francisco is governed by a leadership that is so enamored of the city’s progressive, humanitarian self-image that the idea of enforcing basic laws—even ones that save people’s lives like controlling drug sales and consumption—has come to be regarded as reactionary.”

    In a country where a state like Texas has seen six mass shootings this year (USA Today, 5/8/23), why is San Francisco the object of such obsession? The San Francisco Bay Area, in the imagination of the American right, is the closest thing America has to Sodom and Gomorrah. San Francisco is identified as the epicenter of gay liberation, the home of the hippies, vegan restaurants and streets where Cantonese and Spanish are heard as much as English. Berkeley, just across the Bay, was a primary site of 1960s student radicalism and counter-culture, and the flagship UC campus continues to be a dreaded symbol of state-funded academic wokeness (Berkeleyside, 12/12/18; Washington Examiner, 8/21/22; Daily Beast, 10/31/22).

    Affluenza has cleansed the Bay of much of its bohemia, but its national political legacy lives on in Democratic establishment titans like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The area’s tech industry, like Hollywood in the southern end of the state, is a lucrative capitalist sector that the right, not incorrectly, associates with Democratic voting (Open Secrets, 1/12/21; Wall Street Journal, 2/20/21).

    So to paint San Francisco as an example of failed governance is, in the right-wing narrative, to prove that the progressive urban experiment has broadly failed. The Nazi Joseph Goebbels probably didn’t say, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” but it remains a central principle of propaganda. The failure of San Francisco has been a drumbeat in the conservative press, and as a result, major corporate media are acting as if this is true, or at least arguable. CNN, the New York Times and the Atlantic, by buying into this mythology, are able to call into question compassion for the homeless and alternatives to aggressive policing.

    In fact, the Washington Post (5/21/19) seemed a little lonely in the corporate press when it argued that it was an “earthquake of wealth” that permanently worsened the city’s character, not the poor or any overly compassionate social policy.

    But all of the recent negative coverage surrounds the issue of homeless people. Homelessness and poverty are the tragic results of unfettered capitalism and raging inequality, whether it’s in rural West Virginia or in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Drug addiction is a public health crisis that the US healthcare system neglects, like many other ailments. These media pieces aren’t appalled by the conditions that create seas of unhoused people, but are appalled that housed, professional people have to deal with them. The New York Times and CNN are in many ways different from Fox News and the New York Post, but this is where their worldviews meld.

    This is media outrage focused not at systemic injustice, but based in disgust at the victims of injustice.

    Correction (5/30/23): A previous version of this article incorrectly said that tech boss Bob Lee, a former resident of the Bay Area, was killed “near his home.”

    The post The Character Assassination of San Francisco appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Dehumanization Killed Jordan Neely—and Dominated Coverage of His Death

     

    Daily News: NYC man threatening strangers on Manhattan subway dies after Marine Corps vet puts him in chokehold: NYPD

    An earlier Daily News headline (5/2/23) was “Brawling NYC Subway Rider Dies After Chokehold, NYPD Says.”

    Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man, appeared to be in the throes of a mental health crisis and asking for money on a New York City subway train when another passenger—a 24-year-old white man—put him in a chokehold for several minutes, killing him.

    The dozens of other passengers in the car of the northbound F-train did not stop the attack, although in a witness video, one bystander can be heard warning Penny he was “going to kill” Neely. The video also reveals some passengers cheering, while two other men stood above Neely, holding him down while Penny choked him for several minutes until he went limp.

    The death was ruled a homicide. The killer’s name, Daniel Penny, was not released to the media for four days. Penny was not charged until May 11, ten days after the killing, and after protests took place across the city demanding that he be arrested. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter, but released on $100,000 bond. A fundraiser on a right-wing Christian crowdfunding website called GiveSendGo has raised more than $2.5 million as of May 19.

    ‘A man in pain’

    NYT: Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed

    Roxane Gay (New York Times, 5/4/23) raises questions “about who gets to stand his ground, who doesn’t, and how, all too often, it’s people in the latter group who are buried beneath that ground by those who refuse to cede dominion over it.”

    Neely, who often busked as a Michael Jackson impersonator, had a history of mental illness and trauma. Before he was killed, he was reportedly yelling on the train, complaining of hunger and thirst and throwing his jacket down in a way some witnesses described as aggressive.

    “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” a witness quoted Neely saying. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”

    No witness accounts suggested he was physically violent. Even so, much of the corporate press deliberately refrained from framing Neely as a victim, and far-right media outlets have gone even further to dehumanize him and excuse the killing.

    An opinion piece by Roxane Gay for the New York Times (5/4/23) rightly grouped this killing in with other recent wannabe vigilante–style assaults: 16-year-old Ralph Yarl shot for ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City; 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis fatally shot for pulling into the wrong driveway in upstate New York; competitive cheerleaders Heather Roth and Payton Washington shot after one got into the wrong car in a parking lot in Texas; a father and four members of his family—including an 8-year-old boy—fatally shot for asking his neighbor to stop firing an AR-15 assault rifle in his yard.

    Gay writes of Neely:

    Was he making people uncomfortable? I’m sure he was. But his were the words of a man in pain. He did not physically harm anyone. And the consequence for causing discomfort isn’t death, unless, of course, it is.

    Dehumanization

    The New York Daily News (5/2/23) announced Neely’s killing under the headline “NYC Man Threatening Strangers on Manhattan Subway Dies After Marine Corps Vet Put Him in Chokehold.” The lead made it clear that his killer was to be understood as the “good guy” in this story:

    A disturbed man threatening strangers on a Manhattan subway train died after getting into a brawl with the wrong passenger—a US Marine Corps veteran who put him in a chokehold.

    Of course, Neely didn’t “get into a brawl” with Penny, who by all accounts approached Neely from behind. But this framing of Neely as the instigator of violence was common.

    New York Times columnist David French (5/14/23), suggesting that Neely’s death was fundamentally a failure of the “rule of law”—not because of Penny’s vigilantism, but because of the city’s failure to keep Neely behind bars for more than 15 months after a 2021 assault charge—called Neely “reportedly aggressive and menacing.” French’s only evidence of this characterization was Neely’s yelling about needing food and water and being ready to die.

    NYT: Jordan Neely's Criminal Record: Man Killed on Subway Had 42 Prior Arrests

    As Neely’s killer knew nothing about his arrest record, Newsweek‘s headlining it (5/4/23)  suggests the magazine thinks it should affect how sorry we should be that Neely is dead.

    Piling on the dehumanization, Newsweek (5/4/23) published an article centered on Neely’s prior criminal record: “Man Killed on Subway Had 42 Prior Arrests.” While quoting homeless advocates who condemned the ways poor and homeless people are demonized and dehumanized, Newsweek simultaneously framed the piece in a way that demonized and dehumanized Neely, relying on law enforcement accounts.

    Sara Newman, director of organizing at the housing justice group Open Hearts Initiative, told Newsweek:

    Jordan Neely’s murder is the direct result of efforts to dehumanize and demonize New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness, living with mental illness or just existing in the world as Black and poor.

    But Newsweek‘s piece overall did just what Newman condemned, citing a “police spokesperson” who outlined Neely’s arrests between 2013 and 2021: four for alleged assault and others for low-level crimes and crimes of poverty, including transit fraud, trespassing and violations like having an open container in public.

    Activists quoted in the article called out the NYPD’s willingness to disclose Neely’s entire record as an attempt to vilify him and justify his killing, but that didn’t stop Newsweek from leading with the police narrative.

    At the time of publication, Penny’s name had still not been public, but nearly a decade of Neely’s prior arrests that had nothing to do with the incident that got him killed were headline news.

    ‘Was this heroism?’

    NBC: Jordan Neely Subway Chokehold Death: Protests, Calls for Charges Grow As NYPD Asks for Help

    NBC‘s New York affiliate (5/4/23) asks, “Was this heroism, or vigilantism?”

    Reporting on Neely’s death being ruled a homicide caused by the chokehold, NBC New York (5/4/23) still managed to pose the question: “Was this heroism, or vigilantism?” The report described Neely’s killer as someone “initially hailed as a Good Samaritan.”

    FoxNews.com (5/4/23) reported that demonstrators chanted “Fuck Eric Adams” and implied that was because the New York mayor had said “that the DA should be given time to conduct his investigation.” In fact, protesters were angered because, as FAIR (6/25/22, 12/7/22, 4/4/22) has documented, Adams’ policies have stigmatized homelessness and mental illness, while inflating police budgets and cutting funds for education—and doing little to make people safer.

    New York Times (5/4/23) and NBC (5/4/23) headlines also referred to the killing as a “Chokehold Death.” Even well-intentioned reporting that highlights the demands of protesters is eclipsed by the passivity in this language. If a chokehold causes someone’s death, it’s more than just a death; it’s a homicide.

    Gay’s piece for the Times put it best:

    News reports keep saying Mr. Neely died, which is a passive thing. We die of old age. We die in a car accident. We die from disease. When someone holds us in a chokehold for several minutes, something far worse has occurred.

    A ‘debate’ of their own design

    USA Today: Chokehold Death Hardens a Stark Divide

    USA Today (5/18/23) suggests that one way to look at Neely’s killing is that a “former Marine” drew “accolades” for “choking him into submission.”

    USA Today (5/17/23) illustrated the “Grand Canyon-size rift between the left and the right” in how people view the death of Neely:

    A former Marine stops a violent homeless man from harassing subway passengers, choking him into submission and drawing accolades for his willingness to step in.

    A well-known Black street performer who struggled with mental health and homelessness for years dies at the hands of a white military man in front of horrified onlookers.

    The headline online was, “An Act by a ‘Good Samaritan’ or a Case of ‘Murder’: The Rift in How US Views Subway Chokehold Death.” In print, “Chokehold Death Hardens Stark Divide” says the same thing in fewer words: The value of Jordan Neely’s life is up for debate.

    The  New York Times (5/4/23) also both-sidesed New Yorkers’ opinions on this killing, calling it a “debate”:

    For many New Yorkers, the choking of the 30-year-old homeless man, Jordan Neely, was a heinous act of public violence to be swiftly prosecuted, and represented a failure by the city to care for people with serious mental illness. Many others who lamented the killing nonetheless saw it as a reaction to fears about public safety in New York and the subway system in particular.

    And some New Yorkers wrestled with conflicting feelings: their own worries about crime and aggression in the city and their conviction that the rider had  gone too far and should be charged with a crime.

    It later explained, “Many have grown worried about safety on the subway after experiencing violence or reading about it in the news.”

    But the overwhelming majority of riders have not experienced violence on the subway themselves. As FAIR (12/7/22) has pointed out, one’s odds of being the victim of a crime while riding New York City public transportation is approximately 1.6 out of 1 million. The NYPD’s own statistics show transit crimes essentially flat for the past 10 years, excluding the dramatic drop during the pandemic, when ridership plummeted. On the other hand, if you follow the news, you’re virtually guaranteed to hear about supposedly rampant subway crime—meaning the fear of rising crime in the city and the subways has been almost entirely manufactured by the news media itself.

    ‘Paths crossing’

    NYT: How Two Men’s Disparate Paths Crossed in a Killing on the F Train

    The New York Times (5/7/23) describing a killing as “paths crossed” recalls its reporting (11/23/14) a police officer shooting an unarmed man in a stairwell as “two young men” who “collided.”

    A later Times piece was titled “How Two Men’s Disparate Paths Crossed in a Killing on the F Train” (5/7/23). In true Times-style storytelling, a man killing another amounts to “paths crossing.”

    “Was this a citizen trying to stop someone from hurting others? Or an overreaction to a common New York encounter with a person with mental illness?” mused the paper of record. The article explained that the type of chokehold Penny used resembled one taught in the Marines. The Times reports the maneuver is meant to cut off blood and oxygen to the brain but not crush the windpipe (it did). It quotes a Marines press release from 2013 that describes choking techniques as a “fast and safe way to knock out the enemy” (1/31/13).

    Characterizing Penny’s chokehold as a generally harmless maneuver gone wrong is irresponsible. Chokeholds like the one Penny used are designed for combat—not the subway. In 2021, the Justice Department banned the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement agencies unless lethal force was authorized.  In a piece for Military.com (5/9/23), Gabriel Murphy, a former Marine who started a petition to prosecute Penny for Neely’s death, explains that these martial arts methods Marines learn in training are “not designed to be non-lethal or safe.”

    Unlike much coverage of unhoused murder victims—of whom there are many—the article did offer some humanizing details about Neely’s life: that his mother was murdered when he was 14, and that a former high school classmate remembered him as a good dancer and a well-behaved student.

    But it then focused on his record of arrests and use of K2, a potentially dangerous form of synthetic marijuana, and his voluntary and involuntary hospitalizations over the years. The paper paraphrased a hospital employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “because they were not authorized to discuss his history.” In other words, the employee was granted anonymity to violate patient privacy laws and air Neely’s personal medical history.

    Meanwhile, a “surfing friend” of Penny got the last word in the piece: “He could only guess at Mr. Penny’s mind-set: ‘Knowing Danny and knowing his intentions, it was to help others around him.’”

    Right-wing depravity

    NY Post: Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a ‘hero’ and offers to testify on his behalf

    “The rhetoric from Mr. Neely was very frightening, it was very harsh,” the New York Post (5/18/23) quoted an anonymous bystander. “I sensed danger.”

    Right-wing media coverage of Neely’s death reached yet another level of depravity. “Shocking Video Shows NYC Subway Passenger Putting Unhinged Man in Deadly Chokehold,” read one New York Post headline (4/2/23). In the piece, the victim was described as a “disturbed man” and a “vagrant,” while the person who killed him for yelling on the subway was a “subway passenger” and a “Marine veteran.”

    The Post quoted freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, who captured the video of the incident. “I think that in one sense it’s fine that citizens want to jump in and help. But I think as heroes we have to use moderation,” he said, adding that if police had shown up earlier, “this never would have happened.” (The Post did not challenge this suggestion that police are not notorious choke-holders themselves—see George Floyd, Eric Garner, Elijah McClain.)

    Fox host Brian Kilmeade (Media Matters, 5/4/23) justified the killing, saying the other passengers who “felt threatened” “helped out,” too. He added that Neely had prior arrests for “assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating.”

    “I can’t tell you how many times you see this guy—these guys—walking up and down screaming, and you think to yourself, this can be out of control at any moment,” Kilmeade said.  He added:

    You have a 24-year-old who we trained in the military, lives on Long Island, hopping on a subway, and said, let me help out the American people again, when I’m not in Afghanistan, let me just grab this guy and hold him down. No cops around, because they are understaffed and they are not on the trains. They are upstairs. And this guy takes action. And now you have people protesting for the homeless guy? Were you protesting when he was throwing garbage at people and threatening people in their face? So, I have no patience for these people.

    Assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating, throwing trash and disrupting passengers are not punishable by the death penalty in a court of law—and certainly not by a subway passenger who decided to play judge, jury and executioner on his afternoon ride. No matter how short on patience Kilmeade is for people he sees on his commute to his $9 million/year job, Jordan Neely was a human being.

    Mental illness is not a crime

    Additionally, Adams’ police “omnipresence” plan deployed more than 1,000 extra officers underground in early 2022. Despite record levels of police underground, the April 2022 subway shooting that injured at least 29 people still happened. Officers on the platform that Michelle Go was fatally shoved off of that same year didn’t stop her murder, either.

    In April 2023, the NYPD reintroduced a $74,000 robotic police dog to spy on people in Times Square. Meanwhile, the city’s department of education may lose $421 million in additional budget cuts next school year (Chalkbeat, 4/4/23).

    It can’t be repeated enough that mental illness and homelessness are not criminal, and that the demonization of both things are leading to policies and prejudices that cost lives. Homelessness and mental illness are both conditions that make someone more likely to be victims of crimes, not perpetrators (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 1/24/22; NIH, 1/9/23).

    But as the corporate media has demonstrated with Neely’s story, even a victim of homicide is framed as guilty when he is Black, unhoused and mentally ill.

    The post Dehumanization Killed Jordan Neely—and Dominated Coverage of His Death appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Cody Bloomfield on Anti-Activist Terrorism Charges

     

    Time: Georgia Is Using a Domestic Terrorism Law Expanded After Dylann Roof Against ‘Cop City’ Protesters

    Time (5/4/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Do you care about environmental degradation? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about violent overpolicing of Black and brown communities? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about purportedly democratic governance that overrides the actual voice of the people? Then you care about Cop City.

    But be aware: Your concern about Cop City, and its myriad impacts and implications, may get you labeled a domestic terrorist. The official response to popular resistance to the militarized policing facility being created on top of the forest in Atlanta, Georgia, is an exemplar of how some officials fully intend to bring all powers to which they have access, and to create new powers, to treat anyone who stands in opposition to whatever they decide they want to do as enemies of the state, deserving life-destroying prison sentences. So if your thoughts about Cop City don’t motivate you, think about your right to protest anything at all.

    We’ll talk about anti-activist terrorism charges with Cody Bloomfield, communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent.

          CounterSpin230519Bloomfield.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Israel’s “crisis of democracy.”

          CounterSpin230519Banter.mp3

     

    The post Cody Bloomfield on Anti-Activist Terrorism Charges appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.