Category: zSlider

March 10, 2023

A Taste of What’s in Store if Right-Wing Zealots Get Green Light to Sue Media

Michael Knowles at CPAC (3/4/23): “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.”

Michael Knowles, host of the Daily Wire’s right-wing Michael Knowles Show, has accused several news outlets of libel for their coverage of his speech at CPAC (Twitter, 3/4/23). The affair illustrates the kind of ideological pretzel-twisting right-wing media go through to make themselves look like victims of free speech suppression, but it’s no laughing matter: This is the kind of censorship and bullying of journalists the right is hoping will be standard practice if the Supreme Court implements its anti-press agenda.

Knowles at CPAC (3/4/23) declared that “for the good of society…transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Rolling Stone (3/4/23) initially reported this under the headline “CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated,’” which Knowles called libelous. (The magazine’s headline is now “CPAC Speaker Calls for Eradication of ‘Transgenderism’—and Somehow Claims He’s Not Calling for Elimination of Transgender People.”) Alyssa Cordova (Twitter, 3/4/23), a public relations executive for the Daily Wire, called for retractions from HuffPo and the Daily Beast for their headlines as well.

Knowles and Cordovas’ argument is that Knowles didn’t specifically say society needed to eradicate transgender people, but that it must eradicate “transgenderism”—whatever that means. Like Rolling Stone, Daily Beast (3/4/23) also changed its headline to address “transgenderism.” A headline in HuffPost (3/4/23) now doesn’t mention “trans” or “transgenderism” but said Knowles’ comments “sound downright genocidal.”

‘A preposterous ideology’

Rolling Stone‘s revised headline (3/4/23) attempted to deal with the libel threat while still conveying the point of Knowles’ speech.

At first glance, the changes to the Rolling Stone and the Daily Beast headlines after Knowles’ online tantrum could seem innocent enough, but it’s hard to imagine media outlets being so generous to an incendiary speaker if the tables were turned. If someone said, “Christianity should be eradicated,” and media heard that as a call against all Christians, the excuse “I didn’t say I wanted to eradicate Christian people—I just want to eradicate their ideas, liturgy, houses of worship, freedom to identify as Christians and their entire way of life” is probably not going to hold up well in the court of public opinion.

But “transgenderism” is a tricky word that was once a broadly used term referring to people with a gender identity different from the one they were assigned at birth. Now, however, it’s used almost exclusively by the right to paint trans identity as some sort of political agenda to undo God’s gender order (Focus on the Family, 9/13/15), a campaign to influence children into a new “gender ideology” (Focus on the Family, 9/13/15) and an abomination on par with gay rights and abortion rights (Fox News, 11/2/22). Knowles, in his speech, called “transgenderism” a “preposterous ideology” that he knows to be “false.”

Being transgender isn’t a political ideology, just as being gay or straight aren’t ideologies. But in the right’s ongoing moral panic about gender identity, trans people aren’t simply a population that exists, but the foot soldiers in the anti-Christ’s campaign to use “they” pronouns and gender-neutral bathrooms to upend established orders.

Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said in a statement to FAIR:

“Transgenderism” is a phony term made up by anti-transgender activists and used to dehumanize transgender people and target them, their lifesaving healthcare and access to society. Similar hate speech about “eradicating” human beings has been used by extremists throughout history… This rhetoric is horrifically irresponsible and endangers innocent people and children. Responsible media must accurately describe terms used to target transgender people as hate speech, and identify those who use this rhetoric on any platform as anti-trans activists.

Politics of transphobia

There is an extremist ideology seeking to impose its views of gender on society—it’s called “Republicanism.” (Washington Post, 3/1/23).

The conservative use of the word “transgenderism” is a form of projection, a distorted mirror image of their own reactionary political agenda that seeks to eradicate access to healthcare, free speech, spaces to exist and protections for people who deviate too far from established norms about binary gender.

In Tennessee, the Republican governor signed bills “banning drag shows in public spaces, a measure that will likely force drag shows underground in Tennessee,” and a “ban on gender-affirming healthcare for youth” (NPR, 3/2/23). Another proposed measure (Washington Post, 3/1/23) “would effectively cut off access to gender-affirming care for low-income people, including adults,” by prohibiting “Tennessee’s Medicaid program from working with health insurance companies that cover gender-affirming care.” Meanwhile, “Republican lawmakers in at least five states have introduced legislation that would limit such care for adults.”

Last year, Michigan saw a bill that sought to “potentially sentence parents of transgender children to life in prison if they allow their child to obtain gender-affirming treatments” (MetroWeekly, 10/27/22). The Georgia state senate has “passed a bill that would prohibit medical professionals from giving transgender children certain hormones or surgical treatment that assists them” in transitioning (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 3/6/23).

Florida has proposed bills limiting the use of preferred pronouns (Washington Post, 3/5/23) and another that would “allow disapproving parents to take ‘emergency jurisdiction’ over their children if the minor receives or is ‘at risk of’ receiving gender-affirming care—or if their custodial parent receives it themselves” (Insider, 3/4/23). The American Civil Liberties Union (1/19/23) has cited more than 120 bills introduced this year aimed at “restricting LGBTQ people, targeting their freedom of expression, the safety of transgender students, and access to healthcare for gender dysphoria.”

‘False account of human nature’

Knowles literally demonizing trans people (LA Blade, 2/7/23).

Knowles is very much a part of the media arm of this political crusade, and he often mixes the style of a late-night AM radio preacher with the banality of someone begging for a job with the Trump Organization. He said “depictions of demons” are “always trans. And the reason for that is that the Devil hates human beings, and sexual difference is, basically, at the very core of human nature” (LA Blade, 2/7/23). He has called on states to “ban transgenderism entirely” (Vice, 3/3/23).

(As an aside, I’ve seen a lot of horror flicks and been to a lot of museums, and Knowles’ assertion about the sexual identity of demons is certainly going to leave a lot of cinephiles and art historians scratching their heads.)

Knowles (Twitter, 2/1/23) said that former President Donald Trump “is calling to outlaw transgender ideology—not just for little kids, not just in classrooms or certain federal programs—at every level. This is an *excellent* development.” He declared (KSNT, 3/31/22): “Transgenderism is simply not true. It is a false account of human nature which holds that one’s true self has nothing to do with reality.”

It’s not hard to infer that if a “false account of human nature” is “eradicated,” no one would subscribe to this “false account”—i.e., there would be no more trans people. If Knowles ever does take his case against these media outlets—despite the changes in headlines—to court, he would have to argue that his words don’t mean what they seem to mean.

‘Created a monster’

Without Sullivan, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis could sue you for calling his “Don’t Say Gay” law a “Don’t Say Gay” law (Slate, 3/26/22).

Knowles was partly successful in forcing the media to bury this inference, and that’s part of the broader problem. For FAIR (3/1/23, 2/25/22, 3/26/21), I have repeatedly covered the right’s desire to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, a Supreme Court decision that protects people against defamation lawsuits from powerful people, noting that “public figures”—of which Knowles is certainly one—must prove “actual malice,” which is to say a “reckless disregard for the truth,” for the case to go forward.

In this instance, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Twitter, 3/5/23) said that the headlines about Knowles are proof that Sullivan “has created a monster—giving the news media a license to lie about any public figure who can’t prove that the reporter acted with ‘actual malice,’ which is nearly impossible.”

Lee isn’t blowing hot air when it comes to exerting state power over the media. Republican Florida State Sen. Jason Brodeur has proposed a bill “requiring bloggers to register with the Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics…[and] requiring such bloggers to file monthly reports with the appropriate office by a certain date.” This comes after the state enacted legislation to police speech in schools around LGBTQ identity (Slate, 3/26/22). In Texas, a bill seeks to “force internet providers to block websites containing information about obtaining an abortion” (Vanity Fair, 3/1/23).

In short, the right wants the freedom to spout their hateful ideology, but to be protected from criticism in the press. The Daily Wire’s quick attack on media outlets that accurately put Knowles’ comments in their actual political context shows the lengths the right will go to in order to suppress their critics in the media. And if they take down the Sullivan standard, they will have far more power to do so.

The post A Taste of What’s in Store if Right-Wing Zealots Get Green Light to Sue Media appeared first on FAIR.

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

Kim Knackstedt on Disability Policy, Algernon Austin on Unemployment & Race

      CounterSpin230310.mp3

Judy Heumann

This week on CounterSpin: “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.” So declared disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who died last weekend at age 75. As a child with polio, Heumann was denied entry to kindergarten on grounds that her wheelchair was a fire hazard. Later, she was denied a teachers license for reasons no more elevated. She sued, won and became the first teacher in New York to use a wheelchair. Media love those kinds of breakthroughs, and they matter. Here’s hoping they’ll extend their interest into the barriers disabled people face in 2023, and how policy changes could address them. We’ll talk with Kim Knackstedt, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.

      CounterSpin230310Knackstedt.mp3

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963

And speaking of problems that aren’t actually behind us: You will have heard that the US is experiencing “blowout job growth,” and unemployment is at a “historic low,” with gains extending even to historically marginalized Black people. Algernon Austin from the Center for Economic Policy and Research will help us understand how employment data can obscure even as it reveals, and how—if our problem is joblessness—there are, in fact, time-tested responses.

      CounterSpin230310Austin.mp3

The post Kim Knackstedt on Disability Policy, Algernon Austin on Unemployment & Race appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
March 9, 2023

Right-Wing Media’s ‘Grooming’ Rhetoric Has Nothing to Do With Concern for Children

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/19/22) invents an imaginary phenomenon in which young children are being trained in sexual practices by elementary schools. So whose “sexual fantasies” is he really talking about here?

In front of a graphic of fluffy pink handcuffs and “Kink for Kids” spelled out in blocks and crayon font, a red-faced Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/19/22) ranted about the story of a transgender Canadian high school teacher whose photos went viral on social media for wearing comically large prosthetic breasts to work.

This is a specialty of Carlson’s: taking one weird example of an individual’s behavior and attributing it to an entire movement or community to stoke moral panic. Carlson declared:

It’s hard to believe this is happening, but we’re sad to tell you it’s not just happening in Canada. You see versions of it everywhere, including in this country. And to be clear what this is, children being used as props in the sexual fantasies of adults.

From this single Canadian teacher’s cartoonishly inappropriate outfit, Carlson leaps—to teachers on social media talking about how they validate children when they disclose their sexualities and gender identities to them.

Then he leaps back to talking about pedophilia. This conflation is where the danger lies, both for LGBTQ individuals, and children who are actual survivors of sexual abuse.

What ‘grooming’ is—and isn’t

The term “grooming” has become a favorite of anti-LGBTQ politicians and right-wing media. Carlson said in the segment:

Some people describe what was happening, it is grooming. We’re not exactly sure what that means. But if it’s sexually abusing children, yes, that is what’s happening.

In fact, we do know what grooming means. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) describes grooming as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” It involves isolating victims, gaining their trust, and desensitizing them to inappropriate touch, sex and other forms of abuse.

Teaching children that some kids have two moms, or that certain people identify with a gender that does not match the one assigned to them based on their body parts, is not grooming. Having a drag queen in theatrical makeup read books to them is not grooming.

Vince Everett Ellison, on Tucker Carlson Tonight (1/24/23) to talk about “endless lies,” claims Democrats “want you to castrate little boys and cut off the breasts of little girls.”

Age-appropriate discussions about bodies, boundaries and relationships have been a regular part of school curriculums. It’s the introduction of LGBTQ-related topics in these discussions that sparked hysterical headlines and TV rants. A Carlson guest, author and documentarian Vince Everett Ellison—whose latest film is about how voting Democrat will keep you from Heaven—said in a January screed (Fox News, 1/24/23):

This is a party that believes in this transgender grooming thing to a point where…they want you to castrate little boys and cut off the breasts of little girls, and they’re telling people they’re not going to be held responsible for this.

Not only is the depiction of young children being castrated and receiving mastectomies graphic, it’s also untrue. If “little” children—i.e., those entering puberty—express a desire to transition, doctors may put them on reversible puberty blockers (which have been shown to reduce suicidal ideation in trans youth). Surgeries for youth under the age of 18 are relatively rare, and generally only done with the consent of the patient, their guardian and a doctor. And of course the language aired on Fox isn’t only meant to suggest child abuse; it also deliberately denies the gender identity of the young person requesting the gender-affirming surgery.

‘Your kids are ours’

Fox‘s Jesse Watters (9/23/22) interviews Mario Presents about his “Groom Dogs, Not Kids” T-shirt.

Fox‘s Jesse Watters, towards the start of his September 23 show, discussed the story of a Florida teacher convicted of sexually assaulting her 14-year-old student (Media Matters, 9/23/22). He moved on to bemoaning Covid school closures interrupting children’s education, then rounded out his segment by arguing that educating children about LGBTQ issues, like Critical Race Theory, is a form of Democratic indoctrination:

Sex and CRT become the new math and science. Kids are learning racism instead of reading. Do you think parents are pissed off about this? Of course, why wouldn’t they be? But, when they speak up, Democrats tell them to sit down, shut up and stay out of education: “Your kids are ours.”

To help him make his argument, Watters brought on Mario Presents, a “concerned uncle” who condemned LGBTQ education at a California school board meeting. Watters asks Presents about his shirt—which read, “Groom Dogs, Not Kids.”

“We love a pretty pet, but we don’t love kids being sexual,” Presents replied. “We don’t love…confusing them. We want kids to just be themselves.”

Presents also praised the work of “Gays Against Grooming” a conspiracy theorist, far-right operative -run anti-trans group masquerading as a grassroots organization (Media Matters, 2/7/23).

Validating a child’s stated identity, preferred name and pronouns is not “grooming.” There is, of course, nothing more inherently sexual about being homosexual or transgender than there is about being heterosexual and cisgender.

Dehumanizing myths

Julia Serano (Medium, 11/29/22): “The ‘grooming’ charge—as well as the related accusation that we are ‘sexualizing children‘—insinuates that LGBTQ+ people (but not cis-hetero people) are inherently sexually ‘contaminating’ and ‘corrupting.’”

But these far-right tropes aren’t new. Baselessly accusing a group of people of one of the worst crimes imaginable is a pretty surefire way to dehumanize them. Stigmatizing queer people by claiming they are sexually deviant is an age-old tactic. As Julia Serano notes in her blog for Medium (11/29/22), the “groomer” accusation recalls late 19th-century pseudoscience that claimed stigmatized people—like queer people, sex workers, poor people and disabled people—were evolving backwards, and that the mere exposure to them could make you evolve backwards, too.

The idea that merely learning about LGBTQ people and identities “causes” children to become queer has also been debunked. As Serano points out, several peer-reviewed studies have debunked the concept of transgender “social contagion,” an idea coined by a trans-skeptical parent online in 2016 and elaborated in a 2018 paper, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD),” by Lisa Littman. Flaws in the paper were called out in three peer-reviewed studies (Restar, 2020; Ashley, 2020; Pitts-Taylor, 2020), and the journal that published it later issued an apology and correction (PLoS, 3/19/19).

Serano also draws on earlier research to point to the likelihood that children like those in Littman’s study were most likely already trans or gender-diverse in some way, and seeking out access to information and support from peers similar to them. At least one study debunked the idea that same-sex attraction “spreads” among peer groups (Brakefield et al., 2014).

Serano also discusses the phenomenon of reduction of restraint. When a behavior is stigmatized, people who are inclined to engage in it are more likely to refrain:

In a 2017 essay, I argued that the current increased prevalence of trans people is akin to the increase in left-handedness (from 2% to 13%) during the 20th century once the stigma and punishment associated with being left-handed abated.

Hypocrisy and hatred

The incorrect use of the term “groomer” is rooted more in thinly veiling right-wing media’s anti-LGBTQ hatred than it is in an actual desire to protect children from sexual content—or other dangers. As Serano astutely summarized in her blog:

They also often use “grooming” in reference to completely non-sexual things, such as rainbow flags hanging in classrooms, efforts to accommodate trans students, or when schools have nondiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ+ people. While anti-trans/LGBTQ+ campaigners may frame their interventions in terms of “safeguarding children,” they rarely if ever express similar concern over actual cases of grooming and [child sexual abuse], the overwhelming majority of which are perpetrated by cis-hetero men who are family members or close acquaintances of the child.

The issue clearly isn’t about discussions or experiences involving cis-heteronormative sexuality or gender. It’s queerness itself that’s believed to be perverted. The Murdoch empire demonstrates this.

A father bragging about taking his nine-year-old son to Hooters didn’t prompt concern from the New York Post (11/23/22) about sexualizing children, but rather an array of boob puns.

A New York Post article (11/23/22) profiled a British father who took his 9-year-old son to Hooters to celebrate his good grades. “Tit for tot?” the article begins, later describing the restaurant as a “ta-ta temple.” It highlighted both critical and supportive responses to the stunt.

Teaching kids about gender diversity causes hosts like Fox’s Laura Ingraham to beat their chests in preparation for a culture war (Fox News, 4/7/22), and parents taking their kids to a drag show “normalize[s] the sexualization of kids” (10/19/22), yet this story evokes nothing more than a few lighthearted boob puns from Murdoch’s New York Post.

Meanwhile, children’s actual physical safety takes a backseat to “Don’t Say Gay” hysteria on Fox. Media Matters (4/1/22) documented Fox hosts melting down over Disney’s public opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in at least 53 segments over a week in 2022, accusing the company of grooming, indoctrinating and sexualizing children.

To compare, in December, a bipartisan bill supporting the welfare of child sex abuse victims was introduced in the House. Twenty-eight Republicans—including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have both referred to pro-LGBTQ advocates as “groomers” (CPR News, 11/22/22; Sacramento Bee, 11/25/22)—voted against the now-passed Respect for Child Survivors Act, which seeks to improve how the FBI handles cases of child sexual abuse (Newsweek, 12/22/22). FAIR’s Nexis search of the legislation’s name turned up no results on Fox News in the weeks preceding and following the voting.

The New England Journal of Medicine (5/19/22) found that gun violence had become the No. 1 cause of death in children and adolescents in 2020. A Nexis search of Fox transcripts found no mentions of that report in the week following its release. Only after the Uvalde elementary school shooting, which occurred on May 24, was the report mentioned in passing (Fox News, 5/29/22, 5/30/22).

Centrist media complicity

Centrist and neoliberal media have also been slow to call anti-LGBTQ advocates’ bluff. While the New York Times (4/7/22, 5/31/22) has published op-eds that confront the term “groomer” as harmful to both the LGBTQ community and victims of child abuse, its news section continues to both-sides the issue, quoting Republican use of the term with little critique.

In a piece that sterilely chronicled right-wing political attacks on LGBTQ rights, the Times (7/22/22) reported:

Officials and television commentators on the right have accused opponents of some of those new restrictions of seeking to “sexualize” or “groom” children. Grooming refers to the tactics used by sexual predators to manipulate their victims, but it has become deployed widely on the right to brand gay and transgender people as child molesters, evoking an earlier era of homophobia.

Washington Post (4/5/22): “In the charged debate over what and how children should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity, some mainstream Republicans are tagging those who defend such lessons as ‘groomers,’ claiming that proponents of such teaching want children primed for sexual abuse.”

The article later went on to briefly cite a survey by the Trevor Project that showed the staggering suicidality rates of gender non-conforming youth. However, the piece ultimately treated the issue as a political game, outlining Republican tactics and the risks they face of losing centrist votes due to homophobia. It ended with a quote by Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who is calling for legislation that allows parents to sue school districts that host drag shows (despite no evidence of any district doing so). “We’re taking the first step today to protecting children,” Dixon said, getting the last word.

At the Washington Post (4/5/22), the article “Teachers Who Mention Sexuality Are ‘Grooming’ Kids, Conservatives Say” devoted its first 12 paragraphs to coverage of anti-trans bigots using “groomer” rhetoric. As FAIR (4/12/22) pointed out:

It barely matters that the Post brought in some “experts” later to offer the “other side”—that actually talking about these things in fact helps curtail sexual abuse (which in schools primarily happens at the hands of heterosexual male teachers, noted all the way down in the 37th paragraph of the Post article) and bullying against LGBTQ+ kids. In giving the GOP the headline and the (extraordinarily lengthy) lead, Natanson and Balingit gave a bigoted and dangerous campaign the right to frame the story as a debate with two somehow comparable sides.

Other outlets are sometimes even worse. NY1 (6/16/22) platformed a Queens council member who called drag queen story hours in schools “grooming.” The Salt Lake Tribune (10/21/22) dedicated a whole article to outlining Utah politicians’ moral panic about drag shows. It quoted write-in Washington County clerk/auditor candidate Patricia Kent in the unhinged headline: “They are grooming our children for immoral satanic worship.”

The real danger

NBC‘s Today (5/9/22) on “grooming”: “Misusing the term also puts people, particularly children and teenagers, at risk of being groomed and eventually victimized.”

LGBTQ people are nearly four times more likely to be victims of violent crime—including sexual assault—than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. They’re nine times more likely than non-LGBTQ people to be victims of violent hate crimes. The November 2022 mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs is only one recent example of this danger.

Misusing the term “groomer” is also counterproductive to helping real victims of child sexual abuse. While it didn’t directly address LGBTQ education, a Psychology Today piece (4/10/22) asserted that referring to Disney movies, sex education and other sexual content as “grooming” is clinically inaccurate, and has the potential to make it “more difficult to detect and identify actual manipulative behaviors and prevent actual sexual offending.”

NBC’s Today (5/9/22) published a laudable piece on the topic based on an interview with Grace French, a former dancer and gymnast whom USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar groomed and molested. She explained why careless use of the term is harmful to survivors like her:

It’s so incredibly important to use this term correctly, because if we don’t understand it—and we have these assumptions about what it can or can’t be—then it’s harder and harder for grooming to be identified, and perpetrators are going to be able to get more access to children and to victims.

The New York Times (5/31/22) echoed this sentiment with a guest essay from a survivor, who concluded:

If we can’t agree that the use of these words is sacred and worth protecting from daily politics, we are telling one another that our deepest, most intimate, heart-wrenching wounds are empty—and that we may as well be, too.

Conservative politicians’ and right-wing media’s reckless use of the term “grooming” is intentionally inaccurate and dehumanizing. It not only harms LGBTQ people, but also the children these figures claim to be fighting to protect.

The post Right-Wing Media’s ‘Grooming’ Rhetoric Has Nothing to Do With Concern for Children appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 8, 2023

‘The Water Crisis Is a Manifestation of Jim Crow Politics’ – CounterSpin interview with Makani Themba on Jackson’s crisis

Janine Jackson interviewed the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s Makani Themba about Jackson, Mississippi’s crisis for the March 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3

Janine Jackson: So this is CNN on February 17: “And ahead, the plan to create a court system for the wealthy and mostly white parts of Jackson, Mississippi, and separate from the system for the mostly Black community.”

It’s hard to know how to respond. For sure, it’s good that CNN is choosing to point its national audience’s attention to what’s happening in Jackson. But at the same time, if it’s not too much, why is a deeply anti-democratic, racist action just a sort of blip on the evening news, like a new drink at Starbucks?

Mississippi Bill 1020 gives the state of Mississippi the control to appoint systems, and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba says it would be less than honest to call the effort “anything other than racist.”

New York Times (2/20/23)

Which leads us to headlines like the New York Times on February 21: “In Mississippi, Racial Outrage at Court Plan.” Well, CounterSpin listeners will likely be attuned to the difference when journalists use “racial” when “racist” would be the more appropriate word, and framework, to use.

So what does all this mean in the story of Jackson? And what questions and conversations would help us understand what’s going on there, and point us in the direction of a useful response?

Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and a volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies, which is based in Jackson. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Makani Themba.

Makani Themba: Well, I’m so glad to be back. And I’m so grateful that CounterSpin is still going strong. Thank you.

JJ: Absolutely. You know, we keep on keeping on.

I just feel, in this case, that a lot of folks would appreciate some story, some understanding, about what’s actually happening, and how we got to this point.

If I read reporting today, it’s about water treatment, and then about governance. But how would you bring somebody up to speed, who was maybe just looking at the latest headlines?

IBW21 (3/2/23)

MT: I think one of the most important things to understand is that HB 1020, which I know has gotten most of the media attention, is one of about a dozen bills, a dozen bills, that the state legislature and the governor have really, it feels like a sort of gun. It’s like artillery pointed at our city, to be honest. It’s like legislative weaponry.

And these bills, which include 1020, do all kinds of damage. 1020, I think, got a lot of folks’ attention, because it basically creates a new governance structure in the middle of the city that’s a predominantly white area, northeast Jackson. It also includes our downtown, where the Capitol is, and all the way up to the border of Ridgeland, Mississippi, which is the neighboring city, and actually into a portion of Ridgeland—a new jurisdiction which is called the Capitol Complex Improvement District.

It originally came out as a way to make sure that the Capitol had resources to do, you know, gardening, and some improvements for beautification. And the state came back after the City of Jackson, the residents of Jackson, the mayor of Jackson, had fought really hard to get federal dollars to finally come directly to Jackson to address our water issues. Because money was coming into the state for water infrastructure, but that money was not getting to Jackson, even though it was a primary reason why the money was coming in.

So that was the context, right, that we were able to work with Congress to come around the state, because they were blocking the resources; they even created a special process, just for the City of Jackson, to have to have approval for the use of funds that were dedicated to the city.

And so we were able to get around that, and get a sizable appropriation, about $600 million, actually, to address what is about a $2 billion problem. But we were excited. We were planning, we were there.

And it seems like this is not only revenge for figuring out a way to be resilient, and just address the problem without having to deal with the state and all of their shenanigans, but the set of bills, taken together, not only create this governance structure, [they] take away revenues from the city.

There are other bills that restrict our use of our sales tax revenue to only water infrastructure. So we’re not able to fix roads, or do anything else with it. And there’s no other city with that kind of restriction, where they say this is what you spend with your revenue, right? That’s not something happening anywhere else in Mississippi.

It also creates a police force that has jurisdiction over the city of Jackson, and over the Jackson Police Department. And they say the reason why they’re doing all this is to try to address the crime in Jackson. But that doesn’t seem to be true, because crime, one, is actually going down, and when crime was at the record high that it was at a couple of years ago, the state was not engaged at all, except to use it as a way to talk bad about us.

The other thing I think people should understand is that Jackson, like many majority Black and majority brown cities, folks denigrate those cities and defame those cities as a way to devalue, not only the people, but the property, the business, the commerce that happens there, because they don’t want the competition. So I think that’s important for people to understand.

So this whole array of bills—they even have a bill that restricts how the mayor can veto things or not. It’s not just about the water, because then I think it would be a different kind of response.

And the other thing is another bill that actually seizes the money that Congress allocated to the city, and creates a Regional Water Authority that is not responsible for addressing the problems in Jackson, it’s only responsible for receiving the money.

And the governor will have three votes on this commission. The lieutenant governor, who they’re in lockstep, has two votes. And this is a nine member commission. The mayor has four appointments, but two of them are dedicated to two other cities, so really Jackson has two votes on a nine-member regional handoff for money that was allocated directly to the city.

So they’re seizing those funds, as they have done other federal monies. What I also want people to understand is, there’s no law against this. There’s no law against this.

JJ: Exactly. So if we had a conversation about community needs, what would that look like? Who would be in that conversation? The conversation is like, oh, the community failed. But that’s not the story. And if we were going to talk about ways forward, we would, I believe, include different voices. And I just want to ask you, what could that conversation look like?

MT: First of all, I would love to see more investigative reporting and less punditry about it.

JJ: Say it.

The Nation (2/16/23)

MT: That’s important. Because it’s easy to make this, and I know in my own writing I talk about this, as a David versus Goliath story. And it is, in a way.

Jackson doesn’t have the votes. This is a supermajority Republican state house that does all the kind of ill they want, even though, because of the pressure from outside the state and within the state, there’s been some negotiation, but we’re still facing the brunt of the awfulness that all of these bills combined contain.

But yes, so what happens with the money when the federal government gives money to Jackson? Who uses it? Why don’t we see it? And why is that OK? And also, we’re not the only state that experiences these kinds of shenanigans, this kind of misappropriation of funds. All over the place—Michigan’s an example, Texas is another example.

States make applications to the federal government, using the problems of their communities of color, that basically happened because of the lack of investment, which is the first step. And then the extraction—because it’s one thing to not invest, but in Mississippi, they literally extract what they want from the city.

So when this money comes in, they extract that money and say, OK, well, great, we’ve got this money, we talked about the problems. And now we’re going to take this money and make communities that already have smooth roads smoother, already have good water infrastructure even better. We’re going to keep up with that, and then blame the folks—for what they’ve stolen from us.

Where’s the investigative reporting that looks at the documents, that FOIAs the application, that tracks it? And I’m so grateful for the work that the Clarion Ledger has done around the welfare scandal, because that would have never been uncovered had it not been for investigative reporting.

Makani Themba: “If there was really investigative reporting around what happened in Mississippi, folks would see a pattern of theft and extraction from the low-income people, from Black people, from brown people.”

But I think if there was really investigative reporting around what happened in Mississippi, folks would see a pattern of theft and extraction from the low-income people, from Black people, from brown people. It isn’t even that the white communities in Mississippi are benefited, because many of them do not.

I think that they would discover that a few businesses, a few people, a few politicians are benefiting from this, and most people are not. And how do you have a state that’s against Medicaid? Right? I mean, healthcare for their folks.

I think that more investigative journalism would nail these kinds of stories, and that it’s been investigative journalism in the past that’s helped lift up what’s happening in places like this.

And you know, like you think about, we would not know who Fannie Lou Hamer was, if folks weren’t telling the story outside of Mississippi. Because if it was up to them—I mean, this was a state that was trying to keep Sesame Street from coming on the air because it was too forward, too progressive, who actually had to be sued by folks in Mississippi—including the late Everett C. Parker, who media activists actually get an award in his name—they sued television stations in Mississippi in the ’60s, because they would literally not show anything about the civil rights movement, or the marches, or what was going on on the news.

And they had to sue to force that, and they would actually block out national news coverage in Mississippi of these stories. So we’re dealing with a long legacy.

So journalism is critical, good journalism, investigative journalism, or some people would say actual journalism, is critical to exposing this kind of theft and dishonesty.

And also just the issues of democracy. What does it mean to be in a state where there’s a Republican supermajority that does not reflect the proportions of who lives here at all?

Time (9/13/22)

JJ: When I see a headline, like Time magazine’s, “The Mayor of Jackson,” I guess it said, “Had a Racial Vision for His City”—OK, all right, whatever—“but the Water Crisis May Have Put It Out of Reach.”

So when I see that headline, what I hear that telling readers is, we tried to do it, and we failed. And so stop thinking about that.

So you can only talk to people who are interested in change, and media are just maybe not the way to do that. And yet so many people that we talk to, their agenda, their understanding of what is politically possible, is set by media, and it’s media saying, oh, hey, the mayor of Jackson wanted to do something, but he can’t. And that’s their understanding of, well, I guess we shouldn’t even try.

MT: Fortunately, Time magazine is not going to dictate to us what we might do, thank God. And I think, in many ways, the world was captivated by Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s vision around Jackson being the most radical city in America. And that radical vision for the world was very compelling, and also the story of Mississippi, right? The story of Mississippi is everybody’s, deep down.

I think that him articulating that, when he was first elected, gave folks a different view for a moment, right, of this is a place where there’s been resistance. He’s not the first person to articulate that.

In fact, Mississippi’s radical legacy has roots in Reconstruction. The state had the most radical constitution in the country during Reconstruction, and a majority Black legislature, all those things. And then, when the Confederacy took back the state in 1890, that’s the kind of governance we’ve been dealing with ever since. But they don’t represent the majority of the state, and they never have.

And so I think that it’s not true that the water crisis threatens our—and I would say, collectively, Jackson’s—radical agenda, because another convention of corporate media, and oftentimes storytelling, is to reduce it down to one person, when he was always part of a movement and a legacy and a history that many, many, many, many people are involved in.

That what threatens the agenda, so to speak, has been Jim Crow politics, and that the water crisis is a manifestation of Jim Crow politics.

You have a water crisis because there’s no investment in infrastructure when there should be, and those decisions are racialized.

I think that’s the other piece of the story, is that folks are not dealing with how deeply racialized the work, the legislature’s agenda—and I shouldn’t say the whole legislature, let me be clear, the Republicans, because it’s interesting, in Jackson, almost all the Democrats in both houses are Black. Guess why.

So we have this essentially apartheid approach to governance that has been in effect since 1890, with some breakthroughs, with some fights, and the Voting Rights Act was really critical to helping things move forward.

And it’s really been the folks in Mississippi and Alabama, whose blood was on the line, who made that legislation happen, and I want to be clear about that. The whole nation owes Mississippi and Alabama a debt for the elevation of democracy. That’s critical to understand.

And so we look at that, and I want to see reporting about that racialization, right? I want to see reporting about how this paradigm of whiteness and anti-Blackness is driving the policy agenda.

You know, people want to call it “Trumpism.” But this was Trumpism before Trump. This is where he got it from.

JJ: This is not new.

MT: And Jeff Sessions in Alabama, and from this Jim Crow legacy.

And that’s the crisis that we’re in. There would be no water crisis if there was equity. There would be no water crisis if the state of Mississippi had any kind of ethics, and allocated the money which they received from the federal government to the places where there is a problem.

And you think about it, how crazy is it that you won’t invest money where the problem is, and fix the problem? But that is kind of politics as usual—not just in Mississippi, but all over. And that ought to be the crime.

Jackson Undivided Coalition

Look for the hashtag #jxnundivided. You’ll see that online. That will let you know where the petition is, and also IBW21.org.

I have an extensive piece that has how people can get involved, as well as a link to the petition site. So there’s an article there that has a link to the petition drive.

We’re asking everybody to please sign and share it. And it also goes through the list of bills, and there’s two petitions listed in this piece. One is a petition to the state around this attack on Jackson.

The other, and this is, I think, really important as well, is a petition by the family of Jaylen Lewis. Jaylen Lewis was a 25-year-old Black father of two who was killed by the Capitol Police, basically execution-style. And his family is still looking for answers.

It happened in September. There was a witness, who is why we know what we know. But the police themselves have not released any findings, and are supposed to be investigating it. And so there’s a petition there as well for Jaylen Lewis.

And that’s one of the reasons why we’re so concerned about the Capitol Police having jurisdiction. They have a police chief who’s not accountable to anyone in the city of Jackson. They’re appointed by the attorney general of the state.

And so there’s a whole range of issues that are just so problematic about this, so that not only will we have this unelected, again, governing body over a big part of what will then not be a part of Jackson, but still in Jackson, right, where we go to downtown, where we shop, all of these kinds of things.

But we’ll have this occupying force that’s not accountable to any of the residents at all, that’s already shot several folks, and killed one in just the last few months.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Makani Themba. She’s a volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, as well as chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. Thank you again, Makani Themba, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MT: Thank you.

The post ‘The Water Crisis Is a Manifestation of Jim Crow Politics’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Scary Headlines Hype Dangers Rarely Faced by Tourists in Mexico

“Reconsider travel” to Mexico, asks USA Today (10/2/22)? Cancun has a relatively high homicide rate, but it’s 24% lower than Baltimore’s, which we haven’t seen the paper warning tourists away from. Cozumel, meanwhile, has a homicide rate lower than 38 major US cities.

Planning a trip to Mexico? If you read the news these days, you would think that Americans ought to be terrified of the popular tourist destination.

Headlines abound like “Killing of Artist Brothers Shatters Mexico City’s Veneer of Safety” (Guardian, 12/23/22) and “Reconsider Travel? Safety Experts Talk Violence in Mexico Tourist Spots” (USA Today, 10/2/22).

Of course, a headline isn’t the text of an article, but it’s frequently all readers see, and their constant repetition about the alleged dangers posed by simply being in Mexico is disturbing.

Most recently, you might have seen a version of “US Issues Strongest Possible ‘Do Not Travel’ Warning for Mexico Ahead of Spring Break” (LA’s Fox 11, 2/9/23) in a local news report headline. But read down to just the first line, and you’ll see that the warning is for only six of Mexico’s 31 states, not for the entire country—nor does it apply to Mexico City, by far the country’s largest metropolis, which is in its own federal district.

Nonetheless, the article goes on to say, “Other countries that are under the same highest-level travel warning include Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Ukraine, North Korea and Syria.”

Take a breath, Fox 11.

One of the most-visited countries

AP (via ABC, 2/21/23) offers news you can use, if you’re a Playa del Carmen bar inspector.

Isolated incidents, like the murder of a US resident in Zacatecas (CBS News, 1/25/23) and the possible extortion and death under mysterious circumstances of a US lawyer near Tijuana, described in the Fox 11 article above, do happen, particularly in the parts of the country where cartel violence is out of control.

But this must be placed in context. Mexico is a country—yes, one with social violence—that is consistently among the most visited in the world, in large part due to US tourists. The country had 32 million visitors in 2021, which was down from a pre-pandemic high of 45 million.

While they’re often happy to produce click-bait headlines that spark fear in potential travelers, many corporate media outlets seem less interested in giving those readers any sense of what level of risk the average tourist visiting a popular Mexican tourist destination might actually face.

Consider the article, “Bar Employees Stabbed Inspectors at Mexico Resort” (AP, 2/21/23). The AP devotes four of seven paragraphs to providing context, which offer that Playa del Carmen “has long had a reputation for rough and dangerous bars,” “has long had a problem with illicit business,” and has been the site of two shooting attacks in the last five years, at least one of which killed tourists.

That emphasis certainly suggests that tourists to Playa del Carmen ought to be worried about being shot while there. The article does not offer the context that Playa del Carmen is in the state of Quintana Roo, which the State Department puts in the same travel advisory category as France. Or that according to the US State Department, four US tourists were murdered there in 2021 (the last full year for which there’s data)—out of some 4.8 million visitors from the States that year, making homicide on a trip there literally less than a one in a million chance.

Spring break crime crisis

Fox News (2/21/23) paired a report about increased police patrols in Playa del Carmen with video of a Polish tourist climbing an off-limits pyramid in Chichen Itza, in a different state.

Fox News (2/21/23), predictably, went even further, offering, “Mexican Beach Town Announces Major Crackdown Amid Country’s Crime Crisis Ahead of Spring Break.”

In case you miss the point about the ginned-up crisis, and whom it purportedly affects, the article was paired with a video of a white European tourist, climbing the steps of a Mayan pyramid in a totally different state, who was heckled and took a few cheap shots while being escorted out for breaking the rules.

Yet, as tourism advice website TravelLemming.com (1/19/23) notes in a much more balanced piece, “Playa del Carmen is, overall, a relatively safe place to visit.” The piece focuses as much on Covid, water contamination and crocodiles as it does on cartels.

Where it does talk about violence, it does so in measured and specific terms:

In general, unless you’re using drugs, purchasing drugs or are involved with people who are affiliated with cartels, chances are you won’t be the victim of a cartel-related incident.

As scary as France

Carlos Vilalte, a geographer of crime based in Mexico City, says that although there are no official statistics kept of crimes against tourists, he has “no knowledge of tourists being particularly targeted for crime, either in tourist locations, or anywhere else.” He notes, though, that they might be affected “collaterally.”

This is because there is violence in Mexico–a lot in some places, often fueled by drug consumption in the United States. Several cities, like Tijuana, are among the most dangerous in the world that are not in a literal war zone. “Organized crime is a serious issue in Mexico,” says Vilalte.

The Louisville Courier Journal (8/25/22) offers “Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula” as a “refreshing alternative” to Cancun—which is on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula (though not in the state of Yucatan).

But roughly three-fifths of the country’s states are under the first (“Exercise normal precautions”) or second (“Exercise increased caution”) levels of the State Department’s system for alerting US travelers to possible danger. These areas, according to the government’s system, are as safe as or safer than France and Spain (both of which carry warnings about “terrorism and civil unrest”).

You wouldn’t know that from headlines about the Riviera Maya like “US Tourists Beware: Popular Mexico Getaway Plagued by Drug Cartel Intimidation and Violence” (Courier Journal, 8/25/22), or the Fox News article mentioned above, which says:

“Violent crime and gang activity are widespread,” the [State Department] warning said of one area. “Most homicides are targeted assassinations against members of criminal organizations.”

This would be terrifying if you were planning to travel to the resort town, if you didn’t know better—or read down to the end, where even Fox News is forced to admit, “The state of Quintana Roo where Playa del Carmen is located is not included on the State Department’s ‘do not travel’ list.”

It’s a xenophobic double standard: You’d be hard pressed to find a US media outlet suggesting foreign tourists should beware of visiting our own country because of social violence in New Orleans or St. Louis, or even Dallas or Portland, Oregon, all of which now have higher murder rates than Mexico City.

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March 3, 2023

Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Strom Scoop Too Hot to Handle
Scores of hits from publications across the globe pop up from an internet search for veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim that the US destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline.

The British news agency Reuters (2/9/23) ran at least ten stories on Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream report; the US AP didn’t run one.

But what is most striking about the page after page of results from Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in the weeks following the February 8 posting of Hersh’s story isn’t what is there, but what is not to be found:
- The Times of London (2/8/23) reported Hersh’s story hours after he posted it on his Substack account, but nothing in the New York Times.
- Britain’s Reuters News Agency moved at least ten stories (2/8/23, 2/9/23, 2/12/2, 2/15/23, among others), the Associated Press not one.
- Not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR.
- No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
Is there justification for such self-censorship? True, Hersh’s story is based on a single anonymous source. But anonymous sources are a staple of mainstream reporting on the US government, used by all major outlets. Further, countless stories of lesser national and international import have been published with the caveat that the facts reported have not been independently verified.

Doubts about Hersh’s story aside, by every journalistic standard, the extensive international coverage given the story, as well as the adamant White House and Pentagon denials, should have made it big news in the United States.

More important, if Hersh got it wrong, his story needs to be knocked down. Silence is not acceptable journalism.

News blackout

The online magazine Newsweek (2/8/23) was one of the few notable US outlets to cover Hersh’s report as a news story.

What’s not in doubt is the remarkable breadth of the news blackout surrounding Hersh’s story. The only major US newspaper to cover it as breaking news was the New York Post (2/8/23).

It did appear on the opinion pages—but not the news columns—of two major dailies. The Los Angeles Times (2/11/23) mentioned Hersh’s story in the 11th paragraph of a weekly round-up by the letters editor. On the New York Times opinion page (2/15/23), Ross Douthat included Hersh in a column headlined “UFOs and Other Unsolved Mysteries of Our Time.”

Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson (2/8/23) and Laura Ingraham (2/14/23) collectively gave Hersh’s story a few minutes on their cable TV shows, but their network didn’t post a news story. On Fox News Sunday (2/19/23), National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was asked about Hersh’s claims. But, again, Fox News didn’t do a separate news report.

Newsweek (2/8/23) has covered the story , but focusing mainly on White House denials and Russia’s reaction. Bloomberg News (2/9/23) ran a four-paragraph follow-up that also stressed the Russian response, but provided no details of Hersh’s account of the bombing.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the story (2/22/23) came two weeks after it was posted. Again, Russian reaction was the hook, as seen in the headline: “Russia, Blaming US Sabotage, Calls for UN Probe of Nord Stream.”

‘Discredited journalist’

Focusing on a story’s acceptance by an official enemy (Business Insider, 2/9/23) is a good tactic for promoting unquestioning rejection of information that challenges official narratives.

Arguably the most influential coverage of Hersh’s story came from Business Insider (2/9/23), which posted what can justly be called a hit piece, given its blatantly loaded headline: “The Claim by a Discredited Journalist That the US Secretly Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline Is Proving a Gift to Putin.”

The Business Insider article was picked up by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23). It also was the primary source of an article in Snopes (2/10/23), the only major factchecking site to weigh in on Hersh’s claims. But Snopes, which bills itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation,” didn’t check any disputed facts. Instead, it starts with an ad hominem attack, asking “Who is Seymour Hersh?”

Snopes answers that rhetorical question by summarizing his body of work—uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, revealing the secret bombing in Cambodia and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq—but emphasizing that “his later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.”

Snopes’ presentation is hardly even-handed. No defenders of Hersh are cited in the four-paragraph overview of his work, which includes seven hyperlinks to sources. That looks impressive. But clicking on the links reveals four are to the same source: the Business Insider hit piece.

Snopes’ failure to acknowledge multiple links to the same source isn’t just sloppy, it’s misleading, because most readers don’t check to see if the same source is cited repeatedly.

It’s likely Snopes used the Business Insider piece a fifth time—the last without attribution. The Snopes article’s final sentence states: “Hersch [sic] was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, ‘It’s a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what’s going on.’ ”

The Business Insider piece ends with a paragraph with the same misspelling of Hersh’s name, the same TASS link and identical—word for word — translation of his response. (It doesn’t help Snopes’ credibility as a factchecker that Hersh’s name was originally misspelled two other times in the article.)

Much of the remainder of Snopes’ article consists of quotes from Hersh’s story, followed by commentary disparaging Hersh’s reliance on a single, unnamed source. Since that’s something Hersh readily acknowledges, it’s hard to see the informational value of the Snopes article.

Competition, not just critics

While several bloggers have challenged details in Hersh’s account, no news outlet has answered the only question that matters: Who blew up the pipeline?

Waiting for official explanations appears to be a dead end. Sweden, Denmark and Germany have launched investigations, but have not indicated when—or if—results would be released.

The giants of US journalism—the New York Times, Washington Post and the major broadcast networks—have the resources to try and solve the mystery. And it’s certainly possible that one or more of them are working to do just that. But the pipelines were destroyed five months ago. Since then, Seymour Hersh is the only journalist to offer an explanation of who was responsible.

There should be others. Hersh needs competition, not just critics.

The post Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Strom Scoop Too Hot to Handle appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 3, 2023

Makani Themba on Jackson Crisis

      CounterSpin230303.mp3

(Image: Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are certainly following the story of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—giving us a chance to see how floods of reporters can get out there and print a lot of words about a thing…and still not ask the deepest questions and demand the meaningful answers that might move us past outrage and sorrow to actual change. Are there not forces meant to protect people from this sort of harm? Is it awkward for reporters to interrogate the powerful on these questions? Yes! But if they aren’t doing it, why do they have a constitutional amendment dedicated to protecting their right to do it?

There’s a test underway right now in Jackson, Mississippi, where residents who have been harmed many times over are now being told that the appropriate response is to take away their voice. Here’s where a free press would speak up loudly, doggedly—and transparently, about what’s going on.

Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. She’ll bring us up to speed on Jackson.

      CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Social Security.

      CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3

The post Makani Themba on Jackson Crisis appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 2, 2023

Nicaragua’s ‘Political Prisoners’ Would Be Criminals by US Standards
The New York Times (2/9/23) reports that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega “rose to power after helping overthrow another notorious Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in 1979.”

“Nicaragua Frees Hundreds of Political Prisoners to the United States,” the New York Times (2/9/23) reported. In an unexpected move on February 9, the Nicaraguan government deported to the United States 222 people who were in prison, and moved to strip them of their citizenship. The prisoners had been convicted of various crimes, including terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government, requesting the United States to intervene in Nicaragua, economic damage and threatening the country’s stability, most relating to the violent coup attempt in 2018 and its aftermath.

President Daniel Ortega explained that the US ambassador had unconditionally accepted an offer to send the 222 “mercenaries” (as Ortega called them) to Washington. Two others opted to stay in prison in Nicaragua, and an additional four were rejected by the US.

Despite the Times’ relatively benign headline, its story was heavily weighted against a country that had “slid into autocratic rule,” and whose government had “targeted opponents in civil society, the church and the news media.” For the Times, the “political prisoners” were not criminals but “opposition members, business figures, student activists and journalists.”

For the Washington Post (2/9/23), they included “some of Nicaragua’s best-known opposition politicians” and “presidential hopefuls.” Their release had “eased one of Latin America’s grimmest human rights sagas.” It added that “several of the prisoners had planned to run against Ortega in 2021 elections, but were detained before the balloting.”

The Guardian (2/9/23) blamed the imprisonments on “Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime” and its “ferocious two-year political crackdown,” intended to “obliterate any challenge” before the last presidential election in 2021.

Bad when they do it

The Guardian (2/16/23) did not note that the British government has stripped at least 767 people of citizenship since 2010.

The corporate media were given a second bite of the cherry when the Nicaraguan government announced, six days later, that it was rescinding the citizenship of a further 94 people, most of them living abroad, in some cases for many years. The list included such notable names as authors Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli. The Times (2/17/23) quoted the United Nations refugee agency as saying that international law “prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of nationality, including on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds.” For the Guardian (2/16/23), “Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian regime has intensified its political crackdown.”

Neither mentioned that law in the US and Britain, and other countries, permits the revocation of citizenship in the US for, among other things, engaging in a conspiracy “to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States,” and in Britain of “those who pose a threat to the country.” The British government has made orders to deprive at least 767 people of citizenship since 2010.

There are other important considerations that apply in Nicaragua’s case, which the media ignore. First, it is a small country, with limited means to defend itself, that has been the subject of US intervention for decades—militarily in the 1980s, politically more recently, and economically since sanctions were imposed in 2018. Those calling for even stronger US pressure (e.g., curbs on trade) are putting the well-being of Nicaraguans at real risk.

In 1983, the CIA wrote a manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, that advised Nicaraguans fighting the Sandinistas to lead “demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the government to create even bigger conflicts.”

Second, there is a precedent for a country’s unelected citizens being recognized as its “real” government by the US and its allies, in the case of self-proclaimed “president” Juan Guaidó in Venezuela, a gambit that successfully stole the country’s assets (Venezuelanalysis, 1/11/22), even though it did not provoke the hoped-for military coup (FAIR.org, 5/1/19). The possibility of similar tactics being used against Nicaragua might well have been a factor influencing the action it took.

The corporate media’s accounts of the Nicaraguan government’s reasons for the deportations and cancellations of citizenship were both perfunctory and disparaging. For example, the Guardian’s second article (2/16/23) said the government “called the deportees, who were also stripped of their citizenship, ‘traitors to the motherland.’” The rest of its article was given over to criticism of the Ortega government.

The New York Times (2/9/23) quoted Nicaraguan journalist Carlos Chamorro, one of the 94, as saying, “All prisoners of conscience are innocent.” It made no assessment of his claim.

The Washington Post (2/9/23) did include Ortega’s criticism of US financing of opposition groups: “These people are returning to a country that has used them…to sow terror, death and destruction here in Nicaragua,” Ortega said. But it went on to report in its own voice that “Ortega crushed a nationwide anti-government uprising in 2018, the beginning of a new wave of repression.”

Three months of January 6

In the United States, the New York Times (12/19/22) does not express shock that people who try to overthrow the elected government are treated as criminals.

As FAIR has shown in a range of articles, media coverage of Nicaragua consistently presents the image of a country suffering extreme repression. The story of the 222 deportees was a further opportunity to repeat this treatment. For example, included in the Guardian’s coverage (2/16/23) was an official from Human Rights Watch saying, “The country is on the verge of becoming the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent of North Korea.” Whether it is the closure of NGOs, the results of the 2021 presidential election, the reasons for increased Nicaraguan migration to the United States, or the country’s response to Covid-19, corporate media ignore good news about Nicaragua, give prominence to the views of government opponents and, if Daniel Ortega is quoted, this is done in a disparaging way.

The most extraordinary example of this bias is the corporate media’s pretense that the “terror, death and destruction” of the 2018 coup attempt either never occurred or were perpetrated solely by the “authoritarian regime.” Yet there was ample evidence at the time, and since, of horrific acts of violence against police and Sandinista supporters. Examples can be seen in two short videos (warnings about content apply), here and here, which include clips made by opposition protesters themselves and uploaded to social media.

The uprising that shook Nicaragua lasted roughly three months, resulted officially in 251 deaths (including 22 police officers; others put the total deaths as higher) and over 2,000 injured. It allegedly “caused $1 billion in economic damages,” and led to an economic collapse. (After years of growth, GDP fell by 3.4% in 2018).

The coup attempt led to at least 777 arrests, with many of those convicted given lengthy prison sentences. But importantly, and mostly ignored by the corporate media, 492 prisoners were released between mid-March and mid-June 2019.

Nicaragua’s experience in 2018 stands comparison with the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, and the response to it by the US justice system, generally with the corporate media’s support. The siege of the Capitol lasted only a few hours and led to five deaths, about 140 injuries to police and $2.7 million in damage. Reporting uncritically on the sanctions against those responsible, the New York Times (12/19/22) said that more than 900 people had been charged so far, facing prison sentences of up to ten years.

Later, the Times (1/23/23) reported that four culprits had been charged with “seditious conspiracy,” under a statute dating from the civil war period. In words not dissimilar to those used by the Nicaraguan judge who announced the order stripping 94 people of citizenship, one of the prosecutors was quoted as saying that the defendants “perverted the constitutional order.” He added that they “were willing to use force and violence to impose their view of the Constitution and their view of America on the rest of the country.” Unlike the Times’ reports on Nicaragua, there is no hint of criticism of these charges, nor questioning of whether they are justified.

Evidence of wrongdoing

William Sirias Quiroz testified that Medardo Mairena, one of the prisoners deported by Nicaragua, personally supervised his torture at the hands of opposition militants, saying, “We have to make an example of this one.”

This is the context in which the 222 supposedly “innocent” people released into the United States had been charged and found guilty during 2021 and 2022. Questions about the wrongdoing of the 222 were set aside in corporate media coverage, yet it would have been easy to find evidence of wrongdoing. Here are three examples:
- Cristiana Chamorro headed an NGO, the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, that received $76 million from USAID. This was used to influence Nicaragua’s elections via an array of opposition media outlets, several owned by the Chamorro family. She refused to comply with transparency laws and closed her foundation; she was then convicted of money laundering.
- Félix Maradiaga was convicted of treachery because he had pleaded for economic sanctions against Nicaragua.
- Medardo Mairena and Pedro Mena had organized a range of armed attacks in 2018, for which they had been pardoned in the 2019 amnesty. These included the siege of the police station in Morrito on July 12, 2018, in which five people were killed. Both were later convicted again for further offenses. In 2020, a large number of victims provided evidence of the violence directed by Mairena and his associates in 2018 in the central region of Nicaragua.
For US corporate media, none of this was relevant. The real reason for the original arrests in 2021 was simple: Ortega expected to lose that year’s election, so he locked up his opponents.

It is true that several of those imprisoned had expressed interest in running. But in a joint post-election analysis with journalist Rick Sterling, I argued that they would have had little chance of taking part, much less of winning.

However, according to the Washington Post (2/9/23), this meant that Ortega, “essentially unopposed, cruised to a fourth consecutive term.” In fact, he won 76% of the vote on a 65% turnout, standing against five others, including two candidates from parties that had been in government in the years before Ortega returned to power.

‘A terrible place’

Travel + Leisure (4/29/22) praises Nicaragua as “home to a rich cultural heritage and friendly locals who go out of their way to get you the most delicious seafood, help you catch a wave, or show you the way around the backroads.”

Why were the prisoners released? The Post admitted that there had been no “quid pro quo,” but then carried a quote claiming that Ortega was “buying some breathing room internationally.”

The New York Times reported that the releases “bolster the argument that sanctions are effective,” linking this to its portrayal of Nicaragua as an authoritarian regime: “The sanctions have also stretched the government’s ability to pay off pro-Ortega paramilitaries or expand the police force to manage dissent.”

Not that sanctions would be relaxed, of course: “Officials…said they would continue to apply pressure to the Ortega administration,” the paper reported, as “the Biden administration does not believe that ‘the nature of the government’ has changed.” Dan Restrepo, President Obama’s national security adviser for Latin America, declared, “Nicaragua remains a terrible place for Nicaraguans, and a lot more has to change.”

Readers of the corporate media who are unfamiliar with Nicaragua receive impressions of the country, reinforced with every news item, that it is a “terrible place,” in the grip of a police state. As someone who lives in the country, I find a huge disjuncture between these descriptions and the reality of Nicaraguan daily life.

Readers of the Times or the Post might be surprised to hear Nicaragua was recently judged to be the place in the world where people are most at peace (CNBC, 1/7/23). InSight Crime (2/8/23) ranked it the second-safest country in Latin America, according to reported data on homicides. It tackled Covid-19 more successfully than its neighbors, and has the highest vaccination rate in the region. Websites devoted to tourism dub it a favorite destination in Central America and extol its friendliness.

Finally, the government’s decision to deport the 222 was popular in Nicaragua itself, at least among government supporters. There were enthusiastic demonstrations in at least 30 cities the following weekend, including the one where I live. Unpersuaded, the British Independent (2/12/23) said that the “Sandinista political machine mobilized a few thousand of its faithful.” They must not have seen the reports from the capital, Managua, where tens of thousands filled the streets.

Featured image: Tens of thousands march in Nicaragua in support of the government expulsion of people seen as “vende patrias”—country-sellers (TN8, 2/13/23).

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March 1, 2023

DeSantis’ War on Florida’s Press Is Designed to Hit Nationwide

The Hill (10/10/22) reported that DeSantis “has surged in recent national polls, propelled by his willingness to position himself at the epicenter of the culture wars.”

One reason why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a hot contender (CBS, 2/27/23; SunSentinel, 2/27/23; AP, 2/27/23) for the Republican presidential nomination is his constant war with the media, framing himself as an everyman trying to fix the state’s problems against elite critics who stymie him at every turn. He has also gained a reputation as a bully who wants to use his political might to silence criticism of his administration in the press.

Twitter suspended the governor’s press secretary for “violating rules on ‘abusive behavior’” after the AP (8/20/21) said the official’s “conduct led to [an AP] reporter receiving threats and other online abuse.” Last year, DeSantis displayed his combativeness when he accused a reporter of creating “false narratives” when he was questioned about his anti-gay speech codes during a press conference (Twitter, 3/7/22).

He told a local right-wing website (Florida Voice, 10/4/22; quoted in The Hill, 10/10/22) that “regime media”—a funny term coming from the head of a state “regime”—were cheering for Hurricane Ian to destroy Florida:

They don’t care about the people of this state. They don’t care about this community. They want to use storms and destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda.

In Ian’s aftermath, DeSantis bit back at a CNN reporter who questioned his storm response policies (Fox News, 10/2/22).

Most recently, his office (Independent, 2/23/23) said his staff “will not take questions from NBC News or MSNBC until host Andrea Mitchell apologizes for misrepresenting [the governor’s] bans on books about Black history.” Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (New York Post, 12/15/22, 2/2/23, 2/15/23; Fox News, 1/27/23, 2/22/23, 2/23/23) has been eager to cheer on DeSantis’ war against the press.

Making journalists easier to sue

A proposed Florida bill (Politico, 2/23/23) would, among other things, declare that “comments made by anonymous sources are presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits”—and remove protections from journalists who decline to reveal their sources.

The trick of executives projecting their policy mishaps on the press is as old as politics itself. But DeSantis is far more dangerous than your average governor, not just because he is seeking the presidency, but because he is actively trying to legally neuter the free press in the same way he is trying to destroy academic freedom and freedom of speech in his own state. And he could win, because he has much of the conservative movement behind him.

The Florida state legislature is considering a bill that seeks “sweeping changes to Florida’s libel and defamation law,” the Orlando Sentinel (2/21/23) reported. It would presume “information from anonymous sources to be false and removes protections that allow journalists to shield the identity of sources if they are sued.” And the bill “limits the definition of who would qualify as a public figure,” which means that more people would be able to sue news outlets without having to show that the outlets displayed a reckless disregard for the truth.

Politico (2/23/23) noted that “beyond making it easier to sue journalists, the proposal is also being positioned to spark a larger legal battle with the goal of eventually overturning New York Times v. Sullivan,” the 1964 Supreme Court decision “that limits public officials’ ability to sue publishers for defamation.”

DeSantis expressed his disdain for the Sullivan standard at a round-table discussion about the media in February (2/7/23): “When the media attacks me, I have a platform to fight back. When they attack everyday citizens, these individuals don’t have the adequate recourse to fight back.” Telegraphing his legislative ambitions, he added, “In Florida, we want to stand up for the little guy against these massive media conglomerates.”

This is absolutely backward. The Sullivan rule doesn’t offer the media protection against lawsuits from Joe Taxpayer, but it does offer protection from partisan leaders, as the Sullivan standard forces public figures to show a court that a publisher acted with “actual malice” in order for a libel suit to stand (Washington Post, 2/15/23). Eliminating Sullivan doesn’t offer the “little guy” anything.

And while he targets “massive media conglomerates,” ending the Sullivan standard would be especially harmful for local and independent media. The New York Times (3/1/22) has a legal team that can combat defamation suits , but do smaller outlets like Common Dreams or Hell Gate stand a chance?

Conservative quarry

The American Conservative (9/9/22) argues that “the public needs accurate information about the candidates for public office”—and therefore government officials need to be able to sue reporters if they don’t like how they’re being depicted in the press.

Two years ago, I warned FAIR’s audience (3/26/21) about the conservative movement’s targeting of Sullivan, as late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—as well as current Justice Clarence Thomas and the US Court of Appeals’ Lawrence Silberman—expressed their hostility to the Sullivan standard. Surely, if this bill is passed and signed into law in Florida, it will face a legal challenge; if that challenge goes to the Supreme Court, there’s very little reason to think that the 6–3 conservative majority that just struck down Roe v. Wade thinks striking down Sullivan is a bridge too far.

The threat against Sullivan has intensified since my 2021 warning. At the February round-table discussion, Carson Holloway of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life said:

The thumb seems to be on the scale for the media in these lawsuits, and that’s because of what the Supreme Court did in New York Times v. Sullivan back in 1964. That case changed the standards under which libel cases are heard in modern America…. If we go back to the Founders, we are reminded that people have a right to their reputation. Reputation is a right as precious as one’s property, one’s life, one’s liberty, so another fundamental purpose of American law is to protect rights. The actual malice standard is an invention of the Supreme Court inconsistent with the way the Founders thought about libel and freedom of speech.

The American Conservative (9/9/22) also called for the high court to overturn Sullivan, as it is “a typical product of the Warren Court—probably the most activist and least originalist Court in the nation’s history.” This is a swipe at the one era of the court’s history, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, marked by progress for civil rights and civil liberties, with decisions like Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia. The magazine complained, “It is nearly impossible to prove actual malice.”

Most ominously, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (New York Times, 7/2/21) said the Court must revisit the doctrine, “suggesting that the actual malice doctrine might have made more sense” in 1964, “when there were fewer and more reliable sources of news.”

In other words, DeSantis is flanked by conservative legal theorists, activists and sitting jurists who are licking their chops at the prospect of cutting down Sullivan. This would be catastrophic for free expression. Corporate tycoons and politicians could use lawsuits to bankrupt and cripple news outlets with costly litigation, and editors would constantly think twice about publishing critical reporting on powerful people out of fear of litigation. Government figures and big business would essentially have more control over what can be printed or aired.

War on academia

Keith Whittington (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/27/23): “Florida is breaking new ground in insisting that state universities convey the government’s favored message in its classes.”

In taking on Sullivan, DeSantis is opening a new front in a culture war he has long waged against academics in his state. The state has “deployed a controversial survey on campus ideological diversity to public college and university students, faculty and staff members,” a move some faculty have called “a political litmus test since it was first proposed” (Inside Higher Ed, 4/5/22).

DeSantis has asked “state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions” (AP, 1/18/23).

A new Florida bill would bar “funds from being used for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as critical race theory–related programs, on college campuses,” and “would also remove diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or policies that impact hiring practices” (ABC, 2/23/23). Even sillier, one Florida proposal would “ban ‘unproven’ or ‘theoretical’ content from general-education courses, which might banish Plato and Albert Einstein to elective courses.” according to the Chronicle for Higher Education (2/27/23), which added that Florida is a trailblazer for “higher-education reforms,” while “Republican-leaning states are likely to follow its lead.”

For DeSantis and a great deal of the American right, academics and journalists are partners in the same ideological war: They make up a disloyal intelligentsia that uses professional stature to sow doubt about the political establishment, challenge traditional cultural orders and threaten the power of big business. If DeSantis has come this far waging a war against academia in his own state, there is no reason why he wouldn’t take this war to the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times.

Sullivan and civil rights

The Supreme Court ruled in Sullivan v. New York Times that a Montgomery, Alabama, police official could not sue over minor inaccuracies in an advertisement that asserted that “Southern violators have answered Dr. King’s peaceful protests with intimidation and violence.”

It should not be forgotten, also, that Sullivan was a civil rights case: an Alabama police commander had brought a libel suit against the Times for an advertisement by civil rights activists that mischaracterized the role of his officers. Samantha Barbas—a professor at SUNY Buffalo’s School of Law and author of Actual Malice, a book about the Sullivan case—wrote (UC Press Blog, 12/20/22):

In the 1960s, segregationist officials in the South weaponized libel law in a campaign to undermine liberal Northern newspapers that criticized segregation. Their objective was to halt coverage of the civil rights movement, reporting that would prove crucial to forging national support for desegregation and civil rights.

DeSantis’ war on press freedom—in the context of his campaign to censor Black authors (PEN America, 2/13/23) and attacks on “wokeness” (Guardian, 2/5/23), a word that has its origins in Black awareness of racial injustice—is the living legacy of Jim Crow–era Southern governors who did everything they could to maintain racial apartheid.

As faculty and students fight Florida’s war on campuses, journalists who value their freedom to report and opine must also oppose this assault on media. If DeSantis wins, it won’t just impact Florida, it will impact the whole country.

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February 28, 2023

Bret Stephens Says Journalists Admitting Values Would ‘End United States’

Leonard Downie (Washington Post, 1/30/23) quotes approvingly: “Decisions about which news to cover can reflect an organization’s values, whether or not these are stated publicly.” In fact, there’s no way that they can’t reflect such values.

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor for the Washington Post from 1991 through 2008, last month published an article in the Post opinion section (1/30/23) headlined “Newsrooms That Move Beyond ‘Objectivity’ Can Build Trust.” He observed that “increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality.” He added that younger, more diverse reporters “believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting.”

Downie argued that news organizations should

strive not just for accuracy based on verifiable facts but also for truth—what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have called “the best obtainable version of the truth.” This means original journalism that includes investigating and reporting on all aspects of American life.

This doesn’t mean rejecting the idea that objective facts exist. Instead, it involves accepting that news organizations’ reporting on those objective facts cannot be done in a mechanically detached way. After all, key reporting decisions—what to cover, what information to present, how to present it—depend ultimately on subjective human judgments.

‘That’s dramatic’

Bret Stephens: When your hippie-punching is so extreme that even Bill Maher (2/3/23) won’t buy it.

Bret Stephens apparently could not wrap his head around this idea. During an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher on February 3, the right-wing New York Times columnist responded to Downie’s piece:

If he were to get his way, that would be not just the end of any serious journalism in the United States, I think it would be the end of the United States.

Even Maher, who was setting Stephens up to tee off on what he saw as Downie’s loony ideas, was taken aback. “What? Wow. That’s dramatic,” Maher remarked, to the chuckling of the audience.

Stephens immediately strawmanned Downie’s argument:

I thought that was the battle we spent six years fighting the Trump administration about, that you just couldn’t say it was true that you had sold 90% of your condominiums in your fabulous new development even if it wasn’t true.

Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with Downie’s piece, which made the case for news organizations being more honest about the influence that their values inevitably have on their reporting, while sticking to factual accuracy in that reporting. Stephens apparently interpreted that as: Downie thinks the media should abandon factual accuracy.

‘View from nowhere’

Stephens (New York Times, 2/9/23) does not appreciate how much damage he personally does to corporate media’s credibility.

Unsurprisingly, Downie was not impressed by Stephens’ understanding of his position. According to Stephens, Downie asked him to actually read the report upon which the op-ed was based after his appearance on Maher’s show. Stephens then took to the opinion pages at the New York Times (2/9/23) to elaborate on his critique:

[Downie] even claims that objectivity was never a standard he upheld [at the Post], even though the principles he says were the goals he pursued as editor—“accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth”—are the same as those upheld by most objective journalists and little different from what he elsewhere says is the dictionary definition of objectivity—“using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice.”

Stephens’ column calls to mind a half-asleep high school student slogging through the reading section of the SAT. In Downie’s report—titled “Beyond Objectivity,” and co-written with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward—the authors are quite clear about the distinction between objectivity and the pursuit of truth: The former would require an impossible elimination of the influence of personal values on reporting, while the latter involves admitting that values influence reporting.

The report quotes several critics of the idea of objectivity, who collectively make the point that objectivity is simply unachievable in practice. For instance, it cites NYU professor Jay Rosen as disparaging the traditional notion of objectivity

as a form of persuasion in which journalists tried to get us to accept their account by saying something like, “I don’t have a point of view, I don’t have a starting point, I don’t have a philosophy, I don’t have an ideology. I’m just telling you the way it is. So believe it, because this is the way it is.” That’s the view from nowhere.

Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, adds: “Objectivity is not even possible…. I don’t even know what it means.” And Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, continues: “The journalist’s job is truth, not objectivity…. It is getting close to the reality, notwithstanding that we all have biases and passions.”

None of these quotes show up in Stephens’ op-ed. And for good reason: They completely undermine his interpretation of the report. In his crusade for “objectivity,” Stephens seems, ironically, to have thrown inconvenient evidence out the window.

Shortcomings and blinders

What’s remarkable is that Stephens, towards the end of his essay, himself concedes that objectivity is unattainable:

All journalists are subject to the personal shortcomings and cultural blinders that make all human enterprises imperfect. And there’s never a foolproof way of capturing reality and conveying information, particularly in a pluralistic and often polarized country.

This comes after he earlier wrote, “The fact that objectivity is hard to put into practice does nothing to invalidate it as a desirable goal.” But as he says, “All human enterprises [are] imperfect.” Objectivity is not difficult to achieve; it’s a fundamental impossibility.

And its pursuit is not as valiant as Stephens would have us believe. As Downie and Heyward point out, attempts to make reporting “objective” have all too often led to “bothsidesism,” in which the pursuit of truth is simply outsourced to outside parties, who make competing claims about reality as reporters throw their hands up and tell the reader, “You decide.” This “balancing” tends to result in outsized platforms for the powerful few.

Stephens nevertheless longs for the old days of “objective” reporting. In the final paragraph of his piece, he contends:

If you still believe that a healthy democracy depends on the quality and credibility of information with which our society makes its choices, then we have few better models than the kind of objective journalism that is now going out of fashion.

‘The most honest picture of reality’

An example of the downside of “objectivity,” which for Stephens means publishing things conservatives believe regardless of whether they are true or not: He declared (New York Times, 2/21/23), based on a meta-analysis, that “the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.” In fact, the two studies (out of 78) in the meta-analysis that actually looked at Covid and mask mandates both concluded that they reduced infection (L.A. Times, 2/24/23).

But what did that model actually look like in practice? As one illustrative example, Downie and Heyward point to early coverage of climate change:

Early stories about scientific evidence of climate change and the role of human behavior were often “balanced” with the views of climate change deniers.

Downie and Heyward are highly critical of this style of reporting, and call for a different approach. In the final section of the report, in which they make six recommendations for how news organizations can update their approach to news coverage and move beyond the myth of objectivity, their first recommendation is: “Strive not just for accuracy, but for truth.” They write:

Accuracy starts with a commitment to verifiable facts, with no compromises. But facts, while true, aren’t necessarily the whole truth. Therefore, your journalists must consider multiple perspectives to provide context where needed.

That said, avoid lazy or mindless “balance” or “bothsidesism.” If your reporting combines accuracy and open-mindedness to multiple points of view, the result should still reflect the most honest picture of reality you can present—what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein call “the best available version of the truth.”

Stephens’ true concern seems to be that news organizations will follow Downie and Heyward’s advice on exactly this point:

What Downie and Heyward dismiss in their report as “both-sides-ism” is, in reality, a crucial way to build trust with audiences, particularly in a country as diverse as America. It gives a platform to multiple views. And it shows faith that people can come to intelligent conclusions of their own.

This is perhaps the natural position for someone with as tenuous a grasp on reality as Stephens to take. Most obviously, he is well-known as a “climate change bullshitter” (Vox, 5/1/17) “whose very first article at the Times had to be corrected due to his misunderstanding of basic climate science” (FAIR.org, 6/30/17). Stephens pretends to think that journalists need to respect the facts, but when the claims his side is making are verifiably false, he wants media to publish them anyway; that’s what he means by “objectivity.”

‘Viewpoint diversity’

In the end, it turns out what Stephens is interested in is not a fair and accurate airing of the facts. His main gripe is rather a well-worn complaint of the right: The media have a liberal bias. How should we rectify this? More representation for conservatives.

He pronounces in the piece that “viewpoint diversity” is currently “the most glaring deficit in most of the American news media landscape.” And he later bemoans the media’s treatment of “religious conservatives, home-schoolers, gun owners and Trump supporters,” in particular the fact that reporters are willing to label people from these groups as “racist” or “misinformers” or “-phobic.” In other words, Stephens doesn’t want the facts in print when they reflect poorly on his side.

There are serious problems with US journalism. FAIR has decades of pieces documenting these problems. The pro-war and pro-corporate bias of prominent news outlets can be staggering. And, though Downie and Heyward’s report offers fairly moderate prescriptions for improving news coverage, the fact that mainstream voices are at least calling for a shift away from false balance in reporting is a welcome shift. That Stephens sees this as a threat says more about him than anything.

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

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February 28, 2023

Tyre Nichols Was One of Too Many

Family photo of Tyre Nichols published in the Amsterdam News (2/14/23).

Every news outlet was talking about it. On January 7, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten by Memphis police officers, and he died three days later. The incident was captured on video, and the gruesome footage sparked nationwide outrage.

Calls for police reform were reignited (NPR, 1/31/23), echoing the uproar regarding George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Political leaders paid their respects, with Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at Nichols’ funeral, and President Joe Biden acknowledging Nichols’ parents during his State of the Union address. Biden, Harris and other Democrats pushed to revive the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has twice failed to pass in the Senate (Washington Post, 2/1/23; Guardian, 2/6/23).

The attention was warranted. And yet, in the month of January 2023, at least 17 other Black men were killed by police—with next to no media coverage.

Names rarely mentioned

A search for Tyre Nichols’ name returns 65 results at the New York Times in January. The same search returns 58 results at the Washington Post and 49 at the Wall Street Journal.

A photo of Takar Smith published by the nonprofit journalism project Knock LA (1/19/23).

Compare that with the coverage of three other Black men killed by police in January 2023—selected out of more than a dozen others because these particular police killings got more coverage than most other such deaths. A search of the Post’s archives over the same time frame returns three articles for Keenan Anderson, and none for Takar Smith or Anthony Lowe. Both the Times and the Journal were silent on these killings.

Since these major news outlets rarely if ever mentioned their names, let us tell their stories now.

On January 2–3, Los Angeles police killed three men in less than 48 hours: Takar Smith, Keenan Anderson and Oscar Leon Sanchez (Center for Policing Equity, 1/13/23). Smith and Anderson were Black, and Sanchez Latino. Note that a Washington Post report (1/13/23) obscured the timeframe of these killings: “Three men have died after encounters with Los Angeles police officers in recent days,” it said, and “the killings occurred in the first week of January.” The LAPD released body-cam footage of these separate incidents.

The first victim was Smith, who was tased and then shot by police after picking up a knife (LA Times, 2/11/13). His wife, who called to request police help due to his violent behavior,

warned that he had threatened to fight police if they were called and that there was a knife in the kitchen. But she also relayed that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was not taking his medication.

Despite the clear warnings, the LAPD failed to call the Mental Evaluation Unit, which is specifically trained to de-escalate situations like Smith’s.

Photo of Keenan Anderson that appeared in the Guardian (1/12/23).

Out of the three victims killed on January 2–3, Keenan Anderson got the most attention, as he was the cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. On the same day Sanchez was killed, Anderson, a 31-year-old high school teacher, was stopped after a traffic accident and tased repeatedly to death (Guardian, 1/12/23). Like Nichols, he was unarmed, and the chilling video showed he

was begging for help as multiple officers held him down, and at one point said, “They’re trying to George Floyd me.” One officer had his elbow on Anderson’s neck while he was lying down before another tased him for roughly 30 seconds straight before pausing and tasing him again for five more seconds.

(We focus in this article on Black victims of police violence because they are killed disproportionately; African Americans made up 26% of police killing victims in 2022, while making up only 13% of the US population. Sanchez’s story is just as horrifying and tragic, and representative of the fact that Latinos are also at heightened risk of being killed by police in the United States. People of all ethnicities are killed by police at much higher rates in the US than in other wealthy democracies. This analysis of specifically Black victims is one part of a larger conversation on police violence in the US.)

Back on agenda—but still ignored

Police killed Smith and Anderson just weeks before the news of Nichols’ killing exploded. Yet even after Nichols’ death put “police violence” in the abstract on the national agenda, more Black men were killed by police with little media attention.

Anthony Lowe, a double amputee who was shot and killed by police while attempting to flee (NBC, 2/1/23).

Anthony Lowe, who had lost both his legs, was shot and killed while attempting to flee from LAPD officers on January 26. Lowe had stabbed a person with a butcher knife, and police claim he threatened to throw the knife at them.

Police expert Ed Obayashi, according to NBC News (2/1/23), “said that to justify a shooting, officers must show they had been under immediate threat and had considered reasonable alternatives, including using a Taser.” NBC quoted Obayashi’s response to the footage of Lowe’s killing:

But here we see an individual that, by definition, appears to be physically incapable of resisting officers…. Even if he is armed with a knife, his mobility is severely restricted…. He’s an amputee. He appears to be at a distinct physical disadvantage, lessening the apparent threat to officers.

These are just a few of the Black people killed by police in January. Mapping Police Violence is a nonprofit organization that “publishes the most comprehensive and up-to-date data on police violence in America”; according to its database, 104 people were killed by police in January 2023. Of the 61 victims with race identified, 28% were Black and 20% were Latino. In all of 2022, Mapping Police Violence found that police killed at least 1,192 people.

Despite George Floyd’s death and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, police killings have generally continued to rise; the number of killings in 2022 is the highest in the 11 years for which Mapping Police Violence has data.

Sympathy for victims

An AP profile (2/3/23) that presented Tyre Nichols as a multi-dimensional human being.

What is it about Tyre Nichols’ death, unlike these other deaths of Black people killed by police, that shook the nation to the core? Why is the media contributing multiple articles per day to one person, but only a few in total for the other victims?

Of course, the video evidence of Nichols’ killing made police responsibility hard to dispute, and easy to sell in a media ecosystem that puts a premium on sensationalism. But there is video footage of Takar Smith, Keenan Anderson and Anthony Lowe. Why was the reaction not similar?

Nichols certainly comes across in coverage as a sympathetic character. The New York Times (1/26/23) described him as having

loved to photograph sunsets and to skateboard, a passion he’d had since he was a boy…. [He] worked for FedEx and had a 4-year-old son…. His mother, RowVaughn Wells, said that Mr. Nichols had her name tattooed on his arm. “That made me proud,” she said. “Most kids don’t put their mom’s name. My son was a beautiful soul.”

Smith and Lowe both wielded knives, and the latter had stabbed someone, making it easier to present these individuals in an unsympathetic light, although the crux of the problem is that their deaths, like Nichols’, appear to have been completely preventable. Smith and Lowe both had disabilities; they were at a clear disadvantage, yet police decided to shoot anyway.

In the death of Anderson, like Nichols, it’s perhaps especially difficult to blame the victim. He was also unarmed, only stopped because he got into a traffic accident. His cries of “Please help me,” and “They’re trying to kill me” (Guardian, 1/12/23), are just as heartbreaking as Nichols’ cries for his mother. One would think that Anderson, killed in similar circumstances, would have gotten similarly extensive coverage—but such was not the case.

Chart: Mapping Police Violence

A widespread systemic issue

Needless to say, the problem is not that the killing of Tyre Nichols got too much coverage. He deserves the public’s passionate anger on his behalf. The problem is that major news outlets have a bad habit of treating cases like Nichols’ as isolated incidents, lavishing short-term, specific attention that makes the chronic seem exceptional.

It’s not just Tyre Nichols. It’s George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and a depressingly long list of lesser-known names. Their killings are by no means isolated.

But news outlets look for easy clickbait—disturbing videos, viral trends on social media, humanizing backstories. These can play a role in coverage, but, without more, the template seems rehearsed and disingenuous.

Media need to do better. They should actively and urgently report the dire statistics. Every time an incident like Tyre Nichols’ killing happens, they should remind people of the big picture—that police brutality is a national, systemic issue, and Black people are disproportionately targeted and killed. Recognition of that reality and concrete plans for change should play a bigger role than performative hand-wringing.

“There have been some important advances,” the Washington Post (2/2/23) reported. “Yet at the same time, since Floyd’s death, police have also shot and killed more people than they did beforehand.”

The thing is, media have shown the ability to do better. The Washington Post (2/2/23) outlined the (lack of) progress made between the deaths of George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, where they hyperlinked to their database of police shooting deaths since 2015. (Note: The Post‘s database specifically records deaths from police shootings, not those resulting from beatings, electric shock and other forms of violence.)

Even in this example of better coverage, there are some glaring red flags. In an attempt to address both sides, the Post article tries to reason why police have killed so many people:

Most people shot and killed by police have been armed, the Post’s database shows, and the overwhelming majority of shootings are deemed justified. In many of these cases, defenders of police have said officers feared for their lives while confronting people armed with weapons, usually guns.

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that the police kill, on average, more than 1,000 civilians every year, armed or unarmed, and they disproportionately target Black men.

Regardless, the Post at least has a limited database, and some articles addressing the trends of police killings. The Los Angeles Times maintains a database of LAPD killings, which while significant, still only covers one region. The Guardian published an investigative series covering US police killings in 2015–16, but the series has not been updated to include more recent years. USA Today responded to George Floyd’s death by creating a database of police disciplinary records, as well as a specific list of decertified police, but it added a clear disclaimer that the records are not complete.

The collection of this data is commendable, but to be valuable, this information should be foregrounded in reporting on individual incidents of racist police violence. Without continual contextualizing of the problem, it can be difficult for the average news reader to see Tyre Nichols’ killing as both a specific horrific crime, and a representation of a problem even bigger than that.

The post Tyre Nichols Was One of Too Many appeared first on FAIR.

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

The Washington Post Is Coming for Your Retirement Benefits

The Washington Post (2/5/23) warns that in 2034, when Social Security exhausts its reserves, “seniors face an immediate 25 percent cut in benefits.” Its solution to this problem: cutting benefits sooner, plus raising (regressive) payroll taxes.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he didn’t transform it into a paper that elevated the perspectives of the wealthy elite—it had already been that for decades. What he did do was put it on steroids: Over the next three years, the Post doubled its web traffic and surpassed the New York Times in its volume of online postings. One result: The paper’s traditional hostility to federal retirement programs has become only more amplified.

As progressive economist Dean Baker (FAIR.org, 3/19/18) has written, “The Post calling for cuts to [Social Security and Medicare] is pretty much as predictable as the sun coming up”—it’s been up to this for decades, as Bezos is probably aware. So when it once again called for retirement benefit cuts on Sunday, February 5, Baker was unsurprised (Beat the Press, 2/5/23).

The Post came out swinging in the piece (2/5/23), with the headline “Yes, Social Security and Medicare Still Need to Be Reformed—and Soon.” It began by fretting over the depletion of the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare:

The longer Congress puts off fixes, the more painful they will become for the 66 million seniors, and growing, who receive monthly Social Security payments and the approximately 59 million people enrolled in a Medicare plan.

Among other solutions, the board suggested “raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 to match the existing Social Security retirement age for those born in 1960 or later.” As Baker pointed out (Beat the Press, 2/5/23):

As people who follow policy have long known, this would have little effect on the budget, since it would raise the amount spent on providing insurance in the ACA exchanges.

‘Bipartisan grand bargain’

President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill got together in 1983 to pass a bipartisan plan that allowed working people to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy (Extra!, 3–4/97). (image: WAMU, 10/1/13)

But that was far from the worst of the Post’s suggestions. In the final paragraph of the editorial, the Post made its intentions even clearer. Attempting a call to action, the board wrote:

Mr. Biden was among 88 senators who voted in 1983 for a bipartisan grand bargain, negotiated by a commission led by Alan Greenspan and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, that rescued Social Security. Forty years later, if he and Republican leaders are willing to work in good faith, Mr. Biden could safeguard the greatest legacies of both the New Deal and the Great Society.

To translate: In 1983, Congress “rescued” Social Security by cutting it. The 1983 law did not change the actual age at which you can retire and draw Social Security benefits. It left that at 62. Instead, it simply said you’d get less money for retiring at any point before the new full retirement age, which reached 67 last year. For instance, those retiring at 62 today face a 50% larger cut in benefits for early retirement compared to before 2000.

The Post apparently remembers these reforms fondly. And it wants more.

‘Modest benefit adjustments’

For the Washington Post (6/4/22), the US keeping retirement benefits at their current level is making “promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations.”

This is not the only time the editorial board has called for stiffing the seniors in recent months. Last year, the board published an editorial (6/4/22) headlined “The Medicare and Social Security Disaster That Washington Is Doing Nothing to Fix.” The board sounded the alarm: “The nation has made promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations.”

Before calling for “some mix of modest benefit adjustments and tax hikes” to shore up these earned benefit programs, the Post spent most of the piece attempting to instill fear in its readership about the latest projections for the finances of Social Security and Medicare. After laying out the numbers, the board wrote:

These numbers may seem small. They are not; total federal spending has historically hovered around 20% of GDP. The trustees are projecting a vast expansion of outlays for the elderly that would hollow out the government’s ability to spend on education, infrastructure, anti-poverty programs and other investments in children and working-age adults.

The Post quite explicitly places Social Security and Medicare in direct conflict with other government programs in this passage. But under even minor scrutiny, this idea of a zero-sum conflict between protecting elderly entitlement programs and investing in children falls apart.

Why can’t we spend more on social programs? The answer is—we can. According to a 2019 report from the University of New Hampshire, total government spending in the US, which sits at 38% of GDP, puts the US at 12th out of the 13 highest-income countries in the report.

The US does rank first in healthcare spending, but this is not because of largesse directed towards the elderly. Rather, it is a result of the brutally inefficient design of the US healthcare system, marked by administrative bloat and inflated prices.

As Baker observes (Beat the Press, 2/5/23), Medicare, which is much more efficient than private health plans, points to the solution, not the problem. In fact, studies have estimated that Medicare for All, a target of the Post’s vitriol in the past (1/27/16, 8/12/18, 5/4/19), would actually lower overall healthcare spending while improving health outcomes (Jacobin, 12/3/18).

What to do with resources

Compared to high- and middle-income countries, the US spends far less of its GDP on social protection, and spends more on its military—and on its highly inefficient healthcare system (Carsey Research, Fall/19) .

When it comes to spending on social protection, which includes retirement programs for the elderly, the story is more straightforward. The US comes in last place among the highest-income countries. It spends 57% less per capita than the average in these countries. As the UNH report explains:

Social protection is the only spending category for which US spending is greatly lower than other countries. The difference explains how the United States can spend so much more than other countries on its military and health services while still spending so much less than other countries overall.

To portray Social Security cuts as necessary in light of this evidence is absurd.

What we’re really talking about when we’re discussing Social Security and Medicare is what we want to do with our resources as a country. We have more than enough wealth to provide solid retirement benefits and good medical care to the elderly. The question is: Do we want to do that? Or do we want to cut the programs that do those things? It’s really that simple.

It just so happens the Post favors cuts over human welfare. Exactly the kind of perspective Bezos deemed well worth putting his money behind.

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 The Washington Post Is Coming for Your Retirement Benefits appeared first on FAIR.

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

Early Polling Tells You Little About Next Year’s GOP Primary

The Hill (2/17/23) turns a 3-point change in the margin between Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump—11 months before the first Republican nomination contest—into a headline.

The Hill (2/17/23) announced last week, “DeSantis Approval Drops in GOP Primary: Poll.” The article, by Max Greenwood, went on to say:

A new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll released Friday exclusively to The Hill shows Trump leading DeSantis 46% to 23%. That marks a 5-point drop in support for DeSantis since last month, when he trailed Trump by 20 percentage points in the same poll.

In fact, the poll showed no significant differences between January and February in that multicandidate matchup. (For poll information noted below, see a compilation by 538.) The actual difference in Trump’s lead between the two polls was just 3 points—48% to 28% in January (a 20-point margin), 46% to 23% in February (a 23-point margin). Yes, DeSantis’ support fell by 5 points, but Trump’s fell by 2 points, for a net marginal change of just 3 points. Such a small poll difference hardly proves DeSantis is losing support.

Later in the article, the author indicates that “perhaps more alarming for DeSantis” were results showing the Florida governor with only 39% support, when Trump was excluded from a matchup that included Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo, Marco Rubio and Tim Scott. In a similar poll the previous month, DeSantis had 49% support.

Yes, there was a 10-point decline, in part because Pence and Haley picked up 8 points between them. Still, the results were hardly “alarming.” Taking any of these early polls seriously is foolish.

11 months in advance

Early polling (Extra! Update, 6/07) told us that the 2008 presidential race would be between Rudy Giuliani (above) and Hillary Clinton—rather than John McCain and Barack Obama, the eventual nominees.

Should we really pay attention to national primary polls 11 months ahead of the first contest?

The obvious answer, of course, is no. A year from today, Trump may well have been indicted on one charge or another—and could conceivably be convicted, though even getting a case to trial will require navigating a long appeals process. How an indictment, much less a conviction, would change the political landscape is anyone’s guess.

Apart from that, it’s unclear which Republicans will run for president and, more importantly, how each individual will fare in the campaign. While DeSantis is clearly among the better known candidates, other than Trump, he has yet either to declare his candidacy, or to begin campaigning in the first two states in the delegate selection process—Iowa and New Hampshire. The potential challengers to the former president have yet to prove they are ready for the intense media scrutiny that comes with being a presidential candidate.

The current national primary polls thus reflect mostly name recognition of the candidates challenging Trump. Even then, the national polls don’t tell us what voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are thinking, though those two states can have an outsize role in screening out candidates and launching others into frontrunner status.

There is a long history of early polling being next to useless in predicting the results of competitive primary races (Extra! Update, 6/07). Still, looking at how news outlets read these tea leaves can tell you something about the media’s own preferences in political campaigns.

DeSantis the new frontrunner?

Over a year and a half ago, the GOP Daily Brief (6/21/21) jumped on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bandwagon, announcing: “Republican 2024 Race Gets Fresh Frontrunner—Donald Trump Is No Longer Leading, Now Governor DeSantis Is.”

A PJ Media column (11/12/22) promoted DeSantis as the “greener pastures” Republicans were said to be looking for.

It took the GOP’s disappointing showing in the recent midterm elections, when Trump’s candidate endorsements mostly hurt the GOP, for Matt Margolis—conservative commentator and columnist for PJ Media (11/12/22)—to come to the same conclusion. “There’s a New Frontrunner for the 2024 Presidential Nomination,” blared his headline. “Many Republicans,” he wrote, “are starting to wonder if there are greener pastures for the GOP with someone like Ron DeSantis, according to a new poll from YouGov.”

That new YouGov poll (11/11/22) was a national survey of potential Republican primary voters that pitted DeSantis vs. Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup. The Florida governor got 42% support, Trump 35%. The most recent Yahoo/YouGov poll (2/8/23) shows little change over the intervening three months, with DeSantis still beating Trump in a head-to-head matchup, 45% to 41%.

Perhaps the strongest advocate for DeSantis’ frontrunner status is Aaron Blake of the Washington Post (1/14/23), who listed the Florida governor as the most likely among ten possible GOP candidates to be the Republican nominee for president, a position DeSantis has occupied on Blake’s list for several months. Blake’s principal evidence consisted of national primary polls that included only DeSantis and Trump.

He downplayed the multi-candidate polls that did not support his theory. The vast majority of polls that matched Trump against several candidates simultaneously found Trump getting the most support, often by double digits.

That led Nathaniel Rakich of 538 (1/10/23), who analyzed the December 2022 polls, to write that “DeSantis is polling well against Trump—as long as no one else runs.” A recent poll by Yahoo News/YouGov (2/8/23) reaffirmed that conclusion: “DeSantis leads Trump for 2024 GOP nod—but not if Haley and others split the vote.”

But this new version of the conventional wisdom is not completely supported by the data either.

Head-to-head polls

Below is a list of all the national polls in January and February (as of this writing) compiled by 538 that report on a head-to-head matchup between Trump and DeSantis.

What’s most striking is the wildly contradictory pattern of results, which vary from a DeSantis advantage of 26 points (Marquette) to a 23-point advantage for Trump (Big Village)—a 49-point variation in the lead.

If the results are averaged (including the most recent results of Big Village, Premise, Harris/Harvard CAPS and YouGov, but excluding their earlier results, so they do not get disproportionate weighting), DeSantis averages 45.8%, Trump 44.3%—a 1.5 percentage point DeSantis advantage, not too far from a tie.

Misreading polls

It would be a mistake to interpret these results as though there is a volatile GOP electorate.

The only polling organizations that polled a head-to-head matchup in both January and February showed no significant change from one month to the next. YouGov/Yahoo News gave DeSantis a 3-point advantage in mid-January, and a 4-point advantage in early February. Harris/Harvard CAPS reported Trump with a 10-point advantage in mid-January and a 12-point advantage a month later. And Big Village recorded just a 1-point decline in Trump’s advantage from January to February, from 23 to 22 points.

NBC‘s subhead (1/26/23) told readers that “GOP voters slightly prefer Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over former President Trump”—even as the story reported that Republican and Republican-leaning voters “preferred DeSantis as the eventual Republican presidential nominee over Trump by 28 percentage points.”

In addition, some polls conducted in the same or close time frames produce conflicting results. In fact, the most extreme numbers for the two candidates are produced in virtually the same time period. Big Village’s January poll ends on January 20, and shows Trump with a 23-point margin over DeSantis. Marquette’s poll ends on the same date and shows a DeSantis advantage of 26 points—a 49-point discrepancy.

Another example: YouGov/Yahoo News and On Message both show DeSantis in the lead (by 4 points and 15 points, respectively), at virtually the same time that Premise finds Trump in the lead by 20 points.

Opinion simply does not change that quickly.

The large fluctuations shown in the table thus reflect mostly the polling organizations themselves—their particular methods of sampling, question wording and data analysis. And it is indeed surprising, if not shocking, that polls of supposedly the same electorate, conducted over roughly the same time, should come to such contradictory findings.

The most obvious conclusion to draw from this table: We simply can’t trust any of these polls this early in the campaign to tell us which candidates might prevail in a head-to-head matchup—not “if the election were held today,” much less when it will actually be held many months from now.

The earliest polls that may have some meaningful results about the GOP candidates for president will be polls of the electorates in the four earliest states to choose delegates—the Iowa caucuses, and the primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. But again, not for months, until shortly before the Iowa caucuses. Until then, arguing about the meaning of the latest national primary poll will have much in common with determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

That will not deter the media from its obsession with early polls. Just in the past week and a half, several new national primary polls and poll stories have been reported—at Fox (2/20/23), NBC (2/16/23), Newsweek (2/19/23) Forbes (2/13/23) and PBS/NPR (2/22/23), among others.

But just because they are there doesn’t mean we have to waste our time reading them.

The post Early Polling Tells You Little About Next Year’s GOP Primary appeared first on FAIR.

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

Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism

      CounterSpin230224.mp3

Tucker Carlson on Fox News (7/6/21)

This week on CounterSpin: If you care about free expression, and freedom generally, there is much to talk about right now. It is good to anchor ourselves in that conversation when we talk about books being banned and efforts to erase entire concepts, and then folks trying to inoculate themselves by saying they weren’t even talking about those concepts, until they learn that actually running away from those ideas doesn’t make you safe. These are not entirely new conversations or struggles. But our past has not been fully grappled with or understood, and that has everything to do with what’s happening now and how we can address it. History is alive and active, and you are a part of it.

So this week we’re going to re-air a conversation that we had in January of 2017 with historian Ellen Shrecker, an expert on McCarthyism and its impacts. We don’t doubt that you will understand the relevance and the meaning in 2023.

      CounterSpin230224Schrecker.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the price of eggs.

      CounterSpin230224Banter.mp3

The post Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism appeared first on FAIR.
February 21, 2023

Distortion of Breakfast Price Hikes Leaves WSJ With Egg on Face

Note to those considering the Wall Street Journal‘s advice (2/14/23): For the price of a Journal subscription, you could buy 1,170 eggs a year.

The Wall Street Journal (2/14/23) gave a crash course on the true meaning of freedom under capitalism with its piece “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast.” Ironically, the article sat behind a paywall. So instead of skipping breakfast to cut costs, maybe Journal readers should cancel their subscriptions.

The absurdity of the headline is self-apparent. It was met with bewilderment by readers shocked to realize it lacked even a tinge of sarcasm. As one noted, “If you skip breakfast, lunch and dinner you can save even more money.”

Nonetheless, the article bears examination, because it highlights the corporate media’s determination to convince workers and consumers that inflation means that resources are scarce, and not that immensely profitable corporations are ripping them off (FAIR.org, 4/21/22, 1/25/23).

Other than its cruel recommendation, the article, by economics reporter Gabriel Rubin, was a rather mundane report about the rising costs of breakfast staples like eggs, juice, cereal and coffee. But it neglected to mention that in the case of the egg industry, for example, which saw prices rise 138% over 2022, advocacy groups like Farm Action are sounding the alarm on potential collusion to price-gouge under the guise of an avian flu outbreak and inflation.

The big players in the industry include Cal-Maine Foods, Rose Acre Farms, Versova Holdings and Hillandale Farms. But Cal-Maine Foods alone “controls approximately 20% of the egg market and dwarfs its nearest competitor,” according to Farm Action’s letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting an investigation of the industry. Central to Farm Action’s case is their determination that “supply chain disruptions do not justify [the] dramatic increase in egg prices.”

Don’t blame the chickens for the high price of eggs. (CC photo: Marilyn Brinker)

According to the USDA, the letter notes, the total loss of egg-laying hens to the avian flu in 2022 was about 43 million birds. Although that sounds substantial, the reality is that, “after accounting for chicks hatched during the year, the average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than 7–8% lower than it was a year prior.”

Despite this marginal effect, Rubin wrote that the outbreak’s impact “has devastated poultry flocks across the US.” The reporter also blamed the war in Ukraine for the drastic price increases. But according to Cal-Maine Foods’ own investor presentation, the associated cost of bird feed has only gone up 22% over the last year, not nearly enough to account for such high prices, Farm Action notes.

So, contrary to the Journal’s assertions, the evidence shows that the more than doubling of egg prices over the past year is disproportionately high compared to losses in production. And at the same time that these companies are acting like their hands are tied by supply disruptions, their profits have skyrocketed. From May through November 2022, Cal-Maine saw their gross profits increase tenfold.

Instead of acknowledging this damning evidence, the article referred to a “perfect storm” of supply disruptions—a framing that bolsters the “act of God” narrative promoted by industry trade strategists (Yahoo!, 2/15/23) meant to rid companies of responsibility for price hikes.

As food insecurity grows with inflating prices, corporate media continue to insist that the supposed efficiency of the free market is doing the best it can. In doing so, they continue to expose what capitalist freedom really means. You don’t have to stick with the program, because there’s always the option of starving!

If the Wall Street Journal were truly concerned with the impact of inflating egg prices on consumers, it wouldn’t make the callous and indifferent suggestion that they skip a meal; it would take on the powerful and profitable corporations that continue to use their monopoly power to extract maximum profit at the expense of people’s well-being.

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 Distortion of Breakfast Price Hikes Leaves WSJ With Egg on Face appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘Punitive Enforcement Does Not Save Lives, or Reduce Drug Supply’ – CounterSpin interview with Maritza Perez Medina on fentanyl

Janine Jackson interviewed Drug Policy Alliance’s Maritza Perez Medina about fentanyl for the February 17, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230217PerezMedina.mp3

DrugPolicy.org

Janine Jackson: When it comes to drugs—that is to say, when it comes to drugs whose use by some people in some contexts is officially deemed illicit—to suggest any other approach than criminalization is to be told you aren’t “taking the issue seriously.” That any response not involving jail, prison, loss of livelihood, family separation, is widely deemed, essentially, a non-response is indication of an impoverished state of conversation.

But is that changing? Some pushback to the White House policy addressing fentanyl suggests that there is space for a new way to talk about drugs, and harm, and ways forward.

Maritza Perez Medina is the director of the Office of Federal Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. They’re online at DrugPolicy.org. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Maritza Perez Medina.

Maritza Perez Medina: Thank you so much.

JJ: What, first of all, does current policy with regard to fentanyl look like? It seems like states—and I know you look at federal affairs—are rushing to do something, but the things that they’re doing are not necessarily well-grounded, or based in understanding of what we know works.

How would you describe the current state of play with regard to policy here?

New York Times Magazine (7/13/22)

MPM: Unfortunately, I think at the moment we’re experiencing a lot of media sensationalism, but also sensationalism coming from lawmakers, around fentanyl, rather than thinking about policy solutions that are based on public health, because when we’re talking about overdose deaths, and overdose deaths related to illicit fentanyl, we’re really talking about a public health issue that requires a public health response.

We know from decades of research that the criminal legal system and a punitive enforcement strategy does not help people who use drugs, does not save lives, and certainly does not reduce the drug supply.

If anything, it can lead to a more dangerous drug supply.

JJ: That seems important to go on, because I think to the extent that folks who aren’t experiencing it personally in their lives, what they get from news media is, first of all, that weird round of coverage of police officers apparently being laid out on the street from just touching fentanyl, which was debunked, or at least explored, subsequently by media.

But it’s really sensationalist scare tactics, or it’s genuinely hard stories about people who have lost loved ones to overdose, but it’s not necessarily a public health conversation, or even a research-based policy conversation. It’s very much scare tactics and heartstrings, in a way that doesn’t necessarily tell us what to do about it.

MPM: Yeah, and I think those narratives are harmful. For one, the myths that we’re seeing around fentanyl are not helpful, because it’s essentially just creating more stigma around people who use drugs.

And we know that that stigma essentially is going to harm people, especially people who may have used fentanyl, because they’re going to be reluctant to want to call for help if they need it.

Folks are going to be reluctant to want to call for help if they witness an overdose, because of potential law enforcement involvement.

Or people might even think that, if they help someone who’s overdosing, they themselves will be exposed to fentanyl, which is not true. Rather than perpetuating these myths, we should really be having a conversation that’s grounded in public health education and knowledge.

Maritza Perez Medina: “We need to make sure that people who use drugs are armed with information that will keep them safe and that will keep them alive.”

The fact of the matter is fentanyl is in the illicit street supply. We need to make sure that people who use drugs are armed with information that will keep them safe and that will keep them alive.

So people should have access to things like drug-checking tools, so they can check their drugs for fentanyl. They should have access to harm reduction tools like clean needles, things like Naloxone that can help reverse the effects of an overdose.

These are real tools that we know save lives and keep people healthy. Unfortunately, a lot of the myths that we’re seeing perpetuated in the media, and even by lawmakers, are really not helpful to keeping people safe.

JJ: Did the State of the Union change anything for you? What did Biden’s remarks suggest to you about what might happen at the federal level, and what we might expect to be repercussions of that?

MPM: On one hand, I acknowledge that the Biden administration has really embraced harm reduction, and even says “harm reduction” out loud. So they’re the first administration to really do that, and to be supportive of those efforts. So I think that’s great. It’s outstanding. I give them a lot of credit for doing that, and for really acknowledging that drug use is a public health issue, and we need to meet people where they’re at.

But on the flip side of that, during the State of the Union, I heard a lot of talk about supply-side interdiction, and we know that prohibition and supply-side interdiction have done nothing to quell the supply of illicit fentanyl. If anything, those tactics have made it so that we have a dangerous illicit supply of drugs in the US.

This is the fourth wave of the opioid overdose crisis, and it’s been driven because of law enforcement tactics criminalizing various substances, which means that people move on to another substance that they can find more easily.

My fear is that if we keep focused on supply-side interdiction, we know from 50 years of failed drug war that that strategy doesn’t work, that we will see new substances emerge, and that the public health issue will remain, which is why we really need to focus on a public health response.

We need to make sure that people who use drugs are using drugs safely and are staying alive, and that we empower people with education around drugs.

JJ: Are there particular policies at a state or federal level, either that are drafted and ready to be acted on, or that you think could be created tomorrow, that would actually change things? Are there particular policies in the works, or that we might think about?

MPM: So I think the most concerning policy at the federal level, and it’s concerning because usually what happens at the federal level is mimicked by localities in different states, but there has been an effort over the last few years to criminalize fentanyl-related substances, and schedule them as schedule one drugs, without fully testing these substances.

And that is really concerning because it’s a criminalization approach to this issue, which we know is really a public health problem, but it would impose new mandatory minimums on people who are caught with fentanyl-related substances, and we know that people who sell drugs and people who use drugs are often the same person. I think lawmakers like to pretend that we’re talking about two different populations, but often they’re one and the same.

And we know that criminalization is not going to give people the support they need to end problematic drug use. So the criminalization approach doesn’t make sense for that purpose.

Rather, I think Congress should embrace public health alternatives, and there are a number of bills in Congress that would support harm-reduction services, health services for people who use drugs, would support things like education, so that people have knowledge related to drugs. We think that those bills should be ones that lawmakers move in Congress.

But unfortunately, just because criminalizing things continues to be incredibly popular with some politicians, it’s been hard for them to drop that notion, and instead really, truly embrace the science and public health.

But we’re trying to explain to them the potential ramifications of continuing to choose criminalization versus public health.

AP (2/8/23)

JJ: Finally, I have to say, I was struck by Associated Press’s piece about the State of the Union and fentanyl in particular; it was called “Biden’s Fentanyl Position Sparks Criticism From Two Sides,” but it led with harm reduction advocates who, as it put it, think a call for “strong criminal penalties” is the wrong way to go about it.

It started with that, and it actually gave voice to that perspective ahead of, at least semantically, the people who were hollering about border policies. And that was kind of—after I turned off the cynic in me that was like, where was this when we were talking about crack cocaine?—but still, the idea of harm reduction advocates taking the lead in a news article about a drug was something a little bit new for me.

And I just wonder if you see anything shifting in media coverage of these issues, or if there is something in particular you would like to push reporters to do when it comes to this.

MPM: I think any issues, actually, related to drugs and crime, I think it’s really important for reporters to look at the facts, and not continue to perpetuate what they think will drive clicks.

I think oftentimes, unfortunately, news is driven by clicks, but when we’re talking about drug use, specifically, that could be really, really harmful. We don’t want to push people away from seeking help if they need it, and especially when we’re looking at a drug supply like we have today that is incredibly dangerous, if anything, we want to encourage people to seek out health services.

So just making sure that we’re not using stigmatizing language, [or] supporting criminalization publicly, is really important in order to save lives.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Maritza Perez Medina, director of the Office of Federal Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. You can find their work online at DrugPolicy.org. Maritza Perez Medina, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MPM: Thank you so much.

The post ‘Punitive Enforcement Does Not Save Lives, or Reduce Drug Supply’ appeared first on FAIR.
February 17, 2023

NYT Trans Letter a Fight for Media Democracy
The New York Times Magazine (print, 6/19/22) referred to a trans teenager whose treatment for gender dysmorphia helped establish protocols as “Patient Zero”—the same term used in an infamous New York Times article (10/7/87) that seemed to blame the AIDS epidemic on an individual gay man.

In a letter to New York Times leadership (2/15/23), more than 180 of the paper’s contributors (later swelling to more than 1,000) raised “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary and gender nonconforming people.” What started as a conversation about a paper’s coverage exploded into a battle between media workers who see a problem at one of the most powerful media outlets on earth, and a media management that simply won’t listen.

“Some of us are trans, non⁠-⁠binary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record,” the letter declared:

Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.

The letter was organized by the Freelance Solidarity Project, a part of the National Writers Union.

A similar letter from LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD (2/15/23) and over a hundred other LGBTQ groups and leaders made three demands (summarized in a press release):
1. Stop printing biased anti-trans stories, immediately.
2. Listen to trans people: hold a meeting with trans community leaders within two months.
3. Hire at least four trans writers and editors within three months.
As FAIR (1/6/23) and many other progressive outlets and groups have noted, there is a campaign in state legislatures, in the courts, in the streets and in the media to roll back rights for transgender people, fomenting a moral panic about teachers and drag queens coming for America’s children. States like Florida are already banning certain types of medical care for trans people (Tampa Bay Times, 2/10/23), and other states have enacted similar laws (NBC, 2/14/23). States are even looking to restrict drag performances (Washington Post, 2/14/23).

This campaign is often portrayed as coming from the far right, which sees traditional gender roles under attack by a new world order. But liberal and centrist institutions like the New York Times aid and abet this campaign.

‘Patient zero’

Invoking the Times’ early homophobic response to the rise of the gay rights movement and the AIDS crisis, the letter writers argue that the paper has a responsibility to do better. The contributors’ letter cites an article (6/15/22) that

uncritically used the term “patient zero” to refer to a trans child seeking gender⁠-⁠affirming care, a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared.

The article quoted “multiple expert sources who have since expressed regret over their work’s misrepresentation.” (FAIR and the podcast Death Panel, among others, have detailed many other problems with the article).

The letter points to another piece (1/22/23) about children’s right to safely transition and policies about whether schools can or should withhold students’ gender transitions from their parents. The piece, the letter says, “fails to make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups,” which have “identified trans people as an ‘existential threat to society’ and seek to replace the American public education system with Christian homeschooling,” noting that this is “key context” that was not provided to Times readers.

Liberal Currents ( 2/8/23): Gender-affirming treatments are “ubiquitous, safe, and provide hundreds of thousands of people with happier, more fulfilling lives every year”—and are noncontroversial, except when offered to trans youth.

The articles cited in the letter give the impression that we are living in a time of rushed, ill-informed transitions and shady treatments for children that lack oversight. As Samantha Hancox-Li wrote (Liberal Currents, 2/8/23), this is, in fact, the opposite of the truth, because cisgender minors have easier access to treatments they need than trans youth:

This is the reality of trans care in the United States: not children being rushed to experimental treatments, but explicit segregation, discrimination and the denial of basic care. When a trans kid wants to grow out her hair and change her name, it’s national news. When a cis kid wants to do the same thing, it’s Tuesday. When trans kids want hormone replacement therapy, we call it “gender-confirming treatments” and publish article after fretting article about how strange and dangerous they are. When cis kids receive medically identical prescriptions, it’s Tuesday. We don’t even have a name for it. Because what’s normal is invisible.

The question before us isn’t whether we should allow trans kids access to special experimental treatments. The question is whether we enable trans kids to access essential medical care on the same terms we allow cis kids to.

Gender-affirming care is critical because it has been shown to have enormous mental health benefits for trans youth, including reducing the risk of suicide (JAMA, 2/25/22; Scientific American, 5/12/22).

Misrepresenting facts

“Nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic,” the New York Times‘ Pamela Paul (2/16/23) insists–though as the Cut (2/16/23) points out, Rowling “simply doesn’t seem to believe that trans women really are women.”

The letter writers note that the coverage of trans issues has fed into the assault on trans rights at the state level. GLAAD said in its letter:

Every major medical association supports gender-affirming care as best-practices care that is safe and lifesaving and has widespread consensus in the medical and scientific communities. Yet the Times continues to churn out pieces that anti-trans extremists use to harm children and families. In November, the Times published a story that got the science of gender-affirming care so wrong that the WPATH had to write a multi-page tear-down explaining how the Times misrepresented the facts at every turn.

The letters’ examples are far from exhaustive. For instance, columnist Pamela Paul—once again, no relation—regularly uses the platform the Times gives her to spread misleading anti-trans narratives, as FAIR (12/16/22) has documented.

In perhaps the clearest display of out-of-touch-ness, the day after the letter went public, the Times published a column by Paul (2/16/23) defending author J.K. Rowling—who has immense literary fame and cultural power—from charges of transphobia, quoting one advocate saying Rowling “sees herself as standing up for the rights of a vulnerable group.” The vulnerable group here isn’t one of the world’s most marginalized minorities, but people like Rowling who want “spaces for biological women only.” Paul invoked the stabbing of Salman Rushdie in deeming criticism of Rowling “dangerous.”

Rowling has been an outspoken opponent of Scotland’s attempt to enact legislation to protect trans rights (BBC, 10/7/22), which was eventually blocked by the British prime minister (Guardian, 1/16/23). That defeat helped lead to the Scottish first minister’s resignation, which was celebrated by conservative British media (Economist, 2/15/23; Daily Mail, 2/15/23; London Times, 2/16/23).

In other words, Rowling isn’t just saying things trans people don’t like, she’s actively impeding social progress and helping to end the careers of politicians who offend the established order. Paul’s advocacy for Rowling is a reversal of journalism’s mission: She afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfortable.

Pushed to the margins

The New York Times got some collegial support from the Onion (2/17/23): “Good journalism is about…asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.”

Keep in mind, the contributors’ letter isn’t saying that certain viewpoints should be censored because they are offensive or right-wing. The push for the New York Times to keep a skeptical eye on the agenda of resisters of social progress isn’t censorship or anti-free speech. It is saying that trans issues have not been reported on accurately or fairly. That is a discussion that should happen more often in the mediasphere on a whole host of topics.

“It’s really a question of emphasis and resources,” FSP organizing committee member Eric Thurm told FAIR. “The pieces that take the ‘just asking questions’ approach are A1 cover stories, while others are pushed to the margins.”

There’s another important aspect of this letter: It comes from freelancers organized by the FSP, not staffers who have a regular paycheck or longevity at the paper. For freelancers, openly criticizing the editors of a major outlet is a real risk, because it might mean no more commissions in the future. This kind of precarity in journalism has long been denounced as cost-cutting—contractors are just cheaper and more expendable than NewsGuild-represented staff members—but it’s also a good way to enforce ideology at publications, because contractors have far less power to contradict their editors. By banding together publicly, these independent workers are challenging a very important tool corporate media use to manufacture consent.

Letter-signer Steven Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass and contributor to Scientific American, told FAIR that writers are confronting the “most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world about its trans coverage; it’s not above critique.” Such coverage is “an ungodly amount of pressure being put on such a small percentage of the population.”

Thrasher added, “It’s hard to dismiss this many writers, past and present.”

Declaring war on criticism

Hell Gate (2/17/23) on the journalists who questioned the New York Times‘ trans coverage: “To the Times, they’re now activists, which means their concerns don’t matter.”

Yet dismissing them is exactly what the paper’s leadership has done so far. The paper’s top editor, Joe Kahn, has essentially declared war against the letter—and its signatories. In a memo to staff (Hell Gate, 2/17/23), Kahn characterized the letter as a “protest letter” that “included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name.” “Participation in such a campaign,” Kahn warned, “is against the letter and spirit of our ethics policy.”

Kahn defended the paper’s work without acknowledging or addressing any of the letter’s specific claims, writing, “Our coverage of transgender issues, including the specific pieces singled out for attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written.” He claimed that “any review” of the paper’s coverage “shows that the allegations this group is making are demonstrably false,” without offering any evidence.

Kahn continued:

Even when we don’t agree, constructive criticism from colleagues who care, delivered respectfully and through the right channels, strengthens our report.

We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.

The writers offered documented criticism, and Kahn dismissed it—prohibited it—as an attack and a protest organized by an outside group. Remember, these are people the Times clearly regards as worthy enough to write for the paper, but not worthy to have an honest discussion with about the paper’s biases. As Thurm said, the response doesn’t engage “substantively with the issues we’re raising.”

National reporter Michael Powell—author of one of the pieces criticized by the letter writers—likewise responded smugly (Twitter, 2/15/23), “Journalism is meant to ask difficult and discomforting questions, and to question institutions, including the medical establishment.” It’s a clever response, in which the real issues brought up in both the FSP and GLAAD letters are pushed aside and reframed as the Times courageously standing up to Big Medicine.

The paper (Mediate, 2/15/23) also publicly responded to the GLAAD letter, contrasting its own “independent reporting” with the “advocacy” goals of GLAAD. The response argued that the Times “strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society… Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.”

‘A plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade’

Tom Scocca (Popula, 1/29/23): “The Times‘ gender-treatment coverage insists, through its sheer bulk and repetition, that there is something particularly wrong about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care…. If the Times didn’t believe this, as an institution, the coverage would make no sense.”

The answer to this line of defense is in a piece cited in the letter itself, an essay by Tom Scocca in Popula (1/29/23):

In the past eight months, the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast…. This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care…. The notion that trans youth present a looming problem is demonstrated to the reader by the sheer volume of coverage. If it’s not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?

But the Times can never engage in a discussion of why it’s obviously problematizing the issue, because it’s wedded to the fiction that the paper only ever reflects reality—and that its coverage does not shape that reality.

That helps explain why Kahn was so angry in his memo to the staff. You could almost hear him muttering the old War on Terror line, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.”

GLAAD (2/15/23) responded, “The Times is not only standing behind coverage that hundreds of leaders in journalism, media and LGBTQ advocacy are speaking out against, but boasting that they are proud of it.”

The paper has taken an “us versus them” attitude in its newsroom. The battle here is more than a debate over trans coverage, but a struggle between workers and media bosses over the narrative. Collective action for media reform, especially from many people with influence in the literary world, is more powerful than individual letters to the editor. And as the letter writers say, this isn’t just about how words appear on the page—the trans community and its allies see this as a necessary action in slowing down the growing assault on trans rights. Let’s hope to see more of this kind of action.

“The Times is on the defensive and the people advocating for trans rights are on the offensive,” Thrasher said. “That’s a good thing.”

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: A collage of headlines on trans issues from the New York Times.

The post NYT Trans Letter a Fight for Media Democracy appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 17, 2023

You’d Scowl, Too, if Media Covered You Like Bernie Sanders

The New York Times‘ Sheryl Gay Stolberg (2/12/23) describes Sen. Bernie Sanders as “wearing his trademark scowl” when she uses his becoming chair of the Senate health committee as an opportunity to ask him about running for president rather than about healthcare.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the new chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions—and the New York Times has something to say about it. In a piece by veteran reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg (2/12/23) headlined, “Bernie Sanders Has a New Role. It Could Be His Final Act in Washington,” the paper demonstrates once again (FAIR.org, 2/24/16, 10/1/19, 1/30/20) how the lens through which corporate media view progressive politicians colors their coverage.

Stolberg kicks things off by noting that Sanders has “made no secret of his disdain for billionaires,” and now “has the power to summon them to testify before Congress—and he has a few corporate executives in his sight.” On the list: Amazon founder (and owner of the Washington Post) Jeff Bezos and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Writes Stolberg:

He views them as union busters whose companies have resorted to “really vicious and illegal” tactics to keep workers from organizing. He has already demanded that Mr. Schultz testify at a hearing in March.

We might point out here that these “views” aren’t just Sanders’ opinion. Less than two weeks before Stolberg’s piece appeared, a judge ruled that Amazon violated labor law trying to stop unionization efforts in Staten Island warehouses. (Stolberg might also see her colleague David Streitfeld’s lengthy investigation published in the Times—3/16/21—headlined, “How Amazon Crushes Unions.”) The National Labor Relations Board had filed 19 formal complaints against Starbucks as of last August—as Stolberg herself acknowledges two-thirds of the way into the article—and just ruled against the company in a union-busting case in Philly.

‘Angry letter’

Bernie Sanders (seen here smiling in a TMZ photo—8/7/22) was once described by the New York Times (6/10/16) as “unkempt and impatient, often angry.”

But another passage caught our eye:

Mr. Sanders is clearly operating on two tracks. Last week, in a move that might surprise critics who view him as unbending, he partnered with a Republican, Senator Mike Braun of Indiana, to call on rail companies to offer seven days of paid sick leave to their workers—a provision that the Senate defeated last year when it passed legislation to avert a rail strike.

But he also sent a curt letter to Mr. Schultz, giving him until Tuesday to respond confirming his attendance at the hearing. That followed an earlier, angry letter in which Mr. Sanders urged the Starbucks chief to “immediately halt your aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign.” A Starbucks spokesman said the company was considering the request for Mr. Schultz to testify and was working to “offer clarifying information” about its labor practices.

To the Times, this is a lesson in contrasts in which Sanders can sometimes be flexible and pragmatic, but at others “unbending” and “angry.” But the truth is that the “two tracks” here are actually following exactly the same script: calling on corporate bosses to treat their workers fairly, and if they don’t, asking them to come in for questioning.

Sanders issued his warning to Schultz last March when Schultz took over as interim CEO, writing, “Please respect the Constitution of the United States and do not illegally hamper the efforts of your employees to unionize.” Nearly a year later, with no progress, he’s calling Schultz in to testify.

In the case of the rail companies, local news station WAVY (2/11/23) reported that “Sanders promises if he doesn’t see change, he will question railway executives under oath in a Senate hearing.” Sound familiar?

The only difference between the two—and what really matters to the Times—is that in one case, a Republican joined him, which by corporate media’s definition makes it a flexible and pragmatic action, whereas in the other, no Republicans on the committee signed the letter. No bipartisanship? No pragmatism. It’s a golden rule for political reporters that encourages compromise for the sake of compromise, no matter what the public actually wants.

And it elevates empty rhetoric over more serious action. Asking big companies to be nice to workers is framed in a positive light, but trying to back it up with any more serious action gets you called out as “curt,” “angry” and “unbending.”

(We’ll let you decide for yourself if this standard-looking letter from the committee, giving Schultz a week to respond and a month to prepare testimony, is “curt.” It’s not clear what Stolberg was looking for to make it more polite; apologies for taking up a very important man’s time?)

The number of negative words used to describe Sanders in this one article is remarkable. In addition to “unbending,” “curt” and “angry,” he’s “combative,” full of “disdain,” a former “left-wing socialist curiosity” who “rants,” makes demands, has a “trademark scowl” and can almost never be seen smiling in the Capitol.

‘Ever combative’

Bernie Sanders “already has,” Stolberg writes, “provide[d] a wonderful target for Republicans to shoot at.”
Bernie Sanders “already has,” Stolberg writes, “provide[d] a wonderful target for Republicans to shoot at.”The end of the piece perfectly illustrates the eternal disconnect between Sanders and reporters like Stolberg:

With the recent retirement of Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat who served for 48 years, Mr. Sanders is finally the senior senator from Vermont. Asked how he felt, he said, “Pretty good.” Then, ever combative, he shot back, “How do you feel?”

“How do you feel?” Them’s fightin’ words!

Stolberg continued:

He said people who wonder about whether he will run again—and by people, he meant reporters—should “keep wondering.”

Why? “Because I’ve just told you, and this is very serious,” he said, wearing his trademark scowl. “If you think about my record, I take this job seriously. The purpose of elections is to elect people to do work, not to keep talking about elections.”

Just as they prioritize compromise over meaningful political action, political reporters consistently prioritize the horserace over substantive issues, all to the detriment of democracy. But those reporters cling to the fiction that they’re strictly observers—and anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is dismissed under a steady stream of pejorative adjectives.

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 You’d Scowl, Too, if Media Covered You Like Bernie Sanders appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 16, 2023

ACTION ALERT: NYT Book Review in Denial on Japanese Persecution in World War II

A New York Times book review (2/14/23) gets an important fact about US history seriously wrong.

In a red-baiting New York Times review (2/14/23) of Malcolm Harris’ book Palo Alto, writer Gary Kamiya makes a false assertion about the persecution of Japanese people that amounts to denial of one of the most shameful chapters of US history. The Times should issue an immediate correction and apology.

Complaining that “Harris doesn’t acknowledge the exceptions” to his “seamless, all-explanatory narrative” of California history, Kamiya writes:

Take his discussion of Japanese internment. As an example of how “embracing white supremacy and segregation meant sacrificing a certain amount of nonwhite talent”…he cites the story of the sculptor Ruth Asawa, who was interned along with her family and then “formally excluded from California” and thus forced to study out of state.

“At a time when the Bay Area’s artists began toying with Japanese ideas and forms, artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state,” he writes, implying that all artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state. This is not true.

Contrary to Kamiya’s claim, it is true that not just all artists of Japanese descent, but all Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens were banned from California, beginning in March 1942. As Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians explained, under the US Army’s interpretation of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066,

all American citizens of Japanese descent were prohibited from living, working or traveling on the West Coast of the United States. The same prohibition applied to the generation of Japanese immigrants who, pursuant to federal law and despite long residence in the United States, were not permitted to become American citizens.

Japanese residents of some lightly populated areas of eastern California were initially not subjected to the ban, but the exclusion was extended to the entire state in June 1942. While the initial plan was to allow the people ethnically cleansed from the West Coast to relocate to other states, this was deemed impractical, and concentration camps, in the original sense of the term, were set up to confine them. As the commission report put it, “The evacuees were to be held in camps behind barbed wire and released only with government approval.”

At the time, the New York Times (3/24/42) presented the incarceration of Japanese Americans in upbeat terms, describing people being rounded up into camps as “weary but gripped with the spirit of adventure over a new pioneering chapter in American history.” (See FAIR.org, 3/24/15.)

This is history that Kamiya, who writes a history column for the San Francisco Examiner, surely knows. So what does he offer in support of his assertion that Harris’ writing that “artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state” was “not true”? This is Kamiya’s entire argument on the point:

To take just one example, the artist Chiura Obata, who was on indefinite leave from his professorship at Berkeley while interned at Topaz, was reinstated by the University of California president Robert Sproul in January 1945.

So the fact that a person released from a detention camp, after the War Department rescinded the ban on Japanese residents in California (effective January 2, 1945), was allowed to get his job back means that the ban didn’t really exist? This is a preposterous argument, and one that will surely mislead many readers about the scope of the anti-Japanese program.

Kamiya treats the fact that Japanese exclusion didn’t continue in perpetuity as a damning indictment of Harris’ book:

Palo Alto is chock-full of Asawas, and this ugly underside of California history should be told. But the book has virtually no Obatas, and that selection bias, clearly driven by Harris’s conviction that “positive” stories are simply window-dressing concealing capitalism’s dark reality, severely damages its credibility.

To the contrary: Kamiya’s insistence that the historical fact that all Japanese people were banned from California “is not true” severely damages the credibility of the New York Times. The paper needs to offer a correction, and an apology, immediately.

ACTION:

Please contact the New York Times to demand a retraction of and apology for the paper’s denial of the historical reality that people of Japanese descent were completely banned from California.

CONTACT:

Letters: letters@nytimes.com

Readers Center: Feedback

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: Map of showing “Military Area No. 1” and “Military Area No. 2,” from which Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens were totally excluded.

The post ACTION ALERT: NYT Book Review in Denial on Japanese Persecution in World War II appeared first on FAIR.

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

As Right Media Hail DeSantis as ‘Woke’ Killer, Centrists Admire His Brand

The College Board has “purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism” from its Advanced Placement African-American studies curriculum after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—and likely Republican presidential candidate—moved to ban the curriculum in public schools (New York Times, 2/1/23).

Sometimes you have to destroy academic freedom to save it, Joshua Rauh argues in the Wall Street Journal (2/8/23).

Conservative media took a victory lap. “Critical race theory is out, and Condoleezza Rice is in,” boasted the Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/1/23). “It’s vindication for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.” The headline of a Journal op-ed (2/8/23) on legislation that prohibits diversity education declared, “Florida Shows How to Combat Woke Indoctrination on Campus.”

A New York Post editorial (2/2/23) called Florida an inspiration to other states, and asked for a “a leader who will step in and save the State University of New York from woke madness.”

Fox News (2/1/23) highlighted the marginalization of the Black Lives Matter movement in courses’ changes, which it framed as the Advanced Placement course being “stripped of ‘woke’ content after criticism.”

The roots of BLM trace back to the acquittal of vigilante George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida—so the “‘woke’ content” Florida is being heralded for successfully suppressing is the legacy of a historic injustice in the state.

At City Journal (2/2/23), the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden made no effort to hide the fact that DeSantis was aiming to stifle the ideas of “far-left academic ideologues”—“left,” of course, being an entirely subjective term, especially in states where Civil War revisionism still exists. Eden had earlier hailed DeSantis in Newsweek (1/31/23), adopting a John Birch Society tone as he suggested that Black studies were an “attempt to impose a far-left worldview on high school students.”

DeSantis has also become a darling of the international right: The British Telegraph (2/5/23) said he should be a model for the Conservative Party as it fights multiculturalism and diversity.

Where ‘woke goes to die’

CBS (11/9/22) highlighted DeSantis’ re-election as a kickoff for his presidential bid.

There’s a broader context here. DeSantis appointed several allies to oversee the prestigious New College of Florida—among them anti-anti-racism crusader Chistopher Rufo, worrying faculty that the governor wants to convert the small public liberal arts school into a conservative idea mill (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/27/23). DeSantis has also mandated that “public colleges and universities survey students and faculty about their beliefs” (The Hill, 6/23/21). Now he’s bullied a major national player in college education into whitewashing its study of the Black experience…during Black History Month. Not very subtle.

DeSantis is offering red meat to the conservative media who are able to mobilize Republican voters by painting college campuses as left-wing indoctrination camps that mold good Christian patriots into non-binary Sandinistas; this will serve him well if he does chase the GOP presidential nomination. But he’s also accomplishing the Right’s overall censorship goals, regardless of what he does with his own political future: He has successfully used state power to suppress speech and activity that might counter racism, homophobia and the growing militarization of police.

It’s why he has proclaimed that his state is where “woke goes to die” (CBS, 11/9/22)—using an African-American Vernacular English expression that signifies awareness of social and racial injustice. DeSantis joins the tradition of another defiant Southern governor, Alabama’s George Wallace, who stood in a schoolhouse door in 1963 to oppose racial integration—but while Wallace represented a dying old order, DeSantis actually has a shot at national power.

This is what makes DeSantis a hero in conservative media. New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz (2/3/23) claimed that “leftist” corporate media like CNN are, by contrast, suffering from “DeSantis Derangement Syndrome.” In fact, more centrist media are in no way hammering DeSantis with the same vigor that their right-wing counterpoints are defending him—and that lack of symmetry is illustrative of the truncated political spectrum of corporate media.

‘Builds his brand’

While right-wing outlets depicted Ron DeSantis as a role model, more centrist publications like the New York Times (2/9/23) presented him as…a role model.

With the headline “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, as He Builds His Brand,” the New York Times (1/31/23) treated the story with a both-sides, political horse race approach that downplayed the severity of the issue at hand.

It was even more curious that Times columnist Pamela Paul (2/3/23) wrote about the collegiate struggle against woke word-policing and academic censorship without even mentioning Florida.

What Paul misses here is that the main reason journalists and academics find their jobs in jeopardy for saying something controversial is because this generation of media and academic workers enjoy less job protections than their elders. For example, she reported that Hamline University “had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive,” though it reconsidered this move after popular outcry.

But this wasn’t the result of oversensitivity or Islamic policing of US academia. The problem was that the instructor had no tenure or other job security, which, in an era where colleges are employing a customer service model of education, which means one’s scholarship is meaningless against any tuition-payer who wants to “speak to the manager.” Acknowledging this would pin the problem on neoliberalism and managerial capitalism, which is something the Times can’t do.

But Paul—who I am happy to report is no relation—wasn’t done. She followed up (2/9/23) saying liberals should “learn from Ron DeSantis” rather than fight him:

If ideological conformity has taken root in American universities, long a bastion of liberal ideals, then Democrats are the ones with the knowledge, experience and record to attend to the problem. It’s on liberals to check the excesses of illiberal orthodoxies rampant among those on its far-left wing. It’s on us to ensure academic freedom and the kind of educational system parents can trust.

‘The state’s legitimate power’

In the Atlantic‘s theory of free speech, harsh criticism on social media may be a dangerous totalitarianism (8/31/21), but governments actually banning ideas is just the democratic process in action (1/30/23).

Paul isn’t the only pundit who brought a blame-the-victim approach to the issue. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic (1/30/23) framed Florida’s ideological purge as the consequence of democracy:

If Ron DeSantis wants to put [Rufo] in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so.

As a New England resident, Nichols declares, “I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools.” That contrasts a bit with the magazine’s series, “The Speech Wars,” which tends to present controversies over free expression in more alarmist tones, as when the magazine’s Conor Friedersdorf (9/21/19) warned: “Campus-speech restrictions jeopardize society’s ability to seek truth and advance knowledge.” (“The Speech Wars” project, incidentally, receives part of its support from the right-wing Charles Koch Foundation.)

But then, Nichols says that he agrees there’s “some truth to the charge” that “colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal,” as he has written on “some stories of campus boobery.” So he does share some ideological common ground with DeSantis, even as he scorns him for his populist pretensions.

Intervening in college affairs

DeSantis is the most successful and high-profile Republican leader to crusade against academic freedom and free speech on campus, but there is no shortage of examples of this political trend.

Right-wing control of North Idaho College’s Board of Trustees has shown how the right can take electoral action to intervene in college affairs directly (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/15/21). Georgia’s Board of Regents, appointed by the Republican governor, moved to make the tenure process more onerous and give the board more oversight (WABE, 10/13/21), while Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he would “push to end professor tenure for all new hires at Texas public universities and colleges” in order to fight “faculty members who he says ‘indoctrinate’ students with teachings about Critical Race Theory” (Texas Tribune, 2/18/22).

Chalkbeat (2/1/22).: “At least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism.”

And thanks to the state legislature in Louisiana, “a task force to study tenure policies at the state’s colleges and universities” is “worrying [Louisiana State University] faculty members that lawmakers may pass laws aimed at limiting academic freedom” (Reveille, 8/6/22). Conservative donors at Yale University were able to pressure at least one professor into resigning her post (New York Times, 9/30/21). All over the country, conservatives are looking to legally ban Critical Race Theory (Chalkbeat, 2/1/22).

In other words, the news with DeSantis and the College Board isn’t just “building his brand” for the campaign, or the consequence of democratic outcomes, as the Times and Atlantic suggest. Rather, it is another material victory in the right’s long war against higher education, one that more or less started when National Review founder William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951.

DeSantis is emboldening Republicans in other states to amp up the campaigns against higher education. Following his lead, South Carolina lawmakers (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/8/23) have sought “information from the state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding all spending on programs, trainings and activities targeted toward people based on their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” defining

diversity, equity and inclusion programs as, among other things, attempts to take an official institutional policy on concepts such as unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation and microaggressions.

As a likely contender for the White House, DeSantis is telegraphing that if elected, he will rein in the power of educators and encourage the closing of the American mind. Anyone in the United States who cares about free speech and academic freedom should be alarmed; so far, DeSantis is polling well (538, 1/10/23).

Outlets like the Times (e.g., 2/10/23) and the Atlantic (e.g., 2/4/23) spill a lot of ink about whether “wokeness” is hampering our discourse (FAIR.org, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). It would be refreshing if they put this question in the context of the Republican-led assault on learning and debate—because right-wing media certainly do.

The post As Right Media Hail DeSantis as ‘Woke’ Killer, Centrists Admire His Brand appeared first on FAIR.

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

Media ‘Spy Balloon’ Obsession a Gift to China Hawks

For over a week, US corporate media have been captivated by a so-called “Chinese spy balloon,” raising the specter of espionage.

NBC News (2/2/23), the Washington Post (2/2/23) and CNN (2/3/23), among countless others, breathlessly cautioned readers that a high-altitude device hovering over the US may have been launched by China in order to collect “sensitive information.” Local news stations (e.g., WDBO, 2/2/23) marveled at its supposed dimensions: “the size of three school buses”! Reuters (2/3/23) waxed fantastical, telling readers that a witness in Montana thought the balloon “might have been a star or UFO.”

As time went on, headlines’ certainty that this was a “spy balloon” or “surveillance balloon” only increased (NBC, 2/9/23).

While comically sinister, the term “Chinese spy balloon”—which corporate media of all stripes swiftly embraced—is partially accurate, at least regarding the device’s provenance; Chinese officials promptly confirmed that the balloon did, indeed, come from China.

What’s less certain is the balloon’s purpose. A Pentagon official, without evidence, stated in a press briefing (2/2/23) that “clearly the intent of this balloon is for surveillance,” but hedged the claim with the following:

We assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective. But we are taking steps, nevertheless, to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.

Soon after, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website (2/3/23) stated that the balloon “is of a civilian nature, used for scientific research such as meteorology,” according to a Google translation. “The airship,” the ministry continued, “seriously deviated from the scheduled route.”

Parroting Pentagon

Despite this uncertainty, US media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon’s conjecture as fact. The New York Times (2/2/23) reported that “the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon,” only to call the device “the spy balloon”—without attributive language—within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC, where the description shifted from “suspected Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23) to simply “Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23). The Guardian once bothered to place “spy balloon” in quotation marks (2/5/23), but soon abandoned that punctuation (2/6/23).

Given that media had no proof of either explanation, it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility—spy balloon vs. weather balloon—equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the US’s official narrative than to that of China.

Of course, governments have also been using balloons to track weather for more than a century—but that didn’t merit a New York Times article (2/3/23).

In coverage following the initial reports, media devoted much more time to speculating on the possibility of espionage than of scientific research. The New York Times (2/3/23), for instance, educated readers about the centuries-long wartime uses of surveillance balloons. Similar pieces ran at The Hill (2/3/23), Reuters (2/2/23) and the Guardian (2/3/23). Curiously, none of these outlets sought to provide an equivalent exploration of the history of weather balloons after the Chinese Foreign Affairs statement, despite the common and well-established use of balloons for meteorological purposes.

Even information that could discredit the “spy balloon” theory was used to bolster it. Citing the Pentagon, outlets almost universally acknowledged that any surveillance capacity of the balloon would be limited. This fact apparently didn’t merit reconsideration of the “spy balloon” theory; instead, it was treated as evidence that China was an espionage amateur. As NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel (2/3/23) stated:

The Pentagon says it believes this spy balloon doesn’t significantly improve China’s ability to gather intelligence with its satellites.

One of Brumfiel’s guests, a US professor of international studies, called the balloon a “floating intelligence failure,” adding that China would only learn, in Brumfiel’s words, at most “a little bit” from the balloon. That this might make it less likely to be a spy balloon and more likely, as China said, a weather balloon did not seem to occur to NPR.

Reuters (2/4/23), meanwhile, called the use of the balloon “a bold but clumsy espionage tactic.” Among its uncritically quoted “security expert” sources: former White House national security adviser and inveterate hawk John Bolton, who scoffed at the balloon for its ostensibly low-tech capabilities.

Minimizing US provocation

The unstated premise of much of this coverage was that the US was minding its own business when China encroached upon it–an attitude hard to square with the US’s own history of spying. Perhaps it’s for this reason that media opted not to pay that history much heed.

CNN (2/4/23) acknowledged that China and the US “have a long history of spying on each other”—but thought its audience only needed to know details about China spying on the US.

In one example, CNN (2/4/23) published a retrospective headlined “A Look at China’s History of Spying in the US.” The piece conceded that the US had spied on China, but, in line with the headline’s framing, wasn’t too interested in the specifics. Despite CNN‘s lack of curiosity, plenty of documentation of US spying on China and elsewhere exists. Starting in 2010, according to the New York Times (5/20/17), China dismantled CIA espionage operations within the country.

And as FAIR contributor Ari Paul wrote for Counterpunch (2/7/23):

The US sent a naval destroyer past Chinese controlled islands last year (AP, 7/13/22) and the Chinese military confronted a similar US vessel in the same location a year before (AP, 7/12/21). The AP (3/21/22) even embedded two reporters aboard a US “Navy reconnaissance aircraft that flew near Chinese-held outposts in the South China Sea’s Spratly archipelago,” dramatically reporting on Chinese military build up in the area as well as multiple warnings “by Chinese callers” that the Navy plan had “illegally entered what they said was China’s territory and ordered the plane to move away.”

The US military has also invested in its own spy balloon technology. In 2019, the Pentagon was testing “mass surveillance balloons across the US,” as the Guardian (8/2/19) put it. The tests were commissioned by SOUTHCOM, a US military organ that conducts surveillance of Central and South American countries, ostensibly for intercepting drug-trafficking operations. Three years later, Politico (7/5/22) reported that “the Pentagon has spent about $3.8 million on balloon projects, and plans to spend $27.1 million in fiscal year 2023,” adding that the balloons “may help track and deter hypersonic weapons being developed by China and Russia.”

In this climate, it came as no surprise when the US deployed an F-22 fighter jet to shoot down the balloon off the Atlantic coast (Reuters, 2/4/23). Soon after, media were abuzz with news of China’s “threat[ening]” and “confrontational” reaction (AP, 2/5/23; Bloomberg, 2/5/23), casting China as the chief aggressor.

Perpetuating Cold War hostilities

Since news of the balloon broke, US animus toward China, already at historic highs, has climbed even further.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a trip to China. President Biden made a thinly veiled reference to the balloon as a national security breach in his February 7 State of the Union address, declaring, “If China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country.” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democratic ranking member of the newly formed House Select Committee on China, asserted that “the threat is real from the Chinese Communist Party.”

Rather than questioning this saber-rattling, US media have dispensed panicked spin-offs of the original story (Politico, 2/5/23; Washington Post, 2/7/23; New York Times, 2/8/23), ensuring that the balloon saga, no matter how much diplomatic decay ensues, lasts as long as possible.

Featured image: Creative Commons photo of the Chinese balloon by Chase Doak.

The post Media ‘Spy Balloon’ Obsession a Gift to China Hawks appeared first on FAIR.
February 10, 2023

60 Minutes’ Weight-Loss Tip: Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You

People in the United States have grown accustomed to endless pharmaceutical ads when watching TV. The industry is the fourth-biggest spender on TV advertising in the country—one of only two in the world (along with New Zealand) that allows such direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs.

But sometimes it gets even worse. Like on a 60 Minutes segment (CBS, 1/1/23) that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (1/19/23) has accused of effectively being a pharmaceutical ad.

In the 13-minute segment on weight-loss drug Wegovy, the only medical experts interviewed by CBS were doctors who had received thousands of dollars in consulting fees and honoraria from Novo Nordisk—a company that just happened to be a sponsor of the broadcast. As the group also pointed out, “No alternative methods for weight loss were mentioned.”

‘Fabulous’ reporting

One of 60 Minutes‘ main sources, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, has received at least $15,000 from the drug company whose product she was touting.

60 Minutes‘ Lesley Stahl interviewed obesity specialist Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, and profiled two women who had been trying unsuccessfully to lose weight, along with their physician, Dr. Caroline Apovian.

Stahl told viewers that Apovian “is relieved that at last, she has a highly effective medication to offer her patients that’s safe, according to the FDA.” She continued, “It’s part of a new generation of medications that brings about an impressive average loss of 15% to 22% of a person’s weight, and it helps keep it off.”

“Safe,” “impressive,” “at last.” More words used to describe Wegovy in the broadcast: “fabulous,” “robust” and “very effective and safe.”

But there’s a problem, Stahl said:

The vast majority of people with obesity simply can’t afford Wegovy, and most insurance companies refuse to cover it, partly because, as AHIP—the health insurance trade association—explained in a statement, these drugs “have not yet been proven to work well for long-term weight management and can have complications and adverse impacts on patients.”

Apovian reassured viewers that most of the side effects—”nausea, vomiting”—go away with time, and she expressed frustration that many of her patients can’t get the medication “because insurance won’t cover it.” One of the patients described being told by her insurance company that it considers Wegovy a “vanity drug.” Stahl pointed out that the health plan of the other patient “puts anti-obesity medications in the same category as drugs for erectile dysfunction and cosmetic purposes.”

Drugmaker as hero

It’s good to see CBS going after the insurance industry, which regularly denies needed coverage in order to maximize its own profits (ProPublica, 2/2/23; Truthout, 10/20/22). But our broken healthcare system is only partly about rapacious insurance companies; greedy pharmaceutical companies also play a starring role. Yet in 60 Minutes‘ story of villains and victims, Novo Nordisk plays the would-be hero whose hands are tied.

Stahl reported that Wegovy is “not easy to get. The drug is currently in short supply. And it costs more than $1,300 a month.” But her only questions about that cost concerned why insurance companies wouldn’t cover it—not why it costs so much in the first place.

Novo Nordisk recently predicted record earnings as a result of demand for Wegovy, with operating profits expected to increase by up to 19% (Bloomberg, 2/1/23)—from a company that made $8 billion in profit last year. And this is in an industry that already regularly expects profit margins of 15–20%—Novo Nordisk’s 2022 profit margin was 31%—as compared to 4–9% for non-drug companies.

In Norway, where the Norwegian Medicines Agency recently denied granting reimbursement for it, Wegovy costs up to $425 a month out of pocket (MedWatch, 1/19/23). The price is similar in Denmark (Alt, 12/20/22).

And Wegovy is exactly the same drug—just at a higher dosage—as Nordisk’s older and more widely available diabetes drug Ozempic, which 60 Minutes also discussed as being used “off-label” (meaning not FDA-approved) for weight loss. Ozempic was approved in 2017 and can cost around $900 a month in the US without insurance. It can cost less than $200 a month without insurance in Canada.

The United States spends much more than other countries on healthcare than other wealthy countries, but has increasingly lower life expectancy.

That’s largely because Canada, like Norway and Denmark, has negotiated prices with drug companies, rather than letting them set whatever wildly inflated prices they desire, which leads to those eye-popping profits. (The Inflation Reduction Act passed last year does include provisions giving Medicare the power to negotiate prices for some drugs, with the first negotiated prices to go into effect in 2026.) The United States spends more on healthcare per person than any other wealthy country, and a large part of that is driven by brand-name drug spending. Because of US government policies that favor drug companies over people, prices for brand-name drugs are 3.5 times higher in the US than in other high-income countries (Commonwealth Fund, 11/17/21).

60 Minutes‘ Lesley Stahl did give a nod to the conflicts involved in her report—that “Doctors Apovian and Stanford have been advising companies developing drugs for obesity, including the Danish company Novo Nordisk, an advertiser on this broadcast.”

She didn’t make explicit that their advising services were paid. Cody Stanford received over $15,000 from Novo Nordisk in 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available), and Apovian received close to $9,000.

You’d think that these obvious conflicts of interest would prompt the show to bend over backwards to at least find other, critical sources to balance their reporting. But the only other expert source in the story was economist Tomas Philipson, an outspoken critic of drug price controls, who elsewhere had argued that Democrats’ 2021 bill to let Medicare negotiate some drug prices would be “31 times as deadly as Covid-19 to date” (The Hill, 12/2/21).

‘Commercial relaunch’

NPR (1/23/23) pointed out that if you stop taking a drug that costs almost $17,000 a year, “most people gain back most of the weight within a year.”

Endpoints News (1/23/23) reported that “Novo Nordisk had halted Wegovy promotions back in March on the heels of supply issues, but said in November that it planned a ‘broad commercial re-launch’ in the new year.” It’s quite convenient that 60 Minutes‘ report corresponded so neatly with that re-launch.

Novo Nordisk protested that they can’t run afoul of FDA advertising rules because they

did not provide any payment or sponsorship to CBS 60 Minutes for their reporting on obesity as part of a news segment that aired on January 1, 2023, and we did not control any of the content or have any role in identifying or selecting the doctors and patients featured in the news segment.

Of course Novo Nordisk didn’t control the content of the 60 Minutes report—nor did it have to. Advertisers footing a corporate news outlet’s bills generally don’t have to tell them how to report, because those outlets understand the perils of biting the hand that feeds them. If that segment had been submitted by Novo Nordisk as a paid advertisement, it would have come under more oversight than it did by 60 Minutes.

The FDA requires drug advertisers to present “the most significant risks of the drug,” and to “present the benefits and risks of a prescription drug in a balanced fashion.” So a Wegovy ad would have to talk about the potential risk of thyroid cancer, pancreatitis, hypoglycemia and kidney failure, among other things—none of which 60 Minutes mentioned.

Nor, aside from the quickly dismissed AHIP statement about “adverse impacts,” did they include any information about other potential downsides of the drug that other news outlets have mentioned in their coverage of Wegovy—like the fact that it doesn’t work for everyone, or that it’s meant to be taken long-term lest the lost weight comes back (NPR.org, 1/30/23).

What more could an advertiser ask for?

The post 60 Minutes’ Weight-Loss Tip: Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘Everyone Has a Right to Electricity and Heat’ – CounterSpin interview with Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell on utility shutoffs and profiteering

Janine Jackson interviewed the Energy and Policy Institute’s Shelby Green and the Center for Biological Diversity’s Selah Goodson Bell about utility shutoffs and profiteering for the February 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230203Green_Bell.mp3

Janine Jackson: Some 4 million US households have had their electricity cut off in recent years. But before you say “Russia” or “Covid,” our guests would have you understand that it has something to do with the utility business model that we use in this country, for energy and electricity, and that that model is broken, and worthy of reconsideration.

Bailout Watch et al (1/30/23)

Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, and they’re both behind a new report called Powerless that is out from Biological Diversity and Bailout Watch. They both join us by phone. I’m happy to have you here, Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell.

Selah Goodson Bell: Happy to join.

Shelby Green: Thank you for inviting us.

JJ: Let’s just get into the content of the report. What do you mean by “powerless”? What is the problem that you’re describing? I think a lot of folks might think, oh, my lights blink out for a minute. Losing power is much, much more than that. And it’s life or death in some cases, yes?

SGB: Yeah, that’s well-said. Zoom out a little bit, I just wanted to share, this report is the third in a series that’s been tracking this issue, specifically the extent to which profit-driven utilities have been cutting off families’ basic human right to electricity and heat millions of times a year, while at the same time shelling out billions to their shareholders and executives.

We started tracking this in the pandemic, but it’s a pretty egregious injustice and has continued since. It’s still happening today. Most recently, we’ve seen that houses were cut off of electricity about 5.7 million times since 2020. And that’s a low-end number, as about 20 states don’t even provide information on household disconnections. And that’s about 40% of states that we’ve found.

And so all of the numbers and figures we’re going to share today are just a small scope of the issue. They don’t represent the full scope, and that’s also going to be something we talk about a little bit more: data transparency.

And at the heart of our report, it’s basically a desire to expose the utility industry’s greedy profiteering that’s ultimately driving the shutoffs crisis and energy insecurity.

JJ: I wanted to just, actually, you very forward, in the report, connect electric and gas service shutoffs and profiteering, and I think there’s a reason that you connect those two things.

SG: Yeah, I think most consumers really don’t realize what is happening when it comes to their utility bill, or the energy system that we have designed in America.

Most utilities, they’re able to get a rate of return from their customers, and they’re not really concerned about providing power, or ensuring that everyone has access to power. They’re more concerned about making sure they’re making enough money to give to their shareholders.

And so what we really wanted to highlight within this report is that not only are disconnections happening across the country, especially during a time where people are experiencing such high economic uncertainty, but they are also happening because of rising prices of gas, and utilities are heavily reliant on gas, and are building infrastructure and gas-fired power plants that will cause utility bills to increase further, and also cause customers to have to pay for these rate increases.

And so we really wanted to make the connection between consumers, the price of the utility bill, and also this model that is in need of reform in America.

JJ: Absolutely. And I think that’s not a connection that mainstream news media are making. In other words, we’re hearing prices are rising, and that’s hurting you, but we’re not necessarily connecting that to profit-making by utility corporations.

And so I appreciate the connection that you’re making there, but I just wonder if you could spell out–we’re not talking about a few more pennies at the pump. We’re talking about, in many cases, this is about whether people can do what they need to do to survive.

Selah Goodson Bell: “Last year, one in five American households struggled to pay for an energy bill, but that rate was 50% higher for households of color.”

SGB: I think framing it that way is really important. People seem to take for granted how important electricity is for physical safety; for food security, keeping your food refrigerated; for medical care, if you have medicine that needs to be refrigerated; and also for telecommunications.

And the nexus with disconnects and arrears is, when people are forced to bear those costs and have their service severed, it makes it also harder for them to maintain employment. It makes it harder for them to keep their kids in school. It can make it more difficult to get a loan or a mortgage. And so we really wanted to highlight how this energy and security issue just has tendrils into other ways that social instability can manifest, and how the utility industry is really complicit in that.

And, of course, the impacts of this are most disproportionately felt in households of color. We found that last year, one in five American households struggled to pay for an energy bill, but that rate was 50% higher for households of color, and a big reason has to do with some of the lingering impacts of redlining, and basically a lot of households of color might live in structurally deficient housing that ends up costing more to keep warm or cool, which is especially costly and dangerous in the wake of climate disasters like heat waves, freezes, etc.

They’re already hit the hardest, and are less likely to get the resources they need as early as they need. But then when it comes to the increases in energy demand that come with coping from those extreme weather disasters, we’re seeing households of color also get the short end of the stick. So that’s something that we also wanted to highlight, and really show the utility industry’s role in that factor.

And again, like Shelby said, since they’re continuing to invest in fossil gas infrastructure, but are completely disconnected from the implications of that, that itself is also exacerbating the climate emergency.

Shelby Green: “If just 12 utilities took 1% of their dividends that they paid out to shareholders, that could have covered the cost, that could have prevented disconnections.”

SG: And just to bring it back to profit for a minute, disconnections across the country, as we outlined in the report, occurred over 1.5 million times in just the first 10 months of 2022.

If just 12 utilities took 1% of their dividends that they paid out to shareholders, that could have covered the cost, that could have prevented disconnections. But now they’re also passing on the cost of rising fuel to their customers through rate increases for fuel rider adjustments.

So utility executives, they are not doing their part in making sure that they’re keeping the cost low for consumers. They’re not doing their part in making sure that consumers that fall behind can get access to relief dollars. And they’re also not doing their part in communicating properly why consumers’ utility bills are going up.

So there’s a really big problem here with utilities. They’re not really providing the public with an affordable or reliable service. And regulators, public service commissions, are not doing a good enough job requiring utilities to do that.

So there really is this broken system where the consumer gets hurt every single time. And so we really wanted to highlight in this report that you’re not alone when you say that you can’t afford your utility bill, or when you say that you have to use your credit card to pay for an essential service.

There are millions of people across the country who are having that same plight, and we need to start looking at utilities and their regulators, and how they are able to uphold this system that hurts the everyday American.

JJ: We hear that the role of journalism is to break stuff down for us. We can’t be in those boardrooms, we can’t be in those corporate decision-making rooms. And so we rely on journalists to break it down and explain to us as a consumer, or as a worker, what that means to us.

And so what’s so great about this report is it does break it down. You and I know folks will read the media. They’ll understand that prices are higher for them. They’ll understand that energy prices are higher for them. But they’re going to be told that it has to do with, you know, Russia or Covid or mysterious winds from the West, when actually there are systems that we can talk about, and that we have levers to control.

From Powerless in the United States (1/30/23)

SG: Yeah. And there’s a lack of accountability and transparency. And Selah can talk about this more, but while we were collecting this data, I mean, I live in Florida, and Florida utilities were only required to report disconnections during a very brief period during the pandemic, and then they stopped reporting this data in October of 2021.

But we also know that Florida Power & Light, one of the biggest utilities in the state, they performed almost a million shutoffs during that reporting period, and now we have no idea how many people they’re cutting off again.

So what’s frustrating is that there are people who think that they’re just alone in this process of not being able to afford their utility bills. And there’s also a factor of shame associated with that, not being able to afford your most basic bill, not being able to keep the power on in your house, not being able to cook food, because you have no electricity.

There’s a lot of shame associated with not being able to do the bare minimum, and people think that it’s their fault, but they’re not the only ones to bear this blame. There are utilities and regulators and state legislators who also should be bearing this responsibility, and thinking about: what can we put in place to make sure consumers are being protected?

So in states like Virginia, there’s a bill that’s going through the general assembly that is trying to pause disconnections during a state of emergency. Also, in North Carolina, there is a moratorium in place during winter, so when the weather reaches a certain point, you won’t be disconnected because of the temperature.

Those are protections that should be given to every American across this country. It should not be utility-specific or state-specific. It should be a protection that everyone can receive, because everyone does deserve that right to know, even when you are struggling, you do have protection still.

JJ: Selah, can you add to that? And also I love that you would name the names, you have a hall of shame. There are folks who are doing better and worse on this, in terms of just acknowledging what Shelby has just talked about. It’s a reality for many people, and they shouldn’t be punished by having their freaking lights turned off.

So, immediate action, thoughts?

SGB: Yeah, definitely can add to that. And also in the spirit of naming, I can list a couple of who those hall of shame utility companies were. Some of the top three this year were Exelon, Southern Co. and DTE Energy. And NextEra and Duke last year were two of our worst. But as Shelby mentioned, in Florida, since they no longer require utilities to report on household disconnections, we didn’t have any access to that data.

If NextEra were to continue the disconnection rate it had last year, they would’ve definitely topped our list this year. But even without that, they still made the top 12, when we look back from 2020 through October of last year. These dozen companies were responsible for 86% of the power shutoffs we saw.

So it’s a small number of companies that are just causing a massive amount of harm. Again, like Shelby said, it would’ve only taken 1% of the amount spent on shareholder dividends to prevent those disconnections. And so it’s truly inexcusable, and is a result of their corporate greed.

In terms of immediate actions, another state we want to lift up as an example of their regulators and their legislators actually putting money behind this issue is New York. They actually recently forgave the utility debt of almost 480,000 customers through May of last year, recognizing the different crises that were present, that of the climate crisis, in terms of Covid, and this is like a one-time payment, and they also did the same for low-income customers last summer.

But what we’re asking for is a broader forgiveness of utility debt that Congress can hopefully institute by taxing utility profits. As we just saw, it won’t even take that much to stop utility shutoffs, but when it comes to arrearages, it’s a much bigger issue. And that continues to mount.

Again, like Shelby was outlining, it doesn’t take a disconnection for someone to suffer from the punitive financial measures that these utilities are imposing. And so some other solutions we’re proposing, again, is some disconnection data transparency. In that light, we’re hoping that the Energy Information Administration or state utility commissions are able to mandate these utilities to start tracking and disclosing power and gas shutoff data on a monthly basis, and also include zip code and demographic data, so we know who is being impacted and where.

And we’re also hoping to just institute a shutoff ban. As Shelby said, it shouldn’t be limited to specific times of the year, specific temperatures, or specific states or utilities. Everyone has a right to access electricity and heat.

I already mentioned utility debt forgiveness, but I’m also hoping that Congress boosts funding for LIHEAP and WAP, the Weatherization Assistance Program.

And finally, we’re really trying to start a narrative around the need to really get off of this obsession with fossil fuels. We see how volatile fossil fuel prices are, but we also see how, again, they are what drives the climate emergency, and we’re hoping that the Biden administration uses its executive powers to halt new fossil fuel production and infrastructure.

There are a couple others we could go through, but I know I’ve been talking for a minute, so I don’t know, Shelby, if you wanted to add anything in that light.

SG: I thought that was a great listing.

JJ: Yeah. Let me just ask you both, in terms of journalists, because it seems like you’re in another world, in some ways, than the way that corporate media discuss things.

This kind of conversation is largely off the page, and so I would like to ask you both– obviously folks who are media consumers are also the same folks who might have their lights shut off, you know? But then they pick up the paper, and the paper tells them what the problem is and what the solution is.

And I would like to ask you both: What would you have journalists do? Who would you have them talk to? What questions would you have them ask that could turn this conversation around? And how do we reorient folks to the conversation that might change things?

SG: I think where journalists can start is just going up to people in parking lots, or people at the park, asking them, have you looked at your utility bill lately? Have you noticed any changes in your utility bill?

When I first started learning about shutoffs and utility bills, that’s what I did. I had a petition. I went to the park. I was asking people if they’ve noticed a difference in their utility bill, if they’ve accrued any debt during the pandemic. And I was asking them to sign a petition to make sure my city extended a moratorium, so people didn’t lose power.

So where journalists can start is just start talking to everyday people, and get them to look at things that they’ve stopped looking at, potentially. Not a lot of people look at the fees or charges that are hidden within their utility bill.

And so, yeah, I would just encourage journalists to get everyday residents to start thinking about energy, looking at their utility bill, even scheduling tours with their local utility, and understanding, where does the fuel come from, and what are the factors that are set in place that impact my utility bill?

But there’s not enough everyday people who are thinking about energy, and I don’t blame them. It’s a very difficult topic. Most people just turn on the switch, and that’s the most thinking they do about it. And then when you try to start looking at things, it’s a little bit complicated, because you don’t have access to utility executives, and you don’t understand what decisions they’re making that influence your bill at the end of the day.

So journalists really are the middlemen between the everyday people and the people in power, and the people that sit on those boardrooms for utilities. Those are the spaces where journalists need to be, and they need to disseminate this information in a more direct way to everyday consumers, so they really understand what’s impacting my utility bill, and what can I do to make sure that it’s not increasing.

Like right now across the country, there are utilities who are requesting rate increases from their public service commissioners. That information needs to be disseminated to everyday people, and people need to feel like they have a voice in the process.

They should use this voice. They should file testimony in these rate cases, and they should be more engaged. If we’re not engaged with society, then utilities will continue to do whatever they want, and that will impact us in a negative way.

JJ: Selah Goodson Bell, final thoughts?

SGB: Yeah, that was well said. I don’t have much to add; I just want to echo that last point that Shelby was talking about, of basically opening up the Pandora’s box of what the public service commission is doing and the hearings that they have. These are public hearings that folks don’t have access to, or, like Shelby was saying, they might be talking about topics that feel out of touch, that feel wonky, but know they are topics that affect people on a daily basis.

And I think journalists can do a better job of trying to break those topics down, and know that those are spaces where folks need to be. And so trying to uplift folks in those spaces, but then also translating a lot of the admittedly wonky topics that we’re talking about in a way that everyday people can understand, and feel pressured to get engaged on, so that they can actually hold these utilities accountable and, again, hold their regulators accountable.

JJ: I’d like to thank you both very much. We’ve been speaking with Shelby Green, research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute, and Selah Goodson Bell, energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. Thank you both so very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SG: Yeah. Thank you for having us.

SGB: Thank you.

The post ‘Everyone Has a Right to Electricity and Heat’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Evan Greer on the Fight for the FCC

      CounterSpin230210.mp3

(image: Fight for the Future)

This week on CounterSpin: Why does it matter to me, a media consumer, internet user, a person concerned with social justice—why does a 2–2 deadlock at the FCC matter to me? What could be happening if Biden’s long-languishing nomination of public interest advocate Gigi Sohn were put through? Net neutrality, an anti-discrimination law around broadband access that isn’t written by corporations? Maybe US citizens could stop paying more for slower broadband than just about every other industrialized country? We won’t know unless Democrats stand up to the series of increasingly absurd and offensive smears on Sohn. And that remains to be seen.

Evan Greer tracks technology and its meaning for justice activism as director of Fight for the Future. She’ll help us place the fight around Gigi Sohn’s FCC nomination in that keystone public conversation.

      CounterSpin230210Greer.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the Covid death toll.

      CounterSpin230210Banter.mp3

The post Evan Greer on the Fight for the FCC appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
February 3, 2023

Facebook Protects Nazis to Protect Ukraine Proxy War

Good news! Neo-Nazis are no longer dangerous, says Facebook (Kyiv Independent, 1/19/23).

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced on January 19 that the company no longer considers Ukraine’s Azov Regiment to be a “dangerous organization.” The far-right paramilitary group grew out of the street gangs that helped topple Ukraine’s president in the US-backed 2014 coup. Originally funded by the same Ukrainian oligarch that backed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rise to power, Azov was on the front lines of civil war in Eastern Ukraine, and was later fully integrated into the Ukrainian national guard.

The main outlet to report on this move was the Kyiv Independent (1/19/23), a Ukrainian newsroom closely linked to Western “democracy promotion” initiatives. These ties are reflected in its coverage of Facebook’s move. Take the description of the Azov Regiment:

The group has sparked controversy over its alleged association with far-right groups—a recurring theme used by Russian propaganda.

The “association” with “far-right groups” has been far more than “alleged,” and is well documented and openly acknowledged by members of the organization. Even the use of “far-right” downplays the fact that they have regularly been seen sporting Nazi symbols and even making Nazi salutes. NATO was forced to apologize after tweeting a photo of the regiment, circulated as part of public relations for the war, in which a soldier was wearing a symbol from the Third Reich (Newsweek, 3/9/22).

The danger of white-supremacist military units used to be widely acknowledged in corporate media (Time, 1/7/21; see FAIR.org, 5/18/22).

Even the logo of the Regiment is a variant of a popular Nazi symbol. Another Nazi symbol affiliated with Azov was printed on the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter’s jacket as he opened fire on multiple mosques in 2019.

The founder of the regiment once asserted (Guardian, 3/13/18) that Ukraine’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Even the US Congress, who was funding the Ukrainian military years before the war, acknowledged the regiment’s neo-Nazi affiliation. In 2018, it passed a law restricting those funds from going to Azov fighters (The Hill, 3/27/18). However, officials on the ground acknowledged that there was never any real mechanism preventing the aid from reaching Azov (Daily Beast, 12/8/19).

The Kyiv Independent article was republished in the US press by Yahoo News (1/19/23)—with a note appended with a link to the Independent’s Patreon fundraising account.

The Washington Post (1/21/23) also reported on the move, suggesting that the “Azov Regiment” is now separate from the “Azov Movement,” since the Regiment is now formally under the control of the Ukrainian military. The Post, which called the Regiment “controversial,” did not criticize Meta’s move, and instead highlighted Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, who praised the decision.

The tech news site Engadget (1/21/23) noted that “the change will allow members of the unit to create Facebook and Instagram accounts.”

Backing NATO PR

The emblem of the 2nd SS Panzer Division (left) compared with those of the Azov Battalion (center) and Azov Regiment (right) (FAIR.org, 10/6/22).

This isn’t the first time that the platform’s policies were used to promote US public relations objectives. In February 2022, Facebook announced that it would carve out an exception to its policy against praising white supremacy to accommodate the Azov Regiment (Business Insider, 2/25/22). In March 2022, Facebook announced it would allow posts calling for violence against Russians within the context of the invasion (Intercept, 4/13/22). This included allowing users to call for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Facebook encouraged even more ethnic hate against Russians by relaxing policies on violent or hateful speech against Russian individuals. Materials reviewed by the Intercept (4/13/22) showed that Facebook and Instagram users were now allowed to call for the “explicit removal [of] Russians from Ukraine and Belarus.” In sharp contrast with its policy against allowing graphic images of the victims of Israel’s attacks on Palestine, the platform began to allow users to post such images from Russia’s invasion (Intercept, 8/27/22).

All of this has contributed to the normalization, or even embrace of neo-Nazis in the US. Early in the war, Western media uncritically promoted an Azov publicity event while making no mention of the group’s Nazi ties (FAIR.org, 2/23/22). In October, the New York Times (10/4/22) wrote a laudatory article about “Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion” that completely ignored the group’s Nazi ties (FAIR.org, 10/6/22). An Azov soldier with a Nazi tattoo was even welcomed to Disney World by liberal icon Jon Stewart (Grayzone, 8/31/22).

All of this comes as US media promote ostensible concern about the growth and influence of the far right at home. This blind spot is especially egregious, given the numerous accounts of US white supremacists going to Ukraine to train with the Azov Regiment in preparation of a new US civil war (Vice, 2/6/20).

Featured image: Photo of an Azov memorial service featuring flags with the SS’s wolfsangel symbol, used by Engadget (1/21/23) to illustrate its story “Meta Takes Ukraine’s Controversial Azov Regiment Off Its Dangerous Organizations List.”

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
February 3, 2023

Oil Lobby Prompts Right-Wing Media to Save Whales—From Wind Power

Republicans and right-wing commentators suddenly want to save the whales—and much of the news media is buying it.

As a humpback whale was found on the shore at Brigantine, New Jersey on January 12—the seventh dead whale to wash up on a New York or New Jersey beach since December 5—local Republicans rushed to blame it on offshore wind development projects.

The New Jersey Monitor headline (1/17/23) leaves out crucial information that’s in the lead: “no evidence shows [wind farm construction] caused the [whale] casualties.”

“Not even the whales can survive [New Jersey Gov.] Murphy’s Energy Master Plan,” lamented the Jersey GOP on Twitter (1/18/23). The partisan account linked to a story in the New Jersey Monitor (1/17/23) with the alarming headline “Debate Grows Over Offshore Wind, as Whale Deaths Mount.” The article began by laying out that debate—”environmentalists put out dueling calls to continue or curtail offshore wind work”—before including an important clarification about wind farm construction and the whale deaths: “no evidence shows it caused the casualties.”

The project in question is the recently approved 1,100 megawatt wind project that Danish company Ørsted is expected to build off the New Jersey coast this year. It is projected to power more than half a million homes by 2025. Pre-construction activities, including probing the seabed with a metal rod to test the nature of the soil, have begun.

According to federal National Marine Fisheries Service reports (2/22/18, 4/4/18, 5/4/18) this method of surveying, known as cone penetration testing or CPT, had little noise impact and has not been found to injure marine mammals. A representative from Ørsted told FAIR that the company is not currently using acoustic tests such as sonar in these surveys off the East Coast, and wasn’t in December, either. Ørsted did use acoustic surveys in the early stages of its project, which ended in September 2022.

‘Whales paying the price’

Suddenly Fox News‘ Jesse Watters (1/11/23) cares about whales—when they can be used to make a case against wind power.

That didn’t stop Fox News’ Jesse Watters (1/11/23) from professing outrage. “Something unusual is happening to these whales,” he said:

Maybe this has something to do with it: New Jersey is actively preparing to build massive wind farms right off the coast. And the whales are paying the price, probably. These experts are saying these projects are killing these whales.

In case you missed the point, the report was accompanied by all-caps chyrons with messages like “WIND SURVEYING IS KILLING OUR WHALES,” “OCEAN WINDMILLS ARE THE PROBLEM” and “WINDFARMS ARE UGLY AND THEY KILL WHALES.”

This is from the same Jesse Watters who just two months ago (11/29/22) brought a lobsterman on to condemn Whole Foods for pulling lobsters from its stores due to the risk lobster fishing gear poses to whales. He has also spent much of his career working to discredit the climate movement and dismiss activists as hysterical (Mediaite, 8/5/19; Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/7/22, 9/7/22; Media Matters, 7/21/21, 2/2/22, 10/18/22). But now, suddenly, Watters is a whale conservationist.

The “expert” Watters brought onto his January 11 show was Mike Dean (mistakenly identified as Mike Davis), affiliated with Protect Our Coast NJ, a right-wing nonprofit that has accepted fossil fuel money, disguised as a pro-ocean environmental group (Intercept, 12/8/21). On his Twitter feed, Dean expresses opposition to climate science, and regularly retweeting climate denial posts (Media Matters, 1/12/23).

“The industrial wind companies are out there pounding the seabed with sonar,” Dean incorrectly claimed. “Common sense would tell you that’s what killed these whales. That’s the only new thing going on out there right now.”

Unusual mortality events

CNN (1/20/23) quoted a NOAA official: ““There are no known connections between any of these offshore wind activities and any whale strandings, regardless of species.”

Your “common sense” should take a few other facts into account. First, whale deaths on the Jersey coast have not been isolated to this past December and January. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson said they’re part of a larger spate of “unusual mortality events” the agency has been documenting since 2016, predating these recent wind farm projects (AP, 1/9/23). NOAA Fisheries recorded 17 unusual mortality events of endangered right whales on the East Coast in 2017, and 10 in 2019. It counted no dead right whales in 2022, and one so far in 2023. Humpback whale “unusual mortality events” on the East Coast ranged from 34 in 2017 to 10 in 2021.

Meanwhile, some factors unrelated to wind farms are new: The Port of New York and New Jersey has been the nation’s busiest in recent months, as labor disputes and congestion routed many ships from the West Coast (Post & Courier, 1/13/23).

Also new: The Marine Mammal Stranding Center and NOAA noted that there currently are a high number of large whales in the Mid-Atlantic, due to high numbers of fish they eat remaining in the waters. A 2018 Rutgers study found that warming oceans may be sending crustaceans and numerous fish species further north during the winters. Increasing populations of menhaden—small fish that whales feed on—have also been documented off the mid-Atlantic coast (CNN, 1/20/23).

Sonar, which uses low-frequency noise to detect objects, can potentially interfere with whale navigation (Science.org, 3/21/22). But it’s hardly new. It’s long been in use on the ocean floor by the US military, which often uses it in training missions. Sonar and seismic testing are also used to find oil and gas deposits under the sea bed. Sonar used for wind energy construction surveying is expected to have a much lower sonic impact than the seismic air guns used in fossil fuel exploration (CNN, 1/20/23).

Causes of whale deaths

Contrary to Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson (1/13/23), experts say the leading cause of whale deaths is not Joe Biden.

Leading causes of deaths for whales include ship strikes and entanglement in commercial fishing gear. In fact, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, along with scientists from the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, Mystic Aquarium and Marine Education Research and Rehabilitation Institute, performed a necropsy on the whale found in Brigantine, and determined that a ship strike most likely caused its death, though the investigation is not complete.

According to NOAA, which recently published an FAQ (1/20/23) about its ongoing research on “interactions between offshore wind energy projects and whales on the East Coast,” thus far no whale deaths have been linked to offshore wind development.

Skepticism over the ethics, business practices and environmental impacts of a large international company like Ørsted is healthy. But so is listening to scientists. Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of the Earth, Ocean & Environment, told the Post & Courier (1/13/23) that so far, scientists don’t know much about how offshore wind farm construction will affect right whales, but that her main concern is ship traffic during construction—not sonar before it.

“Meyer-Gutbrod worries that exaggerated claims about wind energy may distract from implementing evidence-based policies that can be a life raft for the species,” the article said.

The distraction is exactly the point for fossil fuel shills and their Fox cheerleaders. Fox’s Tucker Carlson (1/13/23) lamented that, instead of blaming offshore windmills for whale deaths, “the federal government is harassing the people who need the least harassment: commercial fishermen and lobstermen on the East Coast.” In reality, as of 2020, entanglements with commercial fishing gear, along with ship strikes, had “killed or seriously injured at least 31 right whales…since 2017 alone,” according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

‘Stop offshore wind’

NJ.com (1/13/23) says these “calls to stop offshore wind work” come from “climate groups, like Save LBI and the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.” Save Long Beach Island gets legal support from a right-wing fossil fuel–backed think tank (Distilled, 1/5/23); the LICFA is, of course, not a climate group but a commercial fishing association.

But rather than correcting misinformation, local and national papers often amplified false and misleading claims from Fox, Republican politicians and pseudo-environmental fossil fuel–backed groups.

“Murphy & Wind Companies Ignore US Navy Report; Sonar Can Kill Whales” shouted a headline at the Downbeach Buzz local news site (1/17/23).

“Six Dead Whales Wash Up in a Month. Stop Offshore Wind for Investigation, NJ Groups Say,” was a headline at Advance Publications‘ NJ.com (1/9/23). The piece opened with the drama of a dead whale:

Tire tracks in the sand marked the burial ground of a massive humpback whale Monday. The dead 30-foot female whale washed up ashore Saturday and two days later lay buried underneath, leaving behind a decaying rotten smell.

It followed this up with quotes from Clean Ocean Action, a conservationist group opposed to this wind project, offering a clear suggestion of where readers’ sympathies ought to lie.

The story did go on to debunk as false or unsubstantiated the groups’ major claims: that the whale deaths were “unprecedented,” that offshore wind were authorized to “hurt or kill more than 157,328 marine mammals.” But that wasn’t enough to shift the piece’s anti–wind power framing.

Other groups cited included right-wing and fossil fuel-friendly Protect Our Coasts NJ (whose politics the site did not identify), the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and Defend Brigantine Beach—a Facebook group with some members sharing the aforementioned Watters and Carlson segments.

A few days later, the online paper (NJ.com, 1/13/23) was back with “Seventh Dead Whale Washes Up at Jersey Shore. Calls to Stop Offshore Wind Work Grow.” The article “balanced” statements from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center and NOAA against statements from two Republican politicians and Clean Ocean Action.

NY1 and NBC4 New York both published an AP piece (1/9/23) that led with accusations and claims made by the groups critical of the wind farm, waiting until the seventh paragraph to begin to reveal that each claim was unsubstantiated or debunked by the piece’s expert sources.

Consequences of CO₂

This coverage, seemingly more interested in elevating conflict than clarity, misses why wind and other renewable energies are needed in the first place: our world’s unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels—the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change (IPCC, 2018). Never mind that we may run out of them by the end of the century.

At least a quarter of CO₂ released by the burning of fossil fuels is absorbed by the ocean, acidifying the water and threatening sea life. CO₂ in the air causes algal blooms that lower oxygen levels in the water. Wastewater from fracking often contains substances like arsenic, lead, chlorine and mercury that can contaminate ground and drinking water.

And this is if all goes as planned. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates that the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill harmed or killed nearly 26,000 marine mammals, along with 82,000 birds of 102 species, about 6,000 sea turtles and “a vast (but unknown) number of fish… oysters, crabs, corals and other creatures.”

Humans aren’t exempt from the damage either, of course. A 2021 Harvard study (2/9/21) found that “more than 8 million people died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution.”

“Enjoy the View While It Lasts” was NBC10‘s headline (6/17/22) over a story that admits that wind turbines would appear “about an eighth of an inch in size” from the perspective of viewers on the beach.

And the fossil fuel industry is smart. Exxon knew about climate change and its own role in it since 1977, and subsequently spent millions on misinformation campaigns (Scientific American, 10/26/15). It used pseudo-science to cast doubt on the climate change science it knew to be true (NPR, 10/27/21), and to undermine the feasibility, efficiency and profitability of renewable energy (ASAP Science, 9/9/20).

We can’t blame individuals for being confused by clandestine fossil fuel industry lies—they’re designed to be confusing!

Before the sudden concern for whales, opposition to wind farms off the coast of the Jersey Shore was based on a not-in-my-backyard attitude from residents who didn’t want their ocean views altered, and who were concerned about the subsequent effect on tourism (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/15/21).

“They will not be able to look out on the horizon and dream,” one woman was quoted.

“Enjoy the View While It Lasts,” declared an NBC 10 Philadelphia headline (6/17/22) last summer. Note that the wind farm in question will be approximately 15 miles out to sea.

‘Non-scientific’ and ‘dangerous’

At a January 17 news conference covered by NJ.com (1/17/23), climate activists said blaming these whale deaths on offshore wind energy was “baseless,” “non-scientific” and “dangerous.” The outlet quoted Jennifer Coffey, executive director of non-profit Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions:

I think anytime anyone uses the guise of science without actually looking at the data to further their own agenda is dangerous, and when we’re talking about combating climate change the stakes could not be higher.

If local Republicans want to voice their dissatisfaction with Governor Murphy, they’re entitled to do that. But news media’s complicity in using feigned concern for dead whales to shield residents’ fiscal conservatism and fossil fuel interests undermines genuine environmental activism and ignores our planet’s desperate need for clean energy.

The post Oil Lobby Prompts Right-Wing Media to Save Whales—From Wind Power appeared first on FAIR.
February 3, 2023

Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell on Utility Shutoffs & Profiteering

Bailout Watch et al. (1/30/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Powerless in the United States: How Utilities Drive Shutoffs and Energy Injustice is an ongoing project from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Energy and Policy Institute and Bailout Watch. It tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering—because, it turns out, they’re flip sides of a coin.

You and I may think that in disastrous weather conditions (with no signs of stopping), and a pandemic and low wages and a hike in prices, it’s a time to acknowledge workers’ sacrifices and support them. Silly us. Actually, it’s a moment for powerful companies to raise prices on consumers—not to recoup losses, but just to raise profits, as their shareholder speeches will proudly reveal—and why would that gouging stop at life-saving vaccines or medicines? Why not also shut off the power to the homes of struggling families? Seriously, why not? If Wall Street will reward you for it, and corporate media won’t call you out or even seriously, humanistically report on what you’re doing? Or even easier, one might think, argue for the basic transparency that would allow that reporting?

Electric utilities have disconnected US households more than 4 million times since the beginning of Covid, preceding the Russian war on Ukraine. At the same time, shareholder payouts went up by $1.9 billion, increases that could have paid those households’ bills five times over. Our guests’ work illustrates how energy bills take up more and more of families’ earnings, and how the actions of corporations take a tough, in some cases life-threatening situation, make it worse, and then hand it off to their allies in the press corps, who they know will present it as “business as usual if regrettable,” but, above all, nothing worth looking in to or talking about seriously.

Our guests aren’t just complaining; they have ideas about what’s needed to address the situation. Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. We’ll hear from both of them this week on the show.

CounterSpin230203Green_Bell.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the police killing of Tyre Nichols.

CounterSpin230203Banter.mp3

The post Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell on Utility Shutoffs & Profiteering appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
February 2, 2023

You Don’t Stop Police Killings by Calling them ‘Fatal Encounters’

It’s hard to find words after yet another brutal police killing of a Black person, this time of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, captured in horrifying detail on video footage released last week. But the words we use—and in that “we,” the journalists who frame these stories figure critically—if we actually want to not just be sad about, but end state-sanctioned racist murders, those words must not downplay or soften the hard reality with euphemism and vaguery.

The New York Times (online 1/27/23) writes of the “enduring frustration over Black men having fatal encounters with police officers.”

Yet that’s exactly what the New York Times did in recent coverage. In its January 28 front-page story, reporter Rick Rojas led with an unflinching description of the brutal footage, noting that Nichols “showed no signs of fighting back” under his violent arrest for supposed erratic driving.

Yet just a few paragraphs later, Rojas wrote: “The video reverberated beyond the city, as the case has tapped into an enduring frustration over Black men having fatal encounters with police officers.”

People get frustrated when their bus is late. People get frustrated when their cell phone’s autocorrect misbehaves. If people were merely “frustrated” when police officers violently beat yet another Black person to death, city governments wouldn’t be worried, in the way the Times article describes, about widespread protests and “destructive unrest.”

By describing protest as “destructive,” while describing state-sanctioned law enforcement’s repeated murder of Black people as “Black men having fatal encounters with police officers,” the Times works to soften a blow that should not be softened, to try to deflect some of the blame and outrage that rightfully should be aimed full blast at our country’s racist policing system.

That linguistic soft-pedaling and back-stepping language was peppered throughout the piece, describing how police brigades like the “Scorpion” unit these Memphis police were part of are “designed to patrol areas of the city struggling with persistent crime and violence”—just trying to protect Black folks from ourselves, you see—yet they mysteriously “end up oppressing young people and people of color.” Well, that’s a subject for documented reporting, not conjecture.

The New York Times (2/1/23) doubles down on its new euphemism for “killing.”

When a local activist described himself as “not shocked as much as I am disgusted” by what happened to Tyre Nichols, the Times added, “Still, he acknowledged the gravity of the case”—as if anti-racist activists’ combined anger, sorrow and exhaustion might be a sign that they can’t really follow what’s happening or respond appropriately.

Folks on Twitter (1/28/23) and elsewhere called out the New York Times for this embarrassing “Black people encounter police and somehow end up dead” business, but the paper is apparently happy with it. So much so that the paper came back a few days later with an update (2/1/23), with the headline: “What We Know About Tyre Nichols’ Lethal Encounter With Memphis Police.”

In it, Rojas and co-author Neelam Bohra wrote in their lead, “The stop escalated into a violent confrontation that ended with Mr. Nichols hospitalized in critical condition. Three days later, he died.”

Journalism school tells you that fewer, more direct words are better. So when a paper tells you that a traffic stop “escalated into a violent confrontation that ended up with” a dead Black person, understand that they are trying to gently lead you away from a painful reality—not trying to help you understand it, and far less helping you act to change it.

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

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February 1, 2023

Independent Media Need You to Get the Word Out on Social Media

“Liking” a post on social media might not seem like a high-impact action. But nonprofit media groups actually depend a great deal on their readers’ online engagement.

When people like, comment, share and click on the links of independent media posts on a site like Facebook, it tells Facebook‘s algorithm that this is content it should show to others. This increases the amount of people the post will reach. Without these engagements, it is safe to assume that Facebook would show these posts to hardly anyone. More than simply co-signing their content, engaging with posts on social media is a meaningful way of supporting journalism organizations you are sympathetic to by ensuring the organization reaches a larger audience.

To examine the impact of social media engagement, FAIR conducted a study of its effect on our own posts on Facebook. FAIR counted the engagements and total people reached of three of its Facebook posts for each month between November 2020 and October 2022 as of November 1, 2022. These posts were of varied types, including articles, CounterSpin transcripts and promotions.

We found a clear relationship between the amount of engagement and the number of people the post reached: For every one engagement, there were 10 people reached.

Only a slim fraction of its audience engages with FAIR’s posts in the form of reactions (as in a “like” or “heart” reaction), comments, shares or clicks. This fraction of those who engaged changed depending on if the post was an article, a transcript or a promotion.

FAIR found that the more people engaged with its posts, the more people the posts reached. This finding supports existing public knowledge that a post’s reach depends heavily on engagement.

It’s important that left-leaning social media users take this relationship into account, because right-wing digital actors have proven far more effective at manipulating the algorithms of social media sites (Science, 4/9/20). For all the accusations that social media sites are run by “woke mobs,” there’s actually an overrepresentation of right-wing media on social platforms.

And because journalists often rely on these platforms to assess which stories should be told and how they should be framed, the online right has exerted significant influence over what stories corporate media decides to cover (Data and Society Research Institute, 2017). This overrepresentation of right-wing views in corporate media makes it all the more important that an organization like FAIR, working to expose corporate media bias, gets its message across on social platforms.

FAIR’s study found that, on average, only 2.7% of the people reached by one of FAIR’s posts will “like” it. Promotional content like fundraising pitches fared even worse, with only 1.6% of people reached liking these posts.

It’s easy to understand why this might be. Who truly likes fundraising pitches, anyway? And unless you are extremely well off, you can’t be expected to contribute to every fundraising drive for every nonprofit you support. So you might think the best thing to do is just to keep scrolling. To “like” a fundraising post without donating might seem hypocritical, right?

Please don’t think that way! It is actually a free method of putting that fundraising pitch in front of someone who might be more willing to contribute this time around.

The bottom line: If you are interested in helping nonprofit organizations like FAIR to help get their word out on social media, and countering the right’s digital influence, it’s worth interacting more with posts you think others should see.

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

Goldilocks Wants to Eat the Poor

The 19th century English fable Goldilocks tells the story of a young girl who breaks into the home of three bears and eats their porridge. Luckily, they have three different bowls ready for consumption: One is too hot. One is too cold. The other is just right.

Naturally, in setting monetary policy, the Federal Reserve wants to be like Goldilocks. But its concern is not porridge; it’s the US economy. How does it want it? Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.

The main way that the Fed adjusts the economic temperature is by setting interest rates: By raising the cost of borrowing, the Fed slows down the economy, depressing wage gains and often increasing unemployment.

In her search for equilibrium, Goldilocks has a friend in corporate media. The search for the just-right interest rate, one that will punish workers—but no more than necessary, trust us!—is cheered by supposedly objective reporters at outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

‘Weirdly narrow measure’

The latest numbers would suggest Goldilocks—and her media friends—are getting what they want. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) data, released January 12, showed prices rose by 6.5% in December from a year earlier. As the BLS’s news brief (1/12/23) noted, “This was the smallest 12-month increase since the period ending October 2021.” Meanwhile, the unemployment rate has remained low, dropping to 3.5% in December.

Reacting to the new inflation numbers, the liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (Twitter, 1/12/23) quipped, “At this point the case for rate hikes has a real one-eyed-bearded-man-with-a-limp feel—you have to use a weirdly narrow measure to still see an inflation problem.” He and Dean Baker, a progressive economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, both pointed to the annualized CPI rate over the past three months—how much prices would rise in a year, if the recent trend continued. This measure sat below 2%, which they touted as strong evidence for pausing rate increases.

“Given the latest data, it would be irresponsible for the Fed to create much higher unemployment deliberately,” inflation doves were saying four months ago (Project Syndicate, 9/12/22).

Progressives have in fact been advocating a pause on rate hikes for quite some time. Dean Baker, for instance, called for a pause back in September 2022 in a piece he co-authored with the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (Project Syndicate, 9/12/22). In November, the AFL-CIO blasted rate increases, declaring:

The Fed seems determined to raise interest rates, though it openly admits those rates could ruin our current economy as unemployment remains low and people are able to find jobs.

Others, such as progressive economists James Galbraith and JW Mason, have opposed rate hikes since the beginning (Nation, 2/18/22; Slack Wire, 3/2/22).

These progressives believe the porridge may already end up too cold. In particular, they are concerned about the effects that higher interest rates will have on workers, given higher interest rates’ habit of depressing wage gains and hiking unemployment. After all, monetary policy is known to operate with “long and variable” lags; as Krugman has written, “I sometimes think of the Fed as trying to operate heavy machinery in a dark room—while wearing heavy mittens.” So it’s unclear how much of the effect of increased interest rates has already shown up in inflation numbers.

As Raphael Bostic of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta put it in a recent article (11/15/22), “A large body of research tells us it can take 18 months to two years or more for tighter monetary policy to materially affect inflation.” With inflation already falling for six months straight, why risk further rate increases?

‘Gentler path’

Good news, everybody! But not good enough to imagine no longer raising interest rates (New York Times, 1/12/23).

This opposition to interest rate increases is almost entirely ignored in corporate media coverage of inflation data. After the CPI numbers came out on January 12, for instance, the coverage at a number of prominent outlets effectively omitted arguments in favor of pausing interest rates.

Take the New York Times. In an article (1/12/23) released the same day as the CPI numbers, reporter Jeanna Smialek observed:

For the Fed, the report confirms that the slowdown in price gains that officials have long expected is finally coming to fruition. That could help policymakers, who have begun slowing the pace of interest rate increases, feel comfortable moving even more incrementally.

After referencing the Fed’s step down to a 50 basis point (half a percentage point) increase in interest rates in December, after four consecutive 75 basis point hikes earlier in the year—the fastest pace of rate hikes in decades—Smialek wrote:

Now, policymakers have made it clear that they are contemplating an even more modest quarter-point change in February. The fresh inflation data probably bolsters the case for that gentler path, which will give officials more time to see how their policies are playing out in the economy and how much more is needed.

Though the word “probably” is thrown in as a hedge, it’s hard to miss the tacit endorsement of a “gentler path.” This path, of course, does not involve heeding the advice of progressives and abandoning further rate increases, but rather raising rates by a smaller amount than uber hawks might like to see. Smialek elaborated on her reasoning further down the page:

The new report did little to suggest that the problem of rapid price increases has been entirely solved, which is why central bankers are still expected to push borrowing costs at least slightly higher and leave them elevated for some time to wrestle price increases under control.

The idea that the problem of inflation no longer requires rate hikes is not entertained here. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, the foremost economics columnist at the Times tweeted that same day that “you have to use a weirdly narrow measure to still see an inflation problem.”

It takes this article until the third to last paragraph to finally dig up someone opposed to further rate hikes. But this dissenter is not consulted about his dissent; instead, he’s quoted discussing the financial markets’ optimism about a coming dovish turn in Fed policy.

‘Families desperate for signs’

The Washington Post (1/12/23) writes that “American families have been desperate for signs that…the economy, especially the labor market, will continue to stabilize.” Given that “stabilize” is used here as a euphemism for workers accepting lower wages, is this really something US families are “desperate” for?

At the Washington Post, Rachel Siegel’s coverage (1/12/23) of the CPI report was no better. Siegel discussed the Fed’s likely path forward, writing, “Central bankers haven’t finished yet, and they’ve signaled two or three more increases in the coming months.” She did point to the likelihood of a pause in hikes soon, noting:

The obvious risk is that the Fed might slow the economy so much that a recession starts. If history is any guide, that could happen this year as the full effect of high rates takes hold.

But that’s as close as you get to dissent in her piece.

Throughout Siegel’s article, the Fed’s monetary tightening is framed as a noble quest to help besieged Americans overcome their inflation woes. From the second paragraph:

Inflation is still well above normal levels, and the economy remains vulnerable to shocks that could send prices back up. But officials and American families have been desperate for signs that the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation is working and that the economy, especially the labor market, will continue to stabilize in 2023.

A stabilized labor market, in this case, is one in which power has shifted back towards employers after a rowdy period of worker mobilization. Not sure workers at companies like Amazon would be a big fan of that sort of stability. But I can think of someone who would like it. (Hint: his name rhymes with Beff Jezos.)

The piece ends with a quick profile of Mikhail Andersson, the owner of a New York tattoo parlor. Siegel reports that inflation has taken a toll on Andersson’s company. But, she notes, “Andersson has seen a pickup in business since the year began, possibly driven by customers who got gift cards or cash over the holidays. He hopes the trend sticks.” Will you look at that! The Fed is here to save the day.

‘Fed can’t end yet’

The Wall Street Journal (1/12/23) offers the fact that “unemployment is now 3.5%” as a reason “why the Fed can’t signal an end to interest rate increases yet.”

The Wall Street Journal piled on to the heap with three brutally biased pieces on the CPI numbers. One (1/12/23), by Gwynn Guilford, had as its fourth paragraph:

The figures added to signs that inflation is turning a corner following last year’s surge. They also likely keep the Fed on track to reduce the size of interest-rate increases to a quarter percentage point at their meeting that concludes on February 1, down from a half-percentage point increase in December.

No criticism of this path is included. Its likelihood is merely stipulated, its detractors left to the side.

Similar to the Washington Post piece, the article concludes with a quick profile of an American who was negatively impacted by inflation. However, the article does mention that the man, a recent homebuyer, was hurt by higher interest rates as well. So I guess that’s balance.

One of the other pieces in the Journal (1/12/23), by Greg Ip, starts by observing, “Signs are emerging that most of the surge through 2021 and the first half of 2022 was actually transitory—as Federal Reserve officials first thought.” But Ip quickly adds, “This doesn’t mean the inflation battle is over.”

Ip makes his position perfectly clear towards the end of the piece: “Unemployment is now 3.5% and consumers expect 4.6% inflation in the coming year, according to the University of Michigan. This is why the Fed can’t signal an end to interest rate increases yet and the risk of a recession can’t be dismissed.” No argument for a rate pause is entertained.

Finally, in a third piece (1/12/23) titled “Inflation Report Tees Up Likely Quarter-Point Fed Rate Rise in February,” the Journal addressed head on the debate over how much to raise interest rates. “How about not at all?” was not an option. The article started by noting:

Fresh data showing inflation eased in December are likely to keep the Fed on track to reduce the size of interest rate increases to a quarter-percentage-point at its meeting that concludes on February 1.

It then set the frame of debate with the following paragraph:

Fed officials have kept their options open on whether to raise rates by either a quarter percentage point or a half percentage point at their next meeting, saying that the decision would be strongly guided by the latest data about the state of the economy.

So 25 points or 50 points, take your pick. Where’s the dissent from rate-hiking mania? Nowhere.

Marketplace has been another offender in the rate-hiking madness. Its segment (1/12/23) on the CPI data on January 12 concluded cheerily, “The Fed has plenty of reasons to reduce the speed of its interest rate hikes.” Abandon them altogether? No, no, no. Don’t mention that!

Not the Fed’s gauge

While the CPI numbers got prominent coverage at corporate outlets, the inflation gauge actually used by the Federal Reserve to set its inflation target received less attention. The Fed’s preferred measure is the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index, the latest numbers from which were released on January 27 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. According to the Brookings Institution (6/28/21):

Because its formula uses updated data, the PCE is believed to be a more accurate reflection of price changes [than the CPI] over time and across items. Over time, the two measures tend to show a similar pattern, but the PCE tends to increase between 2/10ths and 3/10ths less than the CPI.

That the PCE could provide a more accurate image of inflation, as well as a less alarming one, does not persuade corporate outlets to foreground it in inflation coverage. The opposite, in fact: January’s PCE numbers got fairly sparse coverage in corporate media.

“A closely watched measure of inflation” (New York Times, 1/27/23)—but not that closely watched: While the latest CPI figures were reported on page A1 of the print edition (1/13/23), the PCE numbers ended up on the business page (1/28/23).

At the New York Times, the main article discussing the PCE numbers (1/27/23) registered as a two-minute read, while the other (1/27/23) focused primarily on consumer spending data. At the Wall Street Journal, the headline (1/27/23) folded the PCE release into a story about consumer spending: “Consumer Spending Fell 0.2% in December as Inflation Cooled.” And at the Washington Post, coverage of the numbers was outsourced to an Associated Press wire (1/27/23).

Why might coverage of the PCE numbers pale in comparison to coverage of the CPI data? On the one hand, the answer is rather straightforward. As the BLS puts it in their CPI FAQ, “The CPI is the most widely used measure of inflation.” Moreover, it comes out earlier than PCE data.

On the other hand, though, a disproportionate focus on CPI numbers paints a frightening picture of inflation that would be tempered by a focus on PCE data. The CPI index showed a 6.5% annual increase in inflation in December, whereas the PCE clocked in at 5%. And if the PCE index is what the Fed is actually talking about when it discusses bringing inflation down to a 2% target, wouldn’t it make sense to put PCE data front and center?

Reading the coverage of inflation numbers at corporate outlets brings to mind the old Noam Chomsky quote: “One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda.” Someone who consistently reads outlets like the Times, Post, or Journal (or listens to a show like Marketplace) may not even think to question the idea that rates ought to be raised. The idea that pausing rates could be a reasonable position has been bludgeoned out of their minds by the relentlessly biased framing of the debate by corporate outlets.

Meanwhile, Goldilocks doesn’t seem to care that her porridge may end up cold. Maybe that’s not even what she plans on eating anymore. “Eat the rich?” ponders Goldilocks. “Nah, eat the poor.” And corporate media asks, “Why not?”

Featured image: From Leonard Leslie Brooke’s The Story of the Three Bears.

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