Category: zSlider

January 30, 2023

‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For’ – CounterSpin interview with Michael Mechanic on defunding the IRS

Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Michael Mechanic about defunding the IRS for the January 27, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3

Simon & Schuster (2022)

Janine Jackson: ”But can we afford it?” is Big Media’s core debate question—when the “it” is housing for the homeless or universal healthcare or infrastructure maintenance. We may need it, but alas we, it turns out many times, can’t afford it.

Taxes, of course, are a core way that society pays for things, but as prevalent as is the premise that the country lacks the resources to do things that majorities cry out for—that other industrialized countries do—if anything, louder is the same corporate media’s cry that taxes are too high. And maybe that, come to think of it, is the cause of people suffering.

Those of us who aren’t so wealthy we forget how many houses we own, or mad that people living in boxes don’t pay the state to justify their existence, those of us who think the point to living in a society is shared costs and shared benefits—well, we have a central stake in tax policy, but not so central a place in corporate media’s conversation about it.

Michael Mechanic has been writing about tax policy and its impacts for years. He’s senior editor at Mother Jones, and author of the book Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All, out from Simon & Schuster.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mike Mechanic.

Michael Mechanic: Good to be here.

ProPublica (10/2/19)

JJ: Let’s set up the most current events with a little backstory. I’m thinking about ProPublica, in 2019, reporting that, first of all, the IRS audits the poor—people claiming the earned income tax credit, where average recipients make less than $20,000 a year—that the IRS audits them comparatively more than they do the affluent.

MM: That’s right.

JJ: But then, the salt for that wound is that when Congress asked the IRS why it audits the poor more than the wealthiest—”where the money is,” as Willie Sutton might say—the IRS response was that, well, it’s easy to audit the poor, and it’s really hard to audit the wealthy. And it just doesn’t have enough money or enough people to audit the wealthy, so it just isn’t going to.

Well, their priorities are a separate matter from their budget, of course, but underfunding of the IRS is still a reality. And there was some effort to respond to that, right, in the Inflation Reduction Act. But then what happened there?

MM: Well, the money has been approved by Congress. It’s close to $80 billion over 10 years, and that money should bring the IRS up to where it needs to be. But what happened is, the IRS had a relatively flush budget back in the ’80s, early ’90s, and starting with the Republican Revolution in 1994, with Newt Gingrich taking over the House, Republicans started a concerted attack on the IRS, and chipped away at it over the years.

And especially after 2010, when the Republicans regained the house during the Obama years, they really went after the IRS.

New York Times (10/5/17)

And there were these dog and pony show hearings, drummed-up stuff about the IRS going after conservative groups, which was true, but they were sketchy groups. And also they were going after liberal groups, too—you just didn’t hear much of that at the time.

And what they managed to do is just hack away the IRS budget. They cut it by about 20%, 25%, and they also cut the enforcement budget, more specifically. So the IRS lost a big chunk of its workforce, and most notably, it lost the experts that are required to unravel these incredibly complicated tax returns of sophisticated partnerships and businesses and corporations, and very, very wealthy individuals who have really smart lawyers on their payroll, who are all pushing the envelope of tax avoidance. There’s a lot of gray areas of what’s legal and what’s not.

And when you don’t have the manpower, this stuff is daunting, and you really need sophisticated tax lawyers—who can get paid more, incidentally, in the private sector, right? So the IRS lost a lot of its top guns, and that left it knee-capped and unable to address these wealthy returns, and you saw this soaring of avoidance.

JJ: Right. Like my colleague Jim Naureckas says, cheating on taxes is a luxury only the rich can afford. And that’s certainly exacerbated when the IRS and their enforcement are under-resourced.

MM: Right. Because you have to get caught, and even if they do catch you and call you in, they bring you into this sort of special tax court, which most people have never heard of.

It’s essentially where this very, very top tier of the richest people in America do their litigation with the IRS. And it seems to be somewhat friendly to them, because they win in a lot of cases.

And there’s also an appeals process. If they lose in the tax court, they appeal it and appeal it. And it might cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, but they could save millions in the process.

JJ: Exactly. As opposed to low-income workers who, ProPublica noted, once they were audited—which involved pulling in a lot of documentation that many folks didn’t have—once they were audited, 68% of them were less likely to claim the earned income tax credit in the future, compared to those who weren’t audited. And 14%, they were less likely to file taxes at all.

In other words, poor people, once they go through this auditing process, which is cheaper and easier for the IRS to do, they leave money on the table out of fear.

MM: Right. It’s absolutely true that if you look at the audit rates, it’s always higher on the very bottom, and it used to be pretty high on the very top. Under Obama, I think, 2010 was the year it peaked, and it was basically one in four people who reported adjusted income of over $5 million a year were getting audited—as they should be, because there’s just a lot of cheating that goes on at that level. So you really got to watch carefully what people do.

But as far as the poorer people, a lot of people do claim credits that—you know, they’re not sophisticated people. They don’t have help, or some shoddy tax preparer on the corner tells them they can do this, when they can’t really.

And so there’s also a high rate of audits there, and it’s almost automatic for the IRS. Whereas with these wealthy people, they will do this calculation: How likely are we to be able to get extra money, apart from what we put into our investigation? Which is a bad way of doing it, really, right? It’s the transactional way of thinking about it.

But they do, as an institution, kind of have to think that way: Can our budget justify this? And if it doesn’t, they’ll say, well, let’s just let it pass. Not worth going after Donald Trump’s tax expenses.

JJ: Right. Didn’t the Inflation Reduction Act, to bring us back, didn’t it include some effort to beef up the IRS’s capacities in this regard?

MM: Yeah, that was the point of it. It was almost $80 billion; about $47 billion, $46 billion of that went to enforcement. And there was some footnote in one of the reports, saying that this money will allow the IRS to maintain a workforce of 87,000 people.

Well, the Republicans picked up on that, and started saying “87,000 new IRS agents,” which was completely wrong, and they knew it. The total workforce of the IRS right now is probably around 80,000 people, and they really made it sound like they were going to double the workforce, and hire all these guys to come after middle-class taxpayers and poor taxpayers.

And it was nonsense. What that 87,000 is, is over 10 years of attrition: people leaving their jobs, having to replace them with new people. It would support that workforce, right? But it’s not new agents. And it also included everything from IT guys to the people who answer the phone when you call and need help on your taxes, which has been a big problem.

But see, not only is the IRS strapped with enforcement, an average taxpayer calls the place, can’t even get through when they have problems. So that’s been a real issue, and that makes people hate the IRS even more than—you know, nobody likes the IRS, nobody likes paying taxes. I think a lot of people say, “I believe that we should pay taxes and support the common good.” But personally? everybody hates it.

ProPublica (6/8/21)

JJ: Exactly. And partly because of the opacity and the disconnect between what they feel they’re paying for, and then the responsiveness that they’re seeing. And then, of course, partly because of the very obvious unfairness that folks see, in terms of very wealthy individuals and very wealthy corporations who benefit a lot from social goods. When it comes to tax time, somehow they weirdly owe and pay nothing.

MM: Yeah, I was saying this is why the Republican Party has been basically trying to make it sound like all this funding is going against ordinary taxpayers, when, in fact, the main thrust of it was to beef up its top-notch enforcement and go after the wealthier taxpayers, from which they think they can recoup a lot more taxes already owed.

JJ: But now we’re looking at what listeners will have heard described as the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, which is ostensibly a response to this resourcing of the IRS that the Inflation Reduction Act was going to introduce.

Whether or not it has a chance, we are in fact looking at it. So what might listeners have read about this Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, about what it would do, as compared to what you see it actually doing, should it come to pass?

MM: What it does is repeal almost all of the money that was allocated for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act—it’s like $72 billion out of the $80 billion, it takes back—and it takes back all the enforcement funding.

It takes back funding for oversight for the inspector general of the Treasury for taxation, that actually in 2020 came out with a report on high-income non-filers, which was, I think, embarrassing to some people, basically showing that there’s a lot of very wealthy people that just aren’t even paying. And not only that, the IRS didn’t have the capacity to even go after a lot of them.

Essentially, they want to gut what just happened. The new funding that was given to the IRS, they want to gut it, take it back.

But even just the name of the thing, “Taxpayer Protection Act,” it goes right with the rhetoric of, “The IRS is the bad guy that’s going to come after you.” And it’s easy for people to get riled up about this. And they do. The Republican rhetoric has led to all these crazy TikTok videos and social media posts by militia types, saying, “Yeah, I got your tax refund right here,” showing their guns, and the IRS has gotten all kinds of threats.

Mother Jones (1/4/23)

What this law actually does is make it easier to cheat on your taxes. It doesn’t protect taxpayers. As I put it in my piece, it protects tax cheaters. There are some middle-class people, yeah, they will be audited, but it’s a relatively small amount.

They talk about, they’re going after small businesses. Well, small businesses in America, the way they’re defined, could be quite large. “Small” and “medium-sized” businesses, we’re talking about, in some cases, billion-dollar businesses. Businesses with 500 employees. This is all smoke and mirrors, in a way.

It is interesting; in your intro, you talked about affordability, and that’s talked about quite a bit, but I would almost argue that affordability is beside the point, because we can pay for what we decide we want to pay for. It’s all about priorities—I mean, if you look at our military budget, etc.

But it’s a game that the politicians play. We can afford what we decide to afford, and it all has to do with how much we ask people to pay. So if you slash taxes, of course you’re going to have a bigger deficit. And the Republicans, they’re so against running deficits and the national debt; at least when the Democrats are in power, they complain and complain about the national debt. They never complain about it when the Republicans are in power, which is just kind of interesting.

But then they put forth proposals like this one, the Taxpayer Protection Act, that would actually make the debt worse.

There’s a disconnect there. It’s all politics.

JJ: Absolutely. And that is my point, is that whatever the budget, the priorities are always the bottom line. And then, big picture, I think some folks respond to this whole overarching story about tax cheating as, well, it’s all a game and it’s over my head. Or even, well, it’s OK, because someday I’ll be a billionaire, and I’ll want to hide it from the taxman too.

But to me, it does come back to a big role that I think news media play, which is not just in exposing hidden realities of the way codes work, against who actually pays, against who pays relative to what they bring in.

But I do think that newspapers tell folks a lot about where their interest lies, and also tell them about whether change is even possible. I wonder what you think about the role of reporting in explaining the situation to people, and maybe showing them what levers for change they have.

MM: If you are interested in reading it, there’s actually quite a lot written on this stuff. I mean, I write about it all the time. The New York Times writes about it. ProPublica has done fabulous work on this, really great investigative work showing how people game the system.

And I think what you said earlier, about this ethos that, well, I could get there someday and have these advantages, and so I wouldn’t want to take them away from people. That’s part of this mythical American ethos of mobility that really doesn’t exist. I mean, it’s not real for most people.

We have always fetishized, in America, the rags to riches stories. And in my book, I cite this example where Bono from U2, who is Irish, is talking to Larry King, the former CNN interviewer, and he says, here in America, you look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and you say, someday I could live in that mansion. And in Ireland, we look up at the guy on the hill and say, someday I’m going to get that bastard.

So in America, we really do have a different way of viewing our wealthy people. Sure, we gripe about them, but there’s always this idea, hey, I could make it. And it’s an unrealistic fantasy.

Mother Jones (3/23/21)

JJ: Dorothy A. Brown also who teases out different impacts of tax policy on Black people, for example—which is also a distinction lost in this kind of coverage that we’re talking about.

But she says that she gets pushback, when she talks about disparate impacts of tax policy on different people: “Well, there’s nothing in the tax code about race.” And which, to the extent that that’s true, it’s because that data isn’t collected.

And so I think the same sort of thing can be said about reporting. If I never read about the way tax policy affects different groups differently, well, then I may never actually consider that. I might not think about that. And the idea that there’s an “us” that’s regular folks, and tax policy hits us all equally, and then there’s rich people, and we can think about the way tax policy hits them.

I just feel that journalists, and I know you’ve cited examples, but I feel that journalism in the main could do a better job of situating the role of taxes as a societal resource, and of tax collection, as, like, who it comes from, and who is able to just scurry away from it again and again and again.

Michael Mechanic: “You read very little about taxation as a good thing. It’s always the attacks on taxation, and the reporters act as stenographers.”

MM: There’s also—you read very little about taxation as a good thing. It’s always the attacks on taxation, and the reporters act as stenographers. And I even saw the New York Times the other day, quoting 87,000 new—well, they didn’t say “agents,” but they said new “employees.” And the fact is, if you say you have a business, you have a hundred employees and 20 quit, and you hire 20 more, well, are those new employees? Technically, they’re new, but you’re just bringing your workforce up to speed, right? And that’s what this 87,000 number is.

So whenever you call them new people, you’re kind of missing…. I was like, come on New York Times, you should know better than that.

JJ: Yeah. And it sounds as though they’re putting in new folks to do some sort of ideological mission and that’s not really—we’re talking about a federal agency trying to do its job.

MM: You know what’s interesting? I read about this in Michael Lewis’ book, The Fifth Risk. There are actually some federal agencies that are banned by statute from publicizing what they do, and their victories, and how they help people. The reason those laws exist is because somebody in Congress doesn’t want them to be able to tell their victories, because they want people to see government as this bad thing.

And the government ends up playing all sorts of crucial roles that we never even hear about because of this. I think the IRS is in that realm. I mean, I’m not sure about that, but you don’t see many positive stories about the IRS, in which you actually hear from people within it, because to most of us the IRS is this big, windowless giant, that’s kind of evil and doesn’t have real human beings in it.

JJ: It just brings me back to a kind of misunderstanding that is allowed about the way that the IRS actually works, but then also the way that taxes actually work, and that government actually works. And I guess it brings me back to the beginning of, we have a conversation about how we as a society can’t afford certain things, we can’t pay for certain things, and that exists, that sort of scarcity, lifeboat mentality exists, alongside a situation where people understand that we have incredibly, obscenely wealthy people.

And I look to journalists to connect that disconnect, and tax policy is one way that they could do it.

MM: Yeah. I will admit that at some points when I’m writing, I fall victim to that same thinking, of the affordability thinking. And I’ve had people call me on it, people who are really obsessed with this issue, say, hey, you should read this and this.

But to some degree it’s really true. When I talk about the tax code to people, I say it’s really a moral document. It’s a list of our society’s priorities, what we ask people to pay and what we give in return, and to whom. And the way it’s been structured, for quite a long time, is to give more to people who already have, to the people with passive capital.

Say you have $20 million in excess of your house and your needs, and you put that in the stock market. That’s passive capital. And so you make a lot of money off that, you’re taxed at a much lower rate than the money you get from a paycheck, from working.

And people try to rationalize this in various ways. And one of the things I hear people say is, well, you have to incentivize investment, blah, blah, blah. And I say, what are they going to do with that money? Are they going to keep it under their mattress if you raise the tax rates? I don’t think so.

Biden wanted to raise the capital gains tax rate, which is what you pay on those profits from an asset you buy and then later sell. He wanted to raise it to the same rate as ordinary wages, and that would have been part of the Build Back Better thing. And of course that whole thing just didn’t fly.

New York Times (9/19/21)

The New York Times actually did some great reporting on this, about the revolving door between the wealth management finance world and the Treasury Department.

And so you have people coming in and out of that industry, and that industry lobbies heavily to keep all these tax advantages for the wealthy, and so it’s very hard to get rid of them. Then they leave government, they go back to the firms, they get rewarded for it.

In my reporting, I’ve come across a lot of so-called progressive, extremely wealthy people, and they say, “Hey, I think we should be taxed more, and I’ll say that publicly.” And there are even some groups that exist calling for changes in policy to make the tax code fairer to everyday people, and to tax the wealthy at greater rates.

But then, on the backside, these people are enlisting the wealth industry to manage their money. And the wealth industry is lobbying to keep those advantages. So you’re having it both ways. You get to be the good guy, and you’re helping the bad guys.

JJ: I want to end just there, where we’re talking about human beings, because that’s actually at the front end and the back end of all of this. So we will continue this conversation going forward, but for now, I’d like to thank you very much.

We’ve been speaking with Mike Mechanic; he’s senior editor at Mother Jones and the author of the book Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. Thank you so much, Mike Mechanic, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MM: I really appreciate you having me.

The post ‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

To US Papers, Iranian Weapons Far More Newsworthy Than Those Made in USA

One official enemy’s arms sales to another official enemy are frequently highlighted in headlines (New York Times, 9/25/22).

Russia’s use of Iranian-made drones in the Ukraine war has garnered substantial attention in flagship US news outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. These papers’ first references to the matter came on July 11. Between then and the time of writing (January 24), the publications have run 215 pieces that mention Ukraine and the words “Iranian drones,” “Iranian-made drones,” “drones made in Iran” or minor variations on these phrases. That’s more than one mention per day over six-and-a-half months.

The fact that some of Russia’s drones are made in Iran is not only frequently mentioned, but is often featured in headlines like “Iran to Send Hundreds of Drones to Russia for Use in Ukraine, US Says” (Washington Post, 7/11/22), “Ukraine Warns of Growing Attacks by Drones Iran Has Supplied to Russia” (New York Times, 9/25/22) and “Russia’s Iranian Drones Pose Growing Threat to Ukraine” (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/22).

Drones are, of course, just one type of weapons export among many, and US-made armaments have not received similar coverage when they are implicated in the slaughter of innocents.

US-made bombs in Gaza

Middle East Eye (5/18/21): “The US has agreed…to give Israel $3.8bn annually in foreign military financing, most of which it has to spend on US-made weapons.”

One example is Israel’s May 10–21, 2021, bombing of Gaza. According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli military killed approximately 245 Palestinians, including 63 children, and “totally destroyed or severely damaged” more than 2,000 housing units:

An estimated 15,000 housing units sustained some degree of damage, as did multiple water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure, 58 education facilities, nine hospitals and 19 primary healthcare centers. The damage to infrastructure has exacerbated Gaza’s chronic infrastructure and power deficits, resulting in a decrease of clean water and sewage treatment, and daily power cuts of 18–20 hours, affecting hundreds of thousands.

Israel’s attack was carried out with an arsenal replete with US weaponry. From 2009–20, more than 70% of Israel’s major conventional arms purchases came from the US; according to Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Israel’s “major combat aircraft come from the US,” notably including the F-16 fighter jets that were bombarding Gaza at the time (Middle East Eye, 5/18/21). As the Congressional Research Service (11/16/20) noted six months before the attack on Gaza, Israel has received more cumulative US foreign assistance than any other country since World War II:

To date, the United States has provided Israel $146 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. At present, almost all US bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.

I searched the databases of the Times, Journal and Post for the equivalent terms I used for the Iranian drones used in Ukraine, and added analogous terms. In the one-month period beginning May 10, just 15 articles in these papers mentioned Israel’s use of US weapons, approximately half as many stories as have been published on the Russian use of Iranian-made drones each month.

‘Strongly backing’ attacks on Yemen

Rather than making a top journalistic priority of the question of whether their readers’ own government contributed to the slaughter being reported on, the New York Times (1/21/22) waits until the 23rd paragraph to bring it up.

A grisly case from the ongoing Yemen war is another worthwhile comparison for how Iranian weapons exports and their US counterparts are covered. On January 21, 2022, the US/Saudi/Emirati/British/Canadian coalition in Yemen bombed a prison in Sa’adah, killing at least 80 people and injuring more than 200. The US weapons-maker Raytheon manufactured the bomb used in the atrocity.

In coverage from the month following the attack, I find evidence of only two articles in the three papers that link the slaughter and US weapons. A New York Times story (1/21/22) raised the possibility that US-made bombs killed people in Sa’adah:

It was unclear whether the weapons used in the airstrikes had been provided by the United States, which in recent years has been by far the largest arms seller to Saudi Arabia and the [United Arab] Emirates, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors weapons transfers.

The one piece that explicitly pointed to US culpability in the Sa’adah massacre was an op-ed in the Washington Post (1/26/22) that referred to “ample evidence showing US weapons used in the attack.” Thus the Wall Street Journal didn’t consider US participation in a mass murder that killed 80 people to be newsworthy, and the Times and Post evidently concluded that US involvement merited minimal attention. The Post (1/21/22) even ran an article that misleadingly suggested the US had ceased to be a major factor in the war:

The United States once strongly backed the Saudi-led coalition. But President Biden announced early last year that Washington would withdraw support for the coalition’s offensive operations, which have been blamed for the deaths of thousands of civilians. The Trump administration had previously halted US refueling of Saudi jets operating against the Houthis. Some members of Congress had long expressed outrage over US involvement in the war, including weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

Yet mere weeks before Sa’adah killings, Congress signed off on a Biden-approved $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia (Al Jazeera, 12/8/21). That means Washington is still “strongly back[ing]” the coalition, notwithstanding the hollow claims that such weapons are defensive (In These Times, 11/22/21).

‘Expanding threat’

David Ignatius (Washington Post, 8/24/22) refers to drones that explode when they hit a target as “suicide drones.” Are missiles that explode when they hit a target committing suicide?

The coverage of Iran’s weapons exports and the US’s also diverges in terms of the analyses that the outlets offer.

David Ignatius told his Washington Post (8/24/22) readers to “beware the emerging Tehran/Moscow alliance.” In the periods I examined, there is a marked shortage of articles urging readers to “beware” the Washington/Tel Aviv or Washington/Riyadh alliances, despise the bloodshed they facilitate.

The Wall Street Journal (10/28/22) contended that

Russia’s expanding use of Iranian drones in Ukraine poses an increasing threat for the US and its European allies as Tehran attempts to project military power beyond the Middle East.

The article went on to say that “the Western-made components that guide, power and steer the [Iranian] drones touch on a vexing problem world leaders face in trying to contain the expanding threat.” The piece cited Norman Roule, formerly of the CIA,

warn[ing] that the combination of drones and missiles one day might be used against Western powers. “This Ukraine conflict provides Iran with a unique and low-risk opportunity to test its weapons systems against modern Western defenses,” Mr. Roule said.

The US weapons that helped lay waste to Gaza and snuff out dozens of prisoners in Sa’adah are barely presented as having harmed their victims, and not at all as an “increasing” or “expanding” threat to rival powers such as Russia or China, or to anyone else.

‘Malign behavior’

A co-author from the “United States Institute for Peace” (Washington Post, 12/6/22) suggests sending “US military escorts” into an active war zone. What could go wrong?

In the New York Times (11/1/22), Bret Stephens contended that the Biden

administration should warn Iran’s leaders that their UAV factories will be targeted and destroyed if they continue to provide kamikaze drones to Russia, in flat violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231. If Tehran can get away with being an accessory to mass murder in Ukraine, it will never have any reason to fear the United States for any of its malign behavior. Every country should be put on notice that the price for helping Moscow in its slaughter will be steep.

Of course, the UN charter does not give individual countries the right to attack other nations they perceive as violating UN Security Council resolutions. And needless to say, the Times, Journal and Post do not say that US responsibility for mass murder in Palestine and Yemen means that weapons factories in the US should be “targeted and destroyed” by a hostile power. Nor do they suggest that the US should be “put on notice” that there will be a “steep” “price for helping” Tel Aviv or Riyadh in their “slaughter.”

William B. Taylor and David J. Kramer argue in the Post (12/6/22) that Iranian drones are among the few “Russian weapons that work,” and that the US needs to “provid[e] Ukraine with missile defense, anti-drone and antiaircraft systems.” None of the articles I examined said that anyone should give military hardware to the Palestinians or Yemenis for protection against US-made weapons.

If these outlets’ concern about Iranian arms exports to Russia were about the sanctity of human life, there wouldn’t be such a gap between the volume and character of this coverage compared to that of US weapons piling up corpses in Palestine and Yemen. Instead, corporate media have focused on how official enemies enact violence, and downplayed that which their own country inflicts.

The post To US Papers, Iranian Weapons Far More Newsworthy Than Those Made in USA appeared first on FAIR.

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

Michael Mechanic on Underfunding the IRS

CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3

This week on CounterSpin: If repeated messaging about how we “can’t afford” public goods but we should always be “cutting taxes” isn’t discordant enough, corporate media’s guiding yet unspoken theory has some corollaries—one of which is that because wealthy people pay large (if not proportionate) amounts of money in taxes, they should get policies that reward them, including those allowing them to keep, and grow, their extreme wealth and its concomitant power. That’s how we wind up with congressional Republicans’ efforts to claw back the attempts the administration made to actually help the IRS start to audit the notoriously tax-avoiding wealthy. The message from many politicians and their media amplifiers: Cheating on taxes is a luxury only the rich can, or should be able to, afford.

We know come April there will be a swell of “news you can use” stories about how to save a dime or two on your taxes. We get a bigger picture story this week from Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic, author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.

CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3

The post Michael Mechanic on Underfunding the IRS appeared first on FAIR.
January 26, 2023

If You Won’t Sacrifice Workers to Fight Inflation, You’re Off the Op-Ed Page

Inflation surged in the spring of 2021, hit a 40-year-high rate of 9.1% in June 2022, and was still running at a historically high 6.5% at year’s end. Coverage of inflation has surged along with this rise in prices, with the volume of inflation coverage reaching levels not seen since the 1980s. One analysis (CAP Action, 12/22/21) found that in November 2021, CNN and MSNBC gave inflation roughly double the combined coverage of “jobs, wages and healthcare.”

Despite the New York Times‘ warning (11/8/22), Democrats lost a respectable nine seats in the House and actually gained a Senate seat.

Inflation has, unsurprisingly, taken center stage in the public consciousness. Voters in a pre-midterms poll (Data for Progress, 10/27/22) ranked it as their top issue by a solid 15 percentage points. The New York Times (11/8/22) noted that polling before the vote revealed “the highest level of economic concern headed into a midterm election since 2010, when the economy was coming out of the worst downturn since the Great Depression.” And exit polling put inflation at the top of the list of issues for voters.

Meanwhile, a debate has been raging over all things inflation: How high will it go, how long will it last, what should be done? Call it the Great Inflation Debate. Central to this debate has been the role of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and what it should do, if anything, to quell the phenomenon.

Many on the left, so-called “inflation doves” (e.g., Nation, 2/18/22; In These Times, 9/22/22; Chartbook, 10/26/22), have been highly critical of the Fed’s reliance on interest rate hikes—which notoriously work by “weakening workers’ bargaining power and forcing them to accept lower wages” (Slack Wire, 3/2/22)—as a response to price increases. More conservative “inflation hawks,” by contrast, have called for aggressive monetary tightening (i.e., substantial rate hikes) to silence the inflationary threat.

The opinion sections of media outlets would seem a natural place to host this debate. Doves on one side, hawks on the other. Now rumble! After all, what is an opinion section for, if not a wide-ranging debate that exposes readers to varied perspectives on a pressing issue?

Unfortunately, opinion sections at corporate news outlets are notorious for their failure to include progressive voices. As the Columbia Journalism Review (5/8/18) pointed out in 2018, despite the growing prominence of the left in politics, left-wing thinkers have remained poorly represented on major op-ed pages. The “virtually nonexistent” presence of socialists at these outlets contrasts sharply with readers’ calls for more left-wing voices and the popularity of socialism with the American public—recent polling shows over a third of Americans have a positive view of socialism (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).

The Great Inflation Debate offers yet another example of this marginalization of left-wing voices. At the Washington Post and New York Times, two of the most widely read establishment newspapers, the opinion sections have fallen short in providing readers with exposure to progressive voices on inflation. In one case, the failure has been abysmal. In the other, it’s been merely painful.

Hawks and hawks and hawks, oh my!

Larry Summers went full Bond villain as he declared from a tropical beach (Vice, 1/10/23), “There’s going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation.”

The award for abysmal failure in the field of political balance goes to the Washington Post, where hawks reign supreme. Top hawk is Larry Summers, treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and devout neoliberal, whose inflation takes have been prominently featured on the Post’s opinion pages (2/4/21, 3/17/22, 12/19/22), including in pieces by the editorial board (3/20/21, 9/21/22) and other columnists (6/13/22, 12/14/22). Summers has morphed into an almost cartoonish villain over the course of the Great Inflation Debate, in one recent instance requesting a dash of unemployment while comfortably reclined, hands clasped, by a tropical beach.

Up until recently, when Summers (12/19/22) endorsed the Federal Reserve’s “approach of stepping more gingerly,” his op-eds for the Post have been appallingly hawkish. He was already declaring “tightening” as “likely to be necessary” back in May 2021 (5/24/21) and has consistently called for interest rate hikes over the last year (e.g., 3/15/22, 4/5/22, 10/31/22). Even after the Fed raised the cost of borrowing in March 2022 and signaled its determination to do so again six more times before the end of the year, Summers (3/17/22) reprimanded it for being insufficiently hawkish, stating, “I fear the economic projections of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) represent a continuation of its wishful and delusional thinking of the recent past.”

A core complaint of Summers’ is that the labor market is too tight, a polite way of saying that workers have become too empowered. Ironically, in the summer of 2020, not long before his descent into inflation hysteria, Summers had penned a piece for the Post titled “US Workers Need More Power” (6/28/20). Less than a year later, Summers (5/24/21) fretted, “Higher minimum wages, strengthened unions, increased employee benefits and strengthened regulation are all desirable, but they, too, all push up business costs and prices.” You see, he wants to help workers. But you know what really helps workers? Higher unemployment.

‘The power to quit’

Other Post columnists have not been much better. Jennifer Rubin (6/1/22) has invoked the specter of inflation to lambast Biden’s plan for student debt cancellation. Catherine Rampell (7/12/22) has complained about pesky state lawmakers’ plans for boosting residents’ incomes to shield them from inflation, dubbing these plans “actively harmful in the fight against inflation.” In the same article, she criticized student debt cancellation for its (negligible) inflationary impact and endorsed hiking interest rates instead. Rampell (7/5/22) has further lamented the Biden administration’s tendency to side with labor instead of pursuing policies that would hurt labor but would “modestly reduce pricing pressures.”

The Washington Post‘s Sebastian Mallaby (6/15/22): “To get inflation under control, the Fed will almost certainly have to cause a recession.”

Sebastian Mallaby (6/15/22, 7/15/22) has called for aggressive rate hikes in response to inflation, lauded Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell as “courageous” following his conversion to tight monetary policy, and argued that due to the high pace of wage growth, “the Fed will almost certainly have to cause a recession” in its fight against inflation. Henry Olsen (5/12/22) has taken abnormally high inflation as an opportunity to advocate cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and, like Summers, has worried (2/10/22) that the Fed’s rate increases won’t be large enough to reverse the low unemployment that “giv[es] workers the power to quit and seek better pay and working conditions elsewhere.”

Megan McArdle has provided some dissent in her columns. In one article from May (5/29/22), she stated the obvious:

It is, of course, bad to lose 8% of your purchasing power to inflation. But it’s even worse to lose a hundred percent of it to unemployment—and the collective suffering of those who lose their jobs is arguably much greater than the pains of households strained by inflation.

She concluded the piece by “wonder[ing] whether [it]’s possible” to “stabilize inflation and then lower it gradually” rather than causing a recession.

In other columns (5/16/22, 9/21/22), however, McArdle has dismissed the idea that corporate profiteering has contributed to inflation as a “conspiracy theory,” and has stopped short of sharp criticism of the Fed, opining that “it’s hard to blame them” for “tightening the screws.”

EJ Dionne, a self-proclaimed “inflation dove,” has likewise dissented from the cacophony of hawks at the Post, expressing in a recent column (12/14/22) his disappointment that the Fed has not signaled a pause in rate hikes. He nevertheless made sure to salute Larry Summers for correctly predicting a rise in inflation.

‘Imposing economic pain’

If columnists are mere mortal combatants, the editorial board might be seen more as a deity, descending from time to time to proclaim the victory of Reason and Justice. For the Post, Reason and Justice assume the earthly form of a hawk. Though the editorial board (8/27/20) approved of the more dovish turn at the Federal Reserve back in 2020, the rise of inflation has led the board to widen its wings and unleash its talons.

The Washington Post‘s first example of a “bad proposal” (4/15/22): “Democratic accusations that companies are driving inflation by price-gouging don’t pass the logic test.” This from a paper whose owner raised the price of Amazon Prime 17% after posting a $14 billion quarterly profit.

The board was already preparing for a more hawkish turn in the spring of 2021, just as inflation was about to take off. In a March editorial (3/20/21), the board commented:

Everything depends on the Fed’s timely willingness to use its anti-inflation tools, even if it means imposing economic pain. We must hope both that the central bank never faces such a test of independence, and that it passes if it does.

The board went full hawk in early 2022, with a February editorial (2/16/22) declaring, “It is time for the Fed to get aggressive.” By April, the board’s impatience was palpable (4/15/22):

We have been urging a long-overdue half-point increase in interest rates for months. The Fed finally seems ready to take this decisive step at its May meeting…. But more bold moves will likely be needed later this year.

The board has maintained this aggressive posture as the Fed has come in its direction on interest rate policy. In a September editorial (9/21/22), the board noted that future rate hikes “will hurt, slowing growth and weakening the labor market. Unfortunately, there is no other good option.” In November, the board (11/1/22) made clear its perfect willingness to accept a recession in exchange for lower inflation. Along the way, it has repeatedly argued (6/1/22, 7/30/22, 10/22/22) against student debt cancellation due to its presumed inflationary impact.

Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire founder of Amazon who has owned the Post since 2013, is undoubtedly more than pleased with the near-universal hawkishness found on the Post’s op-ed pages. Amazon has been facing a worker insurgency since early in the pandemic, which has led to the first successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse, despite intense pressure from management to back down (In These Times, 5/23/22). The aggressive interest rate increases that the Fed has implemented, and that the Washington Post editorial board and many Post columnists have cheered, will have the predictable and intentional effect of weakening workers’ bargaining power. No doubt the Post’s columnists and editorial board are not consciously trying to serve Bezos’ interests, but if they were, they couldn’t do a much better job.

Bezos, in fact, has publicly expressed approval of one of his op-ed writer’s being on-message, retweeting a column by Catherine Rampell (5/16/22) that denounced the “demagogic rhetoric” of blaming “Corporate Greed” (in scare caps) for inflation—what she mocked as the “greedflation theory of the world.” (Defending herself against charges that she was carrying water for her boss, Rampell tweeted—5/18/22—”If Post writers are secretly channeling Bezos’s beliefs, we’re doing a terrible job at it, since our policy views are all over the map.”)

This came after Bezos involved himself in a public spat with the Biden administration over its call for heightened corporate taxation as a response to inflation. As Jacobin (5/23/22) put it:

If you were looking for a digital era version of Citizen Kane behavior, this is it—and it not so coincidentally comes right after President Joe Biden hosted Amazon Labor Union organizers at the White House.

The Washington Post is not exactly expected to be a friend of labor. But, as inflation has surged, it is nevertheless jarring just how anti-labor the Post has revealed itself to be. Democracy may die in darkness, but workers die in Amazon warehouses (Jacobin, 1/9/22; Popular Science, 9/2/22).

Doves…with claws

Yes, says Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/23/22): “There don’t seem to be any realistic alternatives.”

The New York Times has taken a decidedly more moderate stance towards the inflation question. The editorial board has shied away from the bellicosity of the Post, primarily outlining its take on the proper response to inflation in one piece (4/29/22) from April 2022. This editorial, gravely titled “The Courage Required to Confront Inflation,” conceded, “It is time to raise rates.” However, the piece called for “a more measured approach,” and warned against “moving too quickly to confront inflation, or raising rates too high.”

The Times’ relative moderation on the inflation question is reflected in the writings of its op-ed contributors. The most prominent voice in the opinion section has been Paul Krugman, a Times staple who has supplied worthy dissent on important issues such as austerity in the past. Yet Krugman’s unwillingness to step too far left is obvious from his past criticisms of progressives, and it shows up once again in his editorials on inflation.

After his over-optimism in 2021 that inflation would resolve fairly quickly of its own accord, Krugman tacked right in his prescriptions in 2022. In a piece from January 2022, Krugman (1/21/22) pronounced, “it’s time for policymakers to pivot away from stimulus…. The Federal Reserve is right to be planning to raise interest rates in the months ahead.” But he cautioned, “As I read the data, they don’t call for drastic action: The Fed should be taking its foot off the gas pedal, not slamming on the brakes.”

Much like Summers, a central concern of Krugman’s has been the tight labor market. In one of his most recent columns on inflation (12/26/22), he wrote, “My concern (and, I believe, the Fed’s) comes down to the fact that the job market still looks very hot, with wages rising too fast to be consistent with acceptably low inflation.”

The tightness of the labor market has led Krugman to reject more progressive alternatives in the fight against inflation. For instance, in a column from August (8/23/22), he invoked the high level of job openings in his rejection of price controls. He concluded: “There are many good things to be said about a hot economy and tight labor markets, and we’ll miss them when they’re gone. But there don’t seem to be any realistic alternatives.”

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Krugman is that his knack for remarkable clarity in dissent from the mainstream is matched by a firm commitment to resisting the most radical conclusions. Krugman, in stark contrast to commentators like Larry Summers, has vociferously defended the Biden administration’s economic recovery policies, despite their contribution to inflation. Hailing the swiftness of the Covid recovery, Krugman (1/6/22) wrote in early 2022, “accepting inflation for a while was probably the right call.” In another column (2/3/22) from around the same time, he observed, “The costs of unemployment are huge and real, while the costs of inflation are subtle and surprisingly elusive.”

Yet as inflation reached higher, Krugman’s claws came out. In March of 2022, he wrote (3/21/22):

Now, excess inflation suggests that recent US economic growth has been too much of a good thing. Our economy looks clearly overheated, which is why the Federal Reserve is right to have started raising interest rates and should keep doing it until inflation subsides.

So, while Krugman is willing to ask whether a war on inflation is really worth the pain, his answer affirms the orthodoxy, workers be damned.

‘Too low for too long’

The New York Times‘ Peter Coy (8/26/22) recanted his dovish views on inflation: “It’s clear now that the Fed erred by keeping interest rates too low for too long, allowing inflation to get excessively high.”

After Krugman, the most frequent contributor to the Great Inflation Debate at the Times has been Peter Coy, who has provided somewhat more dissent than Krugman on inflation policy. For instance, in a column from March 2022, when Krugman (3/21/22) was advocating a series of rate hikes, Coy (3/16/22) featured an economist, David Rosenberg, opposing further rate hikes after the March one, the first since before the pandemic. Rosenberg provided a rare critique of Paul Volcker, the legendary Federal Reserve chair who slayed inflation in the 1980s (partially by sending the labor movement to the morgue): “‘People tend to forget that in the early 1980s Volcker was reviled,’ Rosenberg said. ‘And no one really knows if inflation was going to fall anyway.’”

In June, Coy (6/17/22) evinced “concern about the Fed’s newfound aggressiveness” and noted, “There are other reasons to think the US economy and inflation are beginning to cool off, even without extreme measures by the Fed.”

His concern has been complemented by an openness to alternative ideas. In October, for example, he recommended cost-of-living adjustments to help protect people against inflation (10/14/22). More recently, in a column (1/4/23) on class conflict and inflation, he displayed interest in incomes policy, which would involve wage and price controls.

Yet even Coy has revealed claws. Though he has been skeptical of rate hikes, he has nevertheless yielded to their necessity. In August, he wrote (8/26/22), “It’s clear now that the Fed erred by keeping interest rates too low for too long, allowing inflation to get excessively high.” That such a blunt instrument, one that has the predictable and intentional effect of weakening workers’ power, obviously must be used in the context of the current inflation is not in question among the Times’ foremost participants in the Great Inflation Debate.

Besides Krugman and Coy, both regular Times columnists, a spattering of other commentators have been awarded spots in the Times’ op-ed pages. Mike Konczal and JW Mason, progressive economists affiliated with the Roosevelt Institute, published a piece (6/15/21) in the summer of 2021 that criticized reliance on interest rate hikes as a response to a surge in demand, and warned:

There is a real political danger that policymakers will be pressured into seeing an economy with more worker power as something to be reined in, under the rationale of avoiding dangerous overheating.

A Times opinion newsletter (12/16/21) from late 2021 featured skeptics of rate hikes, with Eric Levitz noting, “Raising rates could actually make things worse,” and Adam Tooze commenting, “A broad monetary policy squeeze may be a high cost, low return proposition.” The Times has also run a more recent piece (10/4/22) by Tooze pointing out the substantial dangers that Fed policy poses for the global economy. Another notable progressive invite has been Ro Khanna, a California congressmember, who took to the Times (6/2/22) last summer to argue for a more holistic approach to lowering inflation.

There have been a number of other Times editorials written by progressives over the course of the Great Inflation Debate, but while left-wing voices are certainly more common at the Times than the Post, they do not receive serious amplification. There is no major columnist at the Times who has, over the past year and a half, not only written regularly on inflation but outlined a genuinely leftist response, one that does not involve deliberately throwing people out of work in order to reduce labor costs. While the Post may be a caricature of a hawk, the Times more resembles a dove…with claws.

Remember the left wing

James Galbraith (Nation, 2/18/22) points out that “since most American jobs are in services, those wages are also prices”—and that “suppressing wage increases for low-wage American workers is reactionary.”

Corporate outlets may have clipped their left wing, but that does not mean leftists have been silent. In reality, they have been significant participants in the debate over inflation—outside the Post and Times. The economist James Galbraith, for instance, outlined a compelling case against interest rate hikes in the Nation (2/18/22) back in February 2022:

Suppressing wage increases for low-wage American workers is reactionary. And it’s a result that can be achieved only by gouging those workers and their families on their debts and then cutting off their bargaining power over their jobs.

Galbraith urged his audience to recognize that progressive transformation of the economy

will put pressure on the price level. The “inflation” to come is just a condensed reflection of this reality. And the idea that “inflation is the Fed’s job” is just a way of denying that reality while dumping the unavoidable costs of adjustment onto American workers, their families, the indebted and the poor.

Rejecting the idea that the Fed should hurt workers to lower inflation, Galbraith advocated progressive remedies to high prices, including the redirection of resources toward more socially beneficial uses, the de-financialization of the economy, control of healthcare costs through Medicare for All, rent control and selective price controls.

A casual reader of the Times or the Post would almost certainly find this line of reasoning shockingly alien. But they would likely be quite familiar with the argument for interest rate hikes. Repetition has made the thought of weakening worker power seem commonsensical, while exclusion makes the idea of strengthening worker power sound radical.

Opinion sections at these outlets just so happen to prioritize views that line up with the interests of their owners’ class and against those of the poor. What readers get is not a real debate; instead, it’s indoctrination.

The post If You Won’t Sacrifice Workers to Fight Inflation, You’re Off the Op-Ed Page appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘The Cry Is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles’ – CounterSpin interview with Maurice Carney on Patrice Lumumba

Janine Jackson interviewed Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba for the January 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3

Patrice Lumumba

Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will have heard a number of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. this past week—a few searching, many shallow. Importantly, the King holiday usually includes attention to his assassination, as well as to his life and work, though even the best reports, if we’re talking about corporate media, fail to draw the straightest lines between the two.

This week also marks the anniversary of another assassination, that of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo. Elite media appear to find that 1961 murder harder to pave over, and easier to just ignore.

But thinking about it, learning about it, involves the same sort of challenges to the US role in the world, and how racism shapes that role—lessons that we very obviously still need to learn.

We’re joined now by Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Maurice Carney.

Maurice Carney: Thank you. Thank you, Janine. It’s my pleasure to be back with you.

JJ: I will ask you to begin where we have in the past, with a reminder to listeners about January, 1961, and the circumstances of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. How was the US involved, but also why was the US involved?

(PublicAffairs, 2008)

MC: Yes, the United States was directly involved. In fact, Janine, the United States State Department released declassified documents a number of years ago, in the last seven years or so, and those declassified documents revealed that the operation in the Congo on the part of the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency, the covert operation, was the largest in the world at that time, in terms of financing.

And the chief of station, Larry Devlin, chief of station of the CIA in the Congo, he wrote a book entitled Chief of Station, Congo, and he laid out why that the United States felt that Congo was important, and that it remained in the sphere of influence of the United States.

Larry Devlin said, in essence, that if we did not overthrow Lumumba, not only would we have lost the Congo, we would’ve lost all of Africa.

So Devlin centered the Congo as a part of US overall foreign policy, strategic policy for the African continent. So the overthrow of Lumumba was vital to the United States.

And we say “overthrow” because, in Devlin’s book, it’s really a playbook that he lays out for how the United States moves against democratically elected leaders who are not necessarily inclined to toe Washington’s line.

And that was the problem that the United States had with Lumumba, that he was an African nationalist and a pan-Africanist, one who loved his people, loved the continent, and, as Malcolm X stated, he was the greatest African leader to ever walk the African continent.

And the reason why Malcolm X said that is because he saw that the US couldn’t reach Lumumba, in the sense that they couldn’t corrupt him, they couldn’t entice him to sell out his people for trinkets, just like some of the other Congolese leaders had done.

So the Congo was key, and it’s key for a whole host of reasons that we can share a little later.

JJ: And the idea that the CIA chief of station, Larry Devlin, would use the pronoun “we”—”we” might lose Africa. This is so deeply meaningful in terms of policy narrative, and here’s where media come in to play their role of serving this narrative.

And I know that you’ve spoken in the past about the role that US news media played in working with the CIA and Larry Devlin and other US foreign policymakers to destabilize Congo and Lumumba. Media storytelling carried a lot of weight here.

A painting of Patrice Lumumba by Bernard Safran, commissioned by Time magazine but not published.

MC: Absolutely, absolutely. The narrative is critical. It was a number of years ago we talked about, Time magazine at the time was portraying Lumumba as a monster, basically laying the groundwork to justify his liquidation and removal from power.

We paint this picture of a monster to the global media when covert action is actually implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency, the US government, then folks are going to say, well, oh, he was a monster anyway. So it doesn’t matter if he was democratically elected. Doesn’t matter if he was a legitimate prime minister. He was a bad guy.

And the United States and its media and its people see themselves as the good guy. So if the good guys move in and get rid of the bad guys, then it’s fine.

And this is really an important point, too, Janine, because that narrative, these people who were involved at the time, some of them are really still alive today. They write books and they make films to paint themselves in a positive light, because of their concern of the repercussion of history, when the truth actually comes out, in terms of the dastardly role that they played, in not only removing a democratically elected leader who was subsequently assassinated, but also imposing a dictatorship over the Congolese people, in essence destroying any prospect of a peaceful, democratic, prosperous country in the heart of the richest continent on the planet.

So recounting the story and correcting the history and continuing to tell the story, especially during the commemoration of Lumumba’s assassination, is so vital. It’s so critical, and it’s not something that is stuck in the past, but it’s very, very much relevant for today, because the same forces that were at play in the ’60s to remove Lumumba are at play today in terms of keeping the Congolese from advancing and fully benefiting from the enormous wealth that’s in their country, which is what Lumumba stood for.

He made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to serve the interest of the Congolese people. He was going to leverage the wealth of the Congo, not only for the benefit of the Congo, but for Africa as a whole.

This basically scared the Western powers, because they thought they were going to lose access to the resources that we’ve learned, over the decades, are vital to a whole range of industries—not only in the West, but global industries.

NPR (12/20/22)

JJ: This is absolutely a story about this very day today, and it’s so important to not think of this as a historical commemoration. But when I looked for coverage, I found pretty much nothing in terms of US media coverage.

But I did find, for example, when I was just looking for references to Lumumba, one of the things I found was the Dutch prime minister’s official apology for that country’s role in slavery and in the trading of enslaved people.

And I wanted to ask the role of these official statements, about apologies, which is not the same thing as a truth and reconciliation conversation, but these official apologies in the context of a general informational void about the specific actions and attitudes that created the phenomenon that now official people are sad about.

And with context to Congo, I just wonder: This is the coverage, this is what media covers, is when a powerful person says I’m officially sorry, and that’s not the kind of coverage we need.

MC: Right. And that’s in line with narratives over the past few years, right? Because, see, even the summer of 2022, you have the Belgian king, who had gone back to Congo. He didn’t apologize for the role that Belgium played in basically plundering and destroying the Congo. But he said he regretted it.

And this apology, regret, it’s really important, because remember, one of the events that shot Lumumba into world attention was his June 30, 1960, inauguration speech, where he laid out in excoriating detail the nature and the scope of the brutality of King Leopold II in the Congo and Belgian colonialism.

CNN (9/10/22)

So we are talking about some 60 years later, where you have the Dutch or the Belgians issuing apologies or regrets, it really doesn’t carry weight for the masses of Africans. And I say that because, if you recall the passing of the queen of England, and if you look at the coverage, you saw that Africans writ large were basically celebrating, and recounting in detail the atrocities that the British colonial power carried out, not only in Africa, but certainly in India and in Asia.

So this apology narrative, Janine, it’s really an elite affair. And the broadcasting of it is sharing the crocodile tears of elites. But if you consult the masses, if you look at the oppressed masses, the working class, you’ll find the type of response that they have, not only to colonialism, but also to neo-colonialism and contemporary capitalists and imperialist exploitation of their lands.

And you’ll find outrage, you’ll find anger, and you’ll find people teeming to demand change of the power relations that exist currently in the world today.

JJ: I know that Friends of the Congo works year round, but that you also use every January 17 to uplift the life and the murder and the legacy of Patrice Lumumba, as well as that of Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, who also died on that day.

And I would like you to talk a little bit about the goals of the action that you do every year, because it’s not just lamentation; it’s about more.

Maurice Carney: “The same forces that were at play in the ’60s to remove Lumumba are at play today in terms of keeping the Congolese from advancing.”

MC: Exactly. Exactly. We commemorate Lumumba to remind the world, not only of the imbalance in the power dynamics between the Western world and the global South, but also to remind people of the principles and ideas that Lumumba lived for and ultimately died: Self-sufficiency, self-determination, pan-Africanism, internationalism, and those principles obtain to this day, and they’ve been embraced by young Congolese in particular, young Africans in general, who are carrying out, building on the legacy of Lumumba.

So the cry is “Lumumba lives,” that is to say, his ideas, his principles. And I was in an exchange with one young Congolese before our commemoration yesterday, and he was sharing that there are a thousand Lumumbas in the Congo today.

So what we try to highlight is the extent to which the current generation has taken up the mantle, and is continuing that pursuit for a self-determined, independent Congo that is inextricably linked to the self-determination and independence of the African continent as a whole.

So that’s why we declare January 17 of each year Lumumba Day, and people go to LumumbaDay.org and they sign up to take action, either get a resolution passed commemorating the day; they can sign up to support the youth who are carrying on the tradition of Lumumba; they can be a part of the current movement in the Congo that is very much as critical today as it was during the time of Lumumba.

So it’s very current, very contemporary, and speaks to the tremendous importance that Congo carries, not only for Africa, but for the world as a whole, being part of the second-largest rainforest in the world, and is vital in the fight against the climate crisis.

And at the same time, Janine, being the storehouse of strategic minerals such as cobalt, which are vital in the pursuit of a renewable energy revolution.

So it’s at the nexus of critical resources that are vital to the future of the welfare of the planet as a whole.

JJ: I just wanted to ask you, if you have another minute in you, about precisely that, that Congo is not a story of the past. Congo is very much a story of the present. And I wonder, if journalists listening to this are looking to connect the history, and the ongoing history of exploitation, to the current exploitation, and are looking for stories as inroads to that, are there particular issues or stories that you would direct an enterprising US reporter who’s looking to get into this; what should they start at?

MC: Oh my goodness. There are so many. And if you’re talking about questions of peace and security, we see the instability unfolding in the Congo as a result of, in large part, US foreign policy and financing and backing proxy leaders in neighboring countries. So peace and security questions.

Congo has suffered the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II. It’d be interesting to see a comparison between the response that we have in Ukraine in the media and what we see in the Congo, wherein as many as 6 million people have lost their lives. But yet the coverage seems to lack in comparison to how Ukraine is covered.

Africa Report (5/17/21)

But if we’re talking about the Green New Deal and climate crisis and renewable energy revolution, you have to talk about Congo. There’s so many stories that you can address in that kind of pursuit: the minerals, cobalt, critical to renewable energy sector; the Congo Basin, which is the second-largest rainforest in the world, and yet it sequesters more carbon than the Amazon itself.

It is the largest repository of peatlands and tropical peatlands in the world, and stores enough carbon that it can address the carbon emissions of the United States for 20 years. So just a tremendous number of stories that can be addressed.

And then you have a situation where you have the Congolese, 70 million of them, living on less than $2 a day, while one billionaire, by the name of Dan Gertler, he makes $200,000 a day from royalties from Congo’s minerals. So the question of poverty, exploitation, plunder, that can be explored by journalists as well.

So there’s just a tremendous amount of stories that can be written around the Congo, because its significance, as I stated earlier, is not just for Africa alone, but for the world, and therefore, it demands the world’s attention, and it demands in-depth, nuanced treatment, not only of Congo itself, but of the Congolese people, and the enormous courage and dignity that they stand on in confronting the challenges that they face.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo; find their work online at FriendsOfTheCongo.org. Maurice Carney, thank you so much for joining us this week on CountersSpin.

MC: Thank you. Thank you, Janine. It’s my pleasure.

The post ‘The Cry Is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘We Live in a New World Where Accountability Barely Exists’ – CounterSpin interview with David Sirota on accountability journalism

Janine Jackson interviewed the Lever‘s David Sirota about accountability journalism for the January 13, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230113Sirota.mp3

Forbes (1/10/23)

Janine Jackson: Forbes Magazine is throwing out some corporate wisdom in the wake of the utter failure of Southwest Airlines over the December holidays. The upshot is that “even the best, most well-managed companies are not immune to failures in the customer experience.” But if those companies engage smartly in “memory making,” they might make customers even more loyal.

Oh, and also, “It’s not that the glamorous, buzzworthy projects aren’t valuable, but they must be balanced alongside investments in more ‘boring’ (but no less important) endeavors.” In this case, that means scheduling software that would ensure that airline crew are available where and when they need to be.

Actually listening to employees is also offered further down as a possible leadership lesson. So that’s exciting.

For analysis explaining not just what went wrong, but how we could prevent it happening again, we saw a lot of news media content, but little space for the difficult, real debate that could move us forward.

Our guest says that has to do with what he calls “the algorithm,” a formula for generating news content that, while profitable, doesn’t really do the core work we look to journalism to do.

David Sirota is a journalist, writer, screenwriter and the leading force behind the Lever, a relatively new news outlet focused specifically on power and accountability, online at LeverNews.com.

He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, David Sirota.

David Sirota: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Lever (1/2/23)

JJ: Your recent piece, “The Partisan Ghost in the Media Machine,” begins with the Southwest Airline meltdown from last month, but you focus on the way that this clearly unacceptable series of events was explained or interpreted to the public.

What leapt out at you as the sort of void in the news coverage here that pointed you to a systemic problem?

DS: I think there was a lot of, obviously, coverage of the canceled flights, and Southwest in particular, the specific airline, and why it had broken down in comparison to other airlines.

But there was relatively little coverage of which government officials, which government agencies, are supposed to be protecting the consumer—in this case, the traveling consumer, the passenger—which government agency is supposed to deter the kind of behavior that we saw from Southwest Airlines.

And the answer, of course, is the Department of Transportation. That is the sole regulator of the airline industry in the United States since 1978, when the airlines were deregulated; the bargain that was struck was that the transportation secretary would be the sole regulator of the airlines.

State regulators can’t regulate the airlines. You cannot bring a class action suit against the airlines. That context, because it really is important context, was not part, as far as I could tell, of much of the coverage of what was going on.

The other context, of course, is that state officials, congressional lawmakers, have been begging the Department of Transportation for months to strengthen rules that are designed to create a financial deterrent to the behavior that we saw Southwest engage in.

So Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been pressed for months—by, by the way, elected officials in his own party—to use his existing regulatory authority to strengthen the punishments, strengthen the deterrence against the kind of behavior that we saw Southwest engage in.

Now, I understand that there’s an argument out there that the transportation secretary isn’t responsible specifically for Southwest’s computer system, the outdated computer system that the company hasn’t invested in.

But, of course, the decisions by the company to not invest in the necessary upgrades to its computer system, those decisions were made inside of a regulatory environment in which the company felt that it could presume that if it was punished at all for any kind of meltdown-style event, that the punishments would be a kind of corporate rounding error.

So in other words, the company figured that because the existing government regulators had not strengthened the rules, the company effectively didn’t have to make the upgrades that it needed to make.

It could instead, for instance, pay a $400 million shareholder dividend, and pay its executives $112 million.

New York Post (12/29/22)

And to come back to the media part of this, this was not part of the coverage of what happened and what should happen and what the fallout should be—except it was part of some of the coverage on the right, right-wing media, Fox News and New York Post, etc.

I should say that we at the Lever broke the story of all of this context: Secretary Pete Buttigieg had been warned…. Our reporting was amplified and discussed at length on Fox News, the New York Post, but it went almost completely undiscussed in corporate, or I guess center-left, Democratic-affiliated media, and it went undiscussed and effectively erased from the coverage in those outlets, because we now live in a world where news organizations are making news decisions about what to cover and what not to cover, what facts to mention, what facts not to mention, based on how they perceive it will be received by their partisan audience.

So Fox News and the New York Post are not covering our reporting about Secretary Pete Buttigieg because they think the airlines need to be better regulated. They’re doing it because they have a chance to bash a Democrat.

And the MSNBCs of the world, the CNNs, the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., they’re not covering the central role that Secretary Pete Buttigieg played in this, because they don’t want to offend the partisan loyalties, the partisan affiliations, of their more liberal audiences, who have been inculcated to believe that Democrats should never be criticized or pressured, or that pressuring or criticizing Democrats is simply a way to help Republicans.

So in other words, our tribalized politics, the supremacy of the tribal nature of our politics, my team versus your team, has bled into the way news organizations now make coverage decisions.

JJ: I guess I would say that I give more primacy in some ways to media, to telling folks that this is the way to herd their opinions, and that this is the way to think about things: that you can only translate your frustration with a regulatory system, for example, into an anti-Democratic point of view.

At FAIR, in general, we have a policy of don’t blame the people.

DS: Oh, sure.

JJ: And in the sense of, media are really working overtime to herd us into very particular understanding, and to understand that everything is—there’s no there there. It’s just about which party you support.

DS: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that it’s a self-reinforcing process, in the sense of, I don’t think there are editors at a lot of news organizations, I don’t think there’s editors sitting around at the New York Times saying, oh, we know our audience is liberal and therefore we’re not going to cover Pete Buttigieg in an accountability kind of way. I don’t think it’s that explicit. I just think it’s sort of baked in at a really media-culture level.

I think you’re right about the news-consuming audience. Essentially, after decades of this, this is how the audience, I think, is taught to think about politics. There’s one way to think about politics, which is the way I think about it, which is that regulators are public officials, and the public should hold accountable its public officials when its public officials refuse to regulate the parts of the economy.

But I think that we live in a culture now where this sort of symbiotic political culture and media culture has taught each tribe to think the goal of politics is to defend my team, no matter what. And if a regulator on my team did something problematic, then it’s my job as a news consumer to defend, on social media or whatever, to defend the regulator if that regulator’s on my team.

Because he is on my team, my job is not to pressure that regulator to actually take action.

So it’s the supremacy of the tribal instinct, I think, is the world we now live in. And it’s a world that certainly politicians have taught voters, and it’s certainly a world that media has helped, I think, inculcate to the population.

And I think it’s problematic. It’s obviously problematic, and I should say there’s a self-reinforcing aspect to this. Once Fox News or the New York Post and the like start covering a story, it’s not like they’re honest actors, then it gives media outlets like MSNBC or CNN or whoever, and gives liberals writ large, the argument, well, you know, that’s just a Fox News story, so it can’t be real. That’s just right-wing media.

And ultimately, who benefits from this dysfunction? The public officials who don’t have to face accountability, who don’t have to face trans-partisan, mass accountability. They know that their voters or their constituents in their own party will rarely ever be exposed to inconvenient truths about their negligence or malfeasance.

JJ: Absolutely. And we’re all, as media critics, dealing with this state of play where some folks are invoking a moment that never happened, where we were all around the water cooler and we all agreed on what the news of the day was, and we all agreed on how we felt about it.

And there’s a kind of big old media lamentation that that era has passed, and now everyone’s in a silo and they only hear what they want to hear. And I just, as people who care about journalism and care about social change, they’ve made it pretty freaking difficult for us to thread this needle.

And at the same time, we can just say we think that journalism is about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, you know? There’s a space that has gone missing. And I understand that that’s what the Lever is trying to do, and I understand that’s what a bunch of other organizations are trying to do, but it’s unfortunate, let me say, that we need to do it.

DS: It is unfortunate. Look, I’m proud of the work that we do at the Lever. I’m proud that we broke that story about Secretary Buttigieg. And it’s a story that if it was Elaine Chao from the Trump administration, I’d be similarly proud that we would’ve reported.

And I think that reporting is, obviously, it’s rare, as we’re discussing. It’s few and far between, but that’s the way news should be reported.

I joke on social media that, looking back on the halcyon days of the Bush administration—I’m kidding, but you know, there was a time when an underqualified person was running the Federal Emergency Management Agency, during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and George Bush went out and said, you’re doing a heck of a job. That got ridiculed, and that government official had to resign.

And that’s the way things are supposed to work, right? If the political appointee falls down on the job and doesn’t do his job, the public gets outraged and there’s public pressure. The media covers it with an accountability kind of posture, and there are consequences. That’s the way the system should work.

David Sirota: “If public officials know they’ll never be held accountable, then they never have to actually do anything other than serve the powerful.” (photo © New York Times/Benjamin Rassmussen)

Not to get too grandiose about it, but I think we clearly now live in a new world where accountability barely exists. The people who perpetrated the financial fraud that created the financial crisis, there was almost no accountability for them. The people who lied us into the Iraq War, there was no accountability for them.

I could go on and on with different examples, and then you arrive at a million people get stranded during the holidays, and the regulator whose job it is to regulate, who refused to listen to members of his own party demanding that he regulate—I mean, maybe there’ll be some accountability, but there was very little, at least in the initial stages, very little accountability from media, very little mention of the idea of accountability in the media coverage of that.

And I think that’s a central problem that relates to so many of the problems in our country, which is that if public officials know they’ll never be held accountable, then they never have to actually do anything other than serve the powerful corporate and moneyed interests that bankroll their political careers. And you can trace that back to every single problem that we’re talking about.

And I think the airline situation, the way it was covered, the lack of accountability, the omission of it by the sort of left-center and center-left side of the spectrum as any kind of context for the coverage, is a microcosm of that larger problem.

JJ: Absolutely. And continuing on that note, elite corporate media, if something can be described as bipartisan—oh my gosh, they’re all over it. If both parties agreed that every person over six feet tall should be thrown in the ocean, I just feel like elite media would be like, it’s bipartisan, therefore it’s fantastic, right?

DS: That’s the interesting thing with the Buttigieg story, of course, which is the pressure that he was facing, he has been facing, from attorneys general across the country to actually get tougher on the airlines, that was pressure from attorneys general of both parties. So it actually is a bipartisan issue.

Twitter (1/29/22)

Now, I agree with you that part of the reason it wasn’t really covered very much is because there was no, as far as I can tell—well, there was one, there was only one Democratic elected official amid the Southwest meltdown, who was willing to go out and say we had warned Secretary Buttigieg to do these things and he didn’t listen to us, and that was Congressman Ro Khanna of California.

And of course he was harshly criticized by liberals, on Twitter etc., for stating the obvious, because, again, protecting the tribe, protecting, in that case, the Democratic tribe, liberals protecting that tribe, was more important than actually looking at the facts of what he was saying.

And so, you know, I do think that it would’ve gotten more coverage had members of both parties come out amid this meltdown and said, hey, listen, we’ve been warning Secretary Buttigieg about this. Because I do think the media is interested in covering, at some level, conflict or the perception of conflict. But it didn’t happen this time.

And, again, I also think that speaks to the political culture as well, especially, by the way, on the Democratic side, that on the Democratic side, we are now living in an era where intraparty tension, intraparty back and forth, which I consider small-D democratic and healthy, on the Democratic side, that just doesn’t happen very much.

We are living in an era where there is really, really kind of lockstep loyalty, from the top all the way down through the party, to the idea that there shouldn’t be conflict. And I mean that in a good way, because conflict, I think, arguments, etc., that is what the small-D democratic idea really is, but inside the Democratic Party sphere, that basically doesn’t exist.

JJ: There’s a difference between bipartisan and nonpartisan, and I feel that, and I know that you talk about this too, the way that corporate news media, if you don’t identify with either party, you’re not on the page, you’re not in the story.

And there are all kinds of reasons that people don’t vote, for example. So we hear a lot of stories about the electorate, or about voters, and we don’t hear about the huge numbers of people who don’t vote—not because they’re stupid, but because they don’t see a connection between what they care about, and what their elected officials do.

So bringing it to news media, you’re not supposed to just go to the statehouse and tally up things on either side. You’re supposed to be looking for news and where people are at.

DS: That’s right. That’s absolutely right. And you’re right to point out that that’s really what we’re talking about here, is that the idea of something being nonpartisan, that’s gone.

And that’s the problem, because there is no culture of news is news, truths are truths, context is context and facts are facts, regardless of which party it helps or doesn’t help.

Popular Information (1/18/23)

JJ: Well, I see you. I see you in the media ecosystem. I see the Lever. I see Judd Legum at Popular Information. I see a number of organizations that are trying to do what we imagined we added an amendment to the Constitution for journalists to do.

But talk for a minute about the media ecosystem and where you see the Lever fitting, and for folks who are just—they come home, they’re tired, they worked a long day. They don’t want to have to sift through information to try to figure out…. Talk to news consumers about trying to be an engaged citizen.

DS: Yeah, I think the old analogy is a diet. You shouldn’t only eat fast food; that’s what corporate media is. So try to mix into your diet some nutritious stuff. And the thing is, is that I think that it’s not like eat your veggies. You know, eat your broccoli, eat your brussels sprouts.

There’s some very compelling news out there from independent media that will either provide context that’s not being provided to the news events of the day, or covering stories that are just completely off the radar that are super important. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

We’re trying to swim upstream, and it’s not easy, because, as I said in my piece, I call all of this the algorithm, because all of these news decisions, what to cover, what not to cover, based on a perceived audience’s partisan sensibilities, that’s also reflected and amplified by the literal algorithms and formulas on social media.

So there’s a symbiosis between news decisions and what gets amplified. So there’s a lot of days the reporting we do, we’re not benefiting from recommendation formulas and other opaque preference formulas that exist on social media. Our reporting is swimming against that current, and I think other independent media outlets are swimming against that current.

Now, I think there’s good news here. We have found an audience, and our audience is growing, and I think that because of the internet, all of this can change. But it can’t change unless people know about these options, and not only know about them, but share them with their friends, right, forward the email, post the story you like on your feeds, tell your friends to subscribe.

These are mundane things, and they sound like they wouldn’t really make a difference, but over time, if enough people do that, it can absolutely change the media landscape.

JJ: And I just would add, I always think of media—I overwork the metaphor of shadows on the cave wall from Plato, but media is just supposed to reflect reality and our ability to shape the world that we live in.

So we’re not interested in journalism just because journalism is so neat. We want to change the world.

DS: That’s right. That’s the whole point of what we do. At the Lever, we’re not just writing to have “content.” We’re trying to produce reporting that will give people the information they need to make the world better.

To go back to the Southwest story, the best thing that could come out of our reporting on the Southwest airline situation, as an example, would be that Secretary Pete Buttigieg feels so much public pressure that he passes, finally, a proposed rule that has been sitting at his agency for five months to actually get tough on the airlines.

And the way that that process can work is, media reports it, enough people see it, enough people get mad, enough people put pressure on him, file comment letters, send in comments, etc., that he feels that he has to act. That’s the way the system is supposed to work.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Sirota. He’s a journalist and writer, and the force behind the Lever, which you can find online at LeverNews.com. David Sirota, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DS: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

The post ‘We Live in a New World Where Accountability Barely Exists’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 20, 2023

WaPo Feeds Denial With False Claims About Overcounting Covid Deaths

The Washington Post (1/13/23) is feeding denialist fantasies about Covid. That’s a problem.

Dr. Leana Wen, a well-known medical commentator for the Washington Post and CNN, wants us to believe that society has overcounted Covid deaths and hospitalizations. She first made this claim in the Post (1/13/23), and again during an appearance on CNN (1/17/23).

In the Post, she suggested that the US Covid death toll might be “30% of what’s currently reported”—that is, about 120 a day rather than 400—though she immediately added, “that’s still unacceptably high.” She maintained that a downward revision of the Covid toll “could help people better gauge the risks of traveling, indoor dining and activities they have yet to resume.”

After a flurry of angry responses (Washington Post, 1/19/23) from readers, experts and other journalists—including MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan (MSNBC, 1/19/23)—Wen (1/19/23) followed up, saying she took critics’ comments to heart, but insisted that society must acknowledge “that data changed over time and that deaths due to the pandemic are not necessarily the same as deaths due to Covid,” as if these thing weren’t related.

How did Wen—a medical doctor, a professor of health policy at George Washington University and the former health commissioner of Baltimore—come to this conclusion? She asserted this bold position after speaking with two doctors.

Determining cause of death

Wen’s citing “someone who had a heart attack” as an example of someone whose Covid infection “has no bearing on why they sought medical care” is peculiar, given the clear link between Covid and heart disease (CNBC, 10/25/22).

One is Dr. Robin Dretler of Emory Decatur Hospital, who “sees patients with multiple concurrent infections.” “If these patients die,” Wen wrote, “Covid might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses,” even though the “coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all.” Wen elaborated:

A gunshot victim or someone who had a heart attack, for example, could test positive for the virus, but the infection has no bearing on why they sought medical care.

That’s not how cause of death is determined, though, as Dr. Joyce deJong, who has served as a medical examiner throughout Michigan, explained to CNN (1/17/23). People often die with numerous medical conditions—”hypertension and diabetes, and name your list of diseases that are potentially lethal”—and it’s the job of medical examiners to pick out the underlying cause of death.

“For those of us who certify deaths routinely, [classifying Covid-19 deaths] is not necessarily much harder,” she said. “Maybe you’re missing some and maybe you’re overcounting some, but probably the bulk of them are accurate.”

“Cause of death is imperfect in every case,” Justin Feldman, an epidemiologist who’s a visiting scientist at Harvard’s FXB Center, told FAIR. “There will be non-Covid deaths that are attributed to Covid and Covid deaths not attributed to Covid,” he noted, adding that the latter is much more typical than the former.

“These are based on death certificates, and the idea that someone is going to die in a car crash and then said to have died from Covid is not going to happen,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University.

As Dr. Lakshmi Ganapathi, a specialist in infectious diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital, told FAIR, “If it were me filling out the death certificate on a child who died due to gunshot wounds who also tested PRC positive for Covid on admission screening, I am not putting Covid there as a contributing cause,” noting that doctors list the “primary cause and in a second section, the most likely other secondary causes.”

Dr. Dannie Ritchie, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Brown University, told FAIR that she believes that society has undercounted Covid deaths, noting that if a person is infected with Covid and then recovers, but then subsequently dies of a heart attack, one can’t rule out the possibility that Covid might have led to that death, given the link between Covid and blood clots (CNBC, 10/25/22).

Thin gruel

NPR (9/16/22) used Doran to advance the claim that Covid is “now less risky than flu.”

Wen’s other source is Dr. Shira Doron. Wen doesn’t say it, but Doron is a well-known contrarian regarding Covid health measures, opposing masking in schools (Washington Post, 3/29/22; Twitter, 8/15/22; WGBH, 11/9/22) and remote schooling during Covid surges (WBTS, 12/23/21). Doron even floated the “overcounting” hypothesis to NPR (9/16/22). Wen wrote of Doron:

After evaluating medical records of Covid patients, she and her colleagues found that use of the steroid dexamethasone, a standard treatment for Covid patients with low oxygen levels, was a good proxy measure for hospitalizations due to the coronavirus. If someone who tested positive didn’t receive dexamethasone during their inpatient stay, they were probably in the hospital for a different cause.

This is what an editor would normally call “thin gruel.” A medical analyst in mainstream media with this much expertise is expected to cut through the “some say” vox populi reactions of quick-turnaround reporting that is all too common on newspaper pages, and instead pull knowledge from the published science and translate it for the rest of us.

It’s bad enough that Wen would offer a reassurance that Covid is not as bad as we think based solely on two interviews. But these physicians are offering speculation. A Covid patient was probably in the hospital for something else. Covid might get added as a cause of death. A diligent editor would certainly ask for more evidence.

Contradictory data

Scientific studies (Nature, 1/18/22) show the opposite result from Wen’s “don’t worry” reporting.

Wen runs up against a body of research that makes the opposite case. The Lancet (3/10/22) said that while total Covid deaths in 2020 and 2021 “totaled 5.94 million worldwide, we estimate that 18.2 million…people died” during the pandemic over that period “as measured by excess mortality.” The Washington Post editorial board (3/13/22) took the findings seriously, noting that the death rate for Covid in the US “was 130.6 per 100,000 population, but the estimated excess-mortality rate was 179.3 per 100,000.”

This all came after Nature (1/18/22) reported that “records of excess mortality—a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur—show many more people…have died in the pandemic” than official data suggests. But the concept of excess mortality—a key measure of whether deaths are being undercounted—doesn’t come up at all in Wen’s piece.

Dr. Jeremy Faust (Inside Medicine, 1/16/23), an emergency room doctor in Boston, wrote that Wen’s column had “no evidence offered for a claim for which we have excellent contradictory data,” noting that if overcounting Covid deaths “were happening, what’s the first thing we’d see? More Covid deaths than all-cause excess deaths. Do we see that? Nope.”

The World Health Organization also said that governments have been undercounting Covid deaths (NPR, 5/5/22). Indeed, by the second half of 2022, the US was recording more than 7,000 excess deaths each week, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, while officially recording fewer than 3,000 Covid deaths per week on average.

Embraced by Covid deniers

New York Post (1/14/23): “Many readers on Twitter seemed frustrated with the piece, expressing that they believed the medical community had been [over]counting for years now and that Wen’s info comes too late.”
Gonsalves noted that while conservative forces have embraced Wen’s column, no one is citing research to validate her position:

There is nothing that I read that says Wen’s hypothesis is true. She’s been provided with the data and she keeps mentioning the idea that we are overcounting deaths in a way that doesn’t make sense…. She’s out there alone.

Despite Wen’s assurances that Covid must still be taken seriously despite her claims, her column and her CNN appearance were embraced by the Covid-denying right. Wen’s piece quickly became ammunition for right-wing media, many of which cater to Covid skepticism and outright denialism. A Fox News column reprinted by the New York Post (1/14/23) reported that Wen had “admitted” that Covid deaths are being overcounted, and cited complaints that this admission comes “two and a half years late.” The Hill’s show Rising (1/18/23) embraced Wen as “based”—a term adopted by the alt-right to describe edgy truth-tellers—and celebrated Wen as a “liberal” apostate who “completely flips” by offering an “admission that the US government grossly overstated the number of deaths caused by Covid-19.” Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Twitter, 1/16/23) commented, “A year ago, this was a conspiracy theory that would get you censored….”

Wen, despite publishing in establishment outlets that right-wing Covid deniers normally disregard, has increasingly acted as a sort of fifth columnist for the medical fringe. As I previously wrote at FAIR.org (1/10/23), Wen was rightly criticized (Daily Beast, 2/25/22) for her downplaying the importance of masking. I also noted how Wen (Washington Post, 12/9/22) gave cover to right-wing critics of military vaccine mandates for the military.

As Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, told FAIR, “All she’s doing is reinforcing a right-wing talking point, contributing to confusion and ultimately contributing to a higher death toll from Covid.”

The mountains of research that suggest Covid deaths, contrary to Wen, are actually undercounted aren’t just a statement of how dangerous Covid is, but suggest how poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, drug use and disability have exacerbated this crisis (Brink, 5/13/22). These excessive death studies indict social inequality and a broken public health system as much as they do the virus itself.

An honest accounting

In a follow-up piece, Wen (Washington Post, 1/19/23) blames excess deaths on “Covid mitigation measures” and “community health resources…diverted to address the coronavirus.” But that doesn’t explain why excess deaths rise and fall in tandem with Covid cases (MSNBC, 1/19/23).

In Wen’s follow-up piece, she said a study like Doron’s, using the administration of a particular drug as a proxy for Covid as primary cause of death, “is more precise than the often-cited excess mortality data.” She doesn’t back up this claim with evidence, only asserting that it is “tempting to compare the current level of deaths to pre-pandemic mortality and attribute all additional deaths to Covid.”

Faust blew this excuse out of the water (Inside Medicine, 1/20/23):

An honest accounting is precisely what all-cause mortality is about. It takes out the subjectivity. The fact that Covid deaths rise and fall in lockstep with all-cause excess mortality and that for the most part, there have been fewer Covid deaths than excess deaths, argues strongly that Covid itself is driving these deaths. But the author could be correct. Semantically speaking, these may not be the same deaths. But with data like ours, the burden of proof is on the author. What is responsible for these deaths and what evidence is offered to support those explanations? The author offers nothing.

Wen has made a name for herself as a national media figure with lots of medical expertise who says that it is time to “return to normal” (Politico, 4/22/22). Her latest provocation was embraced by Covid-denying right, to which Wen does not belong. She does, however, stand with the neoliberal forces who want to get workers back into offices, roll back investment in public health and end discussions of how the pandemic highlights the need for universal healthcare (Vox, 6/16/22).

“Leana Wen is one of many pundits who tell the powerful what they want to hear,” Feldman said. “The thing you do when you want to go ‘back to normal’ is to downplay the severity of the problem, and one of the ways to do that is to say there aren’t that many deaths.”

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

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

The post WaPo Feeds Denial With False Claims About Overcounting Covid Deaths appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 20, 2023

Maurice Carney on Patrice Lumumba

      CounterSpin230120.mp3

Patrice Lumumba, 1960 (photo: Harry Pot)

This week on CounterSpin: US media elites have gotten comfy with what writer Adam Johnson calls their “wall calendar version” of Martin Luther King, in which he represents the “good” left, unmoved by racial nationalism and Marxist ideology.

With Patrice Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA on January 17, 1961, as newly elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the story is different. Look up Lumumba on the anniversary of his murder and you’ll find—nothing, really, except maybe a story about how street vendors in Kinshasa are being pushed off of Lumumba Boulevard to prepare for a visit by the Pope.

Martin Luther King, corporate media would have it, offers a lesson about hopes and dreams and the slow but steady push toward progress. Lumumba’s assassination, judging by attention, has zero lessons for US citizens or the press corps to learn about the past, the present or the future.

That’s how you know you should pay attention.

Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo, has another story. And we hear about it this week on CounterSpin.

      CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Signal app.

      CounterSpin230120Banter.mp3

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
January 19, 2023

Israel’s Hard-Right Turn Fails to Raise Alarm in US Media

Tens of thousands marched to denounce the new Israeli government for perpetrating a “coup d’etat” (Jerusalem Post, 1/7/23).

There is a political crisis in Israel—particularly for Palestinians, minorities and anyone who believes in secular democracy. But US press coverage has had trouble recognizing that the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu is anything other than business as usual.

The recent Israeli elections thrust Netanyahu back into power and the prime ministry (Reuters, 12/28/22), prompting major protests that called his new government a “coup d’etat” and urged a “preventative strike against dictatorship” (Jerusalem Post, 1/7/23; i24, 1/8/23). Middle East observers are alarmed, not just at Netanyahu’s own military hawkishness, but the fact that his ruling coalition includes religious and nationalist fringe elements, including followers of the late Meir Kahane, who advocated for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel (New York Times, 11/6/90). While Israeli politics have been on a rightward trajectory for two decades, the most recent election has put the country into a dark zone of outright illiberalism that almost seems irreversible.

Americans for Peace Now president Hadar Susskind summarized the new coalition:

It includes racists, theocrats, homophobes and ultra-nationalist zealots. It may have been democratically elected, but many of its senior members are deeply anti-democracy. We are horrified by the incoming government’s stated plans to intensify the process of de facto annexation and further entrench the Occupation. In the past, we congratulated incoming Israeli governments and wished them success. This time, given the makeup of the government, the dangerous views and background of its members and their stated goals, we cannot but sound our alarm.

The election results were also a near-total electoral vanquishing of what remained of the Israeli left. The once mighty Labor Party finished in last place among the parliamentary parties with four seats, and the Hadash and Ta’al coalition got only one more, despite the fact that Hadash’s charismatic leader was once thought to be the Arab minority’s political hope (New Yorker, 1/17/16). Meretz, Israel’s social democratic party, now has zero seats. Israel’s government isn’t just far right, it’s serving without any meaningful political counterbalance.

Palpable alarm

An Israeli former judge (Times of Israel, 12/28/22) said he signed a protest letter because never before “could we imagine, in the foreseeable future, the destruction of Israeli democracy.”

There is a palpable sense of alarm in Israeli media—Ha’aretz has called the election results “fascist” (1/13/23) and referenced a government of “thugs” (1/12/23). The paper (12/28/22) has reported that the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, has passed a “bill that would give more authority over police to the far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir.” The paper (12/27/22) also reported on “legislation [that] paves the way for Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich to appoint a minister in the Defense Ministry who will oversee the West Bank, including responsibility over the civil administration.”

An incoming minister has suggested “that Israeli doctors should be allowed to refuse treatment to LGBTQ patients on religious grounds” (Guardian, 12/26/22). “Israel will not ratify the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women” (Ha’aretz, 12/26/22), thanks to the new government.

Jurists and legal scholars (Times of Israel, 12/28/22) have warned against the “destruction of Israeli democracy,” citing the new government’s mission to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court, including “passing a so-called override clause that would let the Knesset reinstate laws invalidated by the court.” They have also introduced “plans to revamp the panel that selects judges, giving a majority to the government’s representatives and its appointees,” and moved to “weaken anti-discrimination laws.”

One former Supreme Court chief judge, Aharon Barak (Financial Times, 1/8/23), “likened the plans to the attacks on judicial independence carried out by authoritarian governments in Poland, Hungary and Turkey.”

The Times of Israel (12/27/22) noted that

executives from mainstream American Jewish organizations warned a visiting senior Israeli diplomat…that the policies being promoted by incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners risk seriously damaging the Jewish state’s ties with the Diaspora.

Israelis are already feeling the impact. A left-wing Israeli journalist was detained by police on suspicions that his pro-Palestine tweets could incite terrorism (Middle East Eye, 12/27/22). One law professor (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1/8/23), when asked what countries he’d compare Israeli to right now, said, “The two most prominent recently are Hungary and Poland, which are not necessarily countries that you want to compare yourself to.” Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai (Times of Israel, 12/2/22) declared, “Israel is being transformed from a democracy to a theocracy.”

For Palestinians, the new government means heightened tension. Netanyahu has vowed the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories (Deutsche Welle, 12/28/22) and the government is now banning public displays of Palestinian flags (Sky News, 1/9/23). The new government is already retaliating against recent Palestinian efforts to push the International Court of Justice to move against the decades-old Israeli occupation, including “imposing a moratorium on Palestinian construction in some areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank” (Al Jazeera, 1/6/23).

‘No longer a bedrock of stability’

The New York Times (12/17/22) fails to question whether a state that defines itself as being a state for only some of its citizens can be a democracy.

But the alarm felt by those close to the situation is not reflected much in the US press. The New York Times editorial board (12/17/22) lamented the move to the right, and called for US pressure on the Jewish state, but as Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel said in a letter to the editor (12/23/22), the editorial “doesn’t urge any specific actions.” Instead, it “echoes the president in emphasizing the inviolability of the US/Israel alliance—a bromide that assures Israel that its blank check is guaranteed.”

Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/15/22) fretted about the future of Israel, noting that the new government is creating a “total mess that will leave Israel no longer being a bedrock of stability for the region”—a point of view completely divorced from the experience of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, who have never known “stability” from Israel.

The Washington Post (12/21/22) said the “new government has already sparked concern among Israelis and members of the international community over bills that seek to prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one.” This echoes the Times editorial’s headline, “The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State Is in Jeopardy.”

This impossible wish for a country that is both an ethno-state and a democracy is at the heart of the problem with the mainstream US press’s view of Israel/Palestine.

The historic extremism of the new government has certainly been documented in the United States, as the AP has covered the response to Israel’s right-wing government in straight reporting, including a report (12/26/22) on Israeli Air Force veterans who worry about the coalition’s impact.

But the Wall Street Journal (12/27/22) ran an editorial by Religious Zionism’s Smotrich that defied criticism, insisting that the government he belongs to will “strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.” He added, “Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and will remain so.”

‘Radicals’ on both sides

A New York Post op-ed (12/21/22) equates the far-right takeover in Israel with the Biden administration being “influenced by the Democrats’ increasingly radical left-wing elements.”

Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard University law professor and outspoken Israel supporter, and Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president, wrote an op-ed in the New York Post (12/21/22) that painted President Joe Biden and Netanyahu as two sides of the same coin. Biden, they said, was “influenced by the Democrats’ increasingly radical left-wing elements,” while Netanyahu had a coalition with the far right. Their solution, then, was for the two leaders to embrace their essential centrism and work together—not to protect democracy in either country, but to gang up on Iran.

Of course, this “both sides” logic is all too common in US media. Netanyahu’s extremists include followers of a racist ideology that was once considered toxic even on the right. Biden’s “extremists” say they want universal healthcare. These things are just not the same.

US press coverage of Israel’s political situation ranges from support to muted concern, as opposed to an existential crisis for a place that calls itself a democracy. It is slowly dawn on US media that political affairs in Israeli have deteriorated, even though it’s been plenty of time to digest this since two of the most prominent human rights organizations—Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—have labeled Israel’s ethnic segregation a form of apartheid (FAIR.org, 2/3/22).

Israel’s political turn should be treated with the same urgency as Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his desire to remake the US government into an autocracy. The problem may be that Netanyahu is a more talented politician than Trump, and his coalition has little opposition in its path. Given Israel’s importance in US foreign policy, the nation’s spiral into extremism is cause for dismay, not just among observers with an interest in the country, but for news outlets that claim to defend the global democratic order.

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January 17, 2023

New York Press: Hey, People, Leave That Judge Alone

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s nominee to the state’s top court is in trouble (amNY, 1/6/23)—but corporate media are doing everything they can to save him.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is going forward with her nomination of Hector LaSalle, a conservative mid-level appellate judge, to the state’s Court of Appeals (the top court), despite doubts that LaSalle has the votes in New York’s state Senate (amNY, 1/6/23; New York Post, 1/8/23).

New York’s corporate media have provided the embattled nominee with a great deal of support, arguing that a rejection of LaSalle would move the top court too far to the left, and be an unjustifiable politicization of the state courts. Many of LaSalle’s defenders, both in the press and in government, stress that he would be the first Latino judge on the top court.

LaSalle’s nomination has rallied intense Senate opposition, whose confirmation is required to ratify judicial appointments (NY1, 1/12/23). His critics, which also include labor unions and reproductive rights groups, among others, say his decisions disregard workers, due process, immigrants and abortion rights, the latter of which has become a lightning-rod issue for state governments since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

A group of 46 law professors urged a “no” vote against LaSalle, citing his “activist conservative jurisprudence,” and warning that he would “take our state’s law in the wrong direction” (New York Focus, 12/19/22).

More than 30 immigrant rights groups (Immigrant Defense Project, 1/10/23) declared, “LaSalle’s record demonstrates a disturbing pattern with irreversible consequences for immigrant New Yorkers—in particular Black and Latino immigrant communities—who risk being funneled into the hands of ICE.” And “about half a dozen labor unions have announced their opposition to LaSalle, citing an opinion he joined as an appellate judge they considered anti-labor” (City and State New York, 1/9/23).

A group of Jewish lawyers opposed LaSalle in a statement (Forward, 1/9/23):

We are called by our Jewish and American values to defend the rule of law, including the right to privacy and reproductive freedom, the right to associate freely and to demand better working conditions, and the right to justice in the criminal legal system.

‘Dutifully parroted’

In Errol Louis’ view (New York, 1/12/23), New York judicial nominee Hector LaSalle faced ” a blizzard of buzzwords, bad-faith and outright falsehoods.”

In a piece in New York (1/9/23), Errol Louis describes the opposition to LaSalle as “railroading,” as if the application of Senate oversight were some sort of foul play. Louis coming to LaSalle’s defense is significant, as both a Daily News commentator and a host for the local news cable channel NY 1.

Louis said that the idea that LaSalle is “anti-abortion” and “anti-labor” is a “made-up mischaracterization of LaSalle’s record” that is “dutifully parroted by a group of state senators who announced opposition to LaSalle before any public hearing, discussion or debate has been held or even scheduled.”

One decision cited in the law professors’ letter opposing LaSalle’s nomination bypassed the state’s protections for the speech of labor unions by allowing Cablevision to sue individual labor leaders who had criticized the corporation. Another concerned an investigation into whether an anti-choice operation designed to look like an abortion clinic was defrauding patients; the ruling barred the state attorney general from accessing promotional materials for the operation on the grounds that this would violate the faux clinic’s First Amendment rights.

Though defenders say LaSalle’s critics are focusing too narrowly on a few decisions, Cornell law professor Gautam Hans (Syracuse Post-Standard, 1/12/23) countered this narrative: “LaSalle’s defenders insist his critics need to take a broader look at his record. But that broad review just confirms his opponents’ worst fears.” The piece cited several other cases where LaSalle sided against workers, immigrants, consumers and civil rights.

Louis, like other supporters of LaSalle, invoked the idea his opposition was anti-Latino. It’s a claim that glosses over the fact that LaSalle’s “no” votes come from senators of all backgrounds, including several of Latin American descent–and that he is opposed by labor unions with many Latin American members, as well as immigrant advocates.

To make the case that defense of LaSalle is an ethnic cause, Louis quotes failed mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer’s support for the nominee, which he offers as evidence that proof that “anger among some Latino leaders is palpable.” Ferrer, who has been out of elected office for more than 20 years and last campaigned in 2005, is an odd choice to represent the diverse Latin American community of New York in 2023.

Latinos vs. ‘left-leaning lawmakers’

The New York Times (1/11/23) said the dispute over LaSalle “has pitted a crop of Latino and other minority lawmakers…against left-leaning lawmakers”–without mentioning that his opponents also include Latino and other minority lawmakers.

The New York Times (1/11/23) also used this questionable framing, saying the “dispute has pitted a crop of Latino and other minority lawmakers—who embrace him as the state’s prospective first Latino chief judge—against left-leaning lawmakers.”

This is a part of an attempt to paint progressive and socialist electoral movements as overly white, when demographics suggest otherwise (New Republic, 12/20/18). Despite the suggestion that “left-leaning lawmakers” is an entirely distinct category from “Latino and other minority lawmakers,” opposition to LaSalle in the Senate is being led by the chamber’s three socialists: Kristen Gonzalez and Julia Salazar, two Latinas, and Jabari Brisport, a Black man.

LaSalle is also opposed by the senate’s labor committee chair, Jessica Ramos, who is Colombian-American (New York Post, 1/6/23). And two Black senators, Robert Jackson and Cordell Cleare, voiced their opposition to LaSalle in one of New York City’s most prominent Black newspapers, the Amsterdam News (12/23/22).

Times readers, however, might be unaware that many LaSalle opponents are people of color, because the Times seems reluctant to quote LaSalle critics at all. As Jewish Currents contributor Raphael Magarik (Twitter, 1/11/23) noted, the January 11 article, which had three writers, including Albany bureau chief Luis Ferré-Sadurní, “contains numerous quotations by [LaSalle’s] supporters but not one single quotation by someone opposing him explaining their opposition.” Magarik concluded: “What horrid, biased reporting.”

‘Extremist insiders’

The New York Post (1/9/23) warned that if LaSalle’s “woke” opponents “get their way, New York’s legal system becomes another far-left power center.”

The city’s three other major editorial boards are united behind LaSalle. The New York Post editorial board (1/9/23) characterized the “no” campaign against LaSalle as being led by “extremist insiders,” who dislike LaSalle because he “follows the law, rather than the far-left wish list.” The Daily News editorialists (12/23/22) was similarly dismissive of the uproar against LaSalle’s record, saying, “The lefties are angry.” The pro-business Wall Street Journal board (1/12/23) said the left was “assailing” (what a word for a constitutionally mandated debate) a judge with a long professional record.

And at least one business coalition has used local media to push for LaSalle. The Queens Daily Eagle (1/12/23) reported that “Citizens for Judicial Fairness, a group that formed in 2016 to advocate for reforms to one of Delaware’s highest courts, took out a number of advertisements in the New York Daily News” to pressure senators to support LaSalle.

The former Court of Appeals chief judge Jonathan Lippman took to Albany’s Times-Union (1/1/23) to insist that LaSalle was “extraordinarily qualified” and “understands the importance of the institutions of the courts,” appealing to the idea that he stands above politics. This is a sort of local version of a trend FAIR has documented (5/16/22), where liberal newspapers insist that if judges are high achieving scholars then their dangerous ideologies shouldn’t matter.

And the Buffalo News (1/9/23) countered the letter by 46 law professors opposing LaSalle with a single Albany law professor who called LaSalle a centrist, and said LaSalle’s detractors shouldn’t “be smearing him the way they are.” The paper’s editorial board (1/12/23) spoke favorably of LaSalle; the paper played a major role in helping an incumbent mayor stay in power after a socialist defeated him in a Democratic primary (FAIR.org, 11/11/21).

These views are meant to show that opposition to LaSalle is coming from the fringes, but as we see above, the calls both inside and outside of the government calling for concern about LaSalle show that it’s LaSalle’s defenders who have backed themselves into a political corner.

It’s disingenuous to suggest that being the first Latino top judge is all that matters, especially when a chorus of Latino voices are pointing out problems with his policies and ideas. The Journal editorial snidely remarks, “ideology now trumps even identity on the left”—as if in the good old days the left rallied around Clarence Thomas because he was a Black man on the Supreme Court.

All of these pieces appear to be taken aback by the idea that the Senate could actually exercise its constitutional power to reject a judicial nominee. Such shock shows how accustomed media outlets are to the idea that hearings, oversight and votes should be considered mere formalities for executives, rather than seeing these procedures as an essential part of a system of checks and balances.

It should be the media’s job, as well, to act as a check on government power. This sort of coverage doesn’t suggest they take that role very seriously.

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January 14, 2023

NYT Moves to ‘Stack the Deck of Justice’ Against Its Subscribers

The New York Times (10/31/15) used to think taking away “the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices” was a bad thing.

“Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice” was a headline on a groundbreaking New York Times report (10/31/15) from 2015. Reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff looked into the fine-print “agreements” that people sign, usually without reading them, as a requirement for obtaining credit card memberships or cellphone contracts or internet service—contracts that tell you that if there is any problem with your account, the company “may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.”

The Times reporters rightfully described those nine words as “the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations.” Because, as they explained and illustrated at length, “inserting individual-arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts” is

a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.

That was vital, critical reporting. Fast forward to today, and another company silently snuck a forced arbitration clause into its terms of service—and that company is the New York Times.

Public Citizen was among those unable to ignore the hypocrisy of a company that had called out a practice signing up to employ that same practice itself. In its letter to the Times‘ chief executive officer, Public Citizen noted the “ironic twist” of a paper that has told its readers that forced arbitration venues “bear little resemblance to court,” and are instead used “to create an alternate system of justice” by virtually privatizing the justice system, now characterizing those same arbitrators, in its updated terms of service, as “neutral.”

We have long noted that media corporations that are themselves anti-union can hardly be trusted to report fairly on unions and organizing. This is just another reminder that while we pick up the paper looking for reporting that simply offers a clear-eyed view on important events, what we are in fact getting is the product of a profit-driven organization, beholden to advertisers and shareholders, that may not set out to harm its readers, but that simply does not have their interest as its first priority.

It doesn’t mean don’t read the paper. It does mean read it carefully. And don’t believe everything you read.

See “Workers Are Increasingly Required to Sign Away Their Rights,” transcript of CounterSpin show (2/19/21).

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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January 13, 2023

NYT Worries Big Brother Is Not Watching You

A New York Times op-ed (12/28/22) takes aim at the “fashionable notion” that “a technology free of corporate and government control is in the best interest of society.”

A recent guest essay in the New York Times (12/28/22) concluded a searing takedown of “our technology overlords” with the sentence:

We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance puts us all at risk.

You might think, Wow, I didn’t think the Times had it in it to take on Google, Meta and Amazon so directly. Well… you’d be right.

Because the technology overlords in this op ed—as absurd as it sounds—are the software engineers supporting the open-source messaging app Signal, and not the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

The piece, “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs,” by Reid Blackman, makes the case for corporate and government surveillance, by demonizing freedom from such surveillance as a dangerous plot by unnamed “technologists” who are “developing and deploying applications of their technologies for explicitly ideological reasons.” Their ideological agenda? Privacy. The horror!

This screed is so full of obvious exaggerations and unsubstantiated claims that it reads like a caricature. That the New York Times published it, even given its ruling-class biases, is surprising as well as disgraceful.

‘Government-evading technology’

Signal‘s website advances the “morally dangerous” precept that “championing user privacy means keeping your data out of anyone’s hands, including our own.”

“We believe championing user privacy means keeping your data out of anyone’s hands, including our own, rather than ‘responsibly’ managing your data,” Signal’s website says. For Blackman, this commitment to what Signal terms “privacy first” is civil libertarian extremism. He trots out predictable bogeymen demonstrating the dangers of unchecked privacy: terrorists and child predators shielded from law enforcement. “Criminals have also used this government-evading technology,” Blackman says darkly. This fear-mongering rests on an old authoritarian argument: that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to lose, from government intrusion.

What of the young woman who needs an abortion and needs to make sure her messages are not tracked? What of the undocumented USian who needs to ask a question about their rights without risking being disappeared by ICE? What of the BLM activist planning a protest who wants to avoid police sweeping up and teargassing demonstrators? What of the transgender teenager looking for support who needs to hide their identity from their parents?

They may all be “criminals” to Blackman since all of them are targeted by various state and federal laws, but to those of us who recognize that there is a wide gap between law and justice, they all have a legitimate moral right to privacy.

Moreover, they have a democratic right to privacy.

‘Safe from bad actors’

Blackman is incensed that Signal refrains from collecting metadata on its users. “The company doesn’t know the identity of users, which users are talking to one another or who is in a group message.” This is the real difference between Signal and other popular messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which also either default to end-to-end encryption or have that option. Why does this matter?

Imagine you are holding a meeting at your house. The conversations in your living room are private—no one can hear them. But the car parked outside can see exactly who goes into your house, when, and when they leave again; how often these gatherings happen; and whenever two people from your group talk to each other. That’s metadata. And once you understand this parallel between the offline and online worlds, you can immediately see why the right to keep that metadata private and away from whoever is parked in that car—whether it’s the NSA, the NYPD, ICE or Google—is essential to democracy.

The Department of Homeland Security’s network of “fusion centers” “abused their authorities to monitor people engaged in First Amendment–protected activities,” according to the Brennan Center (Reason, 1/6/23).

Metadata is surveillance, just as much as wiretapping or surveillance cameras are. “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs” would have you believe that being opposed to the tracking of metadata is an overreaction:

This response reflects a lack of faith in good governance, which is essential to any well-functioning organization or community seeking to keep its members and society at large safe from bad actors.

This is a highly revealing sentence. According to Blackman, the threat to a well-ordered society where people are safe from “bad actors” comes from a lack of faith in the good intentions of government. But for those outside ruling elite circles, the bad actors too often are government actors.

Unethical and illegal government surveillance happens all the time—from the massive NSA surveillance programs that Edward Snowden exposed in 2013, to the surveillance of Muslims by the NYPD, to the routine surveillance of people planning peaceful protests by the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers.

Moreover, much of this illegal surveillance is done with the cooperation of the corporate sector (such as the NSA programs), and companies like Amazon make and host surveillance technology like Ring and Palantir. The former is a home security surveillance service that partners with police and has a long, documented history of racist abuse. The latter is a data mining company that runs on Amazon Web Services and is used by ICE to hunt down and deport immigrants.

(Corporate digital surveillance is also a prime source of profits, as Shoshana Zuboff demonstrates in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The threats to privacy that come from this dimension of surveillance are also dismissed by Blackman.)

‘Scaling up its ideology’

Reid Blackman’s website touts his book Ethical Machines.

In scolding Signal and “technologists” for being unwilling to simply trust the government with our data, Blackman is staking out an aggressive position in favor of existing relations of power, complete with their systemic biases and abuses.

He goes further. “There’s something sneaky in all this,” he says, accusing Signal of surreptitiously making its users carry out its “rather extreme” ideology of privacy. “Scaling up its technology is scaling up its ideology,” Blackman declares. Users are “witting or unwitting advocates of the moral views of the 40 or so people who operate Signal.”

But why are Signal’s politics more sinister or “ideological” than Meta’s? And does Blackman really believe that Signal users are unknowingly furthering an agenda more than Google or Amazon users?

Speaking of agendas, Reid Blackman is a corporate and government consultant whose specialty is artificial intelligence, specifically AI ethics. AI, of course, depends on metadata. So his paychecks come from those who have a vested interest in demonizing privacy and normalizing digital surveillance.

If there’s a case to be made that routine surveillance of the sort enabled by harvesting metadata is compatible with a democratic society, this op-ed is not it. It is, rather, an emotionally manipulative, intentionally alarmist and—it needs to be said—ideological attack on the idea that people have a right to online privacy.

Making Signal the poster child for this supposedly “morally dangerous” proposition is no accident: Signal is routinely used by democratic activists and organizers to exercise their constitutional First Amendment rights. Blackman is right about one thing—the values and interests of those users are at odds with digital surveillance. But as an ethicist, he’s chosen the wrong side in that battle.

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January 12, 2023

In Biden Documents Story, Stenography and Scandal Take Center Stage

News coverage of the revelation that President Joe Biden found and returned classified documents left over from his time as vice president offers a textbook example of corporate media’s twin commitments to scandal and stenography.

After CBS Evening News announced the “breaking news” on its January 9 program, teeing up the right-wing media machine by directly framing the story in comparison to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document scandal, many corporate outlets covered the story by focusing on what each party had to say about it—rather than what the general public ought to understand about it.

‘Breaking news’

CBS‘s Norah O’Donnell (CBS Evening News, 1/9/23) reports the “breaking news” that Biden returned classified documents that he found to the National Archives.

“Breaking News: Classified Records Found,” announced the screen behind CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell, who introduced the segment with an ominous tone. After explaining the known facts, reporter Adriana Diaz noted that “this development comes as the Justice Department is investigating former president Trump’s handling of classified documents.”

Diaz pointed out that Biden had been “critical of Trump” in an interview with 60 Minutes‘ Scott Pelley (9/18/22). The Evening News report aired a clip of that interview, in which Pelley asked Biden what he thought about when he learned about the top-secret documents found at Trump’s private residence in Florida. Biden responded: “How that could possibly happen. How anyone could be that irresponsible.”

CBS followed up that clip with a former federal prosecutor saying that the Biden case was “completely different from the Mar-a-Lago case,” because it was self-reported, suggesting “a lack of intentional conduct,” in contrast to Trump apparently intentionally taking the classified documents.

It’s the kind of independent assessment that, at an outlet more concerned with news value than clickbait, would inform the setup of the story. The CBS report also freely noted that the Biden documents were “small in number” (CBS‘s web story put the number at “roughly 10”) while the Trump documents numbered “over 300.” The piece also noted that while “the National Archive retrieved the [Biden] documents the day after they were discovered” and Biden named a Trump-appointed Justice Department lawyer to conduct an initial investigation, Trump “failed to comply with multiple requests to return” the documents at Mar-a-Lago “for over a year.”

But at CBS, the question, Is this story something people should be concerned about? comes after the question, Can we set this up to look like a political scandal? And so the story concluded darkly, “the attorney general will decide if a criminal investigation is warranted.”

Scrupulously stenographic

Politico (1/10/23) suggests your take on the story should depend on which party you tend to believe.

The report certainly got CBS lots of play—if not lots of love—among right-wing media, with the 60 Minutes interview taking center stage in several conservative commentaries (e.g., FoxNews.com, 1/10/23; USA Today, 1/10/23). But some centrist corporate outlets reporting on CBS‘s scoop did little better in informing the public, instead adhering scrupulously to the reporting-as-stenography axiom of political reporting.

This (unspoken) axiom states that political stories must be covered by simply reporting what representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties say, with little to no analysis of the truth or the relevance of those statements. In this way, media outlets attempt to shield themselves from accusations of bias from the powerful. Note that this form of reporting requires no seeking out of alternative perspectives that might disagree with both parties.

Here’s how Politico (1/10/23) headlined it: “GOP Races to Suggest Trump Equivalency in Biden-Linked Classified Docs.”

The piece launched in with the he said/she said:

House Republicans are racing to draw a straight line from newly discovered classified documents found by President Joe Biden’s personal attorneys to the legal jeopardy enveloping former President Donald Trump over his own storage of top-secret material at Mar-a-Lago.

And Democrats aren’t having it.

It wasn’t until the 16th paragraph (of the 26-paragraph piece) that the reporters offered any sort of assessment of either side’s claims. Prior to that, it’s all partisan talking points. Not a single independent expert is quoted in the entire piece.

This kind of coverage is worse than useless. Without offering more than the slightest hint of evaluation, stenographic reporting of partisan battles will always benefit the party willing to make the most outlandish claims, because there is virtually no downside.

‘Would have been explosive’

The New York Times (1/9/23) treats “matters of political reality” as though they have nothing to do with, you know, reality.

In its main initial report (1/9/23), an entire team of four New York Times reporters tasked to the story wrote:

The White House statement said that it “is cooperating” with the department but did not explain why Mr. Biden’s team waited more than two months to announce the discovery of the documents, which came a week before the midterm congressional elections when the news would have been an explosive last-minute development.

Of course, the news would only be “explosive” because the right wing would pretend it is, and the centrist media like the Times would predictably follow suit so as not to appear biased—while in the next breath acknowledging that the Biden document circumstances “appeared to be significantly different” from the Trump document circumstances. But who cares:

Still, whatever the legal questions, as a matter of political reality, the discovery will make the perception of the Justice Department potentially charging Mr. Trump over his handling of the documents more challenging. As a special counsel, Mr. Smith is handling that investigation, along with one into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the January 6 attack on Congress, under Mr. Garland’s supervision.

Moreover, the discovery will fuel the fires on Capitol Hill, where Republicans who have just taken the House majority were already planning multiple investigations of the Biden administration, including the decision to have the FBI search Mar-a-Lago.

‘Fresh narrative’

“Politically, this drama will run and run,” CNN (1/11/23) promises–while ignoring the cable news giant’s own role in determining which stories have legs.

CNN (1/11/23) adopted a similar attitude. On its highly trafficked homepage, it boosted the headline: “Biden’s Documents Drama Gives Republicans a Fresh Narrative to Use Against Him.” The analysis piece by Stephen Collinson repeatedly drew a distinction between the Biden and Trump cases, yet argued that the fact that the GOP’s narrative “may not reflect the truth of the matter” is “immaterial”:

In a media environment where partisan news coverage blurs the truth, many Americans will only hear headlines about one president—Biden—who condemned Trump for keeping secret documents and is now guilty of the same offense.

Collinson concluded by pointing out that journalists have been peppering Biden and his surrogates with questions about the documents since the story broke: “Scalise, Comer and other Republicans will certainly ensure that Biden won’t get to stop answering questions on his own classified documents problem any time soon.”

It’s a sleight-of-hand just like that at the Times, erasing the role (and culpability) of centrist media in establishing “matter[s] of political reality.” Those questions aren’t just coming from the partisan media, and Scalise, Comer and other Republicans can’t force nonpartisan news outlets to doggedly pursue non-stories. But they don’t have to—those news outlets willingly do it of their own accord, then pretend they have nothing to do with it.

The post In Biden Documents Story, Stenography and Scandal Take Center Stage appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 12, 2023

‘It Takes People Working Together to Bridge Understandings and Undo Misunderstandings’ – Best of CounterSpin 2021 transcript

CounterSpin221230.mp3

Janine Jackson: Welcome to the best of CounterSpin for 2022. I’m Janine Jackson.

All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events, perspectives of those outside of power, relevant but omitted history, important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting.

But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that just make it an unlikely arena for the inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter that we need.

CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly, as well as the role that we can play in changing it.

This is just a small selection of some of them. You’re listening to the best of CounterSpin for 2022, brought to you by the media watch group FAIR.

Janine Jackson: “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources. The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address those concerns in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year.

Rakeen Mabud: “On these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.”

Rakeen Mabud: So we’ve essentially spent 50 years handing our supply chain over to mega corporations. These companies have built a system that works for them, right, it works for padding their own profits, jacking up their profits, all spurred on by Wall Street, who really demanded short-term profit increases over all else.

And so when you think about what a supply chain is for, usually most people would think, oh, it’s here to deliver goods and services. Well, that’s actually not what our supply chain was built to do. Our supply chain was built to really maximize what companies could get out of this, and the dividends that they can pay off to shareholders.

And what that means is that they’ve essentially built this system that has no redundancy. It has no sort of flexibility for changes in an economy, such as a pandemic, or even something like a climate shock, right, which we’re unfortunately likely to see more of over the coming years and decades.

And so there is what we call a just-in-time supply system, right? This is a supply system that is expected to deliver exactly the number of goods that are needed at exactly the moment that they’re needed.

But with something like a pandemic, all of those predictions about what goods will be needed when go out the window. And that’s when you end up with supply shortages, that’s when you end up with bottlenecks.

The consolidation piece of this is also really important. We have three ocean shipping alliances that carry 80% of the world’s cargo. So there, if one of them goes down, you can see how that massively disrupt our global supply chain, but you can also see how that might jack up prices.

And my team and I have combed through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of corporate earning calls. And you really don’t have to take my word for it. There’s obviously a big, deep story here. But on these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.

Embedded within that is also, let’s cut back on pay for workers. You saw Kroger do this, right? Kroger cut back on hazard pay, jacked up its prices, and then issued a bunch of stock buybacks.

And so the issues facing workers and consumers, as well as these small businesses who aren’t able to negotiate better prices for the inputs that they’re selling in their stores, and are being hit by pandemic profiteering higher up the supply chain. These are all part of the same system, and it’s all rooted in what is essentially, in short, corporate greed.

Janine Jackson: The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death, in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org, and that’s because people needed to hear a different version of that story than what they were hearing.

Bryce Green: “Washington decided to expand anyway. And they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance, one country at a time.”

Bryce Greene: So this whole story of NATO expansion and economic expansion, it begins right after the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US and Russia made a deal that NATO, the Cold War alliance, would not expand east past a reunified Germany. No reason to escalate tensions unnecessarily.

But, unfortunately, Washington decided to expand anyway. And they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance, one country at a time.

And even at the time, Cold Warriors, like the famed diplomat George Kennan, warned that this was a recipe for disaster. It would make Russia feel trapped and surrounded, and when major nuclear powers feel trapped and surrounded, it doesn’t really make for a peaceful world. But as we all know, Washington isn’t in the interest of peace, and they did it anyway.

In 2004, the US poured millions of dollars into the anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine. They funded media and NGOs supporting opposition candidates. And they did this using organizations like the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. These organizations are broadly understood to serve regime-change interests in the name of “democracy.”

Now, in 2004, it didn’t work exactly, but Ukraine began to start making closer ties to the EU and US. And that process continued up to 2014.

Shortly before the overthrow, the Ukrainian government was negotiating closer integration into the EU, and closer integration with the Western economic bloc. And they were being offered loans by the International Monetary Fund, the major world lending agency that represents private interests around the Western world.

So to get those loans, they had to do all sorts of things to their economy, commonly known as “structural adjustment.” This included cutting public sector wages, shrinking the health and education sectors, privatizing the economy and cutting gas subsidies for the people.

And at the time, Russia was offering a plan for economic integration to Ukraine that didn’t contain any of these strings. So when President Viktor Yanukovych chose Russia, well, that set off a wave of protests that were supported and partially funded by the United States. In fact, John McCain and Obama administration officials even flew to the Maidan Square to help support the protesters who wanted to oust the president and change the government.

And what’s worse is that right after the protests started, there was a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, one of Obama’s State Department advisors, and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they were describing how they wanted to set up a new government. They were picking and choosing who would be in the government, who would be out.

Well, a few weeks after that, the Ukrainian government was overthrown. And the guy who they designated as our guy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became the prime minister.

So clearly, clearly, there’s a lot of US involvement in how the Ukrainian government has shifted over the last decade. After 2014, the Ukrainians opted to accept the IMF loans, they opted to further integrate with the EU economically. And Russia is watching all of this happen.

And so immediately after the overthrow, the eastern regions in Ukraine, who were ethnically closer to Russians, and they speak Russian and they favor closer ties to Russia, they revolted. They started an uprising to gain more autonomy, and possibly to separate from the Ukraine entirely.

The Ukrainian government cracked down hard. And that only fueled the rebellion, and so Russia sent in volunteers and soldiers to help back these rebels. Now, of course, Russia denies it, but we all know they are.

And so since 2014, that sort of civil war has been at a stalemate, and every so often there would be a military exercise on the border by one side or another. But really nothing much has changed. And so this current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.

Janine Jackson: The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because, sooprise, sooprise, of how we’re portrayed in US media.

We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com.

Layla A. Jones: “This portrayal of urban environments definitely did fuel fear among viewers…. The way that TV news portrayed Black and urban communities really did affect—it does affect—people’s public opinions of Black people and of our communities.”

Layla A. Jones: “Eyewitness News,” and then “Action News,” which came afterwards, went to more than 200 US cities, but also went international, that format. But, yeah, when it was coming up in the late ’60s, and then “Action News” in the early ’70s, at the same time, there was this suburbanization and white flight happening in urban centers, and for a variety of reasons. We were coming off of the civil rights movement, there was a change in industry and work in cities, but also the news was broadcasting city and urban life as something scary, as something very Black, as something dangerous.

And I guess what we talk about in the piece is that this portrayal of urban environments definitely did fuel fear among viewers. They basically said, we proved in the lab that the more people watched local television news, the more likely they were to associate criminality with being Black, the more likely they were to support criminal justice policies that fuel mass incarceration, like longer sentences and even the death penalty. And so the way that TV news portrayed Black and urban communities really did affect—it does affect—people’s public opinions of Black people and of our communities.

The important point to make is that what was happening when these formats were on the rise is really multi-layered. So, first of all, it was being run at the top, and even from the top, basically all the way down, by all white people. A lot of these people were very young, because 1965, 1970, this was brand new. So they’re all learning together.

Then they’re intentionally trying to attract—and this is especially “Action News”—intentionally trying to attract a suburban audience and, locally, our suburbs are more white. So they’re trying to attract a white, suburban audience, because they believe that’s where the money is, and that’s what’s going to draw advertisers.

We also looked at the commercials. A lot of the commercials in between these news segments featured white families, and white picket fences, and things that you don’t really see in the cities that they’re reporting about.

So with all those layers going on, what “Action News” found to work for them, what shot them up past their competitor, “Eyewitness News,” was focusing happy, upbeat and community-oriented stories in the suburbs. So the stories about backyard festivals or charity events, they’ll have a photographer go out there just to cover those good events, to make those people feel seen, and to make sure they tune in and watch the news.

At the same time, the stories that can fill up the time and the newscast and are easy, quick, close by and cheap to cover, which is literally what a veteran anchor Larry Kane told me, are crime stories. He was like, you know, the photographer would just shoot the blood, shoot the scene, you shoot the victim, whatever they have to say, and you can do it in 20 seconds. And speed was another element of this format.

And so it created this dichotomy. And, again, I like to say that I don’t believe, from talking to anyone, that it was like, “We hate Black people and we just want to make them look bad.” I just think it was a complete carelessness, and then once they were told, because the stations had been told this is harmful, they never changed their approach. And I think that’s really important, too.

Janine Jackson: As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage. We talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles, Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. We talked about the 40th remembrance and rededication of Vincent Chin’s murder, VincentChin.org.

Helen Zia: “It became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.”

Helen Zia: It was a horrific killing, and not only that, but a continued miscarriage of justice, where the justice system failed at every turn for a young man who was killed and attacked on the night of his bachelor party because of how he looked at a time of intense anti-Asian hate. And all of that was very important. It brought attention to the whole idea that Asian Americans are people, that we are humans, that we are Americans, and that we experience racism and discrimination.

But that’s not all that was important, because that event and the miscarriage of justice catalyzed a whole movement, a civil rights movement led by Asian Americans, with Detroit, Michigan, as the epicenter of that civil rights movement that reached all across America for Asian Americans, and also had a huge impact on, really, democracy in this country, in many, many different ways. And it represented the solidarity of people from all walks of life.

We were in Detroit, now a majority Black city, back then was a majority Black city, and we had incredible support from the Black community, as well as the Arab-American community, multi-faith, multi-class, people from all walks of life, not only in Detroit. And then it became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.

And that’s why we’re talking about this. It’s to remember that moment, but the legacy as well—of people coming together in solidarity, with the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety. That we are part of a beloved community, that no community should live in fear of violence or hate. And this notion of all our communities being so divided, can we ever be allies, let alone come together.

And so that’s what we’re remembering: Let’s not forget that, actually, we have been in solidarity. And let’s take the lessons of that and move it forward to today, because we need that desperately.

And that’s why we are saying it’s more than remembrance, it’s about rededication. It’s about taking the hard work that happened, and coming together in unity and in solidarity and building a movement. There’s nothing simple about that; there’s no Kumbaya. It really takes people working hard together to bridge understandings and undo misunderstandings, break down stereotypes and build a common understanding and a common bond between communities.

And so when, as you say, communities are portrayed in the news or in TV or in movies, that this is just that community’s concern; it doesn’t involve other people…. Anti-Asian violence, well, hey, that’s just Asians. And we don’t even know that they’re Americans. We don’t even know that they were on this continent for several hundred years.

And so I think you’re right, that’s a way of pigeonholing people and keeping us apart, instead of looking at the true commonality. If we talk about Vincent Chin or violence against Asian Americans, we also talk about Buffalo and we talk about Coeur d’Alene, and how ideas of white supremacy and even active white supremacist groups, they lump us together. They don’t see us as separate groups. They connect the dots in a very negative way. And so it’s really incumbent on all thinking people, and especially our media, to be able to connect those dots too, and not keep us separate.

Janine Jackson: In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them, given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001. We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates.

Sumayyah Waheed: “He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet.”

Sumayyah Waheed: It’s important to note he had choices in terms of how to respond to this, the request for an apology. He could have flatly refused it. He could have defended the NYPD’s program. I wouldn’t agree with that, either, but he could have done that.

Instead, he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. And as you said, specifically something that harms a marginalized community, the Muslims in the New York area, whose harms that they suffered from this massive surveillance echo through today.

And this was not that long ago. This program started in the aftermath of 9/11, so about 20-plus years ago, and then the AP reported on it in, I think, 2012. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on it.

And they reported with a treasure trove of documents, internal documents from the NYPD, some of which our organization utilized in our lawsuit against the NYPD for their spying. And a federal appeals court explicitly said that our client’s allegations were plausible, that the NYPD ran a surveillance program with a racially discriminatory classification.

So he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet with a position that, I don’t even know how much he’s going to be compensated, but he’s now got a national platform to further spread lies.

Just from our lawsuit—and our lawsuit was specifically for New Jersey Muslims who were affected by this, and there were other lawsuits for the New York Muslims, and there were Muslims outside of the New York and New Jersey area who were affected by this. But just from our lawsuit, we knew that the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey.

So every aspect of Muslims’ lives was being surveilled, and the community finding out about this pervasive surveillance, that’s not something that you can just dismiss. The community basically was traumatized by this.

And the result—there’s a Mapping Muslims report that actually goes into all the effects, some of the impacts on the Muslim community from this notorious program of surveillance. And they found that Muslims suppressed themselves, in terms of their religious expression, their speech and political associations.

It sowed suspicion within the community, because people found out, you know, the person sitting next to me at the mosque was an informant. How can I go to the mosque and trust everyone there? Maybe I won’t go.

Of course, it severed trust with law enforcement, and then contributed to a pervasive fear and unwillingness to publicly engage.

So that you can’t just flip a switch on. If the NYPD actually wanted to address those harms, that would be a really long road to repair.

And by having John Miller in his position, and not actually censuring him or firing him for those comments, the NYPD signaled the opposite, right, that they’re going to back somebody who doesn’t care to address the harms of the department.

Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, and they don’t leave the vast majority of us outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise.

Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that their space is the only space, their conversation is the only conversation, and that’s just not true.

One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old, traditional media outlets, but about instead about invigorating community information needs. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project, Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy at Free Press.

Mike Rispoli: “There are all these really profound effects on civic participation and the overall health of our communities when local media isn’t meeting people’s needs.”

Mike Rispoli: In 2016, New Jersey was looking to sell some old broadcast public media licenses that it held, and in the selling of those state assets, the state received $332 million.

And Free Press Action was doing some work in New Jersey at the time. We were organizing in communities, trying to find ways to have communities partner with local newsrooms, but also hold local newsrooms accountable.

And so we were doing organizing around the state, and talking to people about the future of local news in New Jersey. And at that time, they’re set to receive this windfall from the sale of these TV licenses. And so we thought, hey, what would it look like if some of that money coming into the state was reinvested back into communities to address the growing gaps in news coverage and community information needs?

And so with that, we began the idea of what became the Consortium, that ran a statewide grassroots campaign called the Civic Info Bill Campaign. And that work began in 2017.

And obviously we all have seen and experienced and have been impacted by the loss of local news, especially over the past 20 years. And many communities have never been well-served, even in the “good old days of journalism.” There are many communities who were never, never really well-served by local media.

And so when we were looking at this windfall that the state was going to receive, we thought, how could we use public funding to not just invest into local news, or to “save journalism.” But instead, what if we use public funding and public money to help rebuild and really transform what local media looks like in the state? How do we leverage public funding to invest in projects that are filling in gaps left by the commercial media market?

I think that what we knew when we began this campaign was that if this was a campaign to bail out the journalism industry, that wasn’t a thing that people were going to get behind. That was a thing we didn’t even think lawmakers were going to get behind.

But instead, really what we talked about was not the woes of one specific industry, but instead we talked about the impact on communities when local news and information is not accessible. And we know from data, when local media is deficient or disappears altogether, it has significant consequences on civic participation. Fewer people vote, fewer people volunteer, fewer people run for public office; fewer federal dollars go to districts where there’s no local media presence. Government corruption increases, government spending increases.

So there are all these really profound effects on civic participation and the overall health of our communities when local media isn’t meeting people’s needs. And so we wanted to make the campaign, as well as the bill, really centered around that, as opposed to giving government handouts to corporate media who contributed so much to the mess that we are in right now, and that we’re trying to figure our way out of.

Janine Jackson: And that’s it for the best of CounterSpin for 2022. I hope you enjoyed this look back at just some of the year’s conversations. It’s been my sincere pleasure to host them.

Remember, you can always find shows and transcripts at FAIR.org. The website is also the place to learn about our newsletter Extra!, and, of course, to show support for CounterSpin if you’re able and so inclined. The show is engineered by Alex Noyes. I’m Janine Jackson; thank you so much for listening to CounterSpin.

The post ‘It Takes People Working Together to Bridge Understandings and Undo Misunderstandings’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 11, 2023

‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation’ – CounterSpin interview with Paul Hudson on airline meltdown

Janine Jackson interviewed FlyersRights‘ Paul Hudson about the airline meltdown for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230106Hudson.mp3

(NBC News, 12/29/22)

Janine Jackson: You will likely have seen the images, if you weren’t in them yourself: thousands of people stranded in airports, baggage lost, plans foiled. Is this how it has to be? And if not, well, what exactly is in the way?

Paul Hudson is president of FlyersRights, a nonprofit group organizing the consumer rights of airline passengers. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Hudson.

Paul Hudson: Thank you for having me.

JJ: Reasonable folks understand acts of nature, unfair and brutal as they can be, but what were the non-weather-related conditions or circumstances that contributed importantly to the air travel breakdowns that we all saw in late December?

PH: Air travel has been deteriorating for a long time, really, in the last 20 years especially. So we were in a situation, especially coming out of the pandemic, where I would now analogize it to say, we’re in rough air.

We had terrible conditions over the summer with delays. We had awful situations during the pandemic, with flyers not being given refunds when their flights were canceled.

And now, in the most recent situation with Southwest, we have the equivalent of a crash landing. Their software system no doubt broke down, but it’s been in bad shape for many years, and their personnel were simply inadequate to handle the schedule that they have set up.

So there’s a lot of reforms that need to be done, some short-term and some longer-term, and hopefully this will be a wake-up call that allows the system to get back to where it should be, and where it really was in, say, the 1980s, or prior to that.

JJ: It’s not really a reduction, as maybe some folks have seen in media, it’s not a reduction to “finger-pointing,” or to “he said, she said,” to try to trace causes and to call for accountability.

There were systemic issues and problems that employees and their representatives were on the record, right, as pointing to, as being concerned about.

PH: Yes. And these things were ignored. I mean, this is not the first time an airline or Southwest has had computer breakdowns. Delta had some, a number of others had some. The systems are not nearly as robust as they need to be. They need to be failsafe.

If you look at other systems that, like the internet, like the phone system, even like your electrical grid system, if one part of it goes down, it doesn’t crash the system. You have backups, and you get what’s called graceful degradation.

AP (1/4/23)

But in the airline business, they have underinvested in a lot of these things. And as a result, we get these brownouts. And the cost of it, the inconvenience of it, is dumped on the public.

JJ: Associated Press offered an explainer, which, right there in the name, it’s supposed to tell folks, you’re not inside this system, you don’t understand the ins and outs of this system, but here’s what you need to know.

And in that explainer, AP said, “What happened?” And their answer was:

Airlines were prohibited from furloughing employees as a condition of receiving $54 billion in federal pandemic aid from taxpayers. But that didn’t stop them from encouraging tens of thousands of workers to quit or take long-term leaves of absence after the pandemic torpedoed travel in 2020.

I’m a little confused by that. I’m sort of getting “no one wants to work,” I’m sort of getting “airlines couldn’t keep people in jobs.” I just—as an explainer of what happened, I’m a little confused by that.

Paul Hudson: “Airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily…in the business of making money.”

PH: Well, the intention of the PPP programs and some other bailouts of the airlines, which altogether involved about $90 billion, the intention was that you would keep the staff on the payroll so they would be ready when pandemic ended to restore traffic, and they wouldn’t have to go from a cold start.

But the airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money. If that meant reducing their payroll through other means that got around the intention of the law—and there was no real oversight by the federal government on money—that’s what they did.

And they continued to pay, in some cases, dividends. They paid large bonuses to CEOs and top executives. Some of them also did stock buybacks to keep their stock price up while their profits, of course, were dwindling to nothing.

JJ: Let me just take you on maybe a side trip there, because when I looked at airline meltdown, everything, 100% of the stories, were about Southwest. And I wonder if you see any danger in making this conversation, and making conversations about how to come out of it, only about Southwest Airlines per se.

Is there a reason to expand the conversation beyond that, as though they were outliers or rogues?

PH: Definitely there is. The other airlines have all had lesser brownouts and crashes, not only their computer systems, but their lack of personnel coming out of the pandemic.

The reforms that we’ve been promoting pretty much have been ignored by DoT, which is the only regulator of the airline industry. And as a result, things have gotten worse and worse.

For example, you would think there would be some requirement to have a certain level of backup or reserve capacity, for personnel as well as equipment. But there is none. There is no requirement, and some airlines actually have negative reserves. So even on their best day, they cancel 1 or 2 percent of their fights. It’s profitable to do that.

Another example is that there is no requirement that they maintain any level of customer service. Each airline sets their own goals about that, but there’s no enforcement. And they just say, “Well, I’m sorry.” They don’t answer your phones. They don’t have the personnel to do it.

And the area that’s most crucial, which is pilots; we have a shortage of pilots. Pretty much everyone agrees with that, except perhaps the pilot union that wants to leverage the situation says there is no shortage. But the airlines are simply not recruiting the pilots they need, and haven’t done so for years, especially for regional airlines. They don’t pay them nearly enough.

And the proposals that FlyersRights made, going back to June of this year, about 17 of them, have pretty much been ignored by DoT, at least until recently.

JJ: Let me ask you to talk about journalism. When we see structural or infrastructural problems that you’re pointing to of this order, news media coverage can be unfortunately predictable, really, in terms of, just to put it crudely: There’s going to be a wave of disaster, human-interest, “what the heck is happening” stories, and then a smaller wave of, “well, who’s to blame for this” stories. And then later, maybe a ripple of “serious people” analysis. And that often says, “Golly, everybody’s upset, but there’s really nothing to blame here. There’s nothing to point to.”

And then we rinse and repeat, and we act surprised the next time there’s a crisis. I wonder, what did you make—good, bad or indifferent—of media’s reporting on the airline meltdown?

PH: Well, it was somewhat predictable. I think, though, that the fact that air travel affects such a wide proportion of the population, and the media are, frankly, doing a lot of air travel in many cases—personally, it has affected them. So there was a wider coverage than I would have expected.

I was interviewed on CNBC for six-and-a-half minutes. And, as you know, in national television….

JJ: That’s a lot.

PH: You’re lucky to get one or two minutes. That’s huge.

JJ: So that’s very helpful.

We’re coming out of an era where the White House was issuing sort of comic book rules like, well, for every new regulation, you have to eliminate two. And regulation is evil, and that’s the way we’re meant to understand it. The bar is pretty low.

But I don’t know, listeners may remember, this country had moments when we could talk about consumer rights, not maybe as robust and expansive as some of us would want. But it wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a “snowflake issue” to want companies to make products that were safe and nontoxic, and that had consumers—human beings—in mind.

What do you say about the moment to reinvigorate that consumer perspective?

PH: I hope it’s going to come back to some degree. We issued a Bill of Rights for airline passengers back in 2014 and ’13. And we visited 150 congressional offices over the next two or three years. Now, there’s 535 members of Congress; we could not find one member who would introduce any substantial legislation, even drop a bill in.

And so we’re in a total desert situation now. And if you don’t have a member of Congress that wants to make, not just this, but other consumer issues important, and will not introduce legislation, you’re just not going to get anywhere.

The agencies that are the regulators, they are political at the top. And whether and however they’re controlled by the Democrat or Republican administration, our experience has been, over the last 30 years, that they’re actually controlled by the industry. And the industry pretty much has veto power over any consumer regulation.

JJ: It’s what we call being captured.

Do you have any final thoughts for journalists, many of whom might be starting out new, and think they can cover what they want to cover and let the chips fall where they may? What would you encourage journalists to look at or to ignore or to think about, or any thoughts for media?

PH: I would say if I was a journalist starting out, or even not starting out, experienced, in an issue like air transportation, you have to look at all the different sides, not just go with the propaganda or the sound bites from any interest groups, because every group you speak to comes with their own agenda.

But even so, there are many facts that can be distilled from these things. And it’s not impossible to come up with reasonable policies and come up with a reasonably accurate story in many situations.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Paul Hudson. He’s president of FlyersRights. They’re online at FlyersRights.org. Paul Hudson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PH: Thank you so much.

The post ‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘With This Delay of Vacating Title 42, the Death Toll Will Only Rise’ – CounterSpin interview with Melissa Crow on asylum policy

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies’ Melissa Crow about asylum policy for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230106Crow.mp3

New York Times (12/7/22)

Janine Jackson: The Biden administration is “appealing an order to rescind Title 42, a pandemic policy that has allowed it to quickly expel new migrants. It said it nonetheless planned to lift the policy.” So explained the New York Times in early December, if “explaining” can mean leaving readers a bit more confused.

We subsequently learned that the Supreme Court has halted the order to rescind the policy, leaving it in place while somebody decides whether it’s lawful.

If you can peer through the language, you’ll find Title 42, invoked as a supposed anti-Covid move under Trump as justification for the summary expulsion of asylum seekers—in theory, from both Canadian and Mexican borders.

Last fall, a district judge declared Title 42 no longer justified. But Republican attorneys general in 19 states opposed that, were denied the ability to intervene on it, and pushed it to the particular weird Supreme Court we have right now.

Once a piece of legislation or policy is deemed not just a “partisan football,” but an object lesson about the relationship of courts and legislators, you almost despair of news media approaching it in terms of its effects on human beings. What would it mean to put people at the center of the story of migration and immigration?

We’re joined now by Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Melissa Crow.

Melissa Crow: Thanks so much Janine.

JJ: Let me ask you for some baseline clarity here. Title 42 was itself an intervention that countermanded existing laws and protocols on asylum, right? It was always business as unusual.

MC: Yes, that’s quite right, Janine. The Title 42 policy represents a radical departure by the US government from its decades-long practice of processing asylum seekers at the southern border—which, of course, is required by our domestic and international legal obligations to provide protection to individuals who are fleeing persecution.

But over the three years that it’s been in place, it has been, to some extent, normalized, particularly as a result of press reports. And as your organization has pointed out, reporters’ framing of the policy has really shifted since Trump left office.

The framing in many media reports that I read these days suggests that ending Title 42 would be a radical change that would result in a crisis, rather than a return to what had been our practice for more than 35 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

JJ: It’s interesting, because the presentation of rescinding Title 42 as having impacts—it’s not wrong that it would have an impact. It’s just, what is the perspective that we consider that impact from? And what I’m seeing a lot from in coverage right now is communities saying, we’re going to be the ones who are going to receive migrants, and we don’t have the support, necessarily, to take care of them. That, to me, is a different story.

Then that gets funneled into another media frame [in which] you can’t talk about social welfare without demonizing people who might need it, however briefly or in whatever contextual situation. So it’s not as though we couldn’t talk about impacts, it’s just the way they’re being talked about.

CNN (12/16/22)

MC: Right. Humanitarian and legal service providers and shelters stand ready to assist migrants who are coming in, but they do need to partner, not only with the federal government, but with state and local governments to provide much-needed funding.

This talk about a “crisis at the border” is really, in my book, a misuse of language. We hear words like “surge,” or “flood,” or “wave,” and that language is really dehumanizing. It essentially compares people who are seeking protection and safety to natural disasters or military threats, as something to be feared. And it’s xenophobic, and we can do better than that.

We can use language that is more neutral, we can talk about an increase in the number of asylum applications, or a rising number of people seeking safety. But we don’t need to go to the extremes. We have always—well, until three years ago—we have always welcomed asylum seekers at our borders. And there’s no reason to stop now.

JJ: We even hear “invasion” at some point, which puts it really in a certain place.

It seems as though the main frame right now, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, is partisanship: how the Supreme Court is being misused by Republicans to enforce or endorse a policy that really is a congressional matter. But then, also, the Biden White House is trying to have it all ways.

Human beings are showing up in coverage in a very secondary way, and as you’re describing, sometimes they’re described literally as pawns, political pawns, but then they’re not engaged in a way that actually challenges that.

So what human impacts can we expect from what’s being called, rather passively, an “administrative stay,” as though it were a non-action. I read one account that called it a “gift of time” to think about things. But this ruling by the court is not an absence of action; real consequences will follow from it.

Melissa Crow: “It’s very clear from the arguments made by the anti-immigrant states that they’re viewing Title 42 as a border management tool, rather than a public health tool.”

MC: Yes, absolutely. And just to clarify, the only issue on which the Supreme Court has decided to weigh in is whether those 19 states have the right to intervene in this matter.

It’s kind of ironic, because nobody here, neither of the parties, really seems to question whether the Title 42 policy continues to be required as a response to Covid-19. It’s very clear from the arguments made by the anti-immigrant states that they’re viewing Title 42 as a border management tool, rather than a public health tool. And they’ve opposed virtually every other Covid restriction, except this one, which relates to asylum seekers.

In terms of human impacts, the Supreme Court’s decision to extend the stay pending their decision will continue to have deadly consequences for people who are fleeing persecution. Every day that the policy remains in effect, vulnerable individuals remain in legal limbo, and they’re exposed to grave dangers.

We’ve seen reports from Human Rights First and others documenting over 13,000 violent attacks against people expelled to Mexico under the Biden administration alone. And with this repeated delay of vacating the Title 42 policy, the death toll will only rise.

The Biden administration was prepared to end the policy before the holidays, and service providers ready to welcome asylum seekers at the border. Instead, those asylum seekers are continuing to languish in Mexico and elsewhere, in really dire conditions, under freezing temperatures, and the threat of violence by cartels, smugglers and the like, with really no end in sight for the foreseeable future.

JJ: And to the extent that media and reporters talk to those service providers, they get a very different perspective on the story.

And I have to say, I really resent that the narrow framing means that we can’t argue that Covid is still a crisis and at the same time argue that we shouldn’t be harming people who seek asylum as some sort of pretense of a public health measure. I feel like the media gives us this narrow window in which to have that conversation.

MC: Stephen Miller, who, as you know, was the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, wanted to impose a Title 42 type policy long before the Covid pandemic. And when Covid happened in March of 2020, he seized on this opportunity to finally close the border to asylum seekers. But the pandemic was really just a pretext.

The Title 42 policy was implemented over the objections of leading public health professionals and experts at the CDC. In fact, the director of the CDC’s Division of Global Management and Quarantine, who ended up resigning, said explicitly that it’s morally wrong to use a public authority that has never ever been used in this way, and he said that it was evidence of discrimination.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, the frame that’s so big that it’s almost invisible in this coverage is, you know, I keep reading articles about the “solution to immigration”—immigration and immigrants are a problem. These human beings are, first and foremost, a problem.

And, of course, we need “reform.” And, of course, it’s a “divisive issue.” And all of these seem to be accepted tenets of the conversation here.

And what if we don’t buy them? What if we don’t accept that immigration is inherently a problem? What could the conversation look like if we talked about it in a different way?

MC: Yeah. I hate to sound trite, but this country is a nation of immigrants, and always has been. As you may know, there was a poll conducted not too long ago where nearly three quarters of Americans agree that the US should provide asylum to people fleeing persecution or violence in their home country, conducted by the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California/San Diego. And it came out in December. And it was released by the Welcome With Dignity Campaign. I think they surveyed a thousand people across the political spectrum: 80% Democrats, 74% independents and 57% Republicans expressed support for asylum.

So I think that tells a very different story than the characterizations that you shared. And I feel like people are so quick to label those coming in, without really understanding the catalysts that caused them to flee in the first place.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Find their work online at cgrs.uc hastings.edu. Melissa Crow, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MC: Thank you for having me, Janine; I appreciate it.

The post ‘With This Delay of Vacating Title 42, the Death Toll Will Only Rise’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 6, 2023

Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks

Twitter’s “state-affiliated media” policy has an unwritten exemption for US government-funded and -controlled news media accounts. Twitter even boosts these accounts as “authoritative” sources for news during the Russian/Ukrainian war.

Twitter‘s change of ownership does not appear to have altered the platform’s special relationship with the US national security state (Intercept, 12/20/22).

Elon Musk’s controlled release of the documents known as the “Twitter Files” has given us some insight into the inner workings of the social media platform. The batch of docs released on December 20 is arguably the most explosive, detailing Twitter’s deliberate shielding of US propaganda operations. After getting limited access to Twitter‘s internal systems, Lee Fang of the Intercept (12/20/22) detailed how Twitter staff “whitelisted” accounts run by US Central Command (CENTCOM), the unit of the US military that oversees the Middle East, as part of covert propaganda campaigns. In other words, Twitter protected accounts engaged in US psychological warfare operations, even though they clearly violated the platform’s terms of service.

But this is far from the whole story of Twitter’s assistance with US influence operations. A FAIR investigation reveals that dozens of large accounts that are part of US overt propaganda networks are given special treatment from the company, in blatant violation of Twitter’s own policies.

Through a lopsided “state-affiliated” media policy application, Twitter has actually gone against its own mission to provide “context” to users. More acutely, in Ukraine, Twitter actively promoted US funded media organizations as part of the “Topics” feature which ostensibly aggregated “authoritative” sources. The prominence of these outlets on the platform has strengthened their influence on the national media ecosystem, and has helped shape public perceptions of the entire war.

‘State-affiliated media’

In 2020, as part of an effort to “provide additional context” for information users encounter on the platform, Twitter (8/6/20) announced a policy to add labels to “accounts that are controlled by certain official representatives of governments, state-affiliated media entities and individuals associated with those entities.”

“We believe,” Twitter declared in a blog post, “people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor.” Twitter further said it would not “recommend or amplify accounts or their tweets with these labels.”

The clear primary target at the time was Russian state-affiliated media, though the policy has been extended to other countries. According to Twitter‘s own numbers, accounts with the “state-affiliated” label experience up to a 30% reduction in circulation.

As part of its policy during the Ukraine War, Twitter (3/16/22) announced its intention to “elevate credible and reliable information.” In a blog post, Twitter praised its “effective” policy implementation against Russian government accounts. They claimed that “engagements per tweet decreased by approximately 25%,” and “the number of accounts that engaged with those Tweets decreased by 49%”

But it’s clear that Twitter’s policy isn’t applied evenly. There are numerous media operations with close ties to the US government—some even fully government-funded and -run—whose accounts aren’t labeled “state-affiliated.” Under this biased application of the policy, Twitter enables US propaganda outlets to maintain the pretense of independence on the platform, a tacit endorsement of US soft power and influence operations.

This lopsided approach makes it clear that Twitter’s policy is not about “providing context” to users, but rather promoting the US establishment worldview. In short, Twitter is serving as an active participant in an ongoing information war.

Delegitimizing official enemies

Twitter defines “state-affiliated media” as

outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.

The policy is ostensibly apolitical and applies to all state media accounts equally, but in practice, the true purpose of the policy is clear: to delegitimize media affiliated with states opposed to US policy. The assumption inherent in Twitter’s policy is that if a state is considered to be an enemy of the US, then any media affiliated with that state is inherently suspicious. Users therefore need to be warned about the content they are consuming. FAIR could find no examples of accounts labeled “United States state-affiliated media,” even though there are many outlets that would obviously seem to fit that description.

Twitter lists the countries to be targeted by the policy, which has some notable omissions. For example, the list does not include Qatar, and accounts for the Qatar-funded media outlets Al Jazeera and AJ+ do not feature the “state-affiliated” label. But even among the states that are listed, the policy is not applied equally.

Although Twitter lists the United States and US allies like the United Kingdom and Canada as countries where “labels appear on relevant Twitter accounts,” this appears to refer to outlets based in those countries that are affiliated with other countries. Certainly there are US-linked accounts that could not more obviously fit the category of “state-affiliated” yet receive no labels.

As an example of some blatant oversights, none of the accounts for the US Army, National Security Agency or Central Intelligence Agency are currently labeled as a state or government entity, despite being “government accounts heavily engaged in geopolitics and diplomacy.” Additionally, the accounts for the Israeli Defense Force, Ministry of Defense and prime minister are all unlabeled.

Meanwhile, Twitter rigorously enforces the rules for states the US considers to be hostile. Accounts for major state agencies in Russia, China and Iran are generally labeled as state entities. Media outlets from those countries are also targeted: PressTV from Iran, RT and Sputnik from Russia, and China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News from China are all labeled “state-affiliated media.”

Twitter has taken extra measures against Russia after the invasion, adding explicit warnings on any post linking to “a Russian state-affiliated media website”:

If a user attempts to like, retweet or quote tweet a post that includes this restricted media, they are given a second warning:

Though the user is still able to interact with the content, these warnings are designed to nudge the user away from doing so, thus slowing the spread of disapproved information.

Artificial exceptions

Twitter’s policy defines “state-affiliated media” as newsrooms where the state has “control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” But there are several major media accounts that seem to fit this description that have no such warning labels.

None of the major public media outlets in the US, Britain and Canada have received the label. In 2017, NPR received 4% of its funding from the US government. The BBC receives a large portion of its funding from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The CBC receives $1.2 billion in funding from the Canadian government. Yet Twitter accounts for the BBC, CBC and NPR are all unlabeled on the platform.

To explain this discrepancy, Twitter makes a distinction between “state-financed” and “state-affiliated” media. Twitter writes:

State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.

The idea that publicly supported media in either Britain or the US are independent of the state is highly dubious. Firstly, it is unclear why state funding does not fall under the “financial resources” language in Twitter’s policy; governments can and have used the threat of pulling funding to enforce their editorial judgments (Extra!, 3–4/95; FAIR.org, 5/17/05). Secondly, government influence operates on a bureaucratic level, as scholar Tom Mills (OpenDemocracy, 1/25/17) noted of the BBC:

Governments set the terms under which it operates, they appoint its most senior figures, who in future will be directly involved in day-to-day managerial decision making, and they set the level of the license fee, which is the BBC’s major source of income.

National Endowment for Democracy

A look at the US’s soft power initiatives shows far more outlets that ought to fall under the “state affiliated” label. One such conduit for funding is the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED, created during the Reagan administration, pours $170 million a year into organizations dedicated to defending or installing regimes friendly to US policies.

ProPublica (11/24/10) described the NED as being “established by Congress, in effect, to take over the CIA’s covert propaganda efforts.” David Ignatius of the Washington Post (9/22/91) reported on the organization as a vehicle for “spyless coups,” as it was “doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.” The first NED president, Carl Gershman (MintPress, 9/9/19), admitted that the switch was largely a PR move to shroud the organization’s intentions: “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA.”

NED operations in Ukraine deserve especially close scrutiny, given the organization’s role in the 2014 Maidan coup and the information war surrounding the Russian invasion. In 2013, Gershman described Ukraine as the “biggest prize” in the East/West rivalry (Washington Post, 9/26/13). Later that year, the NED united with other Western-backed influence networks to support the protest movements that later led to the removal of the president.

The history of the board is a who’s who of regime change advocates and imperial hawks. The current board includes Anne Applebaum, a popular anti-Russian staff writer at the Atlantic and frequent cable news commentator whose work epitomizes the New Cold War mentality, and Elliott Abrams, a major player in the Iran/Contra scandal who later played a key role in the Trump administration’s campaign to overthrow the Venezuelan government. Victoria Nuland, formerly the foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, is a key player in US foreign policy, and was even one of the US officials who was caught meddling behind the scenes to reshape the Ukrainian government in 2014. She served on the NED board in between her time in the State Department for the Obama and Biden administrations. Other former board members include Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski and current CIA director William Burns.

After the war started, the NED removed all of its Ukraine projects from its website, though they are still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. A look at 2021 projects shows extensive work funding media organizations throughout Ukraine with the ostensible goal of “promot[ing] government accountability” or “foster[ing] independent media.” Despite their overt funding from a well-documented US propaganda organ, none of these organizations’ Twitter accounts contain a “state-affiliated media” label. Even the NED’s own Twitter account does not reference its relationship to the US government.

This is highly relevant to the current war in Ukraine. CHESNO, ZN.UA, ZMiST and Ukrainian Toronto Television, Vox Ukraine are all part of the NED’s media network in Ukraine, yet their Twitter accounts have no state-affiliated label. Furthermore, some of the newsrooms in this network boast extensive ties to other US government organizations. European Pravda, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center and Hromadske—all founded during or shortly after the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014—boast explicit partnerships with NATO. Hromadske and the UCMC also tout partnerships with the US State Department, the US Embassy in Kyiv and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID plays a similar role to the NED. Under the protective cover of humanitarian aid and development projects, the agency serves as a conduit for US regime change operations and soft power influence peddling. Among other things, the organization has been a cover for “promoting democracy” in Nicaragua, and provided half a billion dollars to advance the coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected government.

Kyiv Post and Independent

The most popular recipient of NED funds has been the Kyiv Independent, a reconstitution of another NED-funded newsroom, the Kyiv Post. Though it claims to receive the majority of its funding through advertising and subscriptions, the Post website lists the NED as “donors who sponsored content produced by the Kyiv Post journalists.”

When the Post was temporarily shuttered in a staff dispute in November 2021, many of the journalists formed the Kyiv Independent. They did this with a $200,000 grant from the Canadian government, as well as an emergency grant from the European Endowment for Democracy, an organization headquartered in Brussels that is both modeled after and funded by the NED.

After the outbreak of war, the Independent gained over 2 million Twitter followers and attracted millions of dollars in donations. Staff from the Independent have flooded the US media ecosystem: Its reporters have had op-eds in top US newspapers like the New York Times (3/5/22) and the Washington Post (2/28/22). They often appear on US TV channels like CNN (3/21/22), CBS (12/21/22), Fox News (3/31/22) and MSNBC (4/10/22).

Omitting the newsroom’s ties to the US government, CNN’s Brian Stelter (3/20/22) praised the Independent for going from “a three-month-old startup and relative unknown in the Western world to now one of the leading sources of information on the war in Ukraine.” Its funding drives have been promoted by US outlets like CBS and PBS (MintPress, 4/8/22).

The top staff of the Independent have extensive connections to other US government projects. Contributing editor Liliane Bivings worked on Ukraine projects at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US and other governments that serves as NATO’s de facto brain trust. Chief financial officer Jakub Parusinski worked with the USAID-funded International Center for Policy Studies (MintPress, 4/8/22).

Chief Executive Officer Daryna Shevchenko previously worked for IREX, an education and development nonprofit created by the State Department and Ford Foundation that still receives most of its funding from the US government. She also co-founded the Media Development Foundation, an organization funded by the NED and the US Embassy in Kyiv to promote “independent” media in Ukraine. Chief operating officer Oleksiy Sorokin got his start at Transparency International, an NGO funded by the US State Department as well as other NATO-friendly governments (Covert Action, 4/13/22).

Boosting US propaganda

Twitter’s policy effectively amounts to providing cover and reach for US propaganda organs. But this policy effect is far from the whole story. Through various mechanisms, Twitter actually boosts US-funded newsrooms and promotes them as trusted sources.

One such mechanism is the curated “Topics” feature. As part of its effort to “elevate reliable information,” Twitter recommends following its own curated feed for the Ukraine War. As of September 2022, Twitter said that this war feed for the Ukraine War had over 38.6 billion “impressions.” Scrolling through the feed shows many examples of the platform boosting US state-affiliated media, with few or no instances of coverage critical of the war effort. Despite their extensive ties to the US government, the Kyiv Independent and Kyiv Post are frequently offered as favored sources for information on the war.

The account has generated a list based on what they claim to be reliable sources on the conflict. The list currently has 55 members. Of these, at least 22 are either US-funded newsrooms, their affiliated journalists. Given the complexity of the funding channels, and the lack of information on some of these newsrooms’ websites, this number is likely an undercount:

New Voice of Ukraine (NED, State Department)

Euan MacDonald

Kyiv Post (NED)

Natalie Vikhrov

Kyiv Independent (NED)

Anastasiia Lapatina, Oleksiy Sorokin, Anna Myroniuk, Illia Ponomarenko

Zaborona (NED)

Katerina Sergatskova

Media Development Foundation of Georgia (NED, USAID, State Department)

Myth Detector

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (USAGM)

Reid Standish

Center for European Policy Analysis (NED, State Department)

Anders Ostlund, Alina Polyakova

EurasiaNet (NED)

Peter Leonard

Atlantic Council (NATO)

Terrell Jermaine Starr

If Twitter applied its own “state-affiliated media” policy consistently, these users wouldn’t be included in such a list. In fact, Twitter would actively diminish the reach of these accounts.

Worldwide propaganda network

There are things the New York Times (12/26/77) could say in 1977 that it can’t say in 2023.

The US government currently funds other media organizations that function more blatantly as arms of the state, yet none have the “state-affiliated media” label on their Twitter accounts. These outlets are part of the media apparatus set up to promote the US point of view around the world during the Cold War. The New York Times (12/26/77) once described them as being part of a “worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA.”

The network, known as the “Propaganda Assets Inventory” within the agency, once encompassed around 500 individuals and organizations, ranging from operatives in major media like CBS, Associated Press and Reuters to smaller outlets under the “complete” “editorial control” of the CIA. Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty were at the vanguard of this propaganda operation. The Times reported in 1977 that the network resulted in a stream of US media stories that were “purposely misleading or downright false.”

The US government continues to directly operate several of these organizations. These outlets now fall under the auspices of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a federal agency that received $810 million in 2022. That number marks a 27% increase from its 2021 budget, and is more than twice the amount RT received from Russia for its global operations in 2021 (RFE/RL, 8/25/21).

The first “broadcasting standard” listed on the agency website is to “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.” While the structure of USAGM ostensibly includes a “firewall” protecting editorial independence, the outlet is unlikely to hire anyone who is not comfortable with this primary goal. Certainly the US government has over USAGM what Twitter elsewhere has defined as “control through financial resources.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

RFE/RL operates on a budget of $126 million and reaches 37 million people across 27 languages. It boasts that its reporting receives “daily citations in global media, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, AP, Reuters, USA Today, Politico, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC.”

RFE/RL has been stepping up operations in Ukraine. The network says it “serves as a media leader in Ukraine, frequently conducting high-profile interviews that are picked up across Ukraine’s top media outlets.” The news operation includes “a vast network of local news bureaus and an extensive freelance network,” according to USAGM documents. None of the Twitter accounts under the umbrella of RFE/RL have been labeled “state-affiliated media.” This includes RFE/RL Pressroom and RFE/RL’s Persian service, Radio Farda.

Radio Free Asia

Radio Free Asia reaches almost 60 million people across nine languages, mainly focused on East Asian countries. RFA receives a $47.6 million budget, with the mission of “counter[ing] authoritarian disinformation and false narratives.” “As the United States aims to re-engage with global partners on issues of diplomatic and economic importance,” USAGM states, RFA “will need to combat the malign influence of China’s disinformation juggernaut.”

The main RFA account does not have the“state-affiliated media” label, and neither do the accounts for RFA Uyghur, RFA Burmese, RFA Korean, RFA Tibetan, RFA Vietnamese or RFA Cantonese. RFA’s largest channel, RFA Chinese, has 1.1 million followers, but no label.

Voice of America

With a budget of $257 million, Voice of America (VoA) is USAGM’s largest operation. Its 961 employees reach 311.8 million including 40 million in China, and 10 million Iranians. The media network’s goal is to “[tell] America’s story” and “enhance” the “understanding of US policies” in target populations.

Aimed at Iran, VoA Farsi was described in 2019 by one former executive as pushing “blatant propaganda” with “no objectivity or factuality” (Intercept, 8/13/19). During the height of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, the outlet became “a mouthpiece of Trump—only Trump and nothing but Trump.” In addition to promoting the US-supported Iranian terrorist group MEK, the outlet “lash[ed] out at people they deem unsupportive of President Donald Trump’s Iran policy.”

Neither the main VoA Twitter account with 1.7 million followers, the VoA Chinese account with 1.8 million followers, nor the VoA Farsi account with 1.7 million followers feature the “state-affiliated media” label.

Office of Cuba Broadcasting

USAGM includes the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), a Miami-based operation that receives $12.9 million a year to “promote freedom and democracy” in Cuba. A recent USAGM report noted OCB’s “ongoing, timely and thorough reporting of the Cuban dissident movement.” According to an OCB fact sheet, Radio Television Marti, the main network overseen by OCB, reaches 11% of the Cuban population each week through audio, video and digital content. The network’s Twitter account does not possess the state-affiliated label.

Middle East Broadcasting Network

USAGM also oversees the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), an Arab-language network headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, whose mission is to “expand the spectrum of ideas, opinions and perspectives” in Middle East/North Africa countries. USAGM states that MBN is “poised to represent America like no other across the region.” The network is “fully funded” with a budget of $108.9 million.

According to the agency, MBN reaches more than 33 million people across 22 MENA countries. Its media reached 76% of the population in non-Kurdish Iraqi territories, and in Palestine, MBN media reached 50%. MBN networks include Alhurra TV, Radio Sawa and MBN Digital. The Alhurra TV Twitter account, with 3.6 million followers, does not contain the “state-affiliated” label.

Each of these operations are funded in whole or in part by governments, yet Twitter does not think that they classify as state-affiliated. Therefore, none of them are labeled, nor are they subjected to the limits that the platform applies to labeled accounts. If Twitter doesn’t consider a newsroom “fully funded” by the US government to be “state-affiliated,” it should be clear that its goal of providing “context” does not apply to the organs of US propaganda. The feature serves only to nudge users away from state funded organizations belonging to states hostile to the US.

Twitter and the establishment

Twitter’s adherence to Western foreign policy objectives is nothing new. Twitter has even openly announced that its company policy includes support for NATO. In 2021, as tensions between Russia and Ukraine were on the rise, Twitter announced that it had removed dozens of Russian accounts as “state-linked operations.” The reason Twitter (2/23/21) cited for the removal was that they were “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.” The support for US global objectives has extended to other regions.

In 2019, as Trump was ramping up the coup attempt and brutal sanctions regime against Venezuela, Twitter assisted the US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela’s elected government. Twitter suspended the accounts of Venezuelan government officials and agencies, including the English language account of President Nicolas Maduro himself. At the same time, Twitter “verified” officials in the US-backed self-appointed “government” attempting to overthrow Venezuela’s elected executive (Grayzone, 8/24/19).

A longstanding issue with the platform is its arbitrary enforcement of the rules against critics of US policy. The platform often suspends or bans users for alleged violations with no explanation.

Twitter‘s executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East was simultaneously working for a unit that gives the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level” (Middle East Eye, 9/30/19).

Twitter, like other SiliconValley behemoths, has numerous links to the national security state. An investigation by Middle East Eye (9/30/19) revealed that one of Twitter’s top executives was also a member of one of the British military’s psychological warfare units, the 77th Brigade. Gordon MacMillan, who holds the top editorial position for the Middle East and North Africa at Twitter, joined the UK’s “information warfare” unit in 2015 while he was at Twitter. One UK general told MEE that the unit specialized in developing “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level.” The story was met with near total silence in US and UK press (FAIR.org, 10/24/19), and MacMillan still works for Twitter.

Twitter also partners with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a hawkish think tank funded by the military industry and the US government, for its content moderation policies. In 2020, Twitter worked closely with the ASPI to remove over 170,000 low-follower accounts they alleged to be favorable to the Communist Party of China. More recently, Twitter and ASPI have announced a partnership ostensibly aimed at fighting disinformation and misinformation.

Twitter’s Strategic Response Team, in charge of making decisions about which content should be suppressed, was headed by Jeff Carlton, who previously worked for both the CIA and FBI. In fact, MintPress News (6/21/22) reported on the dozens of former FBI agents that have joined Twitter’s ranks over the years. Elon Musk’s controlled leak of internal communications, known as the “Twitter Files,” has renewed attention to the close relationship between the agency and the platform.

“In the first week of the Ukraine/Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity,” Declassified Australia (11/3/22) reported. “Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week.”

Though Twitter has previously denied directly “coordinat[ing] with other entities when making content moderation decisions,” recent reporting has revealed a deep level of integration between federal intelligence agencies, and Twitter’s content moderation policies. In part 6 of the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi reported that the FBI has over 80 agents dedicated to flagging content on the platform and interfacing directly with Twitter leadership. Last year, emails leaked to the Intercept (10/31/22) showed how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Twitter had an established process for content takedown requests from the agency related to election security.

The platform is clearly an important hub for pro-Ukrainian sentiment online, though not all of the activity is organic. In fact, one study (Declassified Australia, 11/3/22) released last year found a deluge of pro Ukrainian bots. Australian researchers studied a sample of over 5 million tweets about the war, and found that 90% of the total were pro-Ukrainian (identified using the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag or variations), and estimated that up to 80% of them were bots. Though researchers did not determine the precise origin of these accounts, it was obvious that they were sponsored by “pro-Ukrainian authorities.” The sheer volume of tweets undoubtedly helped shape online sentiment about the war.

It appears that Washington understands the importance of Twitter in shaping public sentiments. When Musk originally set his sights on buying the platform, the White House even considered opening a national security review of Musk’s business ventures, citing Musk’s “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.” These concerns were prompted by Musk’s plan to bar SpaceX’s StarLink system from being used in Ukraine, after a spat between Musk and a Ukrainian official. The concerns also came after Musk (10/3/22) tweeted out the outlines to a potential peace proposal between Russia and Ukraine. This proposal was met with scorn and shock among American elite circles, where escalation rather than peace is the dominant position (FAIR.org, 3/22/22).

Musk and the national security state

Alan MacLeod (MintPress, 5/31/22): Elon Musk “is no threat to the powerful, entrenched elite: he is one of them.”

But Musk’s hot take on the Ukraine war should not be taken as proof of Musk’s anti establishment bona fides. Far from being an establishment outsider, Elon Musk himself is a major figure in the military industrial complex, and represents the long tradition of Silicon Valley giants being thoroughly enmeshed in the military and intelligence wars.

Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is a major military contractor, earning billions of dollars from the US national security state. It has received contracts to launch GPS technology into orbit to assist with the US drone war. The Pentagon has also contracted the company to build missile defense satellites. SpaceX has further won contracts from the Air Force, Space Defense Agency and National Reconnaissance Organization, and has launched spy satellites to be used by the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies (MintPress, 5/31/22).

In fact, SpaceX’s existence is largely owed to military and intelligence ties. One of its earliest backers of the company was the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same military research agency that gave us much of the technology that defines the modern internet age.

Mike Griffin, then the president of the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, was a close associate of Musk’s and was deeply involved in SpaceX’s conception. When Griffin became head of NASA under Bush Jr., he awarded Musk a $396 million dollar contract before SpaceX had even successfully flown a rocket. This later ballooned to a $1 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk made headlines by offering to donate his Starlink technology to the Ukrainian government to keep the country online. Starlink, a satellite-based internet provider, was essential to Ukraine’s war effort after the Russian attack disabled much of its traditional military communications. It has enabled Ukrainians to quickly share battlefield intelligence, and connect with US support troops to perform “telemaintenance.”

Musk’s offer to “donate” the technology earned him a lot of positive press, but it was quietly revealed later that the US government had been paying SpaceX millions of dollars for the technology—despite what SpaceX officials had told the public. According to the Washington Post (4/8/22), the money was funneled through USAID, an organization that has long been a tool of US regime change efforts, and a front for covert intelligence operations.

Multiple reports have called the Starlink technology a game-changer in the war. The Pentagon’s director of electronic warfare fawned over Starlink’s capabilities, calling them “eye-watering.” The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff honored Musk by name, saying that he symbolized “the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.”

Ukraine isn’t the only area of interest where Musk’s Starlink is involved. As protests began to rock Iran over the country’s treatment of women, the US saw an opportunity to increase internal, destabilizing pressure on the government—long a goal of US policy in the region. Amid Iran’s crackdown on the internet, the Biden administration solicited Musk for assistance in using Starlink to circumvent blackouts. Later, Starlink terminals began to be smuggled into the country.

The relationship between Musk and the security state is so strong that one official even told Bloomberg (10/20/22) that “the US government would also use Starlink in the event of telecommunications outage,” hinting at links to high-level national contingency planning.

Continuity of governance?

The conversation surrounding Twitter has centered around whether or not Elon Musk is a free-speech advocate, though little has focused on the implications of a military contractor having complete control over such an important platform. Though Musk may (or may not) be stepping down as CEO, the platform will remain his domain.

Many things have changed under Musk’s Twitter, but Twitter’s role as a megaphone for US government–funded media has not. It would take a large research study to understand precisely how much impact Twitter’s misapplication of its own policies has on the propagation. But even without this data, it is clear that the platform’s design serves to nudge users away from most media funded by Washington-unfriendly governments, and, in the case of the Ukraine War, push users toward media funded by the US government. Musk’s status as a military contractor only underscores that challenging US foreign policy objectives is unlikely to be a priority for the company.

The post Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 6, 2023

The Right Turns Anti-LGBTQ Hate Up to 11

Libs of TikTok, “one of the preeminent homophobic and transphobic spaces on Twitter” (Slate, 4/27/22),
has been permanently kicked off of TikTok.

Last summer, while waiting for coffee at a diner in what I’ll just call a small town, I overheard three older men complaining about how schools are forcing children to swap genders. A server responded, “You’re not even allowed to talk about this anymore.” I thought to myself, “A, you’re talking about it right now, and B, where’s my coffee?”

The exchange has stayed on my mind: How on earth are so many people convinced that children’s lives are being turned upside down by the acceptance of LGBTQ rights in America? And why do they believe they are the ones being silenced, when they clearly aren’t?

The main reason is that hostility against LGBTQ “grooming”—the false idea that schoolteachers and drag queen story hours at libraries are attempting to train children to be gay and trans, rather than simply acknowledging the existence of gay and trans people, and discouraging hatred and bigoted violence against them—has become a big feature of the social conservative movement. One notable player in that is Chaya Raichik, who runs an anti-trans Twitter account called “Libs of TikTok,” which boasts 1.7 million followers.

Fox News—arguably the most influential purveyor of the “grooming” narrative—has shown Libs of TikTok consistent support in the past (e.g., 4/20/22, 6/9/22, 6/27/22, 11/21/22), frequently airing clips from the account (Media Matters, 4/1/22). While Raichik’s identity had been revealed by the Washington Post (4/19/22) months ago, she has recently chosen to come out from behind her self-imposed Twitter anonymity—and Fox was happy to offer a platform.

‘Risk of ostracism’

Libs of TikTok‘s Chaya Raichik on Tucker Carlson Tonight (12/27/22): “I know that I’ve helped create legislation to tackle some of these issues.”

Raichik recently appeared on Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson Tonight (12/27/22). using her face and name for the first time, to crank up hateful rhetoric that the LGBTQ community was “evil” and a “cult.” (Video of the interview was made available on the subscription-only Fox Nation streaming service—12/28/22.)

Raichik is clear about spreading a message designed to stir fear about LGBTQ people coming for your children. Her goal, she told the New York Post (12/31/22), is “dismantling and destroying gender ideology [sic] in America.”

The Murdoch-owned Post, which at this point is sort of the print subsidiary of Fox, doubled down on Raichik’s appearance on Carlson’s show, making her out to be a David taking on the LGBTQ Goliath. “Sometimes in life, you’re called to do something that isn’t in your nature, compelled nevertheless because you believe it’s the right thing to do,” a Post op-ed (12/29/22) declared of Raichik, because “the risk of ostracism, threats of physical harm and attacks on your character don’t measure up to the guilt you’d feel by ignoring your instinct to act.”

Laser-focused on trans issues

In the past few years, the right-wing media have become laser-focused on transgender issues, not always attacking trans people individually, but instead claiming that children are being “groomed” to adopt “radical gender ideology,” and that rights for the trans community are infringing on the rights of children, women and Christians.

The Wall Street Journal (3/26/19) accuses Democrats of “redefining the category of ‘women’ to include…people who aren’t women at all.”

For example, the Wall Street Journal (also owned by the Murdoch family) has run numerous pieces worrying about “the wildfire spread of transgender identity” (8/17/22) and how transgender patient rights could infringe on the rights of conservative Christians who wish to discriminate against them (8/25/22), as well as invoking anti-trans positions as a purported defense of women’s rights (3/26/19). The Journal also ran multiple opinion articles defending Yeshiva University’s resistance to allowing an LGBTQ club on its campus (8/29/22, 10/2/22).

The New York Post has painted a picture of parents who fight to protect their children from a supposed trans “gender cult” (12/22/21, 5/11/22), as well as blasting the use of public money for drag queen story hours (6/11/22).

Raichik is far from the only one in right-wing media hawking the myth that LGBTQ people are using public resources to push a sinister agenda on children. There’s Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire and Christopher Rufo at City Journal (9/29/22, 10/12/22). And, to a certain extent, Raichik’s comments aren’t new. Anita Bryant fought against gay rights in the 1970s under the banner of “Save Our Children,” and the right has even resurrected that slogan (NBC, 4/13/22; New York Post, 12/22/22). Or consider the long list of anti-gay and anti-trans comments made by Pat Robertson over the years on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Tucker Carlson remains one of the top-viewed cable pundits in the United States (Forbes, 12/15/22); as his obsession with demonizing trans people increases, he elevates more fringe transphobes and normalizes their bald bigotry. Many transphobes try to smuggle their hatred through customs by attacking gender fluidity as a threat to women (FAIR.org, 12/16/22), a sort of pseudo-feminism for the right. But Raichik attacks all LGBTQ people in her statement—in the same forum that has invoked white supremacist ideas like the “great replacement theory” (Washington Post, 7/20/22) and “white genocide” (Hatewatch, 10/2/18), suggesting that she wants LGBTQ people to be added to the long list of very bad people.

Doing real damage

Washington Post (4/19/22): Libs of TikTok “call[ed] for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be ‘fired on the spot‘” and falsely claimed “schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats.”
The influence of Raichik and other right-wing pundits on anti-trans policy is clear. The Washington Post (4/19/22) said:

By March, Libs of TikTok was directly impacting legislation. DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw credited the account with “opening her eyes” and informing her views on the state’s restrictive legislation that bans discussion of sexuality or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, referred to by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill. She and Libs of TikTok have interacted with each other at least 138 times publicly, according to a report by Media Matters.

When asked by the Post about her relationship with the account, Pushaw wrote, “I follow, like and retweet Libs of TikTok. My interactions with that account are public,” and added that she’s a strong supporter of its mission.

And Raichik knows quite well that her rhetoric is doing real damage. Her account has reportedly encouraged the harassment of children’s hospitals, of all places (Washington Post, 9/2/22). Anti–drag queen zealots targeted the home of a gay New York City Council member (Daily News, 12/19/22), and armed protesters have targeted a drag queen story hour in Texas (Advocate, 12/14/22).

The dangers of dehumanizing LGBTQ people go beyond threats and intimidation. Human Rights Campaign documents crimes directly against trans people, noting that “at least 32 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been killed in the United States in 2022” (PBS, 11/16/22). The group has “documented at least 302 violent deaths of transgender and gender-nonconforming people since the LGBTQ advocacy organization began tracking such fatalities in 2013.”

Carlson and the Murdoch media empire are clearly cheering this on, in a cynical ploy to rile up social conservatives to get them to the polls on Election Day. These types of media appearances are meant to create a culture of fear for all LGBTQ people and their allies, a clear attempt to force them back into the shadows and further out of public life. The campaign is meant to intimidate not just those being demonized, but any politician who contemplates defending LGBTQ rights.

Fueling tension

NBC News (12/30/22), citing GLAAD, reported that some anti-drag protests “had been organized by white nationalist groups, including the Proud Boys, who, in some cases, have shown up to Drag Story Hour events armed.”

It’s become tired and predictable to hear defenses of these media campaigns as free speech. The relentless transphobia and homophobia being cross-promoted by Fox News and people like Raichik is just as culpable for this anti-trans atmosphere as the nuts who actually go out and terrorize children going to story time.

At a drag queen story hour at a public library in New York City, more than 30 protesters, including members of the far-right Proud Boys, heckled families on their way inside, calling them “pedophiles,” while several times that many pro-LGBTQ counter-protesters defended the event (Gothamist, 12/29/22). Police broke up fist fights, and one person was arrested after knocking over a barricade. The protesters eventually dispersed on their own, but the tension and anger, fueled by a small group of right-wingers outnumbered by cops and counter-protesters, was palpable.

As long as Fox News uses the likes of Raichik to spew hate, this tension is only going to grow. And that’s the goal.

The post The Right Turns Anti-LGBTQ Hate Up to 11 appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 6, 2023

Paul Hudson on Airline Meltdown, Melissa Crow on Asylum Policy

(NBC News, 12/29/22)

This week on CounterSpin: Media criticism is, at its heart, consumer advocacy. There’s an unarticulated underpinning to elite media conversation that goes: As a citizen you may have rights, but as a consumer, you don’t have anything called a “right”; the market is an arrangement—the best possible arrangement—but still, you can only hope you’re on the right side of it where it’s profitable to serve you. And if it isn’t, well, too bad. It’s a kind of caveat emptor, devil-take-the-hindmost situation, which would be bad enough if corporate media didn’t present it as though it were unproblematic, and as if we’d all agreed to it! Paul Hudson is president of the consumer group Flyers Rights. He’ll talk about what you did not, in fact, sign up for, in terms of air travel.

CounterSpin230106Hudson.mp3

(Center for Gender and Refugee Studies)

Also on the show: Enacted under Trump, Title 42 instructed officials to turn away asylum seekers at US borders in purported protection of the country’s “public health” in the face of Covid-19. Officialspeak currently has it that Covid is over, so far as public regulations go…. Oh except for that exception about denying hearings to people fleeing violence and persecution in their home country. The Supreme Court has just furthered this injustice with a ruling that, according to one account, “does not overrule the lower court’s decision that Title 42 is illegal; it merely leaves the measure in place while the legal challenges play out in court.” We’ll hear from Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

CounterSpin230106Crow.mp3

The post Paul Hudson on Airline Meltdown, Melissa Crow on Asylum Policy appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
January 4, 2023

‘There Is More Than One Solution Needed to the Problem of an Insurrection’ – CounterSpin interview with Lisa Gilbert on January 6 report
Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert about the January 6 report for the December 23, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin221223Gilbert.mp3

New York Times (12/17/22)

Janine Jackson: “The End of the Trump Era Will Be Unsatisfying,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat this week. “There will be no perp walk where Trump exits the White House in handcuffs.”

That’s a little odd, given Trump’s not in the White House, but the point is to reduce calls for accountability for obvious crimes to emotional, unreasonable cries for vengeance.

It’s the same way the Times told us we were “entitled to wonder whether any of the highly paid executives who helped kindle the 2008 financial disaster will ever see jail time.” But, the paper told us, “the harder question…is whether anybody should.”

So here we are again with Douthat’s advice that, while the realities of Trump and Trumpians’ concerted, premeditated efforts to overturn democracy are “yielding some righteous anger,” the intelligent takeaway is that “an unsatisfying absence of repudiation or vindication is a normal feature of democratic life.”

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal concurs that while the January 6 inquiry “has done useful work gathering documents and putting witnesses under oath,” “the wiser course was to let the established facts speak for themselves.”

After all, the Journal says:

Trump’s ultimate goal wasn’t to obstruct the Congressional session on January 6; he wanted it to go his way. This was nonsense, and it had no chance of success, but was it a crime to lobby Mr. Pence to try?

Wall Street Journal (12/19/22)

So the upshot, lest you miss it, is that it’s appropriate to feel anger and outrage about things, but directing it at the people who orchestrate and profit from it is childish and irrational.

The sophisticated thing to do with our anger over fundamental assaults on our society’s organizing principles is to diffuse it into droplets in the air that never actually land.

So how do we resist this recipe for no change, and turn information about what happened on January 6, specifically, into accountability? Lisa Gilbert is executive vice president of Public Citizen and founder of the meaningfully named Not Above the Law Coalition. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Lisa Gilbert.

Lisa Gilbert: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: Let’s start concretely. Folks will have heard a swirl of stuff, but what are the charges against Donald Trump that come out of this congressional committee, and is there, respectfully, any sense that these charges are inflated, or partisan, or anything other than legal charges?

LG: Well, thanks for that. I think that the herculean efforts of the January 6 Select Committee have really borne fruit. They laid them out in a clear, meaningful and compelling way this Monday.

We’re still waiting for their final report to drop today. But the charges against Donald Trump were clear, and followed in a clear throughline from the evidence that the committee found—in a very bipartisan way; most of their witnesses were high-level Republicans who worked closely with the president.

So the four charges were:
- Obstruction of an official proceeding, the proceeding being the January 6 meeting of Congress itself, where they had intended to certify the presidential results.
- Conspiracy to defraud the United States, and this happened in multiple ways, including the president’s lies about the 2020 election, lies about the vice president’s role in certification and how it works, among many other lies.
- Conspiracy to knowingly make a false statement, so this was the participation in the plot to submit the fake slates of electors.
- And then, finally, assisting, aiding or comforting—that’s an interesting word, but comforting an insurrection. So helping to incite the attack, but then also assisting others who did so as well. The reason for this charge is all the actions he took as the insurrection began to unfold, or actually the actions he did not take: He did not call in additional assistance to the Capitol Police who were under siege, he did not call the Department of Defense. Instead, he just sat and watched it all unfold on TV.
So those are the four charges, I think very clearly outlined by the committee, and very robustly supported by their work.

JJ: Let me ask you, if I could, just another angle on it: What do you see as the harms of not bringing charges here? I think folks are eager to reduce it to partisan back and forth, but it’s so much deeper, and what happens if we just say, “Oh, folks who like Trump like Trump, folks who didn’t like him think something bad happened on January 6”—what happens if we don’t go forward?

Lisa Gilbert: “Not going forward is a recipe for disaster for democracy…if we don’t hold the bad actors accountable.”

LG: I think not going forward is a recipe for disaster for democracy, not to be overblown. I think if we don’t hold the bad actors accountable for what was arguably the most dramatic and dangerous day in recent history of our nation, then what can we hold people accountable for?

And though it is true that referrals to other bodies, referrals to the DoJ or referrals to the House Ethics Committee, are not the same as actually prosecuting or moving forward charges, the committee doing this sends such a clear signal and backup, if you will, to the DoJ, as the special counsel there is working feverishly, as we know, to actually bring charges that will stick. And so having this really clear evidential record is helpful.

JJ: Let’s just draw you out about that in terms of the reality. So what came out of the committee is evidence, is information, and now we’re at a place where that information can be used or not used, what is the state of play here?

LG: That’s right. So the committee is, as advertised, an investigative body. They have spent almost a year investigating, calling witnesses, looking at thousands of documents.

It has been a truly robust, impressive bipartisan effort which led to the findings in their report, the recommendations that we’ll soon see about how to improve democracy, and then these referrals to our bodies of justice that can take it further.

Certainly, that work is essential for laying the groundwork and outside understanding of regular people, such that, as the special counsel moves forward, we all already understand why and what and how important it is.

JJ: When you say “take it further,” I guess what I want to get at is, I think, for the public, there’s an important distinction to be made about Donald Trump, and then what also enablers did, and the idea of, even if Trump, in some fanciful other planet, goes to jail, will that still prevent another thing like this from happening?

So there’s an interest in separating out the criminal charges against an individual, and how do we also, as a society, address the problems that were obviously evidenced on that day?

LG: That’s right, that is definitely right. There is more than one solution needed to the problem of an insurrection. This is a piece of it, what we’re talking about now, the individual who is most culpable being held accountable. And the fact that that person was the president of the United States makes it more important, not less, that we do, in fact, hold him accountable.

That’s the piece the DoJ is pursuing. That’s the piece that is being pursued in Georgia prosecutions. And we want to see it borne out, we want charges and we want them to stick.

However, separately, we also need to reform our democracy such that no other president can ever be this bankrupt morally, and can’t do anything like this again.

NPR (12/23/22)

And so there are a lot of threads to that. One piece, actually, we had a victory this week. I don’t know if people are paying attention to this, but the Electoral Count Act reforms, which many of us in DC have been lobbying for for months now, were included as a part of the year-end budget deal, so will soon pass.

This is critical, because it could prevent the idea of the vice president that, simply in his posture as chair of the Senate as he’s overseeing an electoral account, could change what he’s perceiving.

So that unclear language in the original Electoral Count Act is what Trump relied on. And this led his followers around, and certainly part of what sparked the insurrection. Now, assuming the Electoral Count Reform Act passes, that will no longer be an option. We need that, and we need other reforms that continue to protect democracy to move forward as well.

JJ: Let me ask you about those, because I feel like we’re all getting kind of a civics lesson about what laws are meaningful, what laws, it turns out, don’t mean anything if you don’t push on them. And we’re all learning a lot here. And I think a lot of folks are sort of thinking that their idea about what’s right and what’s wrong is somehow reflected in the law, and we know that that’s an imperfect relationship.

And so there are other things that we could make more sturdy, there are other things that we could back up in order to—setting Donald Trump aside—in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. What are some of those, also?

LG: Certainly a lot of the reforms that we’re talking about are contained in an omnibus legislative package called the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which we are hopeful could garner some bipartisan support, as did the Electoral Count Act reforms that I was just talking about.

So what it would do is shore up a lot of the loopholes that the Trump administration showed us exist, as you say. One of the main things we learned from his administration is that many things that we always thought were law were actually just norms, right, were actually just things that presidents have always done, but they’re actually not required to do.

So take his tax returns as a clear example of that. All presidents have always released them, but they were not apparently yet officially required to do so. So those kinds of things.

So some of the reforms carried within that legislation are things like improving our whistleblower laws, so that it is easier for those within government who are seeing things that might be coming from an unhinged president, those can be more easily shared, and those people are protected. Things to shore up our inspectors general so that, if pressure is being applied to agencies, or across the country, they’ll be able to catch it, and they’ll be protected, and won’t have to fear being fired without cause.

Those are just a couple of things. But I think there are numerous places where the fact that laws are not as clear as we once thought, he was able to take advantage of that and abuse our ethical assumptions.

JJ: Absolutely. And, OK, we can all learn, right? Let’s all learn together.

I’m a media critic, and so I fault media, to some extent, with this framing of Democrats versus Republicans, that encourages people to get to a place of, “Oh, you’re mad at Donald Trump, you don’t like his ideas, and that’s why you want him to go to jail.”

And I just think that’s so corrosive. It’s like, “Well, if it was your guy who was inciting insurrection, you’d be for it, right?”

I guess I’m hoping for more than elite media are giving us right now, in terms of—yeah, I understand, they need to have voices from lots of different perspectives, but there is something very fundamental that I feel that journalists could be doing, in terms of holding up the importance of democratic principles. And I just wonder what you would like to see from journalists right now.

CNN (9/2/22)

LG: I think that’s a fair critique. I think journalists have a responsibility to report the threats as they see them, and they are legion right now.

One thing that may help them cover more and discuss this more is that the president, President Biden, has been leaning in quite a bit on these themes, you know, before the election, spending valuable last-speechifying moments talking about the threats of MAGA Republicans to democracy, and the problems of hate speech, and the issues of the insurrection, and the idea that election deniers could perhaps win.

Luckily, many of them did not. But that was a real threat. And he really spoke strongly about the problems with that.

And so I think, hopefully that kind of engagement on the part of the White House, in turn, makes it easier for journalists to spend more airtime, for editors to want to include stories about how we can improve democracy from here. But I agree, I think it needs as much attention as it can get. And I think the American people feel that too.

JJ: Let me ask you, if charges were brought, if the January 6 Commission evolved into indictments, would that mean the end of the Not Above the Law Coalition? What is your purpose there?

LG: That’s a great question. I mean, every policy group’s idea is to be in place until you put yourself out of business because you’ve won. So I am not sure, but certainly we have found a role around ethics scandals in many a moment. So I wouldn’t want to believe that, should we send Trump to jail, that this problem is entirely solved by that, and we’d still have things to do. But it’s a great question.

JJ: Part of what’s happening going forward is that January 6, 2023, is coming up right on us, and I know that you have work planned around that. What’s going on?

OurFreedomsOurVote.org

LG: We are riding the wave coming out of the Select Committee’s final business meeting and report to memorialize what they’ve done, to celebrate it and to talk about the need for democracy reform going forward.

We’re doing this by holding events all around the country on the second anniversary of the insurrection—”anniversary” is maybe too celebratory a word. We will be memorializing it, and discussing what it means for democracy going forward. These events can be found at OurFreedomsOurVote.org. And hopefully everyone who’s listening can find one near them. And then if you’re in the DC area, the flagship events will be in front of the Capitol at noon. So I encourage everyone to come.

JJ: Can I just ask you, what is the purpose? What’s the intent of these events?

LG: Both to simply memorialize and remember the horror that was the insurrection, but also to pivot forward and to talk about what it means to continue to fight for democracy, to push for voting rights reforms and campaign finance reforms and rule of law reform, and to use the great work of the committee to catapult us into the next phase of that fight.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Lisa Gilbert, co-founder of the Not Above the Law Coalition, and executive vice president of Public Citizen. Their work’s online at Citizen.org. Lisa Gilbert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LG: Thank you.

The post ‘There Is More Than One Solution Needed to the Problem of an Insurrection’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 30, 2022

Best of CounterSpin 2022

CounterSpinBestOf2022.mp3

All year long CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter—that we need.

CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly as well as the role we can play in changing it. This is just a small selection of some of them.

Rakeen Mabud

“Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources (2/1/22). The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address them in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year.

Bryce Greene

The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org.

The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because of sooprise, sooprise of how we’re portrayed in US media.

Layla A. Jones

We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com.

As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage, we talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles, Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, the 40th remembrance and rededication at VincentChin.org.

Jeannie Park

Of a piece with elite media’s denial that racist harm is still meaningfully happening is the flicking away of efforts—decades long, thoughtful, inclusive efforts—to address that harm. We talked with Coalition for a Diverse Harvard‘s Jeannie Park about affirmative action at Harvard University.

Sumayyah Waheed

In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them—given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—”based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.” We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates.

CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are so many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation, in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, leaving the vast majority outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise, or try to find the space to talk around it.

Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that it’s their way or the highway….it’s just not true.

Mike Rispoli

One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old media outlets, which are for sure suffering… but about instead about invigorating community information needs—a very different thing! The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy Mike Rispoli at Free Press.

The post Best of CounterSpin 2022 appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
December 24, 2022

‘Every Issue Is a Disability Issue’ – CounterSpin interview with Rebecca Vallas on disability economics

Janine Jackson interviewed the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s Rebecca Vallas about the economics of disability for the December 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin221216Vallas.mp3

Janine Jackson: Hey, have you heard about “Medicaid divorce”? It’s this trendy thing where people get divorced because it’s the only way to allow one partner to qualify for the Medicaid they need to live their lives, because if they’re married, they’re too rich.

Kiplinger (11/7/21)

That’s a nightmare, not to mention in a country where some people get to forget how many houses they own. But corporate media’s response has seemed to be just a bunch of articles about how maybe you, as an individual, might potentially game the system, like Kiplinger‘s “How to Restructure Your Assets to Qualify for Medicaid.”

And then sort of, “well, would you look at that” pieces about the phenomenon, like Newsweek‘s “Internet Backs Wife’s Plan to Divorce Husband After Cancer Diagnosis.”

There are, of course, many people who couldn’t conscience the idea that having a disability, or a partner with a disability, should mean choosing between your marriage and your healthcare. But they just haven’t given it much thought, or even known that it was happening—thanks, in part, to media coverage that suggests that only people with disabilities care about disability policy, just like only Black people care about racism, and only poor people care about poverty.

It’s an inaccurate, inappropriate approach to core issues of the day that makes us seem more divided than we actually are, and makes change harder to bring about.

So our next guest’s project is not so much about connecting issues of disability and the economy as illuminating how they have always been connected, even if those connections have been obscured.

Rebecca Vallas is senior fellow and co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, based out of the Century Foundation. She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rebecca Vallas.

Rebecca Vallas: Janine, it’s always a pleasure to speak with you. I feel very strongly about the important role that this show plays in larger conversations, and it’s always, always fun to talk with you.

JJ: Well, thank you.

I was thinking about this project walking to work, and I overheard a woman, equal parts angry and tired, saying to a friend, “Why is Medicaid saying they’ll only pay for one hearing aid? He needs two.”

And I just thought about the hours of this woman’s life. She was waiting outside a workplace, she was on her way to work, but this is obviously her other job—trying to get hearing aids for her husband or her child, I don’t know.

But the point is, if you don’t have to be familiar with this system, then you aren’t, and you count yourself lucky. But disability is one community that anyone could be part of tomorrow. And so I will genuinely never understand the sort of general media disinterest.

But into this void comes this project. And so I would like you to just talk about the need for it and, in part, just the informational gap that this project is looking to fill.

Rebecca Vallas: “Disability has been viewed as some kind of an afterthought…to larger conversation around public policy in this country.” (photo: Center for American Progress)

RV: I appreciate that so much, Janine, and you’re so right that for an incredibly and often, to me at least, surprisingly long period of time, disability has been viewed as some kind of an afterthought to larger conversations, not just conversations that we have in the media, but also conversations that go on in Washington, DC, around public policy in this country.

And, you know, I spend a lot of my time working on public policy, and trying to make it fairer for people who have historically been marginalized. And this project really is centered around that general need.

And so backing up just a little bit, folks might be listening to this and thinking, “Well, didn’t we pass the Americans with Disabilities Act? Didn’t we solve disability problems in the US?”

Well, yes, the ADA has been around for more than 32 years now. But more than 32 years after the ADA became law, people with disabilities in the United States still face poverty rates twice as high as our non-disabled peers. And that’s because of discrimination that remains widespread and, frankly, a litany of structural barriers to economic security and upward mobility that keep the American disability community stuck in a permanent recession.

And while this is an economic crisis that long predates Covid-19, it’s also really important to acknowledge that the impact of the pandemic, which itself has been a mass disabling event, has really only made it clearer: We can no longer afford to ignore disabled people in our policymaking.

And we at the Century Foundation actually did some polling on this issue. We partnered up with Data for Progress, a polling firm in Washington, DC, and New York, and earlier this year, we found that just three in ten disabled voters believe that leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities.

And so, really, that’s where the idea of starting the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative came from. Here we are, living through a pandemic—which it doesn’t go without repeating, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has not ended. This is a pandemic that has spurred the largest influx of new entrants to the American disability community in modern history.

And yet, we’re still in a place of needing to play 50-plus years of catch-up to make sure that we have public policies that work for disabled people, and, frankly, even public policies that contemplate disabled people.

And you are doing such a great job in your setup of highlighting, from a human perspective, how public policies that don’t contemplate disabled people’s lives can end up landing when people with disabilities are either an afterthought or, frankly, understood as a “them” instead of as part of an “us.”

And so that’s really the story behind the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. The Century Foundation teamed up with our friends at the Ford Foundation and, in particular, my dear friend and sister Rebecca Cokley, who was the first-ever US disability rights program officer at any major foundation in the United States, we teamed up to bring together what are now more than 40 organizations.

It’s a set of leading think tanks who have outsized power in shaping the economic policy conversations in the US, together with disability rights and justice groups, to work together, to learn from each other and, most importantly, to actually work to ensure that American economic policy conversations include a disability lens, and that’s really the through line, and the theory of change of this collaborative, is to say every issue is a disability issue.

And it’s long past time that we understood, with one in four Americans living with disabilities, that this can’t continue to be a conversation that happens in July, once a year, when we acknowledge the unfinished business of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This needs to be an every day conversation that includes and centers the impact of the pandemic.

But they understand that people with disabilities are part of the “us,” and need to be at the table in shaping the public policies that have an outsized influence in impacting our lives every single day.

And so, yes, we see lots of media coverage trying to say, “Oh, look at the lifeboat”—which is a program like Social Security Disability Insurance, for example, or SSI—and let’s shine a spotlight on that, and try and say that people are wrong for seeking and claiming what are often life-saving and life-preserving benefits, when what we really need is a lot more attention paid to the doors that are closed in people’s faces because of their disabilities, that are the employment doors, that for many people, because millions of disabled people can and do work, that for many is the avenue that economic security and mobility would flow from.

And so a story I would love to see as a headline in the Washington Post, how about some coverage about the fact that disabled workers were paid an average of 74 cents on the dollar in 2020, compared with non-disabled workers? Right?

How about some coverage highlighting the fact that people with disabilities face three times the rates of food insecurity as non-disabled people?

How about some coverage highlighting that roughly half of American adults who need to turn to homeless shelters to have a roof over their head have a disability?

This is a picture that I really can’t describe in any other terms than saying the economy is not working for disabled people. And disabled people, we are the economy, we are part of the economy, and want to be contributors to the economy, both in the form of being workers and consumers.

And that’s a flip of the narrative that possibly the Covid pandemic is creating an opportunity for us to make, given the broader awareness that people now have that the disability community is a community that any of us can join at any time.

And with millions and millions of people now newly disabled by long Covid, I am hopeful that that is a shift in the conversation that we as a society are ready to start to make.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Rebecca Vallas. She’s senior fellow and co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. You can find that project’s work at TCF.org. Rebecca Vallas, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RV: Thanks so much, Janine, for shining a spotlight on the Collaborative’s work, and I really do appreciate your show.

The post ‘Every Issue Is a Disability Issue’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 24, 2022

The Podcast Conglomerate the Media Won’t Name – Spoiler: It’s John Malone’s Liberty Media

News consumers hear about the titans of podcasting regularly these days: Spotify, iHeartMedia, Amazon Music. But there is one name that’s curiously absent: Liberty Media.

The company recently got some coverage after Taylor Swift fans rose up against Ticketmaster’s monopolistic pricing. The live event company increased its market share after being bought by Live Nation, a Liberty subsidiary. Forbes (1/21/22) also named Liberty the “most valuable sports empire” from its profits off its Formula One and Atlanta Braves subsidiaries.

More often ignored, Liberty Media also owns satellite radio SiriusXM, internet radio Pandora and podcast platform and network Stitcher, which it claims amount to the “largest ad-supported audio entertainment streaming service in the US,” with over 100 million listeners.

In 2021, it rolled the advertising wings for all three of those companies into SXM Media, now one of the largest ad sellers in podcasting. These forces combined make it the only real direct competitor to Spotify for a vertically integrated podcast empire (FAIR.org, 4/21/21).

A hidden conglomerate

An avalanche of consolidation over the past few years has made the podcast industry difficult to report on. It’s tedious for readers to shift through chains of corporate subsidiaries, so journalists seem to simply ignore them.

The media press do cover Sirius, but consistently fail to highlight its corporate parent or its own subsidiaries. The satellite radio giant itself owns Pandora and Stitcher, which includes the Midroll ad business, which was rolled into SXM, and the Earwolf podcast network (and oh what a simplification that is). But of much greater consequence is the media’s consistent failure to highlight that all of these companies are owned by Liberty Media.

In 2021, the Department of Justice gave Liberty the go-ahead to purchase iHeartMedia (formally Clear Channel), the largest radio broadcaster in the country. iHeart reaches over 90% of Americans every month “through podcasts, AM and FM stations and online platforms,” according to Variety (10/19/21). Liberty sold off its entire stake in iHeart last year, but had the deal proceeded, it would have merged two of the nation’s largest audio oligopolists into one.

The DoJ decision was sparsely covered, but even if it was front-page news, you can only understand what Liberty taking control of iHeart would have done if you already understood its other audio holdings and how they fit together. This is a bigger picture that is sorely lacking in coverage of either company.

Corporate consolidation bias

Liberty Media owns SXM, which owns Pandora which owns Stitcher which owns Earwolf.

When mergers happen, there is often a natural news bias toward the company doing the purchase. But the complete failure to contextualize which companies the purchaser and purchasee already own, or are owned by, obscures monopolists and insulates them from scrutiny.

The Wall Street Journal (7/6/20) reported that SiriusXM bought Stitcher, and Forbes (7/7/20) noted this will “give it the tools to compete with Spotify,” without a single mention of Liberty Media. Ashley Carmen has a superb deep dive into the after-effects of SiriusXM’s purchase of Stitcher for the Verge (3/22/22), but she never mentions that Sirius itself has a parent company.

Billboard (10/23/20) reported when iHeart acquired Voxnest, and Variety (2/17/21) noted when it bought Triton Digital the next year. Again, no Liberty. When the New York Times (4/3/19) covered iHeart’s potential IPO, it failed to mention Liberty held a stake in the company at the time.

News sites also want to write about companies their audience wants to hear about, and that’s often the platforms and networks that they actually use. Spotify’s purchase of popular podcast network Gimlet Media was a darling story of the podcast press; meanwhile, their purchase of Anchor, an ad seller, was covered less. Today, Anchor is an engine that’s key to the audio company’s success, while Gimlet lags.

Over-focus on podcast networks poses a lot of problems, because they are often nested at the bottom of the new corporate podcasting Matryoshka dolls. Think Earwolf, owned by Stitcher, owned by Pandora, owned by Sirius, owned by Liberty.

The largest Russian doll

Liberty Media‘s John Malone (Vox, 8/26/22): “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”

OK, take a deep breath, because Liberty itself is not the top of this nested power structure. It’s owned by one man: John Malone. Worth over $9 billion, and the largest landlord in the United States (FAIR.com, 2/17/22), Malone’s media influence does not end with audio. He is also the “power behind the throne” of the new company formed from the merger between AT&T’s Warner Brothers and Discovery (Next TV, 11/21/22). Lest I fall into the trap of my own criticism, that includes the following entities: CNN, HBO, DC Comics and 67 other companies.

Malone was the long-term chair of TCI, the US’s second-largest cable provider (and “worst discriminator,” according to the NAACP) until it was purchased by AT&T in 1999.

Liberty Media began as the cable programming subsidiary of TCI, and helped the cable company rise to the top by purchasing stakes in the programs it ran on its channels, including a 10% stake in Time Warner, and a controlling stake of Discovery (Extra!, 11–12/97). Liberty even owned PBS NewsHour (yes, you read that correctly—Extra!, 11/10) from 1995 until 2014, when Washington, DC’s public media station WETA bought the program.

Under AT&T’s ownership, it absorbed TCI’s digital music and satellite businesses, before splitting off into an independent company in 2001 under Malone’s control (CNN, 8/10/01).

Malone was CEO of Discovery between 2006 and 2008, and was the company’s largest shareholder and board chair when it merged with Warner Brothers. He is now an independent director at the newly merged Warner Brothers Discovery, which is also run by his former hand-picked CEO of Discovery and long-term mentee, David Zaslav (Vox, 8/26/22).

Malone is a noted conservative who contributed over $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural campaign. Before the Warner/Discovery merger went through, he told CNBC in an interview (11/18/21) he wished CNN would “actually have journalists,” then praised Fox for its “actual journalism” (FAIR.com, 2/17/22). Many journalists at CNN suspect the media company’s recent firing of celebrated media reporter Brian Stelter was a political decision at the behest of Malone (Vox, 8/18/22).

There are rumors the merged company may attempt to absorb NBC Universal, along with its streaming platform Peacock, as early as 2024 (The Street, 9/22/22).

We’re getting far afield from podcasts here—but the whole point is that these things are all connected. When we put these threads together, we see a bigger picture that’s important for news consumers to digest.

Noted political economist Robert McChesney wrote for FAIR back in 1997 (Extra!, 11–12/97) that TCI faced “a direct and potentially very damaging challenge to its US market share from digital satellite broadcasting.” Now, Malone controls SiriusXM, the largest satellite broadcaster in the country.

The coming Spotify/Liberty duopoly

With the podcast industry thinning out, Liberty and Spotify are fighting for dominance.

All of these failures in clear reporting obscure the bigger picture. Mainstream coverage might leave you with the impression of a podcast landscape dominated by Spotify and Apple. But if we incorporate an understanding of corporate ownership, there are two main end-to-end podcast empires with a clear grip on the market at this point: Spotify and Liberty Media’s SiriusXM (FAIR.org, 4/21/21).

Sirius certainly sees it that way. A former Stitcher employee told the Verge (3/22/22), “Spotify is the devil to SiriusXM.”

Spotify has the bigger platform, with 400 million monthly listeners (CNET, 2/2/22), while Pandora has hemorrhaged listeners year after year since 2019. (Note that these numbers are from before big artists like Neil Young boycotted Spotify over Joe Rogen; Young still has an entire channel on SiriusXM.) But Liberty has built an ad-selling powerhouse in SXM Media that Spotify’s own Megaphone struggles to compete with. In fact, with SXM’s help, Pandora has increased its ad revenue despite shrinking listenership.

SXM Media signed deals with NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Soundcloud and Audiochuck early on, and has since signed with Spanish-language reVolver Podcasts and Crooked Media (home of Pod Save America). In February 2020, SiriusXM made a $75 million minority equity investment into SoundCloud, which expands on their ad agreement.

Sirius has also drawn more listeners to its content than Spotify. Spotify’s Joe Rogan Experience remains the most popular individual podcast, while SiriusXM’s Crime Junkies comes in third in Edison Research show rankings. But the Stitcher podcast network has topped Triton Digital’s weekly download rankings for over a year, after it edged out NPR. And SXM Media beats Spotify in Edison Researcher’s rankings for “top podcasts networks by reach.”

Sirius also bought Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco podcast network and digital media company last year, adding a network with 180 million annual downloads (Tech Crunch, 4/23/22)

But winning the so-called “podcast wars” has never been just about platforms. It’s about building a whole end-to-end system for producing, hosting, monetizing and then platforming content. Spotify and Liberty are the only companies that have unlocked this “final infinity stone” in the US market (Input, 2/22/21).

The post The Podcast Conglomerate the Media Won’t Name appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 23, 2022

Lisa Gilbert on the January 6 Report

Image from January 6 Report (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

This week on CounterSpin: The House committee on the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol heard more than 1,000 witness interviews and held multiple public hearings, resulting in criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Donald Trump, lawyer John Eastman and others involved in violent efforts to override the results of Trump’s electoral loss.

The committee released transcripts showing some two dozen witnesses invoking their right against self-incrimination. Eastman, key advisor to Trump on how to overturn the election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times. At one point, Democratic House member Jamie Raskin asked GOP operative Roger Stone if he believed “coups are allowed in our constitutional system.” To which Stone said, “I most definitely decline to respond to your question.”

But the headwinds the Committee’s recommendations face are not just from the MAGA hatters, but also the Very Smart People who will tell us that our desire for justice is really just partisan or, worse, blood lust—and what we really ought to do, what the intelligent people would do, is, well, nothing. Let wiser heads prevail. We’re having none of that.

We spoke with Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen and co-founder of the forged-for-purpose Not Above the Law Coalition, about what the hearings found and why it can’t end there.

CounterSpin221223Gilbert.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk, inflation and deadly conservatism.

CounterSpin221223Banter.mp3

The post Lisa Gilbert on the January 6 Report appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 22, 2022

Can False Balance Kill You? It Sure Can

The failure to point out that an ideology is deadly represents another kind of lethal politics (Washington Post, 12/16/22).

The Washington Post (12/16/22) had a recent headline: “Can Politics Kill You? Research Says the Answer Increasingly Is Yes.” And the lead of the article, by Akilah Johnson, told readers of two studies that reveal what it calls “an uncomfortable truth”:

The toxicity of partisan politics is fueling an overall increase in mortality rates for working-age Americans.

But when you read further into the article, you find that politics is not really the problem here. One of the studies, the Post reported, found that “people living in more conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to Covid-19.” The other found that “the more conservative a state’s policies, the shorter the lives of working-age people.”

So the problem is not so much “politics” as it is conservatism. Indeed, the article noted that one of the reports found “if all states implemented liberal policies” on the environment, guns, tobacco and other health-related policies, 170,000 lives would be saved a year.

Still, the analysis in the piece centered around the idea that it is not right-wing ideology, but lack of bipartisanship, that is to blame—as in, “The division in American politics has grown increasingly caustic and polarized.”

You know what would actually benefit politics in the United States? A media system that was willing to point out who was causing demonstrable problems, rather than pretending that “both sides” are always to blame.

Reporting like that could actually save lives.

The post Can False Balance Kill You? It Sure Can appeared first on FAIR.
December 21, 2022

‘The Oil Companies Are the Reason We Don’t Have Climate Policy’ – CounterSpin interview with Richard Wiles on fossil fuel lies

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Climate Integrity’s Richard Wiles about the lies of the fossil fuel industry for the December 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin221216Wiles.mp3

Center for Climate Integrity (12/9/22)

Janine Jackson: The House Oversight Committee has revealed new documentation showing that fossil fuel companies have long been well aware of their industry’s impact on climate disruption, with all of its devastating effects. And rather than respond humanely to human needs, they’ve opted to use every tool in the box, including bold lying, pretend naivete and aggressive misdirection, to continue extracting every last penny that they can.

It invites a question: If an investigation falls in the forest and no laws or tax policies or news media approaches are changed by it, does it make a sound?

Our next guest’s group collects and shares the receipts on fossil fuel companies’ architecture of deception—not for fun, but for change. Richard Wiles is president of the Center for Climate Integrity. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Richard Wiles.

Richard Wiles: Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

JJ: I don’t think we can assume listeners will have heard the details from this House committee. What, most importantly to your mind, did the evidence that they unearthed show or confirm or illustrate about the actions and intentions of fossil fuel companies with regard to climate change?

RW: I guess the big new findings here are internal emails, internal communications, PowerPoint presentations, prepared for the CEO of the oil majors that reveal in a number of different ways the way they continue to aggressively mislead the public and the Congress and the media about their role in solving climate change—which is nothing, as you can imagine.

So this investigation was limited to internal documents that the company might have after the Paris Agreement in 2015. The committee subpoenaed any communications that they might have had relevant to climate change since that date.

And that’s important because there’s around 28 states and municipalities, plus another 16 communities in Puerto Rico, that are now suing oil companies for basically lying about what they knew about climate change, and their ongoing deception and greenwashing.

And the committee’s work, the documents that they’ve uncovered, have really added a lot to the evidence that will support those cases that make the case, particularly since 2015, that the companies continue to lie about their commitment to solving the problem.

Wall Street Journal (10/3/21)

And they do it in a number of different ways. I’m sure that some of your listeners have seen Exxon’s famous and seemingly never-ending ads about algae, right, which internal emails to the company make clear is never going to be any kind of a significant contributor to solving climate change, or being a carbon-free fuel.

There’s a lot more stuff in the weeds, like the companies talk about how they support the Paris Climate Accords. But then, internally, they’re saying things like, “God, please don’t say anything that’ll commit us to advocate for the Paris Agreement.”

There’s lots about how they want to position natural gas as a climate solution, when they know that it isn’t a climate solution. And they talk about that in these documents.

So the Committee’s efforts, this investigation, has produced a lot of information that is going to be helpful to holding the companies accountable in court, and also just educating members of Congress and the media about the fact that these companies are the problem, they’re not part of the solution. They’re aggressively part of the problem.

And it’s one thing to have somebody like me say that, or environmental advocates say that, or public interest groups say that. It’s another thing to be able to prove it with the company’s internal communications.

So that’s basically the contribution they made.

JJ: Let me just, as a side note, this is with available information, right, because some of the biggest players just said, “Nope—transparency, public oversight, indicate our internal conversations? Nope, not gonna do it.” Right?

RW: Right. The committee used its subpoena power. But the companies have fancy lawyers, and they’re not particularly interested in cooperating on this issue.

And so they did produce, I think, a million pages of documents, but probably roughly 900,000 of those pages, probably more than that, were things that were irrelevant, like company websites and whatever, that stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with what the committee wanted.

In a lot of cases, some of the players, like API, among others—that’s the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for the oil industry—they would just redact page after page of these internal documents, and might give you a sentence or two.

So there was a lot of redactions, a lot of withholding. I think it’s clear that the companies and the trade association fundamentally obstructed this investigation.

But at the same time, they also knew they had to turn over something. And what they did turn over did contain a significant amount of evidence of this ongoing duplicity and deception around climate change, and their role in causing it, and their role in “solving it.”

JJ: Yeah. You know, it’s shorthanded to the House Oversight Committee, including by me, but it’s called the Oversight and Reform Committee.

And the Center for Climate Integrity, you guys seem post-weasel words, post–”Yes, they do harm, but look at the good they also do”–style conciliation.

You seem to take the fact that fossil fuel industries are in bad faith, as not like, “Let’s talk about it,” but a factor to consider in what we do moving forward, right?

RW: Right, exactly. One hundred percent.

JJ: I appreciate that. And so many people are like, “Oh, well, they’re the experts on the industry. So if we’re going to regulate them, obviously the industry needs to be part of how they define how we regulate them.” And it’s just such a merry-go-round.

And I want to ask you, as a group that steps outside of that, what are we calling for now? What is our work, concretely, now? How do we get off this dime?

Richard Wiles: “The only way we’re going to have the kind of meaningful climate policy change…is if we actually beat the oil guys.”

RW: Yeah, this is a good point. You got to think about the oil industry the way you think about the tobacco industry, the opioid industry, right? Nobody is looking to the tobacco companies for healthcare policy advice anymore, and the same for the opioid guys.

These guys, they cause a problem, and there was no way to work it out with them, right? They had a very profitable product, they knew it was killing people left and right, and they didn’t care at all.

And the only way they were stopped was by head-on confrontation in the courts—not the Congress, which they fundamentally own, but to the courts.

And our view is that, while obviously the Congress has a role here, and we hope someday the Congress passes meaningful climate legislation, that certainly hasn’t happened yet.

We had a good energy bill this fall, but it didn’t do anything to reduce emissions or to rein in these companies.

The only way we’re going to have the kind of meaningful climate policy change that ushers in an era of renewable energy is if we actually beat the oil guys. We have to actually win. It’s not a negotiation, it’s a fight. They want us to think it’s a negotiation, because that means they’ve won; we’re talking to them.

But if anyone can think of a time in human history where the most powerful industry or interest group of that era, that time, voluntarily committed suicide, voluntarily said, “Ah, you know, we don’t want all this power, we don’t want all this money….”

JJ: “We’ll just show ourselves out.”

RW: “…go out of business,” right. Yeah, if you can show me that, maybe I’ll change my mind. But you’ve got to be pretty naive to think that’s what’s going to happen here.

And all the evidence shows that’s not true. We can say that, and there’s still powerful forces who think, “Oh, well, they’re just naive, of course you’re going to have to work with the oil guys.”

Well, no. And what these documents do is help make it clear to people who need to have it made clear to them, like members of Congress and the media, that the oil companies are the problem, period. That’s it. That’s the reason we don’t have climate policy. There’s no other reason. It’s because these very wealthy, powerful, vested interests make sure that the public is confused about climate change, that everybody thinks that they’re part of the solution, that all these things that we know aren’t true, and that this evidence helps us show are not true.

So our view is you’ve got to attack the companies, you’ve got to expose them for all the lies that they live off of. And you’ve got to make them pay, both reputationally and financially, through the courts, for their ongoing lies and deception. And for the damage that those lies do, in terms of the cost that communities face from extreme storms and hurricanes, and just the routine business of adapting to climate change.

Building a seawall we didn’t have to build. Now we need a cooling center, or suddenly we got to move the sewage treatment plant. Look, our drinking water’s loaded with salt water now. Whatever it is, all these costs that were foisted upon us by the industry, they need to pay.

And I guess our view is if they’re held accountable financially, and if people understand through that process—like they do with Big Pharma now, that “opioids, not good, really bad, these companies deliberately and knowingly killed people.”

If we can hang that same kind of messaging around the necks of the oil and gas industry, where it belongs, then I think we can change the conversation about how we’re going to solve climate. It’ll be a much more fruitful conversation.

And if the companies have to pay, also, if these cases are successful and the companies are made to pay for the damage that they knowingly caused—and I want to emphasize that the companies knew 50 years ago that their products would cause climate change, and they wrote it down, and they talked about catastrophes that would happen. And then they decided, at some point in the early ’90s/late ’80s, that they needed to run a massive disinformation campaign instead of tell the truth. If they’re held accountable to that, it’s a big financial cost that they absolutely deserve to have to pay.

And they’ll be very different-looking industries if they’re made to pay those costs. And at that point, maybe, just maybe, we will get the kind of climate solutions that we need.

Until we do that, I don’t think there’s any reasonable path that’s going to get us to the transformational kind of change that we need to get to, if the oil companies and gas companies are just standing in the way, as powerful as they are today, and everybody thinks that really the problem is them, right? That’s what they’ve done, right?

Washington Post (12/9/22)

JJ: And how long a shower they take, right? And I would love to put a pin in that right there. But I feel obliged to ask you a final question, which is that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, his takeaway, as he tweeted, was, “Second only to hydrocarbons, the biggest product of the fossil fuel industry is lies.” That’s what he took away.

But then I read this Washington Post subhead, that was, “Some oil companies remain internally skeptical about the switch to a low-carbon economy even as they portray their businesses as partners in the cause, documents say.”

I mean, uff da, what the heck is that?

RW: Right? Sheldon Whitehouse nailed it, right? The number two product is lies.

JJ: How’s that kind of media coverage going to get us, is what I’m saying.

RW: Yeah, that’s just completely wrong. That’s what we’re battling against, right? There’s somehow this notion that the companies have a legitimate skepticism, and internal debates about whether or not they should really try harder on climate, and that’s what the documents showed…No, that’s not what the documents show.

The documents show that they are lying about their commitment to solving the problem. The documents show that they’re going to increase drilling in the Permian Basin by maybe 1,000% while they’re going to say that they’re in favor of the Paris Climate Accords.

That’s what the documents showed. They showed ongoing duplicity and lies. And, yeah, that’s part of the challenge, is to get the media to report this correctly.

We’re up to that challenge. And we think the more documents come out, the clearer it’s going to be, and the more attorneys general that step up and sue these companies for consumer fraud, and the more municipalities that demand to have the cost that they are spending to adapt to climate change covered by the oil companies, like they should be, the more evidence that comes out, I think, the better we’ll do.

And the more people understand, the message in the media will change. But we got a long way to go.

But this investigation is a good step in the right direction, for sure. You’re building a wall; it’s just a brick in the wall. And at some point, it’s going to be a wall that they can’t get out around. So in the meantime, we’ll just keep building.

JJ: Keep on keeping on.

RW: Yeah, that’s what we do.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Richard Wiles. He’s president of the Center for Climate Integrity. You can find their work online at ClimateIntegrity.org. Richard Wiles, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Oh, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

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December 19, 2022

Media Prescribe More ‘Pain’ for Workers as Inflation’s Only Cure

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit’s prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.

When inflation hits, this is because of the conditions upon which profits are made. It’s not the fault of profit-making itself. The problem is a “labor shortage,” or “too much demand,” which forces the invisible hand to raise prices—and not a shortage of dignified work, or a surplus of people living paycheck to paycheck. Maximal profits are a given, and scarcity for ordinary people is a requirement.

This catechism means that, even if reporters in corporate media are sympathetic to working people’s struggle with the increasing costs of living, the group that inevitably needs to take a hit to curb inflation is, you guessed it, still working people.

The fact that “job openings increased to 10.7 million in September,” USA Today (11/3/22) reported, “can continue to give the Fed a headache.”

This dynamic plays out in the media like a bait and switch, in which reporters acknowledge and sympathize with the pain of ordinary people, but prescribe them more pain as the only way out.

Such was the case when USA Today (11/2/22) ran its front-page headline, “Latest Fed Rate Hike: More Pain Coming.” The article starts by saying that inflation is at its “highest in a generation”; the online version links to another story (10/13/22) with working people rightly bemoaning the increases in their cost of living:

Michael Rossini, 57, of Randolph, Massachusetts, is shelling out an additional $55 or so a week on groceries. And filling up his pickup truck now costs $170, up from $100 before the inflation spike, even after the summer drop-off in pump prices….

“I’ve got to provide for my family,” he said. But, he said, “my quality of life has gone down…. I can’t get this time back.”

But as “More Pain Coming” makes clear, USA Today provides no option for people like Michael but the Rube Goldberg–esque conveyor belt Powell and the Federal Reserve have constructed to cull the bloated American economy.

According to the article, “consumers should expect their costs to head even higher and job losses to mount as economic growth slows” as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. The Fed’s moves will “ripple through the economy and ultimately, hit businesses and consumers and slow demand and inflation.”

That the Fed decided to use its incredible influence over the US and global economy is of course deserving of coverage. But to pay lip service to the needs of ordinary Americans, as if that’s what’s driving the Fed’s decision to burden them further, obscures the class war being waged. It’s a bait and switch that works to convince people that the scarcity they feel is an inevitable consequence of natural forces, not a political decision that need not be.

Corporate greed a ‘red herring’

NPR‘s story (11/29/22) had a twist ending: “As it turns out, consumers might be the guilty party in the inflation mystery.”

Despite corporate media’s best attempts, polls show the vast majority of Americans lay blame on corporations for needlessly driving inflation (Navigator, 7/26/22). This didn’t stop NPR (11/29/22) from characterizing this view as one of “economists and politicians on the left.” NPR‘s “The Mystery of Rising Prices. Are Greedy Corporations to Blame for Inflation?” was written like a “whodunnit,” but if the protagonist detective was too inept to discover that their anonymous employer was in fact the murderer staging a cover-up.

NPR business correspondent Stacey Vanek Smith somehow came within point blank range of the “smoking price gun” of corporate price-setting, only to acquit these corporations and blame regular people in a verdict that takes the bait and switch to another level.

From pointing out that corporate profits “reached an all-time high this year” to detailing the “confessions” of corporate executives at companies like Kroger, AutoZone and Hostess, who “bragged about how much they were able to raise prices,” the author/detective seemed hot on the trail of how corporate profiteering has produced a cost of living crisis. They even acknowledge that corporations have “murdered the competition,” with the four companies that “control about 80% of the beef and poultry market” having “settled lawsuits over price-fixing just this year.”

But after laying all this out, our detective consulted an expert witness whose view is that blaming corporate greed is a “red herring.”

“Blaming inflation on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity,” the economist Justin Wolfers said. Once again, greed and the resulting pain and scarcity working people feel is natural. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Profits are a given.

Further, greed is good:

“The only reason we’re not all paying $800 for a pair of socks or a cheeseburger is simply due to greed in another form: competition. ‘That greed forces them to offer low prices because they’re trying to muscle out their competitor,’ says Wolfers.”

Despite having just detailed the corporate tendency to reduce such competition, as with the case of the meat industry, this is enough to lead her to her verdict.

The killer, our detective determined, is consumers:

As it turns out, consumers might be the guilty party in the inflation mystery…. “Inflation is coming from demand,” says Wolfers.

It’s your own damn fault, people! But the good news? “Prices will fall and inflation will ease.” Why? In order to make ends meet,

our collective savings has been shrinking and household debt has been on the rise…. But, until demand drops, companies will push prices up as much as they can. It’s elementary.

The only way out is through.

To ‘dent the job market’

The New York Times (11/1/22) also ran a story examining evidence that corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices on consumers, but unlike our “whodunnit,” shied away from deciding on a guilty party for inflation writ large. The subhead was forthright enough:

Some companies and restaurants have continued to raise prices on consumers even after their own inflation-related costs have been covered.

The New York Times story (11/18/22) concludes that a recession “would be preferred to the alternative”: that is, continued low unemployment with rising prices.

The Times’ acknowledgement of corporate greed, though, didn’t affect its conviction that consumer demand must take a hit to bring prices down. In a piece assessing the Fed’s interest rate hikes, the Times (11/18/22) reported on the difficulty the continued resilience of both the labor market and consumer demand poses for the Fed, without so much as a word considering an outcome that doesn’t require kicking people out of their jobs:

Rate increases have yet to seriously dent the overall job market…. “The shocking part is, for as much as we’ve raised rates in six months, we’re really just still not seeing much in the labor market,” Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said at a recent event….

In theory, shoppers should be pulling back as money becomes more expensive to borrow and uncertainty about the future mounts. But so far, businesses continue to invest, and consumers are hardy.

With these inflation indicators “lagging,” the Times says the Fed is trying to “thread the needle” so as to not impose supposed unneeded costs on the economy:

So far, “it appears tighter money has not yet constrained business activity enough to seriously dent inflation,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in an essay on Tuesday. “While there are risks that our policy actions to tame inflation could induce a recession, that would be preferred to the alternative.”

How being so determined to bring inflation down that you are willing to cause a recession, a far worse outcome that would throw millions out of work, just to bring inflation down is “threading the needle” remains a mystery. That that outcome “would be preferred to the alternative” just goes to show at whose behest the Fed is operating. Rich people, of course, are never unemployed. However, their giant piles of money do lose value as inflation persists. So a recession would be preferable to them—and only them.

So even though working people are already shouldering the heaviest burden of inflation, and even though the Times (11/1/22) previously reported on how many companies are taking advantage of the situation, it doesn’t propose that those corporations should be made to shoulder more of the burden of deflationary efforts.

‘Stomach for the fight’

The Economist (12/1/22) asks, “Do policymakers today have the stomach for the fight?”—meaning, are they willing to throw millions of people out of work?

But where the Times sees the Fed “threading the needle,” the Economist (12/1/22) questions whether policymakers have “the stomach” to go even further. One cannot describe their take as a bait and switch, given they make no effort to appear sympathetic to the needs of ordinary people. Instead, they invoked the legacy of Carter/Reagan Fed chair Paul Volcker, whose excessive fight against the high inflation of his time led to a recession and drove unemployment to 10.8%.

The Economist stated that central bankers today should draw “three lessons” from the experience of the ’80s:

First, inflation can take a long time to come down. Second, defeating inflation requires the participation not just of central bankers, but other policymakers too. And third, it will come with huge trade-offs.

It’s the second and third lesson which give the most pause here.

The second lesson, that other policymakers must be engaged alongside central banks in order to adequately curb inflation, seems benign until you realize which policymakers and which policies the author is referring to: namely the “liberalizing reforms” of the 1980s, the austerity, deregulation and disempowerment of labor that took place under the Reagan administration.

The third lesson, about trade-offs, amounts to a call to remain firm on kicking millions of people out of their jobs:

The third lesson of the 1980s is that disinflation is painful. The world economy did not benefit from a “soft landing,” where inflation falls without provoking recession. Average unemployment across the rich world doubled in the five years after 1979….

Do policymakers today have the stomach for the fight?… Fighting inflation is hard. It requires all hands on deck, and immense courage over a long period of time. It is also, unfortunately, almost inevitable that some groups lose out, if only in the short term.

Lenin’s description of the Economist as “a journal that speaks for the British millionaires” really holds up. Asking if policymakers today have the guts to serve power is not a question requiring too much investigation. If it were, history would have turned out a lot different.

Journalists should instead be asking if policymakers have the guts to serve those who bear the brunt of inflation, who don’t set the prices, and who don’t make record profits. The answer is a resounding no.

‘For wages to come down’

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed unleashed an era of cheap money for the rich, inflating shareholders earnings without prompting significant reinvestment or wage increases (Project Syndicate, 9/21/22). Unfathomable inequality has followed.

This continued uninterrupted for over a decade. But labor’s more recent moderate increase in wages is being treated as public enemy number one by the Fed and commentators.

At a September press conference, Fox Business’ Edward Lawrence asked Powell how long Americans should be prepared to feel the “economic pain” the Fed has imposed. The Fed chair responded by openly stating that it was going to take as long as was necessary to crush wages:

I mean, it really depends on how long it takes for wages, and more than that, prices to come down, for inflation to come down.

“I wish there were a completely painless way to restore price stability,” the New York Times (12/14/22) quotes Fed chief Jerome Powell. “There isn’t.”

This argument that the Fed continues to make, that too much demand and a “wage price spiral” are exacerbating inflation, gets unquestioningly parroted in the media (e.g., New York Times, 12/14/22). But it ignores data showing that aggregate demand has mostly fallen below historical trends, and would not be excessive if not for supply shocks—and that, crucially, real wages are declining—as laid out in a recent Roosevelt Institute report (12/6/22).

As the report’s authors, Joseph Stieglitz and Ira Regmi, document, inflation has mostly been brought on by “supply shocks and sectoral demand shifts, not by excess aggregate demand.” This warrants a different set of policy tools than the “blunt” hand of monetary policy that would drive unemployment “unnecessarily high.”

While “restoring interest rates to normal levels” not seen since before the ’08 collapse has “distinct advantages”—because zero or negative interest rates subsidize corporate speculation—going further than that, as the Fed seems intent on doing, “will not substantially lower inflation unless they induce a major contraction in the economy, which is a cure worse than the disease.”

When corporate media appear to be sympathetic to the ordinary people that face the brunt of inflation, but only offer policy ideas that would further widen the gap between wages and inflation, and between rich and poor, they are engaging in a bait and switch that only serves the powerful.

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December 16, 2022

Pamela Paul’s Gender Agenda

The New York Times for many years had a transgender contributing opinion writer, Jennifer Finney Boylan. Part of a less exclusive club than that of columnists, who appear more frequently, Boylan nevertheless offered a rare, recurring trans perspective in one of the most prominent opinion sections in the country.

But in April, a seismic shift quietly occurred in that opinion section: Boylan departed, and just two weeks later, the paper debuted Pamela Paul as a new columnist—one who regularly engages in anti-trans politics.

Paul, the former Book Review editor at the Times, never directly attacks trans people; that wouldn’t fly in the New York Times opinion section, as she surely knows. But her repeated returns to anti-trans themes and anti-trans sources reveals a clear agenda that has more in common with Marjorie Taylor Greene than Paul, or the Times, would ever care to admit.

Free to be—not you

It takes some ingenuity to turn Free to Be…You and Me into an argument (New York Times, 12/4/22) for further marginalizing an oppressed minority.

In what by my count is now her fifth column to vilify trans people or the trans movement, subtly or directly, Paul (12/4/22) took the 50th anniversary of the popular ’70s album/book, Free to Be…You and Me, as an opportunity to argue that the movement toward letting people define their own gender is in fact eroding the progress on gender equality that album promised and symbolized.

Free to Be, Paul writes, challenged gender stereotypes and embraced the idea that “it didn’t matter whether you were a boy or a girl because neither could limit your choices.”

But rather than celebrating continued progress on gender freedom, much of which has come about as a result of the LGBTQ movement pushing against restrictive notions of gender identity, or lament the recent backlash against such freedoms by the right, Paul pines for a 1970s-style gender binary, and finds her modern villains in trans people and their allies.

Yes, she dutifully notes that “conservative backlash” is having an effect on gender freedom, and even spends a few paragraphs on the role of marketers who try to squeeze more money out of parents by gender-segregating clothes and toys. But her real purpose here is to highlight “a strain of progressivism that has repurposed some of the very stereotypes women and men worked so hard to sweep away.”

You see, as a result of the lessons of Free to Be, Paul “accepted the reality of biological science that I was a girl.” However:

Now we risk losing those advances. In lieu of liberating children from gender, some educators have doubled down, offering children a smorgasbord of labels—gender identity, gender role, gender performance and gender expression—to affix to themselves from a young age. Some go so far as to suggest that not only is gender “assigned” to people at birth but that sex in humans is a spectrum (even though accepted science holds that sex in humans is fundamentally binary, with a tiny number of people having intersex traits). The effect of all this is that today we are defining people—especially children—by gender more than ever before, rather than trying to free both sexes from gender stereotypes.

Though she positions herself as a free speech liberal, Paul’s position reads remarkably like that of QAnon Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proudly displayed a large sign outside her office announcing, “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust The Science!’” (Greene reportedly did this to taunt her fellow representative Marie Newman, whose office is across the hall and who had hung a flag in support of her transgender child.)

Espousing the same biological determinism that forms the core of the anti-trans movement, Paul asserts (falsely) that “the reality of biological science” dictates our gender, dismisses intersex people (a “tiny” 1 out of every 50 people) as irrelevant, and paints as extremists those who suggest one’s gender might not always match one’s sex—while framing the whole thing as purportedly being about children’s liberation or well-being.

Unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul will occasionally suggest she has nothing against a vague notion of “transgender rights,” without specifying what those might entail. In this column, it comes in the form of a parenthetical: “(It’s worth noting that [Marlo] Thomas, when asked in 2015 if Free to Be fit in with transgender rights, said its message encompasses everyone.)” And Paul herself argues it’s actually her position that allows people to be “gender non-conforming”—by which she really means not conforming to gender stereotypes, while strictly conforming to one’s assigned gender. In this way she tries to paint herself as an open-minded liberal, rather than the reactionary she actually is.

Remember how Paul initially said the problem is that “a strain of progressivism” has “repurposed” gender stereotypes? Did you perhaps wonder what that means? She never explains it; she simply lets readers connect the dots on their own, with the obvious implication being that trans and non-binary people, by embracing a gender identity different from the one tied to their “biological reality,” are failing to challenge stereotypes and instead reinforcing them.

Paul writes that she learned from Free to Be that just because someone with a penis is “afraid of mice and wants to be a cocktail waitress” doesn’t mean he’s a girl. Great! Paul is happy to grant that person the freedom to break gender stereotypes. But what if that person experiences gender dysphoria and identifies as female? Tough luck, suggests Paul—you shouldn’t have that freedom, because that would reinforce gender stereotypes.

Paul refuses to recognize that that is its own straightjacket. Unlike Paul, trans and non-binary people are not trying to dictate how anyone else identifies or how anyone else expresses their gender. And trans and non-binary identities span a glorious spectrum of gender expression; some conform to gender stereotypes, some blast them wide open, some do both depending on the day. Where Free to Be helped break open gender roles and stereotypes that constricted people 50 years ago, the transgender movement is helping to break open a biological determinism that constricts people to this day.

The problem with Paul’s argument isn’t just that it does the opposite of what it claims to do, aiming to restrict people’s gender freedom. By pretending to be a rights-loving liberal while peddling this conservative position, Paul—and the Times—normalizes the backlash against trans people and their rights.

‘What people are afraid to say’

Having a “keen desire to write about what people really think and believe but are often too afraid to say” (New York Times, 3/7/22) is another way of saying that she wants to give people permission to express the prejudices they’re ashamed to have.

The Times got exactly what it wanted when it hired Paul, who had been the paper’s book review editor for nine years. In their announcement (3/7/22) about the new hire, the Opinion editors wrote:

Pamela impressed us in our conversations with her keen desire to write about what people really think and believe but are often too afraid to say. She made clear to us that she has little patience for groupthink on the right or left but rather wants her column to help people question what has often become the received point of view.

This is exactly the sort of language used to decry so-called “cancel culture” by those whose opinions meet with criticism. Indeed, less than two weeks after that announcement, the Times editorial board (3/18/22) published one of its most appalling editorials in recent memory, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” which cast “fear of being shamed or shunned” for one’s public opinion as a greater danger than the government censorship that is taking place across the country.

In other words, to the Times, it’s a more worrying development that those with a platform, like the Times editors, are forced to deal with being criticized on Twitter than that state and local governments across the country are banning books and speech—overwhelmingly books and speech about gender identity and sexual orientation. Hiring Paul was clearly a decision to bring on a hired gun to take the Times‘ side in this “culture war.”

And straight out of the gate, Paul (4/24/22) made clear she would be speaking for the growing cohort of widely platformed pundits who, while generally identifying as liberals, attack those who suggest that marginalized people ought to be able to tell their own stories as people “who wish to regulate our culture.” “Am I,” Paul rhetorically asked, “as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?” She denounced this unattributed perspective as “miserly”:

Surely human beings are capable of empathizing with those whose ethnicity or country of origin differ from their own. Surely storytellers have the ability to faithfully imagine the experiences of “the other.” If we followed the solipsistic credo of always “centering” identity when greenlighting a project, we’d lose out on much of journalism, history and fiction….

That is what art is meant to do—cross boundaries, engender empathy with other people, bridge the differences between author and reader, one human and another.

Of course, it’s a straw man argument, as no reasonable person suggests people can only weigh in on their own experience; the actual argument Paul takes issue with is that marginalized voices should be centered, considered and respected. But it’s Paul’s way of trying to inoculate herself against the inevitable criticism that perhaps a straight, cisgender woman is not the best person for the Times to pick to write repeatedly about the LGBTQ issues she is bizarrely obsessed with.

It’s instructive that she includes “school curriculum dictators” in her list of “those who wish to regulate our culture,” alongside “docents of academia…aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.” As is common in Paul’s columns, it’s a smear she doesn’t elaborate on, but casually drops in to allow readers to connect the dots so she doesn’t have to. You can be sure that, like the Times editors, she isn’t referring to those banning books and speech in schools. In fact, Paul makes that perfectly clear in a column purportedly about book banning. And, once again, trans people are at the center of Paul’s complaint.

A duty to support hate speech

For example, you can “ban” a book by criticizing it (New York Times, 7/24/22).

Under the headline, “There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book” (7/24/22), Paul offers her own version of the Times editorial board’s “anti-woke” argument that supposed threats to free expression emanating from the left are more troublesome than those from the literally book-banning right. Like the rest of these “cancel culture” arguments, Paul confuses criticism and accountability with censorship.

One of her central examples is the criticism of the American Booksellers Association for promoting a book full of dangerous anti-trans disinformation (for example, the false claim that most cases of gender dysphoria “resolve”—Psychology Today, 12/6/20). The ABA responded, to Paul’s dismay, by “issu[ing] a lengthy apology” and “back[ing] away from its traditional support of free expression, emphasizing the importance of avoiding ‘harmful speech.’”

The ABA (2/24/22) took pains to affirm its commitment to free expression in the wake of the incident and to explain that, as a non-government entity, it was nevertheless “free to condemn hate speech as a matter of organizational policy.” Obviously in this case no speech was censored and no books were banned; a book was deemed not worthy of being singled out for promotion, because it spread harmful misinformation about a marginalized community that is currently under political (and physical) attack.

Paul acknowledges that some books might not even be deemed worthy of publishing, but argues that such decisions “should be based on the quality of a book as judged by editors and publishers, not in response to a threatened, perceived or real political litmus test.”

Ah, to live in a world where books were published based solely on quality. As the former book review editor, surely Paul knows that decisions about what to publish and promote are driven by the market, and that any “political litmus test” can only be understood in relation to that market.

The book in question was published by Regnery Publishing, the right-wing outfit that churns out conspiracy-theory and disinformation-laden books like Dinesh D’Souza’s election conspiracy-mongering 2000 Mules (based on his movie of the same title) and climate denialist Marc Morano’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. Regnery published Unfit for Command, the attack on John Kerry’s Vietnam record that made “Swift Boat” a verb (Extra!, 11–12/05); it’s also specialized in Islamophobia, as with Robert Spencer‘s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). It’s clear how decisions are made at Regnery about what to publish—and it scarcely needs explaining that notions of quality grounded in truth, accuracy or democratic discourse have nothing to do with it.

Far from being silenced, anti-trans (and other anti-“woke”) ideas that are centered on disinformation and dehumanization of marginalized groups enjoy a huge right-wing media ecosystem that publishes and promotes them, which “free expression” warriors like Paul never mention.

Inclusion is exclusion

Paul (New York Times, 10/23/22) argues for taking the TQ out of LGBTQ.

Paul even more directly attacks trans people in the column “Let’s Say Gay” (10/23/22). There, Paul—again, by all accounts a straight, cisgender woman—decries what she perceives as a problematic shift in language from the specific words “gay,” “lesbian” and “bisexual” to the umbrella terms “queer” and “LGBTQ.”

The problem, as she frames it, is that because of this linguistic shift, “gays and lesbians can feel crowded out.” And that matters, she argues, “because the gay rights movement’s successes have historically hinged on efforts at inclusion.”

That’s right; just like in her Free to Be column, Paul argues that up is down and down is up—or, in this case, exclusion is inclusion and inclusion is exclusion. To support her analysis, Paul offers data (in the form of New York Times mentions) showing that “queer” and “LGBTQ” appear far more often than they did 10 years ago, and “gay” less often.

“Gay” still outpaces the other two combined; the Times is hardly entering Don’t Say Gay territory. But the data is really just a diversion from the absurdity of the argument. “Gay” is not an inclusive term; the whole reason the acronym was invented (and the “L” placed before the “G”) was to push back against the way the dominance of the word “gay” had been making lesbians and bisexuals less visible.

So if we’re going to count mentions, let’s count Paul’s. She uses the term “gay” 28 times (29 if you count the headline). “Lesbian” appears nine times, while the ever-neglected “bisexual” only appears twice. Paul’s own use of language makes clear the exclusionary tendencies of “gay.”

Indeed, Paul’s entire argument is grounded in exclusion—of trans and non-binary people. She admits that some “lesbians and gay people” prefer the umbrella terms “because they include people who identify according to gender expression or identity as well as sexual orientation.” But, Paul cautions, “let’s consider those who do not, and why.” The main trouble seems to be that “queer” and “LGBTQ” are “about gender as much as—and perhaps more so than—sexual orientation.” And there lies Paul’s bone to pick. She breaks it down further:

But this is important: Not all gay people see themselves as queer. Many lesbian and gay people define themselves in terms of sexual orientation, not gender. There are gay men, for example, who grew up desperately needing reassurance that they were just as much a boy as any hypermanly heterosexual. They had to push back hard against those who tried to tell them their sexual orientation called their masculinity into question.

It’s that person with a penis who’s afraid of mice, again! And again he’s being used to suggest that trans people are the villains, reversing the progress he’s made against gender stereotyping.

Paul wants to separate the struggles around gender identity and sexual orientation. This isn’t a new tactic—some gays and lesbians have been trying to exclude trans people from their movement since the movement’s beginning. But a basic understanding of the history of discrimination against LGBTQ people in this country gives the lie to the idea that they can be easily separated. Most arrests at raids on gay and lesbian bars were based on violations of gender norms, not sexuality: Laws required people to wear at least three articles of clothing “appropriate” to their assigned gender, so that arrests were made based on gender nonconformity—a much easier thing to prove than who you are attracted to.

‘Radical gender ideology’

James Kirchick defended the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning in a New York Times op-ed (8/29/17) headlined “When Transgender Trumps Treachery.”

Paul’s transphobia is also made clear by her sources. The only people she cited to support her “Let’s Say Gay” argument were Julia Diana Robertson, James Kirchick and David Sedaris. Robertson founded the Velvet Chronicle, an online publication, linked to by Paul, created to oppose “gender ideology” (a central and poorly defined buzzword for the anti-trans movement) and the ability of trans youth to access gender-affirming medical care.

Kirchick has argued that the gay rights movement should “declare unilateral victory” and stop “prolonging a culture war that no longer needs to be fought,” attacks on trans rights be damned. In case you’re wondering what exactly that “culture war” entails, he also published a long tirade against the belated recognition of trans women of color activism at Stonewall, complaining that

the intersectional left—perpetually in need of an adversarial posture against society, and for whom “trans women of color” is now a slogan—has settled on radical gender ideology as its next front in the culture war.

The Sedaris quip that Paul cites, in which he declared himself straight because he’s done “fighting the word ‘queer,’” was one that was also quickly praised by an anti-trans lobby group. (Sedaris himself, unlike Paul’s other sources, does not appear to have an anti-trans agenda.)

Stoking moral panic about “radical gender ideology” is exactly where the authoritarian backlash politics of the right intersect with those who would consider themselves liberals and feminists yet cannot abide self-determination and bodily autonomy for trans people. It’s where J.K. Rowling awkwardly finds an unexpected ally in Vladimir Putin, and the media of the liberal elite overlap with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ben Shapiro.

‘Shoving women to the side’

Yes, for New York Times opinion editors (7/3/22), Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are the “far left.”

Paul’s argument about the word “queer” echoes her argument about the word “women” from just a few months earlier: “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count” (7/3/22). There she accuses a “fringe left” group, including “uber-progressives” and “transgender activists,” of working “to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.”

Yes, it’s the tired argument (that nevertheless repeatedly finds a welcoming home in elite news outlets) that using terms like “pregnant people,” which acknowledge that trans men and nonbinary and intersex people can get pregnant and suffer the same—if not greater—harms from attacks on reproductive rights as cisgender women, means “shov[ing] women to the side.” Paul writes angrily:

Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.

Same argument, different bottle. Of course women can still call themselves women, and gay people can still call themselves gay—those terms are in no danger or disappearing from our discourse. But using language like “pregnant people” and “queer” expands our language to be more inclusive, not less, and to try to stop erasing those who have historically been most marginalized and often suffer the most from attacks on autonomy and self-determination (FAIR.org, 11/12/21).

A ‘dystopian’ world of negative reviews

In Paul’s nightmare vision of society (New York Times, 6/12/22), people say negative things about books they don’t like.

In “She Wrote a Dystopian Novel. What Happened Next Was Pretty Dystopian” (6/12/22), Paul denounces the trans critics of a science fiction book about gendercide while pretending the issue can be separated from transphobia: “We can set aside contentious questions around gender identity and transgender politics,” she argues, because a fiction writer “ought to be free to imagine her own universe.”

But in the next paragraph, she jumps right into those contentious questions:

This is in no way a transphobic novel. It neither denies the existence of transgender people, who are woven into the narrative in several places, nor maligns them.

Paul—who is, remember, a cisgender woman—appears to make this definitive judgment based on her own assessment of the novel—Sandra Newman’s The Men—as she cites no trans people supporting that judgment. Nor does she quote any trans critics of the novel in order to present their side of the story—for example, Ada Mardoll (Ramblings, 3/11/22), who argues that the premise of the book is that “no cis woman is evil and no trans woman is good.”

Instead, she falsely suggests that trans critics haven’t even read the book, and reduces their complaints to an inability to accept the idea “that a fictional world would assert the salience of biological sex, however fanciful the context.”

Trans people are the villains in Paul’s depiction of a “nightmare” come to life:

What a sour irony that a dystopian fantasy brought a dark reality one step closer. In this frightful new world, books are maligned in hasty tweets, without even having been read, because of perceived thought crimes on the part of the author. Small but determined interest groups can gather gale force online and unleash scurrilous attacks on ideas they disapprove of or fear, and condemn as too dangerous even to explore.

What happened to the book in question, in the end? It wasn’t banned; it wasn’t taken out of print, or pulled from bookstores. It was criticized by a marginalized group on Goodreads and Twitter. Meanwhile, books affirming trans and nonbinary identities (and discussions of transphobia, and homophobia, and racism) are literally being banned in schools and libraries across the country. As in her other columns, Paul uses the power of her platform to whip up moral panic about the marginalized criticizing the status quo, distracting from the real threat of the powerful silencing those marginalized voices.

A thumb on the scale

Former New York Times writer Jennifer Finney Boylan (4/9/22) won’t be surprised by very many of Pamela Paul’s columns.

Paul’s arguments deserve attention because they’re downright dangerous. Like the rest of the anti–”cancel culture” warriors, she claims to fight for free expression (“Let’s Say Gay!”) by implicitly urging censorship: Don’t say queer or trans.

By giving Paul a platform, the Times is feeding a grievance-based ideology that directly harms trans and other marginalized people (FAIR.org, 11/23/22). It’s the GOP that is pushing a breathtaking number of anti-trans laws across the country that threaten trans people’s very lives. But it’s the supposedly liberal pundits claiming to fight for free speech and feminism, of which the Times and other elite news media consider themselves a part, that blunt opposition to such moves and make them politically possible.

It was only six years ago that North Carolina faced widespread backlash against its so-called “bathroom bill,” which banned legal protections for transgender and nonbinary people. At the time, Pew Research Center (9/28/16) found that Americans believed trans people should be allowed to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with by a 5 percentage point margin. This year, that support has flipped dramatically (Pew, 9/15/22), with people in favor of requiring people to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth by 10 percentage points.

Opinion page editor Kathleen Kingsbury (4/26/21) once wrote of the Times Opinion team, “We have our thumb on our scale in the name of progress, fairness and shared humanity.” In this political moment, when control over trans lives has become an increasingly central political and legal debate, and with no trans writers among their stable of columnists or contributing writers, the Paper of Record is paying a cisgender white woman to regularly voice anti-trans arguments. Their thumb is on the scale, all right—but not in the way Kingsbury would like us to believe.

In Jennifer Finney Boylan’s parting missive, “I’m a Trans Woman. Bullies Don’t Surprise Me, but Allies Still Do” (4/9/22), she lamented the high-profile anti-trans rants of people like J.K. Rowling, but found hope in those who spoke out against them. She probably never dreamed that the columnist coming on as she left would use the platform to be one of the bullies, with no trans voice left to counter her.

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 16, 2022

Richard Wiles on Fossil Fuel Lies, Rebecca Vallas on Disability Economics

      CounterSpin221216.mp3

AP (12/10/22)

This week on CounterSpin: When the Keystone pipeline spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of hard-to-clean, sludgy oil in Kansas, AP‘s headline explained that the disaster “raises questions” about the pipeline’s operation. The utterly predictable harms of fossil fuel companies are forever “raising questions” for elite media. What in the world would happen if they were seen as answering them, and calling for requisite response? We talk about the latest revelations about fossil fuel industry lying about climate change with Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity.

      CounterSpin221216Wiles.mp3

Disability Economic Justice Collaborative (11/2/22)

Also on the show: As powerful people call loudly for a “post-Covid” “return to normal,” many are demanding we acknowledge that not only are we not post-Covid, but that “normal” was not actually good for millions of us. Rebecca Vallas is senior fellow and co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, based out of the Century Foundation. We talk with her about what that new project does, and why they need to do it.

      CounterSpin221216Valles.mp3

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
December 14, 2022

NYT Did Musk a Political Favor

The New York Times (12/10/22) pronounces itself perplexed by Elon Musk’s politics.

A recent New York Times article (12/10/22) describing Twitter owner Elon Musk’s politics—which have clearly aligned with Fox News (12/11/22, 12/12/22) and the Trumpian right—as “tricky to pin down” has people wondering if the Times is paying close attention to the news.

While reporter Jeremy Peters admitted that Musk promoted anti-left theories and rails against wokeness, he said “his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted.” While Musk supported Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for president, Peters wrote, “his endorsement was not especially resounding,” because he “merely replied ‘Yes’ when someone on Twitter asked him.”

It was perhaps bad luck for Peters that the day after his piece dropped, Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”—signaling affinity for a red-meat issue for Covid conspiracy theorists while at the same time ridiculing trans rights (CBS, 12/11/22). But Peters and the rest of the Times had enough evidence at the time of publication to call into question the article’s key assertion that Musk’s politics can’t be easily defined as conservative.

Class-war villain

Under Musk’s management, Twitter has silenced left-wing accounts while trumpeting his commitment to free speech (Intercept, 11/29/22). He’s reopened far-right accounts, including that of the publisher of the Nazi Daily Stormer (Tech Crunch, 12/2/22); unsurprisingly, hate speech on the site has soared (New York Times, 12/2/22).

Twitter just eliminated its Trust and Safety Council, an “advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech…and other problems on the platform” (AP, 12/13/22). Committee to Protect Journalists President Jodie Ginsberg (12/12/22) called the move a “cause for grave concern,” because it is “coupled with increasingly hostile statements by Twitter owner Elon Musk about journalists and the media.”

Intercept (11/29/22): “Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them.”

Internally, as a boss, Musk in his short tenure at Twitter has been an archetypal class-war villain. He remains staunchly anti-union (CNBC, 8/29/22). Janitors at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters went on strike (CBS, 12/6/22), and “a top lieutenant of Elon Musk allegedly told a fired member of Twitter’s cleaning staff that his job would one day be done by robots” (New York Post, 12/9/22). He has threatened to sue Twitter employees who leak information about the company (Fortune, 12/10/22), despite the fact that Musk himself released confidential emails and memos in an effort to discredit the company’s former management.

Musk enlisted ideologically sympathetic writers Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi to publicize internal Twitter documents relating to the company’s handling of possibly hacked information (Above the Law, 12/9/22) about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Weiss and Taibbi unloaded these documents in a series of tweets (12/2/22, 12/8/22) that were “saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity,” New York (12/10/22) reported, while Musk’s personal hyping of the leaks “proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.” Nevertheless, the “Twitter files,” as these information dumps are called, are being used in the right-wing press as evidence of a corporate and government conspiracy to silence conservative voices (Wall Street Journal, 12/4/22; New York Post, 12/8/22; The Hill, 12/11/22).

Musk flatly stated his support for the Republicans in the most recent congressional races (Bloomberg, 11/7/22). When asked why he had a strained relationship with his trans daughter, his answer was “communism” (Advocate, 10/11/22).

Running interference

The New York Times‘ Jeremy Peters (4/16/22) has previously marveled that a professed libertarian could accept corporate subsidies.

The question, then, is why would the Times, thought to be a moderate liberal beacon against the rightward Republican march, run interference for the world’s (then) richest human, whose takeover of a major social media website is heralded by the right as a victory in the culture war (Fox News, 10/28/22; New York Post, 12/12/22)? This latest piece only reinforces the feeling among the paper’s left-wing critics that the paper is hopelessly devoted to protecting the 1%.

Consider, for a moment, the context in which this piece dropped. NewsGuild of New York members at the Times recently staged a one-day walkout, highlighting the paper’s failure to reach a new collective bargaining agreement with the union (CNN, 12/7/22). A.G. Sulzberger, New York Times Co. chair and the paper’s publisher, has displayed his class loyalties in this ongoing dispute with the paper’s workers; the company boasts an increase in profit (New York Times, 11/2/22) and Sulzberger’s pay has increased (NPR, 12/8/22) while he and the company resist the unions. One can imagine the Times is reluctant to portray hostility to unions as a right-wing trait.

A recent profile of Starbucks boss Howard Schultz (12/11/22) likewise described his hostility to unionization as an “emotional” devotion to his company, rather than just cold business calculus. This is meant to humanize Schultz’s callous attacks on workers, but any labor journalist or union organizer could have told the Times that this sentiment is common among bosses who resist unionization.

Peters, the author of the Musk piece, essentially wrote this same article earlier this year (New York Times, 4/16/22): listing Musk’s supposed political contradictions, like the fact that he has “railed against federal subsidies” while his “companies have benefited from billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives from federal, state and local governments.” Again, as economic progressives have complained for decades, this is a common hypocrisy of corporate barons: They’ll gladly accept corporate subsidies while opposing welfare for the masses.

‘A new kind of polity’

If anything, it was the conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat (12/10/22) who got to the heart of the matter, noting a “sense in which Twitter is a new kind of polity,” which leads to a heated response to Musk’s takeover because “the leadership change really affects how people experience their daily lives.”

Indeed, even if one chooses not to log on, Twitter drives a lot of political and cultural discussion in the press, giving the platform an enormous amount of power. The fact that one of the world’s richest humans has used his unmatched purchasing power to turn the site into an extension of the right-wing movement like Fox News is not something individuals can simply ignore. As BBC contributor Matthew Sweet (Twitter, 12/11/22) put it, “It’s like Alex Jones bought the postal system.”

And so if the New York Times wants to be seen as a bulwark against the disinformation and the illiberalism of the Trumpian right, it needs to be more honest and skeptical in its reporting of Musk, who, whether we like it or not, is one of the most powerful right-wing figures in the world at this point.

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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