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September 22, 2022

Dragging Trump Into Spotlight Feeds His Dangerous Movement

In a recent New York Times “America in Focus” opinion piece (9/13/22), the paper gathered 16 Americans to discuss their views on the economy and how it’s affecting their personal finances.

The focus group included seven conservatives, seven “liberals and progressives,” and two moderates. Participants ranged in age from 24–65, lived in several different states, represented a handful of ethnicities (though the majority were white), and worked in occupations from food delivery to law.

The paper ran with the headline: “Is America in a Recession? Here’s What 16 Biden and Trump Supporters Think.”

Supporters of a losing candidate

Vox (8/19/22) details the numerous criminal investigations facing Donald Trump.

Now, asking individuals whether the US is in a recession is peculiar, given that the most widely accepted definition of a recession—“two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s GDP”—is not subjective. You might as well convene a focus group to ask whether a heat wave was breaking temperature records.

But most concerning is the second part of the Times’ headline. Donald Trump lost his second presidential bid nearly two years ago, and is being investigated for inciting an insurrection to retain power, removing classified documents from the National Archives, and other criminal charges. He has not officially announced any plans to run in 2024.

When has the paper ever sought the opinions of supporters of a losing presidential candidate—let alone one under multiple criminal investigations—two years after their loss, to “balance” supporters of the elected president? We weren’t hearing from panels of “Clinton supporters” in 2018, or “McCain supporters” in 2010, or “Gore supporters” in 2002.

An often inaccurate guess

Focus group director Frank Luntz comments on the near-absence of talk about Trump.

However, it’s not clear that the headline accurately describes the participants. Trump’s name doesn’t even come up in the conversation until the very end—which moderator Frank Luntz and some of the interview subjects acknowledged. “We were this close,” Luntz joked.

Throughout the entire piece, participants are classified by their ideologies, and the article only definitively identifies two Biden voters. Otherwise, subjects are classified as conservatives, liberals/progressives or moderates—not by whom they voted for or plan to vote for. It’s presumptuous, irresponsible journalism to assume all conservatives are “Trump supporters” and all progressives are “Biden supporters”—especially given that recent polling averages show that 47% of Republican respondents would like a figure other than Trump to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

On the other side, the New York Times itself (7/11/22) reported that 64% of Democrats do not want Biden to run in 2024—a figure that would likely be greater if the many liberals and progressives who don’t consider themselves Democrats were included. So labeling participants chosen for their ideologies as supporters of particular politicians is a guess, and often an inaccurate one. (A real sample of US adults, of course, would include the one-third of eligible voters who don’t vote, largely because they don’t see the point.)

The choice to nevertheless silo the participants as either Biden or Trump supporters two years after the election that Trump lost is a concrete example of how the corporate press feeds into the sensationalist circus of Trumpism, keeping him at the forefront of the news cycle, even in stories that barely involve him.

Violent and delusional worldview

On his own social media platform, Truth Social (5/16/22), Donald Trump “ReTruthed” an image that linked him to the QAnon conspiracy theory and its foretold “storm.”

Still, Trump’s chokehold on the Republican Party has 70% of its voting bloc believing the unequivocally false claim that Biden lost the 2020 election (Poynter, 6/16/22). This highlights the danger of normalizing Trump’s ideology as the counterbalance to an establishment Democrat like Biden.

Criticism of Biden and Democrats is valid and necessary, but Trumpism is something else entirely: Thousands of his followers took part in the deadly January 6 insurrection that sought to obstruct a democratic transfer of power. A quarter of Republicans believe in the central tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory: that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles control the government and media, and that an ever-coming “storm” helmed by Trump will destroy their power (PRII, 2/24/22).

A politician who actively tried to manipulate election results and sow baseless distrust in electoral outcomes is a direct threat to democracy. Casually treating his political base as the natural alternative to the elected government confers legitimacy on this violent and delusional worldview.

The issue, of course, is not whether the Times should be interviewing people who disagree with Biden—of course it should. But using “Trump supporters” as a default term for conservatives, and presenting them as the inevitable balance to the views of moderates and progressives (whose diverse political views are subsumed under the label “Biden supporters”) serves to mainstream a radical, far-right movement.

A mention of the president’s name in a conversation about the US’s current economic position and his student debt relief plan need not be “balanced out” by a headline dropping the name of a one-term president who lost to him two years ago, and who was barely mentioned in the conversation at all. Shoehorning Trump into conversations that don’t substantially involve him implies a false equivalence between the president and a political pretender.

Unrelenting frequency

CJR (11/13/19) tracked how much more the New York Times talks about Trump than about any other recent president.

The unrelenting frequency with which Trump is mentioned in the New York Times and the US media as a whole is well-documented. During his initial bid for the presidency in 2015, Trump received 327 minutes of nightly broadcast network news coverage, while Hillary Clinton received 121 and Bernie Sanders received 20 (Tyndall Report, 12/21/15). As CBS CEO Leslie Moonves (Extra!, 4/16) said in 2016, the cult of Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

During his presidency, the Times mentioned Trump more than it did his predecessors during theirs. A Columbia Journalism Review study (11/13/19) found that two years after his election, “the Times talks about Trump almost three times as much as they did Obama at the same point in his term.”

Three years later, amid criminal investigations and deadly conspiracy theories, Trump has managed to continue bullying his way into the political conversation. The threat the Trump movement poses requires media scrutiny, but when it comes time to discussing policy options, the New York Times should rule out those who reject the validity of democratic elections.

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

Featured Image: Caricatures of focus group participants from the New York Times‘ “Is America in a Recession? Here’s What 16 Biden and Trump Supporters Think” (9/13/22).

The post Dragging Trump Into Spotlight Feeds His Dangerous Movement appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 22, 2022

‘We’ve Incentivized Corporations to Go After This Price-Gouging Strategy’ – CounterSpin interview with Chris Becker on inflation coverage

Janine Jackson interviewed the Groundwork Collaborative’s Chris Becker about inflation coverage for the September 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220916Becker.mp3

Janine Jackson: In a section labeled “Core of the matter,” the Economist declared: “Despite rosier figures, America still has an inflation problem. Is higher unemployment the only cure?”

Economist (9/13/22)

I guess we’re meant to find solace in the idea that the magazine thinks there might conceivably be other responses, in addition to what we are to understand is the proven one: purposely throwing people out of work, with all of the life-changing harms that come with that.

CNBC‘s story, “Inflation Fears Spur Shoppers to Get an Early Jump on the Year-End Holidays,” encouraged us to think that “inflation is a Scrooge.”

So—an abstraction that is somehow stealing Christmas, to which the healthy response is to make more people jobless while corporate profits soar. It makes sense to corporate media, but if it doesn’t make sense to you, you are far from alone.

Chris Becker is the associate director of policy and research, and senior economist, at the Groundwork Collaborative. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Chris Becker.

Chris Becker: Thank you so much for having me, and just having this very important discussion.

JJ: I know that lots of people don’t really understand much about how the economy works, and I don’t hold it against them, frankly. I do hold it, in part, against corporate news media, who I think rely on that lack of knowledge to sell ideas that people wouldn’t buy if they understood them.

So if you’re having a first conversation with someone who says, “Boy, prices are high, this inflation is killing us. And, you know, the paper says it’s wages,” how would you try to reorient that conversation? Where would you start?

CB: Right. I think there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings floating around that are perpetuated by the media at times. And so where I would start with the conversation is to say that when we’re thinking about inflation, we need to understand that there are stark differences in how American households and consumers are experiencing the post-pandemic economy, versus how corporations are faring.

So for consumers, what this has meant is higher prices: higher prices at the grocery store line, at the pump, even for essential goods like baby formula that are required for basic nutrition of infants. And so the bottom line for consumers is that it’s become harder and harder to make ends meet.

But corporations have turned consumers’ pain into their own gain. So what we’ve seen corporations do is that they’ve used all these crises as an excuse to pass on higher prices to consumers, padding their pockets in the process, and then funneling the extra money back to their wealthy shareholders and investors.

And like you mentioned, there are a lot of narratives going around that corporations were forced to raise these higher prices, that they had higher input costs, or that wage demands were simply too large, and they had to raise prices to compensate for that.

Truthout (8/26/22)

But what we’ve seen, actually, is that not only have corporate profits hit record highs, far exceeding what we saw prior to the pandemic, but also profit margins have hit their highest level in 70 years.

And so what that means is that for every dollar that these corporations are earning, a larger percentage of that is going to corporate profits, rather than paying off input costs or paying wages, than what we’ve seen since the 1950s. So not only are corporations making a lot of money, they’re actually squeezing consumers for more than they have in 70 years.

And so, yes, input costs have gone up, wages have gone up, but corporations have passed all of that onto consumers in the form of higher prices, and then a little bit more, so they’re actually making more and more profits than they used to.

JJ: And I just want to add, the way that media framing tends to talk about workers and consumers as though they were different people is very frustrating in terms of understanding what’s going on, right? I’m the one paying at the pump and at the grocery store, and I’m also the one working for wages. So it’s very obfuscating to separate those groups rhetorically.

CB: Yes, absolutely. And one of the biggest problems is that wages are not rising fast enough. We’ve seen that wages have gone up, but not by as much as inflation has gone up.

So the purchasing power of these workers, in terms of what their wage actually buys them, has gone down. And so we actually need higher wages, not lower wages. We need to ensure that workers are being fairly compensated for the higher prices that they’re seeing. That’s exactly right.

JJ: When I see outlets like the Economist toss off phrases like the “remorseless mathematics” of economic policy-making, that’s sending a message, right, to readers that choices aren’t being made. It’s as if it’s the hand of God.

And as well as misrepresenting what you and I know is the very contested nature of economics—if you have different goals, you want different policies—it also seems to encourage a kind of passivity on the part of people. “There’s really nothing you can do about it. It’s just math, you know, it’s just math.” It’s very frustrating.

CB: I think that’s exactly right. And when we’re thinking about corporations, they do have options. They do have other choices of how they want to go about making profits. We often frame it as if it’s this question of, should corporations be allowed to make profits or not? And, of course, in a strong economy, where everyone’s doing well and everyone’s making money, corporations will make profits too.

The real issue is how they’ve gone about making these profits. And so, unfortunately, we’ve incentivized these corporations to really go after this price-gouging, profiteering strategy, rather than pursuing other strategies that could be good for all of us.

So, for example, one option that corporations have is that it’s not obvious that higher prices are always better for corporations either; if corporations keep their prices low, consumers can afford to buy more from them, and they’ll make more money. But, unfortunately, they put all their eggs in this price-gouging basket instead.

In the long run, low prices could be good for corporations. If you keep your prices low and the products are affordable, consumers will see that, and they’re more likely to keep shopping with you. They’re able to expand your customer base.

So I think even the high prices could, in some ways, be short-sighted for corporations, too.

Another big problem is that corporations are not investing this money. We know that corporations are making all these profits. They could be taking this extra money and saying, “Let’s actually invest it so that we can have long-term profitability, long-term sustainability. Let’s try to bring our costs down. Let’s try to expand our productive capacity, so we can produce more in the future and make more money.”

Unfortunately, they’re not doing that either. What we’re seeing instead is that corporations are taking all those extra profits and doing share buybacks and dividends, and funneling extra money to their shareholders.

These shareholders don’t necessarily have the best interest of the corporations in the long run, or the economy as a whole, in mind. They want to see a short-run return right now, make sure they make their money while they can. And so they’re incentivizing these corporations to go all in on price-gouging; funnel the money back rather than taking the more risky investments in the long run that could benefit all of us.

We need to really move away from this model where corporations are so reliant on shareholders who are really prioritizing short-run profits and profiteering over far more investment.

JJ: I was struck by a recent tweet of yours in which you said we can continue arguing about precise causes of inflation, but we have to connect it to corporate profiteering. And you said:

Whether this profiteering is a cause of inflation or just a distributional consequence, we don’t have to accept this. We can build institutions that ensure everyday Americans get a bigger piece of that pie.

I wonder if you could just finally talk a little bit about that. What institutions need to be grown? How do we build them? Just tell us a little bit about that positive vision.

Chris Becker: “Unfortunately, we have built a system that relies on exploitation of labor rather than building up workers’ rights and good pay.”

CB: Sure. I think that a lot of it goes back to what you were talking about before, where the consumers are workers.

And, unfortunately, we have built a system that relies on exploitation of labor rather than building up workers’ rights and good pay. So corporations are not paying workers well, they’re not giving them proper rights, they’re not respecting their dignity in the workplace. And we see the consequences of this.

We’ve seen it very recently in the labor strike that we’ve seen in the railroad industry. Railroad workers are workers that our economy really depends on; they’re essential workers within our supply chains that allow consumers to access the goods and services that they need. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in this crisis, it’s how important our supply chains are.

But railroads, instead of treating these workers well and taking care of them, have assumed that they can continue to exploit them over and over again, and those workers will always be there when we need them.

And, finally, these railroad workers are saying enough is enough. They’re making very simple demands, just to have basic paid sick leave so that they don’t worry about losing all their income when they get sick.

And so now we are faced with this situation where we could have a railroad strike, which will throw our economy into disruption once again, and raise prices for everyone.

And so we should be investing in workers, investing in higher wages, investing in unions because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it will allow workers to focus on their jobs, get the essential tasks they do done without having to worry about having enough money, being able to make the right choices for their family.

So I think a lot of it just starts with investing in workers first instead of corporate exploitation.

JJ: We’re going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Chris Becker, associate director of policy and research, and senior economist, at the Groundwork Collaborative. Their work is online at GroundworkCollaborative.org. Thank you so much, Chris Becker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: Thank you.

The post ‘We’ve Incentivized Corporations to Go After This Price-Gouging Strategy’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 21, 2022

John Miller ‘Chose to Lie About Something That’s Well-Documented’ – CounterSpin interview with Sumayyah Waheed on CNN’s John Miller

Janine Jackson interviewed Muslim Advocates’ Sumayyah Waheed about CNN‘s John Miller for the September 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220916Waheed.mp3

Janine Jackson: In March of this year, John Miller—then deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department—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.”

NPR (4/15/14)

At that point, media had extensively documented the unconstitutional discrimination of the NYPD’s so-called “Demographics Unit,” including installing police cameras outside mosques, and reporting store owners who had visible Qurans or religious calendars. And the NYPD had agreed to disband the unit in the face of multiple federal lawsuits.

In September, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,” part of changes attached to CNN‘s absorption by Warner Brothers Discovery, whose most powerful shareholder is libertarian billionaire John Malone, who has stated that he would like CNN to feature more “actual journalism,” citing, as an example, Fox News.

Forget what it portends for CNN. The Miller hire is a message to Muslim communities about who it’s OK to harm under official sanction, and how eagerly some will strive to deny and erase that harm and its ongoing effects.

We’re joined now by Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sumayyah Waheed.

Sumayyah Waheed: Thank you so much for having me.

CNN‘s John Miller

JJ: I want to read just a little bit more context for the statement that John Miller made to New York City Council member Shahana Hanif, when she asked for transparency and an official apology for the NYPD surveillance and harassment of Muslims.

Just before he said there’s no evidence, Miller said:

Perception allowed to linger long enough becomes reality. I know from my own conversation with Muslim members of the community, and Muslim community leaders, that there are people…who will believe forever…[that] there were spies in their mosques who were trying to entrap people.

It seems important to acknowledge that this isn’t just lying. This is gaslighting, right?

SW: Yeah. And it’s lying under oath. He was providing testimony under oath to the City Council.

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.

Pulitzer Prizes (2012)

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 facially 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.

JJ: It’s incredible, and I just want to draw you out on one piece, which is that folks, even critically thinking folks, will have heard, yes, this was a program that happened, but it was ended, despite what Miller, in his brain, which we don’t want to explore, believes. The program ended, and so therefore maybe things are better.

Could I just ask you a little bit about the harms from something like this surveillance program, which is—cameras outside of mosques, interrogating people in stores, you know? The harms don’t disappear when the program is officially ended.

CLEAR et al. (2013)

SW: Not at all. So first of all, 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.

And then, of course, now he’s being further validated by a national news media company.

FAIR.org (6/21/17)

JJ: And Miller does Big Lie—a term, by the way, that is now reportedly forbidden at CNN with reference to Trump’s stolen election.

But in 2017, as Josmar Trujillo wrote for FAIR.org, Miller was on a local radio station, WNYM, saying that

activists have in their mind this idea that police departments and cities like New York run massive surveillance programs, targeting innocent civilians for no reason. Now, that’s nutty. I mean, why would we do that? How could we do that? And how would it make sense?

Again, this is beyond misinformation to disinformation. And it’s very clear that this is his jam, you know? And so CNN has to want him for that, and not despite that. It just, it’s breaking my brain.

SW: Yes, because news networks should be helping us sort fact from fiction, not further destroying the line. Otherwise they’re nothing better than propaganda machines.

And this is not just propaganda. This is specifically erasing the experiences of marginalized people —and to elevate law enforcement above any criticism, much less actually holding it accountable to ordinary people.

And we know that law enforcement has a pattern of systemically depriving communities that are already marginalized: Black communities, Latinx communities, poor communities, Muslims, disabled communities. I mean, the list goes on.

So, basically, CNN is signaling that this is where they’re putting their weight.

JJ: Yeah. And you know, at that point, Josmar Trujillo was writing about how the NYC City Council was calling on the police department to be transparent about surveillance operations. That was something called the POST Act, and the police and the right-wing media came in shrieking, like this is going to be a “roadmap for terrorists” to how to attack us.

But the point is, that hysteria pulled the goalpost to the right. So now transparency—what surveillance operations are you doing—becomes the weirdest thing that you can call for. And ending that discriminatory surveillance and harassment is pushed off the page and off the table.

And I just wonder what your thoughts are about media and journalism, and what they could do to help, or could stop doing that hurts.

Sumayyah Waheed: “News networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line.”

SW: Right. I think that, again, going back to my point that news networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line, and specifically with the powerful actors, whether they’re police departments or elected officials, to utilize that truth-telling, the investigatory process, to hold those actors accountable.

Because that should be the role of the news, is finding the information that might not be obvious, accessing the records that should be public, because we live in a free and open society, supposedly, and enabling people to take that information and hold their elected or public officials accountable.

So simply ceding ground because there’s a loud, screaming, radical voice out there is definitely not the answer. And to further reiterate, you know, the AP, by reporting on this, won the Pulitzer Prize. So it’s not like there’s no reward for it besides, you know, a free and well-engaged society. We should be rewarding truth-telling and proper investigations by journalists.

But you know, this is a rightward shift at CNN under the new chairman, and it comes after the firing of Brian Stelter and John Harwood for criticizing Trump and Republicans who engage in election denials.

So the story is already being told by these moves, right? So it’s just really alarming and disturbing for anyone who values truth, who values our democracy—and particularly for the marginalized communities, who know that this type of gaslighting, this type of elevating law enforcement above any kind of reproach is going to continue to harm us.

JJ: And I wish I didn’t have to note that nothing about that program made anybody safer.

SW: Yes.

JJ: Because what we’re going to hear is, “OK, yeah, we’re harming some people’s civil liberties, but it’s all about safety.”

And so I wish we didn’t have to say it, but the thing is that that harm didn’t make anybody safer.

FAIR.org (9/14/22)

SW: Right, the entire massive surveillance apparatus did not lead to one investigatory lead.

And I’ll also point out: the federal appeals court that ruled for our clients also cited the Japanese internment as a bad example of being overly deferential to the executive branch, which law enforcement is part of, and not wanting to repeat that shameful history.

So one step towards repeating history is denying it. Another step is forgetting it. But active denial just accelerates that process. So it’s very unsettling, and CNN should really just reverse course, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, so it’s pretty discouraging.

JJ: Well, we’re going to encourage listeners to encourage that to happen.

We’ve been speaking with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. You can find their work online at MuslimAdvocates.org. Thank you so much, Sumayyah Waheed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SW: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

The post John Miller ‘Chose to Lie About Something That’s Well-Documented’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 20, 2022

Biden’s Afghan Shell Game Prompts Media Shrugs and Stenography

More than a year after it froze $7 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves in the wake of the Taliban’s military victory, the US has announced it will use half the money to establish a fund at a Swiss bank to help stabilize the cratering Afghan economy.

The New York Times (9/14/22) wrote that the US “explored trying to directly recapitalize the Afghan central bank”—in other words, considered giving some of Afghanistan’s money back to Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden’s refusal over the past year to allow the Afghan central bank access to its own reserves has caused an economic crisis that has pushed most of the population into extreme poverty and malnutrition. Moreover, in February, Biden announced that he was reserving half of Afghanistan’s money for families of 9/11 victims, sparking international outrage—and yawns from TV news outlets (FAIR.org, 2/15/22).

The establishment of the “Afghan Fund” is a half measure that, while almost certain to provide some much needed relief, continues both the unjust theft of half the funds and the hobbling of the country’s recovery by undermining the central bank. (Economist Andrés Arauz describes Biden’s plan as “starting a parallel private foundation ‘central bank’ from scratch,” and argues that it’s a “terrible idea”—CEPR, 9/15/22.)

When a government invades a country, occupies it for 20 years, and then sends it into a humanitarian crisis by appropriating most of its money, you’d expect good journalists from that country to follow the story closely and vigorously hold their government to account. In the US, instead, you get largely shrugs and government talking points.

Obscuring US responsibility

The story of Biden’s reallocation of Afghanistan’s reserves wasn’t mentioned by a single TV news outlet, according to a search of the Nexis news database. That failure is sadly unsurprising, given their overwhelming lack of interest in the Afghan people once the US military withdrawal was complete—after incessant wailing about the fate of those people during the withdrawal itself (FAIR.org, 12/21/21).

The AP story the LA Times (9/15/22) ran on the Biden administration’s reallocation of Afghanistan’s banking reserves didn’t quote any Afghans.

The Los Angeles Times (9/15/22) ran an AP report on the funds on its front page. That report—which also ran in major papers like the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun—obscured the US responsibility for the situation, using passive language to explain that “international funding to Afghanistan was suspended” and “billions of dollars of the county’s assets abroad, mostly in the United States, were frozen” after the US withdrawal.

That Biden had unilaterally announced that half the money would be effectively stolen from the Afghan people, who had nothing to do with 9/11, and reserved for families of 9/11 victims, was likewise reported with passive language and no hint of controversy: “The other $3.5 billion will stay in the US to finance payments from lawsuits by US victims of terrorism.”

The only quotes the AP offered were from US officials and the Swiss bank.

CNN.com (9/14/22) also quoted only US officials, and offered the rather credulous assessment: “By setting up this mechanism, the US is making it clear that they intend to get the frozen funds to the Afghan people”—which is hard to square with the earmarking of fully half the funds for US citizens, not the Afghan people.

‘Unusual dilemma’

The Washington Post headline (9/14/22) reflects the framing that Afghanistan is to blame for the theft of its reserves: “US officials say the Taliban has refused to do what is necessary for the funds to be returned.”

The New York Times and Washington Post at least included a human rights critic each, but still included language downplaying US culpability. At the Times (9/14/22), reporter Charlie Savage told readers the crisis is “a highly unusual dilemma”:

Afghanistan’s economy went into a free fall when its government collapsed amid the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021. Financial aid and international spending dried up, in part because the Taliban are a designated terrorist group subject to US and international sanctions that make it a crime to transfer money that could reach them.

In this framing, it’s not US sanctions that are to blame, but rather the fact that the “Taliban are a designated terrorist group” and thus subject to sanctions. Designated by whom? By not answering this question, the Times deflects attention from US decision-making and its catastrophic impact on the Afghan people.

The only unalloyed criticism appearing in any US news outlet we could find came from Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who told the Washington Post (9/14/22), “This move can’t possibly compensate for the harm to the Afghan economy and millions of people who are starving, in large part because of the US confiscation of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves.”

The Post‘s Jeff Stein also was nearly alone in including criticism from a spokesperson for the Afghan central bank. (The only other major US news outlet we found that included a quote from a Taliban spokesperson was the Wall Street Journal—9/14/22).

Even so, the Post couldn’t help tucking an old-fashioned both-sidesing into the story:

Economists say the freezing of these funds has fueled the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy and its hunger crisis, but the Biden administration and other analysts have said the Taliban cannot be trusted to administer such substantial amounts of money.

Urging release of funds

The Intercept report (6/6/22) frankly refers to “the humanitarian disaster triggered by the Biden administration’s decision to seize Afghanistan’s $7 billion in banking reserves.”

The US isn’t alone in its concerns about the Taliban, but Washington’s argument is disingenuous. Central bank funds are not the property of the country’s government, and that government cannot simply withdraw them for its own purposes; the vast majority—some 90%—of the bank’s holdings in fact belong to Afghan citizens and businesses (CEPR.net, 9/15/22).

That’s why a wide range of individuals and groups around the world, including human rights groups, economists and the UN secretary general, have urged the release of the entirety of the funds to the central bank.

The earmarking of half the funds for 9/11 families—which a group of economists including Joseph Stiglitz called “arbitrary and unjustified”—is particularly galling. Kelly Campbell, co-founder of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, told the Intercept (6/6/22):

The fact of the matter is that these reserves are the Afghan people’s money. The idea that they are on the brink of famine and that we would be holding on to their money for any purpose is just wrong. The Afghan people are not responsible for 9/11, they’re victims of 9/11 the same way our families are. To take their money and watch them literally starve—I can’t think of anything more sad.

Missing: women’s voices

Al Jazeera (12/4/21): “The Afghan people should not be denied vital healthcare and be abandoned without food because the international community sees economic starvation as the only available tool to influence the Taliban regime. “

Even those the West most professes concern for, Afghan women, have deeply criticized Biden’s handling of the funds. In March, the US canceled talks in Doha with the Taliban about the funds, ostensibly because the Taliban reversed its decision to allow girls to attend high school (Reuters, 3/27/22). But as Jamila Afghani, founder and president of the Afghan chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, pointedly argued (Al Jazeera, 12/4/21): “We are not supporting Afghan women by starving them.”

In an op-ed for Foreign Policy (1/31/22) several months into the freeze, Jamila Afghani and Yifat Susskind of the global women’s human rights group MADRE argued that US policymakers’ framing of the situation offers a false choice between economic relief and women’s rights—which, they point out, is “grounded in historical hypocrisy,” as the US used women’s rights to justify their war, despite spending nearly 1,000 times more on military operations than promoting women’s rights. (See FAIR.org, 8/23/21.)

“In reality,” Afghani and Susskind wrote, “the best way for policymakers to ensure their actions promote an effective economic recovery is to center the voices of Afghan women leaders and heed their recommendations.”

US journalists’ over-reliance on official sources means that the false choice between economic relief and women’s rights is not just the dominant policymaker narrative, but the dominant media narrative as well. In not a single story in the latest round of coverage was an Afghan woman’s voice heard—let alone centered. Nor were any civilian male voices heard, for that matter. In a story fundamentally about the fate of the Afghan people, to US journalists, those people are little more than silent pawns.

The post Biden’s Afghan Shell Game Prompts Media Shrugs and Stenography appeared first on FAIR.
September 20, 2022

PBS and BBC Team Up to Misinform About Brazil’s Bolsonaro

Both the US and British governments supported the rise of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Future Prime Minister Liz Truss had secret meetings with the future president in 2018 to discuss “free trade, free markets and post-Brexit opportunities” (BrasilWire, 3/25/20).

The US Department of Justice was a crucial partner in the Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) investigation, which resulted in the prosecution and jailing of Brazil’s left-leaning former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The politically motivated legal campaign against Lula served to prevent his participation in the 2018 presidential election, in what Gaspard Estrada calls “the biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.”

Because of this history, and because Brazil is a hard country to explain concisely, I was weary to learn that the British and US state-affiliated media outlets BBC and PBS had co-released a documentary about Jair Bolsonaro only a few weeks before this year’s Brazilian presidential election (10/2–30/22). It didn’t fail to disappoint.

Rise of the Bolsonaros was released on August 28 on PBS, and is airing as a three-part series in Britain on BBC2. It tells the story of Brazil’s far-right president through the words of people like Steve Bannon, Bolsonaro’s son Flavio, journalists, and current or former allies of the president, including a far-right lawmaker who is merely introduced as an “anti-corruption crusader.”

Feigned objectivity

The only time a member of the Brazilian Workers Party got to speak was when Rep. Maria do Rosario was asked to describe her reaction to a misogynistic taunt from Bolsonaro.

With over 20 interviewees, the producers feign objectivity by granting a small proportion of airtime to progressive politicians. Two of the three progressive interviewees, however, are from the relatively tiny PSOL party—a nonthreatening source, given that the party is not even running a presidential candidate this year. The single representative of Lula’s Workers Party, Rep. Maria do Rosario, is given around 30 seconds to answer the following aggressively uncomfortable question: “How did you feel when Bolsonaro told you you didn’t deserve to be raped?”

The cast of journalists included some of the biggest cheerleaders for Lava Jato and Lula’s politically motivated imprisonment. Given the most airtime among the journalist interviewees was Brian Winter, who was introduced as a former Reuters chief in Brazil. The fact that Winter’s current job was not mentioned is indicative of the documentary’s editorial bias.

Winter is vice president of policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas, the think tank founded by David Rockefeller in 1963 that was a key player in the 1973 coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende. Since then, AS/COA has worked, most recently through its media arm, Americas Quarterly—of which Winter is editor-in-chief—to promote nearly every other far-right US intervention in Latin America, including the recent regime-change efforts in Venezuela and Bolivia.

AS/COA held a closed-door meeting in New York in 2017 with US business leaders and Bolsonaro—then a presidential hopeful—evidently prompting Americas Quarterly to lend increasingly favorable coverage to the far-right demagogue. The think tank’s current list of donors reads like a who’s who of mining and agribusiness corporations, many of which have benefited immensely from the massive privatization and environmental deregulation campaigns that followed the 2016 legislative coup against President Dilma Rousseff.

Desertification = development

During the Rise of the Bolsonaros opening montage, as footage of a burning rainforest appeared on screen, Winter said, “Jair Bolsonaro believes that the Brazilian Amazon is the magical path to economic prosperity.” There was no mention of Winter’s prominent role within AS/COA, which counts the agribusiness giant Cargill as one of its “elite corporate members.” This omission is especially glaring, since Cargill has been repeatedly cited as one of the main culprits in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

This set the tone for the film’s treatment of one of the only Bolsonaro policies that was criticized in the nearly three-hour production: illegal deforestation. Every time footage related to this issue appeared, a journalist or Bolsonaro ally arrived on screen to water it down, usually by a ratio of at least two to one.

Bolsonaro meme designer Camila Azevedo describes how deforestation is helping the Indigenous.

One example came nearly an hour in, when the issue of deforestation was first given in-depth treatment. “From the very beginning, Bolsonaro wanted to develop the Amazon economically,” BBC‘s Katy Watson said—as if it were a given that the desertification of former rain forests, the poisoning of rivers with mercury and the destruction of renewable commodity chains is good for the economy.

Similar treatment was given to Bolsanaro’s systematic persecution and dispossession of Brazil’s Indigenous communities, some of which still live with little or no contact with outsiders. APIB—a coalition of Indigenous associations from across Brazil—has already called on the International Criminal Court to investigate Bolsonaro for genocide and crimes against humanity. After Indigenous leader Maial Kayapó explained how Bolsonaro encourages violence against her people, Camila Azevedo, the Bolsonaro family’s young meme designer, pops on the screen and says: “Most Indigenous, they want land to till…. They don’t want to walk around naked for the rest of their lives.”

Rags to riches

Jair Bolsonaro gives PBS viewers a tour of his childhood home.

Bolsonaro’s early years are framed as a rags-to-riches story of rugged individualism. The story begins with the laughable claim that Bolsonaro grew up in the “badlands” of Brazil. In fact, Bolsonaro was born in Campinas, a relatively wealthy city with a metro area population of 3.7 million.

The banana-farming town of Eldorado, where they moved when he was 11, while located in one of the poorest regions of Brazil’s richest state of Sao Paulo, could hardly be called a “badlands.” Brazil’s badlands are the semi-arid back country of the Northeast, where gangs of Wild West–style outlaws called cangaceiros roamed on horseback until the 1940s.

In introducing Brazil’s sub-fascist military dictatorship (1964–85), corporate PR flack Brian Winter tells us that it was Bolsonaro’s “golden age.” Brazilian studies professor Anthony Perreira says:

If you were in one of the armed left groups, if you were a member of the Communist Party, if you were a student, and if you were engaged politically, it was a very dangerous time. But for a lot of people, it was a period of growth.

For the last 500 years, Brazil’s export commodity–based economy has been characterized by cyclical boom and bust periods. During the 21-year dictatorship, there was indeed a five-year boom period between 1968–73, but due to the government’s repression of organized labor and its efforts to suppress wages, it was accompanied by a drastic increase in income inequality. By the time the dictatorship ended, Brazil had become one of the most unequal countries in the world.

This inequality was exacerbated by the military government’s lack of commitment to public education, and its eagerness to take out massive loans from the World Bank to fund unsuccessful, environmentally devastating projects in the Amazon rainforest. Such failures led to the economic stagnation, hyperinflation and crippling foreign debt of what is now referred to as the “lost decade” of the 1980s. When Perreira says, “For a lot of people it was a period of growth,” he is clearly referring to the elites who currently finance Bolsonaro rather than the Brazilian working class, which this documentary misrepresents as constituting the president’s primary base of support.

Man of the people

Bolsonaro’s petit bourgeois origins, glossed over in the film, are revealed in the story of his military career. Agulhas Negras, the elite Brazilian army academy where Bolsonaro studied after attending the Preparatory School of the Brazilian Army, has an extremely competitive admissions process. It’s not the type of place where someone who grew up in “rags” would get into, but a traditional pathway of social ascension for members of the lower-middle class.

The documentary also relates how, in September 1986, then-Captain Bolsonaro wrote an article that appeared in Veja (9/3/86), a national news magazine, complaining about military officer salaries. A journalist says Bolsonaro “couldn’t afford to buy a house,” without mentioning that he was arrested for breaking army regulations by publishing the article. The documentary frames Bolsonaro as being broke and unable to support his family, but at the time of the article, Brazilian army captains earned 10,433 cruzados per month—over 12 times the country’s minimum salary of 804 cruzados.

Brian Winter: “I was there when a reporter asked….” Where was he? At AS/COA. What was he doing there? Introducing Bolsonaro to his corporate sponsors in the mining, petroleum and agribusiness industries.

The salary may have been lower than what Bolsonaro felt he deserved, but it placed him among the roughly 10% of the national population in the upper-middle class. Accurately portraying Bolsonaro as a Brazilian elite, however, doesn’t fit with the director’s attempt to portray Lula, who grew up in a mud shack and started working in a factory at age 14, as a liberal elite, and Bolsonaro as a man of the people, the same way Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson recently did during his one-week stay in Brazil running electoral propaganda for the president (FAIR.org, 7/25/22).

Bolsonaro’s 2017 visit to New York is presented as a brilliant strategy to validate his future candidacy to the Brazilian public, to show that “important people in the US wanted to listen to what he had to say.” Interviewee Brian Winter’s role in introducing Bolsonaro to US business elites is not mentioned at all, only alluded to by his anecdote about how cleverly Bolsonaro answered a question from a US reporter at the time about his rape comments directed at Maria do Rosario.

US-style culture war

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon and his far-right allies like Jason Miller have maintained communications with the Brazilian president’s family for years. In fact, the relationship between Bolsonaro’s sons and the American far right is so good that one of them attended the January 5, 2021, “war council” in Washington, DC, prior to the invasion of Capitol Hill. Bannon’s claim in the documentary that he reached out to the Bolsonaros to learn about their social media strategy seems like a blatant lie, since many of the tactics employed by Bolsonaro were clearly based on the Trump campaign’s culture war rhetoric.

The idea that Lula and Bolsonaro are at opposite ends of a US-style culture war is given disproportionate emphasis in the documentary. For example, at certain times when Lula is discussed, footage of men kissing at a pride parade appears on screen, as does an image of the former president holding a rainbow flag.

Such exaggerated treatment of Lula’s role in the cultural sphere ignores the fact that his popularity was largely driven by massive increases in spending on public health and education and successful poverty-reduction policies. Although, unlike Bolsonaro, Lula is not openly homophobic, he has faced criticism from the LGBT community for not going far enough to advance LGBT rights, and from feminists for not legalizing abortion.

Showcasing Flavio Bolsonaro’s sensitive side.

Nevertheless, the largest protests of Brazil’s working class since Bolsonaro took office had nothing to do with culture wars. The 2019 Education Tsunami protests, organized by student groups and teachers unions, brought over 2 million people into the streets of dozens of cities, and effectively stalled the Bolsonaro administration’s attempts to charge tuition at public universities.

Rio de Janeiro city councilor and anti–police violence crusader Marielle Franco, who is introduced only as an LGBT activist, was not a member of Lula’s Workers Party. Her assassination at the hands of members of a Rio de Janeiro militia, whose leader Adriano da Nobrega’s wife and mother both worked as “ghost employees” in Flavio Bolsonaro’s state congressional cabinet, is another scandal involving the Bolsonaro family that the documentary glosses over.

Instead, Flavio Bolsonaro, who appears several times in the documentary, shares humorous anecdotes about his childhood, and cries to the camera while remembering the 2018 stabbing incident involving his father, which far-right forces falsely tried to blame on Communists.

Missing Moro

Conspicuously absent: Sergio Moro, who broke the law to remove Lula from the 2018 presidential elections then went on work as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice, is not mentioned once in the documentary.

The most glaring problem in the deeply flawed Rise of the Bolsonaros is the omission of arguably the single most important player in Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency: former Lava Jato investigation judge Sergio Moro. During a period in which the Lava Jato task force was having frequent meetings with the US Department of Justice and the FBI, Moro repeatedly broke the law by collaborating with prosecutors to discredit the Workers Party and help Bolsonaro.

The documentary doesn’t mention that Lula’s election-season arrest, on charges of committing “undetermined acts of corruption,” was made after the Brazilian supreme court, under threats from the Army, opened an exception to the Constitution to enable his imprisonment while his appeals were ongoing. Instead, it brings up frivolous charges that were dropped before his trial even started, such as “receiving 1 million euros in bribes.” The fact that Lula was ultimately released from prison after the election is written off as a “technicality.” There is also no acknowledgment that this delay was only made possible by the political bias of a crooked judge who illegally colluded with prosecutors throughout the trial.

While stating that the supreme court ruled that Lula could run for public office, the documentary omits the fact that he was fully exonerated on all charges, while the judge who imprisoned him, Sergio Moro, was found by that same court to have been tainted by judicial bias. An especially relevant piece of information left out of Rise of the Bolsonaros is the supreme court’s charge that Moro leaked fraudulent audio tapes to media in order to damage the reputation of Workers Party candidate Fernando Haddad just one week before the presidential elections, and then, in a clear conflict of interest, accepted a cabinet position in the Bolsonaro government.

Not even mentioning Moro, let alone describing the crimes he committed to empower Bolsonaro, discredits the entire documentary. Without Moro, a false impression is left that Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power was based entirely on his family’s cunning.

Steve Bannon gets the last word.

The program ends, laying any doubts about its lack of objectivity to rest once and for all, with the narrator saying, “The fate of Brazil is in the hands of its people,” followed by a 40-second pep talk by Steve Bannon—giving the last word on the upcoming Brazilian election to one of the main advocates for overturning the last US election.

The fact that US and British state-affiliated media outlets would promote misleading narratives less than a month before the most complicated Brazilian presidential election in modern history is another sad example of the long tradition of Western media facilitating imperialist meddling in Latin American elections.

Featured image: Jair Bolsonaro and sons, pictured in Rise of the Bolsonaros.

Messages to PBS can be sent to viewer@pbs.org (or via Twitter: @PBS). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

The post PBS and BBC Team Up to Misinform About Brazil’s Bolsonaro appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 16, 2022

Sumayyah Waheed on CNN’s Copaganda Hire, Chris Becker on Inflation Coverage

CNN‘s John Miller

This week on CounterSpin: Journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist John Miller makes a blur of the revolving door. For years, he’s been back and forth between the New York Police Department (and the FBI) and news media like ABC. And now he’s the new hire at CNN. Don’t miss the message: For corporate media, being a paid flack for the police in no way disqualifies you to offer what viewers will be assured is a dry-eyed analysis of law enforcement patterns and practices. The hire is part of CNN‘s rebranding under new leadership; the major stockholder cites Fox News as an exemplar. But while it’s tempting to say CNN is acting like the kid who imagines his bully will let up if he offers both his and his little brother’s lunch money, the harder truth is that CNN knows it won’t attract or appease Fox or Fox viewers. So we should focus less on how one network “counters” the other than on whom they’re both ready to throw under the bus—in this case, Muslims. We’ll talk about the Miller hire with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates.

CounterSpin220916Waheed.mp3

Atlantic (9/5/22)

Also on the show: Listeners may have seen the “just asking questions, don’t get mad” Atlantic article about how it might make sense to keep pricing insulin out of the reach of diabetics because, wait, wait…hear me out. (The idea was that if insulin winds up cheaper than newer, better drugs, more people might die.) Other outlets are musing about how higher unemployment might be the best response to higher prices. Why are we doing thought experiments about hurting people? Implied scarcity—”obviously we can’t do all the things a society needs, so let’s discuss what to jettison”—is a whole vibe that major media could upend, but instead enable. We’ll talk about how that’s playing out in coverage of inflation with Chris Becker, associate director of policy and research and senior economist at the Groundwork Collaborative.

CounterSpin220916Waheed.mp3

The post Sumayyah Waheed on CNN’s Copaganda Hire, Chris Becker on Inflation Coverage appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 9, 2022

NYT Scolds China for Not ‘Learning to Live’—or Die—With Covid

Four and a half million people.

That’s how many Chinese people would have died from Covid-19 had its government taken the same approach to the pandemic that the United States has taken, and gotten the same results.

Instead, China has had 15,000 deaths from Covid—most of these from an outbreak in the spring of 2022 in Hong Kong, which has its own healthcare system.

Meanwhile, the United States has lost more than a million people to Covid since the pandemic began. Deaths currently continue at the rate of about 450 a day, which would add up to roughly 160,000 a year if present trends continue.

The New York Times (9/7/22) continues to present the Chinese government’s saving millions of lives as an unmitigated disaster.

Clearly China and the United States have very different systems, and what works in one place would not necessarily work in the other. But given the remarkable success that China has had in protecting its population from a deadly and pernicious virus, surely US-based journalists are examining what lessons China has to teach us?

No, not if you work for the New York Times. There you’ll be writing yet another in a series of articles about how China has had the enormous misfortune of avoiding mass death.

“China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Bind: No Easy Way Out Despite the Cost,” is the headline of the latest iteration (9/7/22), written by Vivian Wang. The article begins:

Tens of millions of Chinese confined at home, schools closed, businesses in limbo and whole cities at a standstill. Once again, China is locking down enormous parts of society, trying to completely eradicate Covid in a campaign that grows more anomalous by the day as the rest of the world learns to live with the coronavirus.

But even as the costs of China’s zero-Covid strategy are mounting, Beijing faces a stark reality: It has backed itself into a corner. Three years of its uncompromising, heavy-handed approach of imposing lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing to isolate infections have left it little room, at least in the short term, to change course.

The New York Times maintains it’s the country with the orange line, not the dark blue one, that has the Covid policy problem.

Nowhere in the article is any comparison of the respective death toll in China and the US. Or any hint that life expectancy in the US has now dropped below that of China—76.1 vs. 77.1 years, respectively (Quartz, 9/1/22)—an acknowledgment that would render ridiculous the Times‘ assertions that that China’s “government has pushed propaganda depicting the virus as having devastated Western countries,” and that President Xi Jinping “has prioritized nationalism over the guidance of scientists.”

But it’s not just the Covid death toll that the Times has to hide in order to make its anti-China spin remotely credible. Much of the piece deals with the hardship supposedly caused by the zero-Covid policy: “The social and economic cost will continue to increase,” insists one of the article’s relatively few sources, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Yanzhong Huang (author of the New York Times op-ed “Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19?”—12/29/20—which argued that “China’s comparative success now risks hurting the country”).

Wang sure does make the economic situation in China sound grim:

Many Chinese have found ways to cope, even if reluctantly: putting in longer hours to scrape up more money, cutting back on spending. Complaints about a shortage of medical care or food often emerge, but some residents say they support the overarching goal….

Youth unemployment is soaring, small businesses are collapsing and overseas companies are shifting their supply chains elsewhere. A sustained slowdown would undermine the promise of economic growth, long the central pillar of the party’s legitimacy.

But what is the actual cost of China’s Covid success? In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, China’s GDP grew by 2.2%, while the US’s shrank by 3.4%. In 2021, the US economy bounced back, with 5.7% growth—but not as much as China, which grew 8.1%. Projections are for the US to grow by 1.3% in 2022, while China is expected (by Goldman Sachs) to grow 3.0%.

When you add it up, China is expected to be 13.8% richer at the beginning of 2023 than it was when the pandemic began—whereas the US will be just 3.4% better off. So which country’s belts need tightening as a result of its Covid strategy?

The New York Times (9/7/22) reported that China “suffered from low vaccination rates”—but a glance at the Times‘ own vaccination tracker shows that China in fact has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.

The Times similarly had to suppress any comparative numbers to make it seem like China’s vaccination strategy was particularly dangerous:

Buoyed by its early success at containment, the party was slow at first to encourage vaccination, leaving many older Chinese vulnerable….

While other countries prioritized vaccinating the elderly, China made older residents among the last to be eligible, citing concerns about side effects. And it never introduced vaccine passes, perhaps sensitive to public skepticism of its own vaccines.

In late July, about 67% of people aged 60 and above had received a third shot, compared to 72% of the entire population. Medical experts have warned that an uncontrolled outbreak could lead to high numbers of deaths among the elderly, as occurred during a wave this spring in Hong Kong, which also suffered from low vaccination rates.

Go to a helpful page of the New York Times website called “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World,” however, and you’ll find that China isn’t “suffer[ing] from low vaccination rates”; it actually has one of the highest rates of Covid vaccination in the world, with 93% receiving at least one dose and 91% “fully vaccinated.” The latter number compares with 86% in Australia and South Korea, 84% in Canada, 81% in Japan and Brazil, 79% in France, 76% in Britain and Germany—and 67% in the US.

That last number, in China, is treated by the Times as a dangerously low percentage of the elderly to have received booster shots—but in the US, only 41% of those aged 65–74 have received booster shots, along with 42% of those 75 and over—and just 26% from 50–64. Isn’t the US booster rate much more ominous?

Well, yes—and that’s part of the reason that tens of thousands of elderly people will die this year as part of the US’s effort to “learn…to live with the coronavirus.”

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

The post NYT Scolds China for Not ‘Learning to Live’—or Die—With Covid appeared first on FAIR.
September 9, 2022

Media Summon Inflation Specter to Oppose Student Debt Forgiveness

President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan may not be full forgiveness, but it can still have a life-changing impact on millions of people. Almost 20 million may see their debts wiped clean, and more than 40 million are directly affected. The plan is a step forward for debtors and activists who have spent decades struggling to abolish student debt and make higher education, long promised as the path out of poverty, affordable for everyone.

It represents an opportunity for America’s poor to imagine futures without instrumentalized and alienated labor. Without diseases of despair. Unpunished by debt. A future America’s ruling class has worked hard to prevent.

Bloomberg (8/22/22)

So, naturally, corporate media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (8/23/22), Financial Times (8/25/22), CNBC (8/24/22), Vox (8/25/22), CNN (8/24/22, 8/25/22), CBS (8/25/22) and Bloomberg (8/22/22) have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it, trying to convince their audience there’s not enough to go around. Their primary weapon: the inflation bogeyman.

Regurgitating the views of conservative economists and politicians, corporate media are warning debt relief is inflationary, and even that it will transfer wealth upwards. These arguments are another example of how news media use the specter of inflation as a rationale for disciplining workers: Sorry, that’s it. There’s nothing left. No surplus. So how much are you willing to share? Don’t look over here at my huge pile of cash. The arguments trafficked by much of the corporate media in the aftermath of Biden’s debt relief announcement expose a reflexive hostility to social progress, and the use of government to improve the lives of ordinary people instead of benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals.

‘Inflation Expansion Act’

Wall Street Journal (8/23/22)

From headlines decrying Biden’s debt relief plans as pouring gas on an “inflationary fire” (Financial Times, 8/25/22) and dubbing the policy an “Inflation Expansion Act” (Wall Street Journal, 8/23/22), to citing manipulative studies by pro-austerity think tanks, the corporate media response to debt relief has stoked fears that providing much-needed relief to student debtors would increase demand, thereby exacerbating inflation.

If gains for working people will necessarily be nullified by corporate price hikes, maybe media should be questioning whether an economy where that’s the case should be reshaped. But media’s claims haven’t even been consistent on their own terms. Debt relief is not nearly as inflationary as media rhetoric suggests, even by the estimations of their most hawkish sources.

For example, the Financial Times, CNBC, Vox, CNN, CBS and The Hill (8/24/22) all cited “America’s foremost pro-austerity think tank” (American Prospect, 8/26/22), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which estimates Biden’s cancellation could cost the federal government $360 billion over ten years, driving spending and increasing inflation. Marc Goldwien, senior policy director at CRFB and “America’s foremost spending scold” (American Prospect, 8/26/22), made the rounds across the corporate news media to share this estimate.

Max Moran (American Prospect, 8/26/22): “According to Goldwein, we couldn’t cancel student loans in 2020 because the boost to the economy would be a paltry $115–$360 billion. But we also can’t cancel student loans in 2022 because the boost to the economy would be a whopping, inflationary (gasp!) $70–$95 billion!”

Biden’s student debt relief plan “is going to worsen inflation and it is going to eat up all the deflationary impact of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Goldwien claimed in the Financial Times (8/25/22). Vox (8/25/22) quoted Goldwien saying Biden’s plan will “raise prices on everything from clothing to gasoline to furniture to housing.” Assuming that CRFB’s estimate is accurate—even though there is much reason not to think so—what the estimate actually says is a far cry from Goldwien’s claim that prices will increase.

Economists like Paul Krugman, far from a hero of the left, as well as Mike Konczal and Alí Bustamante of the Roosevelt Institute, pointed out how even CRFB’s estimate shows at most a 0.3% increase in inflation, which wouldn’t “reverse” or even “dent” larger deflationary trends like the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, or even restarting student debt payments, as Biden intends to do at the start of the new year. Krugman explains that given the “fire-and-brimstone” inflation fearmongering, like the talk of “throwing gasoline on the fire” in the Financial Times (8/25/22), the reader might assume debt relief could cause another “major bout of inflation.” Even according to their own sources, this is far from true.

On top of this, the central argument in Goldwien’s case and across corporate media—that debt relief will spur demand—rests on the assumption that canceling people’s debt will incentivize them to buy things for which there is not enough supply to keep prices stable. Heidi Shierholtz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, took to Twitter (5/12/22) to shut this argument down:

The latest version of the claim “we can’t have nice things because inflation” is the idea that we can’t cancel federal student debt.… But folks, there is currently a pause on federal student loan repayments, which means that people with this debt don’t currently have debt payments. So even if somebody’s debt is entirely canceled under a new policy, their monthly costs won’t decrease relative to what they currently are. This will dramatically limit any impact on new spending and hence provide no upward inflation pressure relative to the status quo.

That corporate media would boost bad-faith arguments against a policy that represents such a sea change in people’s lives, as well as in the government’s role of helping working people, demonstrates a deep adherence to frameworks of austerity and neoliberalism. As Krugman pointed out in a separate Twitter thread (8/29/22), “what we’re seeing looks more like a visceral response looking for a rationale than a reasoned critique.”

Moreover, these arguments ignore evidence that current inflation is not a result of too much demand, but rather of corporate greed. As FAIR (4/21/22) has previously documented, corporate media have a penchant for putting “far more emphasis” on the contributions to inflation by policies that improve working people’s lives than on “the role of corporate profit-taking.” Despite troves of evidence that corporate monopolies are purposely exacerbating inflation by using the pandemic-related supply chain crisis as cover to needlessly raise costs on consumers—and make record profits doing it—corporate media have once again elected to opine on the inflationary effect of social spending.

‘Take from working class’

That student debt relief is inflationary is not the only argument corporate news outlets have peddled since Biden announced his plan. Critics of student debt relief have also framed the plan as a regressive giveaway to the wealthy, as well as unfair to those who have already paid off their debts.

The same Financial Times article (8/25/22) reported, “Canceling debt is not wholly progressive, given the poorest members of society are less likely to have gone to university.” CBS (8/25/22) noted Sen. Ted Cruz’s view that “what President Biden has in effect decided to do is to take from working-class people.” The New York Times’ morning newsletter (8/25/22) claimed student debt relief “resembles a tax cut that flows mostly to the affluent.”

Contrary to Newsweek‘s headline (8/24/22), polling finds a majority of past student borrowers support forgiveness of at least some student debt.

Never mind that if forgiving student loan debt were truly regressive, Cruz would be all for it. The reality is that student debt disproportionately impacts Black and brown and low-income borrowers (Roosevelt Institute, 9/29/21). Cancelation would go a long way towards addressing the racial wealth gap and addressing wealth inequality.

A Newsweek headline (8/24/22) reported that “Borrowers With Paid-Off Debt Feel Punished for Doing ‘Right Thing.’” The Wall Street Journal (8/23/22) claimed debt relief “insults the millions who paid their loans back.”

Astra Taylor, an organizer with the Debt Collective, told Democracy Now! (8/25/22) that this criticism was “so cynical”:

First off, I am one of the millions of people who did have to pay their debts. I paid it in full. I do not want anyone else to have to suffer just because I did. Social progress means that other people do not have to suffer through something that previous generations did. And the fact is, polling shows that most people have that attitude.

Student debt was designed as a barrier to keep Black, brown and low-income people from attaining a college education (Intercept, 8/25/22; Boston Review, 9/1/17). Partial debt relief makes self-determination for America’s most oppressed and exploited groups that much more possible. By trying to convince voters that debt relief will cost them, and that a more egalitarian society is impossible, corporate media are defending America’s ruling class from an educated working class.

The post Media Summon Inflation Specter to Oppose Student Debt Forgiveness appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 9, 2022

Matt Gertz and Eric K Ward on White ‘Replacement’ Theory

Fox News (7/19/22)

This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but it didn’t really happen.

The Washington Post offered an inane tweet about how Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ But a racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

CounterSpin spoke at the time about the issues we hoped more media would be exploring, with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been following Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years.

      CounterSpin220909Gertz.mp3

And we spoke also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways forward.

      CounterSpin220909Ward.mp3

We hear these conversations again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the assassination of Darya Durgina.

      CounterSpin220909Banter.mp3

The post Matt Gertz and Eric K Ward on White ‘Replacement’ Theory appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 7, 2022

‘We Could Be Living in the Future We All Dream About’ – CounterSpin interview with Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso on Powerlands

Janine Jackson interviewed Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso about her film Powerlands for the September 2, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220902ManybeadsTso.mp3

Janine Jackson: Powerlands is an award-winning documentary film about resource extraction and its impacts on Indigenous communities around the world. But if that’s all we, as watchers, take away, then we’re sort of missing the point, and may be almost part of the problem.

The film is about resource colonization, about the way that the same for-profit corporate forces that once took away whole peoples now do the same thing under the radar by usurping the resources, the minerals, the water out from under those people.

Powerlands (2022)

It asks those of us who aren’t at the immediate sharp end to see and to connect our interests in not harming people in Colombia, for example, with the desire to make use of this stuff that we don’t even know comes out from that extraction, that arrangement.

So saying Powerlands, the film, has won awards might imply that we understand that there’s a message, and we are engaged with answering that question, but that’s not necessarily the case. So if Powerlands didn’t need to be made, well, then Powerlands wouldn’t have been made.

We are joined now by Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso. Powerlands is her first feature film. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso.

Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Many people might say, “OK. You’re documenting something in the film. You’re showing us something.” But you started out to say a certain kind of thing, and then it kind of expanded into many, many things. Can you just maybe start us off where you started off, and what was the process about?

ICMT: Yeah, so I grew up in Black Mesa, where Peabody Coal and BHP have been mining since the 1960s, and my family is on the wrong side of the fence. We’re on what’s called HPL, Hopi Partition Lands, not NPL, Navajo Partition Lands.

So I was born into the resistance. I come from the resistance. So that’s what I’ve always grown up knowing. And when I first met Jordan Flaherty, my producer, he had just come back from Colombia, filming a BHP coal mining site.

And we were talking about the similarities between the two. And that’s really where the whole conversation started. It’s been like, wow, this one company has done the exact same thing to these two communities.

And you almost wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, besides the language and they have monkeys. They look very similar. They sound very similar. We eat very similar.

And one thing that I’ve always grown up with is having what I call poverty porn constantly around me in, like, National Geographic, put on news stations. Like even late at night, with that sad Sarah McLachlan music behind it, it would be pictures of my family and my home and the things that I resonated with, flies flying around extended bellies.

And when I see my home, that’s not what I see. I see vibrant, brilliant, smart, funny people. And that’s exactly what we saw in Colombia and in the Philippines and in Oaxaca and in Standing Rock.

Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso: “Indigenous people should be telling Indigenous stories because we see ourselves as people more so than anyone else ever will.”

And for me, it was just showing those human connections, those emotional connections, as well as showing that we’re all connected by these corporations at the same time. We’re all fighting the same, not to say, like, enemy—but enemy.

And I think that Indigenous people should be telling Indigenous stories because we see ourselves as people more so than anyone else ever will. And the thing is, is everyone’s indigenous to somewhere, so behave like you’re Indigenous.

And that’s what the root of the film is, is that we’re all together. We’re all in this together. We all laugh, we all cook. We all love, we all dance and sing. And we all need this planet to survive.

JJ: You know, I launched us right into the middle of it, and I think many folks come to it as, “All right. Well, there’s a relationship between folks who need resources and folks who have resources.”

But there’s a reason to start in the complicated middle, and to say that it’s not a simple question of users and extractors; we’re people across these lines. And what I think is so extremely important about the film is that it makes those connections, and it connects those dots.

I think we’re past it in 2022. I think those of us who are trying to think critically are past the idea that somehow there are some people who don’t mind being harmed, and that there are some people who we can just, like, Pinterest their way of life.

Here are people in the film, their water is being exhausted. And I know for a fact that there are folks who are like, “Oh, water. Water is life,” you know? We have to be one world. We have to connect it. And I feel like that’s what this film does.

ICMT: OK. So we need to look at Arizona, which is where I’m based currently. And we are seeing Lake Powell drop to levels that it’s never been this low before. We’re watching Lake Mead drop to levels that have never been this low before. The Southwest is in a massive drought.

The thing is, because we’re all on this planet together, the entire ecosystem affects everywhere else. So this huge drought here is actually helping to cause massive floods on the East Coast, because we’ve got this heat bubble that’s being formed. It’s pushing all of the would-be water coming here up and over, and it’s creating floods elsewhere.

And that’s just a small way to look at it. We’re losing water here; we’re flooding people out. But that water is no longer drinkable. It’s nonpotable. The less potable water that we continue to have, it’s going to affect the entire world.

And that’s just a very small, simple way to look at it. There’s so many different effects that go into it. Cinder hills are something that are very special to this area, and they’re a catcher of water, but they’ve been being mined for decades to create asphalt, which also helps to cause a heat bubble, which pushes water over, and then it floods somewhere else. And then, again, we lose our potable water.

So when we look at it, you making a change in one location can really affect everywhere else globally. And we can see it happening in lots of different places.

Here in the Southwest, we have massive wildfires, and then the East Coast having these floods. And it’s just going to keep getting more and more extreme until we, as people, come together and decide to fix the problem together.

And looking in your own backyard is the best place to start. And I hope that that’s one message that the film gets across: This isn’t just in these remote, small, quote unquote “Third World” countries. It’s happening literally in your backyard.

Look at Flint, Michigan. Look at what’s happening in like Skid Row, down in LA, that is extremely devastating to people. One, we should be treating people as people. But if we were to help clean up that area, and get those people the same mental health services that they needed, and just the simple way to fix houselessness is obviously give people houses, it would entirely revitalize that area. And we could start using a lot of those areas as farmland, where we grow crops that aren’t water-heavy based.

It’s just, there’s so many different ways and so many different ideas. And I know every single person out there has an idea. And if we each implemented them, we could be living in the future that we all dream about, with flying cars and healthy ecosystems.

JJ: Yeah, no, it’s part of what I resent so much about corporate media, is the way they deny us the possibilities, the way that we can imagine these beautiful futures.

Let me just ask you about the film. Any accounting of struggle, which is what Powerlands is about, it’s going to include unspeakable trauma, and that’s why folks should be aware that if they watch Powerlands, they’re going to cry. But at the same time, it also includes this irrepressible joy, and any conversation that doesn’t entail both of those is kind of not capturing it.

But then again, and I know this is a very hard question, when you make a film, it’s about communication, right? It’s about moving people to action. And I just would love to ask you, how do you balance the struggle and the joy in a way to communicate some message to the people who are going to see this film?

ICMT: I think a huge part of that goes back to, this is my community that we started telling the story in. This is my family. These are my friends. So I grew up in the struggle. I grew up having politicians come out and threaten family members. I grew up seeing family members get sick from cancer, or other various ailments, because of this stuff happening.

But at the same time, I also grew up going to ceremonies where me and the kids would be running around pretending to make rocks together, where me and my cousins would all sleep on the same mattress outside under the stars and tell ghost stories. And those are very similar moments that I think everybody shares, are those simple moments.

There’s a moment in the film where you see two young girls whispering to each other. And that’s a moment that everybody has experienced, is watching two young children talk to each other and giggle. And so when we’re talking about these moments, it’s not just like, “Oh, look at how hard it is for these poor brown people.” It’s, “Look at how hard this is for the entire world to be dealing with, and here’s an example of how these folks are getting through it.”

JJ: And that brings us back to where we started, which is the idea that you very quickly identify the idea of resource colonization (which I think is an excellent term) as a global thing.

You started with Dinétah, but it was very clear that this was something that’s happening everywhere, and that there was resonance everywhere for this message and this conversation.

ICMT: Yeah, we’re going to keep finding that, because the capitalist system, where it’s for profit and not for people, is going to continue to put us in these situations.

And the thing is, especially here in this country, Indigenous people have been the ones who have been put into those situations the longest at this point in time. So if you have any questions, reach out to us. We have lots of support. We have lots of community. We are willing to talk to people, and there’s so many different ways to go about it.

But we’ve been living, specifically here in America, on this land for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. So we know how to grow food without depleting the resources of this natural environment. And we know how to harvest things without depleting these resources.

One good example is this white sage trend that’s hitting. A lot of people are buying white sage that’s not sourced in a sustainable way. And it’s actually really detrimental to the Indigenous people in Southern California and Northern Mexico.

But if we were to, say, start outsourcing to only Indigenous suppliers or sustainable suppliers, then we would be able to help sustain that ecosystem, so that everyone can have white sage, and everyone can be burning it.

So it’s like, we need to be working together. And I think it’s really possible, because I see so many people coming to these screenings and coming to these events, being like, “Well, what can I do? What can I do?”

And I’m not always going to have all the answers. I’m but one person. But if you look in your own backyard, you just ask around, someone out there is already doing it, and you can definitely get in on the ground floor. And there’s also the chance that you could potentially make that resistance better.

JJ: I love that, actually, because my nightmare is, you support a system that basically erases a certain kind of people who say that their relationship is with the land, and that where they are is part of who they are.

And you, as a government, support that erasure, and that you, as a culture, then try to recreate, aesthetically, that culture: “Isn’t it neat about how people are in relationship with the land?”

I guess what I’m saying is, I am very angry and resentful about the idea that media tell us that it’s okay to erase and harm people.

And then they’re going to, out of the other side of their mouth, tell us that, “Isn’t it neat to think about being the sort of person who has a relationship with the land?”

It’s beyond hypocrisy. It’s just a thing that makes me very angry, that has a particular relationship with the way US news media talk about Indigenous people in the United States.

So I guess, after that rant, I’m just asking you, is there anything in terms of news media that you would like to see more or less of, or framework-shifting that you think could be meaningful?

ICMT: I have really enjoyed seeing, in the past two years, the amount of representation that has been risen within media.

The thing is, is I have been making films since I was nine years old—I’m 27. And my uncle has been making films, my cousins have been making films, my aunts have been making films, but we have never been able to break into the Hollywood or the main media cohort in order to be seen and visualized.

And it’s just now starting that our work is getting out there. A lot of that came from Standing Rock and the remembrance that we, as Indigenous people, still exist.

And so people kind of got into it, it became a trend. And so let’s hopefully not make it a trend that goes away.

But there are so many of us out there who are creating incredible content and stories and telling these stories, and we’ve been doing it for decades.

So there’s so much out there. It’s just definitely the accessibility of it is a lot harder, because we don’t have the same resources as, say, Warner Brothers or Disney or Fox or one of those who is getting their larger stories out.

So it is amazing to see us in representation, for the first time ever, that is an accurate representation. And it’s incredible. So if you are Indigenous, keep telling your stories; we want to hear them. If you’re not Indigenous, you are indigenous to somewhere, so keep telling your stories. And I think it’s just so incredible to see the vibrancy of the truth and reality of humans being told for really the first time, and especially in Hollywood media.

JJ: Well, we are going to continue to stay, I hope, in conversation with you. We’ve been speaking with Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ICMT: Oh, thank you so much.

The post ‘We Could Be Living in the Future We All Dream About’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 6, 2022

‘The Real Issue With Dark Money: We Don’t Know Who’s Influencing Policy’ – CounterSpin interview with Andrew Perez on dark money donation

Janine Jackson interviewed the Lever‘s Andrew Perez about a massive dark money donation for the August 26, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220826Perez.mp3

Janine Jackson: Many US citizens, while knowledgeable, skeptical, even cynical, still work from a base understanding of how politics and policy work, which is that people—numbers of human people—want and call for things, and elected officials navigate those needs, while encountering and engaging the better-resourced desires of corporations and other power players.

Some, of course, are more or less in the pocket of particular private interests, but if they weren’t interested in the public, they wouldn’t be in public office.

Well, even if you chuckle to hear that, it’s still the basic working premise of how politics are understood to work. You vote for people to represent your interests, and you expect, or hope, or just throw a rock at the idea that politicians will care about people in the main, and not just money.

Whatever its relation to reality, that’s the template that news media use to explain politics to us: Republican or Democratic voters wanted this or that. You can fight about it, but the understanding we’re given is that we’re in a fight on a playing field where whoever has the most popular support, even if it’s based on misinformation, will win.

News media worth their salt would make it their business to interrupt that understanding, and tell us how power and politics actually break down. And they have an opportunity right now with the news of the largest donation—as far as we know—to a political advocacy group ever, from a secretive Chicago billionaire to a new political group led by conservative activist Leonard Leo.

You don’t have to know about machinations to have them matter. So here to talk about all of this is Andrew Perez. Andrew Perez covers money and influence as senior editor and reporter at the Lever news. He joins us now by phone from Maine. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Andrew Perez.

Andrew Perez: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

JJ: I guess just bring us up to speed on the reality. What do we know about this donation, from whom to whom? And $1.6 billion? What actually just happened?

Lever (8/22/22)

AP: Sure. So what we’ve reported at the Lever, in partnership with ProPublica, is a look at how Barre Seid, a little-known businessman in Chicago, managed to donate $1.6 billion to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who’s the conservative operative and anti-abortion activist who played a major role in building the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court that recently overturned Roe v. Wade and invalidated federal protections for abortion rights.

And what we know is that Seid put his electronics company into a nonprofit, which is called the Marble Freedom Trust, which then sold the company. The end result was a donation of $1.6 billion to the group. The transaction was structured to allow Seid to avoid potentially hundreds of millions in taxes, we believe, for up to $400 million in taxes, and it kept him from experiencing a big tax hit, and it preserved, then, the larger amount of money available for Leo’s dark money operation.

And we believe that this is the largest donation in US history to a politically oriented 501(c)(4) dark money group.

JJ: Can you just explain, for a second, what “dark money” means exactly, and what it means in terms of democracy?

AP: Yeah. So thanks to the Citizens United decision, nonprofits are allowed to engage in politics, specifically 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations. And these organizations, their primary purpose cannot be on politics, but they can spend up to 49% of their expenses on politics, and they can then fund issue advocacy stuff, and really work to build, in this case, the conservative movement.

These have become a really favored route for really wealthy people to affect the political debate, because these groups do not have to disclose their donors, and they can accept donations of any size.

So they’ve really been supercharged in the last decade, and become a favored vehicle for the ultra-wealthy to influence politics.

New York Times (8/22/22)

JJ: I was a little taken aback by seeing the term “kingmaker” in a New York Times story about Leonard Leo, and it seems very cynical to just matter-of-factly toss off the idea that there’s a “kingmaker” who gets to decide whether or not people have the right to reproductive rights because he has a lot of money.

It just seems weird to hear that just tossed off as, “Oh, hey, yeah. That’s what’s happening,” from a press corps, you know, that’s supposed to be defending democracy.

AP: Yeah. I guess I get it, right, like if you have a $1.6 billion pile of cash at your disposal, you can do a lot with it, right? Like, you could probably parcel out tens of millions of dollars every year and just watch the actual overall pile of money grow.

It does make him one of the most powerful people in politics, and, truthfully, he already was one of the most powerful people in politics. Leonard Leo has played a key role in selecting five of the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and he’s buddies with the other guy, with the only one who he didn’t help in this kind of professional capacity: He’s really tight with Clarence Thomas.

So in the Trump era, he served as Trump’s judicial advisor, helping select Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and helping install them on the court. So while he was selecting these judges, helping Trump select these judges, he was also leading this dark money network that was helping run their confirmation campaigns, supporting them with advertisements and media campaigns, and also funding a lot of other conservative groups that supported their nominations as well.

So he is a very powerful figure, but I do also understand the point you’re making, which is that it does sound a little crass.

JJ: And it sounds like what journalists—it’s not a thing that we could know. It’s not a thing that we could understand about how things work. And it’s exactly the type of thing that we would look for reporters to explain to us, to say, you think you’re just voting, and that’s a direct connection to the kind of policy and politics that you’re going to get, but actually there’s this behind-the-scenes machinations going on.

And I’m not saying they don’t ever cover it. I just feel that most people, even smart people, would not understand how much power these folks have behind the scenes, and how indirect, therefore, your connection of, “Hey, I’m putting down my vote,” how much obstruction that’s going to meet.

Andrew Perez: “There’s just very, very little transparency in this world. And they found ways to make this transaction in the group even darker.”

AP: Yeah. That’s the real issue here with dark money, is we don’t know who’s influencing policy, really. We have very little information about how these groups are spending in real time. It’s not like they have to report, “We spent this much on judicial confirmations.” Like, they just don’t have to report that at all.

You learn a little bit about it after the fact, like a year or two after the fact, but you, generally speaking, don’t know who’s financing these organizations whatsoever.

That’s where both the New York Times reporting, and our reporting at the Lever and ProPublica, that’s where we’ve been able to shine a light on one of the biggest-known, probably the biggest-known dark money transaction like this ever. When you learn the details about it, it should definitely raise all kinds of alarm bells.

So as far as the public knows, this group has never existed. It is organized as a trust. That’s not something that you can look up in state corporate filings. It never registered with state charity regulators. It never showed up in any kind of securities documents. So we’re learning about this group that was formed in April 2020, that saw all of this giant windfall in March 2021, a year and a half ago.

Again, the whole real-time issue, we don’t know what it’s really spending on right now at all. There’s just very, very little transparency in this world. And they found ways to make this transaction in the group even darker than what we characteristically see.

JJ: And then finally, I know that you’ve been doing press on this, and I’m not asking you to call anybody out at all, but I just would ask you, are there questions that you wish you would be asked by journalists? Are there questions that you wish journalists would stop asking you? What would you like to see news media do in terms of pursuing this story?

Guardian (8/29/22)

AP: Yeah, so there’s a few things, like part of the reason they were able to really supercharge this donation and avoid the tax bill was because in 2015, as part of this routine tax extenders bill in Congress, they passed legislation that said that there is no gift tax when you give to a 501(c)(4) group.

Like, there’s a gift tax if you donate to a political organization. There’s a question of why that was able to happen with very little controversy or fanfare or notice at all. But I think we’ve seen some coverage around this, but I guess I question whether there’s going to really be sustained coverage about this donation, or about how this is allowed to happen, and then how we’re allowing this kind of influence on our political system.

So Democrats have pitched, periodically, legislation called the DISCLOSE Act that would compel disclosure of donors to dark money groups that engage in politics, and also spend on judicial advocacy campaigns. And all of the coverage around that legislation has been treated as like, you know, Republicans are opposing this, and it’s a “he said, she said,” without any kind of context, without really contextualizing for people what this is, what the byproduct is of a system in which wealthy people can drop tens of millions of dollars, or in this case, $1.6 billion, into a dark money group that can function indefinitely, can really distort the political system and policy outcomes with just a giant pile of money.

JJ: Exactly.

We’ve been speaking with Andrew Perez. He’s from the Lever. They’re online at LeverNews.com. Andrew Perez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AP: So happy to be here.

The post ‘The Real Issue With Dark Money: We Don’t Know Who’s Influencing Policy’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 6, 2022

‘These Organizations Are Doing Critical Work to Advocate for Palestinian Rights’ – CounterSpin interview with Ahmad Abuznaid on Israeli human rights crackdown

Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ Ahmad Abuznaid about Israel’s human rights crackdown for the August 26, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220826Abuznaid.mp3

Janine Jackson: The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that Israel’s designation of a number of Palestinian rights organizations as “terrorist” raised concerns that the designations were being used to “halt, restrict or criminalize legitimate human rights and humanitarian work.”

Guardian (8/22/22)

Ten European countries and, not for nothing, the CIA agreed that Israel has not presented sufficient evidence for that terrorist labeling—or the subsequent raids conducted, computers stolen, files taken, entryways taped up.

The groups’ legal appeals were dismissed with no opportunity to defend against the “secret evidence” against them. The Biden administration says it’s “concerned,” and that “civil society organizations must be able to continue their important work.” And that’s where it ends, evidently: hearts and prayers.

Some might find it notable that the overt harassment of Palestinian human rights groups happens within context of the recent series of airstrikes in Gaza that killed at least 46 people, including 16 children.

It’s important to know that the crisis of occupation isn’t a sometime thing, and that having fewer voices to hold and host debate around that will absolutely impact what happens going forward.

Ahmad Abuznaid is executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ahmad Abuznaid.

Ahmad Abuznaid: Hey, thanks for having me, Janine.

Washington Post (8/24/22)

JJ: Maybe we should just start with what’s been happening in Gaza recently. I don’t say that there’s been zero coverage, but quantity, in this case, is not so much the point as the quality of that coverage.

And I’m not sure how much context there’s been for the pieces that folks may have seen. Like, I saw a Washington Post reprint of an AP piece, “Gaza Militants Hold Parade After Latest Battle With Israel.”

So, given that context of US media coverage, what would you have folks know about just what’s been happening?

AA: Yeah, the first, most important thing I would share, for folks who are, I think, still gathering knowledge about the issue of Palestine, is to know that the people in Gaza have been separated and segregated from the rest of the Palestinian population because of a 15-year blockade imposed by the Israeli government.

And even when we use terms like “blockade,” it’s really important for us to help folks understand what that means. And so a blockade on the Gaza Strip means that Israel essentially controls everything that goes in via land or sea, and comes out via land or sea. And, of course, Gaza does not have an airport.

Ahmad Abuznaid: “This ongoing trauma persists as long as this blockade exists, as long as the occupation exists, as long as this settler colonialism exists.”

Furthermore, when you talk about the situation of the people of Gaza, you have to understand that limited electricity, 75% of Palestinian people in Gaza are food insecure. Hospitals and health services are struggling to operate and save lives, while themselves having to worry about being bombed.

And so this ongoing trauma persists as long as this blockade exists, as long as the occupation exists, as long as this settler colonialism exists.

And so for the Palestinian people all over, but particularly for the Palestinian people in Gaza, an intense blockade does not allow for them to experience the very basics of life. As I mentioned, the water being undrinkable at a 97% clip, electricity being something that’s limited, food insecurity, right? This is average, everyday life for the people of Gaza.

Now what’s also important to note is, because of a lack of an actual military, you have these confrontations between these various resistance groups in Gaza and the Israeli military.

And so then, I would say, the Palestinian people are an occupied population. And I think when most Americans think about Israel and Palestine, they think about a conflict between two nations, each with a military, each with resources, each with the weaponry to defend themselves, and that certainly is just not the case.

And so you end up in a dynamic where these resistance groups are firing rockets that rarely affect Israeli lives; meanwhile, Palestinians face bombardments with which we’ve seen, you know, over 40 Palestinians killed in this latest round of violence, but just last summer, over 260.

And so this is something that, unfortunately, kids 14 and under in Gaza have now experienced five times in their lifetime.

JJ: And just to the point that you’ve just made, that Washington Post—well, it was a reprint of, actually, an AP piece—talked about recent air strikes as a “flare-up” that “left 49 Palestinians dead.” And it makes it sound as though violence is intervening in Gaza, or suddenly and intermittently, there is violence in Gaza.

And it sounds like what you’re saying is we need to think about violence in terms of a daily violence.

AA: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say this passive voice that media operate in is also extremely problematic. Airstrikes didn’t just occur; the Israelis launched the air strikes.

Also, we’ve been hearing many folks talk about this as a defensive war, right? But I think, if folks were to read through a lot of the nonsense, they’d find that this was a strike that Israel launched without any kind of defensive necessity, right? This was an offensive, strategic strike that they started launching in Gaza, and then it escalated.

And then, yes, the point that you were uplifting that I made earlier is that the blockade is incredibly violent. When a young Palestinian student in Gaza wants to study abroad, and they’re denied the ability to travel by the Israeli government, that is incredibly violent, and a direct result of them being Palestinian.

When a cancer patient needs to access better health services in order to survive their battle with cancer, and they’re denied that ability, that is brutality.

When a fisherman has his boats off the sea in Gaza, and cannot leave past a certain radius that the Israelis grant them, that is incredibly violent.

And folks, I think, are not as understanding of that, when we think about terms like “blockade” and “occupation,” they don’t understand how a checkpoint or a blockade being in the middle of a family who needs medical care in a hospital can oftentimes lead to death and a trauma that, again, we have not had the chance to deal with as Palestinians, because it’s ongoing.

JJ: And I wonder what you make of the White House response, then, which is we’re against this, but we’re not going to do anything about it. I mean, that’s how it reads to me, is like, we want to be officially on the record as opposing both the raids on the human rights groups and the attacks on Gaza, but that’s not going to materially amount to anything in terms of policy change with regard to Israel.

AA: Yeah, that’s right. The Biden administration is really just like any other US administration in recent history. And what US politicos have uplifted as their truth is that you need to walk with Israel and allow no sunlight between the US and the state of Israel to succeed politically, domestically.

The problem is we, as Americans, have no idea why, strategically, that makes sense for us. And so Americans, I think every election, we witness the US president essentially pledging allegiance to the state of Israel, and we don’t know what we get out of the deal.

So even if we did not have the perspective of the immense human rights abuse and the colonization and the ethnic cleansing, we would at least, as Americans, be asking these questions about why is it our tax dollars are going to this state that continually occupies, and ethnically cleanses a people.

And so that’s why this media battle is particularly important. That’s why sources like this, where folks can get a different perspective, one that’s not often seen in mass media, are critically important, because there’s a voice of the Palestinian people that, even through it all, is able to shift the conversation in the US.

And that’s why you’ve seen, not only the targeting of these six NGOs in Palestine, but targeting of NGOs and Palestinian organizations here in the US.

Defense for Children International/Palestine

Before I get to any of that in the US, just to mention the six organizations, these are organizations doing critical work to support women organizing, agricultural workers, organizing political prisoners, and one of the orgs, DCIP, is literally, its mission is to defend children, right?

And so these organizations are doing critical work to advocate for Palestinian rights, to advocate for Palestinian dignity, to advocate for Palestinian justice. And, by the way, they’re doing this in a completely nonviolent fashion.

But the response that Israel has shown to these NGOs is exactly why we need to keep pushing, is exactly why we need to make sure that we’re involved in either BDS campaigns or Palestine organizing spaces in the US, or we need to donate.

Because if Israel’s telling us that the violent resistance groups are “terrorists,” right? That’s their terminology. That’s what they label the groups who resist. But then they’re also labeling the groups that are engaging in congressional advocacy and organizing and lobbying, they’re labeling those groups as “terrorists” too.

So what that means for us is that the lines have been blurred by the state of Israel, and they’re doing that because we’re winning; we’re shifting the conversation. Folks are seeing the atrocities that the Israelis are conducting on a day-to-day basis, and they can’t, from a PR perspective, continue to handle the way the conversation is going.

So then what they would do is continue to label BDS as antisemitic and terrorist-affiliated, continue to label organizations, such as these six organizations, as terrorist-affiliated. And that way, no matter how just or righteous their argument is, people would essentially tune them out.

JJ: And I only want to add to that—thank you so much, Ahmad—I just want to add, also, for listeners, that this idea that criticism of the state of Israel is inherently antisemitic: You can find progressive Jewish groups, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice come to mind, but there are a number of groups who can inform you about how concern for Palestinian rights does not amount to antisemitism, and that should not be able to be used as a wedge to divide people, in the US or anywhere, that that is a false conflict that’s being set up by people who have their own interests.

AA: Absolutely. Yeah. If I could just touch on that: Look, we all recognize the monstrosity that was Nazism, and the brutal nature of the Holocaust. And what happened to the Jewish people, obviously, at that point in time is something we are all opposed to, and we absolutely reject antisemitism. This is something that various Palestinian organizations have outright issued statements around. We reject antisemitism.

However, when you colonize people’s land and continue to do so, claiming to do so in the name of Jewish people worldwide, you’re actually, again, blurring the line between Judaism and Zionism. So I think Zionism is to blame with a lot of the confusion that people have around anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

New Press (2019)

You know, as Palestinian people, not only do we have Jewish folks that are in solidarity with us now, we had Jewish folks living with us in Palestine, side by side, speaking Arabic, and across the Arab world.

And actually, I’ll note there was a really great book released a couple of years ago by a Jewish author, titled When We Were Arabs, and it tells the story of Jews in Arab lands, so Jews who viewed themselves as Arabs, who woke up every day listening to Arabic music, eating Arabic foods, speaking Arabic amongst their families, and then Zionism abruptly changed that across the region and, of course, across the world.

And so we have to reject those kinds of lines that are being drawn. Anti-Zionism is absolutely not antisemitism. And I can see a future where people acknowledge that, and that’s of course going to be a future where Palestinians are finally free.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ahmad Abuznaid from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. They’re online at uscpr.org. Ahmad Abuznaid, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AA: Thanks, Janine.

The post ‘These Organizations Are Doing Critical Work to Advocate for Palestinian Rights’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 2, 2022

NPR Devotes Almost Two Hours to Afghanistan Over Two Weeks—and 30 Seconds to US Starving Afghans
NPR ran several stories on Afghanistan to mark the anniversary of the August 2021 US withdrawal, even sending host Steve Inskeep to the country to produce a series of pieces. His visit happened to coincide with Biden’s claimed assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri; Inskeep says that he and his team were staying in close proximity to the Al Qaeda leader.

With the anniversary and assassination providing a renewed focus on Afghanistan, NPR could have used this opportunity to call attention to the US policy of starving Afghanistan by restricting its international trade activity and seizing its central banking reserves. Instead, it briefly mentioned the catastrophe only one time, devoting a mere 30 seconds to it over two weeks. The reserve theft was mentioned once as well, and for less than 10 seconds.

Over the course of the series, between August 5 and August 19, 2022, NPR‘s two flagship shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, aired 18 Afghanistan segments, amounting to some 114 minutes of coverage:
- We Visited a Taliban Leader’s Compound to Examine His Vision for Afghanistan (Morning Edition, 8/5/22; 11 minutes)
- Ackerman’s ‘Fifth Act’ Focuses on the Final Week of US Involvement in Afghanistan (Morning Edition, 8/5/22; 7 minutes)
- Kabul’s Fall to the Taliban, One Year Later (All Things Considered, 8/8/22; 8 minutes)
- Hamid Karzai Stays On in Afghanistan—Hoping for the Best, but Unable to Leave (Morning Edition, 8/8/22; 8 minutes)
- Inside a TV News Station Determined to Report Facts in the Taliban’s Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/8/22; 7 minutes)
- In Afghanistan, Why Are Some Women Permitted to Work While Others Are Not? (Morning Edition, 8/8/22; 6 minutes)
- A US Marine’s View at the Kabul Airport When the Taliban Took Over (All Things Considered, 8/10/22; 8 minutes)
- A Marine Who Helped Lead Afghanistan Evacuations Reflects on Those Left Behind (All Things Considered, 8/11/22; 8 minutes)
- What Remains of the American University of Afghanistan? (Morning Edition, 8/11/22; 4 minutes)
- After Decades of War, an Afghan Village Mourns Its Losses (All Things Considered, 8/12/22; 4 minutes)
- Remembering the Day the Taliban Took Control of Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/14/22; 5 minutes)
- Biden’s Approval Ratings Haven’t Recovered Since the US Withdrawal in Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/15/22; 4 minutes)
- After a Year of Taliban Rule, Many Afghans Are Struggling to Survive (All Things Considered, 8/15/22; 5 minutes)
- What did Afghans Gain—and Lose—in a Region That Supported the Taliban? (Morning Edition, 8/15/22; 7 minutes)
- A Year After the Taliban Seized Power, What Is Life Like in Afghanistan Now? (Morning Edition, 8/15/22; 4 minutes)
- An Afghan Opposition Leader Builds on His Father’s Efforts to Oust the Taliban (Morning Edition, 8/17/22; 7 minutes)
- A Year Later, Former Afghanistan Education Minister Reflects on Her Country (All Things Considered, 8/18/22; 8 minutes)
- Canada Is Criticized for Not Getting More Endangered Afghans Into the Country (Morning Edition, 8/19/22; 3 minutes)
NPR focused almost no attention on the hunger crisis and the US role in exacerbating it. The series instead focused on a question that’s important, but far less relevant to NPR‘s US audience: “Who is included in the New Afghanistan?”

FAIR (8/9/22) has already criticized the initial piece (8/5/22) for the historical framing NPR used to contextualize the current situation in Afghanistan. Host Steve Inskeep misleadingly said that the Taliban refused to turn over Al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, and this “led to the US attack.” In reality, the Taliban repeatedly offered to put Bin Laden on trial or give him up to a third country both before and after the attacks.

‘Tantamount to mass murder’

Afghanistan is currently enduring misery under the onslaught of drought, famine and economic collapse: 95% of Afghans don’t have enough to eat, while acute hunger has spread to half the population, an increase of 65% since last July. Conditions are so dire that some are being forced to boil grass to sustain themselves.

Throughout NPR’s series, which centers mostly on the “inclusivity” question, the dire toll on Afghan civilians was an afterthought. None of the above stats were mentioned on air, and there was little attempt to connect the Afghan plight to deliberate US policy.

Intercept (2/11/22): “The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended.”

The omission is glaring, given the enormity of the Afghan crisis and the direct role the US plays in making it worse. The Intercept has covered the toll of sanctions over the years, even calling Biden’s policy “tantamount to mass murder” (2/11/22). This disaster is actually recognized by some of the establishment press. Even the New York Times editorial board (1/19/22) issued a plea to “let innocent Afghans have their money.” But this central fact fails to occupy central attention.

These events were set in motion almost immediately after the US withdrawal. Before its collapse, the US-backed Afghan government relied on foreign aid for most of its annual budget. After the overthrow, those funds were no longer available, since the US refused to deal with the Taliban.

While numerous human rights organizations called for an increased flow of aid, and warned of an impending humanitarian crisis, US policymakers decided to exacerbate the situation by freezing the Afghan’s central bank reserves, hamstringing the Afghan banking system, and thus the economy. $9 billion of reserves were inaccessible to the Taliban, an amount that equates to half of the entire economy’s GDP. As a result, the new government was unable to fund critical governmental infrastructure, including salaries for nurses and teachers.

At the US behest, the IMF froze about a half billion dollars in funds designated to help poor countries during the pandemic. Relatives living outside the country have been able to send far less money, as the traditional banking avenues have collapsed—leaving MoneyGram and Western Union as some of the only viable alternatives. Both services had temporarily halted services upon the Afghan government collapse. Since the Taliban is designated as an enemy of the US, many companies still avoid doing business in Afghanistan, further compounding the collapse.

Shortly after the withdrawal, the media often recognized these increasingly horrid conditions, but either decoupled them from US policy, or framed the oncoming crisis as “leverage” for the West to reshape the Afghan government. The “hunger crisis,” wrote the Associated Press (9/1/21), “give[s] Western nations leverage as they push the group to fulfill a pledge to allow free travel, form an inclusive government and guarantee women’s rights.” Others took a similar line (New York Times, 9/1/21; Wall Street Journal, 8/23/21).

The economy has since fallen into a tailspin. The humanitarian aid the US still sends to Afghanistan does little to stop the economic free fall. By March, aid agencies were warning of “total collapse” if the economy wasn’t resuscitated, a prospect that has only grown more likely over the last few months.

‘A new US-backed free Afghanistan’

Morning Edition‘s profile (8/8/22) of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai omits details found in a Washington Post report (12/9/19)—such as that he “won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes,” and that “the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years.”

The only mention of the reserve theft was during Inskeep’s interview with former Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Morning Edition, 8/8/22). The interview started off with another instance of mythologizing history, similar to the previous misframing of the origins of the war (FAIR.org, 8/9/22). Inskeep told his audience that “Karzai once personified a new, US-backed free Afghanistan,” marveling at how his name remained on the international airport.

Inskeep’s lauding description of Karzai leaves out the massive, US-financed, heroin-fueled reign of corruption that was endemic to US occupation. Karzai himself stood at the center of it all, financed by CIA cash and retaining power through an openly stolen election that saw nearly a quarter of all votes cast later declared fraudulent. Such facts were well-documented, even by establishment press (notably the Washington Post—12/9/19—in the fourth part of its Afghanistan Papers series).

Inskeep was certainly aware of this endemic malfeasance, because he later acknowledged that the Afghan government was “discredited by corruption.” He didn’t let this tarnish the image he presented of Karzai, however.

It’s subtle erasures and omissions like this that define the process of rewriting history. When something as clear and well-documented as Karzai’s blatant corruption can be so easily swept under the rug, it’s obvious that the goal isn’t to give context to the audience. Instead, we’re listening to mythmaking and historical revision in real time.

A willful omission

On air, Inskeep referenced Karzai’s call for the US to change its policy. Inskeep said: “He wants the US to return Afghan central bank funds, which it froze to keep the money away from the Taliban.” Karzai reiterated: “Americans should return Afghanistan’s reserves. The $7 billion. That does not belong to any government. They belong to the Afghan people.”

NPR (8/8/22) quoted from this Human Rights Watch report—but its message that “international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people” does not seem to have sunk in.

Neither Inskeep nor Karzai stated or implied a causal relationship between the US actions and the hunger crisis; in fact, the hunger crisis wasn’t mentioned at all in the segment as it aired. In an online article based on the segment, NPR (8/8/22) wrote just two sentences:

Western aid has largely dried up, and the US froze some $7 billion of funds from Afghanistan’s central bank to keep it out of the Taliban’s hands. The economy has collapsed, and unemployment and food insecurity are widespread.

Here, the crisis is mentioned, but the causality is obscured. However, it’s clear that NPR is aware of the connection. The piece linked directly to a Human Rights Watch report (8/4/22) whose first sentence reads:

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis cannot be effectively addressed unless the United States and other governments ease restrictions on the country’s banking sector to facilitate legitimate economic activity and humanitarian aid.

Later in the article, HRW Asia advocacy director John Sifton said that “Afghanistan’s intensifying hunger and health crisis is urgent and at its root a banking crisis”:

Regardless of the Taliban’s status or credibility with outside governments, international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people.

So NPR is aware of the US role in exacerbating the crisis, but decided that its listeners didn’t need to hear about it.

Covering malice with ‘apathy’

NPR Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Diaa Hadid.

The only actual discussion in the series of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan came on Morning Edition (8/15/22), and only consisted of 30 seconds, when Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Diaa Hadid said this:

Well, Leila, it’s been a year of hunger. Sanctions that were meant to punish Taliban leaders have battered the economy. They’ve plunged Afghanistan into a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 90% of Afghans don’t eat enough food. There’s not enough aid to go around. And you can see it on the streets. People are gaunt. Men, women and children plead for money. But the UN’s appeal to deal with this crisis is underfunded. And I’m reminded of something that a Human Rights Watch researcher said in a statement a few days ago. She said the Afghan people are living in a human rights nightmare; they are victims of both Taliban cruelty and international apathy.

Here NPR acknowledged that US sanctions “battered the economy,” and that they are responsible for “humanitarian catastrophe,” but claimed that they were “meant to punish Taliban leaders,” rather than the people of Afghanistan. Later Hadid cited a Human Rights Watch researcher attributing the suffering in part to “international apathy.”

This wording significantly downplays the deliberateness of the US economic war. There is no doubt that given the ample warnings about the oncoming catastrophe and hunger crisis, the US was aware that sanctions and freezing assets would only wreak havoc on the population. No serious journalist should take the US government at its word that its intentions were benevolent, especially when the evidence points in the opposite direction.

The rest of the series looked at the sensational days of the US military withdrawal, the stripping of rights from women under Taliban rule, and even how Afghanistan affects Biden’s approval ratings. NPR hosts continued to ask, “Who is included in the Taliban’s Afghanistan?” deploying the contemporary liberal ideal of inclusivity to criticize the Taliban. But when 95% of the population isn’t getting enough food, is “inclusivity” really the proper framework to analyze a country facing a historic famine deliberately exacerbated by the US?

Hadid’s mention of the crisis, along with Inskeep and Karzai’s mention of the central bank reserves, amount to less than 40 seconds over two weeks, in 18 segments that amount to over 100 minutes of coverage of Afghanistan.

A disoriented case

NPR (8/29/22) ran with this bizarrely glass-half-full headline: “In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the Near-Broke Central Bank Somehow Still Functions.”

The Wednesday after the two-week nonstop coverage, August 24, NPR’s Morning Edition (8/24/22) ran a segment headlined “Frozen Afghan Bank Reserves Contribute to the Country’s Economic Collapse.” Here Inskeep acknowledged that “the absence of the money has contributed to Afghanistan’s economic collapse.” He then replayed the snippet from Karzai about the need to return Afghanistan’s central bank reserves.

But even in that segment, the hunger crisis was only loosely connected to the US sanctions against the Afghan people.

Inskeep interviewed Shah Mehrabi, a member of Afghanistan’s central bank board under the US-backed government. Mehrabi, who has been living near Washington, DC, since the Afghan government collapse, in part endorsed Washington’s sanctions regime, saying that the US concerns about Taliban misuse of the funds were “legitimate.” In fact, Inskeep strangely noted that Mehrabi was “less upset about [the US freezing Afghan assets] than you might think.”

Mehrabi did note, somewhat indirectly, that US sanctions were contributing to Afghanistan’s crises:

Isolation from international financial system will have to be ceased in one way or another to address the issue of poverty and mass starvation that this country is experiencing and will continue to experience, especially in the winter, harsh months that lies ahead and in front of us.

This brief mention, at the tail end of this six-minute piece, did little to raise important questions of US policy to the NPR audiences. A more coherent formulation of the problem would be that the US doesn’t want the Taliban to have the $7 billion, and is willing to starve the Afghan people for it. That can be gleaned from the piece, but only in a piecemeal fashion.

If we include the segment with the Afghanistan series, and if we (quite generously) say the whole segment is talking about the starving Afghans, then that means that NPR spent just seven minutes on the economic collapse and hunger crisis over three weeks, 19 segments and 120 minutes. Still shameful for one of the most pressing humanitarian catastrophes on Earth today.

On Monday, NPR (8/29/22) published an online text version of the August 24 segment under the confoundingly optimistic title, “In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the Near-Broke Central Bank Somehow Still Functions.” The title choice is odd, given that Mehrabi explicitly stated that the bank’s current balances are “not adequate to be able to perform the necessary function of the central bank.”

If NPR cared about the Afghan people, its coverage would be aimed at informing listeners about how their country’s policies are dramatically hurting Afghans. US citizens may have differing opinions about these disastrous policies, but the facts need to be adequately discussed in the media. Instead, NPR’s coverage divorced the misery of Afghans from anything having to do with its audience, directing attention to the flaws in the Taliban rather than a violent US policy of deliberately starving the Afghan people.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here (or via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

The post NPR Devotes Almost Two Hours to Afghanistan Over Two Weeks—and 30 Seconds to US Starving Afghans appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 2, 2022

NYT Etiquette Column Offers Advice for the Resentful Rich

As a teenager, I was an avid reader of Judith Martin, the columnist more commonly known as Miss Manners. I was particularly fascinated by esoteric topics that seemed to belong to another era, such as how to address a formal wedding invitation to a woman doctor and her non-physician husband, or which fork is ideal for serving wedges of lemon (a three-tined lemon fork, of course). Martin taught me that etiquette is best viewed as a means of conveying appreciation and respect for others: Lemon forks may not always be necessary but thank-you notes will never go out of style.

In addition to Martin’s column, I’m now a regular reader of “Social Qs,” Philip Galanes’ unintentionally revealing New York Times column. Billed as “lighthearted advice about awkward social situations,” the column frequently tackles situations more miserable than awkward: inheritance disputes, homophobic parents, kids with serious behavioral problems, etc. Galanes is an able and breezy writer, but there’s only so much good humor one can muster in response to the misery, greed and pettiness of the Times readers whose letters the paper chooses to print.

A reader seeks help from the New York Times (8/17/22) about her daughter’s student debt relief: “My brother complains constantly about the ‘government handout’ she’s taking for her education.”

Common topics include: resentment of others’ good fortune, even when one is personally content and secure; ghoulish speculation about and disputes over the assets of living parents; disdain for anyone who relies on government programs rather than family money; and irritation at being expected to tip low-wage service workers—in short, the sticky “social situations” common to a narrow but politically powerful class of people with money and property, and little understanding of or patience for those with neither.

The sheer unpleasantness on display begs the question of why the paper prints these particular letters, of the thousands it must receive. Perhaps it’s meant to make the average reader feel better about ourselves (“I may not be the best person in the world, but at least I’m not as awful as that guy!”). Or maybe the Times simply highlights the situations it believes will resonate the most with the greatest number of readers. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: a column for and by the resentful rich.

‘Sick of being asked for handouts’

The mother of a young woman who paid off most of her educational debt via loan forgiveness programs for teachers (8/17/22) recently sought advice regarding an uncle who “complains constantly” about his niece’s “government handout.”

Question regarding a pool attendant who asked for a tip (New York Times, 1/16/20): Should I have reported him for rudeness?

Concerns about tipping abound. Under the headline “I Thought This Was an All-Inclusive Resort,” one reader (1/16/20) reported that a pool attendant at a resort in Hawaii had explicitly asked her for a tip (“‘Thank you’ doesn’t pay the bills, ma’am”), which, being empty-pocketed at the time, she declined to provide. Her husband later suggested she return with a tip; her daughter-in-law suggested she report the man “for rudeness.” In the end, she neither reported nor tipped him.

What did Galanes think? After expressing compassion for the worker, he indicated that the letter writer should have tipped. Yet he couldn’t entirely betray his class. If the attendant “tip-mongered daily, or was otherwise aggressive,” Galanes added with undue sympathy, he would certainly have “spoken to a manager.”

Another reader (3/17/22) wrote that they

managed to get past [their] annoyance at the tip jar that appeared one day on the counter of [a] local coffee shop…. Now the proprietors have added a “tip screen” to the credit card payment process, reminding me to pay their workers for them in case I missed the tip jar.

“I am sick of being asked for handouts for people who are simply doing their jobs,” the reader continued, before asking Galanes’ blessing to “say something” to the owner of the shop.

Explaining that he tips because “our economy generates enough profit to pay all workers a living wage,” and “even if all full-time workers were paid the minimum wage…it still wouldn’t be enough to survive in many places,” Galanes wrote:

Many employers are not stepping up. So, while we wait for meaningful change for working people, some people tip. You don’t have to. But why make a fuss about others pitching in?

Why, indeed? One possible answer is that Times readers would rather whine publicly about workers looking for “handouts” than learn how to interact more charitably and peaceably with their fellow human beings.

‘Wise up and stop supporting’

Another common if mystifying complaint comes from those who can afford to be generous but would rather not be—or, even more bizarrely, would prefer others not to be. A reader (11/4/21) recently wrote:

I have been a Big Brothers mentor for six years…. [My mentee and I] share a love of dining out…. The problem: Apparently, no one taught him not to order the most expensive item on the menu when someone is treating him to dinner…. Before our last dinner, I played up the restaurant’s burgers and pastas, which are reasonably priced. I ordered an $18 entree. [Mentee] ordered a $14 appetizer and a $36 strip steak. I can afford it, but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Golf player to New York Times (9/10/20): “My friend’s son is a deadbeat…. I don’t want to hurt my friend, but he needs to hear the truth.”

Another (9/10/20) wondered how to break it to a golf buddy that his 35-year-old son was a “deadbeat” whom he ought to “wise up and stop supporting.”

It seems that New York Times–reading, Hawaiian resort–going, $36 strip steak–buying, “handout”-resenting advice seekers are more likely to ask (11/22/18) why a nephew whose parents “died when he was 18, leaving him impoverished,” is now living above his means than how best to support a family member in need.

Galanes’ column reveals a passion for rules-following and resolving petty grievances—Why won’t the man who swims at my local pool abide by pool signage and wear a swim cap, even though he has no hair (11/22/18)? Why must my neighbors leave their shoes outside of their apartment doors (1/28/21)?—that supersedes any commitment to neighborliness, civic virtue or intra-family harmony. At its best, etiquette is about ensuring the happiness and comfort of others, not policing their behavior and denying them income. Miss Manners would be appalled.

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

The post NYT Etiquette Column Offers Advice for the Resentful Rich appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 2, 2022

Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso on Indigenous Resistance, Alex Vitale on the End of Policing

From the film Powerlands.

This week on CounterSpin: It is meaningful that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who in 1973 refused the best actor award on behalf of her friend Marlon Brando, because of Hollywood’s history of derogatory depiction of Native Americans. Some cheered, but a lot of the audience booed, some complete with “tomahawk chops,” and John Wayne evidently had to be physically restrained. Arriving at Brando’s house after the ceremony, Littlefeather was shot at.

It’s good that the Academy is apologizing, but the proof of course is in the material acknowledgement of the message: that Native Americans have been treated poorly in US entertainment and, we could add, news media, and that that has impact. Things are changing, and we need to check what that change amounts to: not just visibility, but justice and redress and the improvement of lives. The film Powerlands explores the treatment of Indigenous people around the world—not in terms of media imagery, but in terms of the resource extraction that is stealing water, minerals and homelands. It talks not just about harm but about resistance, and so it also contributes to the seeing of Native communities in their full humanity. We’ll talk with Powerlands filmmaker Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso.

CounterSpin220902ManybeadsTso.mp3

Time (8/24/22)

Also on the show: You might consider you’re making a misstep when even Time magazine calls you out. Hardly a progressive bastion, the outlet recently ran a piece critical of Joe Biden’s call for the hiring of 100,000 more police officers and some $13 billion to police budgets—calling it a part of a “manipulative message that if we feel unsafe, it is because we have not yet invested adequately in police, jails and prisons.” Contributor Eric Reinhart noted that using a more comprehensive understanding of safety including “factors like homelessness and eviction, overdose risk, financial insecurity, preventable disease, police violence and unsafe workplaces (which, statistically, present far greater preventable threats to everyday life than crime)—it is readily apparent America’s police-centric safety policies do not effectively promote shared safety.” This is not new knowledge, though it obviously needs resaying. We’ll revisit just a bit from CounterSpin‘s 2017 conversation with Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing & Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, and author of the book The End of Policing.

CounterSpin220902Vitale.mp3

The post Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso on Indigenous Resistance, Alex Vitale on the End of Policing appeared first on FAIR.
August 29, 2022

Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US-based media platforms have made an extraordinary effort to cut Western audiences off from news from a Russian perspective. When social critic Noam Chomsky pointed out how unprecedented this was, Newsweek‘s “factchecker” (7/26/22) declared his criticism “clearly untrue”—a determination that did more to confirm the ideological strictures of US media than to debunk them.

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russia Today, funded by the Russian government, was removed from DirecTV and Dish Network (New York Times, 3/12/22), YouTube (France24, 12/3/22), TikTok, Meta (CNN, 3/1/22) Google News (Reuters, 3/1/22) and Spotify (Reuters, 3/2/22) in the United States and/or Europe. RT and Sputnik (another Russian state–funded network) were removed from the Apple app store (TechCrunch, 3/1/22).

CNN (3/1/22): “The actions taken by television providers and technology companies against RT have…reduc[ed] the Kremlin’s ability to peddle its narrative at a pivotal time.”

Microsoft banned RT from the Windows app store, and deranked RT and Sputnik in Bing search results (TechCrunch, 3/1/22). Google (Reuters, 3/1/22), Meta (Reuters 2/26/22) and Microsoft (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22) barred RT from receiving any ad revenue through their platforms. RT was also banned by Roku, a streaming hardware company (CNN, 3/1/22).

Motivations for banning RT and Sputnik were due to “extraordinary circumstances,” in Google’s words (Reuters, 2/26/22), and to protect “against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22). RT’s offices in the US had to close down their production completely (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

PayPal has recently frozen the accounts of independent news outlets such as Consortium News (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22) and MintPress (Democracy Now!, 5/4/22; FAIR.org, 5/18/22). The circumstances around PayPal’s actions are less clear than with the actions against RT. The editor-in-chief of Consortium News, Joe Lauria, said he didn’t know why PayPal froze its account, but he suspects a clause in the user agreement against “purveying misinformation” may have been invoked (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22).

One of the many chilling effects of the media blackout was that YouTube deleted its entire archive of commentary by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges (who formerly worked for the New York Times and NPR) because it was hosted by RT (Democracy Now!, 4/1/22).

In May, the US announced new sanctions against Russian television networks Channel One Russia, Television Station Russia-1 and NTV Broadcasting Company (CNN, 5/8/22), cutting them off from US advertisers.

‘A kind of totalitarian culture’

Newsweek (7/26/22): “There are no justified parallels to be drawn between the Soviet Russia media landscape and that of the US today.”

Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and a renowned media critic, responded to this consolidated effort to “counter the threat” posed by the “information war” (Newsweek, 7/26/22) in an interview with actor Russell Brand (YouTube, 7/22/22):

Take the United States today; it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.

Chomsky’s comments were “factchecked” recently by Tom Norton of Newsweek (7/26/22). He wrote:

While the BBC and Radio Free America did broadcast in Russia post-WWII and during the Cold War, their frequencies were jammed by the Soviet government for decades. Any access that the Russian public did have was gained in spite of, not thanks to, their government’s efforts.

The article briefly covers the history of signal jamming in the Soviet Union and other comments made by Chomsky, concluding:

To suggest that Americans have less access to information than citizens in Soviet Russia is therefore, not only clearly untrue, but an argument that neglects the sacrifices and perils that journalists have endured to deliver accurate news about the country, and continue to endure to this day.

The official ruling of Newsweek declared Chomsky’s comments false:

By all accounts, Americans are able to access news from Russia despite many Western journalists having fled the country, and Russia having blocked its public’s access to most Western social media and news platforms.

‘A ubiquitous phenomenon’

BBC (3/23/11): “Listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.”

One of the articles used to support the certification of falsehood was a New York Times article (5/26/87) from 1987 that reported “Russia had begun broadcasting Voice of America after blocking its signal for seven years.” A BBC article (3/23/11) from 2011 was also used to explain that between 1949 and 1987 the Soviets spent significant funds developing jammers to block Western transmissions.

Interestingly, the same New York Times article reported that “a Harvard University study in the mid-1970s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union tuned in [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’” And similarly, from the same BBC article cited by Newsweek:

However, jamming was never totally effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.

Using just two articles from Western sources selected by the factchecker, it seems that millions of people, including virtually all intellectuals in the Soviet Union, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s, which is fairly consistent with Chomsky’s comments: “Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.”

Newsweek reached out to Chomsky for comment, who responded:

I was explicit. I referred to the banning of RT and other channels, comparing it with pre-Perestroika Russia when Russians were getting their news from BBC and VoA, according to US studies.

A mass Soviet audience

Cold War Broadcasting (CEU Press, 2010): “Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s.”

A collection of studies were published in 2010 in the book, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by A. Ross Johnson, a former research fellow at the Hoover Institute (a conservative think tank) and director of Radio Free Europe (US-funded media), and R. Eugene Parta, also a former director of RFE and a contributor to the Hoover Institution. The studies corroborate the claim that people in the Soviet Union were frequently listening to Western media.

In the 1970s, simulations estimated by MIT put VoA weekly listenership reaching highs of 19% of the adult Soviet population, with the BBC topping out at 11%. “Study results showed that by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the USSR urban population listened to foreign broadcasting more or less regularly,” according to Cold War Broadcasting.

Out of curiosity, what do the US studies have to say about the 1980s?

Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s. That was approximately half of VoA’s global audience at the time.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan apparently did not stop people from listening to Western broadcasts. In 1984, 40% of the urban population received information on the war in Afghanistan from Western radio, and in 1987 it was 45%.

In the contemporary United States, however, this is not permitted. We cannot have people listening to the enemy in times of war.

Cold War Broadcasting noted that

the size of Western radio stations’ audience grew gradually from the beginning of broadcasting in the early post-war period to reach more than 50% of the Soviet urban population in the early 1980s.

In other words, Western radio stations had a mass audience in the former USSR. The number of regular listeners was as high as 20–25%.

Soviet listeners appeared to use their access to news from multiple perspectives to get a more comprehensive picture of events:

Despite a relatively high level of trust in Western radio stations, most listeners did not totally accept all the information they heard. The Soviet audience took a more deliberate approach to understanding information that was based on a comparison of information obtained from Soviet mass media with that from foreign radio programs.

So Western outlets and US studies seem to agree with Chomsky: Despite jamming, people had access and often listened to Western sources in the Soviet Union and were critically engaged with the news at the time, especially during the ’70s.

ACTION ALERT: You can contact Newsweek here or via Twitter: @Newsweek. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

FEATURED IMAGE: Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! (12/7/21).

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August 26, 2022

‘Bizarre Decisions From Facebook Call Into Question Moderation Systems’ – CounterSpin interview with Jon Lloyd on Facebook disinformation

Janine Jackson interviewed Global Witness’s Jon Lloyd about Facebook disinformation for the August 19, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220819Lloyd.mp3

Janine Jackson: Social media platforms’ role in shaping the sharing and fomenting of ideas that they purport to merely facilitate is a widely diagnosed concern. As with any kind of media criticism, it’s important to look at broad patterns of societal impact and to track and unpack the distortions of these media in real time, as they have important real-time, real-world effects.

Our next guest’s recent work does both, really. Global Witness has been monitoring Facebook‘s failure to check outright disinformation in the run-up to elections in Brazil. Jon Lloyd is senior advisor at Global Witness. He joins us now by phone from London. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jon Lloyd.

Jon Lloyd: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Before we talk about what you found, let me ask you why you chose to conduct the inquiry. What were the questions or concerns that drove your investigation into Facebook‘s role in Brazilian elections?

JL: The reason that we chose Brazil is we’ve realized that the choices of the world’s major tech companies have had a big impact online, before and after high-stakes elections around the world. And all eyes are on Brazil this year.

The London Guardian (10/30/19) reported that during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, 42% of viral right-wing messages on Facebook-owned WhatsApp contained false information, versus less than 3% of viral left-wing messages.

The reason being is that disinformation featured heavily in the 2018 election, and this year’s election has already been marred by reports of widespread disinformation spread from the very top. The president, Bolsonaro, right now is already seeding doubt about the legitimacy of the election results, and that’s leading to some fears in Brazil of a January 6–style, “Stop the Steal” kind of coup attempt.

In addition to that, we’ve also done some research into Facebook‘s ability to detect hate speech in other areas which it’s called “priority countries,” so Myanmar, Ethiopia and Kenya. And what we found in those investigations was that, well, they didn’t detect any of it, and really with no explanation.

So we thought Brazil was a good opportunity to see if they’re putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak. They have highlighted that as a priority country when it comes to elections, and really, outside of the US midterms, there is no bigger election this year.

JJ: Well, then, tell us about the investigation itself. What did you do exactly, and what did it tell us?

JL: We sourced, firstly, ten examples of election-related disinformation. Some of those are real-life examples, and others we had pulled from the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court’s Counter Disinformation Program. The Superior Electoral Court has said that they’ve been working with social media companies, in terms of helping identify and do a bit of debunking of some common election disinformation.

So we chose examples that largely fell into two categories. The first thing we did, outright false election information. So [ads] that had the wrong voting day, different things about how to vote—for example, instructions on how to vote by mail, which is banned in Brazil.

And then we had a second category of ads, which was content aimed to delegitimize the election result. It was specifically about Brazil’s voting machines, which they’ve used without incident since 1996. So we created those ads, and then we set them up with an account which should have gone through their ad authorizations process—that’s where an account posting political, social-issue or election-related content has to be verified.

Global Witness’s investigation (8/15/22) found Facebook consistently approved ads from an unauthorized account with election disinformation, including ones advertising the wrong election day.

Really, we broke all the rules when it came to setting up that account: We set it up outside of Brazil; we used a non-Brazilian payment method; we posted ads while I was in Nairobi, and then back here in London, which is not allowed. And, of course, I’m not Brazilian—you need to be a Brazilian and present ID.

So there were lots of opportunities for Meta to detect that this was an inauthentic account. We created that account, and then we submitted our examples of disinformation. And all of them were accepted.

JJ: All of them. All of them, including the ones that said the wrong day on which you should vote.

JL: Yes! And actually, initially, one of the ads that we submitted was rejected under Facebook‘s ads about social issues, elections or politics policy, but just six days later, without any intervention from us, the ad was approved, again without any explanation.

So this bizarre sequence of decisions from Facebook really seriously calls into question the integrity of its content-moderation systems—especially, I think, because that was another opportunity for some sort of additional review, both of the authenticity of our account—we weren’t supposed to be allowed to post any political content—and then also to review the other ads that we posted. So it was quite confusing, and quite concerning, too.

JJ: Absolutely, and disheartening.

You have stated that you’ve also looked at Myanmar, Ethiopia and Kenya. So this isn’t just out of the blue; this is something that you chose to look at, Brazil, because there have been pre-existing problems and issues with this content-moderation process. So in other words, you would think that Facebook would be being extra-vigilant at this point, having already been called out on this in the past.

Jon Lloyd: “Facebook will tout the ability of its content-moderation systems to pick this stuff up. And we just bypass it so easily.”

JL: Absolutely. And it’s really part of a trend, which is, Facebook will tout the ability of its content-moderation systems to pick this stuff up. And we just bypass it so easily.

And one thing that I’ll just say, that is important to note, is the reason that we choose ads is because we can schedule those ads in the future, and they still go through that same content-moderation process, but nobody ever ends up actually seeing the content. We can see that the ads go through the content moderation process and are approved, but then we take them down before the scheduled launch date of those ads.

But as far as we know, the content-moderation process is exactly the same for that organic content that people just post on Facebook, and for ads as well. And if anything, for election-related content, it sounds like for ads, it’s even stricter.

JJ: I appreciate that clarification.

You have stated that Facebook knows very well that its platform is used to spread election disinformation and undermine democracy around the world.

I’ve not read the very latest “shocked, simply shocked” corporate response, but it doesn’t matter, because we judge them by their actions and not by their press releases. So what are you at Global Witness, and I know others as well, calling for at this point? What needs to change from Facebook, and then maybe in terms of public understanding of or reckoning with Facebook?

JL: Yeah, we’re asking Facebook, really, to take this seriously. It has to consider all of this, putting our safety as a priority, as a cost of doing business. And with the US midterms around the corner, they have to get it right, and right now.

Our recommendations fall into two main categories. One is around resourcing and the other is around transparency. So we want to make sure that they properly resource the content-moderation and the ad-account verification processes, just getting all of that up to scratch.

But then on the transparency side, crucially, we need them to show their work. It’s not enough to dazzle us with statistics that have no base of reference. We don’t know what the common denominator is, so saying that they’ve removed 1,000 accounts or 100,000 accounts, I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Same with the amount of posts, because there’s nothing to compare it to.

But the one thing that we do know is that our content that we tested from my computer here in London all got through. So ultimately, it falls down to resourcing its content-moderation capabilities, and those integrity systems deployed on the platform globally as well, not just in countries that it thinks are more important.

And then we want them to publish their risk assessments that they do for each country as well. We know that they’re likely to have done one for Brazil, and, really, we want to make sure that in languages that aren’t English, and in countries that aren’t the United States, that they’re actually doing what they say they’re going to do.

So perhaps that means some verified, independent third-party auditing, so that Meta can be held accountable for what they say they’re doing, and aren’t just left to mark their own homework.

Then when it comes to people like me and you, there’s a real opportunity to be a bit skeptical about what you’re seeing online, and even things like the “paid for” disclaimers—we weren’t required to put one of them on any of our content, because we bypassed the political-ad authorization process.

So even things like that, I think it’s maybe doing a little bit of additional research if you’re seeing something and it’s shocking, probably designed to be a bit shocking. So you want to verify that from trusted sources.

JJ: All right, then. Well, thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Jon Lloyd. He’s senior advisor at Global Witness. You can find their work online at GlobalWitness.org. Thank you so much, Jon Lloyd, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JL: Thank you for having me. Cheers.

The post ‘Bizarre Decisions From Facebook Call Into Question Moderation Systems’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 25, 2022

‘The US Must Break Free of the Banana Republic Mentality’ – CounterSpin interview with Azadeh Shahshahani on Central American plan

Janine Jackson interviewed Project South’s Azadeh Shahshahani about the Biden administration’s Central American plan for the August 19, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220819Shashahani.mp3

Janine Jackson: Listeners may remember Vice President Kamala Harris last summer, on her first official international trip, telling Guatemalans who might consider migrating to the United States, “Do not come.”

While that language was criticized by some as tone deaf, the administration’s message that they would be, as the New York Times put it, “breaking a cycle of migration from Central America by investing in a region plagued by corruption, violence and poverty” was well and ingenuously received.

New York Times (6/7/21)

The White House has since announced some $2 billion in private sector “commitments” to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, part of what they’ve dubbed a “call to action” to engage the root causes of migration from the region by driving what officials repeatedly describe as an “ecosystem of opportunity” that will allow people of the region to build healthy lives at home.

US corporate news media never met a public/private partnership they didn’t like, and they aren’t so big on using critical history to shape foreign policy coverage. So if you want to hear challenging questions about this White House plan to bring peace and prosperity to northern Central America, they won’t be the place to look.

Our guest raises some of those questions in a recent piece co-authored for In These Times, titled “The White House’s Plan to Stem Migration Protects Corporate Profits—Not People.”

Azadeh Shahshahani is legal and advocacy director at Project South. She’s also a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She joins us now by phone from Atlanta. Welcome to CounterSpin, Azadeh Shahshahani.

Azadeh Shahshahani: Thank you very much for having me.

JJ: US government involvement in northern Central America is a long history, violent on many levels, and I don’t want to pretend we’re addressing all of that right now. But if you don’t put the Biden administration’s “call to action” in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in a historical context, it seems like you just can’t see it clearly. So please talk us through a bit about what you and others see as primary points of concern about this plan and about the approach that it reflects.

AS: One of the primary concerns is the administration’s lack of acknowledgement about the long history of US intervention, and facilitating coups against leftist presidents and democratically elected governments in support of US corporate and business interests in the region, from Guatemala to El Salvador to Honduras.

Azadeh Shahshahani: “The US obviously has had a very clear role in destabilizing the region, which has in turn led to forced migration.”

And in Honduras, as recently as 2009, of course, we had a coup supported by the Obama administration toppling the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya.

And so the US obviously has had a very clear role in destabilizing the region, which has in turn led to forced migration. So, for example, the number of Honduran children crossing the border increased by more than 1,000% in 2014, so within five years of the coup.

And as another example, immigration from Mexico has doubled since the US signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which has had the impact of undercutting small business and crushing low-income workers, and has made migration, really forced migration, a matter of survival.

And so the question that we really need to be asking is: “What is driving this call to action? Is it actually supporting people, including Indigenous communities?” Obviously not. What lies at the heart of this call to action, like previous US government plans toward Central America, and I should say Latin America generally, is to preserve and promote corporate interests.

JJ: Concretely, for one thing, the US, we’re told, has a commitment from this company SanMar, that we’re told is going to create 4,000 jobs. I think US listeners understand that media are very interested in promises of job creation, and much less interested in following up on how it plays out. But just using that as an example, what is there to think about there?

AS: Right, so SanMar is a US-based apparel company. And supposedly it’s going to purchase more from Elcatex, which is a Honduras-based garment manufacturer that SanMar partially owns.

The Collective of Honduran Women, which is an organization of women who work in Honduras’ garment sweatshops, has long denounced the low wages, long hours and serious repetitive motion injuries that they suffer in Honduras’ textile industry.

And they actually submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission, which has been admitted, on behalf of 26 women who have suffered some serious injuries as a result of working in the garment factories, including three Elcatex workers with alleged permanent partial disabilities.

And so these are issues of serious concern. And the issue is also lack of living wages and labor rights for the workers in the garment industry. And so the true beneficiary of SanMar’s increased purchasing from Elcatex is going to be SanMar itself, because SanMar is a partial owner of Elcatex, and also one of the corporate elite, which is a pattern we see repeatedly, that these business bills actually support the oligarchy in northern Central America.

JJ: This is obviously connected, because anti-corruption, and the idea that corruption is going to be rooted out, is key to the call to action’s promises here. There’s an Engel list about, you know, you’re going to get on this list if you’ve been involved in any sort of corruption. How do you see that playing out in practice, in terms of these deals that are being made?

Twitter (5/3/22)

AS: Right, well, we’re not truly seeing actual accountability, with the one exception being Honduras. So you know, the 2009 coup was followed by 12 years of plundering and corruption. And so now the Honduran President Xiomara Castro and the new Congress have pledged to combat corruption and restore state institutions.

As a part of this, Honduras recently passed a new energy law, which, among other elements, is basically going to enable the government to renegotiate the contracts by which it purchases energy from private energy producers and set more reasonable rates, because right after the 2009 coup, the government had started negotiating this contract with the private sector that basically gave them huge profits.

So it was estimated that the Honduras energy company, about 70% of its revenue was going to these private companies, whereas if it could produce the energy itself, it would be a lot less money.

You would think that this is something that the US would be supporting, based on the anti-corruption rhetoric at the root of the call to action and all the rest. But then we see the US ambassador to Honduras criticizing the law on Twitter when it was introduced in the Honduran congress, expressing worry about this effect on foreign investment, which again shows us that the US’s true motives are corporate profit.

JJ: Right, here you have an example of a state saying they want to use their state resources to benefit their own people, and you have the US saying, “Well, you know, maybe that’s not a good idea.” It certainly should raise some questions.

How we think that migrants should be treated when they arrive in the US is a separate if deeply related question to foreign policy, that is affecting and has affected conditions in those home countries.

FAIR.org (5/20/13)

If the goal were to stem migration, and I’m not saying anything, frankly, about that as a goal in itself, but if the goal were to stem migration from northern Central America by making or helping to make lives safer and more livable there, what would that policy look like, including what would the US stop doing if those were the real sincere goals?

AS: I think as a first step, the White House would honestly contend with the bloody US history of intervention in the region, including coups and the financing and backing of military regimes as they carried out widespread atrocities, including in Guatemala and El Salvador.

And the US basically must break free of the banana republic mentality that sees the region as a source of natural resources and cheap labor, and begin to respect the autonomy and self-determination of the people in the region.

And so at the very least, the call to action should include a demand for US corporations that operate in the region to pay living wages and respect labor rights, and to also respect the land and territorial rights of Indigenous peoples, and to obey rather than to weaken relevant national laws. And so those would be some steps in the right direction.

JJ: Do you have any thoughts for journalists who are covering this set of issues, in terms of things that they might be digging deeper into, or maybe patterns that they might avoid?

AS: Sure. Well, stop taking things at face value, especially these calls to action and statements coming from the White House, you know. Let’s try to dig deeper, to see what lies at the root of this call to action.

What corporations does this benefit, what oligarchy or set of actors, including people with enormous influence on politicians in Latin America? And look at the connections, also, between US imperialism, corporate interests and forces such as the School of the Americas that is also based in Georgia, that for a long time has trained military forces and paramilitary forces in Latin America in tactics of torture and repression, and is open and running to this day.

In These Times (8/2/22)

So let’s make the connections, and hold the White House accountable for the hypocrisy when they’re calling for democracy and human rights and the rule of law and anti-corruption initiatives. What does that actually mean when we see the actual opposite?

JJ: Absolutely. We’ve been speaking with Azadeh Shahshahani. She’s legal and advocacy director at Project South. They’re online at ProjectSouth.org. And you can find her recent co-authored piece on the White House call to action on InTheseTimes.com.

Thank you so much, Azadeh Shahshahani, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AS: Thank you so much for having me.

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
August 12, 2022

Angelo Carusone on Alex Jones Trial, Karl Grossman on Nuclear War

CT Insider (7/14/22)

This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did it all “from a pure place.”

Jones, as the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board noted in a strong statement, is trying to keep any mention of his “white supremacy and right-wing extremism” out of the Sandy Hook case he’s facing in New Hampshire—because, his lawyer says, that discussion would be “unfairly prejudicial and inflammatory,” an “attack on [Jones’] character” that would “play to the emotions of the jury and distract from the main issues.”

What should be the “main issues” when our vaunted elite press corps engage a figure like Alex Jones? We talk with Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters.

CounterSpin220812Carusone.mp3

Also on the show: In 1991, on the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune concluded: “Despite Chernobyl, nuclear energy is the green alternative.” The Houston Post enjoined readers: “Let’s not learn the wrong lesson from Chernobyl and rule nukes out of our future.” Corporate media have been rehabilitating nuclear power for as long as the public has been terrified by its dangers—sometimes as heavy-handedly as NBC in 1987 running a documentary, Nuclear Power: In France It Works, that failed to mention that NBC’s then-owner, General Electric, was the country’s second-largest nuclear power entity—and third-largest producer of nuclear weapons.

Now in Russia’s war on Ukraine, we’re seeing news media toss the possibility of nuclear war into the news you’re meant to read over your breakfast. Has something changed to make the unleashing of nuclear weaponry war less horrific? And if not, what can we be doing to push it back off the table and out of media’s parlor game chat? We hear from author and journalism professor Karl Grossman.

CounterSpin220812Grossman.mp3

The post Angelo Carusone on Alex Jones Trial, Karl Grossman on Nuclear War appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
August 5, 2022

Luke Harris and Joe Torres on America’s Racist Legacy

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who don’t just want to argue for particular ideas to guide us forward, but want to shut down the spaces in which we can have the arguments. And where a vigorous free press should be, we have corporate, commercial media that don’t have defending those spaces as their foremost concern.

Luke Harris

One crucial thing we now know we need to pro-actively fight for: our right to learn and teach real US history. Listeners will have heard of the campaign against “critical race theory”—a set of ideas of which right-wing opponents gleefully acknowledge they know and care nothing, but are using as cover to attack any race-conscious, that’s to say accurate and appropriate, teaching.

CounterSpin put that cynical but impactful campaign in context last July with Luke Harris, co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum.

Joe Torres

Late last June, we talked about just the kind of story we all would know if our learning was inclusive and unafraid, the kind of story that would play a role in our understanding of the country’s growth—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which 300 overwhelmingly Black people were killed, and some 800 shot or wounded. It’s a part of a sort of “hidden history” that the press corps have a role in hiding, as we discussed with Joe Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author, with Juan González, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

CounterSpin220805Harris.mp3

CounterSpin spoke with Luke Harris in July of 2021.

CounterSpin220805Torres.mp3

We spoke with Joe Torres in June 2021.

The post Luke Harris and Joe Torres on America’s Racist Legacy appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 29, 2022

Vivek Shandas on Climate Disruption & Heat Waves, Jamie Kalven on Laquan McDonald Coverup

NBC Nightly News (6/10/22)

This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.”

The New York Times reports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context.

The package is hundreds of pages long, and folks are only just going through it as we record on July 28, but already some are suggesting we not allow an evident, welcome break in Beltway inertia to lead to uncritical cheering for policy that may not, in fact, do what is necessary to check climate disruption, in part because it provides insufficient checks on fossil fuel production.

But journalistic context doesn’t just mean comparing policy responses to real world needs; it means recognizing and reporting how the impacts of the climate crisis—like heat waves—differ depending on who we are and where we live. There’s a way to tell the story that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings. We talked about that during last year’s heat wave with Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas.

CounterSpin220729Shandas.mp3

Also on the show: Although it’s taken a media back seat to other scourges, the US reality of Black people being killed by law enforcement, their families’ and communities’ grief and outrage meeting no meaningful response, grinds on: Robert Langley in South Carolina, Roderick Brooks in Texas, Jayland Walker in Ohio.

Anthony Guglielmi

Major news media show little interest in lifting up non-punitive community responses, or in demanding action from lawmakers. So comfortable are they with state-sanctioned racist murder, the corporate press corps haven’t troubled to highlight the connections between outrages—and the system failure they betray.

Exhibit A: Beltway media have twisted their pearls about the US Secret Service having deleted text messages relevant to the January 6 investigation. No one seems to be buying the claim from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi that the messages were “erased as part of a device-replacement program” that just happened to take place after the inspector general’s office had requested them.

Laquan McDonald

Now, many people, but none in the corporate press, would think it relevant to point out that Guglielmi came to the Secret Service after his stint with the Chicago Police Department, during which he presided over that department’s lying about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald. There, Guglielmi claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos—audio that upended police’s story that McDonald had been lunging toward officer Jason Van Dyke, when in fact he’d been walking away—had disappeared due to “software issues or operator error.”

As noted by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, Chicago reporters following up on the story discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio—Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80% of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

A dry-eyed observer might conclude that Guglielmi was hired, was elevated to the Secret Service not despite but because of his vigorous efforts to mislead the public and lawmakers about reprehensible law enforcement behavior. But I think it’s not quite right to think this means the elite press corps aren’t sufficiently interested in Guglielmi; the point is that they aren’t sufficiently interested in Laquan McDonald.

CounterSpin talked about the case with an important figure in it, writer and activist Jamie Kalven. We hear some of that conversation this week.

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The post Vivek Shandas on Climate Disruption & Heat Waves, Jamie Kalven on Laquan McDonald Coverup appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 22, 2022

Nora Benavidez on Post-Roe Data Privacy, Dorothee Benz on January 6 Insurrection

Nora Benavidez

This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care online is in danger. How are tech companies responding? We’ll hear from civil rights attorney Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press.

      CounterSpin_Show220722Benavidez.mp3

Dorothee Benz

Transcript: ‘Privacy Is the Entry Point for Our Civil and Basic Rights’

Also on the show: It’s good to be shocked by the news coming out of the January 6 committee; it’s shocking. But suggesting that ALL of this is new and revelatory is a narrative that serves us poorly. For media, the test isn’t so much how they are covering the hearings, but whether they are really incorporating the lessons into their regular coverage. That’s going forward, but today we’ll go back to the day after the insurrection, when we spoke with political scientist Dorothee Benz.

      CounterSpin_Show220722Benz.mp3

Transcript: ‘Being Neutral in the Face of a Fascist Threat Is Not an Acceptable Journalistic Value’

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Uvalde massacre footage, New York Times reporting on Ben & Jerry’s refusal to sell in the Israeli occupied West Bank, and the need for the new Office of Environmental Justice to take fossil fuel companies head-on.

      CounterSpin_Show220722Banter.mp3

Featured Image: Patcharin Saenlakon / EyeEm / Getty Images

The post Nora Benavidez on Post-Roe Data Privacy, Dorothee Benz on January 6 Insurrection appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 21, 2022

Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’

The New York Times (7/2/22) attributed a spike in mentions of Nazism at the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Putin describing Ukraine as “full of Nazis,” but did not discuss Western media comparing Putin to Hitler.

Earlier this month, a New York Times (7/2/22) report, “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis,” argued that falsely branding people as Nazis is inherently propagandistic:

The lie that the government and culture of Ukraine are filled with dangerous “Nazis” has become a central theme of Kremlin propaganda about the war.

To say Ukraine is “filled” with Nazis is an obvious exaggeration, although even a relatively small number of Nazis has wielded disproportionate influence in the Ukrainian government (Kyiv Post, 3/26/19; Euronews, 8/4/21). Nevertheless, FAIR (3/7/14, 1/15/22, 1/28/22, 2/23/22) has covered the Western media’s denial of the far-right’s role in the Ukrainian 2014 coup, as well as their complicity in amplifying Ukrainian neo-Nazi publicity stunts during the war.

But if it’s true that falsely associating a government with Nazism is a manipulation worthy of condemnation, how then should one judge Western media efforts to tie Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler?

FAIR (3/30/22) has previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless. Tracing a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage.

‘Striking similarities’

In the early days of the Ukraine crisis, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul implied to guest host Ali Velshi on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show (3/11/22) that Putin was worse than Hitler, because Putin was killing his own people, while Hitler “didn’t kill ethnic Germans.” McFaul’s comments were later shared without attribution or pushback by the Maddow blog on Twitter (3/12/22)—suggesting that Maddow’s show endorsed McFaul’s comparative ranking of Putin and Hitler—before being removed following social media backlash and a correction by the Auschwitz Memorial. (Many of the Jews killed by Hitler were, of course, ethnically German, as were countless other victims of Hitler, if that makes a moral difference.)

Historian Richard J. Evans (New Statesman, 4/9/22) listed several ways Putin could be compared to Hitler, including the argument that genocide was at “the heart of the Nazi project,” and Russia’s actions in Ukraine amount to genocide because Ukrainians “are being killed because they are Ukrainians, and for no other reason.” Furthermore:

Both men had imposed dictatorial rule over their respective countries, both men suppressed dissent and eliminated independent media, both men had no hesitation in murdering people they considered a threat to their rule. Both Hitler and Putin invaded a series of neighboring countries, both used lies and disinformation to justify their actions, both used a symbol–in Putin’s case “Z,” in Hitler’s the swastika–to advertise support for their aims. Both men had no hesitation in causing death and destruction on a massive scale to further their ends.

Many of these features would seem to apply to virtually any authoritarian ruler, from Augusto Pinochet to Ferdinand Marcos—though not every dictator has a distinctive logo, were they all Hitler as well?

Political scientist Alexander Motyl wrote an op-ed for The Hill (5/3/22), “Putin’s Russia Rose like Hitler’s Germany—and Could End the Same,” that argued that the “striking similarities between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Adolf Hitler’s Germany are not accidental,” because their “imperial mindsets, militaristic ambitions, personality cults and demonization of minorities (Jews and Ukrainians)” made it “almost inevitable that Hitler and Putin then embarked on major wars.”

“We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust…But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin,” wrote Timothy Snyder for the New York Times (5/19/22).

Historian Timothy Snyder’s New York Times op-ed (5/19/22), “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,” averred that we “err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust,” but claimed there are similarities between “Mr. Putin’s war” and “Hitler’s main war aim” of conquering Ukraine in 1941. In any case, Snyder suggested that, as with Hitler,(“ABC World News Tonight” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “The Situation Room” OR “Special Report” OR “The Beat” OR “Nightly News” OR “All Things Considered” OR “NewsHour”) AND (“Oil” OR “gas”) w/100 (“prices” OR “cost”) there was no point in negotiating with Putin, because the only way to deal with such leaders is to hand them a military defeat: “The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him,” he asserted, warning that if “Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.”

‘More dangerous’ than Hitler

In the London Telegraph (5/10/22), Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki argued that Putin is “more dangerous” than Hitler (or Stalin), because not only does Putin “have deadlier weapons at his disposal, but he also has the new media at his fingertips to spread his propaganda.” While it “seems impossible that Hitler or Stalin could return in our time,” Morawiecki wrote, they apparently did so when the “inconceivable became fact when rockets fell on Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities of a sovereign, democratic state in the heart of Europe.” (Serbia was also, like Ukraine, a sovereign state with an at least nominally elected government—but NATO rockets falling on its cities during the Kosovo War did not seem to herald the second coming of World War II–era dictators.)

Morawiecki claimed that Putin’s “Russkiy Mir” ideology is “the equivalent of 20th-century Communism and Nazism,” and a “cancer” that poses a “deadly threat to the whole of Europe.” It is “not enough to support Ukraine in its military struggle with Russia,” he declared; nothing less than rooting out this “monstrous new ideology entirely” would be satisfactory to him.

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international law, condemned by 141 out of 193 countries in a UN General Assembly vote. But claims that Russia is committing genocide—a charge that carries automatic repercussions under international law—have to reckon with the comparison between the Ukraine invasion and the largest US military operation of the 21st century, the Iraq War. The UN’s count of civilian deaths in the first four months of Russia’s war was 4,677; the tally in the first four months of Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, a project that monitored press accounts of civilian casualties, was 8,576.

Both numbers are horrific, and each surely underestimates the true civilian toll of these wars. But if Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, what was the US doing in Iraq?

“I know it’s hard…to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,” a US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told Newsweek (3/22/22). “But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians.”

If one genuinely wants to compare Putin’s brutality to Hitler’s, one has to look at the actual civilian toll of World War II. In the European theater alone, tens of millions of civilians were killed; some 14 million of these deaths were inflicted in the Soviet Union, which comprised both Russia and Ukraine. When you assert that the enemy of the day is as bad as Hitler, you’re also asserting that Hitler is no worse than the enemy of the day.

A parade of new Hitlers

Political scientist Michael Parenti pointed out in Against Empire that the corporate media often demonize the leaders of Official Enemy states as an evil personification of the entire population in order to justify US aggression against them, and there are few better ways to vilify foreign leaders in the West than by making exaggerated accusations that they are Adolf Hitler reincarnate. The glib trope demonstrates how frivolously historical comparisons are thrown around to advance US geopolitical goals.

British journalist Louis Allday (Ebb Magazine, 3/15/22) compiled a list of instances where Western journalists and officials have compared foreign leaders to Hitler—with Hitler sometimes coming off better in the comparison. Hitler-like leaders include Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and even Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

If we take all of these allegations at face value, we should all be shocked by how many Hitlers have emerged after World War II. Or one could reasonably infer that Western journalists and officials will compare any foreign leader they dislike to Hitler, trivializing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the suffering endured by their victims. Allday argues that these flippant Hitler comparisons are “effectively tantamount to a form of Holocaust denial and even an insidious rehabilitation of Nazism.”

Diplomacy = ‘appeasement’

One inevitable feature of these Hitler comparisons is frequent reference to “appeasement” when reporting on the US’s dealings with foreign leaders. This presents any attempt at diplomatic negotiations with foreign leaders opposed by the US as a misguided or unprincipled effort to placate an irrational or evil dictator bent on expansionist conquest.

Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, as it amassed troops near its border, British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace worried that “there was a whiff of Munich in the air.” This was a clear reference to what is commonly perceived to be a failed policy of diplomatic efforts to prevent World War II in the West, when European powers agreed to let Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement (BBC, 2/13/22).

Ian Bond (Guardian, 2/22/22), the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, wrote that although Putin is “not a charismatic madman,” there are still “echoes of 1938 in current developments,” as what “Putin has in common with Hitler” is a “mystical belief in a nation stretching beyond his country’s current borders.” Bond criticized Western officials for appearing to focus on “accommodating” Putin instead of deterring him, arguing that deterrence is “impossible” if “leaders keep telling Putin what they are not prepared to do” by ruling out in advance escalation into World War III.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt (5/9/22) made it seem as if US leaders can only choose between their “old strategy” of “appeasement,” which supposedly caused Putin to “become more aggressive,” and their “new strategy” of “confrontation,” which would risk “a fight with a nuclear power that many Americans and Europeans do not want.”

This is a false dichotomy. Although establishment Western pundits and officials like to claim that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked,” FAIR (1/28/22, 3/4/22) has pointed out that this self-serving narrative omits a record of conscious provocations against Russia via NATO expansion towards Russian borders, in violation of promises made to Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Leonhardt falsely described the US’s previous foreign policy toward Russia as a “strategy of non-confrontation ” rather than encirclement and antagonism.

(A poll of Ukrainians conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center—6/9-6/22—found 58% thought the US bore “some” or “a great deal of responsibility” for the current conflict, along with 55% for NATO, while 82% said the same of Russia. This majority opinion in Ukraine would be difficult to utter in an establishment US media outlet.)

According to a Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center poll, 58% of Ukrainians believe the US bears “a great deal/some responsibility” for the war in Ukraine.

Accusations of “appeasing” Russia or Putin have been raised towards influential Western officials who have either engaged in diplomacy or advocated de-escalation through negotiations. Zelenskyy has made contradictory remarks throughout the conflict, arguing that diplomacy is the only way to end the war, while also advocating for escalation through more NATO military support and setting up a “no-fly-zone.” Western media outlets (e.g., Reuters, 5/26/22; Newsweek, 5/26/22) amplified Zelenskyy’s Munich references, with no pushback, when he criticized former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for advocating Ukrainian territorial concessions as a path to ending the war. Zelenskyy mocked Kissinger, stating that his “calendar is not 2022, but 1938,” and suggesting that Kissinger was speaking to an audience “in Munich back then.”

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has also had to defend her record of diplomacy with Putin numerous times from charges of “appeasement,” as Zelenskyy blamed her and former French president Nicholas Sarkozy for not doing enough to prevent the situation. Other op-eds (Politico, 5/23/22; Bloomberg, 6/9/22) denounced her as the “Neville Chamberlain of our time”–evoking the British prime minister who met with Hitler at Munich–because of her insufficiently aggressive policy.

Russia’s ‘appeasement’ history

Comparisons that depict diplomacy with Russia as a reenactment of Munich gloss over Russia’s unique history with Nazi Germany. The popular narrative of “appeasement” in 1938 often omits that World War II might not have happened if Britain and France had accepted Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s offer to form a military alliance to preemptively attack Nazi Germany in August 15, 1939 (Telegraph, 10/18/08). Britain and France’s rejection of Stalin’s offer arguably led to the USSR signing a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany (also known as the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact) on August 23, 1939; it was this agreement that set the stage for WWII, not Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in Munich.

World War II is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, because approximately 26 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, while around three-quarters of all Nazi wartime losses came from fighting the Red Army (Washington Post, 5/8/15). But there are other historical memories that drive Russia’s perception of threats coming from the West. Another fact seldom recalled in US media is that Russia was invaded by the US and 14 other nations in 1918, who were intervening on behalf of the White Russian Army against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (National Interest, 9/3/19; Consortium News, 7/18/18).

“The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people,” Putin said in his February 24 speech.

Indeed, Putin cited Russia’s history of being invaded by the West in the 20th century as a major reason behind the timing of his decision to preemptively invade Ukraine. In his speech announcing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin invoked his own version of the “appeasement” trope in justification of military aggression:

The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after the hostilities broke out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of lives. We will not make this mistake the second time.

Recreating empire?

An oft-repeated corollary to the Western media’s frequent Hitler comparisons is that there was little point before the invasion in addressing Russia’s security concerns surrounding NATO expansion and the US’s unilateral abandonment of arms control treaties, since Putin supposedly wanted to recreate the Soviet Union or Russian Empire despite his repeated explicit denials. Putin’s alleged belief that the modern state of Ukraine has no right to exist, the argument goes, is proof of his supposed Hitlerian expansionist ambitions.

“Talk of ‘de-Nazification,’ while absurd on a factual level, is nonetheless revealing. It tells us that Putin is acting on his long-held belief that the Ukrainian government has no right to be independent. It hints at his ultimate goal: to transform Ukraine into a vassal of a new Russian empire,” wrote Zack Beauchamp for Vox (2/24/22).

The two sources Western media most cite to make this claim are Putin’s speech (2/21/22) recognizing the independence of the separatist Donbas republics, and an essay he wrote last year (7/12/21) titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp (2/24/22) wrote that Putin “believes that Ukraine is an illegitimate country that exists on land that’s historically and rightfully Russian.” Ha’aretz (3/17/22) published an op-ed comparing Putin’s July essay, with its “Hitlerian motifs,” to Hitler’s Mein Kampf—particularly “the notion of an artificial and tragic division of a people that must be rectified by reunification.”

Perhaps the most frequent purveyor of this narrative is Timothy Snyder (4/18/18), who claimed that the war in Ukraine is a “colonial war”:

In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, [Putin] argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

However, when one actually reads both sources, rather than relying on secondhand sources to explain what Putin meant, it quickly becomes apparent that these are blatant misrepresentations of what Putin said. Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is long and convoluted, but although Putin talks about Russia and Ukraine’s shared historic, religious and linguistic heritage, and claims that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era,” he also stresses that Russia has acknowledged new geopolitical realities:

Things change: Countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!… The Russian Federation recognized the new geopolitical realities: and not only recognized, but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country.

This point was repeated in Putin’s later speech (2/21/22), where Putin blamed the existence of the modern Ukrainian state on Vladimir Lenin and the USSR. Putin’s claim was not that Moscow should continue to govern all of Ukraine, however, but that Russia’s recognition of Ukrainian independence was an act of political generosity, in contrast to what he presented as Kyiv’s ungenerous treatment of the residents of Donbas:

Despite all these injustices, lies and outright pillage of Russia, it was our people whdoo accepted the new geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR, and recognised the new independent states. Not only did Russia recognise these countries, but helped its CIS partners, even though it faced a very dire situation itself. This included our Ukrainian colleagues, who turned to us for financial support many times from the very moment they declared independence. Our country provided this assistance while respecting Ukraine’s dignity and sovereignty.

Putin’s efforts to justify Russia’s invasion are not based on events that happened centuries ago; his historical accounts in these two texts, however self-serving, are not linked to attempts to justify violence. Rather, the speech (2/24/22) that declared the “special military operation” did so on the grounds that the “eastward expansion of NATO” that began in 1999 is “a matter of life and death,” and a “red line” for Russia’s security that had been crossed despite several warnings.

He also maintained it was to “protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime” in the Donbas region. Such concerns are generally dismissed as pretextual in the West, but the UN’s count of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian civil war—3,321 as of January 2019 (UN OHCHR, 9/23/21)–is comparable to the UN civilian death toll from the Russian invasion, with a tiny fraction of the international outrage.

The cost of ‘appeasement’ charges

The hyperbolic comparisons between Russia and Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, as well as constant accusations that anyone who attempts to negotiate with Russia for a peaceful end to the war is engaged in “appeasement,” have cost the world opportunities to de-escalate. The Biden administration has not encouraged the Ukrainian government to engage in serious negotiations with Russia (Jacobin, 5/30/22), no doubt well aware that doing so would bring more Chamberlain analogies.

Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, cohosts of the Citations Needed podcast (10/9/19), point out that the emotionally manipulative and thought-terminating comparisons to Hitler and Munich are designed to suggest that

every so-called dictator is a new Hitler and every negotiation, every potential negotiation even, with those countries is a new Munich, is a new abdication of world responsibility that will inevitably lead to what else: a new Holocaust.

The extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate. A BBC report (6/20/22) last month featured NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urging the West to “prepare to continue supporting Ukraine in a war lasting for years,” while the head of the British Army, Gen. Patrick Sanders, asserted that the “UK and allies needed to be capable of winning a ground war with Russia.” The frequent Nazi comparisons and Munich references made by Western media paint those who would prefer a negotiated settlement to years of bloodshed, the risk of World War III and nuclear war as “appeasers” of a Hitlerian dictator with genocidal ambitions.

Featured Image: Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Clive Rose, Alexander Nemenov and Kirill Kudryavtsev, via Getty Images

The post Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 19, 2022

“They Will Find the Outcome That They Are Looking for and Work the Law Backwards to Make It Fit.” – CounterSpin interview with Jessica Mason Pieklo on abortion rights post-Roe

Janine Jackson interviewed Jessica Mason Pieklo about abortion rights in post-Roe America on the July 15, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220715MasonPieklo – fair.org

Janine Jackson: In their story last May headlined, “Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade,” the New York Times told readers that with consideration of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court was plunging “back into the contentious debate over abortion.”

But the right established in Roe v. Wade of the individual and not the state to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy prior to the point at which a fetus could live outside the womb is actually not really contentious. Majorities of the US public support it, have supported it, and for some 50 years, courts have as well.

The New York Times (5/17/21) “both-sides”ed abortion access—a right most Americans support.

The reversal of Roe by the current court, therefore, presents a challenge to journalists: reflect actual public opinion, tell the real history of jurisprudence and explain the particular political deformation of the current court, or revert to a “some say, others differ” mode that subsumes the public will and human rights into a backdrop of Beltway conventional wisdom.

And that would remind us again why corporate media might not be the place for the conversations we need to have to move us forward.

Well, let’s talk about that with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, which has kept a long-term eye on the issues of reproductive rights and justice. She joins us now by phone from Colorado. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jessica Mason Pieklo.

Jessica Mason Pieklo: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

JJ: Well, you’ve been reporting on reproductive justice and the courts for more than a minute. And you wrote recently that you used to sort of parse

“Six unelected justices defied the Constitution, the will of the people, and their own sworn Senate testimony to declare there is no constitutional right to abortion,” wrote Jessica Mason Pieklo (Rewire News Group, 6/25/22).

legal rulings and look at the language and look at what it meant, but that with Dobbs, it didn’t even really merit that kind of inspection, and it kind of represented a categorical change in what the court says and does.

I wonder if we could start with that on the ruling itself and why you think that it represented a kind of change in the way the court speaks on these issues.

JMP: Sure. Thank you. I think that’s an excellent place to start. You know, within the legal movement, both the conservative and progressive legal movements prior to the Dobbs decision, really since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, there [was], in the court, a more honest debate over what the state could or could not do in terms of regulating pregnancy and childbirth and those outcomes.

And that was under the Planned Parenthood v. Casey framework. That was the great abortion compromise that the Supreme Court came up with as a way to save Roe and sort of settle this debate, so to speak, for the ages. And what happened as a result of the political campaign to take over the courts and to really move this issue away from the will of the people and into a minoritarian space is that the Dobbs decision is a perfect reflection of that.

It cherry picks history, it cherry picks the law and it really just comes to a conclusion that was predetermined by Sam Alito and the other conservative justices on the court.

And I think that’s the one thing that I really hope folks understand that is really different with this iteration of the Roberts court and what we will see amplified moving forward is that for the conservative legal movement, it is outcome determinative.

So it doesn’t matter what the law says. They will find the outcome that they are looking for and work the law backwards to make it fit.

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

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

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

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

So I think as the dust settles and truly how extreme the reality is, I do think they’re starting to latch onto it. I worry though that media has ingrained habits. And that is one of the areas where, in three months from the Dobbs decision and in six months from the Dobbs decision, I’m concerned that journalists who don’t cover this issue and the Supreme Court on the regular will fall back into habits that they know just because that’s what we all do as humans, right? We just sort of fall into our old habits.

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

JJ: Absolutely. Well, concretely, as we speak, Biden has introduced an executive order that talks about government level protections for abortion rights, but I wonder what you make of that generally. And then where do you see the fight right now? Big question.

JMP: That’s a huge question. So let me sort of take them in reverse order. Right now, the fight is absolutely in the states and in your local communities about getting people access to care that they need.

This is a scramble. Where I live in Colorado, for example, when the Texas ban first went into effect almost a year ago, we saw a 500% increase in patient need here in the state of Colorado. And that’s only increased since then. So even in states that currently protect abortion access, it is really, really difficult to access care.

So that’s the immediate moment that needs to be met, is just getting people access to healthcare. The political moment is a real one too, though, and I was glad to see the administration release the executive order.

There are some good parts to it. It doesn’t go far enough. It is too vague. I mean, there are lots of places to criticize, but I think it is important that we have finally, at least, something to start with.

I was happy to see that the administration was taking seriously the need to really address attacks on people’s rights to travel for care, because this is something that extends well beyond the

Abortion rights protest in Ohio (Becker1999 from Grove City, OH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

abortion issue. If we start to unravel the constitutional right to travel in this country, we have no idea where that goes.

So there are big warning signs in the Dobbs decision for a whole panoply and host of other rights for us. The Biden administration taking action on this with this executive order is a good initial first step. I don’t think it goes far enough. I also think it doesn’t matter what the administration did with regard to abortion rights, Republicans and the conservatives on the right were going to say that it went too far anyway, so you might as well swing for the fences at this moment.

JJ: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, we’ve always made a point on this show to acknowledge that some people were never touched by Roe, if you will. Anybody relying on public assistance wouldn’t have access to this so-called right.

Understanding that just makes for a longer timeline and understanding of this fight. And, it also highlights groups that have been providing access to abortion even while it was supposedly provided for everyone.

All of it comes back to say what I know that you think about, which is that when we talk about these rights, they’re not equally accessed by everyone. And it’s important for reporters in particular who are talking about the reality of Roe or post-Roe to acknowledge that it impacts different people differently.

JMP: Absolutely. I mean, for so many people in this country, Roe was already aspirational at best. So what we will see as part of the fallout from this decision is that those folks who were already struggling and marginalized in their ability to access care will only be more so.

For example, Whole Woman’s Health in Texas has announced that they are moving their clinics to New Mexico as a result of Texas’ trigger law being able to take effect which bans abortions; abortion is functionally banned in the state of Texas right now.

And so while it’s good that Whole Woman’s Health is able to move services to New Mexico, to a state where there’s protected access and help facilitate the travel of patients to New Mexico, the reality is that some of those clinics, like the McAllen clinic, were serving the Rio Grande Valley that had no access to healthcare at all.

With those clinics closing, then that’s not just abortion care that’s going away. So we’re exacerbating these deserts, and who’s accessing that in the Rio Grande valley? Well, those are largely Latina and undocumented people.

JJ: Right. And I guess I want to say two things with that, is that both it means that those folks who have lacked access continue to lack access, but also that folks have been making networks to get access…

JMP: Yes.

JJ: …even while, nominally, abortion was legal, it wasn’t for them. And so those networks exist and those people exist and we should acknowledge that that’s there.

JMP: Absolutely. Some of the silver linings of this moment have been witnessing those networks that were already in place, local direct aid and practical aid support groups.

Those are folks who, you know, give patients and people who need money to travel to care, hotels, gas, those kinds of things, along with abortion funds, making sure people can have money for their procedures, because most of the time this isn’t covered by insurance and they’re paying out of pocket. And that is very expensive. I mean, it’s not like these are cheap procedures.

So to see those networks in place and really be able to rise up in this moment is why we do the work, honestly. But it’s also tragic because they’re so beleaguered right now, they’re so overwhelmed. The need for care is so much, and they’re also human beings in their own response. And so they are functional first responders to this huge crisis with very little support of their own.

JJ: Absolutely. We are trying to pull out differently impacted groups, and one of them that is maybe not getting that much attention is young people. And I know that you’ve written about another Supreme Court ruling, Bellotti, that has a special impact here that I haven’t heard media talking about. What’s meaningful there?

JMP: So the Bellotti decision, as you said, absolutely does protect the right of minors to be able to access abortion. That is under fire at this point as well, along with a whole host of others.

When we talk about the harm that abortion bans create and where impact falls, minors who need access are really at the sort of tip of that sphere and we see that a thousand fold.

And, and I could talk about this for hours, but let me kind of draw a real fine point on it. In response to the Dobbs decision and the fallout at the state level of these abortion bans, we had the American Pediatric Association issue a statement on the harms of mandating childbirth for children.

And I pause there on purpose, because the American Pediatric Association is a non-political body. Their job is to just set standards of medical care for pediatricians across the country. And they are now in a spot where they are having to say that the stated policy goals of the conservative movement are contrary to human rights law.

This court is taking us to a very, very dark place so quickly.

JJ: So the Bellotti ruling was a—what was that about, briefly? What were the facts of that case?

JMP: Oh, sure. Absolutely. So the Bellotti decision was one of the sort of first decisions to come from Roe that said, functionally, teenagers don’t have to have their parent’s consent, you know, minors don’t have to have their parent’s consent to have an abortion, that there can be other processes involved if consent is not available.

And so that creates the pathway for what’s called judicial bypass. And now there is a real push to not only upend judicial bypass and mandate parental consent, sometimes two-parent consent.

But, for example, in the state of Texas, the Republican platform there is suggesting that if people stay on their parents’ insurance as is allowed under the Affordable Care Act until they’re 26, that their parents have to consent to a whole host of these kinds of procedures.

So this is an attack on the autonomy of young people in really disturbing ways. And you put that in line with the decision that the Supreme Court released at the end of this term, the Bruen decision on guns, and we’re functionally telling young people in this country that they have no right to feel secure in their bodies.

JJ: Final thoughts from you, Jessica, about what reporters could be doing more of or less of as they cover, as they certainly will, the question of abortion rights going forward. What would you like to see more or perhaps less of.

JMP: I would really love to see more centering of the patients and providers, not in terms of the tragedy stories, but in terms of really what it means to deny people’s access to basic healthcare as a stated policy position in this country.

And I would love to see reporters take these cases where we have a 10-year-old assault victim who has to travel across state lines to have an abortion and know that that might not even be guaranteed.

I want those stories to go back to the elected officials and get them on the record for defending these positions. They campaign off of this. They raise millions of dollars off of this. They should stand by the results of their policies.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jessica Mason Pieklo. She’s senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group. They’re online at rewirenewsgroup.com. Jessica Mason Pieklo, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JMP: My pleasure. Thank you so much.

The post “They Will Find the Outcome That They Are Looking for and Work the Law Backwards to Make It Fit.” appeared first on FAIR.

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July 18, 2022

WaPo Joined Right in Casting Doubt on 10-Year-Old’s Post-Roe Nightmare

A July 1 article in the Indianapolis Star about a 10-year-old Ohio girl seeking an abortion in Indiana sparked public outrage—and right-wing media denials.

The story of a ten-year-old child rape victim from Ohio who sought an abortion across the state line in Indiana caught fire in US media, and around the world, after President Joe Biden (7/8/22) brought it up in public remarks. Given the difficulty of defending a law and a culture that produces such a horrific situation, the right wing went into overdrive attacking the story’s veracity.

Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson (Mediaite, 7/13/22) accused Biden of “lying,” insisting the story was “not true”; a New York Post op-ed headline (7/12/22) declared it “looks like a lie”; and Fox contributor Charlie Hunt (7/12/22) opined:

The idea that you would have politicians in America trying to exploit a story like this and make up a story like this in order to advance their own sick agenda tells you they are not serious about the issue.

While Murdoch outlets like these led the way, Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler (7/9/22) jumped into the fray as well to cast doubt on the Indianapolis Star‘s reporting on the matter. Now that charges have been filed in the rape case, Kessler and the right-wing media have mud on their faces—but they refuse to apologize, or to acknowledge the misdirection their pieces caused.

‘Declined to identify’

The story was originally reported in the Star on July 1 by Shari Rudavsky and Rachel Fradette as one example of people seeking abortions in Indiana from Ohio and Kentucky. In the piece, the journalists described how an Indianapolis obstetrician/gynecologist received the 10-year-old patient as a referral from a child abuse doctor in Ohio, where the state had recently banned nearly all abortions.

The story’s “one source” happened to be the doctor who performed the abortion—and who spoke on the record.

Under the headline “A One-Source Story About a 10-Year-Old and an Abortion Goes Viral,” the Washington Post‘s Kessler wrote that “the only source cited” was the doctor: “She’s on the record, but there is no indication that the newspaper made other attempts to confirm her account.”

Kessler said the Star wouldn’t give him any more information, and the doctor “declined to identify to the Fact Checker her colleague or the city where the child was located.” Nor did Kessler’s “spot check” of Ohio child service agencies turn up any confirmation of such a case.

Why the Star or the doctor should not feel obligated to disclose sensitive and confidential information about a minor to Glenn Kessler is presumably clear to everyone besides Glenn Kessler. But it is surprising that his column made it past Washington Post editors without anyone pointing out that, given privacy considerations in cases of rape and child abuse, a lack of confirmation by “spot check” suggests essentially nothing about the credibility of the initial report—or that “single source” reporting is quite typical in journalism.

In fact, even Kessler’s own paper will publish information from a single anonymous source, depending “on the source’s reliability and the basis for the source’s information.” It’s disingenuous for Kessler to suggest that the the abortion story is problematic purely on the basis of it having a single source.

Indeed, just a few months earlier, in a factcheck (3/6/22) about a quote attributed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that had one, anonymous source, Kessler considered the credibility of both the reporter (“a well-sourced former Marine”) and the source: “The attribution was a single source, but on the surface it appears to be a good one — a senior US official ‘with direct knowledge of the conversation.’”

Those are considerations he didn’t bother to extend to the Indy Star reporters—one of whom is a 17-year veteran at the paper—or their source. Kessler did note in the Zelenskyy piece that “still, it’s just one source,” but his conclusion approvingly nodded to Zelenskyy’s press secretary’s comment that “the quote, even if not accurate, reflects the moment.” And it’s the only other column FAIR could find in the Post archives in which Kessler even takes up the issue of a story being based on a single source.

‘Pretty rare’

Protest against Ohio’s “heartbeat” law (Becker1999 via Wikimedia Commons)

Finally, Kessler noted that an abortion for a 10-year-old “is pretty rare,” since data show that in 2020, “52 people under the age of 15 received an abortion in Ohio.” In other words, a case comparable to the one reported by the Star happens, on average, every single week in Ohio. Yet Kessler takes that as evidence against the likelihood of this incident reported by a doctor being true, rather than as evidence that even if this particular case were somehow false, child rape victims in Ohio will certainly be forced on a regular basis to either carry their pregnancies to term or seek abortions in other states.

Instead, after casting doubts left and right, Kessler concluded, “This is a very difficult story to check”:

With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.

In other words, though Kessler was able to dig up no disconfirming evidence, and, as he admitted later, some agencies he “spot checked” never even got back to him, an on-the-record statement by the doctor who performed the abortion does not give the story “solid grounding”—but an arrest warrant would.

Think about that. The patient’s doctor would clearly know 1) the patient’s age, and therefore whether this was a rape case; 2) whether a fetal heartbeat was detectable, and therefore whether the abortion would have been illegal in Ohio; and 3) whether the abortion in fact took place. For the story to not check out, the doctor—who again, spoke on the record—would have to be flat-out lying.

A police source, on the other hand, would have only secondhand knowledge of the case: whether someone reported the rape, and whether the police department had, as a result, filed any charges in the case. Oh, and by the way, we know that, as reliable sources go, police rank somewhere south of five-year-olds.

Kessler’s standard ignores that fewer than a third of rapes are reported to police, and fewer than 6% result in an arrest (Washington Post, 10/6/18). It’s absurd to expect journalists to wait for charges to be filed before credibly reporting a rape, or a resulting abortion.

‘An interesting example’

Kessler’s email to Neiman Lab‘s Laura Hazard Owen (7/13/22) was perhaps even more revealing about his own biases. When asked about his “Fact Checker,” Kessler told her:

This story is an interesting example of how news can be widely shared these days. It was picked up by outlets around the world and it was based on one source— someone who was an activist in one side of the debate—without an apparent effort to confirm it. This factcheck added more context and was updated once there was a new development.

If only Kessler’s concern for single-source journalism and source “activism” extended to crime reporting, which often relies on a single (police) source, even when the crime being reported was committed by the police (see, e.g., CNN, 1/17/18)—which, unlike the case of the doctor, is a clear conflict of interest. FAIR could find no instance of Kessler expressing such a concern in any of his years of columns.

After updating his article to note that the story had been corroborated by Ohio police, Kessler wrote:

This is an interesting example of the limitations that journalists face in corroborating this type of story without evidence confirmed by law enforcement. Should Bernard have disclosed the case before the police charged a suspect? Should the Indy Star have published her account without a second source? Should other news organizations have repeated the story without doing their own reporting? Those are questions beyond the purview of the Fact Checker, but worthwhile for readers and media pundits to consider.

Despite claiming those questions to be beyond his purview, Kessler made his answers to them pretty clear in his original analysis. When readers expressed disbelief at Kessler’s inability to apologize for feeding the right-wing misdirection on the tragic story, he doubled down on Twitter (7/13/22), protesting: “Getting lots of angry emails but journalism is an accumulation of facts.”

Surely Kessler doesn’t believe that. If true, we’d hardly need journalists: just let the facts accumulate like snowdrifts on the pages of the Washington Post. But of course, journalism requires analysis (Kessler’s abortion piece is explicitly called an “analysis”!) and judgment about what stories are important and what stories are credible. That Kessler’s judgment in this case aligned him with the right-wing propaganda machine should tell both Kessler and his readers something about his own credibility.

‘Fanciful tale’

The broader problem with Kessler’s “Fact Check” is that it lent an appearance of legitimacy to right-wing efforts to discredit the story, many of which picked up his “single-source” criticism as their basis for deeming it false. (See MediaMatters.org, 7/15/22.)

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (7/13/22) couldn’t fathom why no one would divulge identifying information about a 10-year-old rape victim.

Among those outlets, Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda empire unsurprisingly went all in, including the Wall Street Journal editorial board (7/13/22), which called the case “An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm.” The editors deemed it “an unlikely story from a biased source,” a “fanciful tale” that presumably was false because “so far no one has been able to identify the girl or where she lives.”

The next day (7/14/22), the paper was forced to admit that the story was, in fact, true, though it described its previous day’s aspersions merely a matter of the board having “wondered” about the case, and noted again that the Star story had been “based on a single source and provided no other confirmation,” and that “the White House also provided no backup details.” The editors concluded:

The country needs to find a rough consensus on abortion now that it has returned to the states and the political process. One way to help is to make sure that stories about abortion, from either side of the debate, can be readily confirmed. Passions are already heated enough.

In other words, not only did the board not apologize for its unsubstantiated aspersions, the only supposed lesson it could glean from this affair is that reporters should be more reluctant to report accounts of the horrors resulting from abortion bans.

Like every single one of its right-wing brethren, the Wall Street Journal refused to acknowledge the true lesson here: that of course the extreme consequences of the right’s draconian abortion laws are happening and will continue to happen across the country, since stopping all abortions is the whole point of the laws. It’s crucial that media tell these stories, rather than raising impossible bars to keep them in the shadows.

CONTACT: 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.

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July 15, 2022

Jessica Mason Pieklo on Abortion Rights and Preston Mitchum on Reproductive Justice

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in The Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization of abortion law represented by Roe, Christian nationalists, motivated by a desire to protect school segregation and tax exemptions for Christian schools, selected abortion as a way to united conservatives across denominational barriers, by providing a “focal point for anxieties about social change.” Phyllis Schalfly wrote a whole book (How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life) about the work involved in forcing the Republican party to center abortion as a cause—which then became the longer term effort to reframe “religious liberty” as exemption from law. The names Paul “I don’t want everybody to vote” Weyrich and Bob Jones Sr.—who called segregation “God’s established order”—may also mean something to you.

CounterSpin220715MasonPieklo.mp3

(photo: Austen Risolvato/Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group)

While we trace the roots—which disabuses us of the notion that this specious ‘pro-life’ political stance is socially organic—we need to also be looking for the branches: the other obvious, growing harms to human rights and liberties that are encouraged and fully intended by this ruling. The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross reported the, as of last summer, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as rightwing ideologues “engaging in a shock and awe campaign against abortion rights as part of a large and deliberate attack on basic rights that also includes a wave of voter suppression laws and attacks on LGBTQ people.” It’s important to see that, as Katherine Stewart writes, the Dobbs decision “marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.”

In the face of this, those who believe in reproductive freedom will need better public arguments than what liberal media have tended to offer: that abortion is a horrible thing that should really never happen, but that nevertheless should be legal. There’s a hole in the middle of corporate mediaspeak on abortion, where we could be saying, as Katha Pollitt put it in her book PRO: that abortion is an “essential option” for all people, not just those in “dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations”—and that access to abortion “benefits society as a whole.”

We’re going to make a start on the many, multi-level, multi-angle, post-Roe conversations we need to be having with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, who has been reporting reproductive rights for many years now.

CounterSpin220715Mitchum.mp3

(photo: Victoria Pickering)

And we’ll also hear a bit of a conversation we had last May—when we knew the Court had Roe in its sights—with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at the group URGE, Unite For Reproductive & Gender Equity. We talked with him about putting Roe—and court rulings in general —in a context of what else needs, and has always needed, to happen to make reproductive justice real.

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 14, 2022

‘Whether You’re on the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Depend on How Many People You Give Your Phone Number to’ – CounterSpin interview with Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg on John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court

Janine Jackson revisited CounterSpin‘s July 2005 interview with Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg about John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court for the July 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220708 – fair.org

Politico (6/25/22) lamented that Roberts’ “middle of the road” effort to allow states to ban abortions after 15 weeks failed to sway his ultra-conservative colleagues.

Janine Jackson: “The Lonely Chief: How John Roberts Lost Control of the Court.” That was the plaintive headline of Politico’s June 25 report explaining that Roberts, along with his “middle of the road” approach on abortion, would likely be a casualty of the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling.

In July of 2005, on the occasion of Roberts’ nomination to the court, CounterSpin host Steve Rendall and I spoke with journalist Adele Stan and with People for the American Way’s Elliot Mincberg about what was known then about Roberts’ record and what he might mean for the court. We’re going to start with my introduction.

***

JJ: Many in the news media seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the news that George Bush was nominating conservative Washington insider John Roberts to the Supreme Court. And not just the folks you’d expect, like Brit Hume at Fox News, who shared a chuckle with congressional correspondent Brian Wilson and White House reporter Carl Cameron when he noted that Bush had named a white male “just like all of us.”

Well, even while admitting that Roberts’ record is sketchy on some issues, many mainstream reporters seem to emphasize the reassurance that he is not a right wing trench dweller like some others who were thought to be on Bush’s short list of prospective nominees.

The Times‘ Linda Greenhouse emphasized “no flame-throwing articles or speeches, no judicial opinions that threaten established precedent, no visible hard edges.”

New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse assured readers that Roberts was “someone deeply anchored in the trajectory of modern constitutional law.” That’s as opposed to “someone who felt himself on the sidelines throwing brickbats, or who felt called to a mission to change the status quo.”

Our guests think there’s more to the story, and point to some troubling signs in Roberts’ record that warrant serious scrutiny.

We’re joined now by telephone by Elliot Mincberg, the legal director of People for the American Way, and by journalist Adele Stan, author of the article “Meet John Roberts” for The American Prospect Online (7/20/05). Welcome to CounterSpin, both of you.

Elliot Mincberg: Pleasure to be here.

Adele Stan: Good to be here.

JJ: Well, Elliot Mincberg, let me start with you. In that July 20 New York Times piece, Linda Greenhouse emphasized “no flame-throwing articles or speeches, no judicial opinions that threaten established precedent, no visible hard edges.”

There have been some exceptions, and of course the story is still growing, but I wonder what your general reaction is to this first wave of response, which seems to be kind of, “Phew. What a relief. He’s not so bad.”

EM: I think it does underemphasize the very serious concerns that have been raised. Roberts is known well to reporters who cover the Supreme Court as an excellent advocate, someone who makes his legal points well, but if you look carefully at his record, there are a number of very troubling concerns.

Probably the two that top the list are his participation as the top ranking political deputy in the Solicitor General’s office in a case during the Bush One administration that didn’t really even concern Roe v. Wade, where he wrote in the brief that Roe v. Wade is wrong and should be overturned. I think that’s a serious, serious subject of concern.

Second, as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, there was a case before the court that had to do with the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act as applied to a development in California. The three judges who heard the case originally agreed that it should apply. All nine judges on the circuit were asked to reconsider. Seven of the nine of them agreed not to reconsider it, including some very conservative Republican appointees.

Roberts was one of the only two who said, “Let’s take another look at that,” and strongly suggested he had serious doubts about the ability of Congress to pass that kind of law. And that kind of legal philosophy could seriously endanger not just the environment, but the ability of Congress to pass all sorts of laws protecting the environment, health, safety and civil rights.

So those two aspects of his record alone raised very serious concern.

Steve Rendall: Adele Stan, Elliot Mincberg just mentioned John Roberts’ record on Roe v. Wade. In your American Prospect Online piece “Meet John Roberts” you wrote about that, and you further elaborated with some information that might give us an even greater insight into John Roberts’ views on privacy and reproductive rights.

George W. Bush and nominee John Roberts (Public domain)

AS: Well, I mean, of course I mentioned that in the piece and not with the sage wisdom of Elliot because I am not a lawyer or a legal expert, but of course his writings that pulled in Roe v. Wade in his assertion that it should be overturned in a case that had nothing to do directly with Roe v. Wade did, you know, set up a red flag for me.

But at least as troubling to me is the amicus brief he filed on behalf of the government in support of the group Operation Rescue, which those of us in the trench wars of the 80’s and 90’s to, you know, preserve a woman’s right to choose know as a very kind of frightening foe.

And this was not a case in which the government truly had a dog in the fight, which is not to say that the government doesn’t often file amicus briefs, but given the controversial nature of this group, it just seems to me that it had to have been an act of someone’s conscience, you know, to prompt them to file this.

JJ: Well, that involvement in the Operation Rescue case certainly has not been appearing in the context of every article in which Roberts’ view on Roe v. Wade has been mentioned, as that would sort of complicate that story a little bit, don’t you think?

AS: I would certainly think it should, but what you do hear from Roberts’ proponents is that, well, he’s a good lawyer and he knows how to represent his clients. And he has represented clients of different, you know, views. And so he was just doing his job on behalf of the Bush One administration when he, you know, filed these briefs on behalf of his client, you know, the Bush administration, the US government.

I would assert that, you know, we’re hearing a lot of things about his character being quite sterling, and I don’t have any reason to doubt that, you know, but people just talk about what a great guy he is and he’s a man of integrity, and I find it very difficult that someone of that level of integrity would embrace something that fundamental to one’s personal philosophy if he disagreed with it.

SR: Well, something that keeps coming up in this coverage is the idea of “borking,” the possibility that Roberts or any other nominee might be borked. Elliot Mincberg, what do you make of the way the history of Bork’s rejection is being presented here?

EM: Well, I think it’s clearly a revisionist history because what happened with Robert Bork is just what should have happened. His views, his philosophy, his record was examined extremely carefully, and then his hearings, in a lot of ways, became almost a nationwide seminar on the constitution: What it does mean, what it should mean and what, unfortunately, Robert Bork wanted it to mean, which would’ve taken away constitutional rights of every American.

In that sense it’s become an undeserved pejorative, but we think that that kind of work is critical on every nominee, even more so on someone like Roberts who has such a very short record on the Court of Appeals.

AS: Which is said to be pretty partial, that short record, to the executive branch, and we’re in a situation now where so much power is being consolidated into the executive branch, and power is being drawn or [there are] attempts to draw powers away from the judicial branch. And the House of Representatives has passed legislation that’s clearly unconstitutional that would prohibit the federal courts from striking the words “Under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

They’re basically prescribing what courts can and cannot act on. When you combine a mind like Roberts with that trend that is already afoot, that’s what I find rather frightening.

JJ: Well, we’re talking about media’s kind of short memory or distorted memory and how that’s affecting the coverage of this Roberts story. Some other media phenomena, media wisdom has been pretty revealing on this.

There’s an ABC online site called The Note. It’s a kind of a place where media elites talk to themselves. And we found this comment from there pretty revealing:

“The factor we think most likely,” they say on The Note, “to ensure John Roberts’ confirmation: that the Washington establishment, and the media establishment, know him and like him. Do not underestimate how hard it will be for Democrats to tar a potential nominee who has given working Washington journalists his cell phone number, and who is generally seen as a mensch.”

Not quite sure what you can do with that, but let’s get your response, Elliot Mincberg, to this notion of…

ABC‘s The Note (7/20/05) adored “smart, nice, smooth, experienced, genial” Roberts and his nomination process, making little mention of Roberts’ politics: “If someone wants to argue that this was not THE best handled and well-researched process ever for a SCOTUS nominee, please tell us what you would suggest tops it.”

EM: I have seen the same thing and I find it very disturbing to tell you the truth, because whether you’re on the Supreme Court shouldn’t depend on how many people you give your phone number to, but what your philosophy as a judge will be and what your effect will be on the rights of the American people.

And I’m frankly very hopeful as time goes on and as we do the search and examination we need to do that people will rise above that and look at his record and whether he’s willing to answer critical questions before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

JJ: Your reaction then, Adele Stan, to this media wisdom on Roberts.

AS: Well, I mean, you know, I think that it is conventional wisdom and I think that it is—I mean, what they’re talking about is powerful in the Washington establishment. It is a clubby place, but you know, power is often just the perception of power. And if Democrats accede to that, “Oh my gosh, we can’t go against this guy because everybody likes him, especially the press, and then the press will jump all over us.”

Well, I mean then that just makes it happen. But if they put up some resistance, that becomes an interesting story. And I think it’s a story that can be, you know, that can be won and that can be fought well. I mean, a new poll just released today, I believe an AP poll, said most Americans want to know what this guy’s opinions on abortion are and they think that that should be discussed.

So, I think it’s one of these things where if you can just break out of the box, it could be a whole different ball game.

SR: Well, besides the arrogance and the sort of elitism of The Note’s message here, I’d like to zero in on one part of the passage where The Note seems to suggest that any sort of criticism by the Democrats would be a “tarring” of the nominee.

AS: Well, yeah, that is really troubling and see, and this is something—well, because that is what the right will do, is accuse the Dems of doing—and it’s especially insulating, and I’ve gotten already a lot of hate mail on asserting this, and I assert this as a Roman Catholic, it is insulating that he is a Roman Catholic, because the charge of anti-Catholicism is one that is often trotted out when you challenge someone on the right who is a Catholic and you challenge them on legitimate ideological grounds, it somehow becomes a challenge of their religion.

And there are people on the right who will do that. And I really think it’s important that the Catholic senators take the lead on this for just that reason.

JJ: So you, you seem to be saying that, although the Washington Post is saying Democrats should resign themselves to the fact that they can’t stop it, you think there’s still room for intervention here and something could change.

AS: I think that’s true. I think that, you know, every time you accept the focus groups and just the conventional wisdom, you just resign yourself to the predictable and the predictable becomes more predictable.

Things are very uncertain and unstable right now. And that can be played to an advantage. And I think that the American people are really beginning to get sick of all of this. And they just would like some reasonable choices, and I think that it would behoove Democrats, you know, to err on the side of reason and not defeatism.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Adele Stan. You can read her article “Meet John Roberts” at The American Prospect’s online site, prospect.org. She also authors the blog addiestan.com: A breakaway republic of the mind.

We also spoke with Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way. You can find them on the web at pfaw.org.

***

JJ: That was Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg speaking with me and Steve Rendall back in July of 2005, 17 years ago, yet it all feels so fresh.

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July 13, 2022

‘It Would Force the Government to Actually Prove Espionage, not Whistleblowing’ – CounterSpin interview with Chip Gibbons on why Assange matters

Janine Jackson interviewed Chip Gibbons about the latest updates in the Julian Assange case for the July 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220708 – fair.org

Julian Assange (cc photo: Espen Moe)

Janine Jackson: If you’ve been following the case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whose revelations about US wars and war crimes outlets like the New York Times published to great acclaim, you know that you haven’t been following it in, for example, The New York Times.

Major US outlets’ interest in Assange’s prosecution is hard to detect, as if they had no stake in a case which is not, at bottom, only about whether individuals can leak classified information, but whether journalists can publish that information at all. And it’s as if their readers had no stake in that decision either.

Joining us now with the latest is researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director of the group Defending Rights and Dissent. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: It’s always a privilege to be on your program. It is one of the most informative programs we have, and unfortunately, the number of quality hard-hitting journalistic programs that cover these issues dwindles sort of more and more every year. So you are a lifesaver for our republic.

JJ: Thank you. Thank you very much. And this really is a case where it’s shocking, not just the way that media are not giving it the attention that it might deserve, but in particular the way that journalists who are themselves implicated; it affects them, you know?

So the lack of interest or the kind of evident desire to sort of box off Julian Assange as not our kind is deeply disturbing. But I’ve asked you here to give us kind of the latest on the case. What’s going on?

CG: I’ll just note that for some of the appellate hearings in the UK, I was the credentialed correspondent for Jacobin. So I was there covering it. I joined kind of late.

But [UK Home Secretary] Priti Patel has agreed to sign an extradition request for Julian Assange. You had a district level trial of sorts—hearing, whatever you wanna call it in the UK—where the British Crown Prosecution Service, at cost to the UK taxpayer, represented the US Department of Justice on their extradition request. And then Assange, not paid for by the British taxpayer, not backed by the Department of Justice, obviously, put up his own defense as to why he should not have been extradited.

And they raised all of the obvious issues: Press freedoms, the political questions exception to extradition, and they had big experts come in like Daniel Ellsberg, Carey Shenkman, perhaps the biggest expert on the Espionage Act in the country, and the judge rejected all of those press freedom claims, but decided that if Julian Assange was extradited to the US, it would be oppressive given his mental health.

And then the US came in and offered all of these assurances. Particular prison policies loomed very heavily in the decision. So the US gave assurances that had so many holes in them you could drive your car through and not just a car, a big truck. You could drive a big truck through these holes.

But on top of that, even in the best case scenario assurances they were offering, they were talking about Julian Assange won’t be in solitary confinement, he’ll just be in administrative segregation, held for I think 22 hours a day at Alexandria Detention Center, a jail we’re very familiar with because Chelsea Manning has been in there. Jeffrey Sterling has been in there. Daniel Hale has been in there.

And the description they gave under the United Nations Minimum Standards for Treatment of Prisoners, the Mandela Rules, Nelson Mandela Rules, constituted cruel degrading treatment and possibly torture.

So even the best case assurance, you know, they were reassuring the UK they were going to torture him and a higher court vacated the lower court’s decision because they found the US so persuasive. The Supreme Court refused to hear it and then it was entered in this process where it went to Priti Patel, who’s the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom.

It’s all political, right? But it was more openly political as opposed to this sort of legal cloak of a political persecution. And, you know, we could make these kinds of political arguments again.

And Defending Rights, in a sense, has a very narrow mission. We’re a US-based group focused on the Bill of Rights in the US, but because of the implications of this, you know, we did something extraordinary for us. We submitted a letter to the Home Secretary outlining the case against extradition based on our twelve years of monitoring this case.

We talked about how the NSA had put him in the manhunting database and encouraged countries to bring criminal charges against him. We talked about how the CIA had WikiLeaks declared a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” a phrase they invented just to persecute WikiLeaks. And, you know, we outlined all of that.

So now she’s ruled he can be extradited. The UK government has said they would like to get him to the US in six months. That’s very unlikely to happen because now the Assange legal team can appeal on the issues around press freedom the original judge ruled against. So you’re sort of restarting the appeals process if the courts agree to hear them.

And then even after that, you have a final court of last resort in the European Court of Human Rights, which is not part of the EU. I’m sure everyone’s thinking Brexit, how can that happen? It’s actually part of the Council of Europe. There’s apparently a lot of European supergovernmental organizations, more than I, as an American ever, ever knew of. And it’s interesting because obviously it’s independent, but the Council of Europe has a commissioner of human rights who wrote Priti Patel asking them not to extradite Assange because of the press freedom claims.

Nils Melzer (Medium, 6/26/19): “Once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course.”

Which is, you know, United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, every international human rights group, every US civil liberties and press freedom group, they’ve all made this case.

So it’s not surprising that the Council of Europe behaves more like the UN than it does the US Department of Justice and the sort of British security establishment.

One interesting thing that’s happening in Congress right now that you and I want to discuss is that Representative Rashida Tlaib has introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, Amendment 617, which would seriously amend the Espionage Act in a really comprehensive manner we’ve not seen before from other proposals, because it would so limit the scope of the Espionage Act so that it couldn’t apply to members of the general public with some specific exceptions, which would preclude prosecuting a publisher or journalist.

And also, and this is a thing that gets really controversial and really riles people up, but is what I’ve wrote the most on, it also would give some due process protections to the Edward Snowdens, to the Chelsea Mannings and the Daniel Ellsbergs of the world by forcing the government to have to prove specific intent to harm national security.

Right now, the language is “specific intent” or “reason to believe,” and that sounds like a high burden, but what they say, they say, “Oh, this was classified, and you know, you signed a statement that said if you ever released classified information, the sky will fall. And then you released it. You had reason to believe.” And then you’re barred from talking about what you released and why you released it.

So to force them to prove that specific intent, it would also give someone indicted under the Espionage Act sections that apply here the right to testify about the purpose of their disclosures.

Daniel Ellsburg famously was asked why did he release the Pentagon papers, and the judge shut him down and did not allow him to answer. And more recently with cases like drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, before the trial even begins, the prosecutor files a pretrial motion asking that Daniel Hale be blocked from mentioning, his words, not mine, his “good motives,” and the judge granted it. So Daniel Hale, if he had gone to trial, could not have mentioned his good motives.

So this is a really, I mean, it’s a very wonky editing of US criminal procedure in one particular criminal statute. And I think people’s eyes rightfully glaze over with that…

JJ: But I think people can see the purpose of that. I think you’ve made clear what the difference would be if that information were allowed to be included.

CG: Yeah, it’s a game changer, right? Because the government actually has to prove the whistleblower not just released the information, but did so intending to harm the US. I would remind people that Chelsea Manning, in her court martial, was charged with both Espionage Act violations and aiding the enemy, and military court marshals are not known for being very respectful of due process.

The military judge found her not guilty of aiding the enemy because there was a higher intent provision and the government had to prove so much more. So the government would both have to prove actual espionage, this person wants to harm the country, and also they’d have to let them testify about why they did it.

It’s not a perfect solution to prevent these prosecutions, but it would remove the immense procedural hurdles that rob a whistleblower of any basic constitutional due process rights when charged with the Espionage Act, and force the government to actually prove espionage, not whistleblowing.

JJ: All right then, we’re going to end it there, but just for now. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director of the group Defending Rights and Dissent, and you can follow their work online at rightsanddissent.org. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much as ever for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

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July 12, 2022

National Polls, State Ballots Measure Different ‘Public Opinions’

The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn (6/3/22) argues that voters don’t really mean what they tell pollsters about guns.

Nate Cohn, who covers politics and polling for the New York Times, wrote an article last month (6/3/22) comparing the results of national polls with actual ballot measures in states. His major theme was that national polls may be unreliable when they show high levels of support for various policies. The reason: When those same policies are voted on at the state level, they uniformly perform worse than what the national polls show.

He suggested to supporters of gun control in particular: “Their problem could also be the voters, not just politicians or special interests.”

While it’s always prudent to be skeptical of polls in general, I believe Cohn goes too far in dismissing the utility of national polls, and implying that the votes on state initiatives and referendums are a better indicator of what the public wants.

Background checks

Cohn’s initial focus was on guns. He noted that widespread public support for background checks, as revealed by national polls, was not reflected in state balloting on the same issue:

When voters in four Democratic-leaning states got the opportunity to enact expanded gun or ammunition background checks into law, the overwhelming support suggested by national surveys was nowhere to be found. Instead, the initiative and referendum results in Maine, Washington, Nevada and California were nearly identical to those of the 2016 presidential election, all the way down to the result of individual counties.

A bit later in the article, he asserted:

Hillary Clinton fared better at the ballot box than expanded background checks in the same states, most on the same day among the same voters.

As it turns out, Cohn appears to be completely wrong in the latter statement, and partially wrong in the previous one.

Gun questions vs. Hillary Clinton

Here are the results of the 2016 ballot questions in Washington, California, Nevada and Maine (all dealing with gun or—in the case of California—ammunition background checks), compared to the 2016 presidential election results in Washington, California, Nevada and Maine:

In no state did the gun measures fare worse than Hillary Clinton. It is true that in three of the states—California, Nevada and Maine—Clinton’s vote total was similar to (though slightly lower than) the level of gun measure support. In Washington, the gun measure outperformed Clinton by 16.9 percentage points.

Cohn compounded his apparently faulty observations by concluding:

The possibility that one of the most popular policies in polling could run behind Mrs. Clinton at the ballot box raises important questions about the utility of issue polling, which asks voters whether they support or oppose certain policies. While these questions probably tell us something about public opinion, it may tell us quite a bit less about the political landscape than many assume.

Well, as we saw, the gun measures did not run behind Clinton at the ballot box. But do the polls tell us “quite a bit less about the political landscape than many assume”?

National polls vs. state ballots

The New York Times graphic (6/3/22) compared state results “expected” from national surveys to actual support for ballot measures on gun-related background checks—but not with the presidential results from these states, which would have exposed the error in Nate Cohn’s claim that “Hillary Clinton fared better at the ballot box than expanded background checks in the same states.”

For evidence on this point, Cohn referred to a model developed by two academic researchers, professors Christopher Warsaw of Georgetown University and Devin Caughey of MIT, which showed that the gun-related ballot measures in each state all received lower support than what national polls would predict.

In California (in 2016), the model predicted a 91% majority, while just 63% voted for the measure. The comparable figures for the other states: Washington (2014*: 81% projected, 59% received), Nevada (2016: 86%, 50%), Maine (2016: 83%, 48%).

Those projected levels of “expected support” for the state ballots, ranging from 81% to 91%, seem implausibly high—not necessarily because of a faulty model, but because the national polls that provided the input to the model were probably implausible themselves.

That’s because, as I’ve noted previously (FAIR.org, 2/11/22, 5/10/22), pollsters, by the use of forced choice questions and by failing to measure intensity, can exaggerate how many people are engaged enough to have a meaningful opinion. Answers from respondents who don’t really care much about an issue are combined with answers from more committed respondents, giving the illusion of more engagement—and often more support for a policy—than actually exists. Most polls fit that description, and if used in the model could lead to inflated results for expected support.

Cohn acknowledged this possibility:

Those polls have shortcomings of their own. Many voters hold relatively weak views about specific policy items. They may be especially likely to say they “support” policies in a survey, where “acquiescence bias” can lead respondents to agree with what’s being asked of them. Those attitudes might shift quickly once an issue receives sustained political attention.

He also acknowledged that there are many other reasons why national polls may show a much more favorable public opinion than what state ballot votes produce:

It would be wrong to say that the results [discrepancies between ballot measures and national polls] simply prove the polls “wrong,” strictly speaking. Initiative and referendum results are not a perfect or simple measure of public opinion. The text of the initiatives is different and more complex than a simple national poll question. Some voters who may support a proposal in the abstract may ultimately come to oppose its detail. The context is very different as well. The vote follows a referendum campaign that can shift public opinion.

And the act of voting to enact an initiative into law carries far more responsibility and consequence than a carefree response on a survey. When in doubt, many voters may adopt a lowercase “c” conservative position in the ballot box.

All together, it is no surprise that initiatives and referendums tend to underperform their support in the polls [emphasis added].

And yet—and here is where his argument went off the rails—he still insisted that there may be something “wrong” about the national polls. When tested by ballot measures, “the overwhelming support suggested by national surveys was nowhere to be found.”

Initially, he argued that “guns are just different.” The difference between national polls and gun control referendum results, he wrote, “is an order of magnitude larger than on other issues.”

But later he wrote that “voter identification requirements and parental notification for abortion also receive overwhelming support in the polls,” and “these initiatives have underperformed at the ballot box by nearly as much as background checks.” The order of magnitude apparently disappeared.

Evaporating majorities

Looking more broadly, Cohn viewed the discrepancies between ballot measures and national polls as a general phenomenon: that whenever a large majority appears to exist, it is prone to evaporate during a campaign or during subsequent public debate. One example: “Healthcare reform started out as popular, until the Affordable Care Act was actually proposed and debated.”

Here Cohn has abandoned altogether his focus on ballot measures vs. national polls, and on guns as an outlier. Instead, he sees a common pattern where opinion—solely as measured by national polls—shifts significantly as public debate occurs.

Despite all his compelling arguments why one should not expect ballot measures to reflect national polls, Cohn concluded his article by claiming that “a broad challenge to issue voting” remains, and that it is

more inconvenient for progressives than conservatives…. If the public’s operational liberalism functions only in an interview with a pollster, not at the ballot box, it may not count for much.

National polls that differentiate opinion from non-opinion, and anchored opinion from top-of-mind opinion, are important sources of what the public thinks. They “count” by providing a guide to elected representatives about what the public wants, and more broadly by demonstrating how well and when the government responds to the will of the public.

Cohn has not shown that such polls “don’t count for much.” What he has shown is that ballot votes and national polls typically measure opinion in different ways, among different groups of citizens, at different times in the development of public debate. And, as he acknowledged at one point, “it is no surprise” that they diverge.

Both sets of results tell us much about the public and about the state of American democracy.

*In his initial reference to Washington state, Cohn mentioned the 2016 ballot measure dealing with guns, because he could compare Clinton’s support with the ballot results. But in his second mention of a Washington ballot measure on guns, he referenced the 2014 results. Why he switched to 2014 is not clear.

ACTION ALERT: You can report errors in New York Times news coverage at nytnews@nytimes.com (Twitter: @UpshotNYT). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Featured image: Gun show, Shelby, North Carolina (cc photo: Brittany Randolph).

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July 11, 2022

Turning a San Francisco Recall Into Rout for Police Reform

San Francisco voted on June 7 to recall its district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a reformer who had challenged the traditional “lock ’em up” policies of big-city prosecutors. The margin was initially reported as a lopsided 61%–39% landslide, in what major news media across the country reported as a blow to progressive Democrats.

As New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller, in an article published the day after the election (6/8/22), put it, under a headline declaring “Voters in San Francisco Topple the City’s Progressive District Attorney, Chesa Boudin”:

Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday put an end to one of the country’s most pioneering experiments in criminal justice reform, ousting a district attorney who eliminated cash bail, vowed to hold police accountable and worked to reduce the number of people sent to prison.

Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney, was removed after two and a half years in office, according to the Associated Press, in a vote that is set to reverberate through Democratic politics nationwide as the party fine-tunes its messaging on crime before midterm elections that threaten to strip Democratic control over Congress.

‘Decisively to the right’

Yahoo (6/8/22): “Statistics failed to persuade voters who routinely had to step over the broken glass of car windows, human excrement and drug paraphernalia.”

The Times wasn’t alone in portraying San Francisco’s successful DA recall as a watershed moment for the United States, with progressive voters allegedly turning against police and prosecutor reforms in favor of “tough on crime” policies.

Yahoo News White House correspondent Alexander Nazaryan (6/8/22) termed the recall a “decisive” defeat, predicting that it was “sure to reverberate nationwide.” Nazaryan wrote that the recall election result represented

a reprise of February’s successful effort by San Franciscans to recall three school board members who were seen as engaging in progressive cultural issues while doing little to open schools that had been closed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Citing that earlier recall, as well as the latest LA Democratic mayoral primary that sent billionaire realtor Rick Caruso, a former Republican, into a runoff against progressive Rep. Karen Bass, he wrote, “In both cases, Left Coast voters moved decisively to the right.” He then quoted (without naming him) Democratic strategist Garry South, who has also represented the real estate and telecom industries: “People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood. It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”

Wait a minute, though. District attorneys aren’t responsible for dealing with homelessness, nor do they have anything to do with gasoline prices! Does this even qualify as political analysis?

Jumping the gun

Yahoo News columnist Rick Newman (6/8/22) said ex-Republican billionaire Rick Caruso’s “suprisingly strong showing” in the LA mayoral primary was an “ominous” sign for Democrats. Caruso actually came in second to progressive Karen Bass by a slightly larger margin than predicted by polling.

Like many news organizations ready to find meaning in Boudin’s recall, the New York Times and Yahoo News were so excited by the result they jumped the gun in saying that he had suffered a rout. Once all the absentee and mail-in ballots were counted a few days later, Boudin had actually lost not by a 22-point margin but by a less overwhelming 10 percentage points—a 55%–45% vote.

Since Boudin only won election in 2019 in a 50.8%–49.2% runoff, he hadn’t actually lost that much support over his almost three years in office.

Yahoo‘s Nazaryan was also caught flat-footed by reaching his “progressives are getting whupped” conclusion too early in the LA mayoral primary vote count. His report had ex-Republican Caruso leading Bass by 5 percentage points on the evening of the voting, but by Friday, when nearly all the mail-in votes had been tallied, the LA Times (6/17/22) was reporting that lead had flipped, the election had flipped, with Bass, running on a police-reform platform, enjoying a definitive lead of 6 percentage points. (Bass, whose final lead was 7 points, will face Caruso in a November runoff.) Other progressives running for LA’s city council also did well as mail-in ballots poured in following primary day.

Massive financing

The really dramatic margin in the Boudin recall was in the money shoveled into the “Yes” vote. Neither the New York Times nor Yahoo—nor, indeed, most news reports on the Boudin recall—even mentioned the massive financing behind the recall effort.

They should have. Since money and media are so important—and so corrupting—in US elections, it’s important for the public to know who’s behind such campaigns.

The San Francisco Chronicle did a creditable job of covering the recall campaign, endorsed Boudin in an editorial (4/23/22) and reported less apocalyptically on the results than leading national news media. The hometown paper (6/7/22) reported that recall supporters—primarily wealthy donors from real estate and venture capitalist companies, as well as wealthy doctors and lawyers—raised and spent a stunning $7.2 million to oust Boudin. It also noted that the bundlers who donated a whopping $4.7 million of that total showed an average contribution of $80,000. Boudin’s campaign to defeat the recall raised only $3.3 million, most of that reportedly coming from small donors.

Remarkably, most news articles, including the Times and Yahoo News, ignored the fact that on the same Election Day, two neighboring California counties—Alameda and Contra Costa—either elected or re-elected progressive reform DAs, while a progressive candidate won the Democratic nomination for state attorney general (KQED, 6/7/22). Altogether, the day hardly constituted a wave of anti–justice reform voting (CounterSpin, 6/17/22).

Contradictory evidence

Perhaps national news organizations felt that it was okay to focus on the Boudin recall because of his celebrity/notoriety—based on being the child Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two Weather Underground members who were convicted of murder for participating in a lethally botched Brinks robbery in 1981. Chesa Boudin, born in 1980, was raised by two Weather Underground founders, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

But even if that could justify their focus, publications should have provided some contradictory evidence to their shaky theory of progressives losing their passion for criminal justice reform. One major counterexample is the big re-election win in 2021 by Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner, a former public defender and defense attorney, and perhaps an even more radical reformer than Boudin.

Philadelphia Inquirer (5/20/21): A National Academy of the Sciences panel “found that a so-called tough-on-crime approach doesn’t significantly lower gun violence rates.”

While Pennsylvania doesn’t have recall votes, Krasner was challenged both in the spring Democratic primary and in the November general election by former assistant DAs he had fired in a big clean-out of hard-line prosecutors hired by his predecessors. According to Ballotpedia (which gives final results), he trounced his primary opponent, former Assistant DA Carlos Vega, winning by a 65/35% margin. Vega was heavily funded by big donors, with Philadelphia’s traditionally powerful police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, his biggest donor,

Krasner then went on last November to defeat Republican candidate and former Assistant DA Chuck Peruto, also a big recipient of FOP money and support, winning by 69/31%. That’s not that much lower than his 75% blowout win in his first election to DA, and surely doesn’t suggest that Democratic voters and independents are souring on progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia.

Even the Philadelphia Inquirer (5/20/21), which had been hard on Krasner through his first term and this past election season, had to admit after his re-election that there was little reason to believe that he was responsible for the rise in gun violence:

Philadelphia’s rise in shootings and homicides began in 2015, three years before Krasner took office. And while gun violence has indeed skyrocketed during the pandemic, that’s happened across the country and Philadelphia’s increase hasn’t been worse than other cities.

As the Inquirer article put it, “One reason the anti-Krasner argument didn’t stick may be that there’s little evidence to back it up.”

‘Bogus backlash’

Radley Balko (Washington Post, 6/14/21): “Violent crime in [San Francisco] was down in 2020. Overall crime was down 25 percent from 2019.”
Amid all the drivel published about the purported significance of a multi-million-dollar recall campaign taking out Boudin, kudos to the Washington Post for running a column by cop-turned-journalist Radley Balko (6/14/22), which noted that many of the claims made against Boudin were untrue:

Ultimately, the case against Boudin rests on two assumptions: that crime in the city has exploded and that Boudin isn’t charging people at the rate his predecessors did. And neither of those assumptions is true. There’s also little evidence that progressive policies such as ending cash bail or refusing to charge low-level offenses have anything to do with the spike in violence nationwide. The 2020 figures are expected to show a homicide surge coast to coast, in rural areas and urban areas, in jurisdictions with both reform-minded radicals and law-and-order stalwarts in the DA’s chair.

Balko’s data were readily available. Why don’t editors make political reporters do their research?

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