CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them.
It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do—as producers and as listeners—is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation.
Reporting on political killings in Pakistan, the Guardian (11/27/24) makes clear who is accused of violence and who the victims are said to be.
Islamabad was roiled by a days-long protest in the last week of November. Supporters of political prisoner and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and of his Pakistan Movement for Justice party, marched into the city, demanding Khan’s release and the resignation of the military-backed Sharif government of Shehbaz Sharif.
Pakistan’s political crisis has Washington’s fingerprints all over it. However, readers of the New York Times and the Washington Post would be forgiven if they thought the protests were a purely domestic issue. Missing from the protest coverage in leading US papers was the ongoing support the Pakistani government has received from the Biden administration, continuing a pattern of obscuring US actions and interests in Pakistani political affairs.
Khan is a former celebrity cricketer who turned to politics in the 1990s. The PTI (as the party is known by its Urdu acronym) grew in power, culminating in Khan’s 2018 election as prime minister on a platform of change and anti-corruption (BBC, 7/26/18). Since August 2023, he has been continuously locked up on over 180 charges levied by the current Pakistani government (Al Jazeera, 10/24/24), accused of crimes ranging from unlawful marriage to treason (New York Times, 7/13/24).
As protesters descended upon Islamabad’s Democracy Chowk, a public square often used for political rallies, Pakistani security forces unleashed brutal repression on the movement (BBC, 11/26/24). Some protesters were shot with live ammunition, with one doctor telling BBC Urdu (11/29/24) “he had never done so many surgeries for gunshot wounds in a single night.” A man’s prayers were interrupted when paramilitary forces pushed him off a three-story stack of shipping containers (BBC, 11/27/24).
The Guardian (11/27/24) witnessed “at least five patients with bullet wounds in one hospital,” and reported that, per anonymous officials, army and paramilitary forces shot and killed 17 protesters. Independent Urdu (11/30/24) spoke to doctors and officials at two Islamabad hospitals, where over 100 protesters with gunshot wounds were admitted. Geo Fact Check (11/30/24) and Al Jazeera (12/4/24) have independently confirmed some of the deaths.
A source within the Pakistan Army later exposed to Drop Site (12/10/24) that the crackdown was premeditated by the government, and included orders to fire at a deliberately disoriented crowd.
Running cover
The New York Times (11/26/24) framed violence as a “clash” between protesters and police, and depicted the shooting of demonstrators as an effort “to defend government buildings with gunfire if needed.”
To the New York Times, the journalistic responsibility to investigate the repression of protesters by a US-supported regime went only as far as reprinting government denials. The first story (11/26/24), published 13 hours after the government crackdown, initially made no mention of murdered protesters, before later being stealth-edited to reflect that “hospital officials told local news media that at least four civilians had died from bullet wounds.” (The original version is archived here.) The possibility of government violence was framed as a defensive necessity: “Soldiers were ordered to defend government buildings with gunfire if needed,” the subhead read.
The next story (11/27/24) used similarly passive, obfuscatory language, writing that local media reported “four civilians were killed by gunfire in the unrest.” Further down, the Times reported that PTI “accused security forces of killing dozens of protesters, a claim that could not be independently verified and was repeatedly denied by officials.”
In neither story did the Times attribute the bullets to any actor; meanwhile, it did reprint comment from Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar and Islamabad top cop Ali Nasir Rizvi, in addition to twice citing unnamed “officials,” all of whom claimed that security forces did not shoot protesters.
A third Times report (11/27/24) on the protests said that PTI “claimed that several of its workers were killed or injured during the protest…by the authorities,” without mentioning that protesters had in fact died; it quickly followed up that the Information Minister Tarar denied officers shot at protesters. Besides that brief mention, the story bizarrely focused on the inconvenience that protests have created for residents of Islamabad.
The headline of Washington Post’s only story (11/27/24) on the affair mentions “violent clashes,” but the outlet failed to report that anyone had died, much less been killed by security forces. Whenever “alleged” abuses were mentioned in the story, they were followed with government denials.
In all, the Times and the Post responded to brutal government repression of a mass protest by relaying government denials and reporting on bullet wounds with no apparent source.
What’s perhaps more troubling is the failure of either outlet to report that the government carrying out this repression is one well-supported by the Biden administration, even over the objection of his own party’s congresspeople. The omission of Biden’s support for the ruling government, led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) is glaring, but not new.
‘All will be forgiven’
The document that has the Biden State Department telling Pakistan that “all will be forgiven in Washington” if it removed its prime minister (Intercept, 8/9/23) was not quoted by the New York Times or Washington Post.
Corporate media also did their best to obscure the circumstances of Khan’s fall from power and PTI’s recent election loss. Imran Khan lost power in 2022 in the form of a no-confidence vote orchestrated by the military establishment (Foreign Affairs, 6/16/23; Dawn, 2/15/24). That move came after a March 2022 meeting between US State Department officials and the Pakistani ambassador to the United States.
Under Khan, Pakistan had increasingly charted a foreign policy course independent from US interests (Nation, 7/5/21; BBC, 6/21/21). The Biden administration’s appetite for Khan’s leadership had begun to wane, especially with regards to Afghanistan and Russia.
According to a leaked Pakistani diplomatic cable (Intercept, 8/9/23), President Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu informed the ambassador that “if the no-confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington”—a reference to Pakistan’s posture on the Russia/Ukraine war, which Lu reportedly termed “aggressively neutral.” If not, Khan and his government would be further isolated. One month later, Khan was removed in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.
Despite maintaining that the cable does not entail US meddling in Pakistan’s domestic affairs, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has confirmed its authenticity (Intercept, 8/16/23). US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated the cable’s description of the meeting with Lu were “close-ish” in accuracy (News International, 8/10/23).
Only after Khan’s removal of power did the United States intervene to help Pakistan secure a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Fund (Intercept, 9/17/23). The conditions of the loan included forcing austerity measures on the Pakistani population and, notably, a weapons sale to Ukraine (via Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer).
While the Times and the Post did report on Khan’s allegation of US interference in his ouster, even reporting Khan’s claim of a secret diplomatic communique (e.g., New YorkTimes, 4/2/22, 4/9/22; Washington Post, 4/10/22, 4/13/22), they were silent when the Intercept published the cable itself in August 2023.
Slow-walking a rigged election
A confession to vote fraud was treated by the New York Times (2/18/24) as “appear[ing] to lend weight to accusations” of vote fraud.
The next popular election took place in February 2024. (The elections were scheduled for 2023, but the military managed to delay them for another year.) It was clear that the PMLN-led government and the military were conspiring to undermine PTI at every turn, including by jailing Khan and tampering with the military-controlled national election software (Intercept, 2/7/24).
PTI candidates who were winning their elections during live vote-counting were shocked when the official results showed their constituencies had been lost by tens of thousands of votes. Far from Trumpesque fraud claims that attempt to stop vote counting while a candidate holds a tenuous lead, PTI candidates saw tens of thousands of votes erased from their vote totals between live counting and official results (Intercept, 2/9/24). The election was clearly rigged, foreign media observers concurred (Le Monde, 3/1/24; Economist, 3/14/24).
For two outlets that are ostensibly so anxious about the state of democracy in the United States, the New York Times and Washington Post were more staid in their concerns for Pakistani democracy. The Times (2/18/24), reporting on a confession by a senior Pakistani official of rigging votes, only went as far as to say that the admission “appeared to lend weight to accusations” by PTI of election-rigging.
The Post, while initially entertaining the possibility of a rigged election (e.g., 2/11/24), fell short of actually reporting that PMLN and the military stole the election. The Post didn’t report on the Pakistani official’s confession of election-rigging.
The tone struck was highly conservative compared to, say, the Times and Post coverage of the 2018 elections in Bolivia (FAIR.org, 3/5/20, 7/8/20). In that instance, US media didn’t hesitate to pounce on allegations of electoral fraud against left-wing president Evo Morales, even though the election was later found to be fair (only after a right-wing interim government was able to take power). Could it be that US media treats electoral fraud claims more seriously when they’re against official enemies?
Congressional dissent
“A growing chorus of voices in the US government is demanding accountability for Pakistan’s military junta over its attacks on political dissent, imprisonment of opponents, and the rigging of an election earlier this year,” Drop Site (10/23/24) reported—but readers of the leading US papers aren’t hearing about it.
Once it was clear that PTI didn’t have enough seats to form a governing bloc (despite the surprising popular surge behind the party and against the political-military establishment), 31 US lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Casar (D.–Texas) demanded the Biden administration withhold recognition of the Pakistani ruling government until a “thorough, transparent and credible” investigation of the election could be carried out (Intercept, 2/28/24). This letter is part of a pattern of objections by congressmembers to Biden’s acceptance of an authoritarian Pakistani government—so long as they align with US foreign policy interests (Intercept, 11/17/23).
A State Department press release (2/9/24) immediately after the election condemned abrogations of the rights of Pakistani citizens, and further said “claims of interference or fraud should be fully investigated.” The same statement, however, assured that “the United States is prepared to work with the next Pakistani government, regardless of political party.”
Less than two months later, Biden sent a letter (Times of India, 3/30/24) to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the PMLN, “assuring him that his administration will fully back his government in addressing critical global and regional challenges.”
As recently as the past few months, two more letters have been submitted by US lawmakers urging the Biden administration to reevaluate its relationship with Pakistan’s government, which lawmakers say has been violating the human rights of the Pakistani people (Drop Site, 10/23/24; Dawn, 10/24/24; Times of India, 11/17/24).
Coverage of congressional dissent from Biden’s Pakistan policy has been absent from both the Times and the Post. Absent from the pages of leading papers were any stories about lawmaker concerns over human rights, free elections and authoritarian governance.
Continuing omissions
This New York Times article (11/27/24) presented protests against political repression in Pakistan as a big nuisance.
These trends continued in recent reporting. Two of the New York Times stories (11/25/24, 11/26/24) on the protests mentioned the rigged election only as an allegation by Khan and his supporters, countered with government denials and offering readers no sense of which side might be telling the truth. The other three stories (11/26/24, 11/27/24, 11/27/24) don’t discuss election-rigging at all. None of the stories touched on the US involvement in Khan’s fall from power, nor the Biden administration’s continued support of an authoritarian ruling government.
The Washington Post’s single story (11/27/24) also limited itself to critiquing the ruling government, without mentioning the rigged election, US intervention in Khan’s expulsion, or continuing US support for a government that is killing its own citizens.
Reporting on protests in Pakistan without mentioning US involvement in domestic politics creates a perception that Pakistani chaos is a concern mostly for Pakistani people, and readers in the United States need not examine the role of their own government in a national political crisis.
This week on CounterSpin: Writing for a DC court of appeals, Douglas Ginsburg said yes, banning the wildly popular platform TikTok does raise concerns about First Amendment freedoms; but it’s still good, because in pushing for the ban, the US government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.” If that’s clear as mud to you, join the club. We’ll get an update on the proposed ban on TikTok—in the service of free speech, doncha know—from Yanni Chen, policy counsel at the group Free Press.
Also on the show: We’re all familiar with the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo of, especially but not only, local TV news. But just because we’re aware of it, doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t still impacting our lives in negative ways. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us to talk about new research showing how news media coverage actively harms young people of color, yes, but also all of our understanding and policy-making around youth and crime.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
After Republicans turned transgender people into a central target in the 2024 election, trans issues returned to the spotlight less than a month later, when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for youth.
In what is widely considered one of the most consequential cases of the current court term, trans youth in Tennessee (joined by the Biden government) challenged their state’s law prohibiting puberty blockers, hormone treatments and surgery as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Many rights advocates fear that a decision upholding Tennessee’s ban—which seems likely—will quickly erode trans rights across the board, and more broadly undermine equal protection rights.
But voices in the corporate media’s opinion pages were quick to downplay the dangers of the case, leaning on false and misleading anti-trans narratives that have become all too common in US media.
‘Bedrock equal protection’
The ACLU’s Chase Strangio (New York Times, 12/3/24) notes that Tennessee’s case suggests that “somehow medical regulations are sort of exempt from heightened scrutiny when it comes to sex.”
In US v. Skrmetti, the plaintiffs argue that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth must be subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If a state is accused of treating people differently under a law, but it can offer a rational justification for that differential treatment, the courts generally let the law stand. But if a law discriminates based on certain classifications, including sex, gender, race and religion, the state has to prove it’s not based on prejudice—a much higher bar to clear. The Skrmetti case asks the justices to decide whether the Tennessee law discriminates based on sex and should therefore be subject to that higher bar (specifically, that the law serves an “important state interest”), which it would be unlikely to meet.
Though Tennessee’s argument rests largely on the idea that its law discriminates based on “age” and “purpose,” Tennessee solicitor general, Matthew Rice, admitted under questioning that the law does classify based on sex. As trans ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio (New York Times, 12/3/24) explained it:
If a 14-year-old goes to the doctor’s office and says, “I want to have a puberty consistent with my male friends,” the doctor can say yes to the person assigned male who’s just developing later than his peers, but not to the person assigned female who’s transgender.
So it would seem to be a fairly clear-cut decision in favor of the plaintiffs. And yet the conservative justices’ line of questioning suggested they are looking for a way to rule in favor of Tennessee—most likely by justifying an exception to heightened scrutiny, based on the fact that the case involves “medical judgments.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (Newsweek, 12/4/24) expressed serious concern over this line of thinking, arguing that creating any kind of exceptions to heightened scrutiny “undermin[es] the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.” Observers pointed out that doing so could open the door to other medical carveouts for sex discrimination (such as abortion or birth control), as well as exceptions for other forms of discrimination (such as racial discrimination) (e.g., Vox, 12/4/24).
Denialist game plan
The Wall Street Journal (12/3/24) affects incredulity—”believe it or not”—at the argument that it’s sex discrimination to restrict particular forms of healthcare based on the patient’s sex.
But many media pontificators obscured the important legal questions and implications, repeating spurious narratives about transition and its alleged risks in order to justify a rights-restricting ruling.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/3/24) jumped out of the gates to defend the ban before oral arguments even began, arguing that the ban “is focused on diagnoses” and therefore isn’t sex discrimination. The Journal editors have returned to the issue twice since then, once (12/13/24) to hold up a lawsuit by a detransitioner as providing “context” for the case, and again (12/15/24) to incorrectly announce that Britain had “permanently banned” puberty blockers for youth, and to argue that “lawmakers in Tennessee are within their rights to insist their state’s children get the same quality of care that’s becoming standard in Britain.”
Citing healthcare, or lack thereof, across the Atlantic is (somewhat ironically) a favorite argument of trans rights opponents, who regularly point to the British Cass Review, a report conducted by people with no expertise in pediatric transgender care in the midst of a rising anti-trans panic in the UK (FAIR.org, 7/19/24). In response to the Cass Review, the British health system has not “permanently banned” puberty blockers; rather, they have made new prescriptions for puberty blockers unavailable for trans patients not already taking them, for an indefinite period of time while they conduct further studies, but to be reviewed again in 2027.
These arguments don’t like to admit that the European restrictions that they cite are far from the blanket bans that Tennessee and other US states have (FAIR.org, 6/22/23). And they are political decisions that do not represent expert medical consensus. All the relevant medical associations in the US; those in a variety of other countries, including Canada, New Zealand and France; the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other prominent groups of medical experts on trans healthcare have rejected the Cass Review’s methods and conclusions, and support gender-affirming care for youth.
Moreover, while cases of detransition are likewise a centerpiece of arguments for banning trans healthcare, those arguments virtually never—the Journal being no exception here—acknowledge that rates of regret after such care are astonishingly low (PRS Global Open, 3/19/21). Even the Cass Review, for instance, was unable to dig up even 10 cases of detransition out of 3,306 patient records, which would translate to a rate of less than one-third of 1%.
As Joanna Wuest (The Nation, 12/4/24) pointed out, those driving the narrative of trans medical care being “risky” or “uncertain” are following the same game plan as fossil fuel, tobacco and Covid science denialists, exploiting real but marginal scientific uncertainties or outliers to promote public misunderstandings of the scientific consensus and advance their own political agenda.
The other major Murdoch paper in the US, the New York Post (12/5/24), also predictably came out swinging for Tennessee, calling youth transition “insane,” and centrally citing detransitioners and European restrictions.
‘Evidence too thin’
The Washington Post (12/15/24) demands “new research of maximum possible rigor” for gender-affirming care, “overseen by scientists who are not gender medicine practitioners”—which is just like demanding research of cancer treatment conducted by doctors who aren’t cancer specialists.
It’s no surprise that Murdoch’s mouthpieces would parrot the right-wing line against transgender rights. But the more centrist Washington Post took a line nearly as strident and misinformed. More than a week after the oral arguments, the paper published an editorial (12/15/24) taking Tennessee’s side.
The Post editors claimed the “crux of the debate” is
whether, as the plaintiffs argued, the treatments can be lifesaving or, as some global health authorities have determined, the evidence is too thin to conclude that they are beneficial and the risks are not well-understood.
From the start, then, the Post framed it in a wildly misleading way as a scientific debate between, on the one side, the Biden administration and a handful of trans youth and, on the other side, global health experts. It’s obvious who readers are meant to believe has the weight of authority here.
The Post continued:
This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions—and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality.
The Post‘s argument illustrates why many are so concerned about the broader repercussions of the Skrmetti case. Anti-abortion and religious activists already argue that birth control is harmful, and failure rates of oral contraceptives are much higher than rates of dissatisfaction with gender-affirming care (which is presumably what the Post means by “ineffective,” since the treatments are not ineffective in their impact on a person’s sex characteristics). So if the Post wants to make the argument that medical arguments ought to trump arguments of sex discrimination, it ought to at least clue readers into the implications of that argument.
Just as importantly, while both gender-affirming care and birth control carry some side effects and risks, there’s not a legitimate medical debate about either being, on balance, “ineffective” or “harmful.” And there is plenty of evidence that they both improve patient lives.
However, the Post editorial’s readers couldn’t possibly imagine that, because the Post only presented evidence that supported their claim. In case anyone was unsure at this point about their stance, the editors’ conclusion clarified which side the Post wants you believe has greater scientific legitimacy: “The failure to adequately assess these treatments gives Tennessee reason to worry about them—and legal room to restrict them.”
The Post also ran a piece by columnist Megan McArdle (12/6/24) that essentially adopted the medical carveout position, writing that a civil rights framework is trumped by “biology.” Similar arguments could be found on op-ed pages across corporate media, from the New York Times (12/8/24) to USA Today (12/4/24) to the Hill (12/4/24).
‘Ripple effects’
Casey Parks (Washington Post, 12/5/24) reported a rare news story about trans youth that is actually from the perspective of trans youth.
Such voices did not entirely monopolize the op-ed pages, and some strong trans advocates were published as well. The New York Times, whose publisher has vehemently defended the paper’s influential role in spreading misleading anti-trans narratives (FAIR.org, 5/19/23), published trans ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio (12/3/24) arguing from both a legal and personal perspective for the right to gender-affirming care. Trans nonbinary Times columnist M. Gessen, who joined the paper in May, also published a column (12/6/24) and was interviewed by fellow Times columnist Lydia Polgreen for the Times‘ Opinions podcast (12/9/24).
At the Boston Globe, columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr (12/4/24) drew comparisons to the Dobbs ruling and its own “ripple effects,” and called on states to enact shield laws to protect “the ability of doctors, their patients, and patients’ families to act according to their needs, wishes and the proper standard of medical care.” And the Los Angeles Times published a piece by ACLU head Anthony D. Romero (12/3/24) that also linked the Skrmetti case to the Dobbs case, and criticized “the recent retrenchment on the political left and center [that] may set back the cause of trans equality — and equal protection more broadly.”
The Post news section, meanwhile, produced some careful and sensitive reporting its editorial board ought to read, such as an FAQ (12/3/24) on the basics of gender affirming care for minors, “including what puberty blockers are and whether cross-sex hormones impact fertility.” Reporter Casey Parks relied on actual medical experts to answer the questions, rather than allowing it to be framed as a “culture war” or relaying “both sides,” as media reports too often do (FAIR.org, 11/23/22).
Parks also wrote an account (12/5/24) of the Supreme Court oral arguments through the eyes of one of the young trans plaintiffs, who ingenuously wanted to talk to the Tennessee governor and the anti-trans protesters because she believed they were “unaware of the consequences” of their actions, and she wanted to tell them how her life was “immeasurably better than it had been before she started blockers and hormones.”
Scapegoats for Democratic losses
Pamela Paul (New York Times, 11/14/24) says Democrats should embrace a “common sense” approach to trans issues—which appears to mean believing that “gender is based on sex at birth.”
In the 2024 election, Republicans spent more on anti-trans advertising than any other issue (Truthout, 11/5/24; Erin in the Morning, 11/13/24). Rather than fiercely defend trans people from the vicious attacks, several “liberal” pundits accused the Democratic party of going too far on trans rights, scapegoating trans people and their defenders for the party’s losses. That included the New York Times‘ Pamela Paul (11/14/24) and Maureen Dowd (11/9/24), and the Atlantic‘s Helen Lewis (11/10/24), all of whom approvingly quoted Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who said, “I have two little girls; I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton later walked back his comments, saying his point was that Democrats should be leading the conversation on trans rights rather than running away from it, and that he promised “unwavering” commitment to LGBTQ rights—something the aforementioned pundits expressed little interest in.
There’s no reason to doubt the incoming Republican government will continue its attacks on trans people and their rights, only now with much more power at its disposal. We need news media now more than ever to hold those in power accountable for their attacks on minority groups, but the coverage of the Skrmetti case suggests that many in the press corps will instead happily join in on the attacks.
Since the overthrow of the Syrian government, corporate media analysts have offered advice as to how the US should approach Syria going forward. These observers consistently opted not to call on the US and Israel to end their occupations of and violence toward Syria.
The Washington Post (12/8/24) calls for “engaged diplomacy” from the incoming Trump administration to “help write a brighter next chapter for this strategically located, and long-suffering, country.”
A Washington Post editorial (12/8/24), headlined “Why the US Needs to Help Build a New Syria,” said:
Syria might seem far removed from US interests. Before Mr. Assad’s fall, President-elect Donald Trump posted: “DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But America is involved. Some 900 US troops and an undisclosed number of military contractors are operating in northeastern Syria near Iraq, battling the Islamic State and backing Kurdish forces fighting the Assad regime.
Estimates suggest that the US-led coalition that bombed Syria, ostensibly to defeat ISIS (Jacobin, 3/29/16), has killed at least 3,000 Syrian civilians and possibly more than 15,000. The Post misses a rather obvious point: The US can “help” Syria by withdrawing the forces that have slaughtered thousands of Syrian noncombatants.
The Post also published a piece by columnist Josh Rogin (12/8/24), “For the First Time in Decades, Syria Is Free. Now It’s Time to Help.” Set aside that Syria is not “free”; it is under foreign occupation (CBC, 12/10/24). The article provided virtually no details about the forms he thinks that “help” should take. Rogin said that “for those in Washington who have long wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, [the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s government] might offer a path forward.”
That falls short of saying that the US should withdraw its 900 troops and unknown number of contractors from the country, and Rogin said nothing about the US military bases in Syria, of which there are at least five, plus a minimum of two smaller sites (Stars and Stripes, 12/6/24). Through such mechanisms, the US has long exercised control over a quarter of Syrian territory, including its breadbasket and oil reserves (FAIR.org, 3/7/18; Responsible Statecraft, 7/28/24). Surely ending the US military occupation and returning sovereign control over the country’s vital resources are essential ways to “help” Syria, yet Rogin declined to call for these steps.
‘Promote stability and democracy’
Boston Globe (12/12/24): “A US military presence, however small, can make a difference.“
The Boston Globe’s editorial board (12/12/24) said that the fall of the Syrian government
represents an opportunity for the United States and the international community to reach out, to engage, and to help free Syria from the more cynical ambitions of Assad’s patrons in Iran and Russia.
Yet the paper endorsed the US occupation of Syria, writing that “a US military presence, however small, can make a difference.” It also advocated continued US meddling in Syrian affairs, asserting that “American diplomats can help promote stability and democracy in the country while sidelining extremist groups.”
Writing such a thing requires extraordinary cynicism, a goldfish’s memory, or both. The US teamed up with Al Qaeda in an effort to bring down the Assad government (Harper’s, 1/16). Weapons that America and its Saudi allies supplied to groups fighting the Syrian government “fell into” ISIS’ hands, significantly improving the quality of ISIS’ armaments, in quantities “far beyond those that would have been available through battle capture alone” (Al Jazeera, 12/14/17).
‘Cautious about removing sanctions’
“The US should be cautious about removing sanctions,” advised the LA Times (12/13/24).
In the Los Angeles Times (12/13/24), Matthew Levitt said Syria’s “people need and deserve American support now.” His definition of “support” includes the US “maintain[ing] its small but influential US military presence in Syria,” in part to enable America’s junior partners in northeast Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to “continue maintaining detention camps holding Islamic State fighters.”
The conditions in these camps are abhorrent. An April report from Amnesty International concluded that the SDF and its local partners
—with the support of the US government and other members of the coalition to defeat the Islamic State (IS) armed group—are engaged in the large-scale and systematic violation of the rights of more than 56,000 men, women and children in their custody. Most of these people were detained during the final battles with IS in 2019. They are now held in at least 27 detention facilities and two detention camps and face arbitrary and indefinite detention, enforced disappearance, grossly inhumane conditions, and other serious violations. Many of those detained are victims of IS atrocity crimes or trafficking in persons.
Keeping Syrians in dungeons is a rather odd way to “support” them.
Levitt also wrote that “the US should be cautious about removing sanctions against the Syrian state.” Maintaining sanctions is the opposite of “support[ing]” Syrians. In July, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia reported that the sanctions are negatively “impact[ing] large sectors of the population and the economy, including basic services (education, health, [water, sanitation, and hygiene]) and productive sectors (manufacturing and agriculture), as well as the work of humanitarian organizations.”
The cruelty of the sanctions is such that during the war in Syria, according to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, Western sanctions have “severely restrict[ed] pharmaceutical imports,” undermining pediatric cancer treatment (Reuters, 3/15/17). Yet Levitt thinks the US shouldn’t hurry to lift such measures, even as doing so is a straightforward way to “support” Syrians.
Meanwhile, neither the editorial board of the Post nor that of the Globe includes sanctions removal on its list of ways to “help” Syria.
Furthermore, Levitt points out that, between the Assad government’s last hours and the first days after its overthrow, “the Israeli air force and navy have hit more than 350 strategic targets across the country, destroying an estimated 70% of Syria’s military capabilities.” Whatever Levitt’s definition is for “support,” it apparently includes the US allowing its Israeli surrogate to destroy Syria’s capacity to defend itself from foreign aggression. That won’t help Syria regain the sovereignty it has lost in the 13 years of international proxy war that have taken place on its soil, particularly when the party destroying Syrian military capacity is Israel, which maintains a decades-long regime of illegal occupation, colonization and annexation in Syria’s Golan Heights.
‘Suck Israel into Syria’
Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 12/13/24): “Middle Eastern countries…come in just two varieties: countries that implode and countries that explode.”
Similarly, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (12/13/24) argued that the incoming Trump administration should “help with—dare I say it—nation-building in Syria.” He went on to say “it would cost the United States and its allies little money and few troops to try to help” Syria. Friedman subsequently claimed that “without American help and leadership,” Syria could devolve into a “forever war” that would “suck Israel into Syria.”
Prior to Friedman’s article going to print, Israel had carried out 420 airstrikes in Syria in a week, hitting targets in 13 Syrian provinces. Israel had also set up shop on Mount Hermon, which is strategically located on the Syria/Lebanon border, in violation of 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria (BBC, 12/13/24).
Setting aside that Friedman bizarrely cast Israeli involvement in Syria as a hypothetical rather than a long-running reality—Israel bombed Syria hundreds of times in the 13 years of war that led to the Syrian government’s demise—the author’s notion of America “help[ing]” with “nation-building” does not exclude its underwriting Israel’s nation-destroying and nation-stealing in Syria.
In the same vein, the Globe’s editorial board says they want the US to “help free Syria,” but the Israeli violence that the US underwrites appears exempt, since it blandly describes some of what Israel has been doing, but doesn’t say it should stop:
Israel continues to launch bombing raids of Assad’s chemical weapons plants, naval vessels and Russian-made bombers, which the Israeli government says it is doing to prevent those military assets from falling into the wrong hands amid the chaos.
Thus, the authors seem to think the US can “help free Syria” without compelling its Israeli client to ends its relentless assault on the state. Meanwhile, stopping Israel’s bombing and conquest of Syria is not enumerated among the ways that Rogin or the Post’s editors think the US can “help” Syria have a brighter future.
If these commentators genuinely wanted Syria to flourish, they’d insist that the US and its allies finally end their long campaign of intervening in Syria, with quite harmful effects on the country’s population (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17), and allow the nation to chart its own course.
In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of alleged shooter Luigi Mangione, I wrote (FAIR.org, 12/11/24) about how Murdoch outlets like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post editorial board, not only decried the widespread support for Mangione but fought back against legitimate criticism of the health insurance industry.
Now the New York Times is in full-scale panic mode over the widespread boiling anger against the health insurance industry the killing has laid bare (CNN, 12/6/24; PBS, 12/7/24; Reuters, 12/9/24).
‘Working-class hero’
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 12/12/24): Brian Thompson is “a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life.”
Times columnist Bret Stephens (12/12/24) wrote that because Thompson came from small-town beginnings, whereas Mangione was from a privileged background, it was in fact the slain CEO who was the real “working-class hero.” This shows that Stephens doesn’t understand class as a relationship of power, where people like Thompson have economic power, regardless of their cultural background.
(As music critic Kurt Gottschalk noted, it also shows that Stephens doesn’t understand the John Lennon song he’s quoting from, whose lyrics advise the would-be working-class hero: “There’s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill/If you want to be like the folks on the hill.”)
Stephens said that the idea that health insurance “companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.” The aforementioned FAIR piece contains plenty of evidence that contradicts Stephens’ weak claim that Americans are perfectly fine with the status quo, noting that medical bankruptcies are exploding, that polling shows growing dissatisfaction with the American healthcare system, and that studies show the American system lags behind those of peer nations. But, really, the best evidence that many customers are dissatisfied with the health insurance system is that so many of them found the murder of a health insurance CEO perfectly understandable.
Stephens, one of the Times’ several right-wing columnists, has said (2/28/20) that socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the best-known lawmakers supporting Medicare-for-All, “scares” him, because he is “now the old man who rails compulsively against ‘the billionaire class’ and wants to nationalize the health insurance industry.” Stephens (1/31/20) complained that for Sanders’ supporters, “ordinary civility isn’t a virtue,” but rather a “ruse by which those with power manipulate and marginalize those without”; if so, they offer a pretty good critique of the way Stephens himself deploys “civility” to silence dissent.
‘Tiptoe toward justifying assassination’
Ross Douthat (New York Times, 12/13/24) : Criticism of the insurance industry in the wake of Thompson’s murder “illustrates how easily toxic elements can slip into mainstream politics right now.”
Another right-wing Times columnist, Ross Douthat (12/13/24) specifically addressed the “manifestly illiberal conceit that murder is wrong, but public enthusiasm for the murder of an executive in a deplorable industry reflects the understandable anger of people pushed too far”—a position he insisted “seems to tiptoe toward justifying assassination even if you insist that you’re disavowing violence.” He dismissed the “idea that the American model of private insurance is uniquely evil and engaged in acts of social violence because it denies people too much treatment,” maintaining that all insurance systems, public or private, ration care.
But as I noted in the earlier FAIR article, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the US system does, in fact, stand out among other peer nations, ranking “as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare.” Those areas the US falls short in include “preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.” The rest of the world is doing better than us on these scores, contrary to Douthat.
Americans see the systems working in the rest of the world and know that the United States could have a better healthcare regime, but that corporate and government leaders simply choose not to.
‘We let a murderer manipulate us’
As people shared their health insurance horror stories of denied treatments and mounting bills as ways of understanding the shooter’s outburst, bioethicist Travis Rieder (New York Times, 12/13/24) shook his finger at the masses as if they were rowdy kindergarteners:
The supposed motives assigned to the shooter may well be understandable. But not everything understandable is justifiable. This tragic situation should motivate us to change the institutions and structures that have failed so many people. But not to give murder a pass, and especially not to glorify it.
Peter Coy (New York Times, 12/13/24)suggested that UnitedHealth’s vertical monopolization of healthcare is “something like a private version of a single-payer national healthcare system.”
The paper produced an audio op-ed by political scientist Robert Pape (New York Times, 12/12/24), who urged listeners to see the public reaction as part of “the growing normalization of political violence in America,” rather than as part of the growing outrage over the broken healthcare system in America. Bypassing the latter issue, he simply likened it to the attack against the Pelosis and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, incidents that did not spark a national outcry against an unjust policy or system. “It is terribly important right now that national political leaders at all levels condemn political violence and the murder of the healthcare CEO and condemn the outpouring of support for the murder,” Pape said.
Times opinion contributor Peter Coy (12/13/24) investigated the complexities of for-profit healthcare and offered some band-aid solutions, while avoiding any real exploration of a more social democratic approach to healthcare, despite the popularity of publicly financed universal care (Common Dreams, 12/9/24). Coy wrote:
Tragically, Thompson’s shooting wasn’t a solution to anything. “The way we let a murderer manipulate us into having the conversation he wanted is grotesque,” Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, who favors a free-market approach, told me.
Coy, Pape and Rieder all pay lip service to problems with the healthcare system and suggest changing it through politics—as if people haven’t been fighting for that for decades. They offer the diagnosis that public celebrations over Thompson’s death are the result of some weakness of public character, which means that the answer is reminding people that murder is wrong.
The more honest diagnosis would be that the responses are the result of a broken political system that offers no real way for people to have their healthcare grievances addressed—but that would call not for scolding screwed-over patients, but rather demanding political reform that challenges entrenched political and corporate interests that the Times has little interest in challenging.
‘To help make it work better’
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty (New YorkTimes, 12/13/24) : “We understand and share the desire to build a health care system that works better for everyone. That is the purpose of our organization.” The $23 billion in profits the conglomerate made last year was apparently just a fortuitous happenstance.
But the most banal piece of all came from Andrew Witty (New YorkTimes, 12/13/24), the CEO of UnitedHealth Group—the parent company of Thompson’s division—who said, offering no details and no real agenda for change:
We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone, as we always have—healthcare providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments and others—to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs.
While this piece offered almost nothing other than PR for a company in desperate need for positive spin, its placement on the Times op-ed page did help demonstrate why the shooter got so much sympathy in this case. People like Witty, with access to highly compensated crisis management consultants, can have their polished messaging featured in the highest perches of American media. With all of these pieces on the opinion page lambasting the public for voicing anger against executives like Thompson, there is no voice from anyone on the opinion pages explaining why they are taking part in this national movement of solidarity against insurance profiteering.
That’s a telling omission, because those stories could easily be told, especially as more news about the hideousness of this insurance Goliath emerges. Minnesota doctors have sued UnitedHealthcare, alleging it “deliberately engages in the pattern of ‘deny, delay and underpay,’” resulting in over $900,000 in unpaid independent dispute resolution awards (KMSP, 12/12/24).
ProPublica (12/13/24) investigated how the company is limiting treatment for autistic children. Earlier this year, New York’s attorney general announced that the company was forced to pay “a $1 million penalty for failing to provide birth control coverage, a violation of New York state law” (Gothamist, 6/20/24). Senate Democrats accused the company of “denying claims to a growing number of patients as it tried to leverage artificial intelligence to automate the process,” a kind of capitalist nightmare with a sci-fi twist (Fox Business, 12/6/24).
The cancer patient being denied life-saving treatment, or the mom missing meals and working two jobs to afford their child’s medicine, don’t have PR teams like Witty does to reach the Times. That is why people are expressing such vitriol right now.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Content warning: This article discusses the details of sexual assault.
The interview (This Week, 3/10/24) that cost ABC $15 million.
ABC has agreed to pay $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library and $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees “to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll” (AP, 12/14/24).
Fox News (12/15/24) gloated that “Stephanopoulos and ABCNews also had to issue statements of ‘regret’ as an editor’s note” on the online version of the offending piece (This Week, 3/10/24). The note reads:
ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.
This settlement is a dangerous omen for press freedom, given Trump’s threats to use his power to go after his media critics (NPR, 10/23/24; CNN, 11/7/24; PEN America, 11/15/24; New York Times, 12/15/24; Deadline, 12/16/24).
‘Common modern parlance’
Washington Post (7/19/23): Judge Lewis Kaplan “says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.”
Trump has been found liable for defaming and sexually abusing Carroll in two cases, both of which he is appealing (Politico, 9/6/24). “Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury,” Stephanopoulos said (ABC, 3/10/24). “Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury. It’s been affirmed by a judge.”
However, there is a legal difference between “sexual abuse” and “rape” under New York law. The jury found that Trump had violated Carroll with his fingers, not with his penis, and thus the incident was legally classified as sexual abuse, not rape (USA Today, 1/29/24).
However, as the Washington Post (7/19/23) reported:
The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
In other words, Stephanopoulos’ initial description was not legally accurate, but was instead relying on the popular understanding of the word, according to the judge overseeing the case.
Legally perplexing
Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid (Newsweek, 12/15/24): “This is the cowardice of legacy media out to make profit, rather than uphold principle.”
For most journalists, such an offense isn’t nothing: Journalists should always be as accurate as possible, and when they do slip up, they should issue corrections. He should have used the most accurate terminology the court used.
But should this mistake cost the network $16 million, most of which will be used to prop up the legacy of the person who made the complaint, a former president on his way back to power?
Newsweek (12/15/24) noted that it was legally perplexing for ABC to settle so early: “Legal experts also criticized the broadcaster for settling the lawsuit before depositions were due to take place,” it explained. The piece quoted former prosecutor Joyce Vance:
I’m old enough to remember—and to have worked on—cases where newspapers vigorously defended themselves against defamation cases instead of folding before the defendant was even deposed.
Because this case never went to trial, we will never know if there was any evidence of actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth in this misreporting, as would be required to secure a defamation reward under New York Times v. Sullivan (Knight First Amendment Institute, 3/18/24). And while correcting the record seems reasonable for ABC, forking over millions in cash that could be otherwise used to employ teams of working journalists seems excessive.
Newsweek (12/15/24) also covered some of the backlash to the deal:
Democratic attorney Marc Elias wrote: “Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”
Reporter Oliver Willis also chimed in, writing on Threads: “This is actually how democracy dies.”
Tech reporter Matt Novak said: “Not good for the rest of us when you do this shit, ABC.”
“But that’s probably half the point from management’s perspective,” he added Saturday.
A warning to other media
“The First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation,” attorney Floyd Abrams told CNN (11/1/24). “Mr. Trump may disagree with this or that coverage of him, but the First Amendment permits the press to decide how to cover elections, not the candidates seeking public office.”
The fact that the network is coughing up money as a result of Trump’s case sends a warning to other media that no media will be safe under a Trump regime. Trump has also sued CBS, “demanding $10 billion in damages over the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.” His suit alleges that the Harris interview and “the associated programming were ‘partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference’ intended to ‘mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales’ of the presidential election in her favor” (CNN, 11/1/24).
If continuing the CBS lawsuit sounds petty in light of the fact that Trump won the election, that’s because it is petty. But protracted litigation could inflict real damage on the network. Fox News (12/13/24) bragged that the “CBS suit could potentially impact an enormous media merger.” As we know, Trump hates journalists, and is vowing to go after them when he gets back into power (FAIR.org, 11/14/24).
To be fair, this strategy, which is meant to create a chilling effect on speech, can backfire on Trump, as when he was ordered to “pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees to the New York Times and three investigative reporters after he sued them unsuccessfully over a Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices” (AP, 1/2/24). That’s all the more reason why ABC should be fighting this dubious claim by Trump.
The New York Post editorial board (12/15/24) saw this as a big win for Trump, noting that Stephanopoulos had used the R-word several times in the segment:
The law gives even public figures some rights against such smears; if the case had proceeded, Trump’s legal team would’ve been able to access ABCNews’ internal communications in order to prove the network’s reckless attitude toward the truth.
Trump was actually quite magnanimous in not making ABC pay him the settlement, even if the deal makes the company by far the largest donor to the Trump library.
Conservative legal commentator Jonathan Turley (Fox News, 12/16/24) speculated that ABC’s owner, Disney, likely wanted to start off on a better foot with a new Trump administration. “Disney is trying to adopt a more neutral stance after years of opposition to its stances on political issues and accusations of ultra-woke products,” he said. With “networks like MSNBC and CNN in a ratings and revenue free fall after the election, Disney clearly wants to start fresh with the new administration.”
In reality, ABC’s capitulation may have less to do with ratings and more to do with the GOP takeover of all three branches of federal power. Trump’s avowed plan to reward his friends and punish his enemies could force so-called “liberal” media into being more cheerleaders than a check on political power.
Even before the election, FAIR (10/25/24, 10/30/24) noted how the owners of the LA Times and Washington Post stepped in to keep their editorial boards neutral in the presidential race. In the case of the LA Times, owner Patrick Dr. Soon-Shiong has reportedly continued after the election to soften the paper’s editorial voice, a move that has “concerned many staff members who fear he is trying to be deferential to the incoming Trump administration” (New York Times, 12/12/24).
Now that Trump and his legal army see that at least one network will simply pay to have a legal complaint go away, they may feel emboldened to go after others. That could put a damper on critical coverage of the federal government when Americans need it the most.
Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”
In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.
Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.
Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”
Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”
In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).
Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)
The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).
As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.
The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?
And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?
The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?
That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”
The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.
This week on CounterSpin: The New York Timessays that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the otherhumanrightsgroups and internationalbodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition.
The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.
The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.
Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.
A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support.
There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.
While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: The New York Timessays that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the otherhumanrightsgroups and internationalbodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition.
The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.
The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.
Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.
A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support.
There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.
While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.
Amnesty International (12/5/24) found that “Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza.”
Imagine for a moment that a magnitude 8 earthquake occurred somewhere in the world, and the Western corporate media refused to use the word “earthquake” in reporting it, instead talking ambiguously of a “tectonic incident” that had caused buildings to collapse and people to die.
Obviously, reporters would be called out for deliberate linguistic ineptness and a bizarre obfuscation of truth. And yet just such a verbal sleight of hand has been on display for more than 14 months in the Gaza Strip, where corporate media outlets continue to dance around the word “genocide” while the Israeli military carries out the systematic mass killing of Palestinians.
Since October 2023, nearly 45,000 people have officially been killed in Gaza—although as a letter to the Lancet medical journal (7/20/24) pointed out back in July, the true death toll at that time was likely to exceed 186,000. A new report (BBC, 11/8/24) from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights indicates that almost 70% of the over 8,000 Palestinian fatalities verified by the UN over a six-month period were women and children; a survey of medical volunteers in Gaza found that “44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza” (New York Times, 10/9/24).
From the beginning of the Israeli assault, officials like President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23) made it clear that they saw themselves as being at war with a population.
As per Article II of the Genocide Convention, “genocide means…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Israeli leaders again and again have effectively admitted genocidal intent. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23), at the beginning of Israel’s assault, declared:
I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23) likewise insisted, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible…. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mother Jones, 11/3/23) invoked a biblical justification for genocide: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” The Bible (1 Samuel 15:3) says of the Amalekites: “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants.”
And Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi couldn’t have been more clear (X, 10/7/23), posting the following comment to X at the outset of hostilities in October 2023: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”
In other words, Gaza is a pretty textbook case of genocide. But the term “genocide” is ostracized by the corporate media world because it violates the political line of the United States, the global superpower that is currently enabling Israel’s genocidal behavior—to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in aid and weaponry. And the media’s refusal to call a spade a spade has produced all manner of linguistic gymnastics.
‘Blistering retaliatory offensive’
A New York Times memo (Intercept, 4/15/24) said of the word “genocide,” “We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not.” The same memo declared, “It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7.”
In the eyes of the Associated Press (12/4/24), for example, the genocide in Gaza is merely “Israel’s blistering retaliatory offensive,” while Fox News (11/3/24) detects a “fight against terrorists” and the Washington Post (12/3/24) sees “one of the most deadly and destructive wars in recent memory.”
Or take the New York Times, where a memo (Intercept, 4/15/24) leaked earlier this year explicitly instructed journalists to avoid using words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” when discussing “Palestine”—another word whose use was highly discouraged. On October 7, the one-year anniversary of Israel’s ongoing assault, the US newspaper of record headlined the affair as “The War That Won’t End,” with the G-word appearing only in a fleeting reference to “accusations of genocide and war crimes.”
This particular Times dispatch begins with Yaniv Hegyi, an Israeli who “fled his home last October 7, after terrorists from Gaza overran his village in southern Israel.” As ever, the selectivity with which US media deploys the T-word safely obliterates the chance that domestic audiences will be confronted with the fact that the state of Israel has literally been terrorizing Palestinians since the moment of its foundation on Palestinian land in 1948—or that Zionist terrorism preceded even that moment.
Only after we’ve been introduced to Hegyi, victim of “terrorists,” do we meet Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian who “fled his home on October 12, after the Israeli Air Force responded by striking his city in northern Gaza.” Which brings us to another tactic that has been institutionalized in the US political and media establishment alike: the perennial Israeli monopoly on “responding,” “retaliating” and generally engaging in “self-defense” no matter what it does—including genocide.
Never mind that Israel would have nothing to “retaliate” against if it hadn’t up and invented itself on other people’s land, and then spent the next 76 years (and counting) occupying, forcibly displacing and slaughtering Palestinians en masse. Fortuitously for Israel, the corporate media are ever standing by to set the record askew.
‘Propaganda war never stops’
The Wall Street Journal (12/5/24) calls for ethnic cleansing as an alternative to genocide: “Not one of the groups yelling genocide calls on Egypt to let women and children escape to safety by opening its border with Gaza.”
That said, the media have been increasingly unable to abide by a de facto blanket ban on the word “genocide,” given, inter alia, Amnesty International’s recent determination (12/5/24) that Israel is committing just that in the Gaza Strip. In such cases, then, the term inevitably finds its way into news reports—but only as an allegation.
CNN (12/5/24), for instance, reported that Amnesty had “said that it had gathered ‘sufficient evidence to believe’ that Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people—a charge the Israeli government has vehemently denied.” The rest of the article similarly alternates between Amnesty’s charges and Israel’s vehement rebuttals.
This template was also followed by AP (via ABC, 12/4/24), NBC News (12/5/24) and the other usual suspects. Significantly, this sort of rebuttal option is never extended to Palestinians; you’d never see Yaniv Hegyi fleeing his home from “conduct by Gazans that the Israeli government says amounts to terrorism—a charge the government of Gaza has vehemently denied.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/5/24) took it upon themselves to pen a diatribe against the organization that had chosen to “lend…its once-good name to the genocide lie,” and thereby “assure… its good standing in the anti-Israel herd.” Bearing the headline “The Propaganda War on Israel Never Stops,” the rant came accompanied by an entirely irrelevant 23-minute documentary on “the worst antisemitic riot in American history” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which took place in 1991.
According to the Journal, Amnesty has committed an “inversion of reality”: It’s actually Hamas that is the “genocidal” actor—and, by the way, there are “terrorist headquarters in hospitals” in Gaza. This is just about the most unabashed apology for war crimes you can ask for. Israel has pulverized the bulk of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, and an October UN press release noted that
Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles, while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.
By converting Israel into the victim not only of “terrorists” but also of a “propaganda war,” the Journal is engaging in its own criminal “inversion of reality.” But for a corporate media committed to complicity in genocide by linguistic omission, it’s all in a day’s work.
Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 12/6/24) “can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.”
The early morning murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met on social media with a “torrent of hate” for health insurance executives (New York Times, 12/5/24). Memes mocking the insurance companies and their callous disregard for human life abound on various platforms (AFP, 12/6/24).
Internet users are declaring that the man police believe to be the shooter, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, is certifiably hot (Rolling Stone, 12/9/24; KFOX, 12/10/24). A lookalike contest for the shooter was held in lower Manhattan (New York Times, 12/7/24).
If so many people are unsympathetic at best in response to such a killing, that might be a reason to revisit why health insurance companies are so loathed. The rage “was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum, and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters,” the New YorkTimes (12/6/24) noted. Mangione was reportedly found with an anti-insurance manifesto that stated “these parasites had it coming” (Newsweek, 12/9/24), echoing a resentment largely felt by a lot of Americans, and targeted fury at UnitedHealthcare specifically.
UnitedHealthcare has always stood out for exceptionally high rate of claims denial generally in the industry (Boston Globe, 12/5/24; Forbes, 12/5/24). For example, a Senate committee found that “UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization denial rate for post-acute care jumped from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022” (WNYW, 12/7/24).
The Times (12/5/24) reported that the Senate committee found that “three major companies—UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna—were intentionally denying claims” related to falls and strokes in order to boost profits. UnitedHealthcare “denied requests for such nursing stays three times more often than it did for other services.”
Increasing dissatisfaction
The perception of the quality of US healthcare has been on the decline since 2012 (Gallup, 12/6/24).
On top of that, Americans generally believe their insurance-centered system is a mess. Gallup (12/6/24) reported that “Americans’ positive rating of the quality of healthcare in the US is now at its lowest point in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001.”
It continued:
The current 44% of US adults who say the quality of healthcare is excellent (11%) or good (33%) is down by a total of 10 percentage points since 2020 after steadily eroding each year. Between 2001 and 2020, majorities ranging from 52% to 62% rated US healthcare quality positively; now, 54% say it is only fair (38%) or poor (16%).
As has been the case throughout the 24-year trend, Americans rate healthcare coverage in the US even more negatively than they rate quality. Just 28% say coverage is excellent or good, four points lower than the average since 2001 and well below the 41% high point in 2012.
Most Americans are unsatisfied with the healthcare system, say the health insurance system is confusing and opaque, and many have skipped or delayed care because of a bad experience or the lack of timely appointments. A small, but not insignificant number, of Americans believe they have had a negative health outcome as result of their experiences within the healthcare system.
When this inefficient system doesn’t literally kill Americans, it can still kill them financially. “Almost a third of all working adults in the United States are carrying some kind of medical debt—that’s about 15% of all US households,” Marketplace (3/27/24) reported. It added: “This debt is also the leading cause of bankruptcies in the country.”
Many news outlets’ pontificators, however, were incensed that anyone would voice frustration with health insurance when an industry CEO has fallen.
‘Not the time to offer criticism’
After Brian Thompson’s killing, the New York Post (12/5/24) condemned those on social media who “swooned over his killer, speculated on his motives, and wondered if Timothée Chalamet would play him in the movie.”
Responding to the memes and the jokes, many of which were more about the unjust health insurance system than support for vigilante murder, the New York Post editorial board (12/5/24) asked:
Do the jokes point to a society that has become so desensitized by the coarseness of online discussion, so disassociated from kindness, that a baying mob cheers a man’s murder and cries out for more?
And upon Mangione’s arrest, the Post (12/9/24) complained that on social media, “tasteless trolls showered praise on the Ivy League grad.” The Post (12/11/24) also fretted about fake “Wanted” posters for insurance company executives that the paper considered a “a fear-mongering social media stunt to incite hysteria,” adding that the “murder has also spawned a stream of merchandise sympathetic towards the 26-year-old being sold by online retailers, forcing Amazon to pull them from its website.”
Fox News (12/6/24) quoted one of its own contributors, Joe Concha, saying, “I think this encapsulates the far left’s worldview: If you run a company that isn’t to their liking, you deserve to die.” The network (12/7/24) praised Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania for “tearing into” a New York article (12/7/24) that the outlet characterized as saying “resentment over denied insurance claims made…Thompson’s murder inevitable.”
The dismay was felt in other corners of right-wing media. At the Free Press (12/5/24), the brainchild of anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss, Kat Rosenfield wrote:
The people celebrating Brian Thompson’s murder by turning him into an avatar for everything wrong with the American healthcare system remind me of nothing so much as Hollywood screenwriters, cunningly manipulating an audience into cheering on unforgivable acts of fictional violence.
This is not the time to offer your criticisms of the health-insurance industry. And there is never a time to believe that corporate executives are, by their very nature, evil people who deserve to be killed. Yet that is what you’ll see if you go on social media right now and look at comments on news stories about this assassination.
Yet all of these outlets at the same time have run support for Daniel Penny, the man recently acquitted for killing a Black homeless man on the New York City subway (National Review, 6/17/23; Free Press, 10/20/24; New York Post, 12/4/24; Fox News, 12/6/24). These outlets likewise expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse after he gunned down Black Lives Matter protesters (National Review, 11/19/21; Free Press, 11/17/21; New York Post, 11/19/21; Fox News cited by Media Matters, 11/11/21), and for George Zimmerman when he shot Trayvon Martin (National Review, 6/22/20; New York Post, 7/15/13; Fox News, 7/18/12). In other words, it’s fine to defend vigilantes when they kill unarmed Black people or anti-racist activists, but when a CEO’s life is taken, we must solemnly stay silent on the reasons why such a person might be targeted or why bystanders might not be crying.
Piers Morgan (New York Post, 12/10/24) made this clear when he said “I cheered when I heard” Penny’s acquittal, and felt “shocked and saddened when I saw the footage” of the Thompson shooting. “Those two reactions would surely be the correct and appropriate ones for anyone with an ounce of fairness and humanity in their heart,” he said—because Thompson was “a non-violent, non-threatening, non-criminal man in the street,” whereas Penny’s victim was “a dangerous, mentally ill, homeless man.”
Blame it on Medicare
The Wall Street Journal (12/6/24) made the absurd claim that a medical system based on private insurance is better than any other kind of healthcare system.
It was the Wall Street Journal, the more erudite of Murdoch’s media properties, that really addressed the question of why people might hate health insurance companies. The anger was misdirected, the editorial board (12/6/24) said. Rather, we should look to federally funded healthcare if we want to get mad: “Medicare and Medicaid, two government programs, cover about 36% of Americans,” the paper observed; because they “pay doctors and hospitals below the cost of providing care…many providers won’t see Medicaid patients, resulting in delayed care.”
It’s an odd argument, given that people who receive Medicaid report being happier with their health insurance than people who get it through their employers or pay for it themselves—and people with Medicare are the happiest of all (KFF, 6/15/23). If the federal programs are underpaying healthcare providers, the obvious solution would be to increase funding for them—an initiative the Journal would be unlikely to support.
The board (Journal, 10/10/24) later dismissed critiques of the health insurance industry and passed off Mangione as a “disturbed individual” radicalized by the Internet and said it is “a dreadful sign of the times that Mr. Mangione is being celebrated.”
Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (12/8/24) followed up by placing the blame on the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”). “Having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior,” she wrote, but does “cause them to use more care.” The situation, she said, “has gotten worse since Obamacare expanded eligibility” for Medicaid. This portrait of US patients overusing healthcare like sweet-toothed children let loose in a candy store is belied by (among other things) the fact that Americans live 4.7 fewer years than the average of comparable countries (KFF, 1/30/24).
The Journal editorial went on to complain that “some providers prescribe treatments and tests that may be medically unnecessary,” and so “insurers have tried to clamp down on such abuse by requiring prior authorization.” While this “can result in delayed care that is medically necessary…it’s also how insurers control costs.”
In reality, doctors are complaining that insurance bureaucrats are impeding their ability to deliver needed healthcare because of this cost-slashing system (Forbes, 3/13/23). The American Medical Association found “94% of doctors say prior authorization leads to delays in patient care” (Chief Medical Executive, 3/14/23); “one in three doctors (33%) say prior authorization has led to serious adverse events with their patients.”
Journal editorialists appear to believe that doctors are jauntily giving away expensive blood pressure medicine and signing up patients for brain surgery for no particular reason, and the only thing that can stop this carnival of care is some bureaucrat who is trained to say “no.” The reality is that the private insurance system “saves insurance companies money by reflexively denying medical care that has been determined necessary by a physician,” as pediatrician William E. Bennett Jr. (Washington Post, 10/22/19) wrote. This is why people are so unsympathetic to Thompson, who was paid an estimated $10 million annually for imposing medical austerity on patients and providers (PBS, 12/7/24).
Pity the insurance giants
The Washington Post (12/7/24) criticized those who tried to use Thompson’s killing “as an occasion for policy debate about claim denial rates by health insurance companies.” (Note that both the Post and the Wall Street Journal used the same photo of flags at half-mast.)
Right-wing media weren’t the only engaging in scolding. At the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post, the editorial board (12/7/24) criticized those “who excuse or celebrate the killing,” as well as those “who do not countenance the killing itself” but “have nevertheless tried to treat it as an occasion for policy debate about claim denial rates by health insurance companies, an admittedly legitimate issue.” The Post added that debate was “fine in principle, but we’re skeptical that this particular moment lends itself to nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry.”
The editors nevertheless spent a lengthy paragraph explaining to readers that “controlling healthcare costs requires difficult trade-offs,” and that “even the most generous state-run health systems in other countries also have to face” these trade-offs. The editorial attempted to summon sympathy for
insurers, whose profits are capped by federal law, [and] must contend with consumer demand for ready access to high-priced specialists and prescription drugs—and, at the same time, premiums low enough that people can afford coverage.
Note that insurance company profits are “capped” by requiring them to spend at least 80% of premiums on claims, a percentage known as their loss ratio—but those claims can be paid to providers that are owned by the insurers themselves, “a loophole that makes loss ratio requirements meaningless” (Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, 7/16/21). United Healthcare has been particularly aggressive at this, which is part of the reason its “capped” profits soared to $22.4 billion in 2023.
As for the Post’s assertion that insurance providers should keep “premiums low enough that people can afford coverage,” KFF (10/9/24) found that “Family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 7% this year to reach an average of $25,572 annually, marking the “second year in a row that premiums are up 7%.” The Center for American Progress (11/29/22) found that employer sponsored insurance “premiums have risen above the rate of inflation and have outpaced wage growth” over the course of a decade. “Escalating grocery bills and car prices have cooled, but price relief for Americans does not extend to health care,” USA Today (10/9/24) reported.
The Post added that all this talk about how Americans are being tortured by the insurance system should wait until next year, “when Congress is to consider whether to keep temporary Obamacare enhancements that have boosted enrollment.”
It is easy to see the material interests of the Washington Post‘s owner at work. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon does not run a health insurance company, but it is fully entrenched in the for-profit medical system. It offers a health insurance marketplace through AmazonFlex, acquired the healthcare provider One Medical last year (NPR, 11/12/23; Forbes, 4/5/24), and offers a pharmacy and other health services.
As one of the world’s richest people, Bezos might have another reason to be worried about people cheering on the murder of CEOs: Amazon is often hated for its monopoly-like grip on online retail (FTC, 9/26/23), as well as charges of price-gouging (Seattle Times, 8/14/24) and union-busting (Guardian, 4/3/24).
‘Last or near last’
The failure of the US healthcare system in one chart: life expectancy plotted against healthcare spending.
The Washington Post‘s line about the comparable ills of “generous state-run health systems” echoed a similar argument from the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial, which concluded:
Government healthcare is a recipe for more care delays and denials. Witness the fiasco in the United Kingdom, where the Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment. To adapt a famous Winston Churchill phrase, private insurance is the worst form of healthcare, except for all others.
The statement that the British or European health systems are worse for people than the US private insurer–dominated system is simply false. Just months ago, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the United States
ranks as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare, including preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.
The US “ranked last or near last in every category except one,” precisely because
the complex labyrinth of hospital bills, insurance disputes and out-of-pocket requirements that patients and doctors are forced to navigate put the US second to last in administrative efficiency.
The Commonwealth Fund (CNN, 1/31/23) also found that
the United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, but still has the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases.
Healthcare providers in Mexico and Costa Rica are huge draws for Americans in need of care who can’t make it through America’s Kafkaesque system (NPR, 3/8/23). Spain and Portugal are attracting American retirees, and good low-cost health care is one incentive (Travel + Leisure, 6/20/24).
Retreat to the castle
Apparently the CEOs that Fox News (11/13/24) is so concerned about don’t qualify as “professional elites.”
While the Washington Post’s position clearly falls in line with its material allegiance to a system where its owner sits at the apex, the positions from Murdoch are more interesting. As the Democratic Party has lost support among the working class (NPR, 11/14/24; USA Today, 11/30/24), Murdoch’s outlets have touted Donald Trump and the Republican Party as alternatives for working-class voters.
Murdoch and other purveyors of Republican propaganda have promoted the idea that Democrats serve only financial elites and Hollywood producers, and that protectionist policies under Trump will help US workers (New York Post, 7/16/24; Fox News, 11/13/24). Republicans were able to woo voters by complaining about the high price of gasoline and groceries under the Biden administration (CNBC, 8/7/24).
Now Murdoch outlets are fully retreating into their elite castle and telling the rabble to stop complaining about the lack of access to healthcare. The Republicans and their news outlets have worked hard to recharacterize themselves as something more populist, but the Thompson killing has brought back the old narrative that they are, proudly, the champions of the 1 Percent.
Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Arlene Martinez about Amazon‘s subsidized misconduct for the December 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Jeff Bezos (CC photo: Daniel Oberhaus)
Janine Jackson: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” So wrote Upton Sinclair in 1934. It’s hard not to think about that as we see corporate news media report on Amazon, whose leader is, of course, the owner of the Washington Post, but whose influence as retailer, landowner, policy shaper is multi-tentacled in ways you and I probably don’t even know.
That outsized, multi-front power is behind the resistance to Amazon, the urgent need to illuminate what a private company on this scale can do in the country and the world’s political, consumer, regulatory, labor ecosphere, and what needs to happen to address that power.
Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Arlene Martinez.
JJ: You wrote recently, with colleagues, that the #MakeAmazonPay campaign was about calling attention to Amazon‘s
mistreatment of workers, disregard for consumers whose data it misuses, bullying of small local businesses and accelerating climate destruction, especially during the holiday shopping season.
That’s before we get to how we the people enable all of that through government subsidies, which we will talk about.
But first, let’s talk about some of the documented complaints and concerns about Amazon‘s day-to-day practices, the way they operate. Because it’s not about “hating them because they’re beautiful.” It’s not about jealousy because they built a better mousetrap. This is concern about things that just shouldn’t happen, period, right?
AM: That’s right. And I really liked the way that you opened up our conversation here, because it’s really hard to overstate just how powerful Jeff Bezos is, and how many areas Amazon is in, and the way that they run their business across all the different areas that they touch, how harmful it is, whether you’re talking about the environment, and all the data centers that they’re building as they capitalize on AI, artificial intelligence. Or the way that they are so punishing to workers that the injury rate is several times that of any other warehouse company. How they drive down wages wherever they locate. How they squeeze small businesses; a report from the Institute of Local Self-Reliance found that 45 cents of every dollar that a business made selling on the Amazon platform went to Amazon.
So I could just go on and on, but there are so many ways that Amazon harms the entire ecosystem of business worldwide. And one of the worst parts about it, and there are a lot of bad parts about it, is that we are subsidizing that, because communities are giving Amazon billions of dollars in direct cash payments. They don’t have to pay their taxes, or they’re given straight cash, or reduced land, whatever the case may be. And that doesn’t even begin to include the procurement and other public contracting money that they received. I’ll open there.
JJ: Well, and I want to get into that. I think for many folks, maybe they’ve heard about workers beingcheated out of wages, but that is so crucial to the subsidy conversation. But let’s start with the fact that we do have evidence that Amazon is under-serving their workers, not just in terms of wages, but also in terms of health and safety, and what do we know about that?
AM: We run a database called Violation Tracker, where we look at over 450 regulatory agencies that we get data from, so we can begin to see part of Amazon‘s behavior toward its workers. We capture how much money Amazon has stolen from its workers, in the form of wages, and we also look at some health and safety violations.
One of the reasons that Amazon‘s dollar total is so much lower than, for example, Bank of America, which has billions and billions and billions of dollars in penalties and fines—Amazon‘s comparative total is so much lower because the federal agencies that are in charge of protecting workers only have the authority to give thousands of dollars in fines, versus a regulatory agency that oversees banks that can give billion dollars in fines in one single case. So what we see is, as bad as Amazon‘s record is, and it is bad, it would be worse if we treated workers with the same care and with the same concern that we do as investors who got cheated on an investment.
JJ: That’s so deep, because it speaks to, like, folks might want to get mad at a corporation, like Amazon, but then you also have to understand the weakening of the regulatory agencies that are meant to be addressing that. It’s not as simple as one might hope it would be. And folks have heard, for example, on this show, talking about the IRS saying, “We understand that rich people cheat more on their taxes than poor people, but it’s easier for us to go after poor people, because it’s much simpler.” And so a company like Amazon can just make things so complex, in a regulatory framework, that it’s very hard to address the harm that they’re doing. It’s kind of a big-picture problem.
Arlene Martinez: “So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big.”
AM: Yeah, that’s right. So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big. If, for example, some of the antitrust legislation had been implemented and upheld, Amazon never might have been able to grow to this size. That’s why it’s been so promising in recent years to see the FTC and Lina Khan really take on corporate giants like Amazon, which have essentially become monopolies and dominate entire spaces. So it really is a big structural issue.
I get asked a lot about, should people just not shop on Amazon? Well, that would be nice. I mean, I don’t shop on Amazon, but that isn’t the answer. Like I said, it would be nice, but the answer is really these structural problems that enabled Amazon to get so big in the first place. And these regulatory agencies need to flex their muscle to make sure that Amazon is broken up, or contained, or not allowed to dominate entire industries and sectors the way that it is.
And you’ve probably seen it’s moving into even more areas. Now it’s going into chips, and now it’s going into pharmacies and healthcare. And its goal is to dominate the world, and it’s headed there without some proper agency there flexing their muscle to rein it in.
JJ: I wanted to pull you out on one question, which is data centers, which is, we hear, and folks at the local media level may hear, Amazon‘s coming in, and they’re going to locate here, and that’s going to provide jobs. And sometimes what they’re talking about is data centers. Why don’t data centers equal jobs? Can you talk a little bit about that?
AM: Data centers are essentially huge warehouses that just store big, basically, server farms. They’re just running data all the time, and there’s very few people that are needed to actually staff these facilities. So they don’t createmany jobs, because there aren’t many functions that are required as part of these data centers. I mean, there’s the construction phase, and then a few dozen people that are needed to staff them.
And yet they’re getting what’s often several million dollars per job. We did a study in 2016 that looked at the average for the Apples, the Googles, the Amazons, the Metas, was about $2 million per job. But we’ve seen a lot of cases now where it’s a lot higher per job, and a community can never make that money back.
But I think the other question, too, and I think what gets missing from a lot of stories that I see about data centers, is why data centers are getting subsidized in the first place. When you think about what an incentive was supposed to even do in the first place, it was to spur something to happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
We know that AI is the future. These companies are racing to build data centers, because they have to, to remain competitive. So there is absolutely no business case to be subsidizing companies to build a data center, especially considering the low job return.
JJ: In this deep piece about corporate government giveaways, you cite Neil deMause, who is a FAIR favorite, who, with Joanna Cagan, wrote Field of Schemes about subsidizing sports teams’ building of new arenas, and it’s kind of a familiar template, where folks say we’re going to bring in profit, and yet it’s something that would happen anyway. There’s kind of a—it’s not even a bait and switch, it’s just misinformation that is put forward to cities, when something like a sports team, or something like an Amazon, says, “We’re going to bring a lot of stuff to your community, and therefore you should subsidize our taxes.”
And some of us are like: “Well, wait, you’re a business. You’re going to make a profit here. Why would we subsidize it?” There’s kind of a big-picture misunderstanding here.
AM: Yeah, and part of it is that it just becomes irresistible for a lot of politicians to have the opportunity to stand next to a Jeff Bezos, or some other high-ranking official, or a billionaire owner of a sports team. And then you have access to these box-level seats that you couldn’t afford on your own. And all of that is really irresistible. So there’s really a very human element to giving subsidies that are proven to not drive economic development, like a stadium, which study after study has shown does nothing to improve the lives of residents in that community, but it just becomes very irresistible.
And I think on a local level, too, with someone—I was a reporter for many years, covering a lot of city council meetings and school board meetings, and knowing that these council members, most of them who are part-time, get a few hundred dollars a month in pay, they want to do good for their community, and they think bringing in an Amazon is a good move for their community, without realizing what they’re really doing is bringing in a company that hurts their workers, pays them very little and damages their existing small businesses in their community. But they’re thinking they’re doing a good thing.
JJ: Well, and part of it is a kind of numerical thing where media talk about, “Well, these folks will pay this money in taxes,” and that makes it sound like it’s a profit. There’s kind of a basic math problem that sometimes happens here. When you talk about tax breaks to be given to whatever entity, media can sometimes present that as though that’s money that’s going into the tax coffers, which is not what’s happening.
AM: That’s right. I mean, there’s a lot of companies that really profit based on the size of the incentive. There are a lot of site location consultants, for example. The bigger the subsidy, the more their percentages. So their drive is to get the biggest subsidy possible, even though it isn’t in the best interest of their community.
JJ: Subsidies are sold to communities as profit, as though it’s going to be money, somehow, that’s going to go right into the community, when that’s not the way it plays out.
AM: Yes, and this is a big issue in our space, in terms of the media coverage that we often see. It’s because you get what are called “economic impact reports,” and I say “economic impact” in quotes because it isn’t actual economic impact, and it’s nowhere close to being a cost/benefit analysis. What it does is it takes this big, big smorgasbord of everything, every dollar that’s spent on construction phase, or supply chain, or the entire salary sometimes of a worker is included in this economic impact report. And a lot of times you have no idea what’s actually in there, because the people who produced it say it’s proprietary, and they won’t give it to the public.
And a lot of times, those people that are hired to produce the economic impact report, and we see this a lot in the stadium space, are people who are working for the team owners, or who are working for Amazon, they will be the ones producing these economic impact reports. So you have a real conflict of interest that I think is missed sometimes in the reporting, and just makes these studies bogus.
When I talk to reporters about how to cover and report on economic development incentives, I tell them to ask for everything that went into that economic impact report. And if they don’t release it, then don’t include their numbers, and say that they won’t give it to you.
JJ: That gets right to the point of transparency, which I just wanted to ask you about. I think that, whether you understand an issue or don’t, transparency about what’s happening ought to be ground zero. And yet that is difficult to get from some corporations, and also from some government agencies. But journalists should have that as a basic fundamental.
AM: Yes. And we also run these databases called Amazon Tracker and Subsidy Tracker, and both of them look at companies that have received subsidies. And you’ll see, among Amazon subsidies, and also Subsidy Tracker, which is broader, you’ll see a lot of entries that say “undisclosed,” because even though a company is getting public money, they’re not releasing the value of that subsidy. Reporters should insist on that, and make it really clear in stories when they’re not getting it.
JJ: And I’ll end on that. But I will say that, obviously, I’m angry about media for my job, but it’s not that they don’t do critical stories sometimes; it’s this connecting of the dots. So when I see a storyline that says that Amazon or Walmart is a “successful business,” and then I see another story that says, oh yeah, a lot of their workers still need to rely on public assistance to not starve. But then on the other page, I’m still reading Amazon as a “successful business.” So I feel like at a certain point, it’s not about there’s never any good stories or critical stories. It’s about a failure to connect the dots, to say, “What does it mean for a company to be ‘successful’ right now, and what harm is required to get to that?”
AM: Those are all such great points, and it’s true that we have seen a lot of really amazing reporting around Amazon, and Bloomberg is the outlet that reported about how Amazon was driving down wages in the warehouse sector, because they took an industry-wide look, and were able to see that anytime Amazon entered a community, wages dropped for the entire sector, including non-Amazon workers.
And the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, wrote one of the first stories, 12 years ago, to report on ambulances being placed outside of Amazon warehouses, rather than Amazon investing in air conditioning and heating for their workers. So they were getting ill from heat exhaustion.
So there has been a lot of amazing reporting, but I think you’re right in connecting all those dots, it’s very hard to see. And when Amazon releases a press release about how they gave a $500,000 loan, reporters repeat that as if it’s some gift, even though it might not include the fact that Amazon got a billion dollars in that same community as a subsidy. So it is a mixed bag.
JJ: I appreciate the bright critical spots. I’m upset about the fact that it doesn’t seem to get stirred into an understanding of what we, as a democratic society, should ask from corporations, and why do we call a company “successful” whose workers need to rely on public assistance? There’s some kind of connected story that’s not happening there.
AM: I’ll just add, I remember as a reporter—and I was a reporter for many years—I was very fixated on holding government accountable. Really felt like that was a big role of mine, and I spent a lot less energy thinking about holding corporations accountable. And now that I’ve left the space, and I’m in this nonprofit watchdog space, and a lot of my work involves corporate governance, and overseeing their practices, I really see those gaps even more stark, and how, in general, I think journalists don’t do the best job about covering companies, and we could do a lot better, which is why I think shows like yours are so helpful, why I hope organizations like ours are useful, so that we start putting the same kind of scrutiny on corporations that we have long done on governments.
JJ: I will just add, we hope for journalists to look to see critically powerful actors, and those powerful actors are in corporations, and they’re in government. And then here’s us, we the people, and that’s where we would look for journalists to look out for the public interest, however that is affected by whatever forces are in power, and that’s why I appreciate your work.
AM: Thank you so much.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Arlene Martinez. She’s deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. You can find their extensive work on Amazon and other corporate and government accountability on GoodJobsFirst.org. Arlene Martinez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AM: Thanks for having me, and thanks for your work.
An Appeals Court panel upheld banning TikTok in the name of “protect[ing] free speech in the United States…from a foreign adversary nation” (AP, 12/6/24).
Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).
But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A US District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).
All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.
Censorship for freedom
Judge Douglas Ginsburg: “People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire.”
Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” (Reuters, 12/6/24).
In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”
Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:
The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”
He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”
Two-fifths of the nation
But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
Al Jazeera (11/12/24): “Advocates warned the legislation could empower the incoming administration with an incredibly dangerous tool to crack down on dissent with few checks and balances.”
This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state (Intercept, 11/21/24).
With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media…pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.
For example, the New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.
In order to advance Beijing’s “goal…to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.
But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica and the Intercept.
Flimsy security concerns
President Donald Trump tried to unilaterally ban TikTok in 2020 (NPR, 8/6/20).
Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.
And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off US airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).
It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.
The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok
accurately pointed out that the US hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the US.
To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around US user data.”
But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.
Brazil’s Federal Police released an 884-page report on November 26, laying out the evidence used for its November 21 indictments of former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 of his cronies. Among the revelations are evidence showing that Bolsonaro knew about a plot carried out by army special forces officers to assassinate President Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, and proof that Bolsonaro oversaw a complex plan with six working groups to enact a military coup after losing the election in 2022.
This news was covered in media outlets around the world, from the Washington Post, Reuters and AP to the Guardian and Le Monde. Curiously enough, the New York Times, which has given ample coverage to Brazilian politics and the ongoing investigations against Bolsonaro, remained silent.
When former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was accused of trying to overthrow the government, the New York Times (11/21/24) reported that “the police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions”—but when the Federal Police released 884 pages of specifics days later, the Times was silent.
Five days earlier, in an article about the indictments, Times reporter Ana Ionova (11/21/24) misleadingly wrote, “The police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions that led to their recommendations.” So why, five days later, when a mountain of material evidence and plea bargain testimony transcripts were released, demonstrating exactly why the police recommended that the attorney general file three criminal charges against Bolsonaro, would the Times not join in with the other media outlets to add clarification?
As I’ve written before (FAIR.org, 7/7/23), the Times has aligned itself with a toxic narrative pushed by Bolsonaro, along with international allies like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, to discredit Brazil’s court system. Most of their efforts have focused on Moraes, the former Electoral Court president and current Supreme Court minister. As the police report shows, delegitimizing Moraes was one of the strategies used to build public support for the 2023 coup attempt.
Furthermore, since the failure of that attempt, the attacks on Moraes have been used by conservatives to build public sympathy for amnesty for Bolsonaro, in a move to pressure Congress to restore his political rights so that he can run for election in 2026.
Moraes’ central position as a target in the strategy is demonstrated in intercepted WhatsApp conversations between members of the group who were indicted in the coup investigation. A review of Times articles covering Moraes over the last two years shows that, at the least, the newspaper has acted as an unwilling accomplice, or “useful idiot” by perpetuating the coup plotters’ judicial overreach narrative.
‘Knowingly false allegations’
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spreading doubts about his country’s electoral system (New York Times, 7/19/22).
On July 19, 2022, Bolsonaro held an event in the Presidential Palace for dozens of foreign diplomats. There he spent over an hour railing against Brazil’s renowned electronic voting system. Without providing any evidence to back up his statements, he announced that if he lost the October 2 presidential election, it would be a sign of voter fraud.
The entire event was broadcast live on TV Brazil, Brazil’s national public television station, in violation of Brazil’s election laws against abuse of power for electoral purposes. It was this event which, months later, caused the Superior Electoral Court to bar Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years.
Thirteen days earlier, according to the Federal Police report (p. 7), the president held a meeting with high-ranking military officers and cabinet ministers. There, he
presented a narrative which had been built to spread knowingly false allegations, without any concrete evidence, suggesting that there would be fraud and manipulation of votes in the Brazilian elections. [He] used the meeting to spread attacks and make insinuations of crimes he said would be committed by current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and, primarily, Supreme and Superior Electoral Court ministers Luis Roberto Barroso, Edson Faschin and Alexandre de Moraes.
Intercepted communications between the people indicted show that, in the ensuing months, Moraes would become the primary target or, as they proclaimed in military jargon, the “center of gravity” of the coup (p. 14).
‘Going too far?’
The New York Times (9/26/22) attacked the Brazilian Supreme Court’s efforts to rein in the country’s authoritarian far right: “According to experts in law and government, the court has taken its own repressive turn.”
Weeks after Bolsonaro’s event, and six days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, the New York Times published a hit piece (9/26/22) on Brazil’s judiciary, called “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?”
As I later wrote for FAIR (5/14/24), the primary target of the article, written by the Times‘ Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, was Moraes. One of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court ministers, Moraes at the time was also serving a four-year term as Superior Electoral Court president. Clearly basing its analysis on US law, the Times described in alarming terms activities that were completely legal in Brazil:
The power grab by the nation’s highest court, legal experts say, has undermined a key democratic institution in Latin America’s biggest country as voters prepare to pick a president on October 2.
This wasn’t original analysis by the Times. As the Federal Police report (p. 11) stated:
The dissemination of false narratives through digital influencers and some members of the traditional media, with strong penetration among a segment of the population aligned with the right-wing of the political spectrum, maintained the discourse of an illicit action by the Judiciary, especially the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, claiming that they overstepped their constitutional limits in order to prevent the re-election of then-President Jair Bolsonaro.
The narrative of Supreme Court overreach continues to be the key pillar of the amnesty movement. As this campaign picked up momentum, the Times spread doubt regarding the judiciary as it oversaw investigations into anti-democratic behavior by the far right. In an article explaining why Bolsonaro had been barred from running for office, the Times‘ Nicas (7/1/23) wrote that the judiciary’s “hands on” approach to investigating election fraud “has also put what some analysts say is too much power in the hands of the electoral court’s seven judges, instead of voters.”
‘Crisis of democracy?’
As time passed, an investigation into illegal use of social media during the 2022 election season, an inquiry ordered by the Supreme Court due to death threats made against its justices and their families, began to draw the attention of the international far right. This was thanks in part to the efforts of Glenn Greenwald, who ridiculously claimed, to his Rumble audience of millions, that Moraes was the de facto ruler of Brazil.
In May 2024, a group of GOP lawmakers held a congressional subcommittee hearing called “Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy, Freedom and the Rule of Law?” As I documented for FAIR (5/14/24), the most-cited source in the GOP’s supporting document for the hearing was the Times‘ 2022 election-season article (9/26/22) about judicial overreach.
For an expert on “free expression,” the New York Times (9/21/24) turned to a far-right influencer under investigation for electoral disinformation.
One of the panelists at the hearing was Paulo Figueiredo. Introduced as an “investigative journalist,” Figueiredo—grandson of Brazil’s last military dictator, Gen. João Figueiredo—is a far-right influencer who relocated to Florida to flee a fraud investigation into the fleecing of Brazilian investors in a failed real estate deal with Donald Trump in 2019. On November 21, Figueiredo was indicted as one of the coup plotters in the Federal Police report (p. 15), which describes how military leaders who refused to join the operation were targeted with disinformation campaigns. The coup plotters
made use of the modus operandi developed by the digital militia, selecting targets to insert into a machine for amplifying personal attacks, using multiple channels and influencers in positions of authority over their “audience.” Economist and digital influencer Paulo Renato de Oliveira Figueiredo Filho was integrated into the core group responsible for inciting military personnel to join the coup, due to his ability to penetrate the military sphere because he is the grandson of former president of the republic, Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo.
In February, 2024, the Federal Police announced that Figueiredo was under investigation for spreading electoral disinformation during the lead-up to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. Many journalists at the time remembered the fact that, before becoming military dictator, his grandfather served as National Intelligence Service chief during the most repressive phase of the government’s death squad and torture operations.
In an article by Jack Nicas and Ana Ionova on Musk’s losing battle with the Brazilian Supreme Court, the Times (9/21/24) turned to Figueiredo for analysis:
Mr. Musk “has bowed down,” Paulo Figueiredo, a right-wing pundit who had his X account blocked in Brazil, wrote in a post on Thursday, when X first hired new lawyers in Brazil, signaling a shift in stance. “It’s a very sad day for freedom of expression.”
The Times failed to mention why Figueiredo was blocked, or his family ties—a connection it had made before, in the 2019 article “Investors in Former Trump-Branded Hotel in Brazil Charged With Corruption” (1/31/19):
Mr. Figueiredo, the grandson of the last military dictator in the authoritarian government that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985, displayed a picture of himself with Mr. Trump at the Trump Tower in New York, both men flashing a thumbs-up sign.
The different framing illustrates the Times‘ double standard: When it’s useful to attack Trump, Figueiredo is identified as the grandson of an authoritarian. When used to criticize a left-wing Brazilian government as authoritarian, he’s introduced merely as a “right-wing pundit.”
‘I’ll say what I want’
The New York Times (10/16/24) declared that Brazil’s Supreme Court may be “a threat to democracy itself” because it prosecutes violent threats against judges.
The Times‘ Nicas (10/16/24) continued to platform far-right figures with suspect backgrounds while using the story of X‘s ban and reinstatement in Brazil to undermine Brazil’s judiciary in “Is Elon Musk’s Brazilian Nemesis Saving Democracy or Hurting it?” The article opened with:
Daniel Silveira, a policeman turned far-right Brazilian congressman, was furious. He believed Brazil’s Supreme Court was persecuting conservatives and silencing them on social media, and he wanted to do something about it.
So he sat on his couch and began recording. “How many times have I imagined you getting beat up on the street,” he said in a 19-minute diatribe against the court’s justices, muscles bulging through his tight T-shirt. He posted the video on YouTube in February 2021, adding, “I’ll say what I want on here.”
A Brazilian Supreme Court justice immediately ordered his arrest. A year later, 10 of the court’s 11 justices convicted and sentenced him to nearly nine years in prison for threatening them.
While the Times notes Silveira’s YouTube rant against the Supreme Court, it failed to explain the context of his arrest. Silveira, who was kicked out of Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police after 60 disciplinary procedures, had been publicly inciting violence against the Supreme Court and its ministers for months, even after receiving warnings.
In one YouTube video, quoted in the Supreme Court case, he says: “When a soldier or a corporal knocks on your door, locking it won’t help. It will be ripped down. Yes, the armed forces will intervene and this is what we want.”
In the US, federal judges can investigate threats against them through the judiciary’s own police forces, such as the US Marshals and US Supreme Court Police. Yet the Times described the Brazilian Supreme Court’s investigation as a “highly unusual move,” while citing Moraes, central target in Brazil’s failed coup attempt, 22 times.
A target omitted
Another target was Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, whom the New York Times has frequently criticized—but the Times (11/19/24) couldn’t bring itself to report his name.
A series of events that unfolded in November have put a halt to the amnesty movement and attempts to prepare Bolsonaro for a Trump-like return in the 2026 elections.
On November 13, a member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) detonated bombs in Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza. Security footage shows him setting off a car bomb, attacking the Supreme Court with fireworks, and accidentally blowing himself up when his backpack bomb ricocheted off a statue. Several PL officials immediately called him a lone suicide bomber, a narrative echoed by the Times in a piece by Ionova (11/13/24). However, due in part to his links to the PL party, whose president was indicted along with Bolsonaro on November 21, the police are investigating the case as a terrorist act.
On November 19, Federal Police arrested a police agent and four army officers from the “Kids Pretos,” an army special forces division, for plotting to assassinate President-elect Lula, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin and Moraes in December 2022. Planning reportedly occurred at the home of Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and VP candidate, General Walter Braga Netto. Police said a hit man had been stationed near Moraes’ home on the planned assassination night, but the attempt was aborted due to a scheduling change at the Supreme Court.
Despite outlets like AP (11/19/24) and CNN (11/19/24) naming Moraes as a target, the Times‘ Ionova (11/19/24) omitted his name, stating only that “authorities did not divulge the name of the justice.” Brazil’s largest news outlet, Globo (11/19/24), broke the story hours earlier, listing Lula, Alckmin and Moraes as targets.
Although the Times ignored it, the news that Justice Moraes was an assassination target has undermined the far right’s narrative portraying him as overreaching in his oversight of federal police investigations into threats against Supreme Court justices and their families.
Just three days after the indictments, a November 24Times article by Nicas and Ionova, headlined “A Corruption Case That Spilled Across Latin America Is Coming Undone,” targeted another Supreme Court minister, Dias Toffoli. It dusted off the discredited Car Wash investigation, an ostensible anti-corruption probe that ended in February 2021 (FAIR.org, 11/14/19, 12/20/23), to further undermine Brazil’s judiciary. The article blamed Toffoli, who discarded tampered evidence and reversed convictions based on new proof from leaked Telegram chats showing collusion between Car Wash Judge Sergio Moro and the prosecution team, for causing an investigation that ended four years ago to “unravel.”
On the same day, the article was published verbatim in Portuguese in Brazil’s third-largest newspaper, the conservative Estado de S. Paulo (11/24/24).
Historic window
The November 21 indictments have opened a historic window of opportunity in Brazil. For the first time since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, the judiciary is poised to hold high-ranking military officials—including those, like Bolsonaro security advisor Gen. Augusto Heleno, who were actors in Brazil’s bloody military dictatorship—accountable for breaking the law. Furthermore, there is a real possibility that Brazil will avoid suffering from the same system failure that led to Trump’s return to the White House, by jailing former President Bolsonaro for crimes that are more serious than anything Trump was indicted for.
Why, at a moment like this, would the Times continue to bolster Brazil’s Trump-aligned far right by delegitimizing one of Brazil’s three branches of government? Could it simply be another, regrettable chapter in the Times’ long history of smear campaigns against leftist governments in Latin America?
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated Glenn Greenwald’s platform; it is Rumble.
This week on CounterSpin: Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more like representing that conflict than confronting it.
Good Jobs First monitors megacompanies like Amazon and their impact on our lives. Their database, Violation Tracker Global, notes more than $2.4 billion in misconduct penalties for Amazon since 2010. The most expensive of those fines have been connected to the company’s anti-competitive practices; the most frequent offenses are related to cheating workers out of wages and jeopardizing workers’ health and safety. Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. We’ll talk to her about the effort to #MakeAmazonPay.
Amazon Seattle HQ (cc photo: kiewic)
Also: A few years back, Amazon, like it does, dangled the prospect of locating a headquarters in New York City. And the city, like it does, eagerly offered some $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to entice the wildly profitable company to bring its anti-union, environmentally exploitative self to town. The deal fell through for reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talked about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes. We’ll hear just a little of that conversation today.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Next year, Donald Trump will have the chance to reshape the American public health system with his nomination of anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary for health and human services. While corporate media haven’t necessarily endorsed this choice, many commentators have worked hard to downplay the danger Kennedy poses to the US public.
Dr. Rachael Bedard (New York Times, 11/15/24) says of Robert Kennedy Jr., “We can’t spend four years simply fighting his agenda.”
On one of the most influential platforms, the New York Times op-ed page (11/15/24), geriatric physician Rachael Bedard wrote that Kennedy has “seeds of truth” in his agenda: “There’s a health care agenda that finds common ground between people like myself—medical researchers and clinicians—and Mr. Kennedy.”
We shouldn’t fret too much about RFK Jr.’s vaccine positions, Bedard assured us, because “Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism on this topic may counterintuitively be an advantage.” His “statements on vaccinations are more complex than they’re often caricatured to be,” she insisted. “He’s said he was not categorically opposed to them or, as an official in the new Trump administration, planning to pull them from the market.”
Similarly, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky, aka Dr. Drew, downplayed Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance in The Hill (11/25/24):
I know Bobby Kennedy—I’ve had him on my show—and I have talked at length with him about these issues. Kennedy isn’t a vaccine-denier or a vaccine conspiracy theorist…. Kennedy isn’t attempting to deny access to vaccines to anyone.
In Newsweek (11/27/24), Brandon Novick of the Center for Economic and Policy Research acknowledged “legitimate concern about his vaccine skepticism” but went on to argue that those concerns are “overblown”: “He promises not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine,” Novick wrote. “Kennedy mainly wants to require more and higher quality studies of vaccine safety and increase transparency.”
‘Better not get them vaccinated’
Seth Mnookin (Scientific American, 1/11/17): “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality.”
A review of RFK Jr.’s record by the AP (7/31/23) clearly documents that he opposes vaccines generally, especially when talking to right-wing audiences: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” he told a podcast in 2021. (He also said, in 2023, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” but claims the podcaster cut him off before he could say something…more complex.) He has also peddled the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism (Scientific American, 1/11/17).
Of course, his dangerous anti-science views go far beyond vaccines. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (11/22/24) laid out the extent of Kennedy’s maddening ideas:
His opposition to life-saving vaccines, his belief that HIV may not cause AIDS, his desire to increase the use of quack autism “treatments,” and his comments about putting people taking psychiatric medication in labor camps should all be immediately disqualifying. Autistic people, the disability community and the nation’s public health will all suffer if he is confirmed.
Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (11/18/24), sees a direct threat public health under Kennedy:
Unfortunately, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated a consistent lack of willingness to listen, learn and act in the best interest of the health of the American people. He was identified in 2021 as a member of the “Disinformation Dozen” that produced 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms that contributed to the public’s mistrust in science, and likely led to morbidity and mortality.
Nowhere do Bedard, Pinksy or Novick take any of this into account when categorizing Kennedy’s views on vaccines as “more complex” or “overblown.” Unmentioned in all three pieces, for example, is that Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, helped spread misinformation in American Samoa, where vaccination rates plummeted and a measles outbreak subsequently killed dozens of children (Mother Jones, 7/2/24). Derek Lowe of Science (8/28/24) wrote: “As far as I’m concerned, he and Children’s Health Defense have blood on their hands.”
And Novick’s blithe dismissal of health experts’ concerns misrepresents Kennedy’s promise: He did not promise “not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine”; he promised not to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” It’s a crucial distinction. Banning vaccines would actually be fairly difficult for a health secretary to do by fiat, so it’s an easy promise to make. But many rightly fear he would work to make vaccines less accessible—not by “pulling them from the market,” as Bedard assures readers he won’t do, but by, for instance, making decisions that would mean vaccines would in many cases no longer be covered by insurance.
And by changing vaccination recommendations, Kennedy could strongly influence vaccination rates, which would increase the possibility of deadly disease outbreaks impacting far more people than only those able to choose whether they want to be vaccinated—again, whether or not he “takes away anybody’s vaccines.”
‘Best chance of reining in corruption’
Brandon Novick (Newsweek, 11/27/24): “Kennedy represents a unique shift away from the corporate capture that has pervaded the public health agencies.”
Many of these corporate media pieces try to frame Kennedy’s position as populist outrage against the status quo, portraying Kennedy as some anti-corporate crusader looking out for regular folks against parasitic healthcare profiteers.
Novick wrote:
Within the context of a Trump administration, Americans should strongly support Kennedy’s nomination as he is the best chance of reining in corruption and corporate power while prioritizing public health over profits.
“Kennedy has railed against price gouging, and he supports the ability for Medicare to negotiate drug prices like other nations who pay far less,” he argued. Novick added that Kennedy “seeks to stop the pervasive poisoning of Americans by large drug and food companies,” and points “to European nations which have stronger regulations.”
It’s hard to imagine the Trump White House, dedicated to destroying the administrative state, creating more federal regulations on commerce. As Greg Sargent (New Republic, 11/15/24) noted, Trump
didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country…. Trump is basically declaring that his administration will be open for business to those who boost and assist him politically.
The notion that you can pick through an agenda like Kennedy’s and join with him on just the sensible parts is a fundamental misunderstanding of how right-wing “populism” works. Its very purpose is to deflect legitimate concerns and grievances onto imaginary conspiracies and scapegoats, in order to neutralize struggles for real change.
When the far right talks about genuine problems, your response should not be, we can work together because we share the same issues. Those issues are just the bait that’s necessary for the switch.
‘Casualty of the culture wars’
Laurie Ochoa (LA Times, 11/23/24): “Many in the food community would love to see someone break the status quo.”
But this is a mistake that commentators, eager for compromise and common ground, make again and again. Asking if there’s a “silver lining” to RFK Jr.’s appointment, Laurie Ochoa at the LA Times (11/23/24) said that while scrutiny has
rightly been on [Kennedy’s] anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride positions, some have taken note of his strong language against food additives in the processed foods so many of us consume and that are making so many Americans sick.
Houston Chronicle (11/22/24) editorial writer Regina Lankenau used her column space to ask Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard University, “So is there any chance that RFK Jr. under a Trump administration will be the one to disrupt Big Food?” He answered, “Yes, and I’m hopeful,” saying that Kennedy’s potential oversight of “federal nutrition programs, including school meal programs” could help him tackle processed food intake.
At the Boston Globe (11/20/24), Jennifer Block argued that “When It Comes to Food, RFK and the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Crew Have a Point.” Block touted the right-wing pseudo-science “wellness” panel that launched the MAHA movement, writing that while it’s true that Biden-Harris have done much more for public health than Trump did in terms of nutrition and regulation of the food industry, “Yet the community voicing concerns about food and contaminants—like the people who showed up at Vani Hari’s rally in Michigan — feel as if they’ve gotten a warmer reception on the political right.”
Her evidence is that Democrats and the left have been critical of the pseudo-science wellness crowd. “But it would be a grave mistake if necessary conversations about chronic illness and our medical and food systems became another casualty of the culture wars,” she wrote.
The medical world just isn’t being open-minded enough, she wrote, arguing that the “debunkers’ credo is that anyone who’s critical of medicine or offers alternatives to pharmaceuticals will send you on a slippery slope to anti-vaccine, anti-science woo.” The problem, of course, is not that Kennedy is at the top of that slope, but that he’s already at the bottom of the hill.
‘A national disgrace’
Neil Barsky (Guardian, 11/21/24): “Should RFK Jr. be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.”
Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, admitted in the Guardian (11/21/24) that Kennedy’s “anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale,” but said he understood that “our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight.” Barsky added, “He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries [have] over healthcare policy.”
But Kennedy does not actually propose to replace that “national disgrace”; asked whether he supported a Medicare for All system, which would be a real step toward curbing the power of the pharmaceutical industry, his response was incoherent (Jacobin, 6/9/23):
My highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program . . . where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody.
In other words, he thinks “single payer” should be one of the payers!
So it is questionable how much Kennedy really wants to address these issues. But even if one were to give him the benefit of the doubt, the pro-business, anti-regulation nature of the rest of the incoming administration suggests there is scant hope any of Kennedy’s health food talk would ever become meaningful policy.
For example, Mande’s answer that Trump would allow Kennedy to make school lunches more nutritious appears naive in view of Trump’s first term, in which he rolled “back healthier standards for school lunches in America championed by [former First Lady] Michelle Obama,” moving to “allow more pizza, meat and potatoes over fresh vegetables, fruits and whole grains” (Guardian, 1/17/22).
In fact, Kennedy already seems at odds with Trump’s pick for agriculture secretary (Politico, 11/29/24), who will be his main influence over US food policy. Big Pharma already has Trump’s ear (Reuters, 11/27/24). And Kennedy has already felt the pressure of his new boss’s love of fast food when he threw out his ideals and posed with a Big Mac and a Coke (New York Post, 11/7/24).
As SEIU President April Verrett (11/15/24) explained, none of Kennedy’s pseudo-populist sloganeering can really outweigh the danger he poses if he becomes a part of state power:
SEIU members know that healthcare must be grounded in science and evidence-based medicine. Our healthcare workers put their lives on the line to protect patients during the darkest days of the pandemic, and we would have lost many more members and loved ones if it weren’t for lifesaving vaccines. We will not stand silent as an outspoken anti-vaxxer who spread misinformation about autism and widespread public health interventions is poised to take control of one of our most consequential government agencies.
‘Legitimating his extremist positions’
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: “Media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale.”
Pundits in the New York Times and elsewhere taking Kennedy at his word are part of a broader problem in the media, according to Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel. Media frame his MAHA movement to sound “like a health-focused initiative,” she told FAIR in an email, but it’s actually a “platform for dangerous rhetoric and fake science that directly undermines public health research”:
By framing RFK Jr. as a semi-legitimate voice on health issues at all, not only does it bolster the credibility of the MAHA agenda, the media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale, effectively legitimating his extremist positions on vaccines, climate change and chronic disease without sufficient scrutiny, right before his appointment will be up for debate in the Senate. Truly scary stuff.
Rather than critically examining his stances, mainstream outlets often frame his views as “alternative” or “controversial,” which not only normalizes them but implicitly elevates them to the level of mainstream discourse, or further bolsters his reputation among the wellness community as a class warrior/truth teller.
This is particularly problematic in the context of his potential role at HHS, where his views could directly influence policy, research and local health department budgets, drug approvals, healthcare safety guidelines, disability determinations, disease surveillance, health statistics, public health disaster and epidemic preparedness, and so much more, making the media’s soft treatment of him even more dangerous.
‘Failures of the pandemic response’
“Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy claimed (New York Post, 7/23/23), citing this as evidence that the virus “is ethnically targeted.”
These efforts to find a silver lining in the Kennedy appointment, strenuously searching for common ground on which progressives and medical professionals can work with him, necessarily involved distorting the record in order to create a potential good-faith ally who doesn’t exist. Bedard’s piece in the Times, for example, twisted the facts in writing about the context for Kennedy’s rise:
There’s been no meaningful, public reckoning from the federal government on the successes and failures of the nation’s pandemic response. Americans dealt with a patchwork of measures—school closings, mask requirements, limits on gatherings, travel bans—with variable successes and trade-offs. Many felt pressured into accepting recently developed, rapidly tested vaccines that were often required to attend school, keep one’s job or spend time in public spaces.
The Biden administration did, in fact, reflect on the Covid pandemic to better plan for upcoming pandemics (NPR, 4/16/24; STAT, 4/16/24; PBS, 4/16/24), as scientific journals and government agencies have looked at the last pandemic to come up with planning for the future. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (11/14/24) recently held a hearing on the subject, and the Government Accountability Office (7/11/23) offered nearly 400 recommendations on improving pandemic planning. It might be fair to evaluate how well this effort is going, but that’s not what Bedard wrote.
And the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates were popular when they were being rolled out (Gallup, 9/24/21)—as one might expect when an effective preventive measure is introduced to combat a contagious virus killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Meanwhile, the fresh face that Bedard hopes will give us a meaningful reckoning, the one that the Biden administration supposedly failed to give us, endorsed a xenophobic, antisemitic conspiracy theory to explain the coronavirus (New York Post, 7/23/23): “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Bedard sanewashed this lunacy, saying that RFK Jr. “is right that vaccine mandates are a place where community safety and individual liberties collide.” “Official communication about vaccine safety can be more alienating to skeptics than reassuring,” she declared.
If someone wrote that traffic lights are a place where road safety and drivers’ liberties collide, and that traffic enforcement was alienating to red light skeptics, the Times would laugh it off. Yet the Times let a doctor give oxygen to such nonsense, even as she admitted that vaccines are only effective when an overwhelming majority of the population gets them.
Places like the Times have also published criticism of Kennedy (New York Times, 11/18/24), including a thorough look at his role in the American Samoa crisis (New York Times, 11/25/24). But corporate media have no obligation to bend the truth to offer the “other side” of an anti-vaccine extremist who is only taken seriously because his last name happens to be Kennedy.
Beyond Gas (11/24): “We found indoor NO2 pollution levels from moderate gas stove use far above the health standard set by the EPA for outdoor exposure.”
It was the sort of feel-good, David-vs.-Goliath story that’s perfect ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
A coalition of DC-area faith, tenant and environmental groups spent two years studying the health impacts of gas stoves. Just ahead of the holiday, when countless families would be spending hours in their kitchens cooking turkey and fixings, the coalition released their report, and it was a shocker.
After running the gas oven and two burners for 30 minutes, nearly two-thirds of homes studied registered higher levels of nitrogen dioxide than the EPA health-protective standard.
Nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, is a gas linked to wide-ranging health problems, from asthma to heart issues, and possibly “tied to increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, as well as cognitive development and behavioral issues in children,” the report noted.
For the grassroots group, called the Beyond Gas Coalition, the most pressing message to get to families was how to lessen their exposure to NO2 by keeping windows open during and even after cooking with gas stoves.
Longer term, the group encourages localities to ban gas appliances in new construction—a step already taken by DC and Montgomery County, Maryland, the two jurisdictions Beyond Gas studied. (Those bans will take effect in 2027.)
Despite the timeliness of Beyond Gas’s findings, only two news outlets covered the release: the Washington Informer (11/22/24), a venerable Black newspaper, and WUSA9, the local CBS affiliate owned by the media conglomerate Tegna (formerly part of Gannett).
WUSA, in fact, produced no less than three stories on the day of the report’s release (Heated, 11/27/24). Unfortunately, WUSA’s stories were quickly followed by an about-face.
Yanked without explanation
WUSA‘s report (11/27/24) on the dangers of gas stoves disappeared from its website—then came back in a more industry-friendly form.
WUSA’s trio of pieces began running on the morning of November 21, but by that evening, two of the three links to its stories were broken. “I thought it was just a glitch or something,” Barbara Briggs, co-author of Beyond Gas’s report, told the climate newsletter Heated (11/27/24).
When [Beyond Gas] called up WUSA to inquire, they say the message they received from the producer who worked on the story was that the station made the decision at the behest of the utility company, choosing to pull the story down and hide the video from its YouTube channel until it could include a statement from Washington Gas.
Of course, Washington Gas was under no obligation to ever give a statement.
“[WUSA] essentially told Washington Gas, ‘We’ll kill the story, and let you decide when and whether we republish it,’” Mark Rodeffer, a member of Sierra Club’s DC chapter, told Heated‘s Emily Atkin. “It’s shocking to me that they’re letting one of their advertisers dictate stories.”
“Washington Gas has sponsored many WUSA environmental stories,” Heated reported, “most of which are designed to bolster the utility’s environmental reputation.”
While Washington Gas wasn’t initially named in WUSA’s main report, Scott Broom, the environmental reporter who produced the story, noted in his report the gas industry’s objection to findings linking NO2 exposure to negative health outcomes, as well as the industry’s lawsuits against DC and Montgomery County over banning gas appliances.
But Washington Gas apparently wasn’t happy with Broom’s story, and it was quietly yanked without explanation.
New and improved
Heated (11/27/24): “The incident raises questions about how much fossil fuel sponsorship is influencing environmental and public health journalism—both in the DC region and beyond.”
Then, just as suddenly, the story reappeared six days later (11/27/24), now with Washington Gas’s fingerprints all over it. An editor’s note affixed to the top read: “This story…has been updated to include additional research and sources regarding the safety of gas stoves.”
A more honest editor’s note might have read: “We changed this story to keep a sponsor happy.”
WUSA’s apparent accommodations to Washington Gas—a greedy local monopoly utility owned by the Canadian multinational AltaGas—started right at the top of the new story. Here’s the opening to Broom’s original story (which can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine):
As families prepare for Thanksgiving feasts, a new report highlights what studies show is a serious health hazard in the kitchen: gas stoves and ovens.
In the updated version, WUSA downgraded the health hazard from “serious” to merely “potential.”
Broom’s second paragraph initially stated that “a study” had “revealed” that nearly two-thirds of the gas-stove-kitchens tested exceeded standard NO2 levels. The updated version now says “a report” only “claims” this.
Further down, things got stranger. The new version contains a long tangent conveying a gas industry talking point that has nothing to do with the story.
“Gas appliances can play an important role in reducing health hazards in poor countries where people rely on dirtier fuels such as wood and kerosene,” WUSA reported, citing a study likely handed to it by Washington Gas.
Better than nothing?
You might think the advocates who spent two years working on their study would be outraged at WUSA. But the DC area’s local media scene is in such disrepair that any coverage, no matter how problematic, may be better than the all-too-common nothing.
“It’s not like public radio has done anything,” a resigned Briggs told Heated. “It’s not like any of the other stations have carried it.”
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Katherine Gallagher about the Abu Ghraib verdict for the November 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: For a press corps that described the grievous abuse of Iraqi detainees at the prison in Abu Ghraib as “seared into the American consciousness,” there’s been relatively little interest in the fact that a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI guilty of conspiring in that abuse.
Al Shimari v. CACI International was filed in 2008 and, CounterSpinlisteners will know, has been fought and fought and fought. And now, while its unclear what justice would look like for victims of torture, there is some acknowledgement of harm, and the fact that it was people, and not nameless forces in the “fog of war,” who were to blame.
How meaningful this verdict becomes could shape things going forward, given the US military’s increased reliance on private contractors, who’ve evidently been led to understand that they are above the law.
Katherine Gallagher: Thanks so much for having me back.
JJ: First of all, congratulations. I’m not sure people understand that, just because the paper says, “Oh, this was horrible abuse. Our conscience is shocked,” doesn’t mean that anything happens. So the law isn’t justice, but if you use the law, it’s something. So first of all, I want to say thank you.
KG: Thank you, thank you for that acknowledgement, and, really, the thanks and the effort was first and foremost to our clients, who filed this case 16-and-a-half years ago, and stuck with it and stuck with us and stuck with US courts through a rollercoaster ride of moments where they thought that justice might be coming, and then others where the case was dismissed and deep disappointment. So I agree, the law is not always an answer, but it can certainly be a tool, as it was in this case, to get some measure of justice for Suhail, Asa’ad and Salah.
JJ: I’ll ask you to say their names, actually, because they’re not often named. So the plaintiffs in this case, that made it this far, say their names.
KG: Salah al-Ejaili came and testified in person in Virginia in this case. He is a journalist, and he was working as a journalist for Al Jazeera at the time he was detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib. The second plaintiff is Asa’ad al-Zuba’e. He is a fruit vendor in Iraq, and he testified, via video link, live in the courtroom in Alexandria. And then the third plaintiff is Suhail al-Shimari, whose name is the lead name in this long-running case of Al Shimari v. CACI. And he is an educator.
JJ: It seems important to recognize and acknowledge that there are human beings here. I want to ask you to ground us, because some of our listeners weren’t even born. Ground us on the substance of the charges here, and maybe why is this the only lawsuit to make it this far?
KG: So this case stems out of what for many of us, or those of us of a certain generation, really is a historic event, in the negative sense. And that is the torture of Iraqi detainees at a US-run detention center in Baghdad, in Iraq, during the US invasion of Iraq.
At Abu Ghraib, especially during the time from fall 2003 until early 2004, there was a conspiracy to torture and otherwise subject Iraqi detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. And that abuse, that horrific abuse, was documented in photos.
And those photos came out, the world saw them in 2004, and really “shocked the conscience,” which is a term that we often use in the law, but here it was true, for the entire nation and the world, when we saw naked, hooded, Iraqi detainees in human pyramids, being threatened with dogs, being subjected to sexual assault and degradation and humiliation, being held in contorted, painful positions, shackled to bed frames and walls.
And all of this, military generals investigated, they found that this was done, in large part, to “soften up” detainees, to make them pliable and ready to speak when they went into interrogation.
Now, at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, the US went in far too quickly, and with not enough resources, and with really no plan for the counterinsurgency that followed. So in the summer of 2003, the US started detaining Iraqis en masse. And so there were thousands and thousands of Iraqi detainees.
And in order to understand who they were even picking up, the US set up a number of detention centers, and they didn’t have enough trained interrogators, and they also didn’t have enough trained translators within the US military. So they outsourced those functions to private companies, and one of them was CACI, or C.A.C.I., a private government contractor from Virginia.
And CACI was hired, and paid tens of millions of dollars, to augment and support the US interrogation services. So CACI was hired to find so-called resident experts—qualified, trained interrogators to work in Iraq, and to supervise those interrogators who were working with the US military.
But what we found out, as the torture scandal broke and the military investigations happened and more information came out, is that CACI sent over unqualified interrogators, in many cases, and did not provide the kind of oversight or supervision that was required, and that was particularly required at Abu Ghraib, where there was a breakdown in the command structure within the military that allowed the kind of torture and abuse in those notorious photos to occur.
So that’s the big picture of what happened. And the abuse in that time was also inflicted upon the plaintiffs, Suhail, Asa’ad and Salah, who were detained in that end-of-2003, early-2004 time.
JJ: It seems worth just lifting up, as a point of information, these were not people who were charged or convicted of any crime, the detainees that we’re talking about, many of them, at Abu Ghraib, right?
KG: Correct. The individuals in this case, and I’ve represented individuals in two other cases, one that settled back in 2012 and one that was dismissed back in 2009. And of those 338 plaintiffs I’ve represented across those three cases, zero were ever charged with a crime. But I also want to be very clear that, even if one were charged with a crime, torture is always unlawful.
JJ: Right. Well, the case is landmark, in part just because of the way that it names contractors as responsible parties. It’s always been their argument, right, that they’re just private actors following orders from the US, and the US has immunity, so we do too, right? That’s part of what’s important about this.
KG: That’s precisely right. Over the 16 years of litigation, CACI has filed at least 15 motions to dismiss. And whether they’ve invoked Derivative Sovereign Immunity or the Political Question Doctrine or the Government Contractor Defense or the Law of War Immunity, or most recently and throughout trial, the so-called Borrowed Servant Defense—all of these boiled down to essentially one argument, which is, we were working with the US military, and anything we did was because they were overseeing it. And if they were overseeing it, they should have any responsibility, not us. We were just, essentially, following orders.
Now, the conduct at issue in this case—and we have clear decisions from the Fourth Circuit saying as much in our long litigation—the conduct at issue is unlawful. We’re talking about torture. We had plead war crimes, we’re talking about cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. These are violations of US domestic criminal law, and they are also violations of US-signed treaties, including the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.
And so, this is not conduct that the military could order anyone, whether it’s soldiers or contractors, to do. This is unlawful, illegal. So CACI’s defense fails, insofar as this is not a lawful order that they could have ever received from the military.
But, additionally, CACI was hired to supervise its own employees. This is a for-profit corporation that hired employees at will. So, unlike an enlisted person at Abu Ghraib, the CACI employees could quit at any time, and notably, some did, and one even did, more than one, because of what they saw happening at Abu Ghraib. So this corporation should be held accountable for its own employees’ conduct.
And that’s precisely, after 16-and-a-half years, what a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found to be the case two weeks ago when they gave down a verdict against CACI and for our plaintiffs.
JJ: I will say I’m disheartened by the relative quietness of media around the verdict. There has been some coverage, but I feel like I can say pretty confidently that had this case died in court, we would’ve never heard about it again.
But I’m also saddened by the accounts that I have seen: Virtually all of them use the phrase “over two decades ago.” And that, to me, is not a neutral tag. It’s a linguistic wink that says, “Why are we still talking about this?” But as you’ve noted, the case has taken this long because CACI has resisted it for this long, right?
KG: That is absolutely the case. The plaintiffs filed back in 2008, and our plaintiffs, to this day, the 20-year time period doesn’t erase or make this historic. They are living every day with being an Abu Ghraib torture survivor. They still suffer from nightmares, from flashbacks, and talking about Abu Ghraib is not something that’s easy for them to do.
The fact that this case went to trial not once but twice, and that the plaintiffs had to tell their account, tell about their suffering, their humiliation, more than once, it wasn’t easy. And to remember the kinds of details, some of it is seared in their memory, and others, of course, over 20 years is less clear than it used to be. But the nightmares and the mental harm has continued to this day, and it should not be something that is relegated to the history books at all.
And one of the things I’d note: There weren’t many photos shown during trial, but there were a few photos shown during trial, and there were a couple of jurors who appeared to be on the younger side. And when those photos came up, particularly for one of the younger jurors, who may not have seen this on the cover of the paper each day, as those of us did back in 2004, there was absolute shock. There was absolute shock. I mean, these photos were shocking for everyone, but the accounts seemed to be unknown. And that is not something that should be permitted to happen.
And that’s part of why, despite the difficulty, our plaintiffs have brought this case forward, and stayed with it throughout all of this time, so that it is not forgotten. And it is so that what was done in our name, for me as a US citizen, is also not forgotten. And they want to be sure that this never happens to anyone else again. So to the extent that corrections haven’t been made, whether by the US military or by CACI, to ensure that their employees or soldiers do not ever, ever treat detainees, or humans, in the way that the Iraqi men, women and children who were held at Abu Ghraib were treated, that’s what this case is also about.
JJ: Well, what do you make of the “few bad apples” line, which literally has appeared in some of the journalistic accounts that I’ve seen, that these were some rogue CACI employees, and it’s wrong to hold the organization liable for that?
KG: CACI, again, by its contract, had an obligation to oversee its employees, and it had staff on site precisely to do that. Also, the staff in Iraq was in daily contact with the staff back in Virginia, and some of the staff in Virginia traveled to Abu Ghraib over this period of time.
And so, whether we’re talking about a contractor at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture, or frankly, other kinds of corporations, you have an obligation to look down your supply chain. And that, here, that supply chain is your employees, and you have an obligation to ensure that they are abiding by the terms of their contract, and the obligations that you as a corporation are putting forward that you will comply with. And that included following federal and international law. And that means no torture, no cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment.
JJ: I sort of resent the fact, though I understand it, that it’s being reported solely as a lawsuit, and not a human rights crisis. And the coverage as a lawsuit means, first of all, we see a note of monetary outcomes: These folks are getting millions!
And then, also, I see the Washington Post quoting CACI, saying CACI employees say, “None of them laid a hand on detainees.” Well, “laid a hand on,” like, I don’t know, that sounds like language you got from somewhere else.
But, also, plaintiffs are described as “saying” they were restrained, “claiming” they were tortured. There’s always this degree of difference. And I wonder, I wish, in some ways, we could move it outside of just the lawsuit framework, and talk about the human rights crisis that Abu Ghraib actually presents and presented for the United States.
Katherine Gallagher: “The jury found not that our clients ‘claimed’ that they were tortured, but that our clients were subjected to torture.”
KG: I appreciate that comment and that perspective. And just a few reactions to the language that you cited: What’s important here is, our clients testified in court, under oath, and there were findings made by a jury, factual findings against clear law. And Judge Brinkema gave the jury their legal instructions against which to apply facts.
So the jury found not that our clients “claimed” that they were tortured, but that our clients were subjected to torture, or cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. The jury found them credible, as did General Taguba when he investigated Abu Ghraib back in 2004.
And, in fact, one of our clients in this case was someone who provided an account of abuse already, back in late 2003. And at that time, General Taguba also found the report by him and other Iraqi detainees credible.
So these are not mere allegations at this point. We have a jury verdict, and the jury awarded each plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages, and $11 million each in punitive damages against CACI.
And that punitive damages award is saying that it wasn’t a few rogue employees, but it was a corporation that had responsibilities that it didn’t fulfill. The fact that that punitive damages award was meeting the amount that CACI was paid through their contract at Abu Ghraib, I really think sends a very clear message.
JJ: Finally, and perhaps you’ve answered it, but what are your hopes for the impact of this verdict, and what would you maybe say to other attorneys, frankly, who are working on years-old cases that might never lead to such an outcome?
KG: First, on the outcome, we certainly had a big victory, and it was a real validation of our clients, of what was done to them, and of their quest for justice. So that, again, I am very grateful for.
We will be facing an appeal; CACI has made that clear. So the litigation is not yet over, and our clients have not been given the monetary compensation. But, indeed, there already has been a real recognition for them by the jury, which mattered a lot, I have to say. It mattered a great deal to them, to know that they were heard and that they were believed.
In terms of the bigger picture of what this means, I do think that these cases are important. They may be difficult and, frankly, they also may be lost, but raising the challenges, and bringing the facts to the forefront, and putting harm with proper labels, so that those pictures Abu Ghraib are understood as torture, which means causing severe physical or mental harm, intentionally. And that is what happened to our plaintiffs.
CACI was part of a conspiracy to do that to our plaintiffs. And, indeed, they may not have been the ones to literally shackle our plaintiffs, but they gave instructions and encouragement to have our plaintiffs so mistreated and so harmed.
And I think that that message of challenging injustice, and for our clients to try and regain some of their agency, some of their dignity, it’s important. And I’m gratified that in this case it ended in a victory, but I still think it’s worth bringing cases, even if that’s not the outcome.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. They’re online at CCRJustice.org.
Thank you so much, Katherine Gallagher, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
In the aftermath of the Trump victory, the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published post-election eulogies for conventional economics. Remarkably, these columns shared almost the exact same headline.
Peter Coy’s column in the Times (11/8/24) read “The Election’s Other Biggest Losers? Economists.” In the Journal (11/7/24), Joseph C. Sternberg’s piece was headed “The 2024 Election’s Other Loser: Economists.”
While the headlines were nearly identical, the ideological differences between the Times and the Journal mean that Coy and Sternberg arrived at very different conclusions for the future of the field of study.
Coy’s piece is a lament for mainstream economists, who in his view perfectly analyzed the economic situation of the election, only to have their expertise rejected by the voters. Sternberg strikes a smugger tone, arguing that economists deserve scorn for not understanding what the economy meant to voters, as evidenced by the election results.
Despite their divergent tones, both columns suffered from similar problems, including a fundamental misunderstanding of how voters interface with “the economy” as a political concern.
‘Moment of reckoning’
Peter Coy (New York Times, 11/8/24): “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around economists.”
Peter Coy is the resident economics and business columnist at the New York Times. A longtime writer for BusinessWeek, he is an unabashed apologist for mainstream economics, so when “voters utterly ignored” the wisdom of 23 Nobel Prize–winning economists, Coy seemed to take it personally.
Coy ticked off Trump’s economic sins, including tariffs and immigration restrictions, before conceding that “voters ate it up. Economists were perceived as spokespeople for the power structure—if not outright harmful, then at least ignorable.”
One doesn’t have to be a Trump supporter to recognize that economists (or at least, the ones quoted in corporate media) are generally spokespeople for the power structure. That aside, Coy went on to pose the election loss as a “moment of reckoning” for Democrats:
Should Democrats stick to the economic platform of 2024, which on the whole is based on standard economic principles, with a few concessions to electoral politics, such as promises of mortgage down-payment assistance and fulminations against “nefarious price-gouging”? Or should they go full-on populist to compete with Trump?
Coy was vague on what he meant by “standard economic principles,” elaborating only to say “trade should be free, within reason,” and that “monetary policy should be insulated from politics.” (“Insulated from politics” is what media say when they mean bankers should be allowed to set interest rates without regard for their impact on people.)
In other words, Coy stumped for the status quo, in the most general sense. He believes that Biden bet big and lost on “deliverism,” the idea that voters will reward politicians at the ballot box for material gains delivered. Coy failed to mention the Covid-era relief, like the expanded child tax credit, that was delivered then taken back from US workers. Deliverism is far from full-fledged economic populism, but Coy uses Harris’s election loss to argue that interventions in the economy on behalf of working people are a fool’s errand.
‘Unfortunate’ populism
Franklin Roosevelt
Coy invoked the example of President Franklin Roosevelt, a president who turned to economic populism to “fight off threats” from political populists, as a “reference point” for Democrats.
But instead of investigating why Roosevelt’s populism was successful, both electorally and economically, in an effort to imagine what modern left economic populism could look like, Coy decried a hypothetical progressive populism as “unfortunate”:
Higher tariffs would slow economic growth and raise prices, no matter how many times Trump denies it. As for immigration, effective border controls make sense, but sharp restrictions on new arrivals and expulsion of people who are already in the country would leave millions of jobs unfilled and possibly unfillable.
Most progressives who wish a return to economic populism would agree with this analysis. The problem is that Coy presented tariffs and mass deportations as the only forms Democrats’ economic populism could take. Unmentioned were universal healthcare, a wealth tax and guaranteed basic income, to name just a few examples—odd omissions, given that he acknowledged that FDR called for “higher taxes on the rich, a federal minimum wage and Social Security.”
Advice from the right
A scholar from the highly ideological Hoover Institution advised Democrats to “offer nonideological solutions.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas)
Instead, Coy sought advice from Larry Diamond of the right-wing Hoover Institution, and experts from the arms maker–funded Center for a New American Security, on what Democrats can do to “fend off populism.” Their prescriptions include “offer non-ideological solutions…create unifying and aspirational narratives, use blame attributions sparingly,” and other safely capital-friendly methods.
Unsurprisingly, these experts agreed wholeheartedly with Coy’s assertion that left-wing populism in any form is the wrong path for Democrats. The fact that Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election after she renounced the progressive policies she once supported, then offered many “nonideological solutions” of her own, didn’t seem to concern Coy.
Instead, Coy concluded, Democrats would be better served by sticking to their (Hoover Institution–vetted) principles, and waiting for Trump to mess up. “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around economists,” Coy conceded, “but I do think the prescriptions of mainstream economics still make sense.”
It is clear why Coy and his fellow fans of mainstream economics were so disappointed by this election. In his eyes, the Harris campaign did everything right. She ran on an incumbent record that posted strong growth and low unemployment, and lowered inflation rates. She ran on a business-friendly platform (despite Coy’s disapproval of her anti-price-gouging “concession” to voters).
And after all that, Harris lost, decisively. Nonetheless, Coy was optimistic for the future of a Democratic Party committed to centrism: “In the long run, Democrats will be better off sticking to their economic principles while Trump and the party he controls founder.”
‘Those parts that matter most’
Aside from pointing to phony wage growth statistics, the Wall Street Journal‘s Joseph Sternberg (11/7/24) argued that numbers like the “business-investment component of …quarterly GDP releases” mattered most to voters.
Sternberg spent the first half of his Wall Street Journal column (11/7/24) arguing that “prominent economics commentators missed (or chose to overlook) those parts of the economy that matter most to most voters.” As someone who studies Marxian political economy, I am highly sympathetic to the view that the conventional economists have it dead wrong. However, instead of calling for a true reevaluation of the economics field, Sternberg limited his critique to Monday morning–quarterbacking his ideological opponents.
Sternberg claims that real weekly earnings fell 0.5% over Biden’s term in office, as opposed to 7% growth during Trump’s term. Sternberg appears to be looking at Current Population Survey earnings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which show a phantom spike in income just before the end of Trump’s first term. This clearly reflects lower-paid workers disproportionately losing their jobs during the lockdown rather than actual gains for workers’ pocketbooks (FAIR.org, 11/20/24).
More dependable statistics show real incomes increased at all income levels during the Biden administration, and increased the most at lower income levels. Per the Center for American Progress, workers poorer than 90% of all earners saw a 16% increase in real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) between February 2020 and September 2024; workers poorer than 80% of earners saw a 9% increase.
Other analyses similarly found across-the-board income increases from the Biden economic recovery (especially among lower income levels) in terms of both real wages and real weekly earnings. In other words, if you look at data without known aberrations, workers have indeed come out ahead.
Those datasets, however, don’t post-confirm Sternberg’s notion that economists sleepwalked into an election loss. Whether it’s earnings data or anything else, there will always be statistics that can support one’s post-hoc reasoning. Confidently proclaiming which economic indicators decide an election after the election takes place is low-hanging fruit.
Sternberg declared that “only an economist could be surprised by Donald Trump’s presidential victory.” But economists who favorably compared Kamala Harris’ platform to Trump’s weren’t predicting that she would therefore win; they were saying they thought her policies would result in better economic outcomes. That voters most concerned about economic issues picked the candidate most economists thought would hurt the economy is more an indictment of journalism than of economics.
Workers the actual losers
FAIR.org (7/13/23): “Any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings.”
The job of communicating economic activity to the masses is not that of economists, after all, but rather journalists and the punditocracy (of which Sternberg is a part). Throughout his column, Sternberg referred to the “economics pundit class,” “economics commentators,” “economists,” “academics,” “punditry” and “economic analysts,” all in more or less the same role. The problem is, these words describe people in a wide variety of jobs, who were by no means united in their electoral prognostication.
FAIR (1/25/23, 7/13/23, 1/5/24) has documented the media obsession with Biden-era inflation, and indeed, continuous news reports that decry the effects inflation will have on people’s quality of life go a long way to shaping perceptions of the economy. When media bleat for years about inflation, and workers recognize that prices have indeed increased, then workers’ justified dissatisfaction with the economy will be identified as “inflation.”
The pundit class has displayed an inability to differentiate between short-run grievances and long-term disaffection. It may be true that inflation is down, thanks to Biden’s remarkablerecovery. It may also be true that workers are fed up with the status quo, as represented by Harris’s bid to change “not a thing” about the current administration. Of course, Donald Trump has few real offerings for improvements for the working class, but that is another issue altogether.
To Coy, a dramatic Democratic underperformance, especially among workers, is a sign that economists should stick to the same great policies that have generated historic wealth inequality. To Sternberg, economists are fools because they weren’t looking at the figures that exactly predicted the election, notwithstanding the fact that 1) that’s not the job of economists, 2) he only chose his magic figures after the election took place, and 3) Sternberg’s chief data point, how much voters were paid, is known to misrepresent reality.
As long as writers like Coy and Sternberg fail to understand the motivations of voters, then the losers won’t be the economists, but the workers who are forced to vote for one faction of capital against another.
This week on CounterSpin: It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but the pictures of it, that forced public and official acknowledgement. The Defense Department vehemently resisted the pictures’ release, with good reason. Yet when, after the initial round, Australian TV put out new images, Washington Post executive editor Len Downie said they were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” The notion that acts of torture by the US military and its privately contracted cat’s paws are, above all, distasteful may help explain corporate media’s inattentiveness to the efforts of victims of Abu Ghraib to find some measure of justice.
But a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI responsible for its part in that abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has been behind the case, Al Shimari v. CACI, through its long rollercoaster ride through the courts—which isn’t over yet. We hear about it from CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the ICC’s Israel warrants.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Predictably, Israel and its allies condemned the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Washington Post, 11/21/24). A press release from the court (11/21/24) accused the Israeli leaders of “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.” These consisted of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare,” “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts” and “the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”
In addition to the US, Israel’s primary source of military and diplomatic support, Israel also received backing from Hungary and Argentina, two nations run by far-right leaders who seek to undo democratic liberalism (Al Jazeera, 11/21/24).
‘International Kangaroo Court’
New York Post (11/21/24): “This latest effort is simply another part of the international push spearheaded by Jew-hating high officials around the world to delegitimize Israel.”
There were also the expected cries of foul play in right-wing US media. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/21/24) said Israel was merely acting in self-defense because “Hamas started the war on October 7 by sending death squads into Israel.”
“The charge of deliberate starvation is absurd,” the Journal snarled, noting that “Israel has facilitated the transfer of more than 57,000 aid trucks”—in other words, about one-fourth of what Gaza’s 2 million people would have needed to meet their basic needs (NPR, 2/21/24).
Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Journal (11/24/24) that he was “putting together a legal dream team” to defend Israel’s leaders, as if to present Netanyahu as a sort of global stage version of O.J. Simpson. If you want to gauge the seriousness of Dershowitz’s announcement, consider that the “dream team” will reportedly include Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced ex-governor of New York (New York Post, 11/25/24).
Fellow Murdoch paper the New York Post (11/21/24) called the ICC charges “false.” “International Kangaroo Court is more like it,” its editorial board mocked, “and one more reminder why the United States should never recognize the ICC.”
“ICC Unleashes Chaos, Antisemitism” read a headline from an op-ed in the Unification Church–owned Washington Times (11/22/24).
‘Authoritarians who kill with impunity’
What is the right venue, according to the Washington Post (11/24/24)? Israel will bring itself to justice if it’s committed any war crimes.
While it’s not surprising to see right-wing outlets waving away the atrocities in Gaza, it is striking to see the Washington Post—a vehicle for the establishment center whose slogan is “democracy dies in darkness”—not only condemning the warrants, but arguing that the court should stick to prosecuting enemy states of the United States.
In a brutally honest way, the paper’s editorial board (11/24/24) declared that Israel must be held apart from other regimes who do terrible things, arguing that rules needn’t apply to the West and its allies, since they have the “means [and] mechanisms to investigate themselves.”
The board complained that the international justice system singled out Israel for “selective prosecution” while ignoring rogue regimes:
This is a gross oversimplification to the point of deception. In each of the cases the Post names, neither perpetrator nor victim are from countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, which means that it is extremely difficult for the ICC to claim jurisdiction over them. (Palestine, in contrast, is a signatory to the treaty that established the ICC, which is why the court has jurisdiction over that case.)
In the case of Sudan, the court did manage to prosecute pro-Sudanese government militia commander Ali Kushayb (ICC, 4/5/22) and indict former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (Guardian, 2/11/20) for atrocities committed in Darfur. This was possible because the ICC may also claim jurisdiction when a case is referred to it by the UN Security Council. (The court’s prosecutor has spoken to the legal complexities of confronting the current crisis—ICC, 8/6/24.)
An innovative legal approach involving cross-border claims from Bangladesh has allowed an ICC investigation of Myanmar’s genocide against the Rohingya to proceed, albeit very slowly (CNN, 7/7/23). A similar approach might work with the Syria case (Guardian, 2/16/22), but no member state has referred the case to the court (Atlantic Council, 9/26/24), in contrast to the Israel case.
A more apt comparison would be Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine: Russia, like Israel, is not a party to the ICC, while Ukraine, like Palestine, is. And the ICC has indeed, as the Post quietly acknowledges later in the piece, issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The legal complexities here are manifold, but the Post doesn’t bother to grapple with them, suggesting that it’s the Post more than the ICC that’s guilty of selective prosecution.
The Post went on:
The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity. Israel went to war in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and another 250 taken hostage, around 100 of whom still remain captive. The ICC’s arrest warrant for one of the authors of that massacre, Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who was probably killed in an Israeli airstrike months ago, looks more like false equivalence than genuine balance.
In fact, the court had sought a warrant for Hamas leader and October 7 attack planner Yahya Sinwar (CNN, 5/20/24), but the Israeli military killed him before the justice system could catch up with him (AP, 10/18/24). If the court had not prosecuted Hamas officials, then the Post and others would accuse it of singling out Israel. When the court does go after Hamas officials, the Post claims it’s political theater. The court can’t win.
‘Vibrant, independent media’
Israel’s “vibrant, independent media” reports that it is under heavy censorship, with 2,703 articles redacted by the military in 2023, and 613 banned entirely (972, 5/20/24).
The Post then offered some “to be sures.” Yes, “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed and maimed”; yes, Israel “has fallen short” on allowing in humanitarian aid. But it is the next part where one wonders if the Post board has left the earthly realm for another reality, in which Israel will be held accountable by—wait for it—itself:
Israel needs to be held accountable for its military conduct in Gaza. After the conflict’s end—which is long overdue—there will no doubt be Israeli judicial, parliamentary and military commissions of inquiry. Israel’s vibrant, independent media will do its own investigations. Some Israeli reserve soldiers have already been arrested over accusations of abuse against Palestinian detainees. More investigations will follow. The ICC is supposed to become involved when countries have no means or mechanisms to investigate themselves. That is not the case in Israel.
Has the Post been living under a rock? The biggest story in Israel before last year’s Hamas attack that instigated the attack on Gaza was Netanyahu’s attack on the independence of the judiciary (AP, 9/11/23), and Israel’s right-wing government is continuing this effort (Economist, 9/19/24).
As for the so-called free press, the government has moved to boycott the country’s main liberal newspaper, Haaretz (11/24/24), pulling government advertising and advising ministries to end communication with reporters. Israel has also banned Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24), and at least 130 journalists have been killed during Israel’s military campaigns against Gaza and Lebanon (FAIR.org, 5/1/24; Committee to Protect Journalists, 11/25/24). Military censorship of the media has also increased, the Israeli magazine 972 (5/20/24) found.
‘To ensure impunity’
In the tiny fraction of cases where soldiers were indicted for killing Palestinians, AP (12/22/22) reported, “Israel’s military prosecutors acted with leniency toward convicted soldiers…with those sentenced for killing Palestinians serving only short-term military community service.”
Meanwhile, there are isolated examples of the Israeli government prosecuting soldiers, but experts believe that most military crimes have gone and will go unpunished (ProPublica, 5/8/24; Al Jazeera, 7/6/24). “Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the last five years have been indicted in less than 1% of the hundreds of complaints against them,” AP (12/22/22) reported.
When an Israeli court acquitted a border police officer who killed an autistic Palestinian man (BBC, 7/6/23), the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (6/25/20) said that even the original investigation into the killing was “merely a fig leaf to silence criticism until the public outrage and media attention die down.” It added that, on the whole, “the investigation system works behind the scenes to whitewash the violence and ensure impunity for those responsible.”
Moreover, these investigations are largely of the “bad apple” variety, singling out extreme behavior of lower-ranking members of the military. Does the Post seriously expect Israel to hold accountable those at the top who are prosecuting the war?
Right-wing lawmakers are working to further block investigations, Human Rights Watch (7/31/24) said, a situation that builds an increased sense of impunity, as 972 (8/1/24) noted.
This doesn’t sound like a healthy parliamentary system with democratic guardrails, but a warrior state spiraling into authoritarianism. The Washington Post, too, seems to be moving away from liberalism and a rules-based system, and more toward defending Israel at all costs.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Lever’s Amos Barshad about legalized sports betting for the November 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Among other happenings on November 5, Missouri narrowly passed a ballot measure that will legalize sports gambling in the state. Like similar measures in other states, Amendment Two came with a lot of promises and perhaps not-deep-enough questions, as our guest explored in a timely report.
Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, online at LeverNews.com, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. He joins us now by phone from here in New York City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Amos Barshad.
JJ: So “ballot measure” sounds very bottom-up, but Amendment Two did not arise, as it were, organically from the community. Who did you find to be the driving forces behind it?
AB: Yeah, we found that backers of the ballot measure were the two big sports gambling companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, which are national corporations that probably a lot of people are familiar with through their advertising. And they allied with the professional sports teams in Missouri; there’s six of them. And everyone got together to push forward this ballot measure. I don’t know what the final number was; at least something like $36 million was spent backing this ballot measure.
JJ: We should take a minute to note that there’s a relevant Supreme Court ruling from 2018 that opened the floodgates to states doing this legalizing of sports gambling, right? Essentially, there was a law on the books, and it got taken off.
AB: That’s right, yeah. So the 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to make their own decisions on sports gambling. And very quickly, many states legalized; so we were up to 38 as of this year before November, and then Missouri did become the 39th state.
JJ: Now, there’s a sort of a blueprint that the industry uses, and it seems to be working. There’s kind of a template that’s gone from one state to another, right? Can you talk about that?
Amos Barshad: “The industry makes these promises that they can’t keep. They’re telling you that this will solve your issues, but it’s not true.”
AB: Yeah, so what we’ve found through our reporting is that the industry often makes promises that the tax revenue from sports gambling will go to causes that most people could get behind. So in Missouri, specifically, it was education, the public school system, money for teachers, money for kids in the public school system. And that’s common, I think a lot of people would maybe know that a lot of state lotteries allocate money for education.
From there, we found that it gets a little bit more cynical, for two reasons. Specifically in Missouri, the critics, the group that was opposing this ballot measure, made the compelling argument that there isn’t that much guaranteed money going to education, that the way the rule was written both creates carve-outs for the gambling companies to actually not pay quite as much in taxes as it might seem. Plus, then from there, there’s not even a direct conduit created so the money will go to education.
Yeah, that’s kind of been, like you said, the blueprint. So we looked at other states, and it seems like, for example, in Colorado, which faces drought via climate change, the money will be earmarked to address water scarcity; Washington, DC, parents faced really high family expenses, so the promise is with funding for childcare. And it’s almost like they’re engineering the end result; they’re saying, we can fix your problem.
And in California, which voted down a legalized sports gambling ballot measure in 2022, the money would have gone to try to alleviate the homelessness crisis. But, basically, the groups opposing that were able to effectively communicate that the industry makes these promises that they can’t keep. They’re telling you that this will solve your issues, but it’s not true.
JJ: And I wanted to ask you a little more about what we do know about that track record, but I just wanted to point out that in this piece in the Kansas City Star from November 6, it says:
A fiscal note attached to the measure estimated that the state revenue generated from legalized sports betting would range from nothing to $28.9 million each year. But the campaign argued those figures would be much higher.
Well, yeah, higher than nothing would be great, but, I mean, this is even, in the measure itself, it doesn’t sound like a promise.
AB: Yeah, exactly. It’s really interesting, because whatever any given voter’s personal opinion on sports gambling is, you can then go from, “OK, but we should write the legislation to ensure that the promises that are being made are being kept.”
And, basically, part of the reason why that minimum could be zero is because of this carve-out that the industry has successfully pushed for in state after state, which is that they can use their promotional spending against their tax bill, basically, which means the money that they use to lure in new gamblers. And it’s a whole big conversation about issues with sports gambling, where that, again, it gets pretty cynical, and that’s money basically spent on luring in, say, problem gamblers, people with gambling addiction issues. So they’re using that money, money that’s spent trying to hook new gamblers, and that not only maybe exacerbates the situation for any given person gambling too much, that can go into debt, create personal problems in their life, but then they get to deduct that from the tax bill. So, yeah.
JJ: So we have at least 38 sort of case studies, and it sounds as though you’ve said it, but can we say that there’s not a strong track record here in terms of sports betting filling budget holes in any meaningful way?
AB: It’s an interesting question, because, again, you can go state by state. So in the state of New York, they were able to push for a 51% tax rate, which is, as it sounds, extremely high, that’s the highest in the nation. There’s a few other states that have it at that rate as well, and they have been able to collect significant funds, and in New York state, that goes to education as well.
But it’s interesting, even there, there’s legislators that are friendly to the industry, that have tried to claw back, lower that tax rate, actually have tried to introduce that same carve-out where the gambling companies get to use the promotional spending to deduct from the tax bill.
And then in the other states, it can be 10%. I think that’s the tax rate in Missouri, a lot of the other states are set at 10%, and, yeah, it doesn’t become a significant enough source of funding to ameliorate all the issues that are then caused from legalized sports gambling. And I think the other point on that is: Education costs go up. These big issues costs go up, year after year. But is the revenue from the gambling going up year after year? It seems that that’s not necessarily the case.
JJ: You have a fact in the piece that says, “in the run up to the 2023 Super Bowl, Kansans bet $194 million, from which the state of Kansas raked in $1,134.” That is not impressive.
AB: It’s a stark figure, and that’s all about that carve-out that I mentioned. All that money, a lot of it was promotional money for their “free” app. What actually happens is, they get you onto their app; once you’re on there, it says, “Oh, you have to spend this $5 by a certain time.” So these gambling companies are extremely good at getting people onto the apps, and getting them to spend more than they necessarily intended to. And you hear, “Here’s a free $5 bet,” but from there, you have to spend a certain amount of money within a certain amount of time to cash in on the offers. So as you can see, a particularly egregious example, but you’re talking about a ton of money being spent, and the end result is not what would seem to be the correct amount of correlating tax revenue for the state.
Lever (10/24/24)
JJ: The piece starts with a photo op in which the mascots from Missouri’s professional sports teams delivered boxes of signatures in support of Amendment Two to the secretary of state’s office.
AB: [Laughs]
JJ: Very cute. What is in it for the teams? What do the teams see that made them put millions and millions of dollars into this?
AB: Historically, the professional sports teams in America were against legalized sports gambling, for probably reasons you’d expect, feeling that it would corrupt the sport in ways. We’re probably all familiar with certain scandals over the history of American professional sports in the 20th century, most famously Pete Rose, the baseball player. The idea that maybe once you legalized, you incentivize more gambling, that players would have reasons to throw games, or affect what’s happening on the field because of gambling interests.
But, basically, once the 2018 Supreme Court decision came out, once they saw just how much money was there to make, sports teams in America did a complete 180, and are all behind this.
And they’re not directly collecting money, there’s not anything written into the law where they get a certain percentage of the amount that’s gambled. But what ends up happening is, with these sports gambling companies, they have so much money to spend, and they end up spending it through the sports teams. They might set up by advertising inside the stadium, or during the broadcast of the team’s games. They might even set up booths inside the stadium, so they have to pay teams for the right to do that. The teams know that if gambling is legalized in their state, that their marketing revenue is going to go up a certain amount.
JJ: Another interesting part of this very interesting piece is FanDuel, their parent company, called Flutter, they operate in the UK, that’s where they started, but they have different rules about just the kinds of things that you’ve been talking about over there, don’t they?
AB: Yeah, and I think that’s really an important part of everything, because, again, any given person might think about sports gambling, and the legalization of it, and say: “It does exist in other states or other countries. Is it really so bad?” And I think that the counterargument would really be to look at the regulation that is happening in other countries.
Specifically in the UK, it’s actually been about 20 years since this kind of online mobile betting took off. And what critics say is that it took decades of families being ruined, individual lives being ruined through gambling debts, for really good regulation to come, in which gambling companies are legally obligated to make sure that the people betting aren’t betting beyond their means, and that they aren’t exhibiting problem gambling behaviors. And in the US, because this is relatively new, that regulation just doesn’t exist.
So you could say, OK, I believe in legalized sports gambling, I want the tax revenue to come in. But from there, you’ve got to think, what is the impact on people? What is actually going to happen next? And you can see, where sports gambling is legal, there is a spike in addiction, and issues of that nature. And so the question is, are we just going to let companies write the rule book, or is there common-sense regulation that could come in that would really save a lot of people?
JJ: I do see in the writeups from Missouri and other states, there’s kind of an offhand reference to, oh yeah, some of the revenue has to go to this fund to combat problem gambling, or something. But it is very vague.
AB: So it’s basically, anytime a state legalizes sports gambling, it will also either indicate that a certain amount of money is going to go to a preexisting state problem-gambling fund, or create a whole new one. So it’s very much, we are aware that these issues are going to come in, and we’re going to try to tackle them.
What I tried to point out in the piece is that there isn’t some sense that we’re going to prevent people from becoming addicts in the first place. We’re just going to be there to treat them after they become addicts. And I think we can see the obvious issue there, to accept the fact that harm is going to happen on a large public scale, and then say, “And then we’ll deal with it,” is not ever going to be as effective as trying to make sure that that harm doesn’t take place in the first place.
JJ: There is, as you’ve been discussing, a real incentive system to keep people betting, but right now this is still betting on actual games that actually happen. But some folks see a slippery slope. Talk about iGaming.
AB: iGaming is the industry-preferred term for any kind of casino game that we might be familiar with, probably most famously slots. And you could just basically play a digital version of that on your phone. But it just creates an endless variety of options for people to gamble on. It’s legal in some states, and the push is to continue legalizing it, and it’s basically much more lucrative because people lose more money playing it.
And the way that it’s set up, the way that certain games are created, for example, you could play multiple hands of blackjack. There’s one infamous game that you’re basically betting on watching a little cartoon rocket go up, and you’re trying to guess when the rocket will explode. So it’s almost cutesy, children’s entertainment almost, but people are spending real money and losing real money playing these games.
Again, it goes back to the idea of regulation. What are we going to allow people to bet on, as far as knowing that if they get hooked on these games, that it could damage their lives? I think with the iGaming, the way that some critics of the industry have talked about it, is that this sports gambling wave was always the prelude to this next phase, this iGaming phase. And when you think about it that way, yeah, it can feel a bit alarming that there isn’t any kind of organized pushback on a national level, because I think that’s what we’re talking about.
As we mentioned, it has passed in Missouri, and looking at the last few states left in the country, there’s good reason to think that they’ll get up to or close to having sports gambling be legal in every state in the country. You just have to wait and see. But I think the question is from there, then, that obviously indicates the need for a national response. And there are, Rep. Paul Tonko, congressman from the state of New York, he has introduced a bill called the SAFE Bet Act, and this is the first attempt to create restrictions, to create protections, to push back on gambling companies, who currently have a complete green light to do what they want.
JJ: Finally, it was a very tight race. Amendment Two passed by something like half a percentage point in Missouri, and we should understand that in the context that there were all these major sports teams, and millions and millions of dollars, supporting it. So there are a lot of people, it seems, who are concerned about this, who are pushing back on this. There’s a constituency there to stay in conversation with, it seems. I just wonder what you would like to see, along with the regulation from the state and perhaps from the federal level, what would you like to see in terms of reporting, follow-up reporting, on this incredibly impactful and interesting issue?
AB: As we talked about, all this has only been legal since 2018, so the data that has come in since then is starting to indicate the exact severity of the problem, and I think we’re just only going to see more of that. We’re going to have more hard numbers on what this is actually doing to people. There has been and continues to be great reporting on this and, yeah, definitely would just love to see more of that. We can really quantify this and say, OK, sports gambling would come in, here’s the amount of tax revenue that is created, and here’s the corresponding issues that it’s led to. And I think if you look at it in that way, here’s the black and white, and people can make informed decisions on where they stand on it, rather than, like we spoke about, being swayed by the funny mascots running around pushing it, their beloved sports teams pushing it, or being told that money is going to go to education. You can divorce yourself from the sales pitch and say, “OK, what’s the reality?” The numbers are all going to be there.
JJ: All right then; we’ve been speaking with Amos Barshad. You can find the article “The Gambling Industry’s Cynical Play for Your Vote” at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Amos Barshad, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer confronting a “Chinese invader” in Panama’s Darien Gap (X, 2/22/24).
In February, far-right political activist Laura Loomer—the self-defined “white advocate” and “proud Islamophobe” whom Donald Trump has praised as a “terrific” person and “very special”—descended on Panama to investigate the “invasion of America” allegedly taking place via the Darién Gap.
The Darién Gap, mind you, is 5,000 kilometers away from the US border. The only land bridge connecting South and Central America, it is largely comprised of spectacularly hostile jungle. It has become an epicenter of the global migration crisis, as international refuge seekers are forced to contend with its horrors in the pursuit of a better life. More than 520,000 people crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, while an untold number died trying—victims of rushing rivers, steep precipices, armed assailants and sheer exhaustion.
Over the course of her Darién expedition, Loomer exposed the diabolical logistics of the “invasion” by accosting numerous migrants who had just emerged from the deadly jungle, and now had a mere six countries—and all manner of additional life-imperiling danger—lying between them and the United States.
There were the “invaders from Africa,” for example, several of whom Loomer reported “were wearing tribal outfits.” Then there were the “Venezuelans invaders” [sic] who informed Loomer that Trump was a “bitch,” and the men from Afghanistan who “openly admitted” that they were migrating to “escape the Taliban”—the upshot in Loomerland being that it was “only a matter of time before we have another 9/11-style terrorist attack in our country.” And there was the “Chinese invader” from Beijing who was traveling with two children, and who constituted undeniable proof that “the Chinese Communist Party is actively invading the US via invaders. And they are coming in via the Darién Gap.”
Omission of context
Map showing the Darién Gap, which separates the Pan-American Highway into two segments (Wikipedia).
As Trump now prepares to retake America’s presidential reins and realize his dream of manic mass deportations, the likes of Loomer are dutifully standing by with their arsenal of “invading invader” babble. And while US Democrats are generally better at camouflaging their own anti-migrant militance with slightly more refined rhetoric, let’s not forget that President Joe Biden presided over plenty of deportations himself (Washington Post, 12/29/23)—in addition to expanding Trump’s border wall (Reuters, 10/6/23), in contravention of his promise not to do so.
Enter the corporate media, which play an integral role in abetting the bipartisan US war on migrants—even as the more centrist outlets enjoy cultivating the illusion of moral superiority to Trump’s brand of transparently sociopathic xenophobia. Much of the media’s complicity in this war has to do with what is not said in news reports—namely, that the US is itself largely responsible for wreaking much of the international political and financial havoc that forces people to migrate in the first place.
This conscious omission of context has long been on display in the Darién Gap, where, unlike in Loomer’s “reporting,” a constant stream of mainstream dispatches does serve to convey the terrific plight of migrants—but simultaneously excises the US role in the whole sinister arrangement.
‘A hole in the fence’
For corporate media (CNN, 4/17/23), the bad guys are those who help refugees escape, not those who create the conditions they’re escaping from.
Take CNN (4/17/23), which begins one of its countless Darién Gap interventions with a rundown on the various perils: “Masked robbers and rapists. Exhaustion, snakebites, broken ankles. Murder and hunger.”
Throughout the article, we are introduced sympathetically to an array of migrants, such as Jean-Pierre of Haiti, who is carrying his sick son strapped to his chest. According to CNN, Jean-Pierre was driven to leave Haiti because “gang violence, a failed government and the worst malnutrition crisis in decades make daily life untenable.”
This, to be sure, is a rather cursory flyover of the situation in a country where the untenability of daily life is due in good part to more than a century of pernicious meddling by the United States—from military invasion and occupation to support for torture-happy Haitian dictatorships, from repeated coups to economic subjugation. In 2011, WikiLeaks cables revealed that the Barack Obama administration had agitated to block an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian apparel workers beyond 31 cents per hour.
As is par for the corporate media course, CNN deems such history irrelevant, and instead assigns the overarching blame for the human tragedy playing out in the “most dangerous” Darién Gap to migrant traffickers:
The cartel overseeing the route is making millions off a highly organized smuggling business, pushing as many people as possible through what amounts to a hole in the fence for migrants moving north, the distant American dream their only lodestar.
Never mind that, absent the selective US-backed criminalization of migration for the have-nots of the global capitalist system, migrant traffickers would have no business to organize.
‘Seventy miles in hell’
For the Atlantic (8/6/24), economic suffering in Venezuela is the fault of its government’s “corruption and mismanagement,” with US sanctions merely a response to an “authoritarian crackdown.”
Caitlin Dickerson’s recent cover story for the Atlantic, “Seventy Miles in Hell” (8/6/24), similarly purports to show the human side of the story in the Darién Gap—but again without delving too deeply or accurately into the political realities that govern human existence. Traveling through the jungle with a Venezuelan couple, Dickerson offers a brief politico-economic analysis as to why, ostensibly, the pair found it necessary to pick up and leave:
Venezuela’s economy imploded in 2014, the result of corruption and mismanagement. Then an authoritarian crackdown by the leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, led to punishing American sanctions. The future they had been working toward ceased to exist.
This soundbite is no doubt music to the ears of the US establishment, precisely because it all but disappears the fundamental role of the United States in undertaking to destroy Venezuela as punishment for daring to attempt an economic model that deviated from imperial demands.
Hardly a new phenomenon, US sanctions on Venezuela were initially imposed by George W. Bush back in 2005, and extended by Barack Obama in 2015. They were further expanded by Trump in 2017, then intensified in 2019 in hopes of forcing out the government in favor of Juan Guaidó, the right-wing figure who had emerged from virtual obscurity to proclaim himself the country’s interim president. And yet, even prior to the intensification of coercive economic measures, US sanctions reportedly caused more than 40,000 deaths in the country in 2017–18 alone, as per the Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Of course, the US is also known for inciting and waging incredibly bloody wars worldwide, as well as contributing disproportionately to the climate crisis, which is also increasingly fueling displacement and migration. The corporate media’s refusal to mention such crucial facts when reporting on the Darién Gap, then, will only feed into Trumpian fearmongering about a migrant “invasion” in which the US is the victim rather than a key aggressor.
‘Migrant highway’
AP (12/17/23): “Driven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits.”
Another xenophobic media habit that feeds Trumpite self-righteousness is that of referring to the Darién Gap as a migrant “highway”—as in the December 2023 Associated Press report (12/17/23) headlined “The Jungle Between Colombia and Panama Becomes a Highway for Migrants from Around the World.” In the article, journalist Christopher Sherman contended that the more than half a million migrants who traversed the Darién Gap in 2023 were “enabled by social media and Colombian organized crime,” which had converted the “once nearly impenetrable” forest into a “speedy but still treacherous highway.”
As I note in my forthcoming book on the Darién Gap, millions of people somehow managed to make their way to Ellis Island without the enabling of either social media or Colombian organized crime—which simply underscores that human beings migrate when they perceive an existential need to do so.
For its part, the New York Times (11/9/22) characterizes the Darién Gap as “a traffic jam” that is playing host to an “enormous flood of migrants.”
And an April Financial Times piece (4/10/24), headlined “The Migrant Highway That Could Sway the US Election,” remarked on the “rapid transformation” of a “once-impenetrable jungle…into a global migration highway.” “The human tide crossing the Central American isthmus and heading north to the border has swelled to record proportions,” the Financial Times reported. It included a quote from a US Department of Homeland Security Official assuring readers that it was all the fault of “smugglers, coyotes and other bad actors.”
There’s nothing like visions of a migrant deluge surging up the Darién highway and straight into the heart of America to fuel a xenophobic field day under Trump’s second administration. Such rhetoric serves to justify the trampling of rights at home and in the United States’ self-appointed “backyard”—where Mexico already does a hell of a job making life hell for US-bound migrants.
Based on my own incursion into the Darién Gap in January 2024, I can safely say that “highway” is about the last word that comes to mind to describe the place. But the mediatic use of such terminology certainly paves the road for ever more hostile terrain ahead.
When two Venezuelan friends of mine crossed the Darién Gap, separately, in February and March, one reported that women in his group had been raped when they were found to have no money to hand over to armed assailants. The other said she had witnessed women be forced to squat in order to facilitate the probing of their intimate parts for valuables potentially tucked away.
In April, the New York Times (4/4/24) warned that sexual violence against migrants on the Panamanian side of the Darién Gap had reached a “level rarely seen outside war.”
But this is war. And by rendering sectors of the Earth unlivable while simultaneously criminalizing migration, the US is the principal belligerent.
This week on CounterSpin: Passed by a whisker in Missouri on November 5, legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people? Our guest wrote in-depth on the question ahead of the election. Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. We hear from him on this week’s show.
NPR‘s interview (11/18/24) with far-right pro-Trump Republican Marc Lotter appeared to be offered as balance to its interview (11/14/24) with far-right anti-Trump Republican John Bolton.
Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet, but he has wasted no time naming cabinet members and other nominations for his incoming administration. They must be confirmed by the Senate—unless Trump manages an unprecedented end run around the Senate’s power to advise and consent—which means the media play an important role in helping bring to light their records and qualifications.
Clearly Trump is trying to see how far he can push the limits of the country’s democratic institutions with these nominations, which include an anti-vaxxer to oversee the country’s public health infrastructure, and a congressmember investigated for sex trafficking to be attorney general. A look at NPR‘s coverage so far suggests that the public radio network has no interest in using the power of the so-far-still-free press to preserve those limits.
In its reporting on Trump’s picks over the seven days from November 13 through November 19, NPR‘s Morning Edition has featured eight guest sources offering commentary, in the form of either soundbites or lengthier interviews, according to a FAIR search of the Nexis news database. All but two were current or former Republican officials, including one current Trump adviser. The other two were a representative from the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, and a political risk consultant (who offered a perfectly neutral assessment). All of them were white men.
As a result, the most forceful denunciations of Trump’s parade of shockingly unqualified nominees that Morning Edition listeners were permitted came from one of the most right-wing members of the George W. Bush administration, John Bolton (11/14/24). And the show made sure to explicitly balance his interview by also giving one a few days later to Trump adviser Marc Lotter (11/18/24).
The dearth of nonpartisan experts and utter absence of any progressive or even mildly liberal voices also meant that only Trump’s most outrageous picks thus far—Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn), Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—were subject to “expert” criticism on the show. Meanwhile, most of his other picks weren’t even mentioned, let alone scrutinized.
One guest, a former George W. Bush official, made the only mention of Mike Huckabee, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz as picks, calling them “leaders who have to be taken seriously” (11/13/24). But in a sane democracy, the media would be taking a close look at these candidates, too, who have more polished resumes but similar levels of extremism: Huckabee, picked as ambassador to Israel, has argued repeatedly that the West Bank is Israeli territory, and that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” Waltz, for national security advisor, wants Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Stefanik, tapped to be UN ambassador, led the congressional witch hunt against college presidents last spring.
‘Look at the positives here’
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “knit together an unlikely coalition—some from the left and some MAGA supporters—eager to take on the establishment,” NPR (11/15/24) declared.
It wasn’t just Morning Edition sanewashing Trump’s picks at NPR. In a piece (NPR.org, 11/15/24) about Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, NPR‘s headline and opening framed the anti-science conspiracy theorist as just a guy who “Wants to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” but who “Could Face a Lot of Pushback.”
It took seven paragraphs for reporters Will Stone and Allison Aubrey to mention that scientists are “deeply worried about Kennedy’s history of questioning scientific consensus on vaccines and his antagonism to mainstream medicine more broadly.”
After quoting one public health expert who expressed strong fears about the serious damage Kennedy could do to the country’s public health system, NPR cheerfully offered the other side of things:
And yet there’s no denying there are areas of substantial overlap between the goals of MAHA and scientists who have long advocated for tackling the root causes of chronic illness.
The reporters did point out the contradictions between Kennedy’s regulatory goals, which would take on “big food and big pharma,” and the GOP/Trump war on government regulation of big corporations. But they gave the last word to Kennedy adviser Calley Means to argue, without rebuttal:
“I would tell anyone skeptical about this, to look at the positives here,” he says. “This MAHA agenda is one of the golden areas for true bipartisan reform.”
He says Kennedy’s approach will be to insist on what he terms “accurate science.”
In total, the piece gave more time to Kennedy allies with products to sell than to actual public health experts.
‘Expressed doubts’—or lied?
NPR (11/16/24) led with Trump’s claim that energy secretary nominee Chris Wright will usher in a “Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace”; the one quote from a critic came ten paragraphs later.
In a piece on Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, oil executive Chris Wright, NPR (11/16/24) offered a textbook example of sanewashing that ought to have jarred any editor:
Wright has also expressed doubts about whether climate change is driving extreme weather events.
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video uploaded to LinkedIn.
“We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fearmongering of the media, politicians and activists,” he also said in the video. “The only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”
Those quotes do not illustrate “doubts about whether climate change is driving extreme weather events,” they illustrate anti-science climate denialism in the form of flat-out lies.
‘Backstop’ in action?
As we reported last month (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), NPR recently installed a “Backstop” editorial team to review all content prior to airing or publishing, after the latest round of right-wing complaints of bias. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would be funding that team, it explained the purpose was to help NPR achieve the “highest standards of editorial integrity,” including “accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.”
The incredibly lopsided “balance,” lack of actually diverse viewpoints, and dubious fairness and accuracy displayed in the network’s nomination coverage reveals what the CPB was really going for with the new oversight it installed.
Not all NPR cabinet reporting has been spineless. A team of reporters led by Shannon Bond, for instance, published an in-depth piece (11/14/24) on Defense nominee Pete Hegseth that probed his strong links to extremist white Christian nationalism.
The problem with Trump’s nominees, NPR (11/17/24) reports, is that they might provoke “negative media coverage.”
But three days later, another NPR report (11/17/24) talked about Hegseth as if the biggest problem with him is simply that senators simply “have come to expect” nominees with a different “background”:
Real trouble started brewing with Pete Hegseth, an Army vet known for his weekend commentary on Fox News, being named secretary of Defense. Although a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, he does not have the background that senators have come to expect of someone appointed to head up the Department of Defense. Hegseth’s frequent attacks on the uniformed leadership of the armed services has included talk of firing current generals, including at the highest levels.
Similarly, on All Things Considered (11/16/24), NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro explained the “difference” between Trump’s 2016 picks and those this year, saying the 2016 nominations
sometimes stood in the way of things he wanted to do that broke with the normal way…that things had been done for years. This time around, he’s really surrounding himself with a team of loyalists.
What former cabinet members did was stop Trump from doing things that were unconstitutional or abuses of power. For NPR to minimize them as “the way things had been done for years” indicates that the network is currently more concerned with preserving its CPB funding than sustaining democracy.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here. 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.
Ask voters to verify basic facts related to major political issues, and the results are depressing. An Ipsos survey from October of this year, for instance, discovered most Americans were unaware that unauthorized border crossings were at or near their lowest point over the last several years, that violent crime was not at or near all-time highs in most major cities—and that inflation was down from a year earlier and near historic averages.
The political implications of such ignorance are both predictable and striking, with more ignorance associated with greater support for Donald Trump.
Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.)
But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame.
And on perhaps no other issue has corporate media’s failure to inform been more consequential than on inflation. This was, after all, arguably the key factor in the election: Inflation surged, and Democrats were pummeled.
Did they deserve this fate, though? That’s a tougher question, but one that corporate media could help the public grapple with—if only they weren’t committed to misinforming the public about the issue at hand.
Artificially spiking Trump’s economy
It would be absurd to expect the public at large to have the time or ability to do a deep dive into statistics in order to develop as accurate an image of the economy as possible. It wouldn’t be so absurd, however, to expect journalists to perform this task. After all, their essential function is to deliver high-quality, accurate information to a lay audience. Unfortunately, in reality, they often fail at this job. We might refashion an old phrase to say: There are lies, damned lies and statistics as represented by journalists.
Take a recent piece by Washington Post columnist, and former economics correspondent, Heather Long (11/8/24). In it, she makes the claim that voters enjoyed much more robust wage growth under Trump than under Joe Biden, after accounting for inflation. Her column includes a chart showing wage growth outpacing inflation by 7.6 percentage points under Trump and only 0.6 percentage points under Biden.
Something important goes unmentioned here, something that might surprise a casual reader. Specifically, there was a serious and well-known—at least among experts—methodological issue that led to an artificial spike during 2020/2021 in the wage measure Long is citing. As many more low-wage than high-wage workers lost their jobs at the height of the pandemic, this measure artificially inflates wage growth under Trump and deflates it under Biden. Maybe an issue worth mentioning, if you’re making a claim about comparative real wage growth under the two.
When you chart the measure the Washington Post (11/8/24) used to show the superiority of Trump’s wage growth, it’s revealed as an artifact of people dropping out of the workforce during the pandemic (Arin’s Substack, 1/18/24).
Does Long mention this, though? No. Will the average reader be sufficiently in the economic weeds to know she is misleading them? Also no.
An unreal measure of real income
What explains everything for the Atlantic (11/11/24) is a cost-of-living crisis that disappears if you use a better measures of the cost of living.
Another offending piece appeared recently in the Atlantic (11/11/24). There, staff writer Annie Lowrey made the case that the cost-of-living crisis, and the Democrats’ inability to tackle it, explains the election results. Curiously, the media’s role in distracting the public from the remarkable achievements of macroeconomic policy during Biden’s tenure in office went unmentioned.
Lowrey at least acknowledged how impressive the macroeconomic figures have been coming out of the Covid downturn, but she asserted that this obscured a darker story: “Headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing.” Instead of relying solely on these numbers, Lowrey proposed consulting “more granular data” that “pointed to considerable strain.”
First among these data points was an apparent fall in real median income since 2019. As Lowrey put it, “Real median household income fell relative to its pre-Covid peak.”
What she failed to disclose was the flimsiness of the underlying measure being used. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/10/24) pointed out a couple months back, when the Washington Post (9/10/24) ran a piece highlighting trends in the same metric—a median income measure designed by the Census Bureau—making a comparison between the 2024 figure and the 2019 one is messy:
The problem is with the comparison to 2019, the last year before the pandemic. There was a large problem of non-response to the survey for 2019, which was fielded in the middle of the pandemic shutdown in the spring of 2020. The Census Bureau wrote about this problem when it released the 2019 data in the fall of 2020.
As a result of the non-response issue, the 2019 number is artificially inflated, and a comparison between it and more recent figures, which seem to also be inflated but to a lesser degree, is difficult at best. Othermeasures of income, meanwhile, find real income increasing for Americans since 2019. These critical pieces of information, however, are missing from the Lowrey piece.
Sloppy reporting of real problems
This is not to say that Lowrey and others who have made similar arguments don’t have a point that there are real issues facing the American public. For such a wealthy country, the US has obscenely high poverty, internationally aberrant levels of inequality, and a notoriously ramshackle welfare state.
Partially out of sheer necessity, the US welfare state was substantially boosted during the pandemic, and the unwinding of this enhanced safety net after 2021 must have had some effect on Americans’ perceptions of the economy and their own economic standing. Real disposable income, for example, spiked in 2021 due to temporary measures like stimulus checks, but then fell back to the pre-pandemic trend of growth, which may have felt like a loss to some.
And though the Washington Post‘s Long mucked up her analysis of wage trends under the Biden and Trump presidencies, the data that we have does indicate that inflation bit into workers’ wages early in Biden’s term, with median real wage growth turning negative in 2021 and 2022. (It’s nonetheless worth noting that these wage declines were concentrated among high-wage workers, not low-wage ones.)
From December 2019 through December 2023, inflation-adjusted growth in wages was highest in the poorest quintile, and only negative for the top quintile (Arin’s Substack, 1/18/24).
Clearly, there are reasons for people to be angry about the economy. The issue is that imprecise descriptions of the trajectory of the US economy over recent years leave people unable to decipher how the economic situation has deteriorated, and in which ways there actually has been improvement.
Citing a flawed measure of median income to suggest that people are worse off than in 2019, for example, is careless at best. We know that, even after adjusting for inflation, Americans’ wages, disposable incomes and, perhaps most crucially, spending levels are higher today than they were in 2019. Notably, this is true across income groups, with real retail spending up for low-, middle- and high-income households.
There are many ways in which the US economy flatly fails, but addressing those failures becomes even harder when the public is misled into thinking that inflation is outpacing wages, or that real median income is actually decreasing.
For the New York Times (11/8/24), inflation affects “everyone,” whereas unemployment matters to “only a minority of the population.”
Messing up the technical details when presenting statistical information is bad enough. But corporate media misinformation goes beyond that. Recently, for instance, the New York Times (11/8/24) decided to add to the barrage of inflation misinformation by blatantly misrepresenting how inflation and unemployment affect the public. In a piece titled “How Inflation Shaped Voting,” reporter German Lopez wrote:
Why does inflation anger voters so much? Some economic problems, like high unemployment, affect only a minority of the population. But higher prices affect everyone.
This is wrong. An increase in unemployment has economy-wide effects, dragging down wage growth across the income distribution, though particularly at the bottom. In fact, the societal effects of higher unemployment seem to be much more dramatic than those of higher inflation. According to a piece from the Times (7/20/22) published back in 2022:
In a 2003 paper, the economist Justin Wolfers, then of Stanford University, found that a percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate caused roughly five times as much unhappiness as a percentage-point increase in inflation.
Had Lopez written that high unemployment directly affects a small percentage of the population, he obviously would have been on solid ground. But that’s not what he wrote.
Skewing in one direction
“There’s another fundamental cause of economic discontent that should be getting more attention: corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation, which has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy” (FAIR.org, 1/5/24).
These criticisms of how journalists present economic information are technical, but they are important. Notably, in each instance cited, the skewing of facts has specific political implications.
In Long’s piece, workers’ gains under Trump were exaggerated, and their gains under Biden were understated. In Lowrey’s piece, income gains under Biden were disregarded. And in Lopez’s piece, the negative impacts of increased unemployment, which the Biden administration avoided at the cost of a somewhat larger spike in inflation, were downplayed. The negative effects of inflation were played up.
It’s not hard to see how such an approach to reporting will benefit one political party at the expense of the other. This would be totally reasonable if the reporting were based in reality, with journalists sticking to the facts and representing statistics with care. But that’s not what’s happening.
Instead, journalists over the past several years have engaged in a collective freak-out over a surge in inflation, feeding the public’s pre-existing negativity bias with a hyper-fixation on rising prices in economic coverage. That this coverage has not only overshadowed coverage of more positive economic stories—such as the successes of a historically progressive stimulus bill, and the massive wage gains it has spurred—but has misled the public about basic economic facts in the process is a scandal.
Journalists should face flak for imprecision in their reporting, and should be pushed to improve when they fall short of a high standard of accuracy, especially when they occupy elite perches in the US media environment. Otherwise, an information environment polluted by conservative outlets and social media misinformation will never get cleaned up. If corporate media’s mission is truly to inform the public, they have a long way to go.
The New York Times (11/8/24), like other corporate media, framed the Amsterdam violence in terms of antisemitism—treating anti-Arab violence as an ancillary detail at best.
When violence broke out in Amsterdam last week involving Israeli soccer fans, Western media headlines told the story as one of attacks that could only be explained by antisemitism. This is the story right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants them to tell: “On the streets of Amsterdam, antisemitic rioters attacked Jews, Israeli citizens, just because they were Jews” (Fox News, 11/10/24).
Yet buried deep within their reports, some of these outlets revealed a more complicated reality: that many fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club had spent the previous night tearing down and burning Palestinian flags, attacking a taxi and shouting murderous anti-Arab chants, including “Death to the Arabs” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there” (Defector, 11/8/24).
As Marc Owen Jacobs of Zeteo (11/9/24) wrote, the media coverage revealed
troubling patterns in how racial violence is reported; not only is anti-Arab violence and racism marginalized and minimized, but violence against Israelis is amplified and reduced to antisemitism.
Buried context
James North (Mondoweiss, 11/10/24): “You had to jump to paragraph 7, buried on an inside page, to learn that the Israeli fans had, in fact, been violent and provocative the night before.”
“Israeli Soccer Fans Attacked in Amsterdam,” announced NBC News (11/8/24). That piece didn’t mention until the 25th paragraph the Maccabi fans’ Palestinian flag-burning and taxi destruction, as if these were minor details rather than precipitating events.
Similarly, the Washington Post (11/8/24)—“Israeli Soccer Fans Were Attacked in Amsterdam. The Violence Was Condemned as Antisemitic”—didn’t mention Maccabi anti-Arab chants until paragraph 22, and didn’t mention any Maccabi fan violence.
James North on Mondoweiss (11/10/24) summed up the New York Times article’s (11/8/24) similar one-sided framing:
The Times report, which started on page 1, used the word “antisemitic” six times, beginning in the headline. The first six paragraphs uniformly described the “Israeli soccer fans” as the victims, recounting their injuries, and dwelling on the Israeli government’s chartering of “at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home,” insinuating that innocent people had to completely flee the country for their lives.
Also at Mondoweiss (11/9/24), Sana Saeed explained:
Emerging video evidence and testimonies from Amsterdam residents (here, here and here, for instance) indicate that the initial violence came from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also disrupted a moment of silence for the Valencia flood victims.
But despite that footage and Amsterdammer testimonies, coverage—across international media, especially in the United States—has failed to contextualize the counter-attacks against the anti-Arab Israeli mob.
Misrepresented video
Image from Annet de Graaf’s video showing violence by Israeli soccer fans—widely misrepresented as an example of antisemitic violence.
Several news outlets outright misrepresented video from local Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf. De Graaf’s video depicts Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdam locals, yet CNN World News (11/9/24) and BBC (11/8/24) and other outlets initially labeled it as Maccabi fans getting attacked.
De Graaf has demanded apologies from the news outlets and acknowledgement that the video was used to push false information. CNN World News‘ video now notes that an earlier version was accompanied by details from Reuters that CNN could not independently verify. BBC’s caption of De Graaf’s footage reads “Footage of some of the violence in Amsterdam—the BBC has not been able to verify the identity of those involved.”
Message to news outlets:
Today I received an apology from Tagesschau for abusing my footage of the incident which took place after the soccer game in Amsterdam between Ajax and M. Tel Aviv. I refer also to the footage of reporter @OmeBender who covered that same fight with more… pic.twitter.com/9QyEezb8tL
The New York Times (11/8/24) corrected its misuse of the footage in an article about the violence:
An earlier version of this article included a video distributed by Reuters with a script about Israeli fans being attacked. Reuters has since issued a correction saying it is unclear who is depicted in the footage. The video’s author told the New York Times it shows a group of Maccabi fans chasing a man on the street—a description the Times independently confirmed with other verified footage from the scene. The video has been removed.
‘Historically illiterate conflation’
Jacobin (11/12/24): “Far from acting like tsarist authorities during a pogrom, the police in Amsterdam seem to have cracked down far harder on those who attacked Maccabi fans than the overtly racist Maccabi hooligans who started the first phase of the riot.”
It is undoubtedly true that antisemitism was involved in Amsterdam alongside Israeli fans’ anti-Arab actions; the Wall Street Journal (11/10/24) verified reports of a group chat that called for a “Jew hunt.” But rather than acknowledging that there was ethnic animosity on both sides, some articles about the melee (Bret Stephens, New York Times, 11/12/24; Fox News, 11/10/24; Free Press, 10/11/24) elevated the violence to the level of a “pogrom.”
Jacobin (11/12/24) put the attacks in the context of European soccer riots:
There were assaults on Israeli fans, including hit-and-run attacks by perpetrators on bicycles. Some of the victims were Maccabi fans who hadn’t participated in the earlier hooliganism. In other words, this played out like a classical nationalistic football riot—the thuggish element of one group of fans engages in violence, and the ugly intercommunal dynamics lead to not just the perpetrators but the entire group of fans (or even random people wrongly assumed to share their background or nationality) being attacked.
But Jacobin pushed back against media using the word “pogrom” in reference to the soccer riots:
Pogroms were not isolated incidents of violence. They were calculated assaults to keep Jews locked firmly in their social place…. Pogroms cannot occur outside the framework of a society that systematically denies rights to a minority, ensuring that it remains vulnerable to the violence of the majority. What happened in Amsterdam, however, bears no resemblance to this structure. These were not attacks predicated on religious or racial oppression. They were incidents fueled by political discord between different groups of nationalists….
Furthermore, using that designation to opportunistically smear global dissent against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as classically antisemitic only serves to trivialize genuine horrors. This historically illiterate conflation should be rejected by all who truly care about antisemitism.
Breaking with the Netanyahu government’s spin, former Israeli President Ehud Olmert said that the riots in Amsterdam were “not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries.” Olmert, unlike Western media coverage of the event, seemed to be able to connect the violence in Amsterdam to anti-Arab sentiment in his own country. In a more thoughtful piece than his paper’s news coverage of the event, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (11/13/24) quoted Olmert extensively:
The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age—as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank—the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?
The events in Amsterdam called for nuanced media coverage that contextualized events and condemned both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab violence. Instead, per usual, world leaders and media alike painted Arabs and Pro-Palestine protesters as aggressors and Israelis as innocent victims.
Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider)
This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration of white supremacy.
(cc photo: Sasha Patkin)
Also on the show: If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration. We talked about that in July 2018 with Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer at Mijente.
The past is never dead, it’s not even past: This week on CounterSpin.
Donald Trump has repeatedly explained the critical importance of vengeance (Mother Jones, 10/19/16): “When somebody screws you, you screw them back in spades. And I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve gotta hit people hard. And it’s not so much for that person. It’s other people watch.”
“Revenge—it’s a big part of Trump’s life,” Mother Jones’ David Corn (10/19/16) wrote just before Trump was elected to the presidency the first time:
In speeches and public talks, Trump has repeatedly expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, to explain how he had achieved his success. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that successful people must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”
Knowing this about Trump, Democrats and liberals worry that he will use the Department of Justice, especially if Matt Gaetz is confirmed as attorney general, as an unrestrained vehicle to pursue the prosecution of political enemies.
But given Trump’s constant attacks on media—“the opposition party,” as his ally Steve Bannon called the fourth estate (New York Times, 1/26/17)—journalists fear that he will use the power of the state to intimidate if not destroy the press.
Defunding public broadcasting
If you run a journalistic outfit, like PBS president Paula Kerger (Politico, 3/27/19), and don’t know why Trump doesn’t like you, you probably aren’t doing your job very well.
Trump called for defunding NPR (Newsweek, 4/10/24) after a long-time editor accused the radio outlet of liberal bias in the conservative journal Free Press (4/9/24). Rep. Claudia Tenney (R–NY) introduced legislation to defund NPR because “taxpayers should not be forced to fund NPR, which has become a partisan propaganda machine” (Office of Claudia Tenney, 4/19/24). With Republicans also holding both houses of congress, bills like Tenney’s become more viable. Trump has previously supported budget proposals that eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Politico, 3/27/19).
The infamous Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda many see as a blueprint for the second Trump term, calls for the end to public broadcasting, because it is viewed as liberal propaganda:
Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first president in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.
In other words, all Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”
All of which means that the next conservative president must finally get this done, and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,” but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.
PBS and NPR, as FAIR (10/24/24) has noted, has for decades caved in to right-wing pressures—PBS by adding conservative programming, NPR by trying to rid itself of political commentary altogether. But the right will never let go of its ideological opposition to media outlets not directly owned by the corporate class.
‘Whether criminally or civilly’
A bill—defeated for now—”would have granted the Department of the Treasury broad authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed to be supporting ‘terrorism’” (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24).
Trump also has a well known track record of revoking the credentials of journalists who produce reporting he doesn’t like (Washington Post, 2/24/17, 5/8/19; New Republic, 11/5/24). It is realistic to assume that a lot more reporters will be barred from White House events in the years ahead.
While a bill that would grant the secretary of the treasury broad authority to revoke nonprofit status to any organization the office deems as a “terrorist” organization has so far failed (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24), it is quite possible that it could come up for a vote again. If this bill were to become law, the Treasury Department could use this ax against a great many progressive nonprofit outlets, like Democracy Now! and the American Prospect, as well as investigative outlets like ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The department could even target the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has already said in response to Trump’s victory, “The fundamental right to a free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, must not be impaired” (11/6/24).
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24), an avid media observer, said there is no reason to think Trump will soften his campaign against the free press. She said:
In 2022, he sued the Pulitzer Prize board after they defended their awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers had won Pulitzer Prizes for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.
More recently, Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation over the way the anchor characterized the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual misconduct case against him. Each of those cases is wending its way through the courts.
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24): “Donald Trump poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organizations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.”
She added:
There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression.
Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Trump has already gone after the New York Times and Penguin Random House since Sullivan wrote this. CJR (11/14/24) said:
The letter, addressed to lawyers at the New York Times and Penguin Random House, arrived a week before the election. Attached was a discursive ten-page legal threat from an attorney for Donald Trump that demanded $10 billion in damages over “false and defamatory statements” contained in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.
It singles out two stories coauthored by Buettner and Craig that related to their book on Trump and his financial dealings, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, released on September 17. It also highlighted an October 20 story headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and an October 22 piece by Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”
And just before his victory, Trump sued CBS News, alleging the network’s “deceitful” editing of a recent 60 Minutesinterview with Vice President Kamala Harris “misled the public and unfairly disadvantaged him” (CBS News, 10/31/24).
Expect more of this, except this time, Trump will have all the levers of the state on his side. And whatever moves the next Trump administration makes to attack the press will surely have a chilling effect, which will only empower his anti-democratic political agenda.
In the aftermath of the Trump victory, the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published post-election eulogies for conventional economics. Remarkably, these columns shared almost the exact same headline.
(@iAnnetnl) 
