Politico (4/16/25) finds “a disconnect between political elites”—i.e., its own subscribers—”and the electorate.”
A recent Politico article (4/16/25) gave readers an excellent lesson in how not to report on a poll—unless the goal is to push politicians to the right, rather than reflect how voters are truly feeling.
“California Voters Have Trump-Resistance Fatigue, Poll Finds,” declared the headline. The subhead continued: “From taking on Trump to hot-button issues, voters writ large embraced a different approach—although Democrats are more ready to fight.”
From the start, the piece framed its polling results as showing the California “political elite” are out of step with voters, who are apparently tired of all this “Trump resistance” being foisted upon them. Reporter Jeremy White explained that “the electorate is strikingly more likely to want a detente with the White House,” and that “voters are also more divided on issues like immigration and climate change.”
But problems with this framing abound, from its wrong-headed comparison to its skewing of the results, revealing more about Politico‘s agenda than California voters’ preferences.
‘Driving the state’s agenda’
First of all, the poll in question—which the article never links to—surveyed two samples of people: registered California voters and “political professionals who are driving the state’s agenda.” Those “influencers” are a sample taken from subscribers to three of Politico‘s California-focused newsletters, which, the article explained, “included lawmakers and staffers in the state legislature and the federal government.” Presumably that sample also included many journalists, lobbyists, advocates and others who closely follow state politics.
But in a country where the political right has overwhelmingly rejected reality- and fact-based news in favor of a propaganda echo chamber, one can safely assume that subscribers to Politico, a centrist but generally reality-based media outlet, will include vanishingly few right-wingers. In contrast, in a state where 38% of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, a representative sample of voters will necessarily include a significant number of Trump supporters. In other words, by sampling their own subscribers, Politico has selected out most right-wing respondents and created a group that is by definition going to poll farther to the left than the general voting public of California.
On top of that, people subscribed to Politico‘s state-focused newsletters are highly informed about the policies being polled on. One of Politico‘s sources points this out, explaining that “they’re more aware of the factual landscape.”
As polling expert David Moore (FAIR.org, 9/26/24) has explained, large segments of the voting public are disengaged and uninformed on most policy issues, so their opinions on survey questions that don’t provide a great deal of context are not terribly firm or meaningful. There’s very little reason, then, to compare policy opinions of California political professionals from Politico‘s subscription list with a cross-section of California voters, unless your purpose is to push lawmakers to the right.
‘Lower the temperature’
And based on how they skew the polling numbers, that’s exactly what Politico appears to be trying to do here. Regarding the “Trump-resistance fatigue,” White wrote:
The poll shows that while Democratic voters favor taking on Trump, the electorate broadly wants their representatives to lower the temperature. Forty-three percent of registered voters said leaders were “too confrontational”—a sentiment largely driven by Republicans and independents—compared to a third who found them “too passive.” A plurality of Democrats surveyed, 47%, wanted a more aggressive approach.
This is what gives the piece its headline. But it conveniently leaves out all the voters who said state leaders’ level of confrontation was “about right”—a sizable 24%. In other words, 57%—a 14-point majority—either approve of their state leaders’ resistance to Trump, or want more of it, yet Politico manages to spin that into a headline about Trump-resistance fatigue.
Turning to one of the “hot-button issues” the poll asked about, Politico told readers that “a plurality of voters is skeptical of legal immigration.”
What the hell does that mean, you ask? White doesn’t say, except to note several paragraphs later that voters are “more likely to support reducing legal immigration” than the political elite are. Looking at the poll, it would appear to come from the question: “The US admits over a million legal immigrants a year. Do you think the number should be [increased, decreased, stay about the same]?”
Forty-three percent of respondents said “decreased,” either “a lot” or “a little,” while 21% said “increased” and 36% said “stay about the same.” Technically, sure, a “plurality” want fewer legal immigrants (which isn’t exactly the same thing as being “skeptical” of legal immigration). But, just as with the “Trump-resistance fatigue” spin, this buries the majority opinion, which is not “skeptical,” being either fine with current levels of immigration or wanting to see more.
On immigration, the article also reports:
While a clear 60% of voters support the state’s “sanctuary” laws, which partition local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, policy influencers were 20 points more likely to support that policy.
Again, that Politico subscribers in California poll to the left of voters is to be expected. That voters still support sanctuary laws by 20 percentage points despite the relentless onslaught of fearmongering from the Trump administration, as well as both right-wing and centrist media, about immigrants? That seems like important news—that Politico would apparently prefer to bury.
ACTION ALERT: Messages to Politico can be sent here (or via Bluesky@Politico.com). Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Featured Image: Protesters gathered at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to protest the Trump administration on April 5, one of 137 “Hands Off!” demonstrations across California that day (Creative Commons photo: Lynn Friedman).
Reuters not only had a stand-alone story (4/22/25) about Palestinians’ response to Francis’ death, but included his advocacy for Gaza in its main obituary (4/21/25).
The obituaries for Pope Francis in the leading US newspapers ignored the late pontiff’s commitment to the Palestinian people and the acute suffering in Gaza in the last years of his life. Many of them ran separate pieces that highlighted Francis’ concern for Gaza and the response of Palestinians to his death, but they failed to mention these aspects of his papacy in the lengthy obituaries that summed up his life.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936, Francis was the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to be pope. When he died at the age of 88, his leadership as a social justice pontiff was heralded widely.
“For Francis, the poor are ‘at the heart of the Gospel,’ and throughout his pontificate, he affirmed this by deed and word,” said the Catholic magazine America (4/21/25). His liberal philosophy addressed many pressing issues, “from climate change to global poverty, war and violence, LGBTQ+ people and women’s roles in the church,” said Sojourners (4/21/25).
Toward the end of Francis’ life, the head of the Catholic Church focused his attention on ongoing genocide in Gaza. “He used to call us at 7 p.m. every night. No matter how busy he was, no matter where he was, he always called,” George Anton, spokesperson for the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, told NPR (4/22/25). Reuters (4/22/25) ran the headline, “Gaza’s Christians ‘Heartbroken’ for Pope Who Phoned Them Nightly.” AP (4/21/25) called these communications his “frequent evening ritual,” noting that this “small act of compassion made a big impression on Gaza’s tiny Christian community.”
Francis was generally sympathetic to addressing political and human rights for Palestinians, and under his watch the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine (BBC, 5/13/15). He “suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people” (Reuters, 11/17/24). In his final Easter message, issued the day before his death, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza to end a conflict that “continues to cause death and destruction, and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” (Truthout, 4/21/25).
‘Privileged a politicized version’
As well as his call for an inquiry into charges of genocide in Gaza, the New York Post (4/21/25) didn’t like that Francis “took a very standard leftist line on President Trump, decrying his plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.”
Not everyone in the press approved of this act of compassion when recalling his life and church leadership. In an editorial, the New York Post (4/21/25) criticized the “leftist” positions of the “deservedly beloved figure,” complaining that Francis “even went so far as to call for an investigation of Israel over its nonexistent genocide in Gaza.”
When it came to Francis’ support for Middle East peace generally, the Jerusalem Post (4/22/25) said in an editorial, “Time and again, Israel expressed dismay at the Vatican’s tendency to elevate Palestinian narratives while brushing aside Israeli concerns.” It complained that “the Vatican’s posture under Francis consistently privileged a politicized version of the Palestinian story over the complex reality on the ground.”
But rather than criticizing Francis’ attention to Gaza, the lengthy obituaries in the most prominent US newspapers ignored his advocacy for Palestinian rights entirely.
‘Excoriated modern-day colonizers’
The New York Times‘ obituary (4/21/25) for Francis was almost 7,500 words long—but none of them were “Gaza.”
The New YorkTimes’ obituary (4/21/25), by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, did note that “he repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine.”
It also reported that Francis’ travels included “focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.” It continued:
In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.
“No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,” Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan’s presidential palace. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!”
Yet regarding his outspoken concern for Gaza, the Times found room for not a word.
‘Sometimes took controversial stances’
The Wall Street Journal (4/21/25) said Francis “sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice”—but his focus on Gaza could not be acknowledged.
Obituaries at other major US newspapers also failed to include Francis’ Palestine focus. A lengthy obituary in the Washington Post (4/21/25), for example, noted that the pope’s first official trip was to the “Italian island of Lampedusa, a burdened way station for refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East,” a nod to the fact that he offered a home to migrants in need. But it didn’t mention Gaza.
The Wall Street Journal’s obituary (4/21/25) didn’t say anything about the topic either, though it said that Francis
made a priority of improving ties with the Islamic world, washing the feet of Muslims on Holy Thursday, visiting nine Muslim-majority countries and insisting that Islam was, like Christianity, a religion of peace.
The same is true with AP‘s obituary (4/21/25), which likewise commented instead that he “charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.” USA Today’s obituary (4/21/25) said Francis “sometimes took progressive or controversial stances on pressing issues, such as same-sex couples and climate change,” but it didn’t bring up Gaza.
By contrast, it was not hard to find references to Gaza in Francis’ obituaries in major non-US English-language outlets. The British Guardian (4/21/25) noted, “During his recent period in hospital, he kept up his telephone calls to the Holy Family church in Gaza, a nightly routine since 9 October 2023.” The Toronto-based Globe and Mail (4/21/25) included Palestine in a list of war-ravaged places Francis prayed for, and devoted most of a paragraph to his nightly Gaza calls. Reuters (4/21/25), headquartered in London and owned by Canada’s Thomson family, noted that Francis’ last Easter Sunday message “reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—a conflict he had long railed against.”
Though the major US obituaries all ignored Gaza, the same outlets published separate articles on Francis and Gaza. USA Today (4/21/25) ran “Pope Francis Used Final Easter Address to Call for Gaza Ceasefire.” The Wall Street Journal (4/23/25) had “Pope Francis Kept Up Routine of Calling Gaza Until the End.” For the New York Times (4/22/25), it was “Even in Sickness, Pope Francis Reached Out to Gaza’s Christians.” AP (4/21/25) offered “Pope’s Frequent Calls to a Catholic Church Made Him a Revered Figure in War-Battered Gaza,” an article that appeared on the Washington Post‘s website (4/21/25).
These stand-alone pieces are welcome, and spotlight the importance of the Gaza crisis to Francis. But the official obituaries in these major outlets are meant to stand as a permanent record of Francis’ life and career. By relegating Francis’ compassion for Palestine to sidebars, as though it were only of transient interest, US outlets eliminated a central aspect of his papacy from that record.
Mike Gallagher (Wall Street Journal, 4/15/25) insists the “scientific elite…should have come clean about the pandemic’s laboratory origin.” His evidence for such an origin? “Western intelligence agencies…favor that view, and most Americans agree.”
For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”
The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:
Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.
‘Finally comes clean’
“In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 3/16/25) they were treated like kooks and cranks.” In fact, the theory got a respectful hearing from outlets like the Washington Post (4/2/20, 4/14/20), ABC (5/3/20) and CNN (5/3/20); see FAIR.org (10/6/20).
Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly US, one German).
Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”
Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”
The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.
It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the US went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”
Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.
Government talking points
Science (12/3/24): “The committee’s 520-page report…offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case.”
In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”
Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered
a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.
The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”
The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that
Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’
According to a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (2/24), epidemiologists and virologists believe a natural zoonotic origin for Covid is far more likely than a lab leak.
Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.
The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:
Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.
It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.
More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).
Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.
This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:
We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.
Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.
There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.
When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.
We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change.
AP (3/13/25): “Demonstrators from [Jewish Voice for Peace] filled the lobby of Trump Tower…to denounce the immigration arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University.”
In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.
JVP, an organization of Jewish Americans in solidarity with Palestinians, organized the March 13 sit-in of Trump’s Manhattan property in protest against ICE’s detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil.
As Jewish solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide does not fit neatly into the channel’s narrative that pro-Palestine protests are inherently antisemitic, Fox’s all-day coverage of the protest either cast doubt upon the organization’s Jewish identity or minimized mentioning JVP by name altogether—all while painting demonstrators as antisemites.
What’s more, discussion of the protest veered into unabashedly antisemitic conspiracy theories about how George Soros and his supposedly paid anti-American protesters seek to overthrow the West.
The coverage comes as an absurd reminder that while right-wing fearmongers cynically paint opposition to genocide or violation of due-process as antisemitic, the most-watched US cable news network has no problem echoing Goebbelsian talking points.
‘Don’t give them any advertisement’
“Look at some of the signage in here…. They hate Jewish Americans,” says Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner (3/13/25), while playing footage of protesters holding up signs proudly proclaiming their Jewish heritage.
The argument made on other programs that the protesters were antisemitic, anti-American and aligned with Nazis, requires a specific hesitance towards profiling JVP probably best captured in an interview on the Story (3/13/25) with NYPD Chief John Chell. Asked who the group was that organized the protest, he responded, “We’re well-versed in this group, I don’t wanna give them any advertisement.”
He only neglected to say the quiet part out loud—that a shout-out for JVP might advertise a reality in which protesters in solidarity with Palestine and campus demonstrators weren’t motivated by antisemitism.
On Fox‘s Outnumbered (3/13/25), host Harris Faulkner and other panelists spent ample time portraying the protesters as antisemites—while intentionally obfuscating the overtly Jewish messaging of the demonstration.
It’s not as though the panelists or reporter Eric Shawn were somehow unaware of who was protesting: About seven minutes into the coverage, panelist Emily Compagno read the back of one of the T-shirts, printed “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel.” Without missing a beat, she pivoted into an incoherent rant about how the Democratic Party and Ivy League universities venerate Hamas. A few minutes later, Eric Shawn stammered the group’s name once in passing, then never again.
Unsurprisingly, these two incidental mentions were drowned out by relentless accusations that the protesters voiced overt hatred for Jews.
Faulkner set the tone of the conversation with some of her leading remarks: “Look at some of the signage here…. They hate Israel, they hate Jewish Americans, they are Anti-American.” (Such virulently antisemitic signage included “Fight Nazis, Not Students,” “Opposing Fascism Is a Jewish Tradition” and “Never Again for Anyone.”) She then asked her audience, “If you are Jewish in that building, do you feel safe?”
Guest panelist Lisa Boothe added that protesters “hate the West,” arguing that they “are supporting the Nazis.”
‘Some said they were Jews’
“Some said that they…were Jews,” the Five panelist Greg Gutfeld (3/13/25) stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it! And they will not check…who paid for those signs, who paid for those T-shirts, and…who paid for the protesters.”
When the Five (3/13/25) first mentioned the Jewish identities of the protesters about eight minutes into the broadcast, they did so to cast doubt upon the premise that Jews would engage in such an act: “Some said that they…were Jews,” Greg Gutfeld stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it!”
(It’s unclear who Gutfeld considers to be “the media,” given that he’s a panelist on the top-rated show at the most-watched cable news network.)
Like on Outnumbered, the Five panelists accused protesters of supporting antisemitism while only mentioning the demonstrators’ Jewish identity in passing. Jesse Watters summarized the panel’s position best, stating that protesters were “supporting an antisemite” who “hates Jews” and “[blew] up Columbia.”
The commentary hinges on the assumption that an Islamophobic audience will hear that an antisemitic crowd rallied at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil “blow[ing] up Columbia”—and not follow up on who organized the rally, or why.
Such buzzword-laden obfuscation reveals a paranoia in such coverage: If viewers do choose to follow up and learn more about the protesters, it might give the game away. The hoards of supposed antisemites might be raising perfectly reasonable questions about erosion of due-process and US bankrolling of genocide. Some such protests, like the one at Trump Tower, might even be Jewish-led.
‘Hands in many protest pots’
Fox News discussed George Soros as though he’s the Palestine movement’s top financier—though according to its own graphic (Will Cain Show, 3/13/25), Soros is only JVP’s fifth-biggest funder, donating a third as much as its largest donor, and accounting for less than 2% of the group’s total financing.
Curiously, for all of their concern for antisemitism, Outnumbered, the Story, the Five, the Will Cain Show (3/13/25) and Ingraham Angle (3/13/25) all had one thing in common: a conspiratorial fascination with allegedly astroturfed leftist financing. Laura Ingraham was particularly explicit:
The group Jewish Voice for Peace…bills itself as a home for left-leaning Jews…and it gets its biggest funding from groups associated with George Soros…. Soros himself has his hands in many protest pots, stirring up a toxic brew of antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
She cited a graphic displayed on the Will Cain Show, which was also referenced on the Five. It depicted Soros’ Open Society fund as the fifth-biggest funder of JVP for 2019–21, contributing $150,000. Given that JVP has an annual budget of more than $3 million, this suggests that Soros is responsible for less than 2% of the group’s financing.
Ingraham nonetheless felt the need to rail against Soros and the broader Jewish left. She also went on to characterize the pro-Palestine movement as “the overthrow-of-the-West cause.”
So the “antisemitic” pro-Palestine protests are bankrolled by an anti-American Jewish billionaire seeking to overthrow the West? Like her peers on Outnumbered and the Five, Ingraham is empowered to advance such harmful tropes, so long as she also tacks on a spurious charge of “antisemitism.”
Anti-Arab, anti-immigrant tropes
Five panelist and former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro (3/13/25) condemned protesters “want[ing] Mahmoud [Khalil] to have all of his constitutional rights,” implying that violation of Khalil’s due process is legal because he “hates all of our Western values.”
Fox’s obfuscation of the protest’s overtly Jewish messaging is underpinned by another assumption—that Palestinian-led or immigrant-led protest against the genocide is somehow less legitimate than Jewish American–led protest. Coverage not only obscured JVP’s role in organizing the protest, but used anti-Arab tropes and calls for deportation to smear the legitimacy of protesters’ demands.
When Jesse Watters evoked fantasies of student protesters blowing up universities, or Outnumbered guest panelist (and former Bush White House press secretary) Ari Fleischer accused protesters of being illegal residents that “should all be deported from this country,” they played to the racist impulses of their audiences.
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian-Syrian immigrant—thus, his opposition to a genocide in which Israel has killed at least 51,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 presumed dead under the rubble, is illegitimate. And if JVP protesters are Arab immigrants too, then their opposition to repression and genocide is meritless and antisemitic.
It’s another reason why it’s in Fox’s best interest not to identify the Trump Tower protesters—to allow for the assumption that they’re Arabs, or immigrants, which somehow discredits them.
Enemies with no name
As a Jewish-led organization in solidarity with Palestinians, JVP stresses the importance of challenging false antisemitism smears against their Palestinian partners and in creating a Jewish future divested from Zionism.
Fox News’s hesitancy to identify JVP is a striking contrast to Fox’s general proclivity for naming enemies. A search on FoxNews.com for the “New Black Panther Party,” a fringe Black nationalist group, yields more than 100 results; compare that to less than 30 hits on AP‘s website. A Search for “Dylan Mulvaney,” a trans influencer who was targeted in a mass-hate campaign in 2023, yields more than 5,000 results on Fox, compared to AP’s 50.
Fox News thrives upon enemies—but Jewish Voice for Peace is different. As an openly Jewish-American group, JVP challenges Fox News’ narrative that protests against genocide in Gaza are rooted in antisemitism.
“We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness and Judaism,” JVP’s website says. “Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve.”
To be clear, conservative and centrist outlets’ continued preoccupation with the supposed antisemitism of opponents of Israel’s genocide is never in good faith—as when the New York Times (4/14/25), reporting on “Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Universities,” blithely claimed that “pro-Palestinian students on college campuses…harassed Jewish students,” without noting that many of the pro-Palestinian students were themselves Jewish. But the charge of antisemitism is even more ludicrous coming from an outlet that uses antisemitic tropes to make its own attacks on the pro-Palestine movement.
And the charge is most ridiculous coming from a network that is too afraid to name its enemy, as if the mere acknowledgement that some Jews oppose US support for Israel’s genocide might shake the foundations of its whole narrative.
The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).
As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.
In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).
The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”
In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)
The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).
‘An uncertain end’
The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”
The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.
In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”
At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”
The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:
Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.
But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.
These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).
House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).
In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.
‘Constitutional crisis is here’
“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”
Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.
Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).
This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.
Janine Jackson interviewed the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind about the criminalization of immigrants for the April 11, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: US legal resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was swept up by ICE and sent to an infamously harsh prison in El Salvador. A judge declared that unlawful, and, we are to understand, the White House said, “Yes, actually, that was an administrative error, but we won’t return him to his family in Maryland because, well, he’s there now, and besides, they paid for him.” And in the latest, as we record on April 9, the Supreme Court says, “You know what? Let’s sit on that for a minute.”
What in the name of humanity is happening? Is it legal? Illegal? Does that matter? What can thinking, feeling human beings do now to protect fellow humans who are immigrants in this country?
Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, and has been reporting on issues around immigrants’ rights for years now. She joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Dara Lind.
Dara Lind: Thank you for having me on. Let’s try to figure this out.
JJ: Yeah. Well, let’s start, if we could, with what some are calling “renditions,” because “deportation” doesn’t really seem to fit. The White House has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as justification for sending, in this case, Venezuelan people it has deemed to be members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.
They are no contact. We don’t know what’s happening to them, exactly. They haven’t been convicted of any crime. They’ve had no chance to challenge charges against them.
You’ve written recently about this rubric that’s being wafted over this, and that folks will have heard about: the Alien Enemies Act. Talk us through, if you would, what that is, and what we should make of this employment of it.
DL: Sure. So the Alien Enemies Act was enacted in 1798. It was part of a suite of laws, where every of the other laws that were passed around those issues—as America was very worried about war between Britain and France—all of the other acts passed around that were eventually rescinded, because everybody kind of looked at that moment and went: “Ooh, that was a little bit tyrannical. We may have gone too far there.” But the Alien Enemies Act stayed on the books, and has been used very infrequently since then, most recently in World War II, to remove Japanese and German nationals.
What the Trump administration has done is say, “One, we’re using it again. Two, we’re using it not against a government, but against a criminal group, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua,” which they argue is so enmeshed with the government of Venezuela that it constitutes a hybrid criminal state. And three, saying that any Venezuelan man over the age of 14 who they deem to be a member of Tren de Aragua can be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, without any of the process that is set out in actual immigration law.
Under immigration law, you have the ability to make your case before a judge, to demonstrate that you qualify for some form of relief, such as asylum if that applies to you, and the government has to prove that you can be removed. They say, “No, no, no, no, no, because this law existed before any of that, we don’t have to go through any of that process.” That is their interpretation of the law, under which they put people on planes and sent them to El Salvador.
What has been litigated, and with a Supreme Court order on Monday night, where we are right now, is that the courts have said, “No, it is illegal to use the Alien Enemies Act to remove people with no process whatsoever.” But the Supreme Court says, if people want to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, they need to do it through what are called habeas claims, which is not the way that the initial court case was brought.
So in theory right now, we’re in a world where someone hypothetically could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, but how that’s going to work in practice is a little bit unclear, because it would have to be a different process than the one the Trump administration used in mid-March. And what we’re actually seeing is, even in the hours before you and I are speaking, that judges have started to receive lawsuits filed under these habeas claims, and have started saying, “Yeah, you can’t remove people under this act through this either.” So it’s really changing very quickly on the ground, and part of that’s the result of this 200+-year-old law being used in a manner in which it’s never been used before, and with very little transparency as to what the administration wants to do with it.
JJ: It seems important to say, as you do in the piece that you wrote, that the Alien Enemies Act sidesteps immigration law, because it’s being presented as kind of part of immigration law, but one of the key things about it is that it takes us outside of laws that have been instituted to deal with immigration, yeah?
DL: I compare this to when the Trump administration, after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, used Title 42, which is a public health law, to essentially seal the US/Mexico border from asylum seekers. In that case, they were taking a law from outside of immigration, that had been enacted before the modern immigration system, and saying, because this law doesn’t explicitly say immigration law is in effect, we can create this separate pathway that we can use, that we can treat immigrants under this law without having to give them any of the rights guaranteed under immigration law.
They’re doing the same thing with this, saying, because this law that is on the books doesn’t refer to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed a century and a half later, we don’t need to adhere to anything that was since put in to, say, comply with the Refugee Convention, to comply with the International Convention Against Torture, all of these structures that have come into place as people have started to care about human rights, and not sending people to torture or persecution—they’re now saying they don’t have to bother with, because they weren’t thinking about them in 1798.
JJ: Right. And it brings us to, folks for many years on many issues have been saying, Well, it’s not legal, so it’s all going to be fixed, because the law’s going to step in and fix it, because it’s not legal. And I think you’re referring to the fluidity and the importance of the invocation of law. It’s not like it just exists, and you bring it down to bear. It’s fought terrain.
DL: Right. Yes, exactly. It’s contested, and when we say “contested,” it really is being fought out in the courts as we speak. Because the administration is using its authority, the fact that it is the federal government, and litigators are saying, “Please point to us in the law where you can do that, or demonstrate to us that you are adhering at all to what we think of as fairly basic constitutional protections, like due process, like the right to know what you’re being detained for.”
What is legal is ultimately what the courts decide, but how they rule on this is very unclear, and, to be fully honest, the government’s insistence on giving very little information, and in conceding very little—even in cases like Mr. Abrego Garcia’s, where, as you say, they’ve said there was a mistake made—makes it a little bit harder to understand what it would even look like to say a government that’s been so truculent and so resistant is in fact operating under the law.
JJ: Let me just pivot a little bit. The talking point of, If they just come here the right way, like my grandparents did—that’s ahistorical garbage, we understand, but it’s still potent. And we have seen for years an effort to cleave “bad immigrants” from “good immigrants,” and to suggest, even now, that the good ones have nothing to fear.
Your work places this “bad hombre” rhetoric within a broader context of immigration policy and enforcement, because you don’t have to throw people in the back of a van to stir up enough fear and uncertainty to upend lives. You can do it with a quietly announced rule change.
And so I just want to ask you to talk about some of the maybe less visible fronts—you know, the ending of the CHNV program, the demand for registration. Talk about some other things that are going on that are still, in their own way, violent and disruptive.
Dara Lind: “They’re taking far more sweeping, categorical actions toward people with fewer protections under current law, and it’s harder to talk about those.”
DL: I love this question so much, because something that I personally have been thinking about a lot over the last several weeks is that the administration has gotten a lot of attention for the unprecedented ways in which it’s treated people with legal permission to be here, especially student visas.
But we’re hearing about those in terms of individual cases of visas being stripped. And meanwhile, they’re taking far more sweeping, categorical actions toward people with fewer protections under current law, and it’s harder to talk about those, because they don’t look like individual cases. They look like policy changes.
So, for example, thousands of people have gotten letters over the last couple of weeks, saying that their permission to live in the United States and work, which was extended under a presidential authority known as humanitarian parole, has been revoked, or will be revoked as of later this month, and that they’re supposed to return to their home countries as soon as possible.
Now, some of those people received those letters in error. Some of them were Ukrainians who were let in under the United for Ukraine program, and the government said later, the day that it sent them, “Oops, you guys, we didn’t mean to send that to you guys, so hopefully you didn’t see that and pack up and leave already.”
But many of them are being told they need to leave immediately, or within seven days, and it’s absolutely upending their lives, because they were told they had two years, or that they didn’t have to think about this until the next time their parole was up for renewal.
What you’re alluding to with registration is this bind that they’re trying to place immigrants in. People may very well not know that while we talk about “unauthorized” or “illegal” immigrants in the US, millions of those, at this point, are known to the government in some form or another: They have pending immigration court hearings, or they have some form of temporary permission to be in the United States.
While the Trump administration is, on the one hand, talking about this “invasion” of people who we don’t know who they are, on the other hand, they’re trying to use yet another obscure pre-1960s law to force anyone who isn’t already on the books with the federal government to register.
Now, are they going to be protected by registering? Are they being given legal status? Are they being given the right to work? No, not at all. And, in fact, the government has said nothing—the implication is that they’re using that information to go find people and deport them. But if you don’t register, then you risk being prosecuted as a federal criminal.
So they’re doing their best to, instead of actually going after the criminals who they promised were lurking around every corner on the campaign trail, to turn people who have not committed any crime into criminals, simply by engaging in what previously was a civil violation of immigration law.
JJ: To put the pin on it, this would make the United States a place where you can be stopped and told to show your papers.
DL: Yeah, this law that was passed in 1940 says that if you do not produce evidence that you’ve registered if asked by an immigration official, then that also constitutes a federal crime. It’s absolutely one of those where, we say all the time, we’re not a country that asks people to show their papers, and actually, according to this obscure law, that is a thing we can do.
But as with so many things in immigration law, there are powers the federal government in theory has but doesn’t use. And the Trump administration is trying to use them for the first time, and reminding a lot of people just how much power we’ve given the government and trusted them to use correctly.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, we understand, if we’re paying attention, that the Trump administration is not just interested in so-called criminals when we read that they are tracking anyone—immigrant, citizen, no matter—who expresses criticism of the deportation agenda on social media. So it seems clear that this is ideologically based on its face, or at least pieces of it is. Is that not a legal front to fight on?
DL: A lot of things that would be entirely illegal, if the government went after a US citizen for them, are in fact historically considered OK for the government to do in the context of immigration law. For example, the grounds that are being used for many of these student visa revocations are this obscure regulation that the State Department can revoke the visa of anyone it deems to be a foreign policy problem for the United States, which does open itself up to deporting people for speech, for protected political activity, for, again, the sort of thing that would be a core constitutional right for US citizens, but that, in the context in which US immigration law has developed, which was a lot of people being very concerned about Communist infiltration, immigrants have been carved out.
I think in general, it’s really important for people to understand that while the Trump administration loves to imply that it’s going to use all of its powers maximally, that no one is safe and that everyone should be afraid, in fact citizens do have more protections than Green Card holders, Green Card holders do have more protections than others.
For example, the one Green Card holder who they’ve tried to use this State Department thing on, the judge in that case, as of when we’re talking, has told the government, give me some evidence in 24 hours or I’m ordering this guy released. Because it does take more to deport somebody on a Green Card.
So how scared people should be, this isn’t just a function of what the government is saying—although what it’s doing is more relevant—but it should also be a function of how many layers of protection the government would have to cut through in order to subject you to its will.
JJ: And that gives us points of intervention, and I appreciate the idea that while we absolutely have to be concerned about what’s being said, it’s helpful to keep a clear eye on what is actually happening, so that we see where the fronts of the fight are. But I then have to ask you, when you hear analysts say, well, this person had a disputed status, this person had a Green Card, and make those distinctions, but then you hear Trump say, well, heck yeah, I’d love to send US citizens to prison in El Salvador.
He’s making clear he doesn’t think it’s about immigration status. He says, if I decide you’re a criminal, and you bop people on the head, or whatever the hell he said, you’re a dangerous person. “Well, I would love the law to let me send US citizens to El Salvador also.” So you can understand why folks feel the slipperiness of it, even as we know that laws have different layers of protection.
DL: I do. The thing that strikes me about these US citizens–to–El Salvador comments is that I was reporting on Trump back when the first time he was a presidential candidate, so I’ve been following what he says for a minute. It’s really, really rare for Donald Trump to say “if it’s legal,” “we’re not sure it’s legal.”
But he said that about this, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt has also said that about this, and that caveat is just so rare that it does make me think that this is different from some of the other things where Trump says it and then the government tries to make it happen, that they are a little bit aware that there’s a bright line, and even they are a little bit wary of stepping over it.
And I’m kind of insistent about that, mostly because I worry a lot about people being afraid to stand up for more vulnerable people in their communities, because they’re focused on the ways in which they’re vulnerable. And so what I don’t want to see is a world where noncitizens can be arrested and detained with no due process, and citizens are afraid to speak out because they heard something about citizens being sent to El Salvador, and they worry they will be next.
JJ: I hear that. And following from that, I want to just quote from the piece that you wrote for the New York Times last November, about focusing on what is actually really happening, and you said:
The details matter not only because every deportation represents a life disrupted (and usually more than one, since no immigrant is an island). They matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on January 20. Millions of people will wake up on January 21 not knowing exactly what comes next for them—and the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts, the better able immigrants and their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears.
What I hear in that is that there is a real history-making moment for a press corps that’s worth its salt.
DL: Absolutely, and to be honest, in the weeks since the flights were sent to El Salvador, we’ve seen sometremendousreporting from national and local reporters about the human lives that were on those planes. We know so much more about these people than we would have. But what that means is that these people who, arguably, the administration would love to see disappear, Nayib Bukele would love to see disappear, they’re very, very visible to us.
And that’s so important in making it clear that things like due process aren’t just a hypothetical “nice to have.” Due process is the protection that prevents, in general, gay makeup artists from getting sent to a country that they’ve never been to because of their tattoos, that it’s an essential way to make sure that we’re not visiting harm on people who have done nothing to deserve it.
JJ: Finally, I do understand that we have to fight wherever there’s a fight, but I do have a fear of small amendments or reforms as a big-picture response. We can amend this here or we can return that person. It feels a little bit like a restraining wall against a flood.
And I just feel that it helps to show that we are for something. We’re not just against hatefulness and bigotry and the law being used to arbitrarily throw people out. We have a vision of a shared future that doesn’t involve deputizing people to snitch on their neighbors who they think look different. We have a vision about immigration that is a positive vision that we’ve had in this country, and I guess I wish I’d see more of that right now, in media and elsewhere.
DL: What makes it particularly hard, from my perspective, is that most Americans know very little about immigration law. It’s extremely complicated, and most people have never had firsthand experience with it. So in order to get people to even understand what is going on now, you need to do more work than you do for areas where people are more intuitively familiar with what the government does, and that takes up space that otherwise could go to imagining different futures.
The other problem here is that, frankly, it’s not that new and radical ideas on immigration are needed. It’s a matter of political will, to a certain extent, right?
The reason that the Trump administration’s use of this registration provision is such a sick irony to some of us is that there was a way, that Congress proposed, to allow people to register with the US government. It was called comprehensive immigration reform. There have been proposals to regularize people, to put people on the books, to bring people out of the shadows.
And the absence of that, and the absence of a federal government that was in any way equipped to actually process people, rather than figuring out the most draconian crackdown and hoping that everybody got the message, is where we’ve gotten to a point where everyone agrees that the system is broken, and the only solutions appear to be these radical crackdowns on basic rights.
JJ: Yeah. We’ve established that the ground is shifting under our feet, but anything you’d like reporters to do more of or less of, or things to keep in mind?
DL: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the amount of attention, and duration of attention, on the Salvadoran removals. It’s been something where I could easily have seen things falling out of the headlines, just because there weren’t any new facts being developed.
I do worry a little bit that now that the court cases—with a couple of exceptions, we’re unlikely to see really big developments in the next several days—that that’s going to maybe quiet the drumbeat. And I’m hoping that people are continuing to push, continuing to try to find new information, to hold the government accountable to the things that it’s already said, especially if they’re going to start removals back up again.
Because it’s often the case that in the absence of new facts, important things don’t get treated as news stories anymore, and it would be really a shame if that were to happen for this, when our only recourse, unless the courts are going to end up ruling that the Trump administration has to send the plane back and put everybody on them and bring them back to the US, is going to be some measure of public pressure on the administration—on the government of El Salvador, even—to do the right thing.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dara Lind. She’s senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Thank you so much, Dara Lind, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NBC (4/7/25) presented evidence that killed 15 aid workers and buried their bodies along with their vehicles as an IDF “mistake.”
Israeli soldiers on March 23 massacred 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers near the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide has officially killed more than 50,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The slaughter took place before dawn, as a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck from the Palestinian Civil Defense service endeavored to respond to a lethal Israeli attack on another ambulance, which had itself been attempting to rescue victims of an Israeli airstrike.
Eight Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, six Civil Defense workers and one UN staff member were murdered by Israeli gunfire. Their mutilated bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave, their vehicles crushed and buried as well.
The initial Israeli narrative was that nine of the emergency responders were militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously…without headlights or emergency signals.”
As it turns out, however, all headlights and emergency signals were very much on—not that it’s fine to massacre people for driving with no lights, of course. When, after a week of negotiations with Israeli occupying forces, another convoy was finally permitted to access the mass grave and unearth the bodies, the mobile phone of massacre victim Rifat Radwan was found to containfootage of the lead-up to the assault, which shows the clearly marked rescue vehicles advancing with emergency lights on. A barrage of Israeli gunfire then persists for more than five minutes, as Radwan’s screen goes black and he bids farewell to his mother.
Following the release of the video footage, Israel conceded that perhaps its version of events had been partially “mistaken”—but only the claim about the headlights being off. The number of alleged “terrorists” on board was furthermore downgraded from nine to six, the other fatalities naturally being labeled human shields and therefore fundamentally the fault of Hamas.
Anyway, no one committing a genocide really cares about the precise identities of 15 people; mass indiscriminate killing is, after all, the whole point of the undertaking. Since Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas on March 18, the United Nations calculates that more than 100 children per day have been killed or injured in Gaza.
Ludicrous headlines
The New York Times‘ lead (4/4/25) says the aid workers were killed “when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire”—but the headline omits Israel altogether, and the subhead treats Israel’s responsibility as a UN accusation.
Notwithstanding reality, the Western corporate media somehow could not bring itself to report this particular massacre of medics without beating around the bush. The New York Times (4/4/25), for example, ran the following ludicrous headline: “Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On.” There was no room, apparently, to mention the role of Israel in said gunfire barrage, although the syntax implies that the ambulance lights may have perpetrated the killing.
The article’s subheadline specifies that “the UN has said Israel killed the workers”—and yet the singular attribution of this opinion to the United Nations is entirely confounding, given that the very first paragraph of the article itself states that the video “shows that the ambulances and fire truck… were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.”
For its part, NPR (4/5/25) went with its own similarly diplomatic headline: “Palestinian Medics Say a Video of Gaza Rescue Crews Under Fire Refutes Israeli Claims.” CNN (4/6/25) opted for: “Video Showing Final Moments of Gaza Emergency Workers Casts Doubt on Israeli Account of Killings.”
NBC News (4/7/25) reported that the Israeli military had “walked back its account of its killing of 15 paramedics and emergency workers in southern Gaza last month after video emerged that called into question its version of events”; the Washington Post (4/6/25) concurred that that Israel had “backtracked on its account…after phone video appeared to contradict its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on.”
The Guardian (4/5/25), meanwhile, went as far as to assert that the cell phone footage, which “appears to contradict the version of events put forward” by the Israeli military, “appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle” and features “a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.” Imagine if all news reports were written in such roundabout fashion, e.g., “State officials say that what appears to be a bridge collapsed on Thursday into what appears to be a river.”
The New York Times on April 7 produced its own follow-up headline, “Video Shows Search for Missing Gaza Paramedics Before Israelis Shoot Rescuers”—thanks to which readers were presumably too busy trying to parse the grammar to think about anything else.
‘Not seen as fully human’
Ahmed Najar (Al Jazeera, 4/6/25) : “Their story is not just about one atrocity. It is about the machinery of doubt that kicks in every time Palestinians are killed.”
In the case of Israel, corporate media have institutionalized the practice of dancing around the straightforward statement of fact, which is why we never see headlines like “Israel Massacres 15 Palestinian Medics in Rafah,” or, obviously, any acknowledgement that Israel is currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). Thanks in large part to Israel’s oh-so-special relationship with the US, which happily bankrolls its crimes against humanity, the media have long grotesquely skewed reporting in Israel’s favor in order to validate the whole arrangement.
As Palestinian political analyst and playwright Ahmed Najar writes in a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera (4/6/25), the slaughter of the 15 medics and rescuers in Gaza matters because “their story is not just about one atrocity.” It’s about an entire system
in which Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must prove they are hospitals, schools must prove they are schools and children must prove they are not human shields.
A system in which, “when Palestinians die, their families have to prove they weren’t terrorists first.” Najar concludes: “When Palestinians are not seen as fully human, then their killers are not seen as fully responsible.”
Western media insistence on giving ample space to Israel’s patently absurd arguments naturally doesn’t help matters—as when the Associated Press (4/6/25) allows an anonymous Israeli military official to contend that there was “no mistreatment” in the killing of the 15 medics. How could there ever be “mistreatment” in a genocide?
In its dispatch on how Israel “walked back” its account of the killing, NBC (4/7/25) quoted the Israeli military as saying that soldiers weren’t trying to “hide anything” by burying the 15 corpses, which is kind of like allowing someone caught holding up a bank with an AK-47 the opportunity to state that they weren’t trying to “steal anything.” From a journalistic standpoint, it makes no sense to grant credibility to a clearly disingenuous narrative. From a propaganda perspective, unfortunately, it does.
‘Good reason to be anxious’
As Doctors Without Borders (1/7/25) noted, Israel has killed hundreds of healthcare workers as part of its war on Gaza.
In the end, the slaughter of these 15 men should come as no surprise; as of January, Israel had already killed more than 1,000 health workers in Gaza in a little over a year, while engaging in repeated attacks on hospitals and an obscene decimation of medical infrastructure. On April 1, the UN reported that 408 aid workers had also been killed since October 2023, including 280 UN staff.
Killing medical personnel and emergency responders has long been Israel’s modus operandi. Recall Razan al-Najjar, the 21-year-old Palestinian nurse fatally shot by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2018, when Israel claimed that unarmed Palestinian protesters were conducting “kite and balloon terrorism.”
Or recall Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which kicked off in Gaza in December 2008 and killed 1,400 Palestinians over a span of 22 days, among them 300 children. The brief assault left 16 medics dead and damaged more than half of Gaza’s hospitals. The Guardian (3/24/09) quoted the Israeli army as reasoning that “medics who operate in the area take the risk upon themselves”—to hell with the Geneva Conventions.
To be sure, war crimes are all in a day’s work for Israel—and covering them up is, it seems, all in a day’s work for the corporate media. In a dispatch about how Israel “acknowledged flaws” in its “mistaken” account of its killing of the rescue workers, the New York Times‘ Isabel Kershner (4/6/25) cited Israeli military affairs analyst Amos Harel on how the Israeli soldiers who did the killing “had ‘good reason to be anxious,’ and that it would be wrong to assume immediately that the case was one of ‘murder in cold blood.’”
Naturally, it would be inhumane to assume that any aspect of genocide might transpire in cold blood. And as Israel continues its quest to normalize total depravity, Western journalism is becoming ever more cold-blooded, too.
This week on CounterSpin: We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program—not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy, or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.”
It is disheartening to see a report like one in Newsweek, about how Trump “loves the idea” of sending US citizens to prisons outside of US jurisdiction, that feels it has to start by explaining “Why It Matters.” But things as they are, we have to be grateful for what straight reporting we get—at a time when some outlets are signing on to shut up if it buys them a moment of peace, which it won’t—and a moment in which staying informed, paying attention, learning what’s happening and how we can stop it, is what we have to work with.
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Jessica González about Trump’s FCC for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There are reasons that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is an opaque entity for many people. The fact that there is a federal agency setting the terms for media companies’ operations conflicts with many Americans’ understanding of the press corps as a group of brave, independent individuals looking to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may.
There are, in fact, many community-supported, differently structured news outlets doing just that. But, listeners know, the big major papers and stations and channels we may look to for news are owned and sponsored by big profit-driven corporations that share the status quo–supporting interests of other big profit-driven corporations.
In allowing these companies’ increased conglomeration, and sidelining their nominal public interest obligations, the FCC has long played a role in determining whose voices are heard and whose are not. But maybe not quite as loud, as proudly prejudiced and bare-knuckled a role as right now.
Our guest reports how Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has got straight to dangerous work, undermining free speech and press freedom right out of the gate. Jessica González is co-CEO at the public advocacy group Free Press. She joins us now by phone from Los Angeles. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jessica González.
JJ: As you have noted, Brendan Carr is not so much regulating as delivering on Trump’s threats to punish anyone who reports critically about him, including by giving any space to anyone who opposes him politically. It’s beyond the beyond, and we see there’s no piece of government that MAGA will not weaponize.
And so appeals to gentility, and “let’s agree to disagree,” are just not serving the public, not serving marginalized communities or democracy, even a little bit.
So what do you have your eye on right now? What should we know is not “maybe going to happen” with a Trump-led FCC, but actually happening?
JG: You know, Janine, I remember 10, 15 years ago when the concerns we had about the FCC were structural in nature. They were allowing runaway media consolidation, which was resulting in fewer voices, and particularly fewer voices of color, controlling the narratives that we were hearing on broadcast media. Or we were concerned about net neutrality, making sure that internet service providers were not allowed to stop or slow down the traffic online, so that everyone had an equal opportunity to be heard. These, of course, were free speech issues, but they weren’t quite as in-focus threats to free expression as what we’re seeing now out of the Brendan Carr FCC under Donald Trump.
Brendan Carr has systematically gone after broadcasters who have given Trump’s political opponents airtime, or who have factchecked the president. For instance, in his first week in office, he revived three out of the four claims against broadcasters that the FCC chair under Biden had dismissed as politically biased. He left in place the dismissal of a complaint against Fox News, and revitalized the complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS, under claims that are specious, to say the least.
It’s very clear that his intent is to punish broadcasters who have broadcast opposing viewpoints—in ABC‘s case, factchecked the president at a debate before the election, in CBS’s case, they aired on 60 Minutes a recording of Kamala Harris that was edited as per normal standards in broadcast. We saw Brendan Carr going afterNBC when they aired an SNLsegment with Kamala Harris, even though they gave the president airtime the next day during a NASCAR race. This appears to be a clear and systematic effort to weaponize the FCC against broadcasters whose political speech, or just their news reporting, the president and his allies don’t like.
Another case in San Francisco is an investigation that the FCC chair has opened into KCBS radio station, where he is complaining that KCBS aired information about an ICE raid that was happening in the area. This is clearly First Amendment‒protected speech that these broadcasters are—you know, we expect them to cover the news, that’s presumably part of a public interest obligation. But the FCC chair is going after any political speech or any news reporting or any speech, frankly, that the president and his allies don’t like.
Jessica Gonzalez: “They are directing the reporters to be careful, because they fear government retribution for their speech.”
This is chilling. We heard from FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, who’s a Democrat, that she has visited radio and television broadcasters across the country, and is already hearing that they are directing the reporters to be careful, because they fear government retribution for their speech. And this is exactly the type of environment where authoritarianism thrives. Not only is Brendan Carr going after broadcasters, which are clearly regulated entities under the FCC’s scope of work, he’s also, in his diatribe in Project 2025, threatened to go after social media companies, and forced them to leave up hate and lies.
So this is an all-out war on the First Amendment. It’s chilling. And this is the type of stuff that our allies in Hungary tell us they were seeing before Orban took power. A couple weeks ago, we had a convening with András Biró-Nagy from Hungary, and Maria Ressa from the Philippines, who tracked Duterte’s authoritarian takeover of the government, and they were pointing out how similar the attacks on free speech in the United States look to the attacks on free speech in their countries, the similar tactics of quashing dissent, dehumanizing people, of going after minority groups. This is really clearly giving us great concern.
JJ: I will just say, finally, and thank you, we are gripping on with our fingernails, and thank you for acknowledging lessons from other places. We’re so committed to US exceptionalism, but we actually need to be listening to other countries right now.
But if we are dreaming, if we are not just trying to hold on to scraps, are there policies, is there legislation, is there a vision that we can be looking to as a template, imagining that we are surviving this moment?
JG: Yeah, I mean, I imagine we are surviving this moment, and I’m looking to what you’re doing, Janine, and what thousands of other reporters are doing throughout the country, to hold the power to account, be a Fourth Estate. And we’re looking at state policies, and maybe one day federal policies, to expand community journalism, noncommercial journalism that is not relying on moneyed interest to call the shots, that’s really just helping people understand what is happening when people take action when they don’t like what they see.
And so we have, with the Media Power Collaborative that Free Press is helping convene, and with the Media 2070 project that my colleagues are convening as well, that holds attacks on communities of color to account, and that repairs the harm that’s being done, not just now, but that historically has been done through our media system, what does it look like? This is what the Media 2070 project is queuing up for us. What does it look like to have a media system that loves Black people? The Media Power Collaborative is really looking at state-based policies to make sure that there is more public money for noncommercial journalism.
And so these are the types of models that are infusing new reporters on the ground. There was a bill in California that actually didn’t pass, but there was a budget line item for $25 million that went to UC Berkeley here. And we have local reporters embedding inside of newsrooms that are covering city halls, that are covering the state house. This is bringing much-needed capacity to track what’s actually happening in local civics to participate in our democracy.
JJ: All right, I’m going to end right on that note. We’ve been speaking with Jessica González; she’s co-CEO at Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net. Jessica González, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center’s Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.
Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.
Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.
Paul Offit: Thank you.
JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.
You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy’s book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.
PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren’t really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren’t contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren’t.
And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.
So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it’s spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn’t really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you’re in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.
JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don’t get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.
PO: Right. And if you’re a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you’re given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you’ll be injected, or you’ll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.
JJ: And also, CBSNews is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we’re not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It’s because they need treatment.”
PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don’t want measles in the hospital. It’s a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.
Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that’s confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it’s probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there’ll be another child death or more.
JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:
Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.
I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.
PO: That’s a really good point. I think we haven’t done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.
And that’s the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it’s always self-correcting. It’s introspective, and you’re willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.
I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That’s OK. That didn’t mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.
And I think people, at some level, don’t accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can’t trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.
JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there’s something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”
RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you’ve talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.
PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.
For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I’m on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they’re going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there’s things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.
And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that’s caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it’s so easy to make that case.
JJ: When it’s presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let’s parse what is being said. Let’s talk about these ideas. Let’s talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as “controversial” shut down that more nuanced conversation.
PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I’m not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”
Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.
JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it’s being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn’t die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It’s just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn’t have the media pickup.”
And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.
Paul Offit: “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”
PO: No, you’re right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.
But I’m a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.
But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it’s come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they’re learning now.
JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, there’s a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What’s the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?
PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it’s just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.
But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we’re doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we’re just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.
Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.
But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn’t vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we’re going to continue to suffer this.
JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Paul Offit, who’s director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Just under four years ago, New York’s third-term governor, Andrew Cuomo, resigned from office in disgrace, forced out by a looming impeachment inquiry led by his own Democratic Party over sexual harassment and Covid mismanagement scandals.
Shockingly, however, Cuomo has entered the New York City mayoral race and catapulted directly into the polling lead, with the help of his widespread name recognition—and some journalists willing to lend a hand to his image rehabilitation campaign. While some local papers have been scathing in their coverage of the ex-governor, the New York Times seems to be largely buying what Cuomo’s selling.
Scandals galore
Biden’s Justice Department concluded that “Governor Cuomo repeatedly subjected these female employees to unwelcome, non-consensual sexual contact” (New Republic, 1/26/24).
Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021, shortly after the release of Attorney General Leticia James’s investigation that concluded that he had sexually harassed at least 11 women, failed to report and investigate sexual harassment claims, and engaged in unlawful retaliation. A subsequent Justice Department investigation that reached a settlement with the state last year corroborated James’ report, and added two more female victims to its findings.
The bombshell sexual harassment report came on the heels of another major scandal involving nursing home deaths during the early months of the Covid pandemic. On March 25, 2020, Cuomo ordered state nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients released from hospitals. More than 4,500 such patients were admitted before the order was rescinded in May, after heavy criticism and a mounting nursing home death toll (FAIR.org, 2/19/21). Despite Cuomo’s protestations to the contrary, his order did not follow CDC guidelines at the time.
What’s more, in a subsequent probe of his myriad ethical violations, the Democratic-controlled New York State Assembly found that Cuomo’s office had tampered with the nursing home death count released in a state health report, in an effort to hide his order’s impact and avoid investigation. And a Republican-led congressional inquiry found emails showing that Cuomo himself had seen and edited the report, which sought to deflect blame to nursing home employees for the rampant Covid spread among residents.
The state assembly probe also found that Cuomo had ordered staff members to use work hours to help produce his book on pandemic leadership—a book he was paid $5 million for, and which was approved by the state ethics commission on Cuomo’s promise that he would not use state time or personnel to produce it. And it affirmed the attorney general’s findings about Cuomo’s sexual misconduct, citing “overwhelming evidence.”
The assembly probe was launched as part of an impeachment inquiry. Had Cuomo not resigned, he almost certainly would have been impeached. Instead, he’s spent the last several years taking a “scorched earth” approach against his accusers, burning through millions of taxpayer dollars for his legal fees, and gearing up for a political rebirth as New York City mayor—and perhaps, in 2028, US presidential candidate.
As the front-page New York Times article (3/1/25) reporting Cuomo’s entrance into the mayoral race explained, “To win, he will have to convince New Yorkers that he is innocent—or at least to look beyond his transgressions and a field of newer talent.”
It would appear the paper is doing its best to help Cuomo achieve that.
‘Clear advantages’
The New York Times (3/1/25) said that Cuomo “can cite his success as governor…leading the state through the Covid crisis.” In 2020, the last full year of Cuomo’s governorship, New York had the second-worst death rate from Covid in the nation.
The Times article by Nicholas Fandos and Emma Fitzsimmons, which called Cuomo’s comeback attempt “audacious,” acknowledged that his campaign came with “hefty baggage.” Yet it also pointed to his “clear advantages,” including not just $15 million in anticipated super PAC money, but “his success…leading the state through the Covid crisis”—breezily erasing a key component of that baggage.
Shockingly, the reporters didn’t mention the Covid nursing home scandal until the final paragraph of the lengthy piece—which, failing to mention the two Democrat-led reports on Cuomo’s misdeeds, suggested that the whole thing might just boil down to another Republican witch hunt:
A House Republican chairman referred Mr. Cuomo for potential prosecution after he accused him of lying about a report on nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Mr. Cuomo insists he did not lie, but rather failed to remember certain details that he later sought to correct.
Regarding the sexual harassment scandal, the paper wrote: “Mr. Cuomo has had success chipping away at the credibility of some of the harassment claims.” How so, you ask? That paragraph continued:
Last year, the Justice Department reached a civil rights settlement with the state concluding that he and his executive staff subjected at least 13 female employees to a “sexually hostile work environment.” (Mr. Cuomo was not a party to the settlement and disparaged its findings as a rehash of old information.)
If the Times wants to assert that Cuomo has chipped away the credibility of the claims, they ought to at least offer some evidence. None of the accusers have retracted their claims, though one recently dropped her case against him, explaining:
Throughout this extraordinarily painful two year case, I’ve many times believed that I’d be better off dead than endure more of his litigation abuse, which has caused extraordinary pain and expense to my family and friends. I desperately need to live my life. That’s the choice I am making today.
Cuomo immediately countersued her in response (Independent, 12/19/24).
Meanwhile, when the Times article reports that some “opponents say Mr. Cuomo is to blame for some of the very things he says he wants to fix, including the state of the city’s subways,” evidence is also called for. But in this case, the evidence would show that it’s not just a political attack, but an indisputable fact: As governor, Cuomo repeatedly raided hundreds of millions of state dollars earmarked for the city’s public transportation system—which is actually state-run—to help fill state budget holes and fund pet projects, while at the same time working to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy (Jacobin, 3/3/25).
Indeed, Fitzsimmons might have quoted her own reporting from 2018 (New York Times, 10/23/18):
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, helped create the subway crisis by failing to adequately support the system—his administration even diverted transit funding to ski resorts—and he has been pilloried by subway advocates for prioritizing aesthetics over maintenance.
‘It has been discredited’
New York Times (3/1/25): “A campaign-style video on Valentine’s Day showing [Cuomo] holding a rose and hugging women…reinforced the idea that many women still like him.”
The same day (3/1/25), the paper published another piece by Fitzsimmons, “Cuomo’s Foes Look to Renew Focus on Sexual Harassment Scandal.” The article named some of the accusations and noted that Cuomo’s “team often cites how, despite criminal investigations by several district attorneys, none resulted in charges.” It did not mention the attorney general’s investigation or the state assembly probe, leaving readers with essentially a he said/she said duel to evaluate the credibility of the claims.
Another line in that piece stood out: “The power of the #MeToo movement has seemed to wane in recent years, with the re-election of President Trump, a Republican, a visible example.” It’s worth pointing out, as the Times does not, that much of the power of that movement came from pushing news outlets to take more seriously accusations of sexual misconduct against powerful people. If the power of #MeToo has waned, journalists shouldn’t pretend they’re passive observers of the phenomenon.
Even some in the media admitted that Trump’s extensive list of accusers never got the kind of coverage they deserved, which helped smooth his path back to the White House. The Times‘ formulation erases the media’s complicity in shielding sexual harassers and abusers from facing the kind of scrutiny #MeToo demands.
#MeToo also helped the public understand that it’s incredibly hard to convict someone of sexual misconduct, which so often happens with no third-party witnesses, so that charges and conviction can’t be the only standard by which powerful people accused of such deeds are judged. If journalists shift back to reporting on such accusations strictly through the lens of the legal system, as the Times does here, it means winding back an important part of #MeToo’s impact.
Fitzsimmons returned to the subject less than two weeks later in the article “For #MeToo Movement, Mayor’s Race in New York City Poses a Test” (3/10/25). Noting that three of the mayoral candidates face sexual misconduct accusations—Cuomo, embattled incumbent Eric Adams and former city comptroller Scott Stringer—Fitzsimmons wrote that their candidacies “will provide a durability test for the #MeToo movement in New York politics.” She proceeded to lay out the accusers’ claims and the candidates responses, with this for Cuomo’s defense:
Mr. Cuomo told reporters on Sunday after attending a church service in Harlem that he did not agree with a report by the state attorney general, Letitia James, that found that he had sexually harassed 11 women.
“I said at that time it was wrong, I said at that time it was political, it has been discredited and nothing has come from any of it,” he said.
If a politician claims a report that took testimony under oath from 41 people and examined tens of thousands of documents has been “discredited”—a report your own editorial board at the time called “thorough and damning“—don’t you think you ought to press for substantiation of that eyebrow-raising claim? But New York Times editors let it stand unchallenged.
‘Criticism politically motivated’
The New York Times (3/23/25) stressed the political motivations behind pointing out that Cuomo’s Covid policies got people killed—as opposed to focusing on the people killed.
On the anniversary of Cuomo’s nursing home order, families of nursing home Covid victims held an event calling on him to apologize and take responsibility for his actions, bringing together most of Cuomo’s rivals—from the Democratic Socialist to the lone Republican in the race. The Times (3/23/25) lent its support to Cuomo’s framing of the criticism as merely politically motivated:
He has sharply defended his handling of the crisis and has called the criticism politically motivated.
On Sunday, nine mayoral candidates stood on a street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood in front of a memorial wall that displayed photos of nursing home residents who died during the Covid crisis. Each candidate said that they were not attending for political reasons, while taking the opportunity to criticize the former governor, who is leading in the polls.
Reporter Hurubie Meko’s opaque explanation of the scandal likewise offered Cuomo a friendly spin, turning the established findings of multiple inquiries into yet another he said/she said dispute between Cuomo and his “critics”:
Mr. Cuomo’s critics have focused on a July 2020 state Health Department report regarding nursing homes, which they have called inaccurate and have said deflected blame for the deaths away from the governor. In 2021, New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, found that Mr. Cuomo’s administration had undercounted coronavirus-related deaths of nursing home patients by the thousands. Mr. Cuomo, who has said the March 2020 order and the state’s other public health policies adhered to federal guidelines, called the lack of transparency a mistake but denied that his decisions were politically motivated.
It’s not just “critics” who called the numbers “inaccurate”; Meko leaves out the state assembly probe that found that, after intervention from Cuomo’s office, the nursing home death toll was edited to erase the thousands of residents who had died in hospitals. She also leaves out the difference between the CDC guidelines and Cuomo’s policy.
She does add that a “Republican-led House subcommittee…ultimately fault[ed]” Cuomo for tampering with the report, but let a Cuomo spokesperson counter that with further accusations of politicization.
‘An effective leader pre-scandal‘
New York Times Opinion writer Nicole Gelinas (10/8/24) on Cuomo: “There isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative.”
The paper’s kid-glove treatment of Cuomo isn’t restricted to the news pages. The Times opinion editors put together a four-person discussion on “the Democratic Party and Andrew Cuomo” (3/6/25), published as a guest essay, that appeared designed primarily to shore up the barricades against any candidates to the left of the centrist Cuomo. (Most of them are; the surging challenger currently polling second is democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.)
Joining editorial board members Mara Gay and Brent Staples were Giuliani biographer Andrew Kirtzman—whose most recent essay in the Times (10/8/24) had argued that “there’s a compelling reason [Cuomo] should run,” citing his “record of success and aura of competence”—and Nicole Gelinas, identified by the Times as “a contributing Opinion writer,” but more helpfully described as a senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute. (“Contributing Opinion writer” is a new position for Gelinas; apparently the Times felt her weekly column at the New York Post was not enough local exposure for her point of view.)
Gay asked the questions, while Gelinas offered claims like “voters aren’t interested right now in progressivism.” Kirtzman similarly opined, “New Yorkers in particular prefer their mayors to be pragmatists” rather than progressives. (This is the Times‘ line in news reporting as well, as when Fandos and Fitzsimmons—3/1/25—reported, “Democrats have been drifting slowly back toward the ideological center, where Mr. Cuomo has long been at home.”)
Staples offered nothing to counter those takes, and responded to Gay’s question about masculinity by suggesting that any breakout challenger to Cuomo or Adams would “have to give good bomber-jacket vibe,” presumably referring to Cuomo’s habit of wearing a leather bomber jacket in public appearances during the pandemic.
Kirtzman also presented a rehash of his October take, submitting that “the indisputable fact is that as governor [Cuomo] accomplished major things that his predecessors could not,” and that he “has been able to capitalize on the credibility he built up as an effective leader pre-scandal.”
Gelinas continued to hammer on the importance of centrism, saying that if New York City votes for Cuomo, “it won’t be because of ignorance of [his scandals], but because they feel there isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative.”
Right now, polling shows that most people simply don’t know enough about the other mayoral candidates to have an opinion about them, but of those that do, they give three of his five closest challengers higher net approval ratings than Cuomo.
And in terms of what New York voters want, it’s far from clear that centrism wins the day. The consistent topissues for New Yorkers are affordability—particularly housing—and safety. “Affordability” for New Yorkers is largely about housing costs, and the fact that real estate money has been pouring into Cuomo’s campaign bodes poorly for his ability to bring those costs down. “Safety” is driven primarily by fearmongering media coverage that rarely acknowledges that crime is actually near historic lows (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), but there is a visible mental health and homelessness crisis that also spurs fear and concern among residents.
As the Times itself (1/12/16) reported years ago, Cuomo worsened the city’s homelessness crisis as part of his commitment to fiscal austerity. Rather than raising taxes on the wealthy, he canceled the city’s access to a federal housing assistance program in 2011, costing the city nearly $100 million in funds and growing the city’s unhoused population by 16,000 in the next three years. Cuomo also sharply reduced the number of state-run psychiatric beds, shifting more of the seriously mentally ill population back onto the streets and subways.
Screwed over NYC
Politico (3/22/25) examines Cuomo’s “ties to a person loathed by many Democrats”—Elon Musk.
That’s far from the only stain on Cuomo’s record that the Times has reported on in the past but now seems to have conveniently forgotten. For instance, New York City is desperate for an alternative to their hopelessly corrupt current mayor, but Cuomo has his own history of corruption. During his time as governor, Cuomo established an anti-corruption commission, and then proceeded to impede any of its investigations that implicated him (New York Times, 7/23/14).
And Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” project, meant to revitalize the post-industrial western New York city by funneling tax breaks and state grants to economic development projects, quickly became “one of the most sweeping corruption scandals to ever rock a New York governor’s office”—including a massive giveaway to Elon Musk and his family for promised jobs that never fully materialized (Politico, 3/22/25).
But it’s no surprise the Times engages in selective amnesia over Cuomo, as New York City’s centrist neoliberal paper has a natural affinity for the centrist neoliberal politician. Cuomo’s barely a Democrat: As governor, he spent years supporting a posse of turncoat Democratic state legislators who caucused with the Republicans, to allow the minority party to block progressive legislation Cuomo didn’t want to see cross his desk (New Republic, 5/12/17).
He cut pensions for government workers, withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of school funding, and cut Medicaid in the midst of the pandemic.
He also specifically screwed over New York City, even aside from robbing city public transportation funds. In 2019, Cuomo singled out the city for a reduction in the standard state reimbursement for the local health department, so that New York City gets proportionally less than every other municipality in the state—costing the city up to $90 million a year (HealthBeat, 2/27/25). And he tried to cut a third of the state’s funding for the city’s public university system, which would have devastated it (Jacobin, 3/3/25).
‘Withering criticism’
The Daily News (3/22/25) examined Cuomo’s reluctance to criticize Trump—and the backing he gets from wealthy Trump supporters.
Another major local paper, the New York Daily News, has prominently included straightforward descriptions of Cuomo’s scandals in its coverage. In its article (3/1/25) on Cuomo’s entrance to the race, for instance, it explained:
He resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexually harassing 13 women, allegations the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division corroborated in a bombshell settlement last year. Cuomo has denied ever committing misconduct, but said upon resigning that he wanted to “deeply apologize” for making “people feel uncomfortable.”
Cuomo has also for years faced withering criticism over his decision to understate the number of New Yorkers who died from Covid-19 in nursing homes in the state after he enacted a policy in early 2020 prohibiting such facilities from denying entry for residents diagnosed with the deadly virus.
And under the print-edition headline “Cuomo Goes Easy on the President” (3/22/25), the paper covered Cuomo’s reluctance to criticize Trump in light of donation records they dug up showing tens of thousands of campaign dollars coming from wealthy “Trump donors and associates.” The Times has done no such digging.
Meanwhile, the Murdoch-owned New York Post seems happy to aim its disinformationmachine at Cuomo. Reporting on the same nursing home anniversary event as the Times, the Post (3/23/25) wrote that Cuomo’s nursing home directive “by many estimates resulted in the deaths of about 15,000 nursing-home residents.” FAIR is aware of no credible estimates that Cuomo’s directive killed 15,000, as that is the total nursing home death toll. Even Cuomo’s most vocal critics—those with any respect for truth and facts, anyway—don’t claim his order was responsible for every single nursing home death.
‘Strong ethical standards’
The Hill (3/8/25) presented Cuomo as an alternative to Mayor Eric Adams, someone who can tout “his leadership bona fides as Adams finds himself mired in controversy.”
While the Times‘ local competitors aren’t pulling their punches, its Cuomo-friendly reporting is finding some company among national outlets.
The Hill (3/8/25), in what read as a puff piece about Cuomo’s campaign to “woo centrists,” didn’t mention his nursing home or sexual harassment scandals until the 27th paragraph—a curious choice, especially considering that the 10th paragraph of the piece cited a poll that found city voters’ top priority was “strong ethical standards.” The Hill framed only Adams as the one “facing the major stumbling block of ethical questions.”
Politico‘s report (3/1/25) on Cuomo’s entrance to the race seemed determined to absolve him of his misdeeds, cherry-picking evidence to paint a picture of innocence:
Like Trump, Cuomo’s return to electoral office seemed improbable nearly four years ago when he left the governor’s mansion amid cascading scandals.
Still, the former governor’s allies believe he’s been vindicated in the years since he left office. One of the women who accused Cuomo of wrongdoing dropped her sexual harassment lawsuit against him and several prosecutors have declined to bring charges against him. A Justice Department inspector general last year determined the federal government’s probe of Cuomo’s nursing home policies launched under the first Trump administration was politically motivated.
In a piece critical of Democratic Party support for Cuomo, the Atlantic‘s David Graham (3/3/25) wrote, “If, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like [Rep. Ritchie] Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?”
The same might be asked of some in the corporate media, with the New York Times at the top of the list.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky:@NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
After the biggest anti-Trump protests since the 2017 Women’s March, many major media outlets seemed intent on downplaying the size and significance of the massive demonstration of opposition.
The Washington Post (4/6/25) relegated protesters “across the US” to the Metro section.
Despite the scale and significance of the protests, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had stories about them on their front pages the next day.
The Washington Post (4/6/25) had a thumbnail at the bottom of the front page with the blurb “Metro: Thousands gather in DC as protesters rally across the US against Trump.”
The New York Times (4/6/25) had a photo below the fold that was captioned: “A Day of Protest: People gathered around the country, including in Asheville, NC, to voice opposition to Trump administration policies. Page 18.”
“People gathered around the country” was how the New York Times (4/6/25) downplayed the massive wave of protest.
A Timesblurb promoting the story in a roundup of stories about “The Trump Administration’s First Hundred Days” minimized the scale and seriousness of the event:
Anti-Trump Protests: Demonstrators packed the streets in several cities to bemoan what they considered a lack of strong opposition to the president and his policies.
The verb “bemoan” is clearly belittling, and the focus of both organizers and participants was obviously on Trump (and Musk), not on the weakness of their opponents. And since when is 1,400 “several”?
The downplaying of the story couldn’t be explained by a lack of audience interest; indeed, people seemed extremely eager to hear about the protests. The protest coverage buried in the Times‘ print edition was the paper’s most-clicked article online that day, according to the paper’s Morning newsletter (4/7/25).
Little broadcast coverage
ABC‘s Good Morning America (4/6/25) offered protesters a few soundbites to speak for themselves.
The major broadcast networks gave the massive protests only passing coverage in most of their programming. On ABC, World News Tonight (4/5/25) gave only 20 seconds to a correspondent in Washington, DC, to explain the signs she was seeing. The network’s morning show, Good Morning America (4/6/25), offered a bit more, with a few soundbites given to protesters to speak for themselves. In a recent FAIR study (4/4/25) of protest coverage, ABC stood out for its blackout of nationwide anti-Trump protests that, even before this past weekend, already outnumbered protests in the same time period during Trump’s first term.
CBS Face the Nation (4/6/25) told viewers that “tens of thousands of people took to the streets yesterday from Washington, DC, to Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, protesting many of Trump’s policies, Elon Musk and tariffs.” CBS Weekend News (4/6/25) included a short description of the protests only in the context of Trump’s tariffs, airing a soundbite of a protester speaking against them. CBS Sunday Morning (4/6/25) had another, even briefer mention of the protests, in an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders.
A report on NBC Nightly News (4/5/25) mentioned “huge turnouts” and “protests in nearly every state.” The item featured several short soundbites from protesters. Meet the Press (4/6/25) also mentioned the protests briefly, with images.
Undercounting dissent
AP (via Politico, 4/5/25) reported that “thousands of protesters assailed Trump.”
NPR All Things Considered (4/5/25) told listeners that “thousands” gathered to protest Trump and Musk. So did the Associated Press (4/5/25)—whose credibility in the crowd-counting department could be judged by the article’s claim that the 2017 Women’s March also only saw “thousands.” (An effort at the time by the Washington Post to tally the US participants came up with a range of 3 million to 5 million—2/7/17.)
ABC World News Tonight (4/5/25) announced that “thousands” gathered on the National Mall in DC.
Over an otherwise commendable piece that compiled interviews with protesters in 11 cities and towns across the country, a USA Today subhead (4/5/25) also estimated “thousands.” It did so despite the fact that the piece led by reporting that “tens of thousands of people are gathering Saturday at rallies across the country”—itself a clear underestimate. The piece later explained that “more than 500,000 people have RSVP’d to attend” the protests, and that “protesters stretched as far as the eye could see along the National Mall and the crowd had been flowing toward the base of the Washington monument for hours.”
Given that there were some 1,400 separate protest events, it’s laughable to suggest that only “thousands” attended. Even if only 10 people showed up to each event, you’d have “tens of thousands”—but every event the paper reported on from small towns and cities (like Stuart, Florida) had at least several hundred if not thousands, while the DC and NYC events appeared to have at least 100,000 participants apiece (American Crisis, 4/8/25). Boston’s protest was reported locally to have involved “nearly 100,000” (CBS‘s WBZ, 4/6/25; NBC Boston, 4/7/25).
It would not be difficult for news organizations with resources like the national newspapers or major TV networks to produce credible estimates of crowd numbers at significant events. The fact that they don’t bother to do so reflects the scant importance these outlets place on the role of protests in the democratic process. Corporate media journalists are apt to regard protesters as akin to spectators rushing onto the field during a game, interfering with an activity best left to professionals.
Better reporting?
CNN.com (4/5/25; “updated” 4/6/25) edited this piece to change an initial “millions of people took part in protests” to a ridiculous “scores.”
CNN stood out among major corporate outlets for not underestimating the size and scope of the protests, with coverage of the protests in most of its shows over the weekend. The network repeatedly cited organizers’ estimates of at least 1,400 protest events across all 50 states, totaling “millions” of attendees (e.g., CNN This Morning, 4/6/25; CNN Inside Politics, 4/6/25). CNN correspondents in multiple US cities described the messages they heard and saw, and they also interviewed protesters on-air to let them speak for themselves.
CNN‘s online account (4/5/25) of the protests, however, originally reported that “millions of people took part in protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk across all 50 states and globally on Saturday,” but was stealth-edited on April 6 to ludicrously claim that “scores of people took part in protests.” We would be interested in hearing CNN‘s explanation for this self-evidently absurd alteration.
On CNN‘s Newsroom (4/6/25), as an indication of heightened interest in Trump opposition, senior data reporter Harry Enten pointed out that Googlesearches for the word “protests” were
up 1,200% versus a year ago…. We see that the percent in number of folks who are searching for protests, interested in going out in those protests is finally matching what we saw in January of 2017, if not exceeding it.
Axios (4/5/25) also reported organizers’ “millions” estimate, including their 500,000 RSVPs and their reports from the field that turnout was far exceeding those RSVPs. (For instance, they reported getting 2,000 RSVPs for Raleigh, NC, where they ultimately saw some 45,000 in attendance.)
Some local papers in the Gannett chain (which also owns USA Today) usefully offered readers information about the protests planned for their states before they took place (e.g., Columbus Dispatch, 4/2/25; Florida’s TCPalm.com, 4/5/25). These stories included why people were protesting, and the times and locations of every scheduled Hands Off! protest in their respective states.
Such coverage treats readers as citizens, and protesting as a basic part of a democratic system—not as an inconsequential sideshow, which is how it’s generally presented in corporate media.
“Resistance is alive and well in the United States.”
So declared the headline of a March 19 article on the nonprofit news site Waging Nonviolence. Authors Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam, political scientists at Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, outlined how—despite a common belief that grassroots public resistance against the depredations of the Trump Administration is lacking or lukewarm—protests are actually rising dramatically.
These demonstrations, the piece said, “may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but research shows they are far more numerous and frequent—while also shifting to more powerful forms of resistance.”
They note that while
the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025—held on January 18—saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since January 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.
The Crowd Counting Consortium, founded in 2017 to collect “publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States,” tracked more than 2,000 protests in February alone.
Chart: Waging Nonviolence
The acts of collective resistance documented by the CCC—as well as by other activism-tracking initiatives, such the “We the People Dissent”Substack—span every state. They focus on advocacy for diverse constituencies and issues under attack from the current administration, including public education, Medicaid and reproductive, immigrant, Palestinian, labor and LGBTQ rights.
Their common thread is opposition to Trump’s fascistic ideology and rapid rash of likely unconstitutional executive orders, such as freezing federal budget outlays approved by Congress, the mass firing of government workers and the dismantling of institutions by the “Department” of Government Efficiency by unelected “adviser” Elon Musk.
But if you relied on articles and broadcasts from the legacy national news media during early 2025, you wouldn’t know the extent of grassroots action prompted by this discontent. A FAIR examination of five major outlets found that coverage of anti-Trump/pro-democracy protests roughly overlapping CCC’s study timeframe (January 22 to February 26) was minimal, and downplayed the significance of this opposition, especially around the inauguration.
Mostly tepid coverage
FAIR examined reporting on three organized protest events occurring concurrently in Washington, DC, and across the US: The People’s March (January 18), the “50501” demonstrations in all state capitals (February 5) and the Presidents Day protests, sometimes dubbed “No Kings Day” (February 17). Using the Nexis news database and the outlets’ websites, we looked at the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, and at ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings—the top morning and evening national news programs on ABC and CBS—within four days of each of these dates. (NBC was not included in the study because its transcripts are no longer available on Nexis.)
Broadcast coverage was abysmal. None of the four network shows in our study ran any reports focused on any of the three protest events. ABC World News Tonight mentioned none of the events, and GMA referred to only one of them in passing. In their coverage of the January 18 protests, CBS Evening News and Mornings gave more coverage to speculation about violent protest than they did to actual (nonviolent) protest.
The newspapers had more coverage, but their stories tended to be relatively short, buried deep in the paper, or in the form of wire-service reprints. Longer pieces often downplayed the protests’ size and disparaged their significance. The Times and Post tended to focus on DC-based protests, whereas USA Today offered more thorough and accurate articles about the growing nationwide resistance movement.
The People’s March
The January 18 march, centered in Washington, DC, near Inauguration Day, was a reboot of the attendance record–setting 2017 Women’s March spearheaded by feminist nonprofits. The People’s March had a broadened focus on peaceful organizing around a range of progressive issues, and included solidarity actions in every state.
According to CCC data (available for download at the site), on January 18 alone, 352 protests, rallies, demonstrations or marches opposing Donald Trump and/or administration policy were recorded across the country. Though dispersed in a way the Women’s March was not, tens of thousands nonetheless participated in hundreds of acts of protest and civil disobedience around the country.
More than 200 additional on-the-street actions occurred on January 19–20, many linked to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but also including messages against Trump’s agenda, according to CCC data.
We found no mention of any of the People’s Marches on the ABC shows in our study, and no dedicated stories about the protests on the CBS shows we examined. In two segments focused on the incoming administration, CBS mentioned protests generically, only in passing, and focusing solely on those in the nation’s capital.
After noting that “today, thousands of people could be seen protesting the president-elect in Washington, DC,” reporter Jericka Duncan (CBS Evening News, 1/18/25) devoted more time to security measures around potential “violent protests”—a concern repeated in a January 20 segment on CBS Mornings (1/20/25).
The newspapers studied all covered the People’s Protests, but the Times and Post downplayed their significance. The Times (1/18/25) published “‘Angry and Frustrated’: Thousands Protest Trump Days Before His Inauguration,” a thousand-word story that captured the mood and nationwide extent of concern expressed by the events, but made a point of noting that the DC march “paled in comparison to the Women’s March.” It was buried on page A25.
The following day, the Times published a longer (1,600-word) piece on how “The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time,” based on interviews with middle-American activists. The article alleged that “the Democrats who mobilized against Donald J. Trump in 2017 feel differently about protesting his return,” by which they meant defeated and ambivalent. It asserted that “there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed ‘the resistance’ the last time [Trump] took office.”
There was also a 1,600-word Washington Memo (1/19/25) headlined “Defiance Is Out, Deference Is In: Trump Returns to a Different Washington”:
Unlike the last time President-elect Donald J. Trump took the oath of office eight years ago, the bristling tension and angry defiance have given way to accommodation and submission. The Resistance of 2017 has faded into the Resignation of 2025.
The Washington Post had two pieces. The predictive “How Resistance to Trump May Look Different in His Second Administration” (1/17/25) came in at around 1,800 words, while the paper gave coverage of the actual DC event, “People’s March Protests Trump” (1/19/25), only 1,400 words. Both were by Ellie Silverman, its dedicated activism and protest movements reporter.
Like the Times’ articles, the former piece was focused on dispirited activists and how the resistance supposedly ain’t what it used to be. It described a “feeling of resignation in the lead-up to Trump’s second administration [that] is a stark departure from 2017, when more than 1 million people took to the streets.” It added that “some demonstrators are sticking to the sidelines,” and warned that some experts “fear that whatever protests do emerge could be even more disruptive and potentially violent.”
The straightforward latter story was more nuanced, focused on interviews with protesters on the diverse issues that brought them there, who maintained that showing up was more important than rally size. However, it didn’t mention that the protest was part of a larger, nationwide mobilization.
USA Today‘s piece on the People’s March (“Thousands Travel to Washington for People’s March Ahead of Trump Inauguration,” 1/18/25), like those of the other papers, covered only the DC demonstration, and dwelt on its smaller-than-2017 size. But it also portrayed fired-up citizens who made a point of being there to take a stand, rather than trying to tell a story of, as the Times said, “accommodation and submission.”
The 50501 protests
The 50501 protests, short for “50 protests, 50 states, one day,” were the brainchild of grassroots activists on Reddit wanting to take “rapid response” political actions against Trump and Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government Trump and Musk seem to be following. Using mainly social media and the hashtags #BuildTheResistance and #50501, the organizers spurred others to organize and publicize demonstrations in all US state capitals on February 5. According to CCC data, some 159 “50501” or related protests occurred that day (exclusive of counter-protests), from Sacramento, Calif., to Augusta, Maine.
We found no coverage of the 50501 protests in the Washington Post, or on the CBS or ABC shows.
In its sole article, “Thousands Across the US Protest Trump Policies,” the New York Times (2/5/25) devoted only about 600 words to the nationwide rallies. Sara Ruberg’s story accurately portrayed them as “a grassroots effort to kick off a national movement,” quoting a Michigan state representative: “This was organized by people, for people, for the protection of all people…. There will be…more things for regular everyday Americans to plug into.” However, Ruberg depicted the decentralized, quickly organized efforts as something not to take too seriously:
Whether the protests will amount to a sustained anti-Trump movement is yet to be seen.
In the weeks following the election, Democrats were not able to come together under a single message as they did after the 2016 election, when Mr. Trump won the first time. Even the grassroots efforts that once organized large national marches and protests after Mr. Trump’s first inauguration have struggled to unite again.
The piece also said the events only occurred in “a dozen states”; CCC data confirms organizers’ claims that they spanned all 50 states, plus DC. An additional 1:20-minute video of protesters chanting appeared in the online version of this story, featuring passionate slogans like “Stand up, fight back,” “Stop the coup!” and “Impeach Trump” that belie the notion that activists have no uniting message.
At 2,500 words, USA Today‘s feature (2/5/25) on the 50501 demos, “‘People Are Feeling Galvanized’: Anti-Trump Protesters Rally in Cities Across US,” was by far the longest and most thorough of any in the study periods. Its lead set the protests in a broader context:
Groups opposed to actions by the Trump administration in recent weeks converged on cities Wednesday across the US to loudly register their discontent, days after widespread rallies and street marches against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Integrating reporting from DC and 10 other capitals and cities (Austin, Salem, Indianapolis, Harrisburg, Des Moines, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Palm Springs, Calif., and Greenville, S.C.), reporters John Bacon, Karissa Waddick and Jorge L. Ortiz discussed the major concerns of residents in each place, provided background on 50501 and Project 2025, and quoted marginalized people targeted by Trump, such as a trans woman and a refugee from Azerbaijan, along with supportive politicians and the AFL-CIO. The comments included captured the sense of seriousness and commitment of the rallies. It quoted 70-year-old Stewart Rabitz:
“I think a lot of people are now realizing that walking around with signs, people got to get their hands dirty.”… Asked whether he feared retribution, Rabitz said: “You can’t be afraid. I’m willing to be the first one. I’ll be the Tiananmen tank guy.”
The 50501 movement also spearheaded nationwide events, some dubbed “No Kings Day,” less than two weeks later, on February 17, to protest Trump’s undemocratic actions and monarchical leadership, coinciding with Presidents’ Day. The CCC tracked 207 such actions on February 17 (excluding a few counter-protests).
Once again, CBS and ABC had no reports focused on the protests. CBS gave them one sentence on CBS Mornings (2/18/25), which led with the controversy surrounding DOGE’s access to private information: “Protests called ‘No Kings on Presidents’ Day’ against Musk and President Trump’s actions were held across the country yesterday, including outside the US Capitol.” ABC (GMA, 2/18/25), too, briefly mentioned “protests popping up in cities across the country,” even including short clips of protest footage—but also used the demonstrations as a brief segue to discuss DOGE cuts and access to sensitive data.
New York Times coverage included one story (2/17/25), provocatively titled “Thousands Gather on Presidents’ Day to Call Trump a Tyrant.” It focused on the DC march, but did give a sense of the nationwide sweep of actions, noting that protestors framed themselves as patriots fighting tyranny. The piece acknowledged that while
Democratic leaders and operatives [are] worried about alienating voters in reacting hastily without reflecting first on why they lost in 2024. Many activists…have voiced frustration at the lack of a more aggressive stance.
The piece, however, was buried on page A18.
For its part, the Post devoted only one 500-word AP dispatch (2/17/25) to the events, “‘No Kings on Presidents Day’ Rings Out From Protests Against Trump and Musk.” But the subhead did note, “Protesters against President Donald Trump and his policies organized demonstrations in all 50 states for the second time in two weeks.”
USA Today published a photo gallery (2/17/25) and a 900-word story (2/17/25) about the Presidents’ Day protests, focused more on regional actions that “swept across the nation” than on DC. Providing important context, “‘Critical Moment in History’: Protests Across US Target Trump, Musk” (2/17/25) led with this:
Groups opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda and his top adviser Elon Musk converged on cities across the nation Monday to express outrage with slogans such as “Not My President’s Day” and “No King’s Day.”
The rallies, led by the 50501 Movement and other organizations, come less than two weeks after the last round of widespread rallies and street marches.
This broader perspective on the resistance demonstrations may be thanks to the middle-of-the-road paper’s less-insular focus: It covers all 50 states, serves a more diverse audience, and utilizes reporting from its partner papers across the country.
Another mass mobilization
On April 5, yet another grassroots, mass mobilization—organized around the taglines “Hands Off” and “People’s Veto”—is planned for the streets of DC and across all 50 states. Will the legacy media be there and give it the broad and contextualized coverage it deserves? Will they more proactively cover the increasingly localized demonstrations and other forms of political participation—or leave that task to the rapidly shrinking pool of local and regional news outlets? For if CCC’s data is accurate (and it may be an undercount), the nascent pro-democracy movement deserves its own dedicated beat.
This week on CounterSpin: If “some people believe it” were the criterion, our daily news would be full of respectful consideration of the Earth’s flatness, the relationship of intelligence to the bumps on your head, and how stepping on a crack might break your mother’s back. News media don’t, in fact, use “some people think it’s true” as the threshold for whether a notion gets talked about seriously, gets “balanced” alongside what “data suggest.” It’s about power.
Look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. When he was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune.
But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Timespiece has it, “unorthodox.”
Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that.
Also on the show: For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player.
That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesneyexplained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum…it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.”
The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg (3/24/25) complained “the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it”—an odd criticism for a journalist to make about government officials.
The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, are the de facto government in northwest Yemen. The group began as a religious movement among the Zaydis, an idiosyncratic branch of Shia Islam, before taking a political-military turn in the 2000s. Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been a powerful faction in the country’s civil war, fighting against the Republic of Yemen, the weak but Saudi-backed internationally recognized government. With the war on hold since a 2022 ceasefire agreement, the Houthis now control the capital city of Sanaa, and govern the majority of Yemen’s population.
Beginning on March 15, the US military began an operation that has killed dozens in Yemen and injured over a hundred, including women and children, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frankly acknowledged the leveling of a civilian building.
US planning for the operation was revealed in articles by the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg (3/24/25, 3/26/25), which disclosed that the journalist had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat that top administration officials were using to discuss bombing plans—an inclusion that was not noticed by any of the intended participants. This prompted a furor in establishment papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, centering on the Trump administration’s use of an insecure messaging app to discuss classified matters.
While leading newspapers were not wrong to skewer the Trump administration for the use of a commercial messaging app to communicate confidential information—which, it should be remembered, allows officials to illegally destroy records of their deliberations (New York Times, 3/27/25)—the focus on Washington palace intrigue over the bombing of women and children is a stark reminder of corporate media priorities.
‘It’s now collapsed’
The part of the Trump administration group chat where they discuss the actual bombing needed no comment, according to the New York Times (3/26/25).
Since news of the Signal leak broke, the Times has published at least three dozen stories and opinion pieces focusing on the scandal. One of those many pieces was an annotated transcript of the Signal chat (3/25/25). Most messages in the chat featured explanatory notes from journalists, some messages with multiple notes. One message from national security adviser Michael Waltz the Times chose not to annotate: “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
The “collapsed” building in question was bombed by the United States, killing at least 13 civilians, according to the Yemen Data Project. This is a war crime. While alternative media outlets have been quick to call these strikes out for what they are (e.g., Drop Site, 3/16/25; Truthout, 3/26/25; Democracy Now!, 3/26/25), the Times and the Washington Post chose not to go into questions of international law.
Amidst the dozens of stories on the Signal scandal, the Times published five stories focused on the strikes (3/15/25, 3/16/25, 3/19/25, 3/26/25, 3/27/25). None of these stories entertain the possibility of US strikes violating international law. Only one story (3/16/25) made mention of the phrase “war crime,” which was in a final paragraph quote from Hezbollah, with the group described by the Times as “another armed proxy for Iran in the region.”
The only mentions of children or “civilian” casualties were moderated by innuendo. The unfair convention of citing the “Hamas-run” health ministry—a formulation that deliberately downplays the death and destruction caused by US weaponry—has extended to Yemen, with both the Times (3/16/25, 3/19/25) and the Post (3/15/25) citing the “Houthi-run Health Ministry in Yemen” for casualty figures.
‘No credible reports’
The Washington Post‘s Missy Ryan (3/17/25) doesn’t question the Pentagon’s claim that there were “no credible reports of civilian deaths” after the attack on Yemen.
The Washington Post seemed similarly unable to bring international law into their reporting. The furthest the Post (3/15/25) was willing to go was relaying that the Houthis “claimed the strikes targeted residential areas and targeted civilians.” In the Post’s March 17 story on the US offensive, the only mention of civilian deaths was US Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich’s claim that “despite Houthi assertions, there had been no credible reports of civilian deaths in the ongoing US strikes.”
Even Ishaan Tharoor (Washington Post, 3/26/25), whose column on the Yemen strikes was both more humane and more geopolitically realistic than anything else published by the Post, chose not to bring in any mention of international law.
The fact is, unnecessarily bombing a civilian building, with civilians inside, is a war crime. A civilian building is any building not immediately being used for military purposes. Even if by some interpretation, a military officer’s girlfriend’s building could be construed as a military target, the attacker is responsible for ensuring that any civilian losses are not excessive compared to military gain (the “proportionality” rule), and ensuring that “all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.”
In this case, the “military” nature of the target is dubious at best. Further, the Houthis had not attacked US ships since December, before Trump’s inauguration (Responsible Statecraft, 3/21/25). When the Houthis attempted to respond to the recent airstrikes, a US military officer mocked the Houthis’ “level of incompetence,” claiming their retaliatory missile fire “missed by a hundred miles” (New York Times, 3/19/25). In other words, Houthi missiles are not such an imminent threat that killing over a dozen Yemeni civilians might be “proportional” to the military gain of killing their top missileer.
Finally, “all feasible precautions” were not taken to protect civilian life. Based on Waltz’s message, the military was tracking this officer, and chose to kill him only once he entered a building with civilians inside.
As the Times itself (1/16/23) has reported, “it is considered a war crime to deliberately or recklessly attack civilian populations.” The Washington Post editorial board (7/2/23) agreed, citing “large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure” and “methodical violence against…noncombatants” as violations of international law. But these confident media assertions are in reference to Russia, an official enemy of the United States.
The strike against the “missile guy” is just one example of the indiscriminate bombing with which the US punishes Yemen. This recent offensive by the United States has destroyed plenty of residences, and airstrikes have hit a Saada cancer hospital twice (Drop Site, 3/16/25; Cradle, 3/26/25).
‘A more aggressive campaign’
After the US bombs an apartment building, killing more than a dozen civilians, the New York Times (3/16/25) turns to sources who declare that a “more aggressive” approach is needed.
Houthi-controlled Yemen sits on one side of the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa that is a choke point for shipping between Asia and Europe. The Houthis announced in October 2023 that in opposition to the war on Gaza, they would use their strategic position to attack ships “linked to Israel” (Al Jazeera, 12/19/23). The Houthis have succeeded in disrupting Red Sea trade to the point that Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, the Port of Eilat, was forced to declare bankruptcy (Middle East Monitor, 7/19/24). As revealed by the Signal chat leak, the main motivation for the new air campaign on Yemen was to “send a message” and reopen the shipping lanes (New York Times, 3/25/25).
As US bombs fell on Yemen, the New York Times indulged in a variety of foreign policy reporting cliches. A day after the strikes began, the Times (3/16/25) took a survey of what should be done about the supposed threat the Houthis posed in the Middle East:
Some military analysts and former American commanders said on Sunday that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.
The only voices the Times offered as a counterpoint were spokesmen for Iran’s foreign ministry, Russia’s foreign ministry and Hezbollah. When the only people condemning the air campaign are America’s worst enemies, it’s not hard for the reader to see who they’re supposed to side with.
The fact is, the Houthis have withstood a decade of strikes by Saudi Arabia and the United States with no signs of faltering. Indeed, as Jennifer Kavanagh (Responsible Statecraft, 3/17/25) has pointed out, the Houthis’ “willingness to take on American attacks lend them credibility and win them popular support.” In a story whose subheadline mentions a claim that children were killed, the Times is irresponsible to present the only solution as more bombs, more aggression, more killing.
‘Iranian-backed’
The US has long been implicated in a string of atrocities in Yemen (Guardian, 8/19/18).
In each of their five stories on the strikes, the New York Times referred to the “Iran-backed” or “Iranian-backed” Houthis, playing into the falsenotion that the Houthis are little more than Iran’s lapdogs in the Arabian Peninsula. Even the Washington Post, to their credit, was able to find a distinction between an ally of Iran and a proxy (e.g. 3/15/25, 3/27/25).
The Times also had a case of amnesia over the circumstances of Yemen’s protracted civil war and famine. Two stories (3/15/25, 3/27/25) mentioned the Houthi victory over a “Saudi-led coalition,” culminating in a 2022 truce, still holding tenuously. What was left unsaid was the US role in that conflict.
During the Yemeni civil war, the United States provided Saudi Arabia with plenty of firepower and logistical support to prosecute their brutal military intervention. The Department of Defense gave over $50 billion in military aid to Saudi Arabia and the UAE between 2015 and 2021 (Responsible Statecraft, 3/28/23). Despite campaign promises to the contrary, the Saudi blockade and accompanying humanitarian crisis were intact over two years into President Biden’s term of office.
Infamous airstrikes using US-made weapons include a wedding bombing that killed 21, including 11 children, a school bus bombing that killed 40 elementary school-aged boys along with 11 adults, and a market bombing that killed 107 people, including 25 children, just to name a few (CNN, 9/18; Guardian, 8/19/18; Human Rights Watch, 4/7/16). The continuous provision of weapons, training and logistical support amounted to complicity in war crimes (Human Rights Watch, 4/7/22).
Deadly effects
The Yemen where tens of thousands of children died as a result of a US-backed blockade (New York Times, 11/21/18) seems like a different country than the one discussed in a bumbling group chat.
The civil war in Yemen, which began in late 2014, has killed hundreds of thousands. From 2015–22, Saudi-led, US-backed airstrikes killed nearly 9,000 civilians, including over 1,400 children.
More deadly than the bombs and other weapons of war are the indirect effects of the war, namely disease and famine. A 2021 UN report estimated that 60% of the 377,000 deaths in the Yemeni civil war came from indirect causes (France24, 11/23/21). By 2018, Save the Children reported that by a “conservative estimate,” 85,000 children had died from hunger (New York Times, 11/21/18). Today, nearly 40% of the Yemeni population are undernourished, and nearly half of children under five are malnourished.
This ongoing famine started during the war, and has been enforced by a Saudi blockade. While the 2022 truce allowed a trickle of international shipping to Houthi-controlled Yemen, cuts in humanitarian aid have kept Yemenis in precarity (The Nation, 7/27/23).
Since the Yemeni civil war began, not enough attention has been paid to the compounding crises in the region: the civil war itself, the accompanying famine and the Biden administration’s own ill-advised bombing campaign. As juicy as one more Trump administration blunder might be, newsrooms should not lose track of the fact that this military offensive, just beginning, is already stained by violations of international law.
Janine Jackson interviewed Mondoweiss‘s Michael Arria about Gaza “Power & Pushback” for the March 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Listeners may have heard about the violent attack by Israeli settlers on Hamdan Ballal, who had recently won an Academy Award for the documentary No Other Land. He has since been released from Israeli detention, but that doesn’t erase or obscure the fact that he was assaulted, arrested and spirited away in an overt attack on free expression and truth telling.
As his co-director told AP: “We came back from the Oscars, and every day…there is an attack on us. This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like punishment.”
Listeners may not have heard of all the non-Oscar-winning people who have been swept off the street and disappeared for voicing any concern about the Palestinian people, who are victims of what the majority of the world outside these borders are calling genocide.
Into the current context comes “Power and Pushback,” a new feature at Mondoweiss written by our guest. Michael Arria is Mondoweiss‘s US correspondent, and author of the book Medium Blue:The Politics of MSNBC. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Michael Arria.
JJ: Mondoweiss has been reporting, calling attention to, critiquing the occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide of Palestinians, and the US role there, and US news media’s distorted narrative for some time now, and yet there are still so many fronts to this fight. There is still so much that calls for resistance that you saw a place for a new intervention, this new focused feature. Tell us what you’re trying to do with “Power and Pushback.”
MA: I think the idea behind “Power and Pushback” is we’re in a situation, as you described, where there’s so much happening, and this can often be a challenge, I think, for any media, let alone independent media, to keep up with. We have a very small staff; obviously we don’t have the capacity that mainstream outlets do. And with so much happening on the domestic front, especially over the last few weeks, but really dating back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, when we saw the student protests begin, I think there was a need to develop another place to catch stuff before it fell through the cracks, so to speak.
So the idea behind “Power and Pushback” is to put a focus on repression that we’ve seen throughout the United States targeting the US Palestine movement, but also to talk about some of these local fights and local battles that not just students, but people in their communities or in their workplaces, are waging on behalf of Palestine.
And the idea is to really center that and focus on that, and just put a spotlight on these fights, and show people that they’re not alone, that people are fighting. There’s victories throughout certain states.
We didn’t want it to be just, like, this is the suppression report, and this is all terrible things that are being done. We wanted it to have both elements, which is the idea behind the title. We want to cover the power centers; we want to cover lawmakers pushing draconian policies, and pro-Israel groups moving to target Palestine protesters. And we wanted to cover, obviously, these terrible unconstitutional moves by the Trump administration. But we also wanted to show the resistance that’s developing domestically against those policies, and the people who are pushing for that.
JJ: It seems so important on many levels. First of all, if folks think there’s just no pushback or resistance happening, that shapes their understanding of what’s going on. But also, one person speaking out is easier to suppress, and they need to be backed and supported by a community, and by other people. So it’s not just, “Here’s a cool story about somebody resisting this.” It seems to me to give meaningful support to the individuals who are putting themselves on the line.
Michael Arria: “It’s not just one person or two people, it’s thousands of people that oppose these policies, and are trying to fight back.”
MA: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I think something we should keep in mind—one of the objectives of these kind of moves that we’ve seen in recent weeks from the Trump administration is to obviously crack down on dissent. And part of that is to make people fearful about fighting back, for fear that they might be scooped up by ICE if they’re not a citizen, or their student organization might be suspended from the given college or university.
Really, throughout American history, whenever we’ve seen these kinds of campaigns, they purposely have this chilling effect on the population, and that’s kind of the idea. So as you say, we’re kind of also developing the newsletter with this in mind to show people that it’s not just one person or two people, it’s thousands of people that oppose these policies, and are trying to fight back in the face of this, despite these attempts by lawmakers and pro-Israel groups to really chill the environment, and make people skeptical about standing up and voicing support for Gaza.
JJ: Particularly at a time when, it used to be, “Well, write your congressperson, if you’re upset about something.” And we see the frustration with that avenue. And lots of folks will say, “Well, go out in the street; protest.” And so then you have to ask, OK, what’s the follow-up to that when people do protest and they are harmed for that? You can’t simply say, “We all ought to be out in the street,” and then not care about what happens to people who go out in the street, is my feeling.
MA: Absolutely true, and to your point, I think this time around with Trump, we have seen a slightly different approach from the liberal establishment. I think they’ve been much more willing to go along with his plans, and much more complicit. We see the anger towards politicians like Chuck Schumer for approving the Trump budget.
But I think that focusing on the liberal establishment and their reaction tends to get people maybe to look at the situation the wrong way. I think there actually has been a lot of protest. The numbers indicate there’s been consistent protest.
And there’s also been a lot of attempts to challenge the Trump administration legally. So Just Security runs the tracker. This is just in my head, I just wrote a piece where I referenced it, but I think there’s 146 current lawsuits or legal challenges attempting to stop the Trump administration, when it comes to many issues across the country. But more than a few of those lawsuits are connected to our issue, the issue of Israel/Palestine and student protest.
So like you say, people want to do something that they feel goes beyond just sending a letter, just calling and leaving a message for their congressperson. Especially because, it’s worth pointing out, what we’ve seen for the last three weeks has really been a culmination of a push that we’ve seen for years, in terms of stifling pro-Palestine sentiment, and in terms of stiflingcriticism of Israel. And that’s really been a bipartisan project. Even though Trump is amplifying it now and increasing it and has taken it to these draconian levels, we’ve really seen both sides of the aisle embrace some of these policies that he is currently amplifying.
I was, along with many, struck by the statement of Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb to students, after they’d been told to scrub their social media, to essentially thought-cleanse evidence of concern for Palestinians, or protest against US actions. And this is in the context of the ICE arrest and whisking away of Mahmoud Khalil. And Cobb said, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.” He’s speaking to future journalists. What is the lesson there? What else might he have said?
MA: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. He said that in response to another professor making a comment, basically telling students not to post about the Middle East conflict on their social media page. I think we’re really at an interesting and scary time when we look at universities and colleges in this country, just the overall state of higher education. I think that, just like I was talking about before, how the stifling of pro-Palestine sentiment is not a new issue. It’s really been a culmination of something that’s been happening for years.
We can say the same things about our university system, right? Over the last 40 years, 50 years maybe even, we’ve seen this real push to neoliberal policies across higher education, to move to a donor model, as opposed to a model where these schools are set up and live up to the grandiose words of their mission statements, this idea that they’re these places that kids can go and learn about freedom of speech and have the freedom of inquiry, and learn about how society works and how the world works.
After October 7, we saw some big-time pro-Israel donors threaten to take away money to schools, or actually do it. I think the schools are really between a rock and a hard place, because they don’t want to see their endowments threatened. And in recent decades, we’ve seen that that is the important thing. An institution like Columbia, as a private university, they’re not really beholden to the First Amendment, technically, in the way that other places throughout the country are.
And, first of all, we should say the Trump administration first canceled about $400 million worth of contracts and grants to the school, for what it said was their inability to crack down on antisemitism. I mean, we know that they’re referring to the fact that there were pro-Palestine protests on campus. It had very little to do with antisemitism. We know that they’re being targeted because they were the first school to erect a Gaza encampment last spring, which kicked off a wave of protests throughout the United States, obviously across college campuses. We know why they’re being targeted.
But I think the very scary thing here is they withheld that money, and then they sent Columbia a letter detailing things that Columbia could do in order for them to revisit that issue, essentially implying that maybe you could get the $400 million if you did the following things. And those things include instituting a mask ban, suspending a number of students who were connected to an occupation of Hamilton Hall on campus last spring. They wanted new protocol in terms of disciplinary actions. They wanted someone to oversee the Middle East Studies Department, among other things.
And almost immediately, Columbia complied to all these demands. They’ve said publicly that they were actually thinking about doing some of this stuff before Trump had asked them. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
But that’s a huge part of this story. We’ve seen the universities in this country really cower and just respond to the Trump administration, and do pretty much everything they’ve asked for in this regard. And shortly before Mahmoud Khalil was detained on March 8 by plainclothes ICE agents, despite the fact he’s a permanent resident with a Green Card, Columbia had actually changed their protocol when it came to its status as a sanctuary campus.
Sanctuary campus is essentially the same as a sanctuary state. They had previously said that they wouldn’t comply or assist ICE if they were on campus. And days before Khalil was detained by ICE agents, they sent an email out to faculty and students and staff saying, “We’ve modified these policies. There are some situations where we’re going to let ICE on campus without a warrant in certain circumstances.”
So that’s a huge part of the story here. I just think that the university’s going along and being complicit in this entire ordeal. And we’ve seen a lot of resistance from faculty and Columbia students, and students across the country, who are really protesting not just these policies that we’ve seen from Trump and lawmakers, but also the complicity of their schools.
JJ: Gosh, there’s so much to say and to respond to. But along with, in particular, the Columbia protest, you see the erasure of Jewish people, of antisemitism being used as a cover to punish and penalize a community that is composed, in large part, by Jewish people who are protesting the actions of the state of Israel. And Trump, of course, being Trump, just says, “If Chuck Schumer opposes my policy, he’s a Palestinian.” He’s in his own world, but we are seeing other institutions essentially say, “Jewish people, you’re not Jewish if you are critical of Israel.” That seems like another shadow horror that is happening, and that media are playing a role in.
MA: It’s a very dark irony. I mean, not only have there been vast protests by Jewish activists and Jewish students; we saw Trump Tower occupied in the wake of Khalil’s arrest. The fact that the Trump administration is citing antisemitism as their reason for detaining these people, essentially…
I think when Khalil was first detained, there was maybe a belief that the Trump administration was going to rely on some War on Terror policy, or maybe something from Bill Clinton’s anti-terrorism law from 1995. But what we saw is that they’re actually relying on an immigration bill from 1952, which was introduced at the height of the Red Scare.
And that bill was introduced and wielded as a way to target, actually, survivors of the Holocaust, Jewish refugees in the United States, who conservative lawmakers had targeted because they accused them of being Soviet agents. So the irony here is that we see this law that was used to target Jewish people in the United States now used allegedly to protect them.
And it is another dark irony, I think, that it’s coming from this administration of all administrations. As you said, Trump casually will criticize Chuck Schumer by claiming he’s not Jewish, calling him a “Palestinian.” Trump has repeatedly criticized Jewish people more broadly for not voting for him, questioning whether Jewish voters are even Jewish, because he did all this stuff for Israel. Inherent there is the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, which in itself I think is antisemitic.
But it goes without saying that you don’t have to travel very far down Trumpland to start seeing examples of people that have been accused of antisemitism in his administration. We’re dealing with multiple people, either directly in his administration or in that broader world, who have literally given Nazi salutes in recent weeks.
So there is a real, like I said, irony to this whole situation that’s very disturbing, where you have this administration, which has a clearly anti-immigrant, bigoted, history of antisemitism in many areas, and they are detaining people for defending Gaza, for fighting against genocide; and claiming that they’re doing it because they’re antisemitic, and that antisemitism somehow threatens American foreign policy interests. So we’re really in a dark, upside-down time, I think, and it’s very terrifying.
JJ: Looking at what we know about media, we know that years from now, they will tell us, “Remember when we were all out in the streets protesting Israeli genocide in Gaza.” We know that they will say that “Martin Luther King would’ve said….” The powers that be, including in corporate news media, will co-opt the actions of today. Columbia University will have a photo montage about the protesters, and how they allowed protests to happen.
I mean, we know how history can be rewritten in real time by news media. It’s so frustrating to look at it today, and know the way that these folks are going to try to claim ownership of protest later.
That’s not a question, it’s just a rant. We can see it. We can see the way that they will talk about, “Oh, the Civil Rights Movement. That was good protest. This is bad protest,” when in real time, they hated the Civil Rights Movement.
MA: It’s very true. And these images and videos people probably have seen yesterday, a tremendously disturbing video coming out of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk, who’s a 30-year-old Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts, was detained, much like Khalil, snatched up on the street by undercover ICE agents wearing masks, where the police took her phone away from her. And it’s not hyperbole to say these people are being disappeared in broad daylight.
And to your point, I think people love to look back on history and convince themselves they would’ve been on the right side. They like to watch movies about historical time periods, and think that they would’ve been siding with the right side. But I think the way that people are reacting to this now, if they are supporting it or ignoring it, I think it’s pretty clear what side of history they would’ve been on if they had lived through something like the Holocaust, or like the Civil Rights Movement.
And also to your point, there is no kind of accountability for the media whatsoever, where—this is just an aside—but in the last couple of days we’ve seen this big controversy over the Signal chat, obviously, where the bombing of Yemen was revealed to a reporter.
That reporter is Jeffrey Goldberg, a former IDF soldier who has contacts throughout prominent politicians in the United States. But he’s also somebody who helped push a fabricated story about Iraq’s alleged connection to Al Qaeda, which, over 20 years ago, helped pave the way for the Iraq War. And the media is just filled with reporters like that, who have faced no accountability, or have actually moved up in their careers, and have more power now than they did 20, 23 years ago.
So it just speaks to your point, what will things look like a couple of decades from now? I think all the people who are maybe ignoring this or cheering it on, or not responding to it in any serious way, will probably not have to face any type of consequences. And to your point, they’ll also be controlling the narrative in terms of how this period gets remembered.
JJ: You can always fail upward in news media.
I’ll just ask you, finally, for any thoughts about “Power & Pushback,” what you hope folks will take from it, what you hope to uplift, any final thoughts on this intervention that you’re spearheading?
MA: I would encourage people, if they’re interested in this subject, to go on our site where they can subscribe to “Power & Pushback.” We’re really hoping, beyond this being a way to highlight the fights that I’m talking about, that it also opens up a dialogue, that people feel if they’re working in their community in terms of something, or they see something where free speech is being stifled, that they can reach out to us, and we can potentially shine a light on it and cover it.
Sometimes this stuff doesn’t happen where it’s a lot of news cameras. Sometimes it’s not a thousand people. Sometimes it’s just as simple as somebody being told they can’t wear a certain pin to work, or their website faces some sort of crackdown, or their student group at a small college is suddenly suspended. So we really are focused on covering this big-picture Trump stuff, and this big-picture higher education stuff. But we really hope that it also becomes a forum for these smaller-scale battles, because I think these are really going to add up.
And polling shows us that things have really shifted, Israel’s brand has really diminished over the past decade, particularly among progressives and Democratic voters, even if party leaders and Democratic lawmakers haven’t caught up to that. So I think, in some capacity, the momentum is on the side of the people who are protesting on behalf of Palestine, even though when you look at the media, it seems to be the opposite.
I think that a lot of these draconian measures are obviously a response to those successes. We’ve seen this crackdown on the BDS movement. We’ve seen this push to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates some criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
So I really think, insofar as Trump represents a backlash politics, and he does in many capacities, it’s also a backlash to the advances the Palestine movement in the United States has made over the last few years.
So like I said, in addition to covering the repression and suppression, we really want it to be a place that takes a close look at that progress, and looks at this in a wider way, where people can turn and you can talk to us about that.
So that’s what we’re hoping. I encourage people to check out our site where they can read about this stuff pretty consistently, but also sign up for our newsletter so they can get that information.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Michael Arria. He is US correspondent at Mondoweiss—that’s Mondoweiss.net—and author of their new feature “Power and Pushback.” Michael Arria, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Sen. Dick Durbin (Verge, 3/21/25): “I hope that for the sake of our nation’s kids, Congress finally acts.”
In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.
According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.
Section 230 grants platforms the ability to moderate without shouldering legal liability, a power that has historically had the effect of encouraging judicious content management (Techdirt, 6/23/20). Additionally, it indemnifies ordinary internet users against most civil suits for actions like forwarding email, sharing photos or videos, or hosting online reviews.
Dissolving the provision would reassign legal responsibility to websites and third parties, empowering a Trump-helmed federal government to force online platforms to stifle, or promote, certain speech. While the ostensible purpose of the repeal, according to Durbin, is to “protect kids online,” it’s far more likely to give the Trump White House carte blanche to advance its ultra-reactionary political agenda.
More power for MAGA
Mike Masnick (Techdirt, 3/21/25): “These senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does—or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve.”
The effort to repeal Section 230 isn’t the first of its kind. Lawmakers, namely Republicans Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former Florida senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been making attempts to restrict or remove 230 for years, sometimes with explicitly censorial aims. But with a White House so hostile to dissent as to target and abductanti-genocide activists (FAIR.org, 3/28/25; Zeteo, 3/29/25), abusing immigration law and violating constitutional rights in the process, the timing of the latest bill—complete with Democratic backing—is particularly alarming.
To imagine what could become of a Section 230 repeal under the Trump administration, consider an example from July 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic remained severe enough to be classified as a public-health emergency. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)—now a co-sponsor of Durbin and Graham’s 2025 bill—introduced an amendment to 230 that would authorize the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation.” The label would require websites to remove the content in question.
News sources heralded the bill as a way to stem the “proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health-related claims on their sites” (NPR, 7/22/21) and to “fight bogus medical claims online” (Politico, 7/22/21). While potentially true at the time, Klobuchar’s bill would now, by most indications, have the opposite effect. As Mike Masnick of Techdirt (3/21/25) explained:
Today’s Health & Human Services secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet.
‘Save the Children’
ACLU (6/27/22): The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking. Instead, it has chilled speech, shut down online spaces, and made sex work more dangerous.”
Since Klobuchar’s bill, Congress has drafted multiple pieces of bipartisan child “safety” legislation resembling Durbin and Graham’s bill, offering another glimpse into the perils of a Trump-era repeal.
Consider 2023’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which the New York Times (2/17/22) welcomed as “sweeping legislation” that would “require online platforms to refrain from promoting harmful behavior.” KOSA enjoys robust bipartisan support, with three dozen Republican co-sponsors and nearly as many Democrats, as well as an endorsement from Joe Biden.
Though KOSA doesn’t expressly call for the removal of 230, it would effectively create a carve-out that could easily be weaponized. MAGA-boosting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a lead sponsor, insinuated in 2023 that KOSA could be used to “protect” children “from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence” on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram (Techdirt, 9/6/23). In other words, lawmakers could invoke KOSA to throttle or eliminate content related to trans advocacy, should they deem it “harmful” to children.
KOSA has drawn criticism from more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU and numerous LGBTQ groups, who fear that the bill masquerades as a child-safeguarding initiative while facilitating far-right censorship (CounterSpin, 6/9/23). This comes as little surprise, considering the decades-long history of “Save the Children” rhetoric as an anti-LGBTQ bludgeon, as well as the fact that these campaigns have been shown to harm children rather than protect them.
Some outlets have rightfully included the bill’s opponents in their reportage (AP, 7/31/24), even if only to characterize it as “divisive” and “controversial” (NBC News, 7/31/24). Others, however, have expressed more confidence in the legislation. The New York Times (2/1/24), for instance, described KOSA as a means to “safeguard the internet’s youngest users.” Neither Blackburn’s publicly-broadcast intentions nor the protests against the bill seemed to capture the paper’s attention.
Instead, the Times went on to cite the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a 2018 law that amended Section 230, in part to allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites and online platforms, as a regulatory success. What the Times didn’t note is that, according to the ACLU, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which is included in SESTA, “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking,” and could be interpreted by courts as justification to “censor more online speech—especially materials about sex, youth health, LGBTQ identity and other important concerns.”
False anti-corporate appeals
A bipartisan pair of lawmakers argue in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/24) that repealing Section 230 would mean tech companies couldn’t “manipulate and profit from Americans’ free-speech protections”—which is true only in the sense that platforms would be forced to assume that their users do not have free-speech protections.
Protecting kids isn’t the only promise made by 230 repeal proponents. In a statement made earlier this year, Durbin vowed to “make the tech industry legally accountable for the damage they cause.” It’s a popular refrain for government officials. The Senate Judiciary Democrats pledged to “remove Big Tech’s legal immunity,” and Trump himself has called 230 a “liability shielding gift from the US to ‘Big Tech’”—a point echoed by one of his many acolytes, Josh Hawley.
And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/24) headlined “Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand,” former Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Democrat, argued:
We must act because Big Tech is profiting from children, developing algorithms that push harmful content on to our kids’ feeds and refusing to strengthen their platforms’ protections against predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies.
These soft anti-corporate appeals might resonate with an audience who believes Big Tech wields too much power and influence. But there’s no guarantee that dismantling Section 230 would rein in Big Tech.
In fact, Section 230 actually confers an advantage upon the largest tech companies—which at least one of them has recognized. In 2021, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proposed reforms to 230 that would increase and intensify legal requirements for content moderation (NBC News, 3/24/21). The apparent logic: monopolistic giants like Facebook and Google can more easily fund expensive content-moderation systems and legal battles than can smaller platforms, lending the major players far more long-term viability.
But regardless of Meta’s machinations, the fundamental problem would remain: Democrats have embraced the MAGA vision for online governance, creating the conditions not for a safer internet, but a more dangerous one.
Surveillance footage of Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk being taken away by Homeland Security agents (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/27/25).
The journalism world has been reeling from news that a BBC correspondent was deported from Turkey, after he was “covering the antigovernment protests in the country” and was “detained and labeled ‘a threat to public order’” (New York Times, 3/27/25). Turkey has an abysmal reputation for press freedom (CPJ, 2/13/24; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, 10/5/23), placing 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index, so as distressing as this news is, it’s in character for a country many think of as illiberal and authoritarian (Guardian, 6/9/13; HRW, 1/29/15). Journalists have been arrested in the latest unrest in Turkey (AP, 3/24/25).
Meanwhile, a Turkish citizen is going through a similar kind of hell for expressing political ideas a government dislikes. Except in her case, the government doing the repression isn’t Turkey, it’s the United States. In chilling video footage (New York Times, 3/26/25) obtained by several news outlets, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University outside of Boston, can be seen being abducted by plainclothes agents.
‘Relishes the killing of Americans’
“It looked like a kidnapping,” software engineer Michael Mathis, whose camera recorded Ozturk’s abduction, told AP (3/26/25). “They approach her and start grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”
Her crime was reportedly being part of recent student protests against the genocide in Gaza. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson (AP, 3/26/25) declared:
DHS and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans…. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.
The group StopAntisemitism bragged about the arrest on X (3/26/25), saying Ozturk led “pro-Hamas, violent antisemitic and anti-American events” during her time at Tufts, which has led her to deportation proceedings. The group snarkily added, “Shalom, Rumeysa.” (“Shalom” can mean peace, hello or goodbye in Hebrew.)
Ozturk is now part of a growing list of foreign students who have been abducted by secret police and are facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine speech, which the government is labeling support of Hamas, which is designated by the US as a terrorist group (FAIR.org, 3/19/25). As I recently said on the Santita Jackson Show (3/27/25), reporting these things as “arrests” by federal agents—rather than abductions by secret police—understates the authoritarian moment Americans are witnessing. (DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar treated “supporting Hamas” as synonymous with “pro-Palestinian activity” in an interview with NPR—3/13/25.)
‘Fundamentally at odds with our values’
The op-ed (Tufts Daily, 3/26/24) that may get Rumeysa Ozturk deported.
Ozturk, however, might be the first of the bunch to be targeted specifically for engaging in journalism deemed offensive by the state. Many of the reports of her arrest (e.g., New York Times, 3/26/25; CNN, 3/27/25; Forbes, 3/27/25) cite that she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily (3/26/24) calling on the university administration to accept Tufts Community Union Senate resolutions “demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” The op-ed also “affirm[s] the equal dignity and humanity of all people.”
If this is truly a part of the government’s rationale for targeting Ozturk, then we as the American press have to assume that the US law enforcement regime will consider any article in a newspaper that advocates for Palestinian rights or harshly criticizes Israel as some kind of suspicious or unacceptable speech.
Said Seth Stern, director of advocacy of Freedom of the Press Foundation (3/26/25):
If reports that Ozturk’s arrest was over an op-ed are accurate, it is absolutely appalling. No one would have ever believed, even during President Donald Trump’s first term, that masked federal agents would abduct students from American universities for criticizing US allies in student newspapers. Anyone with any regard whatsoever for the Constitution should recognize how fundamentally at odds this is with our values and should be deeply repulsed as an American, regardless of political leanings. Canary Mission is aptly named—it may serve as the canary in the coal mine for the First Amendment.
The Canary Mission named by Stern is a pro-Israel group that operates as a doxxing operation against pro-Palestine campus activists (The Nation, 12/22/23). The FPF said of Ozturk, “The sole ‘offense’ that Canary Mission flagged was an op-ed Ozturk cowrote criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.”
A crime against journalism
Donald Trump (CNN, 3/14/25): “I believe that CNN and MSDNC [sic], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.”
Of course, the government has now used its authority to strip a lawful resident of her visa, putting her in the opaque gulag system of the US immigration system. That has a terrible chilling effect on any legal resident in the US who might make a living putting pen to paper. Their next article could get them shipped home at a moment’s notice without legal recourse.
That is inhumane treatment of the rights of legal residents, but it is also a crime against journalism. How will this motivation be used against writers who are citizens, natural-born and otherwise? Will outlets that publish pieces like the one in Tufts Daily be harassed in other ways? (One should not assume that when Trump at the Justice Department accused major news outlets of “illegal” reporting that he meant it as a figure of speech—CNN, 3/14/25.)
FAIR (11/14/24, 12/16/24, 2/26/25) has been among the many groups who have warned that a second Trump administration could see a severe attack against the free press and free speech generally. Ozturk’s arrest is a warning that the Trump administration takes all levels of speech and journalism seriously, and will do whatever they can to terrorize the public into keeping quiet.
This week on CounterSpin: Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar among others reminds, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat, but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.”
We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted, but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: Hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.
The genocide of Palestinians is a human rights emergency, and also a journalism emergency. US reporters who don’t treat it as such are showing their allegiance to something other than journalism. A key part of their disservice is their ignoring, obscuring, marginalizing, demeaning and endangering the many people who are standing up and speaking out. Pretending protest isn’t happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it’s telling lies about who we are and what we can do. We build action by telling the stories powerful media don’t want told.
We’ll talk about that with reporter Michael Arria, US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.”
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia, and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
“Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).
After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).
That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.
For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”
Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).
This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).
The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.
Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion” (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).
Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).
Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.
Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”
Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”
At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.
Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”
In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.
Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).
After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics,2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.
No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.
The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.
One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.
Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.
Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.
Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.
Robert W. McChesney was a leading voice and a precious colleague in the battle for a more democratic media system, and a more democratic society. Bob passed away on Tuesday, March 24, at the age of 72. No one did more to analyze the negative and censorial impacts of our media and information systems being controlled by giant, amoral corporations.
Bob was a scholar—the Gutgsell endowed professor of communications at University of Illinois—and a prolific author. Each and every book taught us more about corporate control of information. (I helped edit some of his works.)
Particularly enlightening was his 2014 book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy—in which McChesney explained in step-by-step detail how the internet that held so much promise for journalism and democracy was being strangled by corporate greed, and by government policy that put greed in the driver’s seat.
That was a key point for Bob in all his work: He detested the easy phrase “media deregulation,” when in fact government policy was actively and heavily regulating the media system (and so many other systems) toward corporate control.
Robert McChesney speaking at the Berkeley School of Journalism (CC photo: Steve Rhodes).
For media activists like those of us at FAIR—whose board McChesney has served on for many years—it was a revelation to read his pioneering 1993 book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935. It examined the broad-based movement in the 1920s and ’30s that sought to democratize radio, which was then in the hands of commercial hucksters and snake-oil salesmen.
From radio to the internet, a reading of his body of work offers a grand and inglorious tour of media history, and how we got to the horrific era of disinfotainment we’re in today.
Bob McChesney was not just a scholar. He was an activist. He co-founded the media reform group Free Press, with his close friend and frequent co-author John Nichols. Bob told me how glad he was to go door to door canvassing for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. (Bernie wrote the intro to one of McChesney and Nichols’ books.)
Bob was a proud socialist, and a proud journalist—and he saw no conflict between the two. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, a renowned publication covering the music scene in Seattle. For years, while he taught classes, he hosted an excellent Illinois public radio show, Media Matters.
In 2011, he and Victor Pickard edited the book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done. One of Bob’s favorite proposals to begin to address the problem of US media (developed with economist Dean Baker) was to provide any willing taxpayer a voucher, so they could steer $200 or so of their tax money to the nonprofit news outlet of their choosing, possibly injecting billions of non-corporate dollars into journalism.
Bob was a beloved figure in the media reform/media activist movement. We need more scholar/activists like him today. He will be sorely missed.
Hossam Shabat (Al Jazeera, 3/24/25): ““If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces.”
The Israeli military killed Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist and correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, on Monday, March 24. The deadly targeting of Shabat’s vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip was in fact Israel’s second journalist assassination for the day; hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.
And yet it was all in a day’s work for Israel, which according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has now killed at least 170 Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, when Israel’s armed forces kicked off an all-out genocide in the besieged enclave. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the number of fatalities is actually 208.
No doubt many journalists would be expected to perish in an onslaught as indiscriminate and massive as Israel’s in Gaza, where in February the death toll for the past 16 months was raised to nearly 62,000 to account for the thousands of Palestinians presumed to be dead beneath the rubble. Shockingly, that’s one out of every 35 Gaza residents—but for Gaza journalists, the International Federation of Journalists estimates that Israel has killed one out of every ten.
Meanwhile, in the face of such egregious assaults on the press, US media remain shamefully silent.
‘He bore witness’
Hossam Shabat (CPJ, 11/8/24): “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”
In October 2024, one year into the extermination campaign, Israel accused Shabat and five other Gaza journalists with Al Jazeera—where I myself am an opinion columnist—of being militants in the service of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. CPJ, which has repeatedly excoriated Israel for “accusing journalists of being terrorists without producing credible evidence to substantiate their claims,” condemned the accusations as a “smear campaign” that endangered the lives of journalists.
Yesterday, the Israeli army took to the platform X to celebrate the fact that it had “eliminated” Shabat, offering the charming obituary: “Don’t let the press vest confuse you, Hossam was a terrorist.” This from the people who just killed 200 Palestinian children in a matter of days.
Responding to the initial terror allegation last year, Shabat remarked to CPJ: “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.” And convey the truth he did. As Egyptian-American journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who translated Shabat’s last article for US outlet Drop Site News just after he was killed, wrote in the preface to the translation:
He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for 17 months. He was displaced over 20 times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense.
Shabat’s article—penned as Israel resumed apocalyptic killing on March 18 and thereby annihilated the truce with Hamas that had ostensibly taken hold in January—is a testament to the young man’s enduring humanity in the face of utter barbarism. Conveying the post-ceasefire landscape in his hometown of Beit Hanoun, Shabat despaired:
Screams filled the air while everyone stood helpless. My tears didn’t stop. The scenes were more than any human being could bear. The ambulances were filled with corpses, their bodies and limbs piled on top and intertwined with one another. We could no longer distinguish between children and men, between the injured and the dead.
Shabat was well aware that he could join the dead at any moment, and, to that end, he had prepared a statement for posthumous publication, in which he noted that, “when this all began, I was only 21 years old—a college student with dreams like anyone else.” For the past year and a half, however, he had “dedicated every moment of my life to my people,” documenting the “horrors” in Gaza in order to “show the world the truth they tried to bury.”
Deafening silence
Ahmad Ibsais (Mondoweiss, 3/25/25) on Western journalists: “Their failure to accurately report on the targeting of their colleagues, their reluctance to challenge Israeli narratives, and their tendency to frame these killings as unfortunate byproducts of conflict rather than deliberate acts—these journalistic failures have real consequences.”
Indeed, like so many of his Palestinian media colleagues, Shabat risked his life to speak truth to genocidal power until his final moment. But following his demise, the corporate media in the United States haven’t managed to say much at all—just google “Hossam Shabat” and you’ll see what I mean. His death was covered in leading international outlets like the Guardian (3/25/25), Le Monde (3/25/25) and the Sydney Morning Herald (3/25/25), and independent US outlets like Truthout (3/24/25), Democracy Now! (3/25/25) and Mondoweiss (3/25/25), among others—but virtually no establishment US news organizations.
The otherwise deafening silence has been punctuated by just a couple of corporate media interventions, including a Washington Post report (3/25/25) that made sure to mention in the first paragraph that Israel had accused Shabat of Hamas membership.
Meanwhile, Trey Yingst, a correspondent for Fox News—an outlet by no means known for pro-Palestinian sympathies—has rankled others in right-wing media by having the audacity to observe that Israel had just killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza and that, of the 124 journalists killed globally in 2024, “around two-thirds of them were Palestinian.” In response to Yingst’s treachery, the Washington Free Beacon (3/24/25) made it clear that the real crime was Fox News’ failure to refer to the dead Palestinian journalists as terrorists.
‘With no one to hear us’
Robin Andersen (FAIR.org, 5/20/22): “Because journalists document the actions of Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinians, they jeopardize the military’s continued ability to act with impunity.”
The scant US corporate media attention elicited by the assassination of Shabat regrettably comes as no surprise. After all, it would make little sense for the US establishment to pump Israel full of billions of dollars in weaponry and then complain about the casualties of those weapons. When asked on Monday about the killing of Shabat and Mansour, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declared that Hamas was to blame for “every single thing that’s happening” in the Gaza Strip.
In a dispatch for FAIR (10/19/23) published less than two weeks after the launch of US-fueled genocide in October 2023, Ari Paul emphasized that “Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists”—including Palestinian-American ones like 51-year-old Shireen Abu Akleh, murdered in 2022 by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank—”as well as harassing foreign journalists and human rights activists entering the country.” Such attacks, he concluded, “act as filters through which the truth is diluted.”
And dilution has only become turbo-charged since then. By December 2023, CPJ had determined that “more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel/Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” Of the at least 68 journalists and media workers killed between October 7 and December 20, CPJ reported that 61 were Palestinian, four were Israeli and three were Lebanese.
On November 20 of that year, for example, Palestinian journalist Ayat Khadura was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home, just weeks after she had shared her “last message to the world,” which included the line: “We had big dreams but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”
On November 7, Mohamed Abu Hassira, a journalist for the Palestinian Wafa news agency, was killed along with no fewer than 42 family members in a strike on his own home. And on December 15, Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abudaqa was killed in southern Gaza, where he eventually bled to death after Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching him for more than five hours. Needless to say, Israeli impunity for all of these crimes remains the name of the game.
Considering all the lethal obstacles Palestinian journalists must contend with to do their jobs—not to mention the psychological toll of having to report genocide day in and day out while essentially serving as moving targets for the Israelis—it seems the least their international media colleagues might do is acknowledge them in death. Alas, mum’s the word.
And on that note, it’s worth recalling some of Shabat’s own words: “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”
Janine Jackson interviewed Social Security Works’ Nancy Altman about attacks on Social Security for the March 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Social Security has been overwhelmingly popular, and under vehement attack from some quarters, since it began. And for decades, elite news media have generated a standard assessment: It’s the most popular program, hence the “third rail” of politicking, and also, based on willful misreading of how it works, it’s about to be insolvent any minute—the latter notion sitting alongside corporate media’s constant refrain that private is always better than public, just because, like, efficiency and all that.
Now, in this frankly wild, “Only losers care about caring for one another” and “Shouldn’t the richest just control everything?” moment, Social Security is on the chopping block for real. Still, as ever, the attack is rooted in disinformation, but with a truly critical press corps largely missing in action, myth-busting might not be enough.
We are joined now by veteran Social Security explainer and defender Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and author of, among other titles, The Truth About Social Security:The Founder’s Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies and Common Misunderstandings. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.
JJ: A lot of us are in a kind of blurry, “holy heck, is this really happening?” mode, but titrating out what is actually happening today is important—set aside from whether courts will eventually rule against it, or how it might play out. In “what is happening” news, I’m reading in Truthout via Bloomberg that three individuals representing private equity concerns have shown up at the Social Security Administration. How weird is that? What can that possibly mean?
NA: It’s horrible. And if you can believe it, it is even worse. As soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, the DOGE guys—the DOGE boys, as young as 19—were swarming all over the Social Security Administration. As you said in your introduction, there has been a small group of people, completely out of touch, who wanted to do away with Social Security from the beginning. They’ve always been defeated, but unfortunately, they now are in control of the White House.
It’s Donald Trump. Despite all his lies in the campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security, he proposed cuts in every one of his budgets in his first term. It’s Elon Musk, who unbelievably called it “the biggest Ponzi scheme” in history, which is such a slander. And it’s Russell Vought, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who’s architect of Project 2025. And what we’re seeing is Project 2025 on steroids. So you’ve got private venture people there, you have DOGE guys stealing our data, all in an effort to undermine our Social Security system.
JJ: The line is that, “Oh no, they’re not attacking Social Security itself, just fraud within it.” Now, the bad faith is palpable, but what is your response to that notion, that it’s really just the fraud that’s under attack?
NA: As you said, I wrote a book called The Truth About Social Security, and one of the zombie lies is one of the ones you mentioned. They all say, “Oh, this private sector is so much more efficient and so much better and blah, blah, blah.”
Actually, Social Security is extremely efficiently run. Less than about a half a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. The other more than 99 cents comes back in benefits. That’s so much more efficient than you find with 401k for private sector insurance, where you can get 15, 20% administrative costs and hidden fees and so forth.
And that’s also with improper payments— there are a lot of overpayments, underpayments, which were done because Congress has made it so difficult to administer, and some of it’s just impossible to avoid. But 99.7% of Social Security benefits are paid accurately to the right people, on time in full, and about 0.3%—and again, there’s much more improper payments in the private sector—but of that 0.3%, the overwhelming amount of what are called improper payments are overpayments and underpayments.
So, for example, Social Security requires, to get your benefit, you have to have been alive every day of the month before. Now I think that’s wrong, and I think you should get a proportion of payments, but that’s not how the law works. So if you die on the last day of the month, and you get your payment on the third day of the following month, and the money is put in your account, that’s an overpayment.
Now, it doesn’t just sit there. As soon as the federal government realizes that the person has died the last day, they go in immediately, usually within a day or two, and take that money back. But that is mainly overpayments, underpayments.
Fraud is vanishingly small, and the way that fraud is caught is, first we have an inspector general. Donald Trump fired the Social Security Administration inspector general as soon as he got into office. And front-line workers, and they’ve been firing and inducing all kinds of workers out who are the ones who would catch the fraud.
So although they say they’re going after fraud, waste and abuse, they are creating so much waste. They are abusing the workforce, and through that, the American people. And they are opening the door to fraud, unfortunately.
JJ: I have seen leftists take issue with the “It’s my money” idea on Social Security, because actually it’s an intergenerational program. Now choosing that as a point of emphasis in the current context is a choice that I have thoughts about. But do you see meaningful confusion about whose money is at stake here, and whether workers paying into it today are truly entitled to it?
NA: Here’s where the confusion is. I don’t think there’s confusion on that point. I think most Americans—which is why the program is so wildly popular—recognize that these are benefits they earned. It is deferred compensation. It is part of your earnings.
So you have your current cash compensation, you have deferred compensation in the form of pensions—whether it’s a pension sponsored by the employer or 401k or a defined benefit plan—and you have Social Security. You also have what are called contingent benefits, which are disability insurance, survivors benefits, and those are all earned.
What is the misunderstanding, and this is, again, people like Elon Musk and others who are just spreading lies about this program, are, “Oh, there are all these immigrants who are undocumented people stealing our money.” That is a lie. Those people who are undocumented are unable to receive Social Security, and even if they become documented, and can show that they had made contributions, they still don’t, and I think this is wrong, but they still don’t get the benefits they have earned.
But Americans who are here paying in, it is an earned benefit. And when Elon Musk and Donald Trump say, “Oh, there’s fraud, and we’re going to cut the benefits,” they are cutting your benefits, and people should keep hold of their wallets.
JJ: The fact that it’s just about fraud is one lie. And another one is that the things that are happening are just kind of tweaks. And now the latest, maybe not the latest when this airs, but we hear that people who file for benefits, or who want to change the banks that their benefits go to, now they can’t do it by phone. They have to do it online, through one of those easy-breezy government interfaces, or go into a field office. And that might sound like a minor thing, unless you actually think about it with human beings in mind.
NA: It is outrageous. And when you connect the dots, Donald Trump said he wasn’t going to cut our benefits. He said that before when he ran in 2016, and every one of his budgets in the first term cut our benefits.
He said it again in 2024. But now that he’s there, I think they’re trying to figure out ways to do it. And what they are doing is they are throwing the program in complete chaos.
People who receive benefits are disproportionately seniors, people with disabilities. Interestingly, it’s the largest children’s program, too, because it’s survivor’s benefits, but it often covers people who have difficulty with mobility.
The internet, as you said, is very hard to use. And, by the way, some of the people that got fired were the people who maintained the website. So I think it’s going to get harder to use, and that’s where the fraud tends to—there is vanishingly small amounts of fraud, but when it occurs, it tends to be online.
Phones are very secure. There’s been no evidence put forward that there’s any fraud that’s being committed through the phone service.
Requiring everybody to go into field offices, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk have told the General Services Administration to terminate all the leases, so they’re going to be fewer and fewer field offices. They are terribly understaffed, and the staff that’s there is very overworked.
So you’re asking millions of additional Americans to waste time, when they could have gotten on the phone and done what they had to do over the phone. Although they need to hire people for the phone, too, because that’s another place with long wait times, and they’re going to get longer, given what they’re doing.
Trump and DOGE and the others who Republican President Dwight Eisenhower called a “tiny splinter group” who hate Social Security, but they tried to privatize it. They were unsuccessful in that. And now what they’re doing is they’re trying to destroy it from within. And we will see pretty soon as it collapses, they’ll say, “Oh, the private sector should run it.” That will be horrible. It will undermine all of our economic security.
JJ: Consistent majorities support Social Security. As we’ve said, some recent polls find people saying we spend too little on it. And that’s why people, like Republican congressperson Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, are saying, “Nobody is touching Social Security” in town halls.
But it’s also why Liza Featherstone, for example, is reminding us that cutting popular programs isn’t a mistake, it’s a conscious effort, and this is what you’re just getting at, it’s a conscious effort to make the government actually useless, so that people will stop thinking of it as a source of anything good. And, one supposes, they will then look to beneficent billionaires. But this is not a mistake, this chaos that Social Security is being thrown into.
NA: Not at all. This is Project 2025 on steroids. The architects of Project 2025 really started this crusade back in the 1970s, actually when I started working on the program. It’s been 50 years. They’ve tried undermining confidence in the program, because it is too popular; even the most conservative-minded Republicans love Social Security, do not want to see it cut, and correctly think that it should be expanded. So they can’t directly confront Social Security, because they’ll all get voted out of office.
So the question is, how can they undermine it while looking like they’re protecting it? And the old standby is this vague “fraud, waste and abuse.” Nobody wants fraud, waste or abuse. But the reality is, they are creating waste and abuse. They are opening the door to possible fraudulent actors. And they’re all doing it, as you say, so that people just give up on government and give more and more money, upward redistribution of our earned benefits, into the pockets of Elon Musk and other billionaires.
JJ: Finally, I think the way that news media talk is meaningful. When they say, “They’re saying these things about Social Security, and they’re untrue,” to me, that lands different than, “They’re saying these things although they’re untrue.” One is narrating a nightmare, and the other is noting a disruption that calls for some intervention.
TheHill.com says that Elon Musk’s false rhetoric on Social Security is “confounding experts and worrying advocates.” Doesn’t say advocates of what. I just personally can’t forgive this demonstrative earnestness of elite media, when they can get emotional, you know, about welfare reform and “we need to cut food stamps.” But now they’re trying to be high and dry about cutting lifelines for seniors and disabled people.
And I’m not talking about all media. There are exceptions. But I want to ask you, finally, what would responsible, people-first journalism be doing right now, do you think?
Nancy Altman: “Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them.”
NA: You so put your finger on it. I mean, it is outrageous, when you think about it, that Donald Trump will be spewing lies about Social Security in a nationwide, televised joint session of Congress, went on for minutes and minutes, talking about all these dead people are getting benefits, and that is a complete lie. It has been debunked a zillion times, including by his own acting commissioner, and yet he went before the nation and said it.
So there is a method to the madness. This is not confounding at all. It’s an effort to convince everybody that the government is full of corruption and fraud, so when they destroy it, they have their cover.
So I think, first of all, what mainstream media should do is call a lie a lie when it happens, and they should try to call it out in real time, and there should be some solidarity. I still can’t believe that the AP was banned from the White House, and all the mainstream media just didn’t all walk out.
So this is a time our institutions, all our institutions, are under a threat. This is the Steve Bannon “Flood the Zone.” So there are so many outrages at once. All of our institutions are being attacked, including the media.
My concern is Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them. I think everybody’s got to be vigilant. I think they’ve got to make their voices heard, and I know there’s going to be protest on April 5. People should turn out for that. And the media should wake up and realize that everything is under assault, including them.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nancy Altman from Social Security Works. They’re online at SocialSecurityWorks.org. Nancy Altman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (3/21/25) reports the resumption of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as “pressure…to free more hostages.”
The New York Times produced an article on Friday, March 21, bearing the headline “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.” In the first paragraph, readers were informed that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had undertaken to “turn up the pressure” by warning that Israel was “preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.”
This was no doubt a rather bland way of describing mass slaughter and illegal territorial conquest—not to mention a convenient distraction from the fact that Hamas is not the party that is currently guilty of a failure to cooperate. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Israel annihilated the ceasefire agreement that came into effect in January following 15 months of genocide by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.
Over those months, Israel officially killed at least 48,577 Palestinians in Gaza; in February, the death toll was bumped up to almost 62,000, to account for missing persons presumed to be dead beneath the rubble.
The first phase of the ceasefire ended at the beginning of March, and was scheduled to give way to a second phase, in which a permanent cessation of hostilities would be negotiated, along with the exchange of remaining hostages. Rather than “cooperate,” however, Israel and its BFF, the United States, opted to move the goalposts and insist on an extension of phase one—since, at the end of the day, an actual end to the war is the last thing Israel or the US wants.
After all, how will Donald Trump’s fantasy of converting Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” ever come to fruition if the territory is not thoroughly pulverized and depopulated first?
Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide on Tuesday killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat—but, hey, that’s just how Israel “turns up the pressure on Hamas.”
Committed to the deployment of euphemism
What the New York Times (3/3/25) calls “pressure,” Amnesty International calls “a crime against humanity and a violation of international law.”
Were the US newspaper of record not so firmly committed to the deployment of grotesque euphemism on behalf of the Israeli war effort, perhaps the discussion of “pressure” might have included a mention of such statistics as that, between Tuesday and Friday alone, at least 200 children were among those massacred. But this, alas, would have required a humanization of Palestinians, and a dangerous encouragement of empathy fundamentally at odds with US/Israeli policy in the Middle East.
Instead, the Times simply noted that “Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages” in its possession, estimated to consist of “as many as 24 living captives—and the remains of more than 30 others.” No reference was made to the thousands of Palestinian captives held in mind-bogglingly inhumane conditions in Israel, though the Times did manage the—judgment-free—observation that,
even before the ceasefire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.
As Amnesty International (3/3/25) pointed out, that particular Israeli maneuver amounted to a crime against humanity and a violation of international law. But the Western corporate media wouldn’t be the Western corporate media if they reported straight facts.
‘To pressure Hamas on hostages’
Death by bombing and starvation is euphemized by the Wall Street Journal (3/8/25) as “gradually increasing pressure on Hamas.”
For its part, Reuters (3/21/25) explained on Friday that Israel had “intensified a military onslaught to press the Palestinian militant group [Hamas] to free remaining Israeli hostages.” The Wall Street Journal has, meanwhile, spent weeks preparing for the onslaught of “pressure” via such headlines as “Israel Draws Up New War Plans to Pressure Hamas” (3/8/25) and “Israel Chokes Electricity Supply to Gaza to Pressure Hamas on Hostages” (3/9/25).
A BBC article (3/21/25) on Katz’s orders to the military to “seize additional areas in Gaza” in the absence of a comprehensive hostage release is illustrative of the corporate media approach to round two of genocide. Specifying that “Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire,” the BBC quoted Katz as warning that “the more Hamas continues its refusal, the more territory it will lose to Israel.” The article did allow Hamas a line of space in which to respond that it is “engaging with the mediators with full responsibility and seriousness,” but the sandwiching of this quote in between US/Israeli accusations intentionally implied its disingenuousness.
Of course, the unmutilated truth does intermittently seep into media output, as in CNN’s Friday dispatch (3/21/25) containing these two sentences that lay out, in straightforward fashion, who is cooperating and who is not:
Hamas has insisted on sticking to a timeline previously agreed with Israel and the US that would move the warring parties into a second phase of the truce, in which Israel would commit to ending the war. But Israel has refused, saying it wants to extend the first phase instead.
Overall, however, the function of the corporate media is to endow demonstrably false US/Israeli accusations with a veneer of solid credibility, and to portray Hamas as the perennial saboteurs. Ultimately, unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire is about the equivalent, in terms of journalistic integrity, as unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of manufacturing nuclear jelly beans.
By implicitly blaming Hamas for renewed hostilities and legitimizing Israeli “pressure,” media outlets have offered themselves up as platforms for the de facto justification of mass slaughter.
A Thursday Fox News intervention (3/20/25) on Israel’s decision to “expand… activities in Gaza” noted approvingly that “the Israeli air force has continued to target and dismantle terrorists and terrorist infrastructure throughout” the coastal enclave. The article naturally came equipped with the assertion that Israel had resumed operations “following a short-lived ceasefire after it said the terror group repeatedly rebuffed offers to release the remaining hostages.”
To be sure, “activities” is as good a euphemism for genocide as any. And as the corporate media carry on with their own militant activities, one wishes some sort of pressure could stop the truth from being held hostage.
Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”
President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.
Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).
And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”
But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.
‘Incessant valorization of victimhood’
The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”
I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.
Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:
How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?
They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.
In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:
Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.
Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).
‘Fervor that borders on the oppressive’
The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.
The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).
The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.
The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”
‘Belligerent elite college students’
Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”
The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:
I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.
The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.
Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:
It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.
‘Death knell for a Jewish state’
While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.
Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:
The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.
Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”
Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?
The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.
Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.
David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.
David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.
JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?
DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.
If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.
JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?
DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.
There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.
It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.
But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.
And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.
None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.
And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.
JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.
DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.
But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.
And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.
JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.
DP: Yeah.
JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.
So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.
David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”
DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.
And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.
I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.
JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.
And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.
DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.
Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….
DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”
JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”
And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.
DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.
JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.
Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”
DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.
JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.
DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”
Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.
‘If nothing changes’
The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.
An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”
Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.
These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.
It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.
As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.
In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.
Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:
There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.
The easy and popular option is not an option
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.
There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficithawks at the Post.
But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.
In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.
To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”
Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.
Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-ownedPost.
Useful misinformation
Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):
Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.
Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.
Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.
This week on CounterSpin: News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” – unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations.
Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless, ” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House.
Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing…measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans,” go on to ask earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.”
In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people, but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.
We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.
Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.
Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”
The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.
Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.
Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.
Government spending ‘skyrocketed’
The New York Times (1/30/25) claims “even progressives now worry about the federal debt”—though an extensive recent analysis (PERI, 4/20) of the impact of debt by progressive economists found that “the relationship between government debt and economic growth is essentially zero.”
Corporate media’s ever-present fearmongering about spending is well-illustrated by the New York Times, which, within a week and a half of Trump’s inauguration, had already run the headline: “Even Progressives Now Worry About the Federal Debt” (1/30/25). The next day, the paper ran a separate article (1/31/25) by Michael Shear, which stated:
The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.
The paragraph at least avoided the classic tactic of throwing out raw numbers without giving any sort of metric, like GDP, to measure them against. But it nonetheless gave far from the full picture, not even offering numbers for spending as a percentage of GDP, which showed a minor increase of 3 percentage points over this period, to 23%—the same percentage that was spent in 2011.
Even more useful to include than this data, however, would have been international data showing how much the US spends in comparison to other rich countries. As it turns out, the answer is: quite little. And the US taxes even less.
Readers might also be interested to learn that tax cuts, not spending increases, have been primarily responsible for increases in the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio in recent decades, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (3/27/23). The group emphasized: “Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.” Given that reality, CAP concluded:
If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.
Federal outlays as a percentage of GDP have been nearly constant for the past 75 years (FRED).
‘The big areas of the budget’
The New York Times‘ Michael Shear (1/31/25) wrote that Trump was attempting “to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”
If corporate media like the New YorkTimes were serious about informing readers about the causes of and answers to high government debt, they would, like CAP, debunk right-wing deficit hawk propaganda, rather than reinforce it.
Instead, the Times‘ Shear (1/31/25) decided to provide his readers with extensive quotation from Maya MacGuineas, an extreme deficit hawk who got an early boost in her career “from the patronage of billionaire investment banker and arch-austerian Pete Peterson,” as the New Republic (3/4/21) recounted in a 2021 piece. Shear merely described her as “the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”
MacGuineas is the only expert Shear cites in the piece, and the article closes with her warning that Musk’s cuts “would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.” “To make a real impact on the debt,” MacGuineas said:
We are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings—Social Security, healthcare and revenues—the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.
The decision to include only an austerity advocate, and to allow her proclamation about the need for cuts to Social Security to end the piece, inevitably grants legitimacy to her claims. These claims are at the very least meant to be taken seriously, even more so since they come from a supposedly independent expert rather than a politician or government official. The decision to include no left-wing expert has a similar effect in reverse.
Meanwhile, in the paper’s piece (1/30/25) from the previous day about “progressive worry,” reporter Lydia DePillis managed to bury the key point in the 21st paragraph:
But mostly, Democrats say, the government simply needs more revenue to support the increasing number of people who are becoming eligible for retirement benefits.
Debt-scolding reporting
The Washington Post (10/8/24) sounds the alarm over the United States having a debt-to-GDP ratio similar to that of Britain, France and Canada—and much lower than Japan’s.
The Times is hardly the only outlet to legitimize alarmism about government spending. In a debt-scolding piece of reporting from last fall, the WashingtonPost (10/8/24) hammered on the point that runaway spending should be a major concern.
The choice of headline, “US Deficit Hits $1.8 Trillion as Interest Costs Rise,” immediately linked debt concerns to spending, not taxes. The first paragraph described the $1.8 trillion figure as “an enormous sum”—probably equally applicable to any sum over a billion dollars in the average American’s mind—while the fourth paragraph warned:
The nation’s debt compared with the size of the overall economy, a key metric of fiscal stability, is projected to exceed its all-time high of 106% by 2027.
Once again, international comparison would have been helpful here. It could be noted that the US, in fact, has a rather typical amount of debt compared to many other rich countries these days, with Britain, Canada, Spain, France and Italy all posting similar debt-to-GDP numbers. Greece, meanwhile, has a debt-to-GDP ratio close to 170%, while Japan boasts a ratio of around 250%. As Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has noted:
If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.
The Post, evidently, had no interest in providing such context. No international figures were cited. Instead, the next lines were a quote from a conservative economist:
A [nearly] $2 trillion deficit is bad news during a recession and war, but completely unprecedented during peace and prosperity…. The danger is the deficit will only get bigger over the next decade due to retiring baby boomers and interest on the debt.
Notice once more the linking of the increase in debt to spending rather than tax cuts.
The ‘soaring’ debt that wasn’t
The federal debt the Wall Street Journal (9/16/24) claimed was “soaring” was a smaller percentage of GDP in 2024 than in 2020.
The piece continued on to cite deficit hawk MacGuineas—described as the president of “a top Washington fiscal watchdog”—denouncing the “patchwork of targeted fiscal bribes” being offered to voters by the presidential candidates. And it ended with a quote from “president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former CBO director” Doug Holtz-Eakin, reminding us that debt servicing costs will have to be paid and will crowd out other spending priorities.
Unmentioned by the Post is that Holtz-Eakin held high posts in the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain presidential campaign. He also oversaw the creation of an infamous bogus cost estimate for the Green New Deal. Yet the Post portrays him as just an expert who leans a bit to the right.
Though the Post consulted three right-wing sources, they failed to include a single left-leaning independent expert. It’s not hard to understand how that fails readers, or how it legitimizes a certain set of priorities, while suggesting other views lack credibility.
The Wall Street Journal, for its part, has been more than happy to join the general fretting in corporate media about government spending. Back in the fall, for instance, a piece in its news section (9/16/24) complained that the presidential race was not focusing sufficiently on the issue of rising government debt, and flagged Social Security and Medicare as “the biggest drivers of rising spending.” The headline read: “Federal Debt Is Soaring. Here’s Why Trump and Harris Aren’t Talking About It.”
The problem with that headline? In the fall of 2024, federal debt was decidedly not soaring. This holds whether you look at federal debt in nominal dollar terms or as a percentage of GDP. Federal debt had “soared” briefly in 2020, when the Covid recession hit and the government rapidly expanded its spending to deal with the downturn. But for most of 2024, the quarterly percentage increase in the federal debt in dollar terms was actually below the historical average going back to 1970. And the debt-to-GDP ratio was at roughly the same spot as it had been three-and-a-half years earlier, at the start of Biden’s presidency.
‘Shutting off the lights’
For the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25), refusing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is like saying you want to go on a diet except for the beer, chips and ice cream sundaes.”
Even more concerning than corporate media’s penchant for running articles in the news section fearmongering about government spending, though, is what has been going on in corporate outlets’ opinion sections, specifically with the output of their editorial boards. Here, the legitimization of DOGE has reached its highest heights.
Unsurprisingly, the unabashedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board has been the prime offender. Most recently, it published an editorial (3/14/25) with the headline “Don’t Cry for the Education Department,” applauding the unconstitutional DOGE-led attack on the Education Department, which the Journal chastened for “harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”
The final paragraph began: “The closer Mr. Trump can get to shutting off the lights at the Education Department, the better.”
This was just one of numerous Journal editorials in recent weeks cheering on the DOGE project. A sampling of other editorials:
“Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic” (2/4/25) argued that Musk should be contained, but that he is “also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the US Agency for International Development.”
“The Federal Spending Boom Rolls On” (2/10/25) declared that “DOGE is a good idea,” and claimed that it had not gone far enough: “But for all of Mr. Musk’s frenetic tweeting, and the Beltway cries of Apocalypse Now, so far DOGE is only nibbling at the edges of Washington’s spending problem.”
“Judge Wants DOGE Facts, Not Fears” (2/19/25) ended, “Democrats hunting for a constitutional crisis might want to show evidence before they cry ‘dictator.’”
In short, then, the Journal editorial board not only approves of a rogue pseudo-agency operating with no transparency or oversight, but has become a crusader in defense of DOGE’s attacks on constitutional checks and balances—which grant Congress, not a right-wing ideologue from the PayPal Mafia, the power of the purse.
Of course, you can expect little else from the Journal than salivation over cuts to federal spending—it has long been the lapdog of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But it is jarring to witness exactly how rabid the Journal editorial board can be.
Not ‘audacious’ enough
The Washington Post says it’s “true that the $36 trillion national debt is unsustainable and there’s plenty of bloat in government.”
For its part, the Washington Post editorial board, while describing DOGE as a “circus” (2/24/25), has substantially legitimized DOGE’s mission.
An editorial (2/7/25) from early February is case in point. Headlined “Trump Needs to Erect Guardrails for DOGE,” the piece offered five ways for Trump to “be clear about who is boss,” effectively endorsing the mission of slashing government spending while expressing concern over some of Musk’s tactics.
The first four proposed guardrails in the piece, which include “Vet Musk’s operatives” and “Limit Musk’s access to sensitive files,” are all reasonable, but the fifth proposal reveals the board’s substantive concerns about the spending cuts being executed by DOGE. These concerns are not about whether cuts should be made—it is taken for granted that government spending should be reduced. Rather, they have to do with which spending is cut, aligning with the concerns raised by the Wall Street Journal about DOGE not going far enough.
This proposal, labeled “Focus on the biggest drivers of the national debt,” read:
To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts, Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent. Other sensitive areas of the balance sheet, including the Pentagon budget and veterans’ benefits, cannot stay off the table forever.
For the Post, then, the focus on programs such as USAID is simply too limited. We must put Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits on the table!
‘Embrace the same thinking’
The “DOGE ethos,” according to the Washington Post (3/3/25), means making “governments leaner and more efficient.”
The Washington Post’s preference for substantial cuts to federal government is further illustrated by an editorial (3/3/25) published in early March, following Jeff Bezos’s rebranding of the Post as Wall Street Journal–lite.
The editorial, titled “The DOGE Ethos Comes to State Governments,” showered praise on state governments that are capitalizing on DOGE branding while pursuing a more “thoughtful” approach to reducing government spending.
The piece favorably cited Washington state Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson’s insistence that “I’m not here to defend government…. I’m here to reform it.” The board elaborated:
Democrats in DC ought to embrace the same thinking. It’s foolish to defend a status quo that most voters think doesn’t work well. By fighting Trump and Musk tooth and nail, at the expense of presenting an alternative vision, the opposition risks appearing overly keen to protect hidebound institutions even as the world changes rapidly.
The Post’s take on DOGE? Let’s not center its blatant illegality. Let’s instead focus on what we can learn from it. After all, with a few minor tweaks, it’s exactly what we as a country need.
‘A great American success story’
New York Times says of Elon Musk, “he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.” But he’s going about it the wrong way.
The appallingly low bar set by the competition leaves the New York Times to assume the role of the major national newspaper that will seriously attack DOGE. It takes to this role…poorly.
The Times editorial board’s pushback against DOGE has been embarrassingly feeble. Its most direct assessment of DOGE thus far (3/8/25), for instance, began with an uncomfortably obsequious description of Musk:
Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries.
The board quickly conceded a major point to Musk:
Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.
The editorial went on to make a number of criticisms of DOGE, but its critique was undermined by this odd willingness to bend over backwards to appease Musk and his supporters.
Meanwhile, though sharply critical of DOGE’s disregard for the Constitution, the editorial made no attempt at presenting a counter-vision of government. It lamented cuts to a hodgepodge of specific government programs, but it had nothing to say in defense of current levels of government spending, let alone in favor of even higher levels of spending. One would hardly know that many wealthy countries have significantly higher levels of government spending and happier populations—in fact, at least 16 OECD countries register both higher spending and higher happiness than the US.
A gaping hole
This, then, is the state of American corporate media at the start of the Trump presidency. Across arguably the three most important national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—there is broad agreement that government spending is out of control and that something, perhaps something drastic, needs to be done about it.
Even at the leftmost of these organizations, the New York Times, the editorial board appears incapable of mounting a case for social democratic levels of government spending in the face of extreme attacks on spending by the Trump administration. The Times, instead, finds itself caught between bowing before the titans of American capitalism and confronting their disregard for the US Constitution.
The Washington Post has been able to adopt a somewhat less tortured position, occupying the center/center-right in a way reminiscent of 1990s Democrats, supporting cuts to government, but in a “thoughtful” way.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is having the time of its life. Finding itself once again in an era when greed and meanness animate the daily actions of government, it must feel freer than it has in years to bare its teeth at the true enemies of the American republic: teachers’ unions and recipients of government aid.
News consumers have no major paper espousing a truly progressive perspective. On the topic of government spending, at least, the window of acceptable thought appears to span from the center to the far right. There is no direct marketing reason for this—there’s a sizeable audience in the US that would welcome a progressive outlet, the same way there’s a sizeable audience for right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.
Who doesn’t want such an outlet to appear? Ultra-wealthy right-wing Americans of the sort that own and sponsor much of the media landscape. If wealthy people aren’t willing to finance a progressive media outlet that can compete with major papers, it seems that such an outlet simply won’t exist. Crowdfunding could help progressive media overcome this issue, but the playing field is not level.
As it stands, a major progressive outlet that can compete with the existing dominant players does not exist, and does not seem to be coming anytime soon. The gaping hole left as a result is becoming only more apparent as we speed into Trump administration 2.0.
