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  • ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’

    The May 27, 2022, episode of CounterSpin was a special on gun violence, featuring archival interviews with Igor Volsky and Pat Elder (originally aired March 26, 2021, and February 23, 2018). This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220527.mp3

     

    CBS depiction of Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signing a bill criminalizing abortion with a sign reading 'Life Is a Human Right'

    CBS (5/26/22)

    Janine Jackson: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is a human right.”

    Welcome, as they say, to America—where these ideas are presented as somehow of a piece, where news media tell us day after day how exceptionally good and worthy we are, the world’s policeman and a global beacon for human rights and the good life.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in horror. BBC‘s North America editor explained to its audience that there is no expectation of anything being done to prevent things like the latest (as far as I know, as we record on May 26) mass murder in the US, because “the  argument over guns has simply become too politically divisive and culturally entrenched to allow for meaningful change.”

    Reporter Eoin Higgins interviewed teachers around the country who reported the psychological toll of not only actual shootings, but constant drills and lockdowns on children, who they said, “have largely given up on a better future.”  Teachers, meanwhile, feel expendable and unvalued; it’s hardly lost on them that the same forces accusing them of poisoning children with curricula are also demanding that they step between those children and a bullet.

    That powers that be in this country have responded to school shootings not by toughening gun laws, but by loosening them, and responded to the failure of law enforcement to prevent such shootings by calling for more law enforcement, it’s a demoralizing combination of devastating and unsurprising. As a response to violence, we try violence, time after time.

    Hill: Students nationwide walk out of classes to protest inaction on guns by government

    The Hill (5/26/22)

    There doesn’t seem to be anything new to say right now about gun violence in the US. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep saying the things we know—more loudly, more unapologetically and in more places.

    As we record, we hear that students at schools across the country are walking out in an effort to say simply, “We refuse to go on like this.” We owe them our action and effort, no matter how tired or disgusted or defeated we feel.

    We’re going to revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture today on the show. Last March we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns. We talked about the possibility of passing legislation and about misunderstandings about the power of the gun lobby.

    And then: There are always multiple issues involved in a mass murder; elite media use the complexity as an excuse to simply trade accusatory explanations, and then determine that, in the interest of balance, nothing can be done. But if we’re concerned about young people getting high-grade weaponry and thinking it’d be cool to use it, maybe one thing to consider would be the government-sponsored program that gives young people high-grade weapons and tells them it’d be cool to use them. We spoke in 2018 about JROTC—a presence at my high school, and maybe yours too—with Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, and author of Military Recruiting in the United States. That’s coming up this week on CounterSpin.

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          CounterSpin220527Volsky.mp3

     

    New Press: Guns Down

    New Press (2019)

    Janine Jackson: Other countries have misogyny and racism, untreated mental illness and bar fights and robberies. What they don’t have are weeks like the one we saw in March of 2021, in which Americans, just reeling from the murders of eight people in Atlanta, woke up to news of 10 people killed in Boulder, Colorado.

    It’s the guns. The difference is the guns.

    We asked for help thinking about that from Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns. 

    I started by noting the journalistic—and maybe just human—tendency, in the wake of a mass shooting horror like Atlanta, like Boulder, like Sandy Hook, like Buffalo, like Uvalde, to seek more information, more details: What were the circumstances, the motivations, who is this individual?

    Somewhere along the way, one gets the sense that the problem of gun violence is too complicated to address. Whatever measure is being suggested wouldn’t have prevented the latest attack, and somehow that’s not a reason that that’s not enough, but a reason to abandon the whole project.

    I asked Igor Volsky if getting past that hopelessness calls for new goals, or maybe just clarity about what our goals are.

    Igor Volsky

    Igor Volsky: “We know exactly what needs to be done in order to save lives…because states across America have strengthened their gun laws.”

    Igor Volsky: You’re absolutely right. There’s really this sense, oftentimes in the press, that this problem is just too hard, that we already have 400 million guns in circulation and there’s nothing we can do about it, that we somehow have to pay the price of 100 people dying every day from gun violence because we have a Second Amendment.

    And the reality is that none of that is true, that we know exactly what needs to be done in order to save lives. And we know that because states across America have strengthened their gun laws, have invested in communities that are suffering from cyclical everyday gun violence, and have seen significant reductions in their gun suicide rates and in their gun homicide rates.

    So these models of democracy, or these “laboratories” of democracy, as Republicans in particular often like to point to, really serve as an example of what we need to do on the national level in order to have a standard that fits the entire country.

    And, secondly, we just need to look overseas at some of our allies who have dramatically reduced gun violence by doing three basic things: by, No. 1, ensuring that gun manufacturers and gun dealers are actually regulated and can’t produce incredibly powerful weapons for the civilian market. Those countries raise the standard of gun ownership by requiring gun owners to register their firearm, to get a license to have a firearm in the first place. And they’ve also addressed the root causes of gun violence: things like employment opportunities, housing security, healthcare. So we have the blueprint; we just need to follow it.

    JJ: You will hear that “Assault weapon bans don’t help, because most murders happened with handguns,” or “Background checks don’t help, because there’s a lot of resales,” and, “Well, it’s a lot of suicides.”

    But if you spell it out to the goal being fewer guns, if you make that the goal, well, then that addresses all of those things. And it sounds like what you’re saying has worked in other places: It has a goal of just there being fewer guns out there.

    IV: Yeah, the reason why the United States has a death rate that’s about 25% higher than our other peer nations is exactly what you just identified: We have way too many guns, and they are way too easy to get. And until our media and our leaders can have the courage, the political courage, to recognize that reality, and to begin communicating about it to the American people, it’s going to be a challenge to meet the goal of saving lives.

    And I have to say: We now have a president in the White House who has done this work before; who—when he was running for the presidency—released one of the boldest gun-violence prevention programs of any presidential candidate; who promised us that his experience in Washington, DC, gave him the skills to work with Democrats and Republicans to get big things done. And so he has a heavy responsibility to follow through on those promises, to address the nation fully about this crisis, and then to work through Congress, diligently and aggressively, to get tighter gun laws across the finish line.

    JJ: Let me just bring you back to media for a second. When media tend to move from incident coverage to policy coverage, then reporting on gun control gets often into this kind of static frame, where you hear from opponents and proponents of a particular measure; they both get quoted, sometimes they get quoted in equal amounts.  But there’s this kind of backdrop, which is that in this country any restrictions on individual gun ownership face an uphill battle, because it’s enshrined in the law, because the lobby is all-powerful and because this country just loves its guns. These are presented as blanket impediments to change. But how true is that? Is that really an accurate, current depiction of the lay of the land?

    IV: Yeah, this false balance that you’re identifying that you often see in media stories, this effort to perpetuate, really, what is a myth about the NRA’s great power and abilities. And this notion of just regurgitating claims that the Second Amendment somehow impedes us from doing anything about this problem is a real hindrance, I think, to the kind of conversations we have publicly about this issue, to the kind of conversations we have with our friends and families, particularly if some of them are gun owners, or more politicized gun owners. And the truth of the matter is, the kind of coverage we need on this issue, the kind of press we need on this issue, is one that reflects the science and the real history.

    The overwhelming science in the gun violence space tells us one simple truth: Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. And that’s really it. That’s the reality that you have to start from.

    So any kind of argument about, “If you have gun restrictions, you’re disarming the good guys,” or, “If you have gun restrictions, that means it will only harm the good guys, because the bad guys will never follow it”—that kind of argument that the NRA has so successfully gotten the press to parrot for decades is a real hindrance.

    And so I think we hopefully, hopefully, have reached a point where gun violence is so ubiquitous, and support for actually doing something is so widespread, that we will hopefully see less of this effort to just pretend that “Well, nothing at all is possible,” right?

    And just a second on the Second Amendment: The history of this is very intriguing to me, because for decades and decades and decades, really up to about 1972, it was hard to find anybody in the press, or within even the gun community, who argued that the Second Amendment is somehow an impediment to gun regulation.

    That argument is actually quite new, and it was developed through NRA-funded researchers and NRA-funded lawyers. They birthed this idea that the Second Amendment somehow prevents us from doing what we know we need to do. And oftentimes the media just parrots that invented notion without actually recognizing that it is certainly not what the Founding Fathers intended, but also doesn’t reflect the reality of how most courts—the Supreme Court to some degree, but also courts across the country—have ruled repeatedly that the amendment allows for pretty significant regulation. And so my hope here is that we can have a different kind of conversation about this issue.

    Extra! September/October 1996: How the Gun Lobby Rewrote the Constitution

    Extra! (9–10/96)

    JJ: That was one of the points that scholar Howard Friel made in an important piece for Extra!, for FAIR’s magazine, back in 1996: that media seem to feel they’re charting some middle ground when they say, “There could allow for some restrictions on gun ownership,” and the other point is, “No, there should be no restrictions whatsoever.” And they kind of chart a middle course. Friel’s point is they’re ignoring all of that legislative, judiciary history that you just mentioned, which actually says, “No, there’s no conflict between the Second Amendment and some measures of gun control.”

    Let me ask you, finally, I know that at Guns Down, you know that legislation isn’t all there is; you see it as a multifront battle to get us to a safer place with fewer guns. You talked about things that Biden could do. Is there particular legislation afoot that you see moving things forward? What, in general, do you see as roles for the public here? Where can we get involved in making change on this?

    IV: We’re constantly in this cycle of: A gun event happens; usually it’s a mass shooting that grabs headlines. We all talk about, “Oh, things need to be done,” right? We get a lot of press coverage, some of it good, some of it not, about that event. And then we all take a breath and we move on, usually in a matter of days; sometimes, really, in a matter of hours. And the question is, how do we break that cycle?

    And I think there are roles for the general public, and there are roles for leadership, right? I think the president needs to actually lead. The kind of enthusiasm and vigor and hard work that he and his administration put into passing the recovery plan, they need to apply to getting background checks across the finish line, they need to apply to getting an assault weapons ban across the finish line. They’ve shown what they can do when they’re motivated and dedicated. And they need to do that.

    And to make sure that happens, all of us across the country have to keep the pressure on, have to communicate in any way we can, whether it be on social media, or making calls, or organizing friends and neighbors to do larger pushes, to ensure that the president hears from us. Politicians who’ve been talking about this issue for years, who support reform but haven’t actually pushed hard enough to follow it through, they need to hear from us. And then, of course, we need to also push those lawmakers who aren’t there on the issue yet.

    But what I always think is, to first identify what is the path to actually getting something done; to me, that’s getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, and passing through the reforms I mentioned with a simple majority vote. And to move the individuals, to target your advocacy at lawmakers and officials who actually have an incentive to listen to what you’re saying, and to make progress. And I suspect that many of the congressional members on the Republican side don’t have any incentive to compromise on anything, no matter how popular it is in their home states or districts. So I would ask folks to be targeted in how they do this work.

    But I am confident that if all of this aligns, that if we have a president who is committed to acting as he promised, and a public that is cheering him on and pushing him on, we will finally get to a place where we begin to make some serious progress on saving lives in this country.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Igor Volsky of the group Guns Down America. The book is Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, out from the New Press. Thank you so much, Igor Volsky, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    IV: Thank you.

    ***

          CounterSpin220527Elder.mp3

     

    Nikolas Cruz arrested

    Parkland, Florida, shooter arrested wearing a Junior ROTC shirt.

    Janine Jackson:  That was Igor Volsky speaking with CounterSpin in March of last year.

    In February of 2018, the country’s media were talking about how things might be different that time, in the wake of the lethal gun violence in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

    And, as happens, media were mulling specific details of the shooting, and they were talking somewhat about a US culture of violence: imperialist, domestic, statutory.

    But what often gets overlooked are what you might call the bridges between these things: What are some of the mechanisms that convey ideas about the rightness of violence and the value of weapons to individuals like the 19-year-old who killed 14 of his former classmates, two staff members and a teacher? He was a member of the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp program at the high school before he was expelled. He was wearing his JROTC shirt when he carried out the attack.

    Our guest said whatever their role in that case, the presence of military recruiters in high schools around the country calls out for challenge.

    Pat Elder is director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which resists the militarization of schools, and he’s author of Military Recruiting in the United States. I asked him, first of all, to just explain what JROTC is and does.

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    Navy Junior ROTC cadet

    Junior ROTC cadet

    Pat Elder: The JROTC program is part of the Army’s command structure. It’s part of the cadet command, which is the lowest item in the command structure.

    Now, the JROTC program is two-dimensional, as I see it. One, it stresses the physical aspect of being a soldier. And in that capacity, they put lethal weapons into the hands of 13-year-old 9th graders.

    But there’s also a much less studied and understood dimension, and that has to do with the ideology that is taught by the program. And so each of the four branches has its own cadet command structure. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines each have four years of textbooks that the students learn from. And each of the states have accommodated the JROTC program by allowing students to substitute core curricular items—for instance, in Florida, students can substitute biology, physical science, physical education and art if they want to take the JROTC program.

    JJ: What’s some of this ideology that you’re talking about?

    PE: You have to read it to get a firm understanding of it, and it’s easy enough to do: Simply google “Army JROTC textbook,” and you’ll pull up a high school in Alabama or Minnesota, and they’ll have links to, in this case, the Army’s JROTC textbooks.

    So just to give you a little idea, as far as government instruction is concerned, the unit on civics is entitled, “You the People.” Now, I learned it, in Maryland, as “We the People.” Children are taught to respect authority, and they are taught to get in line, and they are taught to not question authority; that’s why they call it “You the People.” That’s civics. Keep in mind that the state of Florida, or other states, I should say, actually allow students to substitute JROTC for civics.

    Perhaps even more insidious is the way United States history is taught. It’s taught in such a way that might makes right. The United States is eminently the greatest power in the world. Students are taught that, as the United States grew, it was correct in doing what it did, and justified.

    JJ: Folks have been asking about the connection to the NRA. They’re connected, but it’s not in terms of giving money. What is the connection between JROTC programs and the NRA?

    Pat Elder

    Pat Elder: “The military is attempting to put as many adolescent fingers around as many triggers as possible.”

    PE: I think the focus, rather than being on the NRA, should be on its proxy, the CMP. The CMP is a little-known congressionally mandated organization. It was set up in 1903. It’s the Civilian Marksmanship Program. After the Spanish-American War in 1898, military planners were shocked that American youth just couldn’t shoot as straight as they’d hoped. And so Congress instituted this program in order to teach children how to shoot.

    And that program exists to today. The Civilian Marksmanship Program regulates the JROTC marksmanship program. Oftentimes, when schools are having difficult times keeping their program afloat, the CMP will communicate with the NRA, and grants will be filled out and the individual JROTC program will be outfitted with guns and ammunition.

    JJ: What is it that you would like folks to keep in mind as JROTC comes up, perhaps in the context of this coverage of this Parkland shooting?

    PE: First of all, it’s a numbers game; there are 565,000 children that are in the JROTC program. That’s all four branches. The military is attempting to put as many adolescent fingers around as many triggers as possible. They understand the impact, the psychological lure, of firing a weapon. So the Army gets it. They understand that the children love to shoot, whether it’s virtual or real. And so they use that psychological element to lure the children in.

    And so it’s only a matter of time, and a matter of numbers. When we have so many children that are that young having guns put in their hands, these types of incidents are bound to happen.

    JJ: Pat Elder is the director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy. They’re online at studentprivacy.org. He’s also author of the book Military Recruiting in the United States. Pat Elder, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    PE: Thanks so much for the opportunity.

    ***

    JJ: That was Pat Elder of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, talking with CounterSpin in 2018.

     

    The post ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views

     

    Despite the proliferation of fringe ideologies on YouTube—and the availability of truly alternative information there—the video hosting service’s anti-establishment status may be overblown.  A FAIR analysis of the 100 most-subscribed YouTube news channels worldwide found that the majority of the top news channels on the platform are not independent.

    YouTube has a reputation for hosting news that challenges the status quo. In 2020, a Pew Research Center study highlighted YouTube’s potential to spotlight more independent news sources, indicating that 42% of YouTube news channels are not affiliated with a traditional news outlet.

    The shadow side of that finding is that YouTube is a breeding ground for internet conspiracy theories and extremist views (FAIR.org, 3/20/18). In fact, it was the platform on which QAnon conspiracy theories first moved from the fringes of 4Chan to the mainstream (New York Times, 10/15/20). A 2021 Anti-Defamation League study found that despite its efforts to remove extremist content from its site, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm still pushes extremist and “alternative” content to users—especially if they’ve already sought out such content—pushing them further down the rabbit hole.

    Overwhelmingly corporate

    But despite the focus on the site’s independent and sometimes extremist offerings, 83 of the top 100 YouTube news channels—based on a list from SocialBlade, a website that tracks YouTube statistics, as of May 4—are corporate media, meaning owned and funded by large companies or conglomerates. Only six of the 100 top news channels are independently run.

    The top channels encompass journalism from around the world, with only 12 based in the United States, and 81 coming from the Global South. Of the 12 US-based channels, all but two are owned—in whole or in large part—by six parent corporations.

     

    The cable giant Comcast, through its NBCUniversal subsidiary, itself owns four of the 10: NBC (ranked 60th worldwide/8th in the US, with 6.7 million subscribers), Telemundo (ranked 77th/9th, with 5.7 million subscribers), MSNBC (ranked 97th/12th, with 4.9 million subscribers) and a stake in Vox Media (ranked 26th/3rd  with 10.5 million subscribers). Disney owns ABC (ranked 19th/2nd with 13 million subscribers) and a stake in Vice (ranked 51st/6th, with 7.7 million subscribers).

    Warner Bros. Discovery , through its Turner Broadcasting subsidiary,  owns CNN (ranked 15th/1st) with its 13.7 million subscribers.

    National Amusements, through Paramount, owns CBS, which produces Inside Edition (ranked 27th/4th with 10.5 million subscribers). The Murdoch family’s Fox Corporation owns Fox News (ranked 35th/5th with 9.4 million subscribers). Televisa Univision, headquartered in Miami and Mexico City, owns Univision, whose news channel Univision Noticias is ranked 58th/7th, with 6.8 million subscribers.

    The two independent channels are DramaAlert (ranked 78th in the world/10th in the US, with 5.7 million subscribers) and Cenk Uygur’s the Young Turks (ranked 89th/11th, with 5.2 million subscribers). DramaAlert, founded by online troll Daniel M. Keem, aka Keemstar, covers and creates Internet and entertainment controversies. The Young Turks, hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, is a left-wing news commentary channel.

     

    Most Subsribed US YouTube Channels

    Source: Social Blade

    A global platform

    YouTube is a global—and multilingual—platform, and the three countries most represented in the Top 100 news list mirror the three most common nationalities of its user base.

    Half of the 100 most-subscribed YouTube news channels (plus BBC News Hindi, which is based both in Britain and India) are headquartered in India. The US comes in a distant second, with 12 channels on the list (plus Al Jazeera English, which is based in the UK, US and Qatar). Indonesia comes third, with six sources.

    These numbers coincide with the top three leading countries based on YouTube audience size (Statista, 1/22). India (the second-most populous country in the world behind China, where YouTube is blocked) has 467 million YouTube users, followed by the United States (the third-most populous country), which has 240 million users, and Indonesia (the fourth-most populous country) with 127 million users.

    The site’s top 100 news channels represent 18 different languages. The most frequently spoken, either the sole or a major language on 33 channels, was Hindi, the most widely spoken language in India and the fourth-most common language worldwide.  Twenty-nine other channels were entirely or partially in English, including three in Hindi and English, two in Urdu and English, and one in Filipino and English.

    Six channels on the top 100 list were in Indonesian, followed by five in Arabic and five in the South Asian language of Tamil. Four channels each were in Spanish, Thai and Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan. Other languages represented on the list were Bengali, Filipino, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Vietnamese and the Indian languages of Malayalam, Marathi, Odia and Telugu.

    Countries Represented in 100 Most-Subscribed YouTube News Channels

    Source: Social Blade. Al Jazeera English has headquarters in the US, Britain and Qatar, while BBC Hindi has headquarters in both India and Britain, but these channels were counted as Qatar-based and British-based, respectively, based on their government ownership.

     

    Aaj Tak, part of India’s TV Today Network and the New Delhi–based media conglomerate Living Media group, is the platform’s most popular news channel, with 51 million subscribers. The Modi government–friendly conglomerate is associated with several other YouTube channels on the top 100 list:

    • News Tak (ranked 43rd with 8.7 million subscribers)
    • Good News Today (ranked 70th with 6 million subscribers)
    • India Today (ranked 72nd with 5.9 million subscribers)
    • Bharat Tak (ranked 75th with 5.8 million subscribers)
    • Crime Tak (ranked 80th with 5.7 million subscribers)
    • UP Tak (ranked 79th with 5.7 million subscribers)
    • Aaj Tak HD (ranked 90th with 5.2 million subscribers).

    All together, Living Media‘s top YouTube channels have nearly 94 million subscribers.

    Seventy-three of the 88 non-US-based channels on the list are owned by corporations. Two are independent: National Dastak (ranked 73rd with 5.9 million subscribers), an online-only alternative outlet that focuses on marginalized sections of India, and Raffy Tulfo in Action (ranked 5th with 23 million subscribers), a Filipino broadcast journalist whose program focuses on abuses of power against laborers and ordinary citizens.

    Six channels were government-funded, or were the platforms of government figures (such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who ranks 27th on the list with 11 million subscribers.) Two channels were affiliates of the Qatari government–owned Al Jazeera Media Network. Five channels’ affiliations were undetermined.

    Misinformation and sensationalism

    Some channels on the top 100 list are known for misinformation and sensationalism. India’s Aaj Tak, the No. 1 news channel on YouTube, came under fire in 2015 after a leaked video surfaced of a reporter bribing a homeless child to elicit a statement (BuzzFeed, 11/4/15). In 2020, the channel was fined for attributing fabricated tweets to Indian actor Sushant Singh Rajput after his death (New Indian Express, 10/8/20).

    The Indian channel Zee News (No. 4, with 25 million subscribers) has published fabricated stories, including claims that an Indian gangster had billions of dollars worth of property seized in the United Arab Emirates (Janta Ka Reporter, 1/5/17). Thairath Online (No. 12, 14 million subscribers) is the video channel of a Thai tabloid that sparked controversy in 2020, when it referred to the Philippines as “the land of the Covid” (Twitter, 8/10/20). Cidade Alerta Record (No. 98, 4.9 million subscribers) is a sensationalist police and crime program aired on Brazilian Record TV. Misinformation spread on Fox has spanned topics including Covid, climate and the 2020 election (FAIR.org, 10/6/20; Poynter, 7/21/21; FAIR.org, 10/26/21).

    While YouTube offers the possibility for independent sites to reach a wider audience, its most-subscribed news channels remain largely reflective of the corporate biases of the global media landscape as a whole.

     

    The post YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Matt Gertz and Eric K. Ward about the Buffalo massacre and “replacement theory” for the May 20, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220520.mp3

     

    Twitter: Biden ran for president pledging to 'restore the soul of America'

    Twitter (5/17/22)

    Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York, this week. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to replace white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews.

    If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations of this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrific crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

    A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating deeply the structural economic political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual—to demand, not just today, but tomorrow and the next day, meaningful response from powerful people, including, yes, Democrats and Biden and whomever. They would not be accepting that murder, mass murder, in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is ultimately just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

    We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America. He’s been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson and their impact on US politics for years now.

    And we’ll also speak with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place.

    That’s coming up this week on CounterSpin, brought to you each week by FAIR, the national media watch group.

    ***

    Twitter: Noting that in AP copy, 18-yeear-old Michael Brown was an “18-year old Black man,” while 18-year-old Payton Gendron is a “white teenager.”

    Twitter (5/15/22)

    Janine Jackson: There are some tropes about corporate news media that you wonder if people even wonder at them anymore. Did you catch that when Michael Brown was killed by law enforcement at age 18 in Ferguson, Missouri, AP described him as a “Black man,” but the white 18-year-old who killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket because it was in a Black neighborhood and he’s a racist, AP instructs readers to understand as a “teenager.”

    That language-level bias is meaningful. But in the case of the racist hate-based crime of this past week, the media question is also writ very large. I will surprise no one by saying that Fox News and primetime host Tucker Carlson see there is no relationship whatsoever in the Buffalo killer’s explicit reference to the same white replacement theory that they have been pushing for years, and his acting in response to those ideas that, again, they have pushed night after night with vigor. At a certain point the rest of US civil society pretending that white supremacy is not a central factor in our conversation and our politics becomes a dangerously willful ignorance.

    Our next guest has been surveying this swamp and its meaning and its impact for years now. Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

    Matt Gertz: Thank you for having me.

    JJ: Depending on which day of the week you ask me, frankly, I have different thoughts about how and whether to respond to people—in media, but also in life—who are saying, without defending this mass murder, that when people talk about immigration, they’re not saying to hurt people. “Immigration,” “demographic shifts”—that’s just language. It seems important to acknowledge, when you hear a Fox News host talking about “demographic shifts,” it’s not a wild interpretive leap to say that they’re actually calling for some sort of action. You’ve been talking about those connections for years now, right?

    MG: I have been, yes. I’ve been working at Media Matters in some capacity or another for almost 14 years, and in that time, I’ve spent much of my career surveying Fox News and the various threads that run through it. And I have to say, in the speed and completeness with which a white supremacist conspiracy theory took hold on the nation’s most popular cable news network, it’s really quite astounding.

    When we talk about the great replacement theory, I think we’re often talking about a couple of different things. The US has, obviously, a long history of xenophobia. America is sort of a competition between our best ideals, in which we imagine that we can bring new people into our body politic and all be Americans together—and backlash that comes against that, that came against the Irish and the Italians and Eastern European Jews, and so on and so forth down through the decades, the fearmongering, the idea that “the other” is joining America in a way that spoils it, that in some way makes it dirtier. So there’s that long story.

    More recently, though, the great replacement is a very particular conspiracy theory, that builds on those long hatreds. And this is the idea that there is some shadowy force that is deliberately bringing in unchecked immigrants, an invasion of them. And the purpose of that is to replace the white populace, and in doing so, gain and retain power. That is a very dangerous phrasing; the idea of replacing one race with another is something that, almost by definition, seems to require some sort of active response to it.

    JJ: Right. Some people belong to be here. If you say “replacement,” that means people being pushed out who are rightfully here by, implicitly, people who are not rightfully here.

    Matt Gertz

    Matt Gertz: “Tucker [Carlson] made it his mission to bring this white supremacist conspiracy theory into the mainstream, to sanitize it just a little bit.”

    MG: Yes. And so this was an idea that, in its recent form, popped over from Europe in 2011. It’s this essay by a Frenchman who wrote in 2011 that French society, white French society, was going to be replaced by Muslim immigrants. And that idea was sort of ported over across the sea to America and, when it was incorporated into the standard white supremacist discourse here, the people who were bringing about this replacement were often described as Jews, and anti-Black racism, obviously, took on a key role. Anti-Black racism, anti-Latino racism, and it took on more of a racial character than the religious one that it had over in France.

    At first, this was largely confined to explicit white supremacist spaces. It’s the sort of thing you’d read if you were on the neo-Nazi Stormfront website, or something like that. It was really kept out of mainstream discourse.

    But it’s not anymore. It’s really everywhere. And the reason for that is Tucker Carlson and Fox News. Tucker made it his mission to bring this white supremacist conspiracy theory into the mainstream, to sanitize it just a little bit so you could get it on the air without it being incredibly obvious what he was doing.

    He started doing this around 2018, and over the years he’s become more and more explicit in his language, until it’s really not different at all from the manifesto that that shooter put out. You don’t have to read that manifesto; it’s not pleasant reading. But you can also get much of the same material if you just turn on Fox News. The conspiracy theory is recited almost on a nightly basis for an audience of millions of people.

    JJ: It’s so meaningful, and I think that CounterSpin listeners know that there are such worldviews and ideologies at work, and that sometimes they’re given platform, and that sometimes others are marginalized. But I think that listeners do understand that this supposedly ideological battle is being fought out in a context of corporate capitalism.

    And Tucker Carlson didn’t put up a lemonade stand and become a millionaire because his lemonade is better. He’s supported and held up and pushed in front of people by a system and a structure that, if we can’t say they wanted him there, we can certainly say they’re happy with him being sustained there. And I just wonder, how do we try to move the conversation from, you know, this twerp with his dumb ideas, to what we could actually push on to change, to push aside the interest in maintaining this kind of fountain of harm and hatred?

    Fox: The Dem Agenda Relies on Demographic Change

    Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21)

    MG: You’re certainly right that he is not some sort of lone actor. He is in his position because Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch want him there, and he is doing, frankly, his job. He’s doing exactly what the Fox News brass wants him to do. They want his blood-soaked conspiracy theories. If they didn’t, they could stop him.

    You know, it’s always sort of unclear whether they’re doing it because they have an affinity with what he’s saying, whether they agree with him, or if they’re simply doing it purely for money. But if they’re doing it for the money, I think that the option available is to try to remove the profitability of Tucker Carlson, for Americans to tell advertisers: “We don’t want you advertising on Fox News. They’re promoting hate and bigotry and, frankly, domestic terrorism.” To tell cable carriers we want an option not to have a bundle that includes Fox News, so that we don’t give them our money every month when we pay our cable bills. That’s really the leverage point, making it not profitable for Fox News to have this kind of hate on its airwaves.

    JJ: I think it’s a big thing to say; part of what we’re critiquing at FAIR is corporate ownership and sponsorship of media, and the leverage that they exert. But given that they exert that leverage, well, exert it, you know?

    I’ll just ask you, finally, because I know it’s the latest thing, “upfronts,” those are places where outlets talk to advertisers and talk to media buyers, and they talk to stockholders and that sort of thing. That kind of behind-the-scenes conversation is where we heard Les Moonves of CBS say, “Donald Trump is bad for America, but he’s good for CBS. So let’s do it.” We just had upfronts for Fox two days ago. No indication there that they are thinking, “Oh, my gosh, people were just murdered based on ideas we’re putting out there. Let’s think about that.” That was not the vibe.

    MG: To the contrary, to some extent, they were rubbing a lot of this in the faces of the advertisers. I mean, the timing for them is really, obviously, quite bad. They were holding this conference, bringing in the nation’s leading advertisers and media buyers, 48 hours after a mass shooting in which the shooter repeated the same talking points that you can hear on Fox News any given night.

    And so they did not talk about Tucker Carlson, I think quite deliberately, at that event. But the person that they had instead flacking for the company was Pete Hegseth, who is another Fox News host who has said that there’s a full-scale invasion of migrants coming to your backyard. Much of the same replacement theory languages as Carlson does, but he’s also one of the network’s biggest defenders of the January 6 insurrection.

    And then there were no apologies, obviously, for Fox News from the Fox News lineup. In fact, they seemed quite clear that they want to brand themselves as victims, that facing criticism in the way that they have is somehow unfair and unjust to them.

    So they are clearly not giving advertisers much to work with, other than to accept that if they continue funding this network, then what they’re doing is giving money for white supremacist propaganda.

    JJ: And we’re gonna end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz. He’s senior fellow at Media Matters for America. They keep receipts on this sort of thing, and you can find them online at MediaMatters.org. Matt Gertz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    MG: Thank you for having me.

    ***

    Janine Jackson: You may have heard the Buffalo mass shooting described as “senseless,” and in some ways that is true, but in other ways, less so. Because we know the man who killed 10 people and wounded three others was armed, not just with military gear and weaponry, but with a particular set of ideas about white people like himself in existential peril, and that these ideas in various forms are being promulgated in an alarming number of places today.

    It’s not about trying to “read the mind” of a murderer, but thinking about what systems and institutions and ideas contribute to such a horrific act, and what different things need to happen to prevent its recurrence.

    Our guest has been working on these issues for many years now. Eric K. Ward is a senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and executive director of Western States Center. He was the 2021 recipient of the Train Foundation’s Civil Courage Award, the first American to receive that honor. He joins us now by phone from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Ward.

    Eric K. Ward: Such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me. I’m sorry that it is around yet another tragedy.

    JJ: Absolutely. Well, I think that a lot of people have avoided learning about this stuff. It’s toxic and upsetting, and why give it space in your head, you know? So with the acknowledgement that knowing about the particular fear and anger that, by his own account, drove this man’s violent actions, that’s not the same thing as appeasing it. So acknowledging that, what should we know about white replacement theory and the worldview that it offers?

    Eric K. Ward

    Eric K. Ward: “Replacement theory…is a story that teaches that a secret elite are at war to destroy white Christian America.”

    EKW: We have to understand that, at the end of the day, there’s another social movement on the terrain of America, and it is not one grounded in the inclusion of racial, environmental and economic social justice groups. It is one that is grounded in exclusion and ethnic cleansing, and it’s known as white nationalism. White nationalism has a narrative, and that narrative is called the replacement theory. It is a story that teaches that a secret elite are at war to destroy white Christian America, through immigration, through interracial dating, through expanding civil rights for the LGBTQ community, the list goes on.

    But we should all be clear that replacement theory is merely a retelling of an old antisemitic narrative called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forged antisemitic document by Russian Czarist police from 1903. It’s the same story; it tells a story of a secret Jewish conspiracy seeking to destroy European Christendom. And it was brought here to America by Henry Ford, proliferated to tens of thousands of Americans. It was used to try to explain why white segregationists lost against the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s. And today, it’s being called replacement theory, and it’s being used to justify racial terror of Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and others.

    But not only is it being driven by the white nationalist movement: Irresponsibly, there are cynical elected officials who are promoting and credentializing this antisemitic theory, and it’s not only killing Jews, it is killing all of us. And we have now lost ten more people from the Black community from this racial terror, and it’s time for us to understand that we are fighting antisemitism.

    JJ: I think sometimes the conversation gets divided according to victims, and then it can make it difficult to see the overarching thing. And so I think when some people hear you, they’re going to say, “Antisemitism? This is about racism.” But it’s important to see the connections of those two streams.

    EKW: That’s right. We, as Black people, have always faced the brunt of all forms of bigotry in American society, along with indigenous communities, we have always been victimized by racism. But we have to be sophisticated enough, particularly those of us on the left, racial justice leaders, we have to be honest with our communities and help them understand what is happening.

    The attacks on Latinos in El Paso in the Walmart that occurred in August of 2019, the targeting of Latinos at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in 2019, the targeting of Jews at the Tree of Life, the targeting of African Americans in 2015 in Charleston. Yes, these were anti-Latino, these were anti-Black, these were attacks on Jews. But in all of those cases, and in many more, they were driven by this antisemitic narrative.

    And we have to let our people know that we are being targeted because of antisemitism. It doesn’t take away from the racism. It doesn’t take away from the xenophobia that Latinos and Asians are facing this community. It is merely helping us understand where the driver is, and if we can disrupt the driver, perhaps we can begin to turn the violence around.

    The Intercept on Les Moonves

    CBS chief Les Moonves in the Intercept (12/10/15)

    JJ: Attention right now is focused, with reason, on Fox News, and Tucker Carlson, and folks who had explicitly talked up white replacement theory for a long time, though apparently Fox has gone very quiet on it just now.

    But we’ve also seen establishment media fail to really be anti-racist and fail to vigorously defend inclusive democracy, as well as kind of a general framework that does tend to present political issues as zero sum. And then again, when Les Moonves said, “Donald Trump might be bad for America, but he’s good for CBS. So keep going, Donald.” That was just dereliction of duty, as far as I’m concerned.

    But as you have just indicated, we know there are more people who oppose this hateful worldview then support it. We know that, although it’s hard not to focus on horrific acts and hate crimes, we know that most people actually support the idea of participatory democracy and inclusive democracy and anti-racism. So I guess my question is just, what do you think is necessary to grow that movement, where’s the energy that we could present in that direction?

    EKW: There is absolutely a pro-democracy movement that is building in the United States. But it’s going to take a broad coalition, meaning lasting progressive movements, and leaders in the United States are going to have to come to terms with what it means to sit in broad coalition with others who may not be progressive or liberal. I’m not talking about some kind of mediocre, Kumbaya, “we’re going to get along and ignore our differences.” It means recognizing that there has to be a broad-based social movement that supports democracy and the functioning rule of law in the United States. And I think there are some things that folks can specifically do.

    So the first is simply this. The first is you have to begin to name that you are part of that pro-democracy movement in this country. “I’m in a pro-democracy movement that opposes authoritarians, that is opposed to bigoted and political violence, and demands that government step up and do its job, that it be of the people.” So that’s the first thing that needs to happen.

    The second is this pro-democracy movement needs to take media accountability, and that includes social media platforms, seriously. We have places like Fox News Entertainment openly promoting an antisemitic theory that has been used in targeting minority communities across this country. Yes, shame on Fox News. But shame on the FCC, shame on the Federal Trade Commission, and shame on the Department of Justice for allowing that to happen without accountability and without consequence. Shame on international businesses who are engaging in business and commerce in United States on the blood of minorities, across this country, who have been attacked over the last five years. Shame on law enforcement for putting ideology ahead of its mission to protect and serve.

    JJ: I just want to ask you one final question, which is, I know that you are a musician, and it sounds trite, but it’s true that music and culture can be healing, and can bring people together. And if you have thoughts on that space, I’d just be happy to hear them.

    EKW: Yes, every musician and artist that is listening right now, if you work in art, if you work within music, your voice and your energy is needed more than ever. We aren’t hearing real stories on social media; we’re being manipulated through algorithm, and we need the stories to be told. And stories get told also through music and through art. And it’s time for artists to tell the real story of America, one that wants to move forward together. We need artists to tell the stories that won’t get told during these times, that keep us moving forward and give us hope.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Eric K. Ward from Southern Poverty Law Center and Western States Center. Thank you so much, Eric Ward, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    EKW: Thank you.

     

    The post ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Igor Volsky on Ending Gun Violence, Pat Elder on Junior ROTC

     

    CBS depiction of Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signing a bill criminalizing abortion with a sign reading 'Life Is a Human Right'

    CBS (5/26/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is a human right.” Welcome, as they say, to America—where these ideas are presented as somehow of a piece, where news media tell us day after day how exceptionally good and worthy we are, the world’s policeman and a global beacon for human rights and the good life.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in horror. BBC‘s North America editor explained to its audience that there is no expectation of anything being done to prevent things like the latest (as far as we know, as we record on May 26) mass murder in the US, because “the  argument over guns has simply become too politically divisive and culturally entrenched to allow for meaningful change.”

    Flashpoint depiction of memorial at Robb Elementary School

    Flashpoint (5/26/22)

    Reporter Eoin Higgins interviewed teachers around the country, who reported the psychological toll of not only actual shootings, but constant drills and lockdowns, on children, who, they said, “have largely given up on a better future.”  Teachers feel expendable and unvalued; it’s hardly lost on them that the same forces accusing them of poisoning children with curricula are also demanding they step between those children and a bullet.

    That powers that be in this country have responded to school shootings not by toughening gun laws, but by loosening them, and responded to the failure of law enforcement to prevent such shootings by calling for more police. It’s a particularly demoralizing combination of devastating and unsurprising—from a country that promotes and perpetrates violence around the globe. As a response to violence, we try violence time after time.

    There doesn’t seem to be anything new to say right now about gun violence in the US. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep saying the things we know—more loudly, more unapologetically and in more places.

    New Press: Guns Down

    New Press (2019)

    As we record, we hear that students at schools across the country are walking out, in an effort to say simply, “We refuse to go on like this.” We owe them our action and effort, no matter how tired or disgusted or defeated we feel.

    We revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture this week on the show. In March of last year we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, about the possibility of passing common-sense legislation and misunderstandings about the power of the gun lobby.

          CounterSpin220527Volsky.mp3

     

    Navy Junior ROTC cadetAnd then: There are always multiple issues involved in a mass murder; elite media use the complexity as an excuse to simply trade accusatory explanations, and determine that in the interest of balance, nothing can be done. But if we’re concerned about young people getting high-grade weaponry and thinking it’d be cool to use it, maybe one thing to consider would be the government-sponsored program that gives young people high-grade weapons and tells them it’d be cool to use it? We spoke in 2018 about Junior ROTC—a feature at my high school, and maybe yours too—with Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which resists the militarization of schools, and author of Military Recruiting in the United States.

          CounterSpin220527Elder.mp3

     

    The post Igor Volsky on Ending Gun Violence, Pat Elder on Junior ROTC appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Press Makes Trump, Not Voting Rights, the Primary Issue

     

    WaPo: Kemp, Raffensperger win in blow to Trump and his false election claims

    The Washington Post (5/24/22) reported that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s GOP primary win “threatened Trump’s reputation as GOP kingmaker.”

    The country’s centrist corporate media have decided what this year’s primaries are mainly about: Donald Trump.

    In the wake of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and continued efforts by the Republican Party to undermine democratic processes, corporate media remain fixated on Trump’s role in the party, seeing the 2022 primaries as a series of referenda on Trump and his role as kingmaker. But the focus on Trump obscures the even more important story that Trump represents: the GOP assault on democracy, which is being carried out only marginally less aggressively by many of those “defeating” him.

    Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is the perfect example of this. After this week’s state primaries, most corporate media made their lead story the losses of Trump-backed candidates, in particular to Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who both played very public roles in refusing to bow to Trump’s demands to “find” votes for him in Georgia in 2020.

    The Washington Post (5/24/22) declared, “Kemp, Raffensperger Win in Blow to Trump and His False Election Claims.” A New York Times (5/24/22) subhead read, “The victories in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, handed the former president his biggest primary season setback so far.” At Reuters (5/24/22), the top “takeaway” subhead read: “Trump Takes Lumps.”

    These are stories centrist media like to tell: The voters are sensibly rejecting extremists from their party, so the “moderate” candidates are taking the right path. Journalists tell this story over and over in coverage of Democratic primaries, with “move to the center” stories encouraging the party to reject its progressive candidates. The problem is, candidates like Kemp and Raffensperger are not moderate, except in comparison to Trump—and painting the story as one centrally about Trump obscures the anti-democratic nature of those who defeated his hand-picked candidates.

    Boston Globe: Kemp Cruises to Victory in Georgia, Delaing Blow to Trump but Not His Voter Fraud Lies

    The Boston Globe (5/24/22) noted that “Kemp had not beaten back the 2020 doubts of voters [who thought that election “stolen”]; he simply found a different way to champion them than Trump.”

    The Boston Globe demonstrated that this contradiction could be addressed, with an article (5/24/22) headlined, “Kemp Cruises to Victory in Georgia, Dealing Blow to Trump but Not His Voter Fraud Lies.”

    The Globe‘s Jess Bidgood reported:

    Kemp’s easy win over Perdue on Tuesday may seem to suggest that the former president and his baseless insistence that fraud and irregularities cost him the election have lost their iron grip on the Republican Party….

    Even though he stood up to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp found other ways to assuage the GOP base’s unfounded doubts about the issue. He signed a voting bill that added new hurdles to absentee voting and handed some election oversight power over to the Republican-controlled legislature. He spoke of “election integrity” everywhere he went, while Raffensperger leaned into the issue as well.

    But even this didn’t go nearly far enough in describing Kemp and Raffensperger’s histories of attacking voting rights. As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp for years vigorously promoted false election fraud stories and made Georgia a hotspot for undermining voting rights. He aggressively investigated groups that helped register voters of color; in 2014, he launched a criminal investigation into Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project—which was helping to register tens of thousands of Black Georgians who previously hadn’t voted—calling their activities “voter fraud.” His investigation ultimately uncovered no wrongdoing (New Republic, 5/5/15).

    Kemp oversaw the rejection of tens of thousands of voter registrations on technicalities like missing accents or typos (Atlantic, 11/7/18) and improperly purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls prior to the 2018 election (Rolling Stone, 10/27/18), disproportionately impacting voters of color (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 3/12/20). He refused to recuse himself from overseeing his own race for governor against Abrams, drawing rebukes from former president, Georgia native and fair elections advocate Jimmy Carter (The Nation, 10/29/18), among others. Kemp ran that governor’s race as a “Trump conservative.”

    None of Kemp’s history as anti–voting rights secretary of state was mentioned in any of the next-day election coverage FAIR surveyed. (There was an opinion piece on CNN.com on May 26 that detailed “Kemp’s appalling anti-democracy conduct.”)

    As governor, Kemp has further eroded voting rights in Georgia, as mentioned by the Globe (a story that the media managed to both-sides at the time—FAIR.org, 4/8/21). He has also taken a hard-right stance on many other rights issues, signing into law a bill to prohibit “divisive concepts” from being taught in schools, a bill to ban abortions as early as six weeks and a bill discriminating against transgender kids in sports.

    Like Kemp, Raffensperger was an early supporter of Trump who pushed election fraud stories and voter suppression tactics. As FAIR (3/5/21) pointed out at the time, centrist media fawned over Raffensperger for standing up to Trump in the 2020 election, ignoring his “support of the little lies that made the Big Lie possible.”

    AJC: A principled stand where it counts

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1/4/21) editorialized that Georgia Secretary of State Brad “Raffensperger deserves kudos from all Georgians for continuing a principled stand for what is right,” weeks after reporting (12/17/20) that “the secretary has helped fuel suspicions about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”

    For instance, just weeks before an uncritical editorial (1/4/21) praising him, the local Journal-Constitution published a front-page investigation (12/17/20) that found Raffensperger was touting “inflated figures about the number of investigations his office was conducting related to the election, giving those seeking to sow doubt in the outcome a new storyline.” Those claims helped propel the state’s 2020 bill restricting voting rights.

    Like Kemp, he launched vote fraud investigations into progressive voter registration groups (AJC, 11/30/20), and oversaw the purge of nearly 200,000 voters, mostly people of color, from the rolls before the 2020 election (Democracy Now!, 1/5/21).

    During his re-election campaign, Raffensperger had gone on national television (CBS, 1/9/22) to push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting noncitizens from voting in any elections, as well as to praise photo ID requirements for voting and oppose same-day voter registration. He has also called for an expansion of law enforcement presence at polling sites.

    In their obsession with Trump’s win/loss record and their desperate search for “moderate” Republicans, journalists whitewash GOP candidates who paved the way for Trumpism and, ultimately, seek the same end—minority rule—by only slightly different means.

    Featured image: Reuters (5/24/22) depiction of Donald Trump illustrating the takeaway, “Trump Takes Lumps.”

    The post Press Makes Trump, Not Voting Rights, the Primary Issue appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • New York’s Chait Quietly Defended Charter Program That Benefited His Spouse’s Employer

     

    New York: Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools

    Jonathan Chait (New York, 5/12/22)defended the Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program–without mentioning that this program has given millions to the employers of Chait’s spouse, Robin Chait.

    It’s getting harder and harder for New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait to argue he’s exempt from ethical disclosure norms when writing about education.

    In his latest article on the topic, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools” (5/12/22), Chait claimed that the current administration is abandoning the governmental commitment to the Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which directs around $440 million annually toward public charters.

    Left unsaid, and not for the first time, is that the well-known liberal blogger’s wife, Robin Chait, works with charter-boosting nonprofit WestEd. At the research nonprofit, according to her LinkedIn, she  “support[s] education organizations in increasing equitable opportunities for students served by charter schools or through school choice policies and programs”—and the organization has benefited from the very program Jonathan Chait was defending, receiving contracts worth millions.

    Chait’s lack of disclosure about his spouse’s work when writing about teachers unions and charter schools has been a point of contention for years. Critics charge that by declining to disclose his family’s financial interest in the charter industry, the writer is giving his audience an incomplete picture of the context behind his articles; he has retorted that his position as an opinion journalist exempts him from disclosure, a position shared by his editors at Vox Media and New York.

    Given the ethical questions raised by his latest foray into the charter school debate, however, Chait’s immunity from journalistic standards is even harder to justify.

    Glaring hypocrisy

    In last week’s essay—another in a long line of pro-charter, anti–teachers union pieces he has written over the years—Chait railed against the Biden administration for adding restrictions to the DoE funding and requiring a more collaborative approach with existing school districts. The merits of this pro-charter argument aside, it’s clearly advocating in favor of the charter school industry and promoting its ability to compete with existing public school programs.

    In a glaring moment of hypocrisy, Chait attacked DoE for directing a reporter from the education outlet Chalkbeat to the Network for Public Education, given what he saw as an obvious conflict of interest:

    The Network for Public Education is a militant anti-charter group that takes funding from teachers unions (a fact Chalkbeat’s neutral story did not mention). Outsourcing your response to that group is essentially confessing that you are turning over charter-school funding regulation policy to the teachers unions.

    Nestled in this attack on the NPE is what could, possibly, be considered a disclosure. Chait included a hover-over-superscript disclosure in the text, not there unless you look for it. But the note reads more as an angry diatribe about why Chait shouldn’t disclose his spouse’s role in charter-boosting:

    My wife works as an analyst for a nonprofit education consulting organization that is not involved in policy advocacy. I’ve found that when I mention this in my articles, critics take it as a confession of a conflict of interest, even though it isn’t—not by any rational standard, and certainly not by the existing standard, which allows institutions and commenters who take funding from interested parties like the teachers unions to never disclose their funding sources. To make the point about my wife’s employer more clearly: It has repeatedly expressed its preference that I do not write about education policy. By writing about education here and in other columns, I am defying, not advancing, the interests and desires of my wife’s employer.

    It’s hard to imagine a reason WestEd wouldn’t want Jonathan to write about education other than it being a conflict of interest. Yet the issue is not whether or not WestEd, or even Robin Chait herself, wants Jonathan Chait to write about education policy. The issue is whether or not Chait should disclose the connection in the first place–and in the proper text of the article, rather than a hyperlinked footnote requiring the reader to take multiple extra steps.

    Chait’s understanding of what a “rational standard” of disclosure or “existing standard” of disclosure aside, there is in fact a very clear delineation of what counts as a violation laid out in the “Ethics and Guidelines” of Vox Media, the parent company of New York:

    Any editorial team member or contributors will be recused from a story and/or publicly disclose conflicts of interest when editorially appropriate. This may include a personal or family relationship, personal financial investment or relevant political activity.

    Undisclosed connections

    Diane Ravitch's Blog: What Jonathan Chait Forgot to Mention in His Latest Defense of the Charter Industry

    Diane Ravitch’s Blog (5/13/22): “This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet.“

    NPE executive director Carol Burris, in a post on fellow education expert Diane Ravitch’s blog (5/13/22), laid out a convincing case that Chait’s latest article oversteps even the limited disclosure he had put in the article’s footnote aside:

    Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

    His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for WestEd, which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, WestEd, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

    FAIR’s research confirmed—and expanded upon—those claims.

    WestEd, where Robin Chait has worked since October 2018, has received CSP funding from the Department of Education, most notably an open grant that’s already paid out $8.1 million to evaluate CSP and work with grantees. The contract, issued in September 2020, is one of a number of high-value DOE grants received by WestEd.

    WestEd: Robin Chait

    Robin Chait’s WestEd bio

    WestEd itself makes the connection between Robin Chait’s work and the CSP crystal clear in her company bio:

    Chait’s primary responsibility is managing WestEd’s work on the National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC), a partnership with Manhattan Strategy Group, funded by the US Department of Education. The NSCRC provides technical assistance to grantees of the federal Charter Schools Program and develops tools and resources for charter sector stakeholders.

    “Saying ‘my wife works for a nonprofit’ is irrelevant when there is a link to the commentary,” Burris told FAIR:

    That is like saying, “My wife works for a pharmaceutical company,” rather than “My wife works for the pharmaceutical company that evaluates the efficacy of drug X,” when the commentary is about drug X.

    Robin Chait’s time at Center City Charter Schools, where she worked before WestEd, coincided with at least two grants from the CSP, the same office that Jonathan defended in his piece. The CSP gave Center City two grants during Chait’s 2013–18 time with the school: $194,435 for 2013–15 and $172,880 from 2017–19. While Chait’s LinkedIn resumé lists her work at the charter as directing “recruitment, hiring, onboarding, compensation and employee retention/relations for a charter network of six campuses that serves about 1,400 students,” her daughter, in a Slate interview from 2018 (3/5/18), said that Robin Chait “does a ton of grant-writing for them, too.”

    “She likely was the person who applied for the school’s CSP grant,” Burris said.

    Perplexing refusal

    Such overlap with Robin Chait’s work seems like a clear example of the kind of conflict of interest that would, at the very least, necessitate a disclosure. But Jonathan Chait disagrees. In his newsletter on May 13, which he personally emailed to this reporter with the note, “Thought you’d like to see this,” the New York blogger wrote that he shouldn’t have to disclose, in part because “many journalists have spouses who work in politics or government, and whose work would be impacted in some way by changes to policy,” and “those roles are essentially never disclosed.”

    Whether or not this is true is, of course, immaterial to whether Chait should disclose his spouse’s position in an upfront and clear manner during his reporting on charters. In FAIR’s prior report (11/17/20) on Chait’s lack of disclosure, SPJ Ethics Committee member Andy Schotz said he was perplexed by the writer’s frequent refusal to disclose his wife’s job while writing pro-charter and anti–teachers union pieces.

    “If he’s writing advocacy that’s his personal opinion, that’s not covering it in a neutral way and doesn’t absolve him of the responsibility,” Schotz told FAIR at the time. “Disclosure is the easy way to avoid that.”

    Since that article, Chait’s record on disclosure has continued to be spotty. He declined to mention his wife’s position in the industry in a number of articles attacking teachers unions and/or boosting charters (2/4/21, 8/3/21, 1/17/22, 3/21/22), and when he did mention her position (1/5/21), downplayed it: “Her current role is with a nonprofit organization, consulting for and providing technical assistance to schools and state education bodies.”

    One has only to look at the comment section any time Chait writes about education to see the damage the lack of disclosure has done to his and New York’s reputation on the topic. Over and over again, his readers cite the conflict of interest as a reason not to take anything he writes on education seriously.

    Ultimately, no newsroom is subject to enforceable regulations around ethical disclosure. It’s solely at Vox Media’s discretion whether or not Chait should disclose his connection to the industry he regularly uses his platform to promote.

    But if New York, and Jonathan Chait himself, want to be taken seriously on education, disclosure is the least they can do.

    Featured image: Jonathan Chait appearing on C-SPAN (12/28/16).

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to New York magazine at comments@nymag.com, or via Twitter @NYmag. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

    The post New York’s Chait Quietly Defended Charter Program That Benefited His Spouse’s Employer appeared first on FAIR.

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  • Polling on Abortion Opinion Misses How Much Would Be Tossed Out With Roe

     

    ABC Poll: Abortion Attitudes

    Polls like ABC‘s (4/28/22) showing widespread opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade probably understate the unpopularity of Samuel Alito’s draft opinion.

    Politico on May 2 released Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft abortion position, signed by four additional justices, that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

    In the wake of that revelation, numerous media articles have reported on polls measuring the public’s opposition to overturning Roe (for example, see here, here, here and here). As Democratic pollster Mark Mellman reports in The Hill (5/11/22), on average the polls show that about two-thirds of the public want Roe to stand, about three in ten want to see it overturned.

    Other polls look at whether the public says that most or all abortions should be legal, or most or all abortions should be illegal. The results there are typical of this poll by ABC News (4/28/22), which found 58% saying legal, 37% illegal.

    Yet those numbers, and many of the stories and the polls, miss the larger point, and underestimate the true level of opposition to what the Supreme Court may rule.

    For example, an analysis by Blake Hounshell in the New York Times (5/10/22) noted:

    Polling shows that abortion rights are popular. But the answers depend heavily on how the questions are worded. The public often shows conflicting impulses: Americans approve of Roe by large margins, but also approve of restrictions that seem to conflict with it.

    The issue with the Supreme Court decision, however, is not just that it overturns Roe, nor that many people approve of Roe but also approve of restrictions inconsistent with it.

    The Alito draft does not just overturn the main finding of Roe, that women generally have a right to an abortion in the first six months of pregnancy (until “viability”). Alito’s draft reasoning goes beyond that, denying that pregnant people have any rights under any circumstances to terminate a pregnancy, except those explicitly granted to them by the state.

    WaPo: Alito’s draft opinion would imperil far more than he’s letting on

    David Von Drehle (Washington Post, 5/3/22): “Will there be any limit to the steps a state can take to enforce proper care and delivery of each fetus? Alito suggests this is a question for the Americans of 1868 to answer.”

    As David Von Drehle wrote in the Washington Post (5/3/22):

    Roe focused on the rights of doctors to treat patients. Planned Parenthood v. Casey put the emphasis where it properly belongs: on the rights of women. At heart, Casey asks: Does government have unlimited authority to force a woman to carry an unwanted fetus? Casey answers: No.

    Alito would say yes—defining an “undue burden” on a woman’s freedom is too difficult; therefore, all burdens may be acceptable. Left unclear is the answer to an obvious next question: What else can a woman be forced to do?

    Von Drehle pointed out that abortion rights are derived from a series of Supreme Court rulings in the past century that are based on a right to privacy, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution but underlying protections provided in the First, Fourth, Ninth and 14th amendments. These include rights of parents to raise their children without undue interference from the government, of people to marry whomever they choose, of married couples—and eventually single people as well—to use contraception. But as Von Drehle noted:

    Though he claims otherwise, Alito would orphan all those rights with his would-be ruling. For he asserts that no zone of privacy exists around family matters unless it is expressed explicitly in the Constitution, or was plainly recognized at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

    Alito would authorize any state legislature to criminalize the abortion of an hour-old zygote by a 12-year-old rape victim. This is not hyperbole; at least 10 states have already passed antiabortion laws with no exception for rape or incest.

    Given the impact of the proposed Supreme Court decision, the standard polling questions on abortion are mostly beside the point. One relevant question to ask the public is this:

    Do you favor or oppose a Supreme Court decision that would allow states to criminalize all abortions, regardless of incest, rape or the health of the mother?

    No polling organization has asked that specific question. But last month, ABC News (4/28/22) asked, “Do you think abortions should be legal or illegal when the mother’s physical health is endangered.” Just 12% said illegal; 82% said legal.

    Public opinion against the pending Supreme Court decision is likely even more lopsided than what most poll stories report. The margin of opposition to what Alito’s draft would allow appears as high as seven to one, and it could be greater.

    Pollsters and the news media should make that clear.

    The post Polling on Abortion Opinion Misses How Much Would Be Tossed Out With Roe appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Matt Gertz, Eric K. Ward on the Buffalo Massacre & ‘Replacement Theory’

     

    Fox: The Dem Agenda Relies on Demographic Change

    Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

    A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

    We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now.

          CounterSpin220520Gertz.mp3

     

    And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Policy Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place.

          CounterSpin220520Ward.mp3

     

    The post Matt Gertz, Eric K. Ward on the Buffalo Massacre & ‘Replacement Theory’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘We Live in an Economy That Provides Little Support to New Parents’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Popular Information‘s Tesnim Zekeria about baby formula shortages  for the May 13, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220513Zekeria.mp3

     

    Popular Information: The baby formula shortage and the twisted priorities of the American economy

    Popular Info (5/12/22)

    Janine Jackson: According to research cited by our next guest, the national out-of-stock rate for baby formula reached 43% last week. It’s a story that should shock the conscience: people driving for hours to get to a place where they can possibly buy the food that their baby needs, or paying insane markup rates to people who are exploiting the shortage to price-gouge.

    The question is what do we do with that shock? One Texas newspaper responded with a no doubt well-intentioned op-ed beginning with the declaration that there “are some things that shouldn’t happen in America, and the shortage of baby formula we’re seeing now is one of them.”

    Well, it’s past time to explore the implication that anything inhumane or harmful in this country must be an aberration, and that surely getting US institutions back to their roots, or back on track, would solve things.

    We have, many of us, caught on to the fact that systems not designed for a multiracial democracy, or for super-powerful corporate actors—at this point, they’re part of the problem and not part of the solution, and so a conversation about how to reorient or replace those institutions is one of the most significant conversations that journalists could possibly host or encourage or platform right now. That we don’t see that is not about journalism itself, but just about journalism as it’s usually done.

    On, in particular, the baby formula story, we’re joined now with a different way of doing reporting on it by Tesnim Zekeria, researcher with Popular Information. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tesnim Zekeria.

    Tesnim Zekeria: Hi, Janine. Thanks for having me.

    JJ: So you’re a reporter presented with a reality, an important reality, but, you know, you can take it as “supply chain shortage,” or you can take it as “people are unable to feed their children.”

    It seems to matter, the prism that you bring to a story, the way you report it. So I just wonder, where do you even start, as a reporter, in terms of what you think people need to know when they’re confronted with a problem, which a lot of folks just kind of woke up to and read in the paper: “Oh my goodness. There’s a shortage of baby formula.” Where do you start?

    TZ: Yeah, that’s a great question. So first, there are immediate things that you can point to as reasons that explain why supplies are low.

    So for instance, as you mentioned, supply chain disruptions; we’ve seen this across many industries. But then, you also have a contamination problem at Abbott, which is one of the largest baby formula manufacturers. And in February of this year, the FDA issued a guidance, warning consumers to avoid certain Abbott formula products from the company, following the death of two infants, I believe, and I think two others were also hospitalized.

    But those are just pieces to the story. There’s also the reality that we live in an economy, and live in a government, that really provides little to no support or protection to new parents, and children, for that matter. So I think when you’re also looking into these stories, it’s important to look and ask the question of who is really being impacted by this the most, and research shows that it’s really low-income families who rely on formula, as well as families with babies who have special needs, that need these products the most, and unfortunately have been hit the hardest.

    JJ: It’s interesting, because you’ll see outlets, like the Washington Post, saying “US Baby Formula Shortage Leaves Parents Scrambling: Low-Income and Rural Parents Most at Risk, Experts and Organizations Say.”

    There’s no part of that that’s a lie; it’s all true. But to me, I don’t know, it just speaks to a number of failings. First of all, yeah. Yeah, a lack of formula is going to leave parents scrambling, and yes, the people who are low-income and rural and outside of things and marginalized are going to be hit worst.

    There’s a thing I call “narrating the nightmare,” which is just, why do you present it as news that the people who are most marginalized are going to be the most hurt? I just have a question about a style of journalism that presents that as new. News is meant to be something new, right? And this is not new.

    Tesnim Zekeria

    Tesnim Zekeria: “A lot of the audiences from these mainstream outlets are not necessarily the folks who are being hit the hardest by the shortage.”

    TZ: Definitely. The other thing you have to consider is that a lot of the audiences from these mainstream outlets are not necessarily the folks who are being hit the hardest by the shortage, right? Maybe they’re going to a grocery store and they’re noticing that, hey, there’s a little less formula than there normally is.

    But, for the most part, some of these elite publications have wealthy audiences that can get formula when they desperately need it.

    JJ: Right. And then the need to say that people who are marginalized are most at risk when there’s a shortage, and the fact that you need to add in the headline, “experts and organizations say,” as though that might be not just a generically acceptable fact, but it might be, like, “depends on who you listen to.”

    TZ: Yeah. The other thing, too, that I find interesting is that, I was curious to learn more about how the lack of paid family leave in this country has also contributed to this crisis.

    And unfortunately, there’s only really a handful of pieces, like kind of blog posts, just things on the fringe, that really touched on the fact that, hey, a lot of moms in this country are unable to breastfeed. While, yeah, we did guarantee working moms breaks to pump milk, this requires adequate space, this requires expensive equipment. And, as a result, this means that it’s pretty inaccessible.

    There’s also no federal requirement that workers are paid while they’re pumping. So for women who work in low-wage industries, like fast food, pumping milk is just not affordable nor practical.

    JJ: That’s what I appreciate about this story, is that it starts from a question of: There’s a baby formula shortage. How can people feed babies? And that’s the question you start from, rather than, well, let’s talk to a CEO of a company that’s involved in the supply chain. It changes everything when you consider things as a problem, and try to think of it from the perspective of a person trying to navigate that problem. That seems to be just a categorically different way of doing reporting to me.

    TZ: Definitely. Yeah.

    JJ: So when you went into journalism, and I did a little research, and I know that you were a college journalist and editor, and had an idea of the role that journalism plays in the world. How did that transition when you became, then, a working journalist, if I can ask, and do you think, when you’re talking to other college journalism students, and they’re trying to find a place in the world, what do you say in terms of, yeah, you should still do this, it still can make a difference. What do you say?

    TZ: I tell them that, both unfortunately and fortunately, there are a lot of stories that are kind of brushed aside, right? There are a lot of voices that are swept underneath the carpet. And there’s a lot happening that you don’t really necessarily notice.

    And so I always really try to encourage folks to look beyond what they’re seeing from just general headlines from your mainstream publications, and to really ask, whose voices are missing here, right? Whose perspectives are missing here? Are we actually being holistic in our investigation? Are we really looking at problems through a systemic lens?

    The reality is, I think sometimes it’s easy to chalk up a certain problem to just two or three reasons, and leave it at that, as opposed to taking on the more challenging task of being like, hey, as a journalist, it’s my responsibility to take this really complicated matter and try to distill it as best as I can to folks, and show people that a lot of these things that we’re seeing, right, even in the case of the baby formula shortage, it’s tied to other issues, or it’s tied to the fact that the Biden administration failed to pass their Build Back Better plan, because you had this multi-million dollar lobbying campaign from major, major corporations.

    So that’s kind of a long-winded answer there, but I really believe in, as you mentioned, really just approaching things from a systemic point, and just figuring out, finding the points where things intersect, and shedding light on those points, because I think you actually end up touching on several issues with just one story.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Tesnim Zekeria from Popular Information. You can find their work on this story and others online at Popular.Info. Tesnim Zekeria, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    TZ: Yeah, thank you for having me; it was a pleasure.

     

    The post ‘We Live in an Economy That Provides Little Support to New Parents’ appeared first on FAIR.

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  • ‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts

     

    NBC: In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid

    NBC (4/6/22) referred to making charges against Russia for which there is “no evidence” as having “blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”

    Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22).

    In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as “disinformation” spread by Russia or its proxies.

    The New York Times (1/25/22) reported that Russian disinformation doesn’t only take the form of patently false assertions, but also those which are “true but tangential to current events”—a convenient definition, in that it allows accurate facts to be dismissed as “disinformation.” But who determines what is “tangential” and what is relevant, and what are the guiding principles to make such a determination? In this assessment, Western audiences are too fickle to be trusted with making up their own mind.

    There’s no denying that Russia’s disinformation campaign is key to justifying its war on Ukraine. But instead of uncritically outsourcing these decisions to Western intelligence officials and weapons manufacturers, and as a result erasing realities key to a political settlement, the media’s ultimate guiding principle for what information is “tangential” should be whether it is relevant to preventing the further suffering of Ukrainian civilians—and reducing tensions between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

    For Western audiences, and US citizens in particular, labeling or otherwise marginalizing inconvenient realities as “disinformation” prevents a clear understanding of how their government helped escalate tensions in the region, continues to obstruct the possibility of peace talks, and is prepared to, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman describes it, “fight to the last Ukrainian” in a bid to weaken Russia.

    Coup ‘conspiracy theory’

    Ben Norton advancing "conspiracy theory"

    The New York Times (4/11/22) drew a red line through Benjamin Norton for advancing the “conspiracy theory” that  “US officials had installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.” Eight years ago, the Times (2/6/14) reported as straight news the fact that US “diplomats candidly discussed the composition of a possible new government to replace the pro-Russian cabinet of Ukraine’s president.”

    For example, the New York Times (4/11/22) claimed that US support for the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a “conspiracy theory” being peddled by the Chinese government in support of Russia. The article featured an image with a red line crossing out the face of journalist Benjamin Norton, who was appearing on a Chinese news channel to discuss how the US helped orchestrate the coup. (Norton wrote for FAIR.org frequently from 2015–18.) The evidence he presented—a leaked call initially reported by the BBC in which then–State Department official Victoria Nuland appears to select opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be Ukraine’s new prime minister—is something, he noted, that the Times itself has reported on multiple times (2/6/14, 2/7/14).

    Not having been asked for comment by the Times, Norton responded in a piece of his own (Multipolarista, 4/14/22), claiming that the newspaper was “acting as a tool of US government information warfare.”

    Beyond Nuland’s apparent coup-plotting, the US campaign to destabilize Ukraine stretched back over a decade. Seeking to isolate Russia and open up Ukraine to Western capital, the US had long been “fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED)” (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). High-profile US officials like Sen. John McCain even went so far as to rally protesters in the midst of the Maidan uprising.

    In the wake of the far right–led and constitutionally dubious overthrow, Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region, prompting a repressive response from Ukraine’s new US-backed government. Eight years later, the civil war has killed more than 14,000. Of those deaths, 3,400 were civilian casualties, which were disproportionately in separatist-controlled territories, UN data shows. Opinions on remaining in Ukraine vary within the Donbass.

    When the Times covered the Russian annexation of Crimea, it acknowledged that the predominantly ethnic Russian population there viewed “the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.” But now the newspaper of record is using allegations of disinformation to change the record.

    To discredit evidence of US involvement in Ukraine’s 2014 regime change hides crucial facts that could potentially support a political solution to this crisis. When the crisis is reduced merely to the context of Russian aggression, a peace deal that includes, for example, a referendum on increased autonomy for the Donbass seems like an outrageous thing for Ukraine to have to agree to. But in the context of a civil war brought on by a US-backed coup—a context the Times is eager to erase—it may appear a more palatable solution.

    More broadly, Western audiences that are aware of their own government’s role in sparking tensions may have more skepticism of Washington’s aims and an increased appetite for peace negotiations.

    Normalizing neo-Nazis

    Atlantic Council: Ukraine's Got a Real Problem With Far Right Violence

    In 2018, the Atlantic Council (6/20/18) wrote that the Ukraine government “tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups” “sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not.”

    The outsized influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukrainian society (Human Rights Watch, 6/14/18)—including the the Azov Regiment, the explicitly neo-Nazi branch of Ukraine’s National Guard—is another fact that has been dismissed as disinformation.

    Western outlets once understood far-right extremism as a festering issue (Haaretz, 12/27/18) that Ukraine’s government “underplayed” (BBC, 12/13/14). In a piece called “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence (and No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/20/18) wrote:

    Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”

    To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.

    Atlantic Council: The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine

    Three years later, the Atlantic Council (6/19/21) was dismissing “the idea of Ukraine as a hotbed of right-wing extremism” as “rooted in Soviet-era propaganda.”

    But now Western media attempt to diminish those groups’ significance, arguing that singling out a vocal but insignificant far right only benefits Russia’s disinformation campaign (New Statesman, 4/12/22). Almost exactly three years after warning about Ukraine’s “real problem” with the far right, the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/19/21) ran a piece entitled “The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine,” in which it seemingly forgot that arguments about the electoral marginalization of Ukraine’s right wing are a “red herring”:

    In reality, Ukraine’s nationalist parties enjoy less support than similar political parties in a host of EU member states. Notably, in the two Ukrainian parliamentary elections held since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014, nationalist parties have failed miserably and fallen short of the 5% threshold to enter Ukrainian parliament.

    ‘Lead[ing] the white races’

    Financial Times: 'Don't Confuse Patriotism and Nazism'

    Contrary to the Financial Times’ headline (3/29/22), the accompanying article seems to encourage readers to mistake Nazism for patriotism.

    Russian propaganda does overstate the power of Nazi elements in Ukraine’s government—which it refers to as “fascist”—to justify its illegal aggression, but seizing on this propaganda to in turn downplay the influence and radicalism of these elements (e.g., USA Today, 3/30/22; Welt, 4/22/22) only prevents an important debate on how prolonged US and NATO military aid may empower these groups.

    The Financial Times (3/29/22) and London Times (3/30/22) attempted to rehabilitate the Azov regiment’s reputation, using the disinformation label to downplay the influence of extremism in the national guard unit. Quoting Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky as well as an unnamed Azov commander, the Financial Times cast Azov’s members as “patriots” who “shrug off the neo-Nazi label as ‘Russian propaganda.’” Alex Kovzhun, a “consultant” who helped draft the political program of the National Corps, Azov’s political wing, added a lighthearted human interest perspective, saying Azov was “made up of historians, football hooligans and men with military experience.”

    That the Financial Times would take Biletsky at his word on the issue of Azov’s Nazi-free character, a man who once declared that the National Corps would “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]” (Guardian, 3/13/18), is a prime example of how Western media have engaged in information war at the expense of their most basic journalistic duties and ethics.

    Azov has opened its ranks to a flood of volunteers, the Financial Times continued, diluting its connection to Ukraine’s far-right movement, a movement that has “never proved popular at the ballot box” anyways. BBC (3/26/22) also cited electoral marginalization in its dismissal of claims about Ukraine’s far right as “a mix of falsehoods and distortions.” Putin’s distortions require debunking, but neither outlet acknowledged that these groups’ outsized influence comes more from their capacity for political violence than from their electoral participation (Hromadske, 10/13/16; Responsible Statecraft, 3/25/22).

    London Times: Azov Battalion: ‘We are patriots – we’re fighting the real Nazis of the 21st century’

    London Times (3/30/22): You’d have to live in a “warped, strange world” to think that these gentlemen wearing SS-derived shoulder patches were Nazis.

    In the London Times piece, Azov commander Yevgenii Vradnik dismissed the neo-Nazi characterization as Russian disinformation: “Perhaps [Putin] really believes it,” as he “lives in a strange, warped world. We are patriots but we are not Nazis.” Sure, the article reports, “Azov has its fair share of football hooligans and ultranationalists,” but it also includes “scholars like Zaikovsky, who worked as a translator and book editor.”

    To support such “patriots,” the West should fulfill their “urgent plea” for more weapons. “To retake our regions, we need vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons from NATO,” Vradnik said. Thus Western media use the “Russian disinformation” label to not only downplay the threat of Ukraine’s far right, but even to encourage the West to arm them.

    Responsible Statecraft (3/25/22) pushed back on the media’s dismissiveness, warning that “Russian propaganda has colossally exaggerated the contemporary strength of Ukrainian extreme nationalist groups,” but

    because these groups have been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard yet retain their autonomous identities and command structures, over the course of an extended war they could amass a formidable fifth column that would radicalize Ukraine’s postwar political dynamic.

    To ignore the fact that prolonged military aid could reshape Ukraine’s politics in favor of neo-Nazi groups prevents an understanding of the threats posed to Ukrainian democracy and civil society.

    Shielding NATO from blame

    NYT: The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized

    Ilya Yaboklov (New York Times, 4/25/22): “NATO is the subject of some of the regime’s most persistent conspiracy theories, which see the organization’s hand behind popular uprisings around the world.”

    Much like with the Maidan coup, the corporate media’s insistence on viewing Russian aggression as unconnected to US imperial expansion has led it to cast any blame placed on NATO policy as Russian disinformation.

    In “The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized,” New York Times (4/25/22), historian and author Ilya Yaboklov listed the Kremlin’s most prominent “disinformation” narratives. High on his list was the idea that “NATO has turned Ukraine into a military camp.”

    Without mentioning that NATO, a remnant of the Cold War, is explicitly hostile to Russia, the Times piece portrayed Putin’s disdain for NATO as a paranoia that is convenient for Russian propaganda:

    NATO is Mr. Putin’s worst nightmare: Its military operations in Serbia, Iraq and Libya have planted the fear that Russia will be the military alliance’s next target. It’s also a convenient boogeyman that animates the anti-Western element of Mr. Putin’s electorate. In his rhetoric, NATO is synonymous with the United States, the military hand of “the collective West” that will suffocate Russia whenever it becomes weak.

    The New York Times is not the only outlet to dismiss claims that NATO’s militarization of Ukraine has contributed to regional tensions. Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute claimed on CNN Newsroom (4/8/22): “There’s two places where I have seen China carry Russia’s water. The first is, starting long before the invasion, casting blame at the foot of the United States and NATO.” The Washington Post editorial board (4/11/22) argued much to the same effect that Chinese “disinformation” included arguing “NATO is to blame for the fighting.” Newsweek (4/13/22) stated that Chinese disinformation “blames the US military/industrial complex for the chaos in Ukraine and other parts of the world,” and falsely claims that “Washington ‘squeezed Russia’s security space.’”

    Characterizing claims that NATO’s militarization of Russia’s neighbors was a hostile act as “paranoia” or “disinformation” ignores the decades of warnings from top US diplomats and anti-war dissidents alike that NATO expansionism into former Warsaw Pact countries would lead to conflict with Russia.

    Jack F. Matlock Jr, the former ambassador to the USSR warned the US Senate as early as 1997 that NATO expansion would threaten a renewal of Cold War hostilities (Responsible Statecraft, 2/15/22):

    I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.

    Weakening Russia

    Foreign Policy (5/4/22)

    The US War College’s John Deni (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22) argues that NATO expansion is not to blame for Russian insecurity, because “over the centuries…Russia has experienced military invasions across every frontier,” and so it was going to “demonize the West” regardless.

    These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22), in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on confronting Russia.

    The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22). Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).

    As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):

    We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….

    What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.

    When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.

    Squelching dissent

    MintPress: An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm

    Alan MacLeod (Mint Press, 4/25/22): “These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying US aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples…for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism.”

    As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to get worse.

    Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time, platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.

    After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:

    Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.

    As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.” In the words of Chomsky:

    There’s a long record in the United States of censorship, not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population, don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right now.

    The post ‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar about Roe reversal  for the May 13, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220513Hollar.mp3

     

    Salon: Republicans aren't even bothering to lie about it anymore. They are now coming for birth control

    Salon (5/9/22)

    Janine Jackson: Commentators like Heather Digby Parton and others are already documenting lawmakers and lobbyists stating that their support for an abortion ban is just a part of their intent to eliminate reproductive rights entirely, including making contraception like IUDs and Plan B illegal, and prosecuting miscarriage as manslaughter.

    It’s hard to imagine that there are people who think the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling is only about abortion, but if there are, they can blame corporate media, at least in part, for years of downplaying and normalizing the scope and the scale of the assault on reproductive justice.

    From reducing everything to Roe when that law has always left some potentially pregnant people out, to the current fascination with everything about this new ruling: who leaked it, how it’s okay to protest it, everything except what it means and how we got to this point, much less how we can get away from it.

    FAIR’s Julie Hollar has been tracking this coverage for years. She’s FAIR’s senior analyst and managing editor, and she joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Julie Hollar.

    Julie Hollar: Thanks, Janine; it’s good to be here.

    FAIR: Media Shocked by the Leak, Not the Opinion

    FAIR.org (5/6/22)

    JJ: I hope no one thinks we’re claiming that news media aren’t covering the import of this ruling. Of course they are. And that’s not the point. But when you look at the coverage now, and over time, as you have, you just don’t see news media rising appropriately to the occasion, would you say?

    JH: I think you have to ask what’s the priority here for the corporate media in their coverage. And if you look, the day that this leak happens, it’s obviously front-page news. It’s at the top of the nightly newscasts. And yes, they talk about what’s the impact going to be for people in this country, but the priority here, the top of the show, the first story that they tell is about the leak itself, who might’ve done this, what is the impact on the Supreme Court, the relationships between the justices and their clerks. That’s story No. 1, and then story No. 2 asks, what are the consequences for others?

    But even there, when you watch the nightly newscasts, it wasn’t exactly, “What’s the impact on people who might get pregnant?” It’s: “What is the impact on the clinics who serve them? What is the impact on the pro-choice and the anti-choice movement?” I didn’t see the people themselves who would be most impacted getting interviewed on these shows.

    FAIR's Julie Hollar

    Julie Hollar: “There will be more people dying, there will be greater poverty. There will be worse health outcomes all across the board for people.”

    So I think, yes, there is some coverage of that impact. It is downplayed, and it is sandwiched in between all of these other stories that are distracting attention from what is really the heart of what’s going on here.

    JJ: And then even a finding within a finding, I thought it was interesting in the piece that you wrote about the initial coverage of this leaked ruling that one place when the question was asked, what’s going to happen to, they said to the women, many of them low-income, who every year get abortions in states like Mississippi, Texas, places like that—the one time that was asked, it was asked of the leader of an anti-choice group.

    JH: Exactly, who gave a very reassuring answer: “Oh, we will step up our efforts to take care of those people and make sure the outcomes are good.”

    Well, you know what, that’s not a satisfactory answer, because that’s not what’s going to happen. You know, there could be some “stepping up,” and what’s really going to happen is, all of the research has shown that, there will be more people dying, there will be greater poverty. There will be worse health outcomes all across the board for people.

    FAIR: State Campaigns to Outlaw Abortion Barely Mentioned by Major Outlets

    FAIR.org (5/19/21)

    JJ: I think that we have seen news media acknowledging that an overturning of Roe v. Wade will launch myriad of other efforts at the state level. They talk about these trigger bills, but at the same time, these things didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been building for years. And when you looked last year at coverage of these state campaigns, it seemed like media were not acknowledging them appropriately as they were brewing.

    JH: Not at all, not at all. The first four and a half months of last year, there were hundreds of state-level restrictions introduced in state legislatures. Many of them passed, and the national media just simply ignored them, for the most part. You got a few mentions here or there, very short, nothing in depth. Nothing at all that gave a sense of the scale of what was going on.

    FAIR: As Abortion Restrictions Soar, Abortion Coverage Dwindles

    FAIR.org (1/6/14)

    And it’s not just last year. I feel like I’ve been writing this article since I started at FAIR, which was quite some time ago. I wrote this article 10 years ago when the right was ramping up state-level campaigns and laws to restrict abortion access.

    And we saw a sharp drop-off in national media coverage of abortion exactly when these things are happening. So the media will pay attention when there’s a huge blockbuster story, like the Supreme Court leak. But during the steady drip-drip of what’s been happening for years, for decades, they’ve been just completely missing.

    JJ: And when they do kind of refer to it in an offhand way, which if you just look up references to abortion, you will find lots of stories that kind of toss it off as an issue, as a political football. And one of the things that is often attached to it is the word “divisive.” And this is just, to me, like a drip, drip, drip of misinformation that people are consuming every time they hear a reference to abortion rights.

    JH: “Divisive” is like one of the media’s favorite words, right, and the thing that they’re trying to put themselves outside of. They’re going to stay neutral and objective, and they’re just going to report both sides of the issue. And, in fact, we don’t have at all any sort of a balanced playing field here, as they’re trying to portray it.

    JJ: Overwhelmingly, even in stories that will describe it as a controversial or divisive issue, they’ll then go on to say, “Oh yes, 7 in 10 people in the United States don’t want Roe overturned.” So if 7 out of 10 is divisive, then we gotta reconsider a whole lot of other opinions.

    A lot of times at FAIR, we think, “What would we hope for from a free press in an aspiring democracy?” and compare that to what we’ve got. What we have in the wake of this, of this leak, of this incredibly important leak, we hardly even begin to know how important ruling, is we’re seeing free press, supposedly, defenders talking about how the most important thing to do is to not protest in a way that is uncivil. It’s kind of bizarre.

    WaPo: Leave the justices alone at home

    Washington Post (5/9/22)

    JH: Right. So like the Washington Post, for instance, editorial board complaining about the protesters outside of the justices’ houses, and actually endorsing having them be fined and/or imprisoned for doing so.

    They use the word “totalitarianism” in this editorial, which, frankly, I searched their website. I could not find another editorial in which they use the word “totalitarian” or “totalitarianism” referencing any sort of domestic context, only with respect to protesters in front of Supreme Court justices’ houses, protesting against the fact that the government is trying to take away their rights to their own bodies. The Washington Post editorial board clearly has some priority issues, I would say.

    JJ: I often think it would be interesting to look up the way that news media talk about, for example, the civil rights movement, or the marches with Dr. King, etc., and they would present themselves as being staunch defenders of civil disobedience and of the right to speak up when you know that the system is failing. And yet you have to judge them by how they act in the moment, right? So we’re seeing what they choose to emphasize right now, and we should be paying attention, I guess.

    JH: Absolutely. The Post did also have an editorial when the leak first came out, professing to be very concerned about this, saying that this was a blow to the Court’s legitimacy, that this is not what the Court should be doing. But then the next time they editorialize about the issue, it’s against the protesters. So it’s like they’re wanting to have it both ways.

    JJ: So one of the things that I know that you found, when you looked at top-tier or major media coverage last year, in terms of the state-level predations, was that there were instances of attacks on reproductive rights that did seem to interest, for example, the New York Times. It just wasn’t Texas.

    JH: Right. It’s easy for corporate media to raise these issues when they’re speaking about some sort of official enemy of the United States. So if it’s in Venezuela, if it’s in China, that’s front-page news. It’s not front-page news when it’s Texas, when it’s South Dakota, when it’s something more local.

    It is the same as this “totalitarian” issue that’s with the Washington Post. There are different standards applied to different parties.

    JJ: Finally, we know there’s going to be lots of coverage. What would be helpful to add to it—or maybe “who,” I guess, is the question—that could substantially improve the coverage of what could hardly be a more important issue?

    JH: First of all, absolutely, there needs to be much more front-and-center coverage of the potential consequences of this, the potential concrete consequences. There have been a lot of studies done about what happens when reproductive rights are restricted or completely eliminated, and that needs to be really front and center so people understand what this is really about.

    I think about in the nightly newscasts, they led off their shows with their justice correspondents, their legal correspondents. And you just have to think, what if corporate media could have rights correspondents instead of justice correspondents?

    Justice, for them, is an institutional idea of, we’re going to cover the Justice Department. That’s your job. And if, instead, we could worry about the real-world consequences, what is going on with people’s rights in this country? If that could be what the media focused on, we would be in such a better place.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with FAIR’s own Julie Hollar. You can find her work on media coverage of abortion rights, along with other things, at FAIR.org. Thanks so much, Julie, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    JH: Thanks for having me.

     

    The post ‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ACTION ALERT: WaPo Calls Peaceful Protest Against Roe Reversal ‘Totalitarian’

     

    WaPo: Leave the justices alone at home

    The Washington Post(5/9/22) calls for “appropriate action” against peaceful protesters at anti-Roe justices’ homes—which according to the law the Post cites means up to a year in prison.

    With the right to bodily autonomy on the line and protesters demonstrating outside of Supreme Court justices’ houses, the Washington Post editorial board (5/9/22) weighed in:

    The right to assemble and speak freely is essential to democracy. Erasing any distinction between the public square and private life is essential to totalitarianism. It is crucial, therefore, to protect robust demonstrations of political dissent while preventing them from turning into harassment or intimidation. An issue that illuminates this imperative in sharp relief is residential picketing—protests against the actions or decisions of public officials at their homes, such as the recent noisy abortion rights demonstrations at the Montgomery County dwellings of Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The disruptors wanted to voice opposition to a possible overruling of Roe v. Wade, as foreshadowed by a leaked majority draft opinion last week. What they mainly succeeded in doing was to illustrate that their goal—with which we broadly agree—does not justify their tactics….

    A Montgomery County ordinance permits protest marches in residential areas but bars stationary gatherings, arguably such as those in front of the Roberts and Kavanaugh residences. A federal law—18 U.S.C. Section 1507—prohibits “pickets or parades” at any judge’s residence, “with the intent of influencing” a jurist “in the discharge of his duty.” These are limited and justifiable restraints on where and how people exercise the right to assembly. Citizens should voluntarily abide by them, in letter and spirit. If not, the relevant governments should take appropriate action.

    To be clear, the cited federal law states that the appropriate action taken against violators is that they “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

    A search of the Post‘s website turns up no other instances of the editorial board applying any variation of the word “totalitarian” to the domestic context. In the Post‘s view, then, those people protesting an attempt by unelected government officials to give the state control over one’s own body—including, by the way, various state laws that deputize neighbors to report on neighbors—are the ones putting our country at risk of totalitarianism, and they should be punished with a fine and/or prison.

    Madsen vs. Women's Health Center excerpt

    The Supreme Court ruled in Madsen v. Women’s Health Center (1994) that the government could not ban marches in front of the homes of abortion clinic employees.

    No one has seriously argued that the peaceful protesters were “harassing” or “intimidating” the justices; they were exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and speak freely. The Post also refused to consider that, as many observers have pointed out, the Supreme Court itself  (Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, 1994) has ruled that requiring anti-choice protesters—who, by contrast, have a documented history of harassment and intimidation—to stay more than 300 feet from clinic doctors’ private homes violated their First Amendment rights.

    The Post‘s screed against protesters came days after the very same editorial board (5/3/22) charged that Samuel Alito’s draft opinion “would inaugurate a terrifying new era in which Americans would lose faith in the Court, distrust its members and suspect that what is the law today will not be tomorrow,” and that overturning Roe would be

    a repugnant repudiation of the American tradition in which freedom extends to an ever-wider circle of people. By betraying this legacy and siding with the minority of Americans who want to see Roe overturned, the justices would appear to be not fair-minded jurists but reckless ideologues who are dangerously out of touch and hostile to a core American ethic.

    The Washington (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”) Post presents itself as a great defender of democracy and freedom—unless, God forbid, your angry cries against attacks on those things might make a reckless, out-of-touch ideologue uncomfortable while enjoying his dinner.

    ACTION: Please tell the Washington Post that its call for repression of peaceful assembly is incompatible with democracy.

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

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

     

    Featured image: Washington Post depiction (5/10/22) of protest outside the Fairfax, Virginia, home of Justice Samuel Alito (photo: Kent Nishimura/EPA-EFE).

    The post ACTION ALERT: WaPo Calls Peaceful Protest Against Roe Reversal ‘Totalitarian’ appeared first on FAIR.

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  • ‘Liberal’ Newspapers Liked the Justices Who Will Kill Roe

     

    Politico: Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

    Politico (5/2/22) broke the news that five Supreme Court justice—including three nominated by Donald Trump—planned to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

    The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that could destroy Roe v. Wade (Politico, 5/2/22) reportedly has the support of three justices appointed by Donald Trump. That’s important for a number of reasons.

    Neil Gorsuch was appointed after the Republican Senate blocked Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Antonin Scalia until after the election, in hopes of retaining a 5–4 conservative balance. Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy, who stepped down specifically so his seat could continue to be held by a Republican appointee. And the last appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, solidifying a 6–3 conservative advantage a week before the 2020 presidential election. Barrett’s confirmation also exposed the cynicism of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had blocked Obama’s pick for Scalia’s seat on grounds that it was an election year, but hurried Barrett’s confirmation.

    All three were nominated by a president who did not win the popular vote, further undermining the bench’s credibility as a democratic institution. (The author of the leaked opinion, Samuel Alito, was also named by a popular vote loser, George W. Bush—as was Chief Justice John Roberts, considered a possible sixth vote, along with Clarence Thomas, for overturning Roe.)

    And in all three of Trump’s nominees, major liberal-leaning outlets offered pieces reassuring readers that fears that these justices would undo Warren Court decisions upholding civil rights were overblown.

    Important studiousness

    NYT: A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh

    Law professor Akhil Reed Amar (New York Times, 7/9/18) endorsed Donald Trump’s view of Brett Kavanaugh as “someone with impeccable credentials, great intellect, unbiased judgment, and deep reverence for the laws and Constitution of the United States.” 

    Kavanaugh had two prominent liberal defenses in the media after Trump offered him to the public. In the New York Times (7/9/18), Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar rested his defense on Kavanaugh’s scholarship, saying that he “has taught courses at leading law schools and published notable law review articles,” and is “an avid consumer of legal scholarship.” Amar added, “This studiousness is especially important for a jurist like Judge Kavanaugh, who prioritizes the Constitution’s original meaning.”

    Even before sexual allegations against Kavanaugh emerged, liberals worried about his partisan record, namely his role in the special prosecution of Bill Clinton (NPR, 8/17/18) and his opinions on abortion rights (New York Times, 7/18/18). But the Amar defense—coming from not just a liberal but a renowned constitutional scholar—was joined by another Yale scholar (9/6/18), emeritus law professor Peter Schuck, offering the argument that “justices often do not perform the way partisans and the news media expect them to.”

    In particular, Schuck suggested, “even some conservative justices may resist overturning Roe v. Wade,” because “it is hard to predict how courts will apply the multiple criteria…for deciding when precedents may be overturned.” While supporters and opponents both saw Kavanaugh as “a guaranteed vote to overrule Roe…hard cases often cause justices to confound ideological expectations.” Rather than seeing Supreme Court nominations as “a Manichaean liberal/conservative battle for legal supremacy,” the professor urged senators and journalists to focus on “the fascinating interplay among legal doctrine, textual interpretation and the factual record in determining outcomes.”

    Conservative Times columnist Bret Stephens (7/12/18) insisted that “liberals always cry wolf” about threats to reproductive rights. (The Times editorial board—9/26/18—did come out against Kavanaugh, saying the allegations against him were grave and put the integrity of the court at risk.)

    Lisa Blatt, a constitutional lawyer and self-described liberal feminist, deferred to Kavanaugh’s warm personality (Politico, 8/2/18), saying he “is a great listener, and one of the warmest, friendliest and kindest individuals I know.” She also said “other than my former boss, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I know of no other judge who stands out for hiring female law clerks,” a line that that makes one wince when put next to the sexual allegations against him (PBS,  9/16/19).

    ‘A sense of fairness and decency’

    WaPo: Ignore the attacks on Neil Gorsuch. He’s an intellectual giant — and a good man.

    “Gorsuch will be a hard man to depict as a ferocious partisan or an ideological judge,” law professor Robert George wrote in the Washington Post (2/1/17). “As Gorsuch himself has frequently observed…good judges sometimes have to vote or rule in ways they do not like.”

    On Gorsuch, the New York Times (1/31/17) had Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Obama, saying liberals should support Gorsuch because the conservative jurist “brings a sense of fairness and decency to the job, and a temperament that suits the nation’s highest court.” He “would help to restore confidence in the rule of law,” Katyal assured, because he has defended “the paramount duty of the courts to say what the law is, without deferring to the executive branch’s interpretations of federal statutes.”

    The Washington Post seemed to make getting Gorsuch confirmed a crusade. As Extra! (3/17) noted:

    In the first 48 hours after Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump (1/31/17–2/2/17), the Washington Post published 30 articles, op-eds, blog posts and editorials on the nomination. Thirteen were explicitly positive, while 17 could be construed as neutral—but not a single one was overtly critical or in opposition to Gorsuch (FAIR.org, 2/2/17). Apparently editors thought columns like “Ignore the Attacks on Neil Gorsuch. He’s an Intellectual Giant—and a Good Man” (2/1/17) required no balance.

    As for Amy Coney Barrett, O. Carter Snead, a Notre Dame law professor, wrote in the Washington Post (9/26/20) that “liberals have nothing to fear” from her: “She genuinely seeks to understand others’ arguments and does not regard them as mere obstacles to be overcome on the way to reaching a preferred conclusion.” It was Barrett’s religion, Snead said, that led to “her commitment to treating others with respect.” But put this in context: Snead is vocally against Roe (National Affairs, 11/7/21; Washington Post, 5/5/22).

    All of these pieces exhibit a kind of naivete about the right’s vision of the court. They share the assumption that while all the nominees were conservative, as jurists they were also “above politics,” because their scholarship and congeniality made them different from partisans in the executive and legislative branches. But it has been very clear since the civil rights era that part of the conservative movement’s long game has been to appoint justices to federal courts who would undo gains made under the Warren Court, and to advance the interests of conservatives (Time, 6/22/21).

    It’s easy to scoff at these articles as “pieces that didn’t age well.” But the polite “above the fray” attitude toward the Court that they embody hasn’t been the governing norm for decades. The 5–4 majority in favor of handing the 2000 election to the Republicans without counting the votes made it clear, if it hadn’t been already, that the Court is utterly politicized. And the move by Mitch McConnell’s Senate to deny Obama the right to appoint a justice who could have tipped the political balance of the Court proved that the Republican approach to top judge nominations is simply not in good faith. But even during the Trump administration, it seems that a lot of what are called “liberal” media could not fully come to terms with that fact.

    Featured image: Detail from an NPR graphic (5/3/22) of Supreme Court justices who supported a draft opinion that would overturn Roe.

     

    The post ‘Liberal’ Newspapers Liked the Justices Who Will Kill Roe appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Ignore Criticism of DHS’s New ‘Disinformation’ Board—Unless it’s from the Right

     

    AP: Disinformation board to tackle Russia, migrant smugglers

    AP (4/28/22): “The new board also will monitor and prepare for Russian disinformation threats as this year’s midterm elections near and the Kremlin continues an aggressive disinformation campaign around the war in Ukraine.”

    Testifying in front of a House committee, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently announced DHS’s formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The board’s stated mission would be to address “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” as well as “transnational criminal organizations and human-smuggling organizations.”

    Little is known about the board, and Mayorkas has claimed it will have “no operational authority or capability.” Still, leading media instantly heralded its creation. The Associated Press (4/28/22) accepted the premise that a DHS-helmed body would “counter disinformation” coming from Russia and “human smugglers” targeting people seeking to immigrate to the US. MSNBC (4/29/22) maintained that the initiative “makes sense.” Notably, not a single reference to the DHS’s history of incessant violence against immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers and other activists was deemed relevant to either story.

    A ‘Soviet’ plot?

    Despite their decidedly uncritical framing, media have acknowledged broadsides against the board—but almost exclusively those from the far right. In the wake of Mayorkas’ announcement, right-wing policymakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R.–Mo.) and Fox News personalities including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity groused about the Disinformation Governance Board, condemning it as an Orwellian, “Soviet,” Democrat-masterminded ploy to spy on and muzzle conservatives. News outlets subsequently alarmed readers of a brewing “tempest” (Washington Post, 4/29/22), “uproar” (CNN, 5/1/22) and “partisan fight” (New York Times, 5/2/22) over the board.

    CNN: Right-Wing Media Balks as Disinformation Board

    To CNN‘s Brian Seltzer (5/1/22), government “counter-disinformation efforts…to give us accurate information” “sounds like common sense.”

    Taking these right-wing cries of persecution at face value, CNN’s Dana Bash (5/1/22) asked Mayorkas to address them, handing him an opportunity to paraphrase a DHS press release. Other than a fleeting question about a disinformation board under a hypothetically re-elected President Trump, Bash inquired no further regarding any harms the board may pose, nor did she so much as flinch when Mayorkas—deputized to manage “disinformation” about immigration—reiterated his enduringly callous message to would-be US immigrants: “Do not come.”

    The same day, CNN’s Brian Stelter (5/1/22) invited Moira Whelan of the federally funded National Democratic Institute (NDI) on his show to tout the board as a civil liberties–honoring public good. The think tank’s funding comes in part from the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development—both of which function as facilitators of US covert operations—as well as the State Department, rendering Whelan a dubious source. Stelter welcomed the development of the board as “common sense,” while raising only the concerns of the right, and characterizing the discourse as “mostly a Fox world story.” Any further interrogation of the board, apparently, was unnecessary.

    ‘Cruel, unlawful and ineffective’

    Guardian: US border agents engaged in ‘shocking abuses’ against asylum seekers, report finds

    The Guardian (10/21/21) reported on declassified DHS documents that documented abuses ranging “from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions.”

    While it’s entirely justifiable to impugn right-wingers’ tantrums, it’s inaccurate to suggest those objections are the only ones that exist.

    As noted, outlets have been conspicuously incurious about a decision to place the stewardship of “disinformation” directly under the authority of the DHS. Conceived in the thick of post-9/11 anti-Muslim “counterterrorism” hysteria, the department oversees ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, two gravely abusive agencies that have been responsible for the death and disappearance of at least tens of thousands of undocumented asylum seekers. The DHS’s cruelty is notorious, prompting activists, journalists and organizations like the ACLU to call for its dissolution. More recently, DHS continued its pattern of violently disrupting civil rights protests in the US when it descended on Los Angeles demonstrators defending the right to an abortion amid a pending overturn of Roe v. Wade.

    Mayorkas, a Biden appointee and former US attorney for the Central District of California, offers little hope that any of this will change. Though he’s voiced mild disagreement with DHS’s rhetoric and tactics, activist groups have described Mayorkas’ DHS as implementing “cruel, unlawful and ineffective deterrence-based policies that extend rather than dismantle the previous administration’s approach to migration.” A glossy Washington Post profile (11/1/21), largely heedless of these concerns, informed readers that Mayorkas “leans into his days leading a team of prosecutors when wooing politicians skeptical that he will aggressively enforce America’s immigration laws.”

    Overseeing Mayorkas’ new board is Nina Jankowicz, a self-described “expert on disinformation” and alum of the National Democratic Institute. At NDI, Jankowicz “managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus”—a phrase that can’t be divorced from the think tank’s soft- and hard-power funding sources.

    ‘A certain amount of gumption’

    NYT: Partisan Fight Breaks Out Over New Disinformation Board

    The New York Times (5/2/22) allowed Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to absurdly claim, “We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens.”

    When considered in concert with Mayorkas’ and the DHS’s virulent jingoism, one might start to view Jankowicz with suspicion. Mainline media, however, have instead embraced Jankowicz as a credentialed, principled and neutral authority (New York Times, 5/2/22), and defended her from the right’s vitriol. “Spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, who has stepped up to lead this effort at the Department of Homeland Security,” Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce (4/29/22) implored. “Volunteering to be a piñata takes a certain amount of gumption.”

    News media have issued some reservations about the board, but these amount to little more than process critiques, comments on semantics and light McCarthyism. Esquire’s Pierce opined:

    I am concerned what this operation would look like under, say, President DeSantis, and there had to be a more deft way to roll it out than having DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just drop it into his testimony before a House committee.

    The Washington Post (4/29/22) also chimed in, calling the name Disinformation Governance Board “a bit ominous; it sounds less like an effort to combat disinformation rather than to, well, govern it.” In a later piece, the Post’s editorial board (5/3/22) cautioned that the initials of the Disinformation Governance Board were the “Soviet-sounding DGB,” presumably meant to evoke the KGB.

    The Post went on to assure readers that the board “could do a great deal of good” with just a bit of transparency and a few language tweaks, adding that “the reality isn’t nearly so scary” as the right suggests. But therein lies the problem: If only the right gets to weigh in on what’s “scary,” the voices of those who truly suffer will continue to go unheard.

     

    The post Media Ignore Criticism of DHS’s New ‘Disinformation’ Board—Unless it’s from the Right appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Julie Hollar on Roe Reversal, Tesnim Zekeria on Baby Formula Shortage

     

    WaPo: Yes, experts say protests at SCOTUS justices’ homes appear to be illegal

    Washington Post (5/11/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media want you to be alarmed about an “extraordinary breach” of privacy. It’s the privacy of the institution of the Supreme Court which, one CBS expert told viewers, had been dealt a “body blow” by the leak of a ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision allowing the right to terminate a pregnancy to remain between the pregnant person and their doctor. And corporate media are in high dudgeon about protecting people from invasions of their right to privacy—but again, only if by that you mean protecting Supreme Court justices and their “right” to never be confronted by people who disagree with the life-altering decisions they make.

    You almost wouldn’t think the real news of the past week was the nation’s highest court declaring that more than half of the population no longer have bodily autonomy. That’s to say, no longer have the control over their own body that a corpse has—since people can refuse organ donation after their death, even if it would save another person’s life.

    Elite media are interested in abortion as an issue, as a thing people talk about, but that it is not understood as a human right is clear from reporting—years of reporting—that suggest that for them it’s most importantly a partisan football, and any fight over it needs equal and equally respectful attention to “both sides,” even if one of those sides is calling for human rights violations. We talked with FAIR’s Julie Hollar about that.

          CounterSpin220513Hollar.mp3

     

    Popular Information depiction of baby formula shortage

    Popular Information (5/12/22)

    Also on the show: In corporate media–land, it’s controversial that people be allowed to determine whether they give birth, because, after all, we care so much about the birthed. It sounds sarcastic, but that’s the underlying premise of coverage of the shortage of baby formula—which incorporates an implied shock at the denial of basic healthcare with another implied shock that somehow capitalism doesn’t allow for all infants to be treated the same. There’s really no time left for pretended surprise at system failure in this country. We can still talk about journalism that shines a light on it, rather than an obscuring shadow. We’ll talk with Tesnim Zekeria from Popular Information about applying a public interest prism to, in this case, the story on baby formula.

     

          CounterSpin220513Zekeria.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of murdered Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

          CounterSpin220513Banter.mp3

     

    The post Julie Hollar on Roe Reversal, Tesnim Zekeria on Baby Formula Shortage appeared first on FAIR.

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  • The Extraordinary Supremacy of the Hyperwealthy

    New York Times Magazine illustration of billionaires

    New York Times Magazine (4/7/22)

    Consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote to the New York Times Magazine in response to its “Money Issue” (4/10/22), which focused on billionaires.

    Your engrossing issue on megabillionaires—their road to riches and influence—devoted little attention to billionaire CEOs directly running their giant corporations. For example, how did CEO Tim Cook of Apple get his board to pay him $50,000 an hour or $850 a minute, while Apple store workers are making under $20 per hour? Apple’s wealth draws from a million serf laborers in China making iPhones and computers they cannot afford to buy.

    Under Cook, Apple decided to pour over $400 billion of excess profits into unproductive stock buybacks. How fascinating would have been the Times covering how these decisions were made, in place of raising wages, thorough recycling, reducing prices for Apple’s expensive consumer products, bringing some production back to the USA or, heaven forbid, paying its fair share of income taxes.

    While the hyperwealthy do attract celebrity treatment, it is when they manage multinational companies that their extraordinary supremacy becomes clearer.

    Ralph Nader

    Washington, DC

    The post The Extraordinary Supremacy of the Hyperwealthy appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The Race Crisis and the Democracy Crisis Are Inseparable’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Forum‘s Chris Lehmann about media in a multi-racial democracy for the May 6, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220506Lehmann.mp3

     

    Christopher Rufo: The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory."

    Twitter (3/15/21)

    Janine Jackson: The concerted attack on critical race theory is one of the most appalling called shots in recent memory. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo declared publicly:

    The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

    “In the newspaper” is not a metaphor here. Media have been the vehicle for this absurd anti-anti-racism campaign, which has achieved devastating traction in a country in which overwhelming majorities– 76% in a recent poll–acknowledge racial and ethnic discrimination as a big, not a past or historic, but a big problem.

    Right-wingers know they can play a press corps that will seek to normalize whatever they do as representing one pole of a debate they can pretend they’re hosting, even as those actions threaten core democratic ideas. All of which makes corporate media the wrong place to talk about the assault on critical race theory, and all that it’s really about.

    Into the breach is a new website primed for launch. The Forum is a daily site of news and commentary published by the African American Policy Forum. AAPF, where I serve as a board member, was co-founded by Kimberle Crenshaw, key expounder of critical race theory.

    The Forum’s editor-in-chief is Chris Lehmann, former editor-in-chief for the Baffler and the New Republic, and author of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity and the Unmaking of the American Dream.

    He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Chris Lehmann.

    Chris Lehmann: Thank you, Janine. Really happy to be here, and thanks for the great introduction.

    JJ: As I understand it, while not denying that critical race theory, or what’s presented as that, is under attack, the Forum isn’t defining itself as a defense, but more a user of what is, after all, a tool. Is that right?

    Chris Lehmann

    Chris Lehmann: “We cannot downplay or disregard the white nationalist assault on multi-racial democracy, and we have to document it everywhere it turns up.”

    CL: Absolutely, Janine. Early on in the bad faith attacks from the right, it became very clear, when you’re locked in a battle with someone who’s lying, and shamelessly lying, the conventional, incremental fact-checking approach is doomed to fail, for the reasons you cited in your introduction.

    So the Forum is meant to be a free-standing proof of concept for people curious about what critical race theory actually is and does. We’re not engaged in the doomed effort to call out the defamations and bad faith attacks from Rufo and company. Rather, we’re here to insist, what is more desperately clear than ever, that the race crisis and the democracy crisis are one and the same.

    For entirely too long in American political history, political elites on all sides have regarded racial justice as something you can negotiate away in provisional, political calculations. We’re in this situation now because of that mindset, and the Forum is very much dedicated to demonstrating, in real time, the disastrous consequences of those kinds of calculations.

    JJ: It’s interesting. With some people, it’s as if when we center race, we’re no longer talking about them.

    CL: Exactly, yes.

    JJ: It’s like, “oh, you’re going to talk about accents, but I don’t have an accent,” you know?

    CL: You’re talking to a Midwesterner.

    JJ: Exactly. “I’m neutral, I’m neutral.”

    I appreciate very much that the Forum is not sort of pitching in as a defense of critical race theory, particularly given that the people behind this assault have made clear they don’t know or care what critical race theory is; it’s a vehicle for them to attack Black people and teachers and history and multiracial democracy in general. So I’m wondering, what is a sense of the range of pieces and perspectives that you’re looking to include, and what are you thinking of as a kind of cohering principle for the content?

    Forum: Bodily Control and the Color Line

    The Forum (5/5/22)

    CL: I think the cohering principle is that we cannot downplay or disregard the white nationalist assault on multi-racial democracy, and we have to document it everywhere it turns up.

    So this week on the Forum, we have a great piece by Rafia Zakaria, author of “Against White Feminism,” on the bombshell leak of the draft opinion by Joseph Alito to strike down Roe V. Wade, explicitly saying it has been a racial project to control women’s bodies, going back even before the founding of the United States, but certainly throughout the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, that has been front and center. So that’s just a timely example.

    Last week, we had a piece about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and how it also reflects what is, at bottom, a colonialist mindset: wealth conquering, literally, the terms by which we engage in public discourse, and sort of leaving a scorched earth behind.

    JJ: So it’s showing the range of things that you may not have associated with this toolbox of ideas, but, in fact, it’s useful to apply this prism to.

    CL: Yes, absolutely. Again, the race crisis and the democracy crisis are inseparable. And I think to talk responsibly about the fate of our democracy entails always acknowledging that the anti-democratic forces in our history, and in our political world today, are committed first and foremost to sowing racial divisions and to, as you indicated earlier, propel this mythic idea of a real America that excludes certain people, largely on the basis of skin color, but also gender.

    Kim Crenshaw also founded intersectionality, which is the analytical tool that insists that you can’t separate out race and gender oppression and other forms of oppression. They are all part of one movement. As we’re seeing at this moment, when the initial attack on CRT in our schools has now metamorphosed into the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, the attack on trans Americans. It is all of a piece.

    And we have to respond as one movement, saying that this is all an attack on our democracy. The Supreme Court opinion is a clarion call, in my view, that we have to organize at the most fundamental levels to stop these unaccountable, elite institutions that have spun out of democratic control.

    Forum: The Plunder Artist

    The Forum (4/28/22)

    JJ: And just on that note, that has been where people see, I think, a huge void on the part of corporate media, in the failure to see these things as a coherent front, as a coherent campaign. It was maddening to see how many media just kind of picked up the script they were handed, and presented the attack on critical race theory not as an explicit disinformation effort that’s aimed at the same dusty, racist goals, but presented it as a “controversy,” sprung up organically from the soil of school boards around the country.

    And that’s media telling the wrong story, and really fundamentally misrepresenting the scale of things that are going on. And I think when a lot of people complain, to FAIR certainly, about media, what they’re looking for is a sense of urgency, a sense that the chips are down, and that journalists need to pick a side. And what we’re getting instead from elite media is, well, you know, some people think Black people are inferior, and then other people call those people racists, and why don’t both sides just kind of calm down?

    CL: Right. And, as they say on the Sunday shows, “We have to leave it there for now,” you know what I mean? Yeah, that whole mindset is disastrous in conditions of democratic peril and the conditions we’re living through now. We have a major party that is now weaponized by white nationalist ideology, and undertook a coup on January 6 of 2021.

    And our media, the mainstream media industrial complex, is sleepwalking through this moment, in part because they have institutional investment in treating politics as a game. It is not a game. This is not a drill. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for anyone who cares about the democratic future of this country.

    And, yeah, our media cannot afford to just reflexively both-sides something as fundamental as the right to know what our history is, and the right to learn, and the right to, yes, pursue actual racial equity in our institutions, because it is long past time to do so.

    JJ: All right, well then, into the breach, as I say, come new spaces, like the Forum. We’ll look out for it.

    CL: Thank you so much, Janine. I really appreciate it.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Chris Lehmann, editor-in-chief at the new news and commentary site the Forum. Thanks again, Chris, for joining us on CounterSpin.

    CL: Sure thing. Anytime.

     

    The post ‘The Race Crisis and the Democracy Crisis Are Inseparable’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Manufacturing Opinion on Lifting Title 42 Border Restrictions

     

    The Biden Administration intends to fully lift the Title 42 border restrictions, which have been in place since March 2020, on May 23. A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, however, has ordered a two-week halt to the phasing out of those restrictions.

    In the meantime, three media polls—Politico/Morning Consult, Fox and CNN—have conducted surveys to get the views of the public on this proposed change.

    As the graph below indicates, all three found majority opposition to lifting the restrictions: Politico by a 19-point margin (35% favor, 54% oppose), Fox by 36 points (27% to 63%) and CNN by 14 points (43% to 57%).

    Three Media Polls on Lifting Title 42 Border Restrictions

    The public’s widespread lack of information on political matters has been amply demonstrated over the years. (See here, here and here.) Yet Politico and Fox are able to coax opinions on this rather obscure policy from 90% of their samples. CNN is even more talented, with fully 100% of its sample expressing an opinion on whether Title 42 border restrictions should be lifted or not.

    Fox: Fox News Poll: Majority wants Title 42 coronavirus border restrictions to remain

    Fox News‘ subhead (5/3/22) said Title 42 “limited illegal immigration”—when it actually barred seekers of asylum, an internationally guaranteed legal right.

    Before asking about Title 42, both CNN and Fox asked their respondents how attentive they had been to the issue. CNN found just 12% of their sample who said they had been following the news about Title 42 “very closely.” Another 29% said “somewhat closely.”

    Fox reported 29% saying they had heard “a great deal” about the Biden administration’s decision to end Title 42 restrictions. Another 32% said they had heard “some” about the decision.

    It’s the 12% and 29% figures that are of most interest, because only people who paid a great deal of attention might have a genuine sense of the issues at stake. People who have heard of the issue only casually (followed the issue “somewhat” closely, or heard “some” information) are highly unlikely to know much.

    Yet somehow all three news organizations report 90–100% of the public with a meaningful opinion on the issue. Clearly these results are illusory.

    Points of information

    Here are some relevant points one might want to know about and consider in determining whether to support lifting the Title 42 border restrictions.

    • The US has a legal obligation to hear asylum seekers about their reasons for seeking asylum, based on US law and as signatory to international protocols.
    • Toward the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration invoked Title 42 to allow the US to return asylum seekers to their home countries without a hearing. The justification was that it would help prevent Americans from getting Covid.
    • The CDC initially refused to comply with the order, because the scientists argued there was no evidence that such restrictions would slow the coronavirus. The organization was overruled by Vice President Mike Pence.
    • As a consequence, 1.7 million people have been denied a legal hearing, and will be ready to apply for asylum as soon as Title 42 is lifted. Some people argue the flood of migrants could overwhelm the ability of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to process all asylum claims.
    • Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas predicted that up to 18,000 asylum seekers could cross the border per day once the restrictions are lifted: “We’re not projecting 18,000, but what we do in the department is we plan for different scenarios, so we’re ready for anything.”

    Eliciting opinion

    CNN: CNN Poll: Most Americans say now is not the time to end Trump-era Title 42 border policy

    CNN (5/5/22) connected polling numbers to a fears of a “mob” of migrants prepared to “surge” into the US.

    Media pollsters typically use two techniques to elicit opinions from respondents who might otherwise admit they have “no opinion.”

    The first is to ask forced-choice questions—whether the respondents favor or oppose a policy, with no explicit “unsure” or “don’t know” option. Respondents who have agreed to participate in the poll feel obligated to please the interviewers, to do what is “right,” what is expected of them. So if at all possible, respondents will try to find something in the question itself to help them come up with an opinion. Very few will insist on volunteering they don’t have an opinion.

    The second tactic is to simply give respondents a limited subset of knowledge about the issue, and then immediately ask whether they support or oppose the policy.

    The limitations here should be obvious. First, once respondents have been given specific information, they no longer represent the larger population they are supposed to represent—because the general public has not been given the same information.

    The second limitation is that almost any given issue is too complex to describe fully. So pollsters have to decide how to limit what information they give. The result cannot help but be biased.

    Fox, for example, told their respondents that the border restrictions were enacted during the pandemic to “enable the US to block migrants from entering the country based on public health concerns.”

    If you didn’t know anything about the issue, of course you would be against lifting the restrictions—since, according to the poll interviewer, they’re “based on public health concerns.”

    The other two polls also informed their respondents that the restrictions were implemented for health reasons. No mention was made of the United States’ legal obligation to have hearings to judge whether asylum should be granted, nor the CDC’s initial evidence-based refusal to comply with the Trump administration’s invocation of Title 42. Nor did they mention that the Homeland Security Secretary specified that numerous steps had been taken to deal with the expected surge of migrants.

    Had some or all of that information been provided, the polls might well have produced quite different results.

    Still, even then, those samples would not represent a cross-section of the general public, which would not have been given the same information.

    The polls simply do not represent the US public.

    What do polls really measure?

    It’s clear the poll results cannot be interpreted literally, as though the vast majority of the US public has come to a conclusion about lifting Title 42 restrictions.

    But the results do indicate that emphasizing health concerns as the reason for Title 42 resonates with the public.

    CNN asked a few additional questions, with these results:

    • 68% of adult Americans believe the situation at the Mexican/US border to be a “crisis.”
    • 73% disapprove of the way migrants are being treated in the US.
    • 56% favor allowing refugees from Central America to seek asylum in the US.
    • 74% are not confident that once Title 42 is lifted, the Biden administration will be ready to handle the increase in the number of migrants who will try to enter the US.

    Each one of those questions is seriously flawed, yet overall they indicate the public’s top-of-mind reaction to be generally positive toward migrants, but concerned about the ability of the government to deal with large numbers of asylum seekers.

    How many people are actually engaged enough to hold those opinions, however, the polls don’t tell us.

    The post Manufacturing Opinion on Lifting Title 42 Border Restrictions appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Copwatch Media‘s Josmar Trujillo about hyper-policing for the April 29, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220429Trujillo.mp3

     

    NYT: Witnesses describe the suspect’s arrest: ‘He went without a struggle.’

    New York Times (4/13/22)

    Janine Jackson: When the news got out that someone had shot people in New York City’s subway system, many of us knew just what would come next, and we were not surprised. Immediate, urgent calls for more police and more policing, for tougher treatment of homeless and/or mentally ill people. Forget tolerance or empathy or social services, because look where that gets us.

    It’s an argument that we’ve heard for decades, but it’s not an abstract debate. Just because patterns and practices are old doesn’t mean their harms are not fresh. So, yes, it matters very much whether the news convinces people that they’ve just been saved from lethal threat by, as the New York Times explained, “hundreds of officers from a multitude of agencies,” using methods “as modern as scrutinizing video from surveillance cameras and parsing electronic records, and as old-fashioned as a wanted poster.”

    And it matters how that tees up your reaction to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ declaration of the suspect that, “if all goes well, he will never see the outside of a prison cell again,” as unmitigated celebration and a renewed sense of security.

    Josmar Trujillo is an activist and writer. He works with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that does print and video reporting about law enforcement’s effects on hyper-policed communities. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Josmar Trujillo.

    Josmar Trujillo: Great to be back. Hi, Janine.

    JJ: It seems worth talking about the Frank James coverage, the suspect in this subway shooting, in part because it was so boilerplate, and it shows the bare bones of a conversation, or what pretends to be a conversation, that we have seen countless times. What would you say were the key markers here? What made this sort of classic copaganda?

    JT: So the subway shooting incident was a little bit of a mix of copaganda, and also a little bit of a throwback to big crisis moments, not quite at the level of 9/11, but moments of panic, sheer panic. For the last couple of years, local media, not just in New York City but around the country, have been spreading copaganda, inciting fear and pushing the conversation away from the issue of Black lives mattering or social justice, and towards this idea that we’re all not safe.

    A subway shooting, because it’s in a public space where millions of people jump on a transit system to go to work, to go around the city, was treated like it was an attack on the entire city. So it had that extra element of fear, of panic, that this could happen to anyone, anywhere. And that escalated the level at which the copaganda operated.

    Now, some of the things that were clear were, one, the NYPD was thrust into the leading role, to be some agency that’s there in the forefront, looking to bring the bad guy into custody and to keep us all safe. And the NYPD not only didn’t stop the subway shooting from happening—even though thousands of police officers have been added into the subway system, and there’s cameras in every subway station in New York City—but were also unable to capture him. Part of the copaganda was, one, putting them in the forefront to say they’re going to stop this guy, they’re going to catch this guy, which they did neither.

    NBC: How the manhunt for Frank James, the N.Y.C. subway shooting suspect, unfolded

    NBC News (4/14/22)

    But then the media also just ignored and politely overlooked the fact of what the NYPD was unable to do, and that the suspect—and we should note that he’s a suspect; because the cameras in the subway weren’t working, we don’t even have clear footage that he did what he did—but the fact that he was suspected of doing it, he called the authorities on himself, after 30 hours of walking around some of the most densely populated parts of the city in broad daylight, using the subway system for hours after the incident, where you would think the police would be looking for him.

    I mean, this spectacular failure of public safety was on full display. And the media not only ignored it, but afterwards still managed to somehow credit the NYPD, and the brave men and women of the NYPD, for capturing the suspect, while begrudgingly noting that he actually did call—he was seen by regular people on the street, who had to point out to police officers that he was on the street,  but that he also had to, at some point, just call Crimestoppers on himself.

    And that was, to me, one of the most amazing things, is this idea that not only will the media always lionize the cops, but when the cops are clearly inept, and clearly not doing what they’re theoretically supposed to do, that the media will cover for them, and politely omit that failure.

    WaPo: Crime Is Rising on Subways Across the Country, Experts Say

    Washington Post (4/16/22)

    JJ: And it’s so important, because this isn’t a moment where we’re just talking about an event that happened and made people scared. It’s linked to solutions, and the solution is more police. So it’s meaningful. It’s not just like, oh, we should call out cops because their crackerjack work didn’t actually wind up apprehending this suspect.

    It’s because we know—and we saw, it’s already happened, the solution has already been called for, and it’s more police and more policing. So it’s extra meaningful that that actually doesn’t work. Forget the ideology for a moment. It just doesn’t seem to work in terms of what people are claiming it works for.

    JT: Yeah. Police enjoy a really convenient arrangement in terms of perception of crime, and the responsibility for keeping the public safe. On the one hand, when crime goes down, when a crime stat goes down one percentage point, they’ll hold a press conference and pat themselves on the back, and say, “Look at us, you should praise us. We’re the men and women of the NYPD, and we keep you safe. Look at the crime stats going down,” which they did for many years, as crime continued to decline in New York City.

    But when crime goes up—and some crime categories have gone up, because of the pandemic. That’s another conversation, that the media has failed to factor in the pandemic effect into some crime categories going up, and also across the city, which was predictable.

    But you would say, well, if police deserve credit when crime goes down, whose responsibility is it when crime goes up? The police are nowhere to be found. Then they’ll point the fingers at anyone else. And in the case of the NYPD, there’s a big conversation about bail reform, a really disingenuous conversation about some of the moderate reforms that were passed in New York state about incarceration, [claims] that are completely fabricated, have no basis in any evidence at all, but have been used to blame reforms for causing crime.

    And so they push blame for crime increases on everyone else: Black Lives Matter protest, social justice movements, anything except themselves. So it’s like a “heads we win, tails you lose.” They only get credit for when things go right in terms of crime stats. And when things go wrong, it’s the fault of social justice movements.

    JJ: Let’s lateral into media, because it’s such a co-operative relationship. There’s kind of a sideways acknowledgement from reporters that more police don’t actually make people more safe, but they make people feel more safe, and that perception is what we’re going to address. It’s very  shadows on the cave wall. Like, we’re not going to actually deal with safety, we’re going to deal with perceptions of safety.

    And that’s why I feel like media are so core to this conversation. The stories that reporters tell people have a lot to do with what people believe about what law enforcement does, what it doesn’t do, who’s harmful, who’s not harmful, and all of that.

    JT: And people should understand the term “copaganda,” which I know is being used now more readily. It’s not just an example of when police are overly quoted in a story, or used as the only source in the story, or when there is favorable coverage or bias given to them. The stories are the symptoms. The core of copaganda is that symbiotic relationship between the press and police. Police rely on press and press rely on police.

    For example, local reporters here rely on access to police officers to get access to crime scenes, to get information that is not yet publicly available, because the police hold so much public information before it goes out.

    That access, to be able to say, “Hey, can we interview you for this new policy that’s going into effect? Can we go for a ride-along for this operation that you’re planning?” This symbiotic relationship, that’s at the core of copaganda, so the stories that you see are the products of that relationship, and that relationship, I think, is what we need to talk about more and more, and why the media is relying—not all of the media, but much of the mainstream and corporate media, and especially the local media, they’re very dependent on access to police officers or police officials.

    The City: Mayor Eric Adams Proposes Boost to Police and Jail Spending in Nearly $100B Budget

    The City (4/26/22)

    And then how police also utilize the press, to, one, stoke fear when they need to, because fear is a really crucial element to validate police authority, and how that goes both ways. And it’s an unspoken relationship, and it goes on and on, and it creates an element of fear that makes the public much more malleable in terms of what they’ll allow to happen without being skeptical, whether you want to bring back stop and frisk, or you want to bring drones to New York City for the police—any return to a horrible form of policing or an escalation of a new form of policing depends on people being properly scared enough.

    And police benefit from it, because they’ll have their budgets expanded, which just happened yesterday; the mayor is proposing more funding for the NYPD. But also it sells newspapers, it gets clicks. It gets people to buy into this narrative that the media has been cultivating for the better part of two years, and you can even say longer than that—many, many years. So there’s a benefit for both sides of that arrangement.

    JJ: Absolutely. So much I could say… I do think that honest, observant people would acknowledge that the game-changing media on police brutality, on police racism, has not come from salaried journalists, who are charged with and constitutionally protected for speaking truth to power.

    It’s not come from there. It’s come from—we’re calling them “citizen journalists.” What they are are regular people on the street with a phone who, I was going to say “are not afraid to use it,” but I think often they are afraid to use it, but they just know that if they don’t record this… they recognize that they’re now the historical record, and if they don’t record this and show it, then people are going to deny that it happened.

    And so if we could just talk about the redefining of journalism, the fact that if we’re talking about police brutality and aberrations by police, it matters so much that just regular folks are creating media and reporting about it.

    JT: Absolutely. And this goes back, in a very recent history, to Ferguson. This goes back to the highs of the Black Lives Matter movement, the recording of the interaction that killed Eric Garner in Staten Island, the Ferguson protesters who were using social media to shoot images out to the world of what the police department was doing in response to protests.

    So you can call it “citizens”—we use “copwatch,” because copwatch is a form of people using cameras to be vigilant of police and tracking what they’re saying, because, unfortunately, we live in a society where police’s word is always taken at a higher value than a regular person’s word.

    So you need that camera. You need that evidence, but you also need to show the world what’s happening. We use “copwatch,” we use “citizen,” you can just say “the public.” Some people will say “activist.” I never got a card in the mail that said I was an activist. I was a person who just started to give a crap about what was going on, and I started to do things about it, you know?

    It’s regular people being able to document what’s going on. And in particular with the police, because policing is most harmful in communities of color, it’s those people in low-income communities of color that have the most experience, the most perspective, the most context to be able to speak about this.

    And not just write about it for a one-time story because, you know, the story is hot, or an editor told you to go over to Harlem and check out what’s going on, but because maybe you live there and maybe you know what’s going on. Maybe you have connections in the community that enlighten your understanding of what’s happening from just a one-time incident to a continuation of a historical oppressive system.

    So I think it’s really important that that conversation of us not relying on salaried, constitutionally protected reporters, or card-carrying members of the press, to understand that storytelling is about people. And that’s the most important element that we can start from, and in terms of policing, there are certain people that are policed more than others. And if we acknowledge that, then we also have to acknowledge that they might be the better suited ones to have an honest conversation about it.

    JJ: Absolutely. You know, if video evidence were enough, we wouldn’t be in conversation right now. We’ve seen videos. We have video—Rodney King—we have video, video exists.

    JT: No, I’ll, I’ll never forget what you told me once. I think it was some event that we saw you at, where you said evidence is not the problem. It’s never been about a lack of evidence, like we just need to compile more evidence, more proof.

    It’s important to document things, but it’s also important to understand that this is not just about winning over people with the rationality of our argument, but really understanding this is a war of information, and a literal war as well.

    I mean, there’s physical violence, death. There are things that are happening in communities at the hands of the police. There is a literal and figurative war that’s happening, and in those cases, it’s not about you sitting down and having an honest intellectual debate with someone who will concede when you have a point.

    They will not concede. The people who are against this are not willing to acknowledge that bail reform has not contributed to crime. It’s beside the point, the facts don’t matter to them. It’s just about pushing an agenda forward, and being the loudest and the most aggressive in that way. I think if we understand that, I think we’ll also have a better understanding of how to counteract that.

    JJ: Well, precisely, and thank you very much, Josmar, for that. And I just want to ask you, finally, if you do think about—you know, we’re not anti-reporter, we’re not anti-journalism—if you think about what useful journalism around this set of issues would look like, or what it would include, what are we talking about? How do we get off the dime on this conversation?

    Josmar Trujillo

    Josmar Trujillo: “We have to understand that journalism is something that anybody should be able to do. We should all be able to document our stories.” (image: Joseph Hayden)

    JT: Well, this is a long conversation. We could have a big conversation, a couple of days’ worth of conversations, about that. But there’s been kind of a reckoning, from what I’ve seen, in media about, at the very basic level, diversity in the newsroom, right? Like just acknowledging that, right? Not to mention, people aren’t moving enough in that direction, but acknowledging that white supremacy is not just an issue of people in power in police departments or in government, but also in the people who shape and tell the stories of our society.

    But there’s this idea also that it’s not just about diversity. It’s also about tearing down the walls of saying, like, this person is a reliable person because this person has a press pass, and this person is  a crazy or a fringe person because they put their stuff on social media.

    There has to be, I think, room for us to understand that citizen journalism and journalism can be made stronger by not thinking of ourselves in these silos, and not thinking of ourselves as “real reporters and people who are really objective,” and “people who are not credible,” and start to open up that conversation.

    Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of stuff since the Capitol riots where there’s this whole battle for information about who’s right and who’s wrong. And there’s a deeper conversation about censorship and all of this stuff. But I think we have to understand that journalism is something that anybody should be able to do. We should all be able to document our stories, and there needs to be, I think, a push for traditional newsrooms to understand that, possibly create programs and put resources into helping bridge that gap, right? So we’re not just hiring from the journalism schools, and we’re creating apprenticeships or creating programs, ways for people to be able to enter the profession, but also for us to not think that the profession is the end all and be all of storytelling, because it’s not.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo. You can find Copwatch Media online at Copwatch.Media, and his work many places around the internet, including FAIR.org. Thank you so much, Josmar Trujillo, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    JT: Thanks, Janine. Thanks so much for having me.

     

    The post ‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Shocked by the Leak, Not the Opinion

     

    When Politico (5/2/22) published a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that would, if handed down by the Court, overturn Roe v. Wade and undermine the foundation for many privacy rights enjoyed by Americans today, it was a headline story across US news outlets. But in the flood of coverage, too many elite media outlets focused on the leak itself and treated the issue as a political football, rather than centering the real-world implications the opinion would have for everyday people.

    NBC: Supreme Court Leak on Overturning Roe v. Wade

    NBC Nightly News (5/3/22) reassures viewers as to “the integrity of the Court’s operations.”

    On NBC Nightly News (5/3/22), for instance, anchor Lester Holt turned first to Justice correspondent Pete Williams to explain what happened. Williams began by offering viewers his take: “While the publication of the draft is a shock, the conclusion of the draft shouldn’t be.”

    Though most court observers did expect the conservative super-majority to overturn Roe (CounterSpin, 9/15/21), Alito’s conclusion—that not only was Roe “egregiously wrong,” but that “unenumerated rights” to privacy or autonomy in general have no constitutional grounding—was, in fact, shocking to many of those who analyzed it (e.g., Slate, 5/2/22). And just because something is anticipated doesn’t mean it’s not still shocking.

    But with that framing, it was little surprise that the first expert Williams turned to for commentary, Tom Goldstein of SCOTUS Blog, spoke only of the gravity of the leak. (“This has never happened in American history. And the Court may never be the same when it comes to the trust between the justices and all of their law clerks.”)

    Holt’s only question to Williams had a similar focus: “Pete, let me ask you. How does the Court plan to proceed in investigating this leak?”

    ‘Shocking breach of privacy’

    CBS: Jan Crawford

    CBS Evening News‘ Jan Crawford (5/3/22) wasn’t sure “how this Court will ever recover” from the leak of a draft opinion.

    CBS Evening News (5/3/22) likewise led off its coverage with its chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, who explained:

    This is really a shocking breach of privacy, something that didn’t even happen when the presidency was on the line in Bush vs. Gore. It raises questions about how this Court will ever recover and what that final decision will be.

    The irony of worrying about the Court’s privacy as it contemplates eliminating a right to privacy for all Americans was not addressed. Crawford later characterized the leak as a “body blow to the Supreme Court.”

    Williams and Crawford are legal correspondents, so it’s perhaps logical that their focus centers on repercussions for the Court rather than for the general public. But this highlights the trouble with Washington reporting, which prioritizes inside baseball over real-world impact, allowing outlets to tout their professionalism and access with little danger of appearing partisan—or of giving the public the information it needs.

    Fox News: FBI to Help Investigate Supreme Court Leak

    Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino told Fox News (5/3/22) the leak was “absolutely jaw-dropping.” Severino’s group has spent at least $37 million to ensure a right-wing majority on the Court.

    The rarefied focus also played into the right-wing framing of the story, which unsurprisingly cast the leak itself as far more important than the opinion’s implications for people seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. At FoxNews.com (5/3/22), Alito’s majority draft opinion “elicited shock from longtime observers of the Court,” not because of the potential elimination of a fundamental right to bodily autonomy, or the anticipated overthrowing of a 50-year-old precedent, but because the Court “rarely had information about its deliberations leak to the public.”

    Notably, none of these networks mustered similar outrage over revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni repeatedly urging the White House chief of staff to illegally overturn the 2020 election results, and Justice Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself from cases related to January 6. In that case, all three newscasts framed the story as merely a partisan battle, with Democrats enraged and Republicans supportive of Thomas, rather than a “body blow” to the Court itself.

    Impact on politics more than lives

    Beyond examining the impact on the Court, the networks still often framed the Roe leak story in terms of politics rather than lives. In a segment introduced as exploring “how this could play out across the country,” NBC reporter Stephanie Gosk (5/3/22) concluded: “It is an issue that has long divided the country. And if Roe v. Wade is overturned, those divisions may grow deeper.”

    ABC World News: Supreme Court Draft Leaked

    ABC World News Tonight‘s David Muir (5/3/22) said the leak “has certainly fueled both sides in this emotional debate.”

    Anchor David Muir on ABC World News Tonight (5/3/22) framed the story in his first segment foremost as a political football, saying that the leaked draft

    has certainly fueled both sides in this emotional debate, alarming millions who came to trust the 50-year-old right to privacy in making this choice as legal precedent and heartening millions of others who have fought to overturn Roe v. Wade for 50 years.

    All the primetime shows did talk as well about the likely impact on those seeking abortions, which was almost always described as clinics or providers having more difficulty doing their jobs, or women having to travel farther to access abortions. Brief nods were occasionally made to the disproportionate impact on low-income and BIPOC communities (e.g., NBC 5/3/22), and the fact that “there’s already dwindling access that could quickly disappear” (CBS, 5/3/22). But what that would mean in practical terms—that more pregnant people will die and more families fall into poverty—was never directly stated.

    Indeed, while NBC‘s Gosk interviewed leaders of abortion clinics in Texas and Mississippi, her sole question explicitly asking “what will happen to the women, many of them low-income, who every year get abortions in states like Mississippi, Texas, places like that?” was directed to the CEO of an anti-choice group, who assured viewers that they will be “providing them with holistic life-affirming options to make sure that they get access to the resources and the help that they need.” Gosk offered no counterpoint to that rosy view.

    Pointless whodunnit

    Fox: Supreme Court draft decision leaked to energize Democrats' base, former Clinton adviser says

    More recently, Mark Penn has been an advisor to Donald Trump—but describing him that way wouldn’t have lent credibility to Fox News‘ conspiracy theory (5/4/22).

    Much of the press was also fixated on the drama of who leaked the draft—a question of far greater interest to political insiders than to people contemplating a sharp curtailment of their rights. The right in particular devoted significant time to piecing together clues and determining what their motive might be, and, primarily, whether the leaker was liberal or conservative. One Fox piece, “Supreme Court Draft Decision Leaked to Energize Democrats’ Base, Former Clinton Adviser Says” (5/4/22), featured right-wing Democrat Mark Penn claiming Democrats initiated the stunt to bring suburban women voters back to the party: “I think that that breathed new life into Democratic hopes for those midterm elections.”

    Right-wing outlet Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield (5/3/22) accused Kentaji Brown-Jackson—who is not yet on the Supreme Court, and thus does not have any access to their computers or documents—of leaking the draft.

    With an investigation underway, such speculation and baseless accusations could easily go on for weeks, working to turn a story about a highly unpopular and undemocratic conservative move, one that strips people of a long-held and extraordinarily consequential right, into a pointless whodunnit. Corporate media have spent too long ceding the framing of the abortion story to the right and failing to show the devastating consequences the right’s decades-long attack on reproductive rights has already produced (FAIR.org, 5/19/21; CounterSpin, 5/28/21).

    The essential story journalists need to be telling now is the story of the further concrete consequences the decision would have on millions of people’s lives throughout the country. Otherwise the real-life effects of a country without Roe are lost to the theatrical, sensational focus on the leak.

     

    The post Media Shocked by the Leak, Not the Opinion appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Chris Lehmann on Multi-Racial Democracy, Mike Rispoli on Funding Local News

     

    The Forum: Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown

    (illustration: The Forum)

    This week on CounterSpin: Listeners are aware of the no-less-destructive-for-being-baseless assault on critical race theory. Just like with affirmative action (where conservatives said, “steps toward racial equity really means unfair quotas”), media took this charge, “steps toward racial equity really means telling white children to hate themselves,” and made it into “something some folks are saying”—while, of course, out of fairness they’ll acknowledge, “others disagree.”  (Media themselves, they suggest, occupy the intellectually and morally superior center.) A new website engages the attack more productively, by using critical race theory as a prism to explore the current range of threats to multi-racial democracy and our ability to fight for it. The site’s called The Forum; we’ll talk with editor-in-chief Chris Lehmann.

          CounterSpin220506Lehmann.mp3

     

    Fix NJ's Local News Crisis

    (photo: New Jersey Civic Information Consortium)

    Also on the show: Between Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, who would you prefer preside over what information you can access? It’s kind of like being offered a choice between a poke in one eye or the other. If the problem is media outlets with priorities that poorly serve even our aspirations for democracy—and it is—the response is media with different priorities, which we know really only come from having a different bottom line. How can that work? We’ll talk about one model with Mike Rispoli of the group Free Press; he’s been working with the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium—a new way of thinking about and meeting local communities’ need for news.

          CounterSpin220506Rispoli.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look back at recent coverage of Roe v. Wade.

          CounterSpin220506Banter.mp3

     

    The post Chris Lehmann on Multi-Racial Democracy, Mike Rispoli on Funding Local News appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Trans Youth Targeted by Texas Are Marginalized by Corporate Media

     

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott put out a directive on February 22, following a legal opinion from state Attorney General Ken Paxton, insisting families with transgender kids be investigated for potential “child abuse.” While not legally binding, the move provoked several investigations into parents of trans kids.

    It’s one more state government assault in what’s beating 2021 as the worst year for anti-trans backlash. The far right’s obsession with reversing LGBTQ progress is nothing new, nor is the gross conflation of gender affirmation with harm to children. But the bigotry is experiencing an unprecedented mainstreaming—through the careful calculations of conservative media, and the callous indifference of centrist media.

    FAIR (3/3/21, 3/12/21, 5/6/21) has previously criticized corporate news outlets for their failure to respond to the vitriolic and well-funded anti-gender movement. In a new study of coverage on the Texas directive across six outlets, we found once again a dearth of trans sources and perspectives, treating those most harmed by the directive as subjects to be debated, not humans worthy of providing insight into their own lives.

    Amount of coverage

    Stories on Texas Directive by Outlet

    FAIR counted news and opinion stories mentioning the Texas directive, as well as the types of sources cited, in the centrist outlets New York Times, Washington Post and Slate, along with the right-wing Breitbart, Daily Caller and Federalist, between February 22 and March 22. The majority of stories were text-based, but some of the results for Slate were transcriptions of podcasts. Stories in the Times were found using the Nexis database, while the other five were counted directly from the sources’ websites.

    The conservative outlets published 33 stories on the directive, versus 38 in the centrist outlets. Breitbart alone covered it more times (23) than the New York Times and Slate combined (21). The coverage we studied included a total of 200 sources; 40% of these sources appeared on Breitbart, a measure of the far-right outlet’s obsession with the topic.

    It’s a principle of good journalism that coverage should be centered on those most affected by an issue. As trans people were those most impacted by Abbott’s directive, one should hope they would be centered in news coverage of the matter. Yet of the 200 sources across all the outlets, only 30, or 15%, were identified as trans.

    Cis vs. Trans Sources in Texas Directive Stories

    Outlet by outlet, 27% of sources cited by the New York Times in directive stories were trans, and 26% at Slate. Breitbart had markedly less trans representation, with 11% trans sources—though this was more than the Washington Post or Daily Caller, which each had 8%. The Federalist, meanwhile, had no sources identified as trans in its stories on the Texas anti-trans directive.

    A majority of trans sources were experts representing NGOs and media outlets, such as Chase Strangio and Gillian Branstetter of the American Civil Liberties Union. While excellent sources to inform the public on trans advocacy, they represent only a small part of the trans population. Trans people who aren’t affiliated with major organizations naturally may fear for their safety when speaking to the press, but there wasn’t even an effort to cite trans members of the general public anonymously. Excluding expert sources, trans people provided a total of 5% of sources across all outlets, while parents of trans children constituted 10%.

    Trans-suspicious ideologues

    WaPo: What I wish I’d known when I was 19 and had sex reassignment surgery

    A trans woman embraced by the right for regretting gender reassignment was spotlighted by the Washington Post (4/11/22) as well.

    The Washington Post, though it cited seven parents of trans kids, notably featured no quotes from trans youth themselves, or from any other trans members of the general public. This choice is all the more disquieting, given the lack of diversity in trans perspectives that the paper has highlighted in its opinion section.

    While there were opinion pieces (2/25/22, 3/2/22) that were critical of the directive during the studied timeframe, none were by trans people themselves. But the following month, Corinna Cohn, a transgender software engineer, was given space to tell her own story. Cohn, who has become a fixture in conservative media as an ally to anti-trans advocates, penned a mournful op-ed (4/11/22) that expressed surgery-regret and alarm at “how readily authority figures facilitate transition.” She referred to her early transition self as a “callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood,” and encouraged gender-dysphoric youth to take their time before making long-term decisions.

    Conversations around regret, risk and the role of therapeutic interventions are essential when it comes to trans healthcare, but they’re difficult to have when the ground is almost entirely ceded to conservative gender politics. The sole trans experience detailed in the Post in the two months following the directive produces an incomplete picture of what gender-affirming care looks like. The absence of direct accounts of trans joy, pride, and resistance promotes the notion that transition is a tragic outcome, that stories such as Cohn’s are the rule and not the exception.

    According to biologist and trans historian Julia Serano (8/2/16), outlets regularly employ “trans-suspicious” ideologues who, while expressing enough acceptance of trans people to appear moderate, or even being trans themselves, nevertheless partake in constant fearmongering over the rate of gender transition. Fellow trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson (New Inquiry, 9/13/21) identifies this rhetorical strategy as “laundering extremism”: filtering anti-trans bigotry through “liberal” rationalism while still pandering to the far-right. Whether it comes from cis or trans voices, this handwringing implies that access to gender transition is too easy, and thus laws restricting access to it are justified—all the while ignoring the damaging impact restrictive medical gatekeeping has had.

    The Washington Post, despite ostensibly being to the left of outlets like Breitbart, carries water for those actively fighting to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care when it fails to provide a greater breadth of trans perspectives.

    Deny and punish

    Slate: The Biggest Threat to Trans Kids in Texas Is Child Protective Services

    Slate (3/2/22): “The child welfare system..is a particularly potent tool for transphobic politicians because it was set up to surveil families that fall outside of the white, middle class norm.”

    The suspicion and concern around gender transition in the media belies the reality that it can be lifesaving for trans kids and adults alike. Trans healthcare is linked to better mental health outcomes and lower suicide risk, while a lack of family acceptance drives the disproportionate rates of homelessness among LGBTQ youth. The domino effect of denying care means trans young people will face exorbitant costs to transition in adulthood, creating even more barriers for a demographic that is 70% more likely to live below the poverty line than cis people. Not every young person experiencing gender dysphoria may require medical transition, but to deny and punish those that would benefit from it is both classist and anti-democratic, as it inserts punitive state authority between patients and qualified practitioners.

    There were some notable exceptions to this framework. An episode of a Slate podcast (The Waves, 3/3/22) featured several prominent trans journalists and researchers, including Gill-Peterson and Evan Urquhart. They provided essential context, including the overrepresentation of LGBTQ youth in foster care, and the lack of families willing to accept them. Another article (3/2/22), by Roxanna Asgarian, took a deeper look than any of the other outlets into the carceral tactics of child protection agencies, such as their ability to investigate individuals and search their homes without alerting them of their rights, and the disproportionate targeting of poor, Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ families for problems that are often synonymous with poverty.

    But overall, trans-centered perspectives were flashes in the pan, and hardly sufficient to counteract the present emergency plaguing trans people and their loved ones.

     

    The post Trans Youth Targeted by Texas Are Marginalized by Corporate Media appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • On Venezuela, Only Hawkish ‘Dissent’ Allowed

     

    Another NATO war means a media establishment in a propaganda frenzy once again. Corporate media outlets have cheered Washington for throwing fuel to the fire in Ukraine, with some demanding that the administration escalate yet more (FAIR.org, 1/28/22, 2/28/22, 3/18/22, 3/22/22). Be it through their choice of pundits, or their own reporters haranguing White House officials for not sending enough weaponry, one thing is clear enough: Elite media will only criticize official foreign policy for not being hawkish enough.

    When it comes to Venezuela, corporate journalists have historically had little to criticize, given Washington’s “maximum pressure” regime-change efforts (FAIR.org, 12/19/20, 4/15/20, 1/22/20, 9/24/19, 6/26/19, 5/1/19).  However, a recent unexpected trip by a high-level US delegation to Caracas to meet with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro opened the spectrum of opinion ever so slightly. Besides the traditional bias and dishonest coverage, a familiar pattern emerged: Just like with Russia/Ukraine, the only allowed criticism of official policy comes from the right, demanding that the US be as extreme as possible in dealing with its “enemies.”

    Media to Guaidó’s rescue

    Reuters: Venezuela's opposition presses U.S. to hold off its consideration of oil imports

    “Political winds shifted against any proposal to ease the US sanctions,” Reuters (3/22/22) reported–as though hostile media coverage wasn’t part of those “political winds.”

    The early March talks, which broached subjects such as sanctions relief and Venezuela resuming oil supplies to the US, were soon discontinued after backlash from hardliners. But they had one clear loser: US-backed self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó, who was “sidelined” (Washington Post, 3/11/22). The Jeff Bezos–owned paper reported that the “notable leader” was left out of the plans (though his “notable” status is very dubious at the moment—AP, 3/2/22). The Post article acknowledged further down that the opposition figure “has little practical authority in the country and little influence outside.”

    However, in Guaidó’s hour of need, corporate journalists came to his aid, treating as newsworthy that the hardline oppositionist was “angered” (Miami Herald, 3/7/22) or “astonished” (El País, 3/10/22) about not being informed of his Washington bosses’ plans in advance.

    Efforts to prop up the fading politician included the oft-repeated lie that he is recognized by “more than 50” (Washington Post, 3/9/22) or “almost 60” countries (AFP, 3/7/22), which was true in 2019. The current number, based on a recent UN General Assembly vote to recognize the credentials of the Maduro government, is 16 (Venezuelanalysis, 12/8/21).

    Soon after, news outlets gave Guaidó the floor to “press” the White House against dealing with the Venezuelan government, as well as to warn oil corporations such as Chevron to not pursue increased activity in Venezuela and “stick with democracy” (Reuters, 3/22/22), which in this instance stands for unconstitutionally replacing an elected president with a legislator whose term expired in 2020.

    A Guaidó aide even asked, “What’s the value of the commodity of freedom?” Given how cheaply US officials and their media stenographers bring it up, not that high.

    Reuters went further than most in the damage-control operation, telling readers more than two weeks after the fact that “the US officials met Guaidó after attending the meeting with Maduro.” The claim is very dubious, given prior reporting that the opposition frontman and the US delegation “didn’t meet face to face” (Washington Post, 3/11/22). Given Guaidó’s communications policy, which prompted him to boast of a phone call with Slovakia’s foreign minister, it seems unlikely he would host a White House delegation and stay quiet about it.

    Inventing ‘hostages’

    WSJ: Hostages for Oil From Venezuela?

    Wall Street Journal (3/9/22): Easing sanctions against Venezuela “would reward a rogue regime for taking American hostages with little energy benefit.”

    The one “consequence” of the surprise Caracas summit was the release of two detained US citizens, Gustavo Cárdenas and Jorge Fernández. Cárdenas was one of the “Citgo 6” oil executives sentenced in 2020 for corruption, whereas Fernández was arrested in 2021 after allegedly entering the country illegally from Colombia while carrying a drone.

    Outlets were happy enough to echo the administration’s claim that the two had been “wrongfully detained” (Al Jazeera, 3/9/22) and were used as “political pawns” (BBC, 3/11/22), but not so much to offer details on the corruption charges brought against the Citgo 6. Certainly none connected Fernández’s drone arrest to the assassination attempt against Maduro in August 2018, which used explosive-laden drones brought in from Colombia.

    Some went even further by referring to the imprisoned US citizens in Venezuela as “hostages” (CNN, 3/16/22; Wall Street Journal, 3/9/22). It seems no crimes can be committed by US nationals in countries deemed evil by Washington.

    Similarly apologetic were the references to Luke Denman and Airan Berry, former US Green Berets serving 20-year sentences after taking part in Operation Gideon, a failed paramilitary/mercenary invasion of Venezuela. Despite their own confessions and public statements by Gideon organizer Jordan Goudreau confirming their involvement, the two former soldiers are only “accused in a plot” against Maduro (Washington Post, 3/6/22; CNN, 3/8/22).

    The Washington Post brought up the case of Matthew Heath, a “former Marine who was arrested while traveling along the Caribbean coast of Venezuela,” without noting that he was caught with heavy weaponry and explosives (Venezuelanalysis, 9/14/20).

    An overdose of Rubio

    NYT: Venezuela could be a fill-in for Russian oil, but critics fear aiding another strongman.

    The New York Times (3/8/22) quoted Sen. Robert Menendez (D.-N.J.) as saying the US “risks perpetuating a humanitarian crisis” by lifting sanctions that have killed over 100,000 Venezuelans.

    To the extent that the media establishment was willing to entertain the possibility of Washington engaging with Caracas again, it did so on its familiar dishonest, US exceptionalist terms. As such, corporate pundits (NPR, 3/13/22; Financial Times, 3/13/22; Washington Post, 3/11/22) weighed the pros and cons of dealing with an “authoritarian” government. Others called it “autocratic” (Guardian, 3/14/22; Financial Times, 3/12/22; CNN, 3/8/22). The New York Times used both (3/8/22).

    Laying down the law, Western journalists wrote that, in order for negotiations to proceed, Biden wants “progress toward restoring democratic governance” (Bloomberg, 3/10/22) and Maduro must “set aside his authoritarian impulses” (AP, 3/10/22), thus establishing both the Venezuelan president’s dictatorial tendencies and the country’s lack of “democratic governance” as background facts.

    Likewise reheated were the unsubstantiated “fraud” claims concerning Maduro’s 2018 reelection (New York Times, 3/8/22; AFP, 3/7/22; Reuters, 3/6/22; see FAIR.org, 5/23/18), and the evidence-free “narco-terrorism” charges (BBC, 3/13/22; New York Times, 3/8/22; Washington Post, 3/11/22; see FAIR.org, 9/24/19). Reuters (3/22/22) ridiculously accused the Venezuelan president of “dragging his feet toward new elections” when the country’s constitution stipulates they be held in 2024.

    But the most remarkable aspect of coverage was that the US politicians asked to weigh in on the Biden administration’s calculations were invariably foreign policy hawks. CNN (3/8/22) cited no less than five US politicians criticizing the rapprochement and the possibility of sanctions relief. The most featured by far was Sen. Marco Rubio (R.–Florida), who got to ramble unopposed about “narco-dictators” (Washington Post, 3/6/22; Bloomberg, 3/30/22; Financial Times, 3/13/22; Newsweek, 8/3/22).

    No corporate outlet sought the opinion of those US representatives who in the recent past have strongly called for sanctions relief because of their documented impact on the civilian population (Venezuelanalysis, 8/14/21, 6/17/21, 2/11/21).

    The sanctions script

    Whether to lift or relax sanctions imposed on Venezuela in recent years is—leaving aside the Guaidó charade—the key decision facing Washington. Multilateral bodies and human rights rapporteurs have decried the measures, which have led to over 100,000 deaths, according to former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas.

    Despite a growing consensus demanding their removal, corporate media have stuck to their routinely dishonest coverage of sanctions and their consequences (FAIR.org, 6/4/21). A key misrepresentation across the board (CNN, 3/8/22; BBC, 3/11/22; Bloomberg, 3/10/22; Financial Times, 3/6/22, 3/13/22; Reuters, 3/9/22) is that sanctions against Venezuela’s oil sector only began in 2019.

    In fact, the first key blow against the industry came in August 2017, when state oil company PDVSA was shut out of global credit markets. Studies on crude output pinpoint a sharper drop beginning at this point, and $6 billion in lost revenue in 12 months. The seminal report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) also begins with the 2017 sanctions. Whether a concerted effort or lazy copy-paste, saying that the measures began only in 2019 is a disingenuous way to claim that Venezuela’s economic collapse has nothing to do with US sanctions.

    Viewing the sanctions debate though the prism of US imperial interests, corporate journalists will  state baldly that the deadly measures are meant to “force Maduro” from power (Washington Post, 3/6/22; Financial Times, 3/6/22); Washington’s right to do so is never in question. As such, Biden changing course is presented as a “gamble” at best (Bloomberg, 3/15/22) or a “strategic blunder” at worst (Wall Street Journal, 3/7/22). The argument against sanctions is that they are “counterproductive,” because they are “ineffective in reducing the power of the government” (Forbes, 3/24/22). Regime change remains openly the goal.

    Readers are assured that sanctions were “intended to help restore Venezuelan democracy” (Guardian, 3/6/22) or “bring reform” (Washington Post, 3/9/22). Nowhere to be found are details of the devastating harm these unilateral measures inflict on the civilian population. Consequences, from lost crops to resurgent epidemics, are out of sight and out of mind.

    Faced with the White House contemplating changes (even for the wrong reasons) to policies that have brought tremendous suffering for ordinary people, corporate media opted to obfuscate the sanctions’ impact, present the debate in the most US-exceptionalist terms, and platform the most hardline positions. In this way, the media establishment manufacture consent for silently killing Venezuelans.

     

    The post On Venezuela, Only Hawkish ‘Dissent’ Allowed appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Josmar Trujillo on Hyper-Policing

    Chief Wiggum photo illustration by Copwatch Media

    (image: Copwatch Media)

    This week on CounterSpin: There are reasons that so much news media is consumed with crime. Not just any crime, not wage theft, not lethal pollution—but street crime, random, individual crime. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism draws eyes to the set, doesn’t bother advertisers, is cheap to produce and lets news outlets look as though they’re tracking an important event in real time, and pretend as though they’re protecting real people…as they forcibly distract from actual humane efforts to respond to the ongoing crises—homelessness, poverty, addiction—that lead to crime, but are less cheap and easy to cover than cops and robbers. It’s a story old as journalism, but it’s still messed up. We’ll talk about that with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo, working now with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that reports on the effects of hyper-policing on communities.

          CounterSpin220428Trujillo.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of inflation, immigration restriction and democracy.

          CounterSpin220428Banter.mp3

     

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  • Damn Good for CBS—but Really Bad for Democracy

     

    WaPo: Turmoil at CBS News Over Trump Aide Mick Mulvaney's Punditry Gig

    The Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that CBS‘s hiring of former Trump aide Mick Mulvaney was “drawing backlash within the company because of his history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims.”

    CBS News hiring former Trump aide Mick Mulvaney speaks volumes about systemic problems in our media. Mulvaney notoriously defended various Trump chicaneries—including withholding military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to extort its president for political gain—and no democracy worthy of the name should give him a prominent media platform. But once again, commercial values trumped democratic principles in mainstream news media.

    A recording of a staff meeting captured CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani explaining how the hiring decision was based on maintaining “access” to Republican elites (Washington Post, 3/30/22). He told the staff of CBS‘s morning show:

    Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.

    Such media malpractice recalls the now-disgraced former CBS CEO Les Moonves (Extra!, 4/16) enthusing in 2016 how the Trump campaign “might not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

    Misguided norms

    De-prioritizing democracy is a recurring failure in our commercial news media, often enabled by misguided norms. As Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan (4/3/22) aptly noted, hiring Mulvaney reveals

    the news media’s blind and relentless pandering to the outdated notion that both sides of the aisle are pretty much equal…just with different governing philosophies.

    PressThink: Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press

    Jay Rosen (PressThink, 9/25/16) : “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”

    The tendency to rely on “he said/she said” false equivalence has long stained professional news practices—simultaneously presenting a veneer of neutrality while also accentuating partisan conflict. But this practice is especially egregious now that the Republican Party has become an openly anti-democratic force, often supporting the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, and refusing to properly condemn the January 6 insurrection and broader efforts to overturn election results—in some cases even encouraging them. The recent revelation that Sen. Mike Lee supported such attempts—a coup by any other name—barely registered with major television media.

    News outlets have increasingly normalized this fascistic threat, at least partly because to call it out and condemn it—as news outlets would in any functioning democracy—counters a key cornerstone in the commercial media model. “Bothsidesism” is arguably one of the worst symptoms of our media’s structural pathologies. Fixating on access to official sources, this practice typically indexes media coverage to the parameters of elite opinion, and naturalizes status quo power relationships instead of challenging them.

    To confront the GOP’s neofascist turn would amount to a departure that, in the words of media critic Jay Rosen (PressThink, 9/25/16), “fries the circuits of the mainstream press.” A profit-driven media so closely wedded to the political elites within a two-party system could never dare alienate a large swathe of Americans who ensure the ratings that advertisers covet.

    Obsession with ratings

    Public Media Funding/GDP index

    The United States government spends 0.002% of its GDP on public media—vastly less than almost all other wealthy countries.

    As former MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary (8/3/20) has publicly written, commercial media’s obsession with ratings warps and degrades media coverage. She described how it’s “practically baked into the editorial process,” but remains “taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content.”

    Yet the damage is all around us. Ratings-driven news outlets focus more on facile coverage of pressing social issues—or provide no coverage at all—to privilege entertainment over information. This commercial logic drives media to emphasize dramatic and sensational storylines that keep our eyes glued to various screens, from online clickbait to cable television’s barking heads.

    Several years ago, Chris Hayes made a revealing comment on Twitter (7/24/18) to this effect when he acknowledged that covering climate change is a “palpable ratings killer. So the incentives are not great”—which begs the observation that we must change the incentives driving our news media.

    But why are commercial media so ratings-obsessed? It isn’t just a popularity contest, but rather stems from the core business model that undergirds the American media system: capturing our attention to deliver to advertisers. In the US, most commercial media organizations—from cable news to social media—rely on revenues from delivering eyes and ears to advertisers.

    Even for many newspapers, it’s long been about an 80/20 split (80% from advertisers/20% from reader-support like subscriptions, though this ratio is changing with the collapse of ad revenue). At the same time, the US is almost literally off the chart compared to democracies around the globe for how little it allocates towards public media.

    Captured by capitalism

    Twitter: Some, like @jayrosen_nyu & @brianklaas , urge journalists to start championing an unapologetic pro-democracy bias.

    Is having democracy better than not having democracy? “Ethical journalism” doesn’t need to make this “subjective value judgment,” argues SPJ board member J. Israel Balderas (Twitter, 4/6/22).

    Progressives often attribute mainstream media’s failings to its corporate ownership. While news media’s allegiance to corporate power deserves ruthless criticism, it’s also important to underscore how these pathologies are baked into the very DNA of a commercial press, resulting in media’s capture by unfettered capitalism.

    Democratic theorists have long warned us against this kind of market censorship, a filtering process that creates patterns of omission and emphasis in which some voices and views are elevated, and others muffled, according to commercial values, especially the need for profit to satisfy media owners and investors. They rightly observe that much of this power traces back to the influence of advertising, which privileges some narratives and some audiences over others, thereby essentially redlining the news by serving whiter and wealthier audiences.

    A commercial press that’s overly reliant on advertising revenue and “access journalism” based on elite sources, simply is—and always will be—ill-equipped to defend democracy. Despite noble exceptions, such a profit-first system will consistently marginalize progressive issues and favor news frames that align with elite interests and worldviews.

    For many journalists who have internalized these norms—a code of professional ethics that traces back to the first half of the 20th century when publishers assumed a semblance of “social responsibility” to stave off public criticism of commercial excesses in the press—these practices are carried out in the name of objectivity. It’s this orientation that led a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists to recently suggest that journalists shouldn’t adopt a pro-democracy bias in reporting.

    This commercial system’s shortcomings are symptomatic of core structural maladies—namely, profit imperatives that overwhelm commitments to democratic principles. It’s not simply a few bad journalists and news organizations; it is deeply systemic. While critiquing corporate media is an important exercise—public pressure can help push the needle toward more progressive and democratic narratives—at least part of our focus needs to be on apprehending and changing the underlying structures that help produce bad journalism.

    Democratizing media

    This media reform project is especially urgent now, as much of the professional journalism ranks have been decimated in the last two decades. Our long-term strategies for democratizing media should include building nonprofit and public alternatives to failing commercial models.

    Today, exciting new experiments are taking root across the country—many are independent, grassroots-driven and noncommercial—but we still need a society-wide approach to ensure that all members of the public not only have access to reliable and diverse news and information, but also have opportunities to make their own media and tell their own stories. Ultimately, we must democratize our media, but first we must remove journalism from the market as much as possible.

    This task of de-commercializing our media is made more feasible by the market itself, as profit-seeking entities (with the unfortunate exception of vulture hedge funds) abandon local journalism altogether. We’re faced with a historic opportunity to create a new media system from the ground up. It’s incumbent upon all of us who have a pro-democracy bias to work towards building true structural alternatives to the run-amok commercial system we’ve inherited in the US. Because what’s damn good for CBS is really bad for democracy.

     

     

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  • Trump’s Asylum Ban Hasn’t Disappeared—but Media Outrage Over It Has

     

    WaPo: Facing coronavirus pandemic, Trump suspends immigration laws and showcases vision for locked-down border

    The Washington Post (4/3/20) reported that Trump “shelved safeguards intended to protect trafficking victims and persecuted groups” and “created a pilot test for the impact of the more draconian measures he has long advocated.”

    “Facing Coronavirus Pandemic, Trump Suspends Immigration Laws and Showcases Vision for Locked-Down Border,” a Washington Post headline (4/3/20) announced in April 2020, reporting on the administration’s invocation of Title 42, a public-health code provision that allows the government to take emergency action to prevent communicable disease. The lead explained:

    President Trump has used emergency powers during the coronavirus pandemic to implement the kind of strict enforcement regime at the US southern border he has long wanted, suspending laws that protect minors and asylum seekers.

    Almost exactly two years later, the same paper (3/24/22), including one of the same authors of the 2020 article, reported on the coming end of the same policy restrictions with this headline: “Biden Faces Influx of Migrants at the Border Amid Calls to Lift Limits That Aided Expulsions.” Here the lead said that increasing numbers of migrants and refugees at the border were “stirring fears that the Biden administration will face an even larger influx if it lifts pandemic restrictions next week.” An end to Title 42 deportations was announced the following week, to go into effect May 23.

    It’s hard to even recognize it as the same policy in these two pieces.

    I looked at the Washington Post’s coverage of Title 42—from its introduction to its effects, calls for its end as well as for its continuation, to its announced end—to track how the paper’s reporting changed from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. The differences, which were stark and consistent, reveal something about how the Post views the two administrations, but also a lot about how they analyze —or don’t—US immigration policy.

    From pretext to pandemic policy

    WaPo: Biden faces influx of migrants at the border amid calls to lift limits that aided expulsions

    Two years later, the Post (3/24/22) said the number of people crossing the border was “stirring fears that the Biden administration will face an even larger influx if it lifts pandemic restrictions.”

    Under the Trump administration, the Washington Post consistently framed Title 42 as a pretext for severe restrictions on immigration, rather than presenting it at face value as a legitimate public health measure. The April 3, 2020, article described the use of Title 42 as “a pilot test for the impact of the more draconian measures [Trump] has long advocated.” An April 21 Post piece spoke of “the pandemic as the reasoning,” not the reason, for the restrictions. On May 13, it attributed to “some experts” the belief that Title 42 was “an excuse to implement the kind of blanket closures President Trump has sought for years.”

    Moreover, the 2020 coverage regularly included damning evidence supporting the view that the pandemic was merely a pretext for shutting the border, namely the fact that Covid was much worse in the US than anywhere else, and in particular, much worse than in Mexico and Central America. “Mexico has confirmed fewer than 1,500 positive cases of the virus so far, less than 1% of the number in the United States,” one report (4/3/20) noted. “Though Trump administration officials have tried to emphasize the external threat of the virus, the United States continues to have the worst outbreak in the world,” another (5/7/20) explained. “Despite the administration’s claims of an external threat, the United States remains the world’s worst coronavirus hot spot, by far,” the Post (5/13/20) told readers.

    By contrast, in 2021 and 2022, with a different occupant in the White House, Title 42 restrictions were generally contextualized as a response to the pandemic.

    In a July 2021 piece (7/28/21) headlined “Along Mexico Border, Covid Spike and More Migrant Families Stall Plans to End Title 42 Expulsions,” the claim that public health concerns were driving decisions about whether/when to end Title 42 is taken at face value. The piece goes so far as to relay a story from local Joya, Texas, police about a migrant mother “sneezing and coughing” walking into a fast-food restaurant, where the USians promptly called the police on the family. “This is day after day. We get hundreds of people, and they could all be sick,” the cop is quoted.

    On the day this article ran, Mexico had 13,911 new Covid cases while the US logged 84,961—more than twice as many even on a per capita basis. These numbers, however, were missing from the account.

    Similarly, in the March 24, 2022, piece, the Washington Post framed the upcoming decision on whether to continue or end Title 42 restrictions as a public health decision. If the administration chose to continue them, it noted,

    it would not be the first time the Biden administration…opted to renew them as another wave of infection looms. The emergence of the omicron variant of the coronavirus last winter quashed speculation that an end to Title 42 was imminent.

    Danger to migrants and refugees

    WaPo: Under Trump border rules, U.S. has granted refuge to just two people since late March, records show

    The Post (5/13/20) noted that the Trump administration “has yet to publish statistics showing the impact of the measures on the thousands of migrants who arrive in the United States each year as they flee religious, political or ethnic persecution, gang violence or other urgent threats.”

    In April 2020, the Washington Post (4/3/20) reported that Title 42 “bypassed court-ordered due process protections for minors, asylum seekers and others,” and said that Trump “has shelved safeguards intended to protect trafficking victims and persecuted groups.” That May (5/13/20), it revealed:

    The Trump administration’s emergency coronavirus restrictions have shut the US immigration system so tight that since March 21 just two people seeking humanitarian protection at the southern border have been allowed to stay.

    Such blunt statements about the devastating human rights impact of Title 42 were absent from the coverage in 2021 and 2022, however. In their place, the paper sometimes attributed concerns about dangers to migrants to critics of the policy.  “Advocates for immigrants have repeatedly sued over the policy, saying it endangers migrants and violates federal law,” it reported in March  2022 (“Democratic Lawmakers, Civil Liberties Groups Demand End to Title 42 Border Expulsions,” 3/10/22). It mentioned that a federal appeals court had days earlier ordered the Biden administration to stop sending families to countries where they face persecution, “citing reports that migrants have been raped, tortured and killed after being expelled.”

    In the March 24 article, objective dangers were again couched as partisan opinions: “Democrats and immigrant advocates…say that the order is denying victims of persecution the right to seek asylum under US law.” On March 30, it was “activists” who “argue” that Title 42 is “an inhumane way to treat people seeking refuge.”

    I dunno—rape, torture and murder seem objectively inhumane to me.

    And while Trump’s use of Title 42 was described with words like “draconian” (4/3/20) and “crackdown” (5/7/20), such normative terms were absent when it came to explaining Biden’s border policy. In 2020, Title 42 was used to “summarily expel” migrants (5/7/20), but in 2022 it was used to “rapidly deport” them (3/24/22).

    ‘Migration pressures’ and ‘unprecedented strains’

    WaPo: Biden officials bracing for unprecedented strains at Mexico border if pandemic restrictions lifted

    Reporting on the prospect of Biden relaxing Title 42 restrictions, the Post (3/29/22) recalled “mass migration events…that placed severe strains on US agents, holding facilities, transportation networks, humanitarian shelters and border communities.”

    In 2020, the Washington Post (5/13/20) was concerned that the border was shut “so tight” by Title 42 that only two people had gotten humanitarian protection. But in 2022 (3/30/22), it worried “lifting the policy could swell the border with migrants who view it as easier to come to the United States and claim asylum.” Apparently there’s such a thing as too much humanitarian protection.

    Indeed, the biggest theme of the Biden-era coverage of Title 42 has been the perception that ending the restrictions would result in too many people seeking asylum or otherwise trying to immigrate to the US. “The quantity of border-crossers is now so large that if Title 42 were lifted, agents would not be able to safely detain migrants, especially if large numbers seek asylum,” “analysts” told the Post (7/28/21). In “Biden Officials Bracing for Unprecedented Strains at Mexico Border if Pandemic Restrictions Lifted,” the Post (3/29/22) talked about “a possible post–Title 42 border rush.”

    “Biden officials insist the CDC renewal decision is driven by public health,” the March 24 article noted, “but in private, border authorities and others say it has become a management tool to cope with the historic migration pressures they have faced since early last year.” Under Trump, Title 42 was a pretext to implement “draconian” immigration policies, but under Biden it’s a “management tool” to deal with a legitimate problem.

    Barely unspoken is that the Washington Post now considers it a necessary management tool to stem the “influx” of people migrating to the US. Thus 2020’s concern over “shelved safeguards” has dissipated, and in its place we have justifications for continuing the very same policy that two years ago was viewed as extreme.

    Return to normalizing

    FAIR: Talking Turkey About Impeachment Hearings

    “Because of the myth of objective journalism, reporters’ and editors’ views of how Trump is a bad president or a terrible human being have no legitimized expression” (FAIR.org, 11/26/19).

    As I’ve argued earlier (FAIR.org, 11/26/19), I believe that most of the neoliberal media did dislike Trump and that bias influenced their coverage of the administration. The Washington Post—with its pretension to be the defender of democracy (“democracy dies in darkness”)—was fine with implying that Trump’s policies were beyond the pale, but is less inclined to paint the same policies the same way under the return-to-normal administration of Biden. What they disliked about Trump was not really his policies, but the fact that he said the quiet part out loud—in the case of immigration, the overt racism,  xenophobia and undisguised cruelty—and his unpredictability. With Biden, there is a return to a predictable bipartisan range of politics and policy.

    And equally predictably, the Post has returned to its habit of legitimizing and stabilizing the US presidency, and framing immigration policy as part of a chess match between Democrats and Republicans.

    Underlying the reflex to defend the administration is an unexamined bias in favor of our racist immigration and border policies, policies that have overall been the same before, during and after the Trump administration. As border crossings increased in the second year of the pandemic, Republicans, Democrats and the Washington Post are all in agreement that shelving human rights concerns is the price of keeping unwanted refugees and migrants out of the US.

    You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

     

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    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Dorothy A. Brown and Dean Baker on Tax Policy

     

    Fat cat pays pittance to Uncle Sam.

    This week on CounterSpin: News media coverage of taxes falls broadly into two camps: There are, especially in April, lots of “news you can use”–type stories—like NBC‘s Today show on April 14 warning viewers to be mindful of typos and not be lazy about filing for extensions, or NBC Nightly News on April 18, noting that if you filed by mail, you might wait five to eight months for your return, due to backlogs at the IRS. Taxes as an “oh well, what are you gonna do” thing that all of us have to deal with.

    Then there are other stories, disconnected stories, about tax policy: Who pays, how much, and why? We’ve talked about that a fair amount on this show, and we’re going to revisit two of those conversations today.

    Last April, we spoke with Emory University law professor and author Dorothy A. Brown about how, though you can scour tax policy and find no mention of race, our tax system still affects Black people very differently, in ways most conversation obscures.

          CounterSpin220422Brown.mp3

     

    And in February 2019, we spoke with economist Dean Baker about why the idea of raising taxes on the superwealthy makes sense to many mainstream economists and to the general public, but still faces a perennial headwind in corporate media.

          CounterSpin220422Baker.mp3

     

    Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.

    The post Dorothy A. Brown and Dean Baker on Tax Policy appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Blaming Workers, Hiding Profits in Primetime Inflation Coverage

     

    Rising prices directly impact virtually the entire population, so it’s not surprising that there has been a constant drumbeat of reports in the corporate media laying out the factors contributing to inflation as well as its economic and political consequences. But while the media cite many legitimate factors, including pandemic-induced effects on supply and demand, their choices of which causes to emphasize can have political and economic consequences of their own.

    NBC News: Inflation Crisis

    An NBC Nightly News segment (11/12/21) on the “Inflation Crisis” stressed the role of labor shortages.

    A FAIR study looking at six months of coverage across six primetime television news shows and NPR‘s All Things Considered found that segments on inflation put far more emphasis on the contributions of labor shortages and social spending—through driving up the cost of labor—than to the role of corporate profit-taking.

    This portrays the economy as a zero sum game between workers and consumers, who appear to be intractably at odds if corporate profits are left out of the equation.

    During the same period, the shows proved capable of hearing workers’ demands for higher wages when their coverage framed the issue as a “Great Resignation,” or during the shows’ scant coverage of “Striketober,” when a wave of labor militancy swept through much of the country.

    This points to an inconsistency in coverage of the same labor market trends: When the shows were covering inflation, the “tight” labor market was mostly treated with the cool and icy calculation of market logic. But on the comparatively rare occasions when the shows covered the grievances of workers and their demands for dignified work—which are widely popular demands, given that most consumers are in fact workers too—the reports showed a more human side to what would otherwise be numbers on a scorecard, and mentioned the record profits of corporations.

    Causal arguments

    FAIR analyzed the transcripts from ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, CNN’s Situation Room, Fox Special Report, MSNBC’s The Beat, NBC Nightly News and NPR’s All Things Considered between September 2021 and February 2022, using the Nexis news database. We searched for stories mentioning “inflation” and identified 310 segments.

    We also searched for segments mentioning “labor,” “union” or “worker.” The labor search terms were meant to identify coverage of worker activism and how it compared to labor market coverage in the context of inflation. The search turned up 73 such segments.

    We recorded the main causal arguments identified in inflation segments, grouped into six main categories:

    • Supply (“The supply of new cars was limited by that shortage of semiconductors.”—All Things Considered, 1/12/22)
    • Demand (“People just said they had more money from not going out and doing stuff last year.”—All Things Considered, 11/26/21)
    • Labor shortage (“There aren’t enough truck drivers. So, more containers get stacked up. They don’t get delivered.”—Situation Room, 11/10/21)
    • Social spending (“The spending plan could create more inflation to the extent that it’s pumping more dollars into an economy that has a lot of money flowing around in it.”—Fox Special Report, 11/24/21)
    • Covid-19 (“The emergence of the Omicron variant poses increased uncertainty for inflation.”—Fox Special Report, 12/22/21)
    • Profiteering (“There’s increasing evidence and suspicions that this market power has gone too far and is beginning to hurt consumers.”—All Things Considered, 9/13/21)

    These categories were non-exclusive; a suggestion that Covid had caused supply problems, for example, would be counted in both categories. Many segments included more than one causal argument, while 116 attributed inflation to no cause in particular.

    Total Mentions of Causal Arguments for Inflation

    We don’t talk about profit-taking

    Of the 310 segments that covered inflation, eight identified profiteering as a causal factor, while 50 put the focus on workers, either in the form of labor shortage or supply-side social spending arguments (the latter being a proxy for the former). While labor market trends have had an inflationary impact, the disproportionate focus on them, without mention of the underlying conditions that lead to labor shortages in the first place, erases the culpability of corporations. And as economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 11/10/21) explained, it would be a “perverse” solution to inflation to put “downward pressure on wages” by increasing unemployment, when companies are already incentivized to “innovate to get around bottlenecks…in ways that could lead to lasting productivity gains.”

    NBC News: Profits Tripled During Pandemic

    A report by Jacob Ward (NBC Nightly News,  1/22/22) was one of the only segments that looked at how corporate consolidation contributed to rising prices.

    An NBC Nightly News investigation by Jacob Ward (1/22/22) was one of the only segments that focused on the inflationary impact of market consolidation. Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef, Ward reported, “control roughly 85% of all beef production in America, and saw their profits tripled during the pandemic.” Other references to the meat trusts were limited to Joe Biden’s plan to apply pressure to meatpackers and Tyson’s decision to raise prices due to “escalating costs” (NBC Nightly News, 12/10/21, 11/15/21). This angle was absent when it came to other powerful industries, however.

    David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud of the American Prospect (1/31/22; CounterSpin, 2/11/22) raked through company earnings calls and CEO statements, and found ample evidence for profit-taking in the direct accounts of numerous retail executives:

    Corporate profit margins are at their highest level in 70 years, and CEOs cannot help but tout in earnings calls how they have taken advantage of the media commotion around inflation to boost profits. “A little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” the CEO of Kroger said last June. “What we are very good at is pricing,” the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive added in October. Inflation is being enhanced by exploitation, with companies seeing a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to raise prices.

    Corporations with no choice

    CBS Evening News: Boutique owner Constance Benham

    CBS News (11/10/21) made a small business owner the face of corporate America: “If they’re charging me, I have to turn around and charge my customers.”

    Despite this, the decision to raise prices was often reported from the perspective of small business owners. Five such segments appeared across CBS Evening News, including a Houston boutique owner (11/10/21) lamenting that she hates having to raise prices, but that “if they’re charging me, I have to turn around and charge my customers.”

    One of the segments that directly addressed the decision from the perspective of multinationals appeared on ABC World News Tonight (10/22/21), where Gio Benitez reported:

    Major companies facing rising costs now expecting to charge more, like Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company; Unilever, maker of Dove soap and Ben & Jerry’s; Procter & Gamble, from grooming products to diapers; and Danone, maker of yogurts and plant-based milks, even Evian water. Inflation shooting up by 5.4% in just a year. That supply chain crisis is taking center stage.

    The profitability and market dominance of these firms, especially Nestle and Procter & Gamble, made no appearance—with price hikes instead attributed to corporations “facing rising costs.”

    Despite this framework, recent polling from Data for Progress suggests that Americans aren’t buying it, with only 29% of respondents believing that corporations had no choice but to price-gouge. And with $19 billion being paid out to Procter & Gamble shareholders in the wake of a 14% rise in the cost of diapers, that skepticism is hardly surprising.

    Ari Melber of MSNBC’s The Beat (1/11/22) covered inflation’s disproportionate impact on workers, even citing the “Great Resignation” as a factor in labor shortages, but did not mention monopolistic corporations’ price-gouging. Melber pointed out that it is average workers who “bear the risk in our version of capitalism,” as opposed to “pandemic billionaires.” He described this disproportionate impact as “classism.” The omission of the evidence for price-gouging was all the more stark in the context of reporting that ostensibly focused on the interest of workers.

    Slamming social spending

    Despite the mounting evidence that corporate greed plays a significant role in rising prices, the shows tended to focus on social spending as a possible factor, with 67 segments framing debates around both whether the already-passed stimulus bills were responsible for current inflation, and whether Build Back Better would worsen it.

    These debates centered around both supply-side and demand-side factors. On the supply-side, the debate was whether social spending was keeping Americans from seeking work, given that the stimulus provided an alternative form of income. This in turn fueled the labor shortage and strengthened workers’ hands, the argument went, contributing to the rising cost of labor and the shortage of goods. It follows that businesses had no choice but to pass these rising costs onto consumers.

    Washington Post opinion writer Charles Lane went on Fox‘s Special Report (10/8/21) to share his view that redistribution will slow job growth and increase inflation: “Two bills of spending that are more than $4 trillion. And we’re going to pretend that this is going to have no effect on jobs? No effect on inflation?”

    While other networks proved more willing to provide an alternative view when discussing social spending as a possible inflationary cause, they rarely outright refuted the claim, let alone touched on corporate profits.

    Biden Under Pressure as Inflation Surges

    NBC News (11/12/21) cited Rep. Jim Jordan (via Fox News): “Their plan is basically, lock down the economy, spend like crazy, pay people not to work.”

    Kristen Welker (NBC Nightly News, 11/12/21) reported that although Biden was

    insisting that while more spending generally drives prices up, his trillion dollars bipartisan infrastructure bill will bring prices down long term…. Moderate Democrat Joe Manchin suggest[ed] the president’s spending bills could raise prices even more.

    And Republicans were “blasting the president’s policies.” The report cut to Rep. Jim Jordan (R.–Ohio), who claim ed, “Their plan is basically, lock down the economy, spend like crazy, pay people not to work.”

    To center debates over inflationary causes around redistributive measures, while failing to bring up the stacks of cash lining the pockets of the very corporations raising prices, leaves an impression of scarcity and implies a necessary struggle between workers and consumers. It also ignores the reality that countries like France and Japan, which had larger stimulus packages, actually saw less inflation.

    Not only do supply-side social spending arguments blame labor for rising costs, they do so by claiming that workers have it too good. Redistributive measures can’t work, they presume, because if labor is not desperate enough to seek alienated, low-wage jobs, the economy will grind to a halt. Something has to give, and it won’t be the billionaires who happen to own the media outlets.

    On the demand side, opponents of social spending argued that the stimulus put far too much disposable income in the hands of ordinary people, whose spending therefore outpaced supply. To argue that there is too much money in the hands of regular people, in light of more than a decade of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve—transferring wealth to the very wealthy to prop up stock markets—brings to mind Martin Luther King’s statement that this country has “socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.”

    Inconsistent labor reporting 

    The six-month timeframe coincided with both “Striketober” and the “Great Resignation,” moments that together saw workers utilizing their temporarily enhanced bargaining power. While union membership is at a historic low, support for unions is at the highest it’s been since 1965. According to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker, there were 442 strikes and labor protests between September and February–likely an undercount, given the rise in strike activity not sanctioned by unions.

    FAIR found that NPR’s All Things Considered included 28 segments on labor activism, but the remaining shows had at most half that amount. NBC Nightly News came in second place, with 14 activism segments, while Fox Special Report had 11, ABC’s World News Tonight had six, MSNBC’s The Beat and CNN’s Situation Room had five, and CBS Evening News had four.

    Labor Activism Coverage From 9/1/21-2/1/22

    While the coverage of strikes proved some shows were capable of hearing the concerns of workers bargaining collectively, the focus on labor shortages in inflation reporting highlighted a disregard for the perspective of labor.

    When reporting on the John Deere strike that saw more than 10,000 workers walk off the job, Charlie De Mar (CBS Evening News, 10/14/21) noted that it came “as the company is forecasting its best earnings ever”;  he listed workers’ demands, including “livable hours and benefits.”

    CBS: Inflation Rises at Fastest Since 1982

    CBS Evening News (12/10/21) noted that “a shortage of truck drivers to deliver the goods.” contributed to inflation—but didn’t mention the conditions causes truckers to leave the business.

    However, in the show’s segments that attributed inflation to labor market trends, workers’ grievances were mostly left out of the picture. Carter Evans (CBS Evening News, 12/10/21) reported that the rising costs of “just about everything,” from beef prices up by 50% to fuel prices up by 53%, were the result of soaring demand, while the supply chain was hampered by “a shortage of truck drivers to deliver the goods.” Never mind the evidence of price-fixing in a meatpacking industry fraught with consolidation, or the poor labor conditions driving people to resign from trucking.

    CBS‘s Scott McFarlane (1/12/22) reported that “a survey by an association of the nation’s grocery stores finds 80% of them are having trouble recruiting or retaining workers right now,” citing this as evidence that labor shortages were a factor in empty grocery shelves and higher prices. McFarlane neglected to mention the low wages and safety concerns that prompted more than 8,000 Kroger grocery workers in Denver to go on strike that very morning (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/22).

    Claims of a trucker shortage received the most emphasis, appearing in 13 unique segments across all shows. ABC‘s Whit Johnson (10/13/21) included “not enough truck drivers” among a list of inflationary pressure points. Fox News chief correspondent Jonathan Hunt (10/8/21) claimed that “supply and demand is not the problem…. There simply aren’t enough truck drivers to get goods to American store shelves.” News flash: If there aren’t enough drivers, that’s a supply problem.

    While primetime audiences were made well aware of how few truck drivers are on the highways, they were left in the dark about how trucking deregulation has led to stagnant wages and lack of driver protections (American Prospect, 2/7/22). Segments reporting on ports remaining open 24/7 to alleviate backlogs (NBC Nightly News, 10/13/21) made no mention of the stolen wages and general precariousness of the labor making that happen.

    Fickle supply chain

    While there were multiple mentions of “supply chain bottlenecks” across the seven shows, the decades-long transformation of the global supply chain to maximize profits at the expense of its resiliency (CounterSpin, 2/11/22) was generally not a part of the story.

    Just three ocean shipping alliances control 80% of the market, giving them substantial power to set prices and squeeze wages. In order to keep down the costs of production and distribution, shipping companies promoted a “just-in-time” delivery schedule, reducing warehouse costs but also raising the chances of disruptive shortages. Coupled with the outsourcing of manufacturing, just-in-time delivery supply chain “shocks” are less shocking than they might appear.

    But according to Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich (11/24/21), the White House’s accusations of price-gouging by the ocean shipping cartel as a driver of inflation were “ominous,” as they indicated that supply chain crises may take years to resolve. Not once did she mention the cartel in question made nearly $80 billion in the first three quarters of 2021, giving the companies ample and unaccountable price-setting capabilities (American Prospect, 1/31/22).

    News media that feature constant coverage of inflation may appear to be serving the public interest, but with an issue that directly affects so many peoples’ wallets, it’s important that the corporate media give an accurate portrayal of the contributing factors. And while sympathetic coverage of labor activism may seem pro-worker, that’s undercut when the debate about what’s making it harder for people to put food on the table is centered around low-wage essential workers saying enough is enough.

    The post Blaming Workers, Hiding Profits in Primetime Inflation Coverage appeared first on FAIR.

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  • Media Need to Treat Every Day as Earth Day if We Want a Livable Planet

     

    LA Times: Earth on track to be 'unlivable'

    The LA Times‘ decision (4/5/22) to put the news that the planet is becoming uninhabitable on page 3 summed up the problem with corporate media’s climate change coverage.

    On Earth Day, no doubt most major media will pay lip service to the extreme dangers of climate change. But what happens the next day?

    A major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released at the end of February, could scarcely have been more clear—or more dire:

    Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.

    The IPCC released a follow-up report on April 4 focused on how to limit the damage; the co-chair of the report’s working group warned that “it’s now or never.” It’s too late to avoid many of the effects of our addiction to fossil fuels, but drastic action must be taken immediately if the planet has any hopes of avoiding catastrophic levels of warming.

    US media, however, are largely treating the climate crisis as just another news story among many.

    When the dramatic IPCC report was released on February 28, most major outlets covered it in prime time. CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight and PBS NewsHour mentioned the report that day. But in the subsequent six weeks, the climate crisis dropped almost entirely off the radar of most of these shows.

    NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight mentioned climate change (or the “climate crisis,” or “global warming”) only one other night during that period—a month later, when the next IPCC report came out (4/4/22). CBS Evening News returned to the subject only twice (3/31/22, 4/5/22). PBS NewsHour, to its credit, ran eight more shows that mentioned the crisis.

    Incredibly, cable news was even worse. None of the 6 pm CNN, MSNBC or Fox news programs even mentioned either IPCC report. CNN‘s Situation Room mentioned climate change only once (3/7/22) during the entire six weeks. MSNBC‘s The Beat aired two shows that touched on it (3/2/22, 3/3/22). Fox News Special Report named climate change nine times—but almost always in the context of attacking a Democratic statement or action to address it.

    Gloomy reports on the fate of our planet don’t drive ratings, nor do corporations thrill to the thought of their ads running next to such reports. But as the IPCC reports made abundantly clear, the climate crisis is an emergency that demands urgent, sustained attention and action—not a fleeting mention once a month.

    Featured image: The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report‘s illustration of the threat to small islands.

    The post Media Need to Treat Every Day as Earth Day if We Want a Livable Planet appeared first on FAIR.

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  • ‘This Portrayal of Urban Environment Definitely Did Fuel Fear’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Layla A. Jones about “Lights. Camera. Crime,” for the April 15, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

          CounterSpin220415Jones.mp3
    Philadelphia Inquirer: Lights. Camera. Crime.

    Philadelphia Inquirer (3/29/22)

    Janine Jackson: Anywhere in this country, you can turn on the local TV news and see pretty much the same thing: two hosts, likely a man and a woman, joshing back and forth in between tightly edited clips, a weather person in front of a green screen, some sports—and crime. Lots of crime.

    Shootings and stabbings and muggings, police-taped streets, people marched off in handcuffs—often followed by a call for viewers to phone tips into a Crimestopper hotline. You’re watching “Eyewitness News,” or some variant on the format pioneered in Philadelphia in the 1960s.

    Along with its competitor/corollary “Action News,” this format didn’t just revolutionize local TV news, attracting viewers and the ad money that comes with them. It directed viewers gaze in particular ways, presenting Black Philadelphians through a lens of pathology, their communities as sources of danger and threat.

    The Philadelphia Inquirer is engaged in a project looking at the roots of systemic racism in America through institutions founded in Philadelphia. “Lights. Camera. Crime,” is an early installment, a look at a widely influential news format and its impacts, reported by our guest, Layla A. Jones. She joins us now by phone from Philadelphia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Layla Jones.

    Layla A. Jones: Hi, thank you for having me.

    JJ: It’s strange to think of the “Eyewitness News” format starting; for many people, it’s the only sort of local TV news they’ve ever known, is this kind of crime, crime, crime, here’s a penguin at the zoo, you know? What did you learn about the origin story of this way of doing local TV news?

    LAJ: Yeah. I think you’re exactly right. That was a feeling that I had while reporting, that this is the kind of news that you think just existed, but no, it was created, and intentionally. But also, can I say that that intro really wrapped up the whole piece? I don’t see what else I can possibly add.

    But, yes, what I learned reporting, I spoke with the creator of “Eyewitness News,” which started in 1965. And, basically, he was a young guy at the time, 30 years old. And prior to “Eyewitness News,” what news looked like was one middle-aged to older white male reading through the news in, like, a radio format, a radio news reader format. And what the creator of “Eyewitness News,” Al Primo, learned was that you can have multiple reporters appear on screen with their original reported stories for no additional cost to the station.

    And when he learned that, he just made it a lot more dynamic. He made a family of reporters, a family of anchors, the male and female that you talked about, they kind of banter back and forth. What we called it in the piece was the rise of infotainment. It was a mix of showbiz and news, and it was on purpose, to draw eyes, to get more advertising and more revenue for the stations. Prior to that, the news was not profitable, and afterward it became networks’ big moneymaker.

    JJ: And the format worked so well that, as listeners know, it really spread around the country. I guess let’s talk about the context in which this is happening in Philadelphia, because as this infotainment format is growing up and flourishing, this is a time of white flight and changes—demographic, racial changes—in Philadelphia. And that backdrop, or that context, is important.

    Layla A. Jones

    Layla A. Jones: “The more people watched local television news, the more likely they were to associate criminality with being Black.”

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

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

    JJ: Let’s talk a little bit about what that format was. One reporter that you spoke to—and one of the great things about the piece is that you really do talk to a lot of veteran journalists who were there—a guy, Vernon Odom, describes the format as, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll watch him die.”

    So it’s no secret, internally, that they’re doing a particular kind of coverage. And, in fact, they were told, they had consultants tell them, “No, crime is your thing. You want to go with crime.” And then the question is, what crime? Crimes committed by whom, or in which community? They’re making decisions. It’s not an accident, the way this news looks and the effects that it has.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    News for All the People

    (Verso, 2012)

    JJ: And the piece has that complexity within it, in part, because it just allows people to speak, and people are complex. This is, of course, a long unfolding conversation and struggle, and it goes back to media depictions of Black people and brown people, and the impacts that has societally, that goes back to the founding. And I always recommend, here, the book News for All the People by Joe Torres and Juan Gonzalez on that, which is excellent.

    And then some of our listeners are going to remember the Kerner Commission report, back in the wake of 1967 unrest, that talked about the problems that we’re just talking about, saying that the news is pathologizing Black communities, and it makes it seem as though only white people have full lives, you know, and go to PTA meetings. Black reporters have been trying to navigate this from the beginning, haven’t they? And I just found their experiences and their different strategies very interesting. And I was happy to see those voices in the piece.

    LAJ: Yeah, it’s funny, because even before reporters were really a thing, Black people have been correcting media narratives. So one of the examples that I mentioned, and it happened in Philadelphia, was in 1793 after the yellow fever epidemic, Black leaders had to put out their version of news to correct a racist account of their work during that epidemic, their health and safety work.

    Some of the pioneering African-American reporters that I spoke with were Trudy Haynes, who is now 95, and in 1965, she was the first Black woman news reporter in Philadelphia when she was hired at “Eyewitness News,” which was something intentional that the creator, Al Primo, wanted to do. He said he learned that people wanted to see Black people and brown people on the news.

    And she said that she went out and she tried to do whatever it was that our brown story was, that’s what she said. She said she always tried to look for the color. She did what she thought the story should do. And in the editing, she went back with the editors and demanded that they use certain images to run with her story, and usually she was talking about images of Black people being positive, productive, normal, like we are.

    Vernon Odom said something really similar, that even when he covered hard news like crime, like violence, like disaster, that he tried to put in the social context that he understood as a Black person, and that his white colleagues did not understand, is what he said. But they always have worked really hard, and I think a lot of Black people have a desire to represent our communities correctly.

    But one thing I did was ask Ms. Trudy Haynes, if she felt like her work there caused institutional change at the station. And what she said was, “I don’t know if they felt the same way I did,” but she said, I just tried my best and I stayed on as long as I could.

    JJ: Yeah. It’s always a question, and an active question: Do you work inside institutions that need change? Do you go build a whole ‘nother ship over there? And I think we always kind of land on doing both, and hopefully supporting one another. And it’s very important to—people aren’t calling for just more upbeat stories about Black people in the news. Presenting a more full, human picture of Black communities also involves unpacking the “negative stories,” and actually being able to talk about racism and white supremacy and institutions.

    And just to go back for one second to that format, one of the things about the format is that it doesn’t do follow-up. You see the crime, you see the violence, but it isn’t the practice of an “Eyewitness News” station to go back to that community, to go back to that family later. And it’s that depth and complexity that’s part of what people are demanding, are calling for.

    LAJ: Exactly. One of the experts I talked to, basically, he called it extractive. Like they just drop in—we’ve heard of parachute journalism—get their story and go, and that’s just because that’s what it’s designed to do. It wants to be quick, it wants to be fast, and it wants to get eyeballs on the newscast. It really isn’t necessarily about telling the best story. The anchors and reporters from the past and present told me that they kind of feel like print journalists get to tell a more holistic story, and they just want to be quick. And so that’s how we kind of get where we are now.

    JJ: And cheap as well.

    Well, this interrogation of institutions and practices, and I know anyone listening knows we’re not talking about history; we’re talking about history because of the way that it relates to the present. It’s part of a bigger project that has deeper intentions than most.

    I’d like to ask you to tell us a little bit about the Inquirer’s project, “A More Perfect Union,” that this piece is part of, because listeners will know that, after George Floyd, there was a moment where we kept hearing that there was going to be a reckoning. We get a reckoning every year or so. We hear that we’re reckoning with racism in this country.

    But media outlets seemed to take it more seriously than they generally do, to see themselves as also institutions that need to be looking internally, and looking at their role. And that’s what this “A More Perfect Union” project is about, isn’t it?

    LAJ: Yeah. So “A More Perfect Union” at the Philadelphia Inquirer, it was created by Errin Haines. She is our contributing editor and she’s also the founder at The 19th. But basically the overarching view of this project is that Philadelphia was the home to a lot of first institutions: the first hospital, the first prison, the first bank and things like that.

    So if we talk about institutional racism, we’re looking, in a lot of places, to Philadelphia to figure out how those institutions were founded, and how, from their beginning, racism was baked in. Then we’re going forward through the present to see how it’s still affecting people, tracing it through that origin point till today. And then trying to look to the future and see, are these institutions making changes? Why or why not? Where can they make changes? And how can we create a more perfect union, with the belief that America can work for everyone.

    JJ: Yeah. Yeah. Well, finally, nobody you spoke with thinks the work is done, or has a rose-colored-glasses view towards it. We will see how truly radical media are going to allow this institutional interrogation work to be. But if we don’t fight for it, then what are we doing? And there’s a lot we can learn along the way.

    Philadelphia Inquirer: Black City. White Paper.

    Philadelphia Inquirer (2/15/22)

    LAJ: Yeah. And I will say that in the first chapter, the Inquirer did a look at its own self. I think it was founded in 1829, and we got a freelancer to dig into the racial hiring discrimination here. And so it is something that I think media organizations, especially because they’re so public-facing, are trying to really take a look at it.

    JJ: Yeah. That was Wesley Lowery. And I would love to end, he quotes Rev. Mark Tyler, who says, “I don’t know if the Inquirer is capable of the change that is needed, just like I don’t know that America is capable of the change that is needed. But I desperately hope that it is.” Sounds about right. Any final thoughts?

    LAJ: One thing that I wanted to say about the importance of the series and these media stories is that, kind of bringing into right now: In the Ukraine, with the war going on, they had African-American human rights aides going over to help, and they put out a press release saying that they might face racism from the Ukrainians.

    And the reason that they said that Black people might especially be victim to that kind of harm and treatment is because of how they’re portrayed in the media, and because Ukrainians don’t usually see African Americans. And that’s the whole problem with the TV news, that it’s portraying Black people to people who don’t even live around them, don’t live around us.

    And so it just shows how important those false and not objective narratives are in shaping public opinion.

    JJ: All right, thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. You can find “Lights. Camera. Crime: How a Philly-born Brand of TV News Harmed Black America” and accompanying video, along with other pieces from the “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com. Layla Jones, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    LAJ: Thank you.

     

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