Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider)
This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration of white supremacy.
(cc photo: Sasha Patkin)
Also on the show: If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration. We talked about that in July 2018 with Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer at Mijente.
The past is never dead, it’s not even past: This week on CounterSpin.
Donald Trump has repeatedly explained the critical importance of vengeance (Mother Jones, 10/19/16): “When somebody screws you, you screw them back in spades. And I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve gotta hit people hard. And it’s not so much for that person. It’s other people watch.”
“Revenge—it’s a big part of Trump’s life,” Mother Jones’ David Corn (10/19/16) wrote just before Trump was elected to the presidency the first time:
In speeches and public talks, Trump has repeatedly expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, to explain how he had achieved his success. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that successful people must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”
Knowing this about Trump, Democrats and liberals worry that he will use the Department of Justice, especially if Matt Gaetz is confirmed as attorney general, as an unrestrained vehicle to pursue the prosecution of political enemies.
But given Trump’s constant attacks on media—“the opposition party,” as his ally Steve Bannon called the fourth estate (New York Times, 1/26/17)—journalists fear that he will use the power of the state to intimidate if not destroy the press.
Defunding public broadcasting
If you run a journalistic outfit, like PBS president Paula Kerger (Politico, 3/27/19), and don’t know why Trump doesn’t like you, you probably aren’t doing your job very well.
Trump called for defunding NPR (Newsweek, 4/10/24) after a long-time editor accused the radio outlet of liberal bias in the conservative journal Free Press (4/9/24). Rep. Claudia Tenney (R–NY) introduced legislation to defund NPR because “taxpayers should not be forced to fund NPR, which has become a partisan propaganda machine” (Office of Claudia Tenney, 4/19/24). With Republicans also holding both houses of congress, bills like Tenney’s become more viable. Trump has previously supported budget proposals that eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Politico, 3/27/19).
The infamous Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda many see as a blueprint for the second Trump term, calls for the end to public broadcasting, because it is viewed as liberal propaganda:
Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first president in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.
In other words, all Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”
All of which means that the next conservative president must finally get this done, and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,” but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.
PBS and NPR, as FAIR (10/24/24) has noted, has for decades caved in to right-wing pressures—PBS by adding conservative programming, NPR by trying to rid itself of political commentary altogether. But the right will never let go of its ideological opposition to media outlets not directly owned by the corporate class.
‘Whether criminally or civilly’
A bill—defeated for now—”would have granted the Department of the Treasury broad authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed to be supporting ‘terrorism’” (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24).
Trump also has a well known track record of revoking the credentials of journalists who produce reporting he doesn’t like (Washington Post, 2/24/17, 5/8/19; New Republic, 11/5/24). It is realistic to assume that a lot more reporters will be barred from White House events in the years ahead.
While a bill that would grant the secretary of the treasury broad authority to revoke nonprofit status to any organization the office deems as a “terrorist” organization has so far failed (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24), it is quite possible that it could come up for a vote again. If this bill were to become law, the Treasury Department could use this ax against a great many progressive nonprofit outlets, like Democracy Now! and the American Prospect, as well as investigative outlets like ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The department could even target the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has already said in response to Trump’s victory, “The fundamental right to a free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, must not be impaired” (11/6/24).
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24), an avid media observer, said there is no reason to think Trump will soften his campaign against the free press. She said:
In 2022, he sued the Pulitzer Prize board after they defended their awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers had won Pulitzer Prizes for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.
More recently, Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation over the way the anchor characterized the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual misconduct case against him. Each of those cases is wending its way through the courts.
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24): “Donald Trump poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organizations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.”
She added:
There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression.
Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Trump has already gone after the New York Times and Penguin Random House since Sullivan wrote this. CJR (11/14/24) said:
The letter, addressed to lawyers at the New York Times and Penguin Random House, arrived a week before the election. Attached was a discursive ten-page legal threat from an attorney for Donald Trump that demanded $10 billion in damages over “false and defamatory statements” contained in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.
It singles out two stories coauthored by Buettner and Craig that related to their book on Trump and his financial dealings, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, released on September 17. It also highlighted an October 20 story headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and an October 22 piece by Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”
And just before his victory, Trump sued CBS News, alleging the network’s “deceitful” editing of a recent 60 Minutesinterview with Vice President Kamala Harris “misled the public and unfairly disadvantaged him” (CBS News, 10/31/24).
Expect more of this, except this time, Trump will have all the levers of the state on his side. And whatever moves the next Trump administration makes to attack the press will surely have a chilling effect, which will only empower his anti-democratic political agenda.
Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas about placing blame for Trump for the November 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: Horserace over substance, ignoring actual popular opinion that doesn’t serve major-party talking points, top-down sourcing that ensures that those most harmed by social policies are not at the table when responses are discussed.
But there’s also something about the role of elite media in this election that needs some illuminating as we try to move forward. My guests have just written the first of no doubt many pieces about media’s role. I’m joined by FAIR’s senior analyst Julie Hollar from Brooklyn, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, both of you.
JJ: Well, Jim, the Washington Post’s non-endorsement was a pretend silence that actually said a lot. But we know that most outlets would not stand up and yell, “Donald Trump is our guy.” So we have to think deeper than these once-in-four-years endorsements about how elite news media, still labeled liberal by very many, can grease the wheels of something like what just happened.
JN: Yeah, I do think that the non-endorsement was an important moment in the election. By saying, “We’re not going to take a position between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris,” they’re saying these are two acceptable positions that you can take. And, obviously, a lot of people took the Donald Trump position, so I think that did have more impact than the expected Kamala Harris endorsement would’ve had.
JJ: But when you look at the issues and the other things apart from the election per se, when you look at the way media covered particular issues, you found something that you found important.
JN: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”
I think that media have long understood that fear is a great way to catch and hold an audience’s attention, because we are really evolutionarily attuned to things that are dangerous. Our brains tell us to pay extra attention to those things. And so news media are prone to describe issues in terms of, “Here’s something scary, here’s something that’s going to hurt you.”
And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.
Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.
And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done–or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.
And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.
JJ: And it built on years, also, of crime coverage. The way that immigration and crime were stirred up together, I think, is also part of that fear mongering that you’re talking about.
JN: When you look at crime statistics, the striking thing is how much lower crime is now than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. It was at a much higher level than it is today, but that is not a story that is going to sell news to people. You want to sell people with the idea that, “You’re in danger, read our news report to find out how.”
And so even though crime is both historically down from earlier decades, and it’s been down over the course of the Biden administration, that is not the story that people have been told. The story is that, “Here’s some scary crimes, and what are we going to do about this crime crisis?” And, again, Donald Trump was able to use that picture, that had been painted by right-wing and centrist media alike, in order to present himself as this strong man who is going to do something about the criminal threat.
JJ: We can add to that: Truthoutreported, as you note, that “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people in this election cycle.” And that fits, too, with this, “There’s something to be afraid of. There are people to be afraid of.”
JN: Yeah, it is really striking that this was the big push in the closing days of the campaign; the Trump campaign was pumping their campaign funds into ads that presented this transgender threat. That was the thing that they thought was going to get people to vote.
Interestingly, a lot of the ads focused on the idea that Kamala Harris wanted to pay for gender reassignment surgery for federal prisoners. So it sort of ties in the trans threat and the crime threat, as trans criminals…. It’s hard to construct a rational danger that is posed by the situation.
JH: I could be wrong, so delete that if I’m wrong. But….
JJ: I don’t doubt it. Just for the reason that Jim’s saying, it’s hard to create a rational story around it. And the truth is, you don’t have to. You just say a number of words that have been designated hot buttons, and if you can throw ’em all together, well, then, so much the better.
JN: And this is really an issue where the groundwork was laid by right-wing and centrist media alike. Fox News, trans threat stories are part of their bread and butter, but the New York Times has also done a great number of stories about the supposed threat trans youth pose. They’re going to be getting into girls sports, or gender-affirming care is somehow going to snatch your child away from you.
These are stories that the supposedly liberal press has been hammering hard on, and so really given someone like Trump, who wants to demagogue these issues, a real platform to begin his harangue from, because you’ve already read about it in a supposedly authoritative source like the New York Times.
Julie Hollar: “You would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups.”
JH: I wanted to underscore that. I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority–although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them–but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.
So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.
And by not doing that at all–and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.
But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around–well, I’m getting ahead of myself–and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.
JJ: I want to draw you out on that, because the New York Times itself came out swinging. They’re pretty sure why Democrats lost, but you described their explanation as “mind boggling,” so just keep going with what you’re saying there.
JH: So the editorial board put out their diagnosis of the Democrats’ problem the day after the election. They had no doubts about this. They blamed it, in part, on the fact that it took, here I’m going to quote, “it took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters.”
They don’t say exactly what progressive agenda this was. From a progressive perspective, it’s hard to see very much progressivism in the Democratic agenda. But in the same paragraph, it goes on to talk about how Democrats have really struggled for the last three elections to find a persuasive message that Americans really can believe in, that they can’t find a way to offer a vision to people to improve their lives.
This is the same paragraph where they’re talking about this alienating progressive agenda, and when you look at the exit polls, it’s very clear that the main driver, it seems, of the Trump vote, when you set aside the real core believers, this election was won because of the economy.
And if the Democrats are struggling to find a vision that appeals to voters, the progressive agenda is the agenda that appeals to voters. It’s not in question. Medicare for All, a wealth tax, living minimum wage: all of these big, very popular progressive agenda items that the Democratic Party flirted with in the primaries four years ago, and has since really run pretty hard away from.
Harris had a few little economic agenda items that were somewhat progressive, like her anti–price gouging plan. She did have something about minimum wage, but, really, the big ticket items that people really want to see and could really make a big difference in their lives, those weren’t the things that Kamala Harris was hitching her wagon to.
Jim Naureckas: “When Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them.”
JN: And when Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them. They are very alert to any signs of economic radicalism, like universal healthcare. When Harris was talking to media, the repeateddemand that she re-renounce her former endorsement of Medicare for All was really striking. There was a suspicion that “you haven’t really changed from the candidate in 2020, who was suggesting that we ought to pay for everybody’s healthcare.” That is the kind of stance that that community finds very suspicious, and very nervous-making.
JJ: We only have a couple more minutes, and I do want you both to have an opportunity to talk about other takeaways. Obviously, this is a work in progress. We’re just getting started here, but it seems as though asking for corporate news media to be self-aware, to actually take some accountability, to acknowledge that there’s a relationship between what they report and how and what happens in the world. It seems like we’re moving farther and farther from that, and I’m reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Now, you might say that more of media owners, more so than reporters, but it does just bring us back, doesn’t it, to the fact of who owns and controls our news media, who they feel accountable to. And it’s not us. The top-down problems that we’re talking about, they’re structural.
JN: Absolutely. If you have a media that is dominated by billionaires, you are going to get a different take on the problems facing the country than if you had democratic media that was answerable to the general public.
Going back to the Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos refusing to let them endorse a candidate in the election, he’s a guy who is one of the richest people on earth. His fortune is largely based on government contracts, and so he has a super strong interest in making sure that the president of the United States doesn’t have a vendetta against him.
And he’s got another strong interest in the fact that the Biden administration was pursuing antitrust claims against Amazon, which was very important. The amount of money taken from the public by Amazon‘s artificially increased prices is actually quite large, and has a lot to do with why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on Earth. And so having Harris not in the White House could be a real boon for his personal fortune.
And then you have Elon Musk, again, someone who depends heavily on government contracts, who has been promised a prominent role in a Trump administration, and he was using his takeover of Twitter to pump out election disinformation on a really wholesale scale. The claims about illegal immigrants voting was a nonstop flow on what he calls X now, in the weeks running up to the election.
And he’s got tens of millions of people who are getting his stuff, and he’s rigged the platform so that if you’re on it, you’re definitely going to hear from the boss. It is just a firehose of disinformation, coming from the owner himself of this centrally important social media platform.
JH: Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.
And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with FAIR senior analyst, Julie Hollar, and FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. Thank you both, Julie and Jim, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (5/12/15) relayed Israel’s warning that “in the event of another conflict with Hezbollah, many Lebanese civilians will probably be killed, and that it should not be considered Israel’s fault.” Strangely, the same logic does not apply to Israel placing its military headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.
Back in May 2015, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged exposé (5/12/15)—headlined “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk”—in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah’s infrastructure in south Lebanon.
The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.” In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some “400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.”
Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that “the Israeli claims could not be independently verified.” But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict. Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that “many, many Lebanese will be killed” in the next showdown with Hezbollah.
I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article’s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering “Botox filling.”
Legitimizing destruction
CNN (9/17/24) labels the target of a terrorist attack as a “terror group.”
Nine years have now passed since Kershner’s bout of weaponized journalism, and Amidror’s words have certainly rung true: Many, many Lebanese have been killed in Israel’s latest war on Lebanon.
From October 2023 through November 5, more than 3,000 people have been slaughtered in the country—among them 589 women and at least 185 children. The vast majority were killed in September through November of 2024, when Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanese territory as a sideshow to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
More than 800,000 people have been displaced. Muhaybib has literally been blown up in its entirety, and much of Shaqra has been pulverized as well. Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly a quarter of all buildings along the entire southern border.
And while the United States newspaper of record and other Western corporate media outlets have not exactly been preemptively calling in the strikes, à la Kershner, they have nonetheless done a fine job of legitimizing mass killing, displacement and destruction in other ways.
For starters, as FAIR has written about recently (10/10/24), there’s the insistence on following the US/Israeli lead in branding Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization and a “proxy” for Iran. Never mind that the Shia political party and armed group emerged as a direct consequence of the 1982 US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people and constituted a textbook case of terrorism, including the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
When Israel in September staged an unprecedented terrorist attack in Lebanon by detonating personal electronic devices across the country — killing 12 people, including two children—CNN (9/17/24) spun the episode thusly: “Exploding Pagers Injure Members of Iran-Backed Terror Group.”
Converting communities into targets
The Guardian (10/4/24) was one of numerous outlets that referred to Dahiyeh, a densely packed Beirut suburb, as a “Hezbollah stronghold”—painting the entire community was a legitimate military target.
Then there is the matter of the term “Hezbollah stronghold,” to which pretty much every corporate media outlet has proved itself hopelessly addicted when describing the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Devastated in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, Dahiyeh is now once again under maniacal bombardment by the Israeli military, which on September 27 leveled a whole residential block in order to assassinate Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Sure enough, the New York Times (9/27/24) was standing by with the headline: “Israel Strikes Hezbollah Stronghold in Attempt to Kill Leader.”
Just google “Hezbollah stronghold” and you’ll see what I mean — that the press is apparently incapable of talking about Dahiyeh any other way. Or, if you’re not in the mood for googling, here are some illustrative links to the Washington Post, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC News, Reuters and Associated Press. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To be sure, there is substantial public support in Dahiyeh for Hezbollah—not that support for an anti-Zionist resistance organization should make anyone fair game for extrajudicial slaughter. There is also support for numerous other Lebanese parties and groups in this neighborhood of nearly 1 million people, although the “stronghold” designation tends to erase the diversity that exists.
But the real problem with the terminology is that, when deployed in the context of war, a “stronghold” is more likely to be interpreted as “a fortified place”—the first definition of the word appearing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In that sense, then, Dahiyeh is effectively converted into a legitimate military target, its inhabitants dehumanized by the linguistic arsenal of a media establishment that is ultimately committed to validating Israeli massacres of civilians.
And it’s not only Dahiyeh. The press has now expanded its obsessive use of the “stronghold” descriptor in accordance with Israel’s current killing spree in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, both of which regions we are now continuously reminded are also “Hezbollah strongholds.” When the Lebanese health ministry reported 60 killed in airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on October 29, the BBCnoted that “rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.”
Back in July, the same outlet had warned that the south Lebanese city of Tyre would “be in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.” Four months later, Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon are an unmitigated horrorscape, blunted for a Western audience by media euphemism.
MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews, once one of the most prominent pundits on cable TV, used his post-election appearance on Morning Joe (Mediaite, 11/6/24) to demonstrate just how unhelpful political commentary can be.
Asked by host Willie Geist for his “morning after assessment of what happened,” Matthews fumed:
Immigration has been a terrible decision for Democrats. I don’t know who they think they were playing to when they let millions of people come cruising through the border at their own will. Because of their own decisions, they came right running to that border, and they didn’t do a thing about it.
And a lot of people are very angry about that. Working people, especially, feel betrayed. They feel that their country has been given away, and they don’t like it.
And I don’t know who liked it. The Hispanics apparently didn’t like it. They want the law enforced. And so I’m not sure they were playing to anything that was smart here, in terms of an open border. And that’s what it is, an open border. And I think it’s a bad decision. I hope they learn from it.
You could not hope for a more distorted picture of Biden administration immigration policy from Fox News or OAN. “They didn’t do a thing about it”? President Joe Biden deported, turned back or expelled more than 4 million immigrants and refugees through February 2024—more than President Donald Trump excluded during his entire first term (Migration Policy Institute, 6/27/24).
Human Rights Watch (1/5/23) criticized Biden for continuing many of Trump’s brutal anti-asylum policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) called those restrictions unconstitutional. How can you have any kind of rational debate about what the nation’s approach to immigration should be when the supposedly liberal 24-hour news network is pretending such measures amount to an “open border”?
‘Democrats don’t know how people think’
In one brief segment, MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews (Morning Joe, 11/6/24) was able to mangle the most important issues of 42% of the electorate.
“It’s all about immigration and the economy,” Matthews told Geist. Well, he got the economics just as wrong:
I think you can talk all you want about the rates of inflation going down. What people do is they remember what the price of something was, whether it’s gas or anything, or cream cheese, or anything else, and they’ll say, “I remember when it was $2, and now it’s $7.” But they remember it in the last five years. That’s how people think. Democrats don’t know how people think anymore. They think about their country and they think about the cost of things.
The suggestion here is that success in fighting inflation would not be bringing the rate of price increases down, but returning prices to what they were before the inflationary period. That’s called deflation, a phenomenon generally viewed as disastrous that policy makers make strenuous efforts to prevent.
A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal (10/16/14) described “the specter of deflation” as “a worry that top policy makers thought they had beaten back”:
A general fall in consumer prices emerged as a big concern after the 2008 financial crisis because it summoned memories of deep and lingering downturns like the Great Depression and two decades of lost growth in Japan. The world’s central banks in recent years have used a variety of easy-money policies to fight its debilitating effects.
in a deflationary economy, wages as well as prices often have to fall—and…in general economies don’t manage to have falling wages unless they also have mass unemployment, so that workers are desperate enough to accept those wage declines.
It’s natural for ordinary consumers to think that if prices going up is bad, prices going down must be good. For someone like Matthews to think that, when he’s been covering national politics for more than three decades, is incompetence.
This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.
Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.
Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.
This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).
This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.
Scary issues
Corporate media rarely point, as this New York Times graphic (7/24/24) did, that crime has fallen dramatically since 1991, and continued to fall during the Biden/Harris administration.
Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).
This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of US residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).
With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.
Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, DC (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”
Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in the New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).
‘Classic fear campaign’
Republicans spent so much on transphobic ads (Truthout, 11/5/04) because they knew voters had been primed by media to fear trans people.
Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration and the economy combined.”
Journalist Erin Reed (PBS NewsHour, 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:
The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.
Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.
‘Alienating voters’ with ‘progressive agenda’
The New York Times (11/6/24) didn’t want people to vote for Trump—but its reporting contributed to the perception that “an infusion of immigrants” and “a porous southern border” were among “the nation’s urgent problems.”
But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with Biden too long):
The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election…. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.
It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision…to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.
More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.
‘Democratic self-sabotage’
The Washington Post‘s Matt Bai (11/6/24) thought Trump’s anti-trans ads resonated with “a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues.”
At the WashingtonPost, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’s Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Postroundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)
At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).
George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at the Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”
Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of the New YorkTimes‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”
Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.
But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.
‘Wary and alienated’
In a rare instance of actually listening to left-wing voices, a New York Times article (10/24/24) focused on pre-election warnings that Harris “risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”
The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:
In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.
She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.
Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.
Janine Jackson interviewed ProPublica‘s Nicole Foy about immigration and labor for the November 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: One of the weirdest and most harmful things so-called mainstream news media do is to take concerns, social problems, experiences, hardships—and reduce them to “electoral issues,” meaningful solely to the extent that candidates talk about them, and defined in terms of what they say—rather than starting with people, and our lives, and judging candidates based on whether their proposed responses are grounded and humane.
Immigration would have to be near the top of the list of phenomena that exists, has existed, worldwide forever, but that corporate news media seem comfortable larding with whatever ignorant hearsay and disinformation politicians of the moment care to spout. Anyone interested in just, human-centered immigration policy has to keep their eyes on the prize through the fog of horserace coverage.
Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica, where she’s Ancil Payne Fellow. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nicole Foy.
JJ: I want to talk about your recent piece that gets at a lot of things, but it really is a story of a person. And so, before anything else, please just tell us, if you would, about Elmer De León Pérez, and what happened in January of this year.
NF: Yeah, so Elmer was a young, only 20 years old, Guatemalan immigrant who was living in Houma, Louisiana, which is a little bit southwest of New Orleans, one of the areas that’s quite frequently threatened by hurricanes. He was working at a shipyard in the Houma area. He was a welder, pretty skilled welder. He made a decent amount of money, and was called upon to do some pretty difficult tasks, including helping build a ship for NOAA, which people may know for weather forecasting and hurricane forecasting. This shipyard that he was working at had a number of government contracts for ships.
He was building this ship for NOAA on that morning in January, when, essentially, his coworkers realized that he didn’t show up for lunch that day. And by the time he was found in the tank of the ship where he was welding, he was already unconscious, unresponsive, and, later, first responders did not continue trying to resuscitate him because he was already showing signs of rigor mortis, meaning that he had likely died some time ago.
And in the aftermath of all of that, his family, which, even though he was only 20, he had a young son with another immigrant who also lives in Houma, and he has an extended family, from Louisiana to all the way back in Guatemala, who cared quite a bit about him. They not only struggled to get answers about what happened to him for a long time, but they’ve yet to receive any sort of compensation, or even really acknowledgement, from the company he was working for, and even though he died on the job.
JJ: So this is a person who dies on the job, working for a government contract. So what is it that made you want to report this out? It can’t be because you thought this is an anomalous case.
NF: Yeah. The way this story started is kind of interesting, actually, because my editor and I were initially very interested in finding a story that explained what happens when immigrant workers die on the job. I had been telling him how often you see families raising money, whether through GoFundMe, or asking for help on Facebook, often because they’re trying to get their loved ones’ bodies home to their home country, whether they’ve been here for years and years, and they really would prefer to be buried in their hometown, or because they had only been here for a couple of years, and they’re just trying to get their bodies home.
We were really interested in that concept, because it struck us as something really, I think, indicative of, I don’t know—I think it spoke to a number of things about how immigrant workers exist in the United States. We rely on them so heavily now, and have always, and yet their families are often left in really difficult financial straits just to do what they would consider, I am assuming, is the bare minimum, which is get them home, get them buried in the land that they may have wanted to return to, or that they came from. And we were really struck by that.
So I was looking into a number of different cases. I was poring through GoFundMe and Facebook and through OSHA fatality-on-the-job records and pulling different cases, and there’s so many. You spend a lot of time doing this, and you see just how many immigrants are dying on the job, everywhere from California to Louisiana to Texas. And reading the GoFundMe pleas or the Facebook pleas of their family asking for help, to try to have a funeral, send the body home.
Elmer De León Pérez (right) with his father, Erick De Pérez (family photo)
And we were really interested in his case, because as we were doing reporting, not only was I able to find all of the different, just really moving videos that his family had posted on Facebook, of trying to raise money, and then eventually they filmed his body arriving back home to his hometown in Guatemala. And the way the community really came together in a common way was really moving. And also then we, as I looked into his employer and where he died, realized that this was a company that has a number of government contracts, to build and repair ships for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers—you name it, there’s a government agency that needs a ship.
And so that’s kind of how we got started there, is we were interested in what happens to immigrant workers, to their families, when they die on the job, what kind of care is taken for them. And then we discovered this really truly heartbreaking case of someone who was building a ship for our country, and still his family couldn’t get the help that they say they need.
JJ: This is where journalism connects the human story with a data story, with a broader story, a policy story. The story about immigrant workers and the workforce, it’s like the worst kept secret in the country, the idea that farmworkers, and shipbuilders as you’re talking about, that these industries rely on, they couldn’t operate without, immigrant labor. And yet we’re still supposed to accept this weird capitalist story about only Americans can work here, and immigrants are actually stealing jobs. And it’s such a weird disconnect between what a lot of folks know is actually happening, and the storyline that people are being told.
And I think that’s what’s so important about this story: Organizations, companies, rely on immigrant labor, but they rely on them in a particular way. And that has to do with the contratista, the idea of the legal designation that is given to these workers. And that, of course, is important in Pérez’s story.
Nicole Foy:
NF: Yeah, I think, too, what I found really telling, reporting this story, is that it really is such a common story for immigrants who don’t currently have the legal authority to work in the US, the ways that they still have to pursue in order to support their families. And it was really interesting to see that playing out in an industry that you don’t really see as part of the immigration debate, shipbuilding, and particularly shipbuilding for government ships.
This particular shipyard, they don’t have contracts to build nuclear submarines or even battleships or anything, but they’re building support vessels or research ships for NOAA, for so many different branches of the military and for the government, that are pretty essential to our country’s defenses, and also just to keep our country running properly. And that’s not really something that you see in the immigration debate, is that we also need workers desperately for those types of jobs.
I think people still think of welding in a shipyard as a job that should pay so well, and does pay so well, that everybody is competing with each other for them. But the economic facts of our country right now are very different. We don’t have as many blue collar workers as we used to, and we have quite a lot of work that needs to be done. So that’s why you see immigrants in these jobs that, again, I think there’s often this narrative of “they’re taking these jobs from workers,” but the shipbuilding industry in particular is suffering greatly from a really dramatic lack of workers to do the jobs that they need, whether it’s welding or another job in a shipyard.
I just thought that was another good example of his life and the work that he was doing. It’s another good example of how, if you’re commonly thinking of immigrant workers, you may be thinking of agriculture, you may be thinking of maybe restaurants or construction. And certainly there are many, many immigrant workers sustaining those industries.
But they’ve become very essential to the fabric of our entire economy. It’s not very easy to disentangle them from the work that we need to do as a country. And that’s something that I don’t think a lot of our current rhetoric accounts for, is how many different jobs and how many different types of jobs around the country that these workers are fulfilling, that we’d miss them quite a lot if they weren’t there.
JJ: Let me just ask you, you tried to get responses from employers and from folks to say, “What’s going on here? What happened here? Why are you not accountable for this?” What happened with that exercise in trying to say: A person died, a person died, his family deserves compensation. What happened there?
NF: I did my absolute best. ProPublica takes it very seriously that we want everyone to have a chance to tell their side of the story. And so I did everything possible. It wasn’t just phone calls and emails. I came by the shipyard several times. I hand-delivered, actually, a letter with a list of questions to one of the shipyard executives several weeks before the story published, just in an attempt to try to get some answers.
I also spoke very briefly with the contractor that actually employed Elmer. I talked to him briefly, but he declined a comment on the advice of his lawyers.
I don’t know why Thoma-Sea, the shipyard where he was working, didn’t want to comment, because they told me very little. I did my best to reach out to them.
But I think it was really important to try to get their side of the story, especially since we also looked into the campaign finance records, and saw that, even though there are so many immigrants like Elmer, he was not the only one working at the shipyard, the company’s main managing director, top executive, has donated fairly heavily to many Louisiana politicians who have been vocal about their desire to either close the border, restrict immigration, and, honestly, what they think about immigrants in their own state.
JJ: I was struck, as I’ve said, throughout the piece, by how many powerful people and company representatives said they just had no comment. And it reminds me, it takes me back to independent reporting. It’s the families of the immigrant workers who are killed and then ignored and not given compensation; they look to the press, they need to speak, they want to get their voice out. And the powerful people, what’s in it for them? They don’t need to speak or justify or explain themselves. And it makes me mad, because I think Journalism 101 would send you back to those powerful people and demand some sort of answer from them.
The other thing is that you show up at this person’s home, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really disrespectful to show up at the home of a company CEO where a worker has died on the job. It’s really disrespectful of journalists to bother us at home.” And I just think, there are people who need a press, an independent press, and there are people who don’t need it. It drives me angry. So I just want to say, the difference between getting access to people who are harmed and people who are harming, as a reporter, that’s a very different thing.
NF: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I just wanted to make sure that everyone gets to tell their side of the story. As a reporter, I try not to approach something speaking as if I know everything, but want folks to share their side.
And genuinely, too, I think a lot of people, including Elmer’s family, are still seeking answers. I was trying my best to get answers as well.
JJ: There are very particular legal regulations that folks hide behind, in a way, in terms of delivering protections. You’re not an employee, you’re a contracted worker, or you’re a subcontracted worker, and that allows them some degree of cover.
NF: And also, too, at the same time that it allows them some degree of cover when it comes to liability in an accident, it’s also what makes it possible for many of these companies to hire immigrant workers who do not have authorization to work. So it’s one of those things where it’s sometimes the only way that an immigrant worker can get a job, as they’re trying to maybe support their family, support themselves.
But it can leave them very vulnerable, because these layers of contractors can make it much harder for them, or their families if they pass away, to claim any type of support or resources. They still can, but the workers’ compensation system is pretty difficult to navigate without a lawyer in a straightforward case. And when you add on different barriers that contractors may face, and then certainly folks who don’t speak English as their first language, and then also you have legal status mixed in there, and folks being really worried that coming forward could endanger them.
All of that does tend to make it easier for the company to have these systems in place, and certainly disincentivizes many folks who need these resources, need benefits, need some type of financial compensation. It disincentivizes them from stepping forward, or just fighting through what can be a pretty difficult process.
JJ: And, not for nothing, incentivizes the companies themselves to set up this system in which their workers don’t have access to this kind of compensation.
NF: Yeah, I would imagine that—I can’t speak for anybody’s motives, but I do think they’re going to get the workers that they need, one way or the other, and some ways leave their workers with much more limited protections.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, if you have thoughts about the way that immigration and immigrants are covered, what would you have to say in terms of…. I had kind of a rant at the beginning about how I really am unhappy when immigrants are reduced to an electoral issue, when they’re human people and they have a story. And I feel like that’s what reporters should be doing.
But do you have thoughts in terms of the way that big media cover immigration, or just thoughts about something you’d like to see more or less of in terms of, big picture, the way the story is covered?
NF: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really wonderful immigration reporters out there who are doing their best to bring facts to a pretty charged conversation, honestly, a recurring conversation. I mean, I have not been in the industry for decades and decades and decades, but this is definitely the thirdelectioncycle that I’ve covered where immigration has been a pretty significant issue, whether because candidates have made it so, or people are concerned about folks arriving at the border. And I can say, as a journalist who is trying to present facts, it can sometimes be distressing to see the same misrepresentation of the facts repeated, sometimes without pushback or factchecking.
But the truth is, and I think the Elmer story shows this, is that candidates can say as much as they want that immigrants are stealing jobs, and the actual reality on the ground just does not really reflect that. And, at the same time, there’s a pretty significant narrative about, maybe, people who believe that immigrant workers get more than they do. I think you can see, in this case, that not only are many not getting more than a citizen worker, their families are often left abandoned and without any resources when something tragic happens.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Nicole Foy. Her article, “An Immigrant Died Building a Ship for the US Government. His Family Got Nothing,” can be found at ProPublica.org. Thank you so much, Nicole Foy, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Cuba is in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and October’s widespread power outages are only adding to the Cuban people’s troubles. For the last six decades, Cuba has been on the receiving end of myriad sanctions by the United States government. This blockade has proved devastating to human life.
Reporting on Cuba’s blackouts have either omitted or paid brief lip-service to the effects of US sanctions on the Cuban economy, and how those sanctions have created the conditions for the crisis. Instead, media have focused on the inefficient and authoritarian Communist government as the cause of the island’s troubles.
Pulping the economy
Michael Galant (The Hill, 1/5/24): “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves for association with ‘a sponsor of terror.’”
One of President Donald Trump’s final acts in office was to re-designate Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, after President Barack Obama had removed them from the list in 2015 as a part of his Cuban thaw. Inclusion on the list subjects a country to restrictions on US foreign aid and financing, but, more importantly, the SSoT list encourages third-party over-compliance with sanctions. “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves,” The Hill (1/5/24) reported.
Trump reportedly added Cuba to the list for harboring members of FARC and ELN, two left-wing Colombian armed movements. However, Colombian President Gustavo Petro later “noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks,” the Intercept (12/14/23) wrote. Indeed, if Cuba deported the dissidents, they would have been in violation of the protocols of the peace talks, which they were bound to by international law (The Nation, 2/24/23).
President Joe Biden has not begun the process of reviewing Cuba’s inclusion on the list, despite his campaign promises to the contrary.
The terror designation, plus the many other sanctions imposed by Trump and continued by Biden, are no small potatoes. Ed Augustin wrote at Drop Site (10/1/24) that
the terror designation, together with more than 200 sanctions enacted against the island since Obama left office, has pulped the Cuban economy by cutting revenue to the struggling Cuban state…. The combined annual cost of the Trump/Biden sanctions, [economists] say, amounts to billions of dollars a year.
Augustin argued that the economic warfare regime is a root cause of the rolling blackouts, water shortages and mass emigration that have plagued Cuba in recent years. Even imports that are ostensibly exempt from sanctions, like medication, are caught in the dragnet as multinational companies scramble to cut ties with the island. Banks are so reluctant to run afoul of US sanctions, Augustin wrote, “that often, even when the state can find the money to buy, and a provider willing to sell, there’s simply no way of making the payment.”
Cuba’s pariah status as a SSoT has put a stranglehold on its economy, and its government’s ability to administer public services. However, US restrictions on Cuba are almost never mentioned in US coverage, and reporting on the recent blackouts is no exception.
Cash-strapped Communists
Reuters (10/10/19): “Tougher US sanctions against Cuba have led international banks to avoid transactions involving the island, while prospective overseas investors put plans on hold.”
Coverage has emphasized the inability of Cuba’s government to pay for necessary fuel imports. The New York Times (10/19/24) reported “the strapped Communist government could barely afford” to pay for fuel. Elsewhere, the Times (10/18/24) claimed “a severe economic crisis and the cash crunch it produced made it harder for Cuba to pay for those fuel imports.”
The Washington Post (10/18/24) made broadly similar arguments, chalking the blackouts up to “a shortage of imported oil and the cash-strapped government’s insufficient maintenance of the creaky grid.”
The “cash crunch” referenced by the Times is not just the result of an abstract economic crisis, as is implied. Instead, it is a direct effect of US sanctions on financial institutions. During the Obama administration, European banks, including ING and BNP Paribas, were fined to the tune of over $10 billion for transacting with Cuba (Jacobin, 3/27/22). Even before Cuba was choked further as a result of their SSoT designation, reporting by Reuters (10/10/19) showed the extent to which banks were terminating operations with Cuba and Cuban entities:
Many Western banks have long refused Cuba-related business for fear of running afoul of US sanctions and facing hefty fines.… Panama’s Multibank shut down numerous Cuba-related accounts this year and European banks are restricting clients associated with Cuba to their own nationals, if that.…
Businessmen and diplomats said large French banks, including Societe Generale, no longer want anything to do with Cuba, and some are stopping payments to pensioners living on the Caribbean island.… For the first time in years, the island has had problems financing the upcoming sugar harvest. Various joint venture projects, from golf resorts to alternative energy, are finding it nearly impossible to obtain private credit.
This de-risking by financial institutions manufactures a cash-scarce economy. Cuba’s inability to procure cash for imports is not a function of financial mismanagement, or a lack of credit-worthiness. Instead, it is a deliberate effect of American foreign policy. By omitting the actions of the most powerful government on earth, mainstream coverage allows only that only Cuban failures could be the cause of a shortage of cash.
‘Terrorism’ cuts off tourism
Britain’s ambassador to Cuba told the Telegraph (11/6/23), “Those who come are profoundly shocked at what the SSOT designation is doing to the people here.”
Cuba has historically used tourism as a way of bringing money into the economy, but lately the Cuban tourism industry has been severely depressed. The explanation employed by corporate media for the decline of this industry is to blame the extended effects of the pandemic recession (New York Times, 10/19/24; Washington Post, 10/18/24).
This explanation, however, is incomplete. Cuba has indeed had a lackluster rebound in their tourism industry, but the Times and the Post fail to explain why Cuba has faltered while other Caribbean islands have more than re-achieved their pre-pandemic tourist numbers.
Travelers from Britain, Australia, Japan and 37 other countries do not need to procure a visa for travel to the United States. Instead, they can use ESTA, an electronic visa waiver. This greatly reduces the cost and the annoyance of obtaining permission to visit the US. However, since Cuba’s 2021 listing as a SSoT, any visit to the country by an ESTA passport-holder revokes the visa waiver, for life (Telegraph, 11/6/23). In other words, any Brit (or Kiwi, or Korean, and so on) who visits Cuba must, for the rest of their lives, visit a US embassy and pay $180 before being able to enter the United States. US policy, not a Covid hangover, is hamstringing any possibility of a resurgence in tourism to Cuba.
Blame game
During Cuba’s most recent energy crisis, the New York Times published three stories describing the blackouts. Two of these stories mention the US blockade only as something that the Cuban government blames for the crisis.
The New York Times (10/21/24) presented the idea that the US is punishing Cuba’s economy as a Communist allegation: “The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration.”
The headline on the Times website (10/21/24) read: “A Nationwide Blackout, Now a Hurricane. How Much Can Cuba Endure?” The paper was right to report on the humanitarian crisis ongoing in Cuba, but it chose to downplay the most important root cause: the decades-long US blockade on Cuba’s economy and its people.
That same story described Cuba as “a Communist country long accustomed to shortages of all kinds and spotty electrical service.” Why is the country so used to shortages? Eleven paragraphs later, the Times gave an explanation, or at least, Cuba’s explanation:
The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration, which severely restricts the Cuban government’s cash flow. The US Department of the Treasury blocks tankers that have delivered oil to Cuba, which drives up the island’s fuel costs, because Cuba has a limited pool of suppliers available to it.
Earlier coverage by the Times (10/18/24) similarly couched the effects of the blockade as merely a claim by Cuba. The Washington Post (10/22/24) also situated the blockade as something that “the Cuban government and its allies blame” for the ongoing crisis.
To report that Cuban officials blame the US sanctions for the energy crisis is a bit like reporting that fishermen blame the moon for the rising tide. It is of course factual that US trade restrictions–which affect not just US businesses, but also multinational businesses based in other countries–are a blunt weapon, with impact against not just a government, but an entire people.
At the very least, it is incumbent upon journalists to do at least minimal investigation and explanation of the facts concerning the subject of their reporting. None of the coverage in either major paper bothered to investigate whether this was a fair explanation, or even to report generally the effects a 60-year blockade might have on an economy.
Brief—and buried
“Cuban economists and foreign analysts blamed the crisis on several factors,” the New York Times (10/19/24) reported; 18 paragraphs later, the story gets around to mentioning US sanctions.
On October 19, the Times gave its most complete explanation of the relationship between the US sanctions regime and the Cuban blackouts:
Cuba’s economy enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the United States during the Obama administration, which sought to normalize relations after decades of hostility, while keeping a longstanding economic embargo in place. President Donald J. Trump reversed course, leading to renewed restrictions on tourism, visas, remittances, investments and commerce.
This explanation can be found in the 31st paragraph of the 37-paragraph story. Only once the Times has painted a picture of all the ways the Communist government has gone wrong can there be a brief mention of the role of US sanctions. And how brief it is; the Times chose not to detail the extent of blockade against Cuba, nor how Cuba was wrongfully placed on the SSoT list, nor the failure of Biden to reevaluate Cuba’s status as he promised on the campaign trail.
Describing the US starvation of Cuba’s economy in abstract terms like “economic crisis” provides cover for deliberate policy decisions by the US government. By reporting on the embargo only as something that the Cuban government claims, it is easy for readers to dismiss that explanation as simply a Communist excuse. Instead of asking why the United States is choosing to enforce a crippling sanctions regime on another country, outlets like the New York Times find it easier to repeat the line that Cuba’s government has only itself to blame for its problems.
The New York Times (10/12/24) says it “verified” supposed Hamas documents provided to the paper by Israel—which turns out to mostly mean that that the Israeli military “concluded the documents were real.”
Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24) and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.
Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.
Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.
A history of lying
Fake “Hamas” documents were being cited in the press as recently as September 2024 (Middle East Eye, 9/9/24).
Israel’s use of fabrications to shape public perception is well known, and was put on display early in the assault on Gaza that began last October. After an explosion at Al Ahli hospital killed and injured hundreds (misreporting of which caused a great deal of confusion), the media naturally pointed the finger at Israel. The Israeli government, concerned about the public backlash, denied responsibility, claiming that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (See FAIR.org, 11/3/23.)
To back up their claims, Israel released a recording allegedly capturing two Palestinian militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by the firm Earshot found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together (Channel 4, 10/19/23). In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip in an attempt to clear itself of war crimes in the public mind.
Investigations based on open sources have since come to various conclusions about the attack (Guardian, 10/18/23; Bellingcat, 10/18/23; Human Rights Watch, 11/26/23; AP, 11/22/23; Michael Kobs, 2023; New Arab, 2/19/24), but Israel’s fraudulent attempt to manipulate evidence certainly suggests that they had something to hide, and demonstrates their lack of reliability as a media source. Recently, the UN released a report accusing Israel of systematically targeting healthcare infrastructure in Gaza, making their denials of this earlier attack far less credible.
In another instance, Israel presented 3D renderings of a supposed Hamas “command center” beneath Al Shifa hospital, claiming it was based on intelligence. However, no such command center was ever found (FAIR.org, 12/1/23). Upon storming the hospital, Israel staged scenes in order to bolster claims that the facility was used by militant groups. The deception was so blatant that mainstream outlets were openly calling it out.
Recently Israel was caught actually providing fabricated documents to the press with the aim of manipulating public opinion. Earlier this year, the Israeli government provided documents to both the Jewish Chronicle (9/5/24) and the German paper Bild (9/6/24) that purportedly showed that Hamas had no interest in a ceasefire, and had a plan to sneak the late Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar out of Gaza to Iran, along with some of the remaining hostages. The reports were then uncritically repeated in outlets like the Times of Israel (9/6/24).
Shortly after these documents were published, the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (9/8/24) reported on an internal IDF investigation that found that they had been leaked to foreign media as part of a campaign to “shape public opinion on Israel.” The documents were determined to be forgeries, after a comprehensive search of all databases containing documents found in the wake of Israel’s operations. The IDF told the paper that an investigation was underway to determine the origin of the leak.
This non-exhaustive list of examples demonstrates a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.
Questionable authenticity
The Washington Post (10/12/24) reported that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established”—but there’s no trace of that doubt in the story’s headline or subhead.
Whether they are authentic or not, it is clear that the documents leaked to the Wall StreetJournal, New York Times and Washington Post serve the same purpose of propagandizing on behalf of Israel. In an attempt to preserve some journalistic integrity, the Post and Times both gave separate justifications for why they believed the respective documents leaked to them were authentic.
The Post was quick to note that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established,” but gave readers the impression there was reason to believe they were real. First, it claimed that the contents of the documents it received were
“broadly consistent” with US and allies’ post–October 7 intelligence assessments about Hamas’s long-range planning and complex relationship with Iran.
Then it wrote that unnamed US and Israeli officials they shared the documents with did not express concerns about their authenticity. (Iranian and Hamas officials they consulted didn’t comment on the documents but accused Israel of having a history of “fabricating documents.”)
The New York Times consulted former Hamas member Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, whom the paper frequently quotes on matters related to Hamas, and an unnamed Palestinian analyst with “knowledge of Hamas’s inner workings.” It also said an internal Israeli military report concluded the documents were authentic, and the paper “researched details mentioned in the meeting records to check that they corresponded with actual events.” It said “Hamas and Hezbollah did not respond to requests to comment” and that Iran “denied the claims made in the minutes.”
The Wall Street Journal story did not describe any attempt to verify the authenticity, and only reported that the paper “hasn’t independently verified the documents.”
But given Israel’s track record, there is no epistemologically sound way of verifying the validity of documents provided by the Israeli government without confirmation from Hamas itself. Citing sources who say that the documents resemble Hamas documents, without noting Israel’s history of creating credible forgeries, creates a patina of credibility without actually substantiating anything.
Advancing Israel’s agenda
Haaretz (10/14/24): The documents bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is “fighting a terrifying ‘axis of evil’ led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.”
The Israeli paper Haaretz (10/14/24), which took the documents as authentic, argued that their release by Israel was “Aimed at Aiding Netanyahu.” While both the Times and the Post have largely advanced Israel’s agenda over the past year of bombing (FAIR.org, 10/13/23, 2/1/24, 10/7/24), both papers are considered to be on the critical end of the press spectrum in the US, particularly towards Netanyahu. As Haaretz explained, this perception enhances the propaganda value of the document leak: “The Times and the Post enjoy greater credibility when they fall in line with Israel’s narrative.”
While Haaretz made no note of the leaked documents provided to the Wall Street Journal, the article ironically acknowledged that
having them published by Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal would have looked like an Israeli public diplomacy operation rather than a legitimate journalistic investigative report.
Haaretz noted that the documents promote narratives that “Israel would be happy to burn into the world’s consciousness,” namely the well-known propaganda effort to equate Hamas with organizations that are universally reviled by Americans. The Post documents purportedly outlined a Hamas plan to blow up a skyscraper in Tel Aviv, evoking the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center:
The Hamas documents are supposed to bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel isn’t fighting against a liberation movement seeking to free the occupied Palestinian people, or even against a paramilitary organization that is poorly funded and trained and lacks planes, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, tanks and artillery….
Rather, it is fighting a terrifying “axis of evil” led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.
Haaretz also argued that this kind of propaganda campaign was designed to ensure that the violence continues to escalate:
In this spirit, the documents are supposed to justify Israel’s counterattack, which has so far caused enormous death and destruction in Gaza and, to an increasing degree, also in Lebanon.
Obvious PR value
Unlike the New York Times or Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) acknowledged in its headline that the revelations in the documents are what “Israel says” they show.
While Haaretz overlooked the story from the Wall Street Journal, the same logic can be applied to the documents given to that paper as well. The Journal was apparently curious about the political purpose of the documents, noting that “the officials who provided the documents declined to say why they were releasing them now.”
The Journal wrote that the documents “suggest that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was negotiating with Iran over funding for a planned large-scale assault on Israel as far back as 2021,” and gave specific dollar amounts that Iran provided to Hamas’s armed wing. The obvious public relations value of these documents was that they boosted the negative image of Iran prior to Israel’s recent attack on that country.
Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza and greater war in the Middle East has been successful in part because the Israeli government can count on Western press to present and contextualize facts in a way that advances their narrative. Despite Israel’s long history of fabrications, the corporate media will dutifully republish documents, statements and explanations with complete credulity.
This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons US workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to.
Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life.
We hear that story this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at recent press coverage of NPR‘s overseers and the Washington Post‘s non-endorsement.
The Washington Post (10/24/24) claims that “the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.”
As the country begins to vote in an election that will be hugely consequential for the climate crisis, the central task of news outlets’ climate beats should be informing potential voters of those consequences. Instead, the Washington Post‘s “Climate Lab” seems to be working hard to cast doubt on whether climate change is really causing weather disasters to be more expensive.
In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:
The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.
The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.
Distorting with cherry-picked data
The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.
What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”
A review of Roger Pielke’s book The Climate Fix in the journal Science (11/26/10) accused him of writing “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.”
When Pielke published the argument in his 2010 book, the journal Science (11/26/10) published a withering response, describing the chapter as “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.” It detailed the multiple methodological problems with Pielke’s argument:
He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.
Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.
That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”
Debunked a decade ago
In response to Pielke, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (538, 3/31/14) pointed out that it’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product (GDP) if the intent is to detect an underlying climate trend,” since “GDP increase does not translate in any obvious way to damage increase,” as “wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets.”
Pielke peddled the story in 538 (3/19/14) four years later—and lost his briefly held job as a contributor for it, after the scientific community spokeoutagainst it in droves, as not being supported by the evidence.
The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”
That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?
Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.
Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.
Pielke agrees with Pielke
Roger Pielke “agrees with studies that agree with Pielke” (Environmental Hazards, 10/12/20).
Stevens tells Post readers that the science is firmly on Pielke’s side:
Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.
You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.
The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”
A phony ‘consensus’
Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say
disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.
He also adds that
many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.
Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that
the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.
But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)
When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.
Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?
By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Intercept‘s Shawn Musgrave about the voter fraud hoax as voter suppression, for the October 25, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When you hear that Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to turn over valuable possessions, including a Manhattan penthouse, watches and a signed Joe DiMaggio jersey, to the two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of ballot tampering in the 2020 election, you might believe that, though the harm is ongoing, at least the lawyers who propped up Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 vote have paid some kind of price.
And, indeed, catspaws like Sidney Powell, like John Eastman, have faced repercussions. But, our guest explains, not only is the scaffolding of Trump’s voter fraud hoax still standing, some key architects are still hard at work on it.
Shawn Musgrave is a media law attorney and reporter who serves as counsel to the Intercept, where you can find his recent piece, “Trump’s Big Lie Attorneys Are Back.” He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shawn Musgrave.
Shawn Musgrave: Thanks so much for having me on.
JJ: The key elements of the piece are right there in the lead:
Across battleground states, attorneys who helped former President Donald Trump undermine confidence in the 2020 election results are back at it, filing lawsuits that seed doubt in advance of this year’s outcome.
Let’s start with the lawsuits themselves, as lawsuits. What are the claims being made, and what can we say about those claims?
SM: So the lawsuits that I looked at fall into a couple of different buckets: one alleging the possibility of voter fraud for overseas ballots, under a federal law that helps US citizens abroad, including members of the military and their families, to vote. And in several states now, Republicans have filed last-minute lawsuits—with voting already going on, including overseas ballots—claiming that there’s a possibility of fraud using this mechanism.
And then the second bucket of lawsuits that I look at in this piece is another go-to boogeyman, which is the cybersecurity of voting machines. And the case that I look at is filed in Georgia over Dominion voting machines, which, again, were just one of the centerpieces of the election fights in court in 2020, and it looks like they will be again this year.
JJ: You note that these are last-minute lawsuits being put in there, but still, in terms of evidence, in terms of information, what can we say about, for example, fraud in overseas voting?
SM: So many of these lawsuits have already been rejected. They’ve been thrown out by courts, including [on] the basis that the people filing them did not show any evidence of actual fraud that had been happening. It’s all based on hypotheticals in the lawsuits themselves.
JJ: And the Dominion case, that’s not new news for folks. That’s also been kind of churned through, hasn’t it?
SM: The Dominion claims are very much recycled from 2020, and from other cases that were filed in between the 2020 cycle and now. And it just really underscores the fact that these are also many of the same attorneys who are trying to just recycle the legal playbook.
JJ: The big Big Lie attorney that you’re writing about in this piece is Cleta Mitchell. And so what should listeners know about her, and what she’s up to?
SM: Cleta Mitchell is very central to the election denial movement. And in 2020, she really came to prominence by being on the infamous call that Trump had with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump asked the Georgia secretary to “find” a few thousand votes. Cleta Mitchell was advising Trump on that call, and she resigned from the law firm that she was at at the time, and then has really since made election integrity, so to speak, her entire brand.
And now, in terms of her involvement this cycle, she has given this pretty frank interview—not to me, but to a conservative radio host—describing her involvement in putting together and helping organize lawsuits over overseas ballots. And she said she struggled to find an attorney who was willing to file one, that was ultimately filed in Pennsylvania.
JJ: I guess there’s something heartening about that, actually, about the difficulty of finding attorneys who would line up behind what looks clearly to be a specious set of lawsuits. And, just as a detour, there is something about the abandonment of principle, the politicizing of the professions—doctors who can say, “Well, torture is OK,” and lawyers who can abandon ethical codes. It’s somehow different than just being a bad lawyer. It really feels like a giving over of the whole principles of the profession. So I guess I’m happy to hear that it’s not so easy to turn up attorneys who will sign on to that.
SM: That was in Pennsylvania, where Cleta Mitchell said she had a hard time finding anyone else to file it. In two other states, where the Republican National Committee were the ones filing, other attorneys were found.
JJ: Right. Well, then, to bring us back, there’s no evidence, as you’ve indicated, for these charges; they haven’t been able to put forward any evidence, and they weren’t in the previous incarnations of these. So maybe it’s time to recognize that evidence, and even winning the lawsuit, is not the point. What is the point, do you think, of these last-minute lawsuits?
SM: When I talk to election law experts, they certainly don’t think that the point of most of these suits is to win in court, to convince a judge that they have evidence to support the pretty drastic request that they’re asking a judge to give. In the overseas ballots cases, asking for a court order that state election officials set aside ballots that were received from people who went through the registration process as it was when their ballot was sent.
But that doesn’t seem to be the point, to convince the judge that they should win on this. It really does seem to be to essentially put out a press release, put together to look like a lawsuit, to sprinkle a little doubt into the public’s thinking about the election headed into November.
JJ: And so then maybe, if the Trump team—whatever happens, we don’t know—but if the Trump team decides to dispute the election results, well, then, those seeds of doubt have already been laid, and people will say, “Oh, I remember something from even before the election about overseas ballots being perhaps corrupt,” right? So it can be successful in its real goal, even if nothing at all happens in court, or if it gets thrown out.
Fox43 (10/30/24)
SM: And I should mention, in the same radio interview, Cleta Mitchell implied that she already had evidence, but none of it made it into the lawsuit. She told the conservative radio host that Democrats were encouraging people to fraudulently register using these overseas mechanisms. So the striking thing is what is said out of court versus what actually goes into the lawsuit itself. And I think, again, looking at what happened in 2020, same dynamic, is that people will point to the lawsuits, even though the lawsuits don’t have any actual proof of fraud, and use the filing of the lawsuit itself as its own form of proof, even though the lawsuit itself doesn’t contain proof.
JJ: Well, it’s very Joe McCarthy: “I have a list right here in my hand,” and it turns out to be a blank piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. People see him holding what he says is a list, and the impression is made.
Well, I don’t want to say that we don’t see any reporting that is acknowledging folks like Cleta Mitchell’s strategy as a strategy, as an intention of sowing doubt. The New York Times. just on October 22, had a piece on the “election denial network.” But I know that listeners will also have seen coverage that just says, “concerns raised about overseas voting,” and stories that, if you don’t read them carefully, or even if you do read them, the very fact that the story got written suggests that there’s that there’s a there there, that there’s a valid question, even if, “Oh, well, we looked into it, and actually it’s not grounded. There’s no evidence there.”
And I wonder, what do you, as a reporter as well as an attorney, see as the professional, critical way for journalists to engage this sort of campaign, that uses legal tools and legal language and legal mechanisms, but isn’t really about the legality? How do you cover that?
SM: I do think that it’s important for reporters to be clear-eyed about what the strategy is, which is to get coverage of the lawsuit just as a lawsuit, and put it into this neutral reportage territory. Like you said, “Concerns raised.” My typical one that drives me nuts is “lawsuit filed,” or something like that, that really just says what the claim was, without looking, as I am currently doing, at—consider the source, consider the lawyer who is willing to sign their name to this, and think about what that means.
The Times today actually had a good story about one of the attorneys that I’ve also writtenabout, Kurt Olsen, and his background. And he was deeply involved in 2020, in a number of different efforts, including trying to get the election fight straight to the Supreme Court, on a pretty ridiculous theory that was panned by legal experts. But I just remember coverage at the time really focusing just on the stakes, the Supreme Court weighing in, and painting it as if it were similar to what happened in Bush v. Gore, things like that, as opposed to the extraordinary way that the lawsuit arrived at the Supreme Court in 2020.
That’s sort of what I’m trying, not to be too grandiose, but to do a little bit of correcting on, just focus on the people that are involved, and the attorneys who are willing to put their law licenses on the line, and sign their name, and attest that everything in the papers is true, even when they have often a checkered track record on that front.
JJ: And not to draw you out on it too much, but it isn’t that reporters can’t consider the source, because in some other cases they say, “Oh, well, this is the ACLU,” or, “Oh, this is this other organization, so maybe we ought to put an asterisk next to that.” It isn’t that they can’t do that. It just seems that they don’t do that in the way that would always be most balanced, or most useful, when it comes to electoral politics, or something somehow changes when it gets to presidential electoral politics.
But let me just ask you for final thoughts, Shawn Musgrave, about the way—because it’s not going to go away—we have indicated that these lawsuits are coming in at the last minute, while folks are already voting, so clearly it’s a last-minute press, in many ways, that we might see even more coverage of going forward. What should we be keeping an eye out for? What would you like to see more of, or less of, as reporters cover this going forward?
Shawn Musgrave: “”People will…use the filing of the lawsuit itself as its own form of proof, even though the lawsuit itself doesn’t contain proof.”
SM: What I aim for, and what I think that other reporters should aim for too, is to take a moment on some of these stories, as so many of these lawsuits are flying, and look at trends. Look at, not just the parties who are named in the lawsuit itself, like the RNC, the DNC, ACLU, different voting rights groups, which are often very generically named, and try to look at the people who are actually working on them. Because I do think, seeing from the postmortem on 2020, the people really mattered, in terms of what strategies were followed, which lawyers Trump was listening to, which he was sidelining and ignoring, or forcing to resign.
We know from 2020 that the people who were working on particular lawsuits matter incredibly. And I think, going into the election and afterward, when there are absolutely going to be lawsuits of one kind or another, it’s important that readers understand who the people are, not just faceless attorneys. Because it mattered in 2020, and I assume it’ll matter again.
JJ: All right, well, thank you very much for that.
We’ve been speaking with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave. You can find the work we’re talking about at TheIntercept.com. Thank you so much, Shawn Musgrave, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Jeff Bezos has finally taken the halo off of his head. It should have never been there in the first place.
Ever since his $250 million purchase of the storied Washington Post in 2013, Bezos has been feted as a savior of the free press (e.g., Slate, 8/6/13; Business Insider, 5/15/16; AdWeek, 11/28/16; New York Times, 2/27/21; Guardian, 6/12/24). The endless fawning was always misplaced. And for me, having grown up watching my parents run the local newspaper, this praise was nauseating.
While Facebook and Google have rightly been called out for destroying the news business, Amazon has been given a comparative pass, even though it may be the worst offender.
Amazon may hoover up a smaller (but growing) portion of ad revenue than Google and Facebook. But its ruthless business practices have helped turn once vibrant Main Streets into ghost towns across the country. Thanks to Amazon, it’s not just ad dollars being lost, but the advertisers themselves—local bookstores, clothing stores, toy stores, etc. And those losses destabilize fragile local economies, and the newspapers that depend on them.
If current trends continue, by the end of the year the US will have lost one-third of its newspapers and nearly two-thirds of its journalism jobs in a span of just two decades, according to a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. The number of lost reporting jobs, 43,000, is more than enough to fill DC’s baseball stadium.
‘A terrible mistake’
CJR (10/25/24): “Journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned” to learn that the paper would not be issuing a presidential endorsement.”
Fortunately, we won’t have to read this Bezos-saves-the-free press drivel any longer, which may be the only good thing to come out of his halo-off moment.
That moment came last Friday when the Postannounced that it will no longer be endorsing for president, breaking with its decades-long precedent, and providing a shot in the arm to Trump’s candidacy. The Post’s move came a week after the LA Times, another billionaire-owned paper, did likewise (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).
In short order, Bezos’ top lieutenants at the Post dutifully fell on their swords, claiming it had been their decision. But simultaneously they (or others) leaked to the media that the decision was in fact Bezos’ alone, and they’d even argued against it (New York Times, 10/27/24). In fact, the Post editorial board had been working on its draft endorsement of Kamala Harris for weeks, and for the past week had been awaiting only the sign-off from the top that Bezos never gave (CJR, 10/25/24).
The gold star for trying-to-put-a-happy-face-on-this-hot-mess goes to Will Lewis, the Post CEO and publisher. Bezos tapped the Brit for the paper’s top job last year despite his shady right-wing past. In attempting to defend the indefensible, Lewis (Washington Post, 10/25/24) wrote, “we are returning to our roots.”
No one found this terribly convincing, not even Post columnists, 21 of whom signed onto a statement (10/25/24) calling the non-endorsement “a terrible mistake.” “Disappointing” is how the famed Post duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein put it. But maybe the harshest criticism came from former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who called it “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.”
The fallout from Bezos spiking of the Harris endorsement has been swift. Since Friday, nearly a third of the Post’s 10-person editorial board has resigned in protest, two Post columnists have departed the paper entirely (with more resignations expected), and 250,000 readers—10% of the Post’s total—have canceled their subscriptions. “It’s a colossal number,” said another former Post executive editor, Marcus Brauchli.
Bezos’ blocking of the Harris endorsement came just 11 days before the election, and on the heels of the Post issuing endorsements for lower-level offices like Senate and House—a practice the Post will continue, even as it discontinues endorsing for president, the one office that can seriously threaten Amazon’s sprawling interests.
Hedging Bezos’ bets
Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (CNN, 10/27/24): “Trump rewards his friends and he punishes his perceived political enemies and I think there’s no other explanation for what’s happening right now.”
“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory,” Post columnist and opinion editor Robert Kagan, who resigned in protest after 25 years at the paper, told CNN (10/27/24):
Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. They have tremendously intricate relations with federal government. They depend on the federal government.
Recall that Trump as president routinely attackedAmazon and Bezos over the Post’s coverage of him. Trump even went so far as to upend a $10 billion cloud-computing deal between the Pentagon and Amazon Web Services. (Amazon then sued; the contract was ultimately divided among four companies, including Amazon.)
With Trump’s return to office looking as likely as not, Bezos has reason to hedge his bets. That’s especially true considering how dependent on federal largess Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, also is. It currently has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA, and is expected to compete for $5.6 billion in Pentagon contracts over the next five years. Surely this came up when Blue Origin’s CEO met with Trump only hours after the Post announced its non-endorsement (Guardian, 10/27/24). (Blue Origin’s chief competitor is SpaceX, headed by Trump superfan Elon Musk.)
‘Endorsements do nothing’
“Something we are doing is clearly not working,” writes Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 10/28/24)—and he’s decided that “something” is endorsing presidential candidates.
With all hell breaking loose in the wake of his personal electioneering, Bezos—who can rarely be bothered to explain himself to the free press he supposedly cherishes—had to interrupt his European vacation to pen an op-ed for the Post (10/28/24).
Mustering all the humility you’d expect from the world’s third-richest man, Bezos began not with an apology but an attack—directed at, of all things, the media, including his own paper.
“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom,” Bezos wrote at the top of his op-ed, headlined “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media.”
The fact that Bezos’ last-minute nixing of the Harris endorsement will only worsen trust in the media went unstated, of course. Thin-skinned billionaires are better at pointing fingers.
Bezos’ op-ed continued:
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.
And with that, Bezos absolved himself of any role in aiding Trump’s potential return to the Oval Office.
But in the eyes of Trump fundraiser Bill White, it sure looks like Bezos just put his thumb on the scale. “Bezos not endorsing Kamala Harris—I think that’s a $50 million endorsement for Trump,” White told the Post (10/28/24). “Not picking a horse is picking a horse.”
‘No quid pro quo’
Robert Kagan (Daily Beast, 10/26/24): “All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee.”
The billionaire went on to assure readers that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” regarding the meeting between the Blue Origin CEO and Trump that took place immediately following the non-endorsement.
Bezos may have penned this line in response to Kagan, the recently departed Post columnist who two days earlier told the Daily Beast (10/26/24) that a quid pro quo is exactly what went down:
Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people…. Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.
While Bezos’ non-endorsement may seem like a last-minute decision, it had “obviously been in the works for some time,” Kagan said, citing Lewis’ hiring as Post CEO and publisher back in January.
Lewis rose to prominence over a decade ago when he helped steer the British wing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to calmer waters, at a time when Murdoch’s tabloid News of the World was engulfed in a phone-hacking scandal. While Lewis’ actions during this time remain the subject of legal inquiries, Murdoch was quick to promote him, naming Lewis CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal in 2014.
When Bezos tapped Lewis to helm the Post earlier this year, he was aware of Lewis’ shady background (Washington Post, 6/28/24)—and may have even viewed it as a plus.
“[Lewis’] eager solicitude before power could well be why Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Lewis for the publisher’s job in the first place,” the Nation’s Chris Lehmann (6/21/24) wrote. “[Bezos] may well look at Murdoch’s sleazy antidemocratic empire and think, ‘I want one of those, too.’ If so, his eager quisling Will Lewis is already hitting all the right notes.”
For Kagan, Lewis’ hiring was an early signal of Bezos’ intention to take the Post in a different, right-wing direction. “All the facts” point to Bezos’s desire to remake the Post in the image of the Wall Street Journal, with an “anti-anti-Trump editorial slant,” Kagan told the Daily Beast (10/26/24).
Amazon’s antitrust antipathy
FTC chair Lina Khan (Wired, 9/26/23): “Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform.”
While media are focused on how Bezos bent the knee for Trump, something important has been left out of the story: namely, that it may be President Harris whom Bezos fears most.
A second Trump presidency may put Amazon’s (and Blue Origin’s) current government contracts in danger, but it’s Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, who poses a more serious long-term threat to Amazon, as she seeks to break apart dominant monopolies like the online retail giant, which she’s currently suing.
If Harris wins, there’s a possibility that Khan will stay put, enabling her to continue building on the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement.
While the FTC’s case against Amazon hasn’t received much attention, it “marks the biggest legal test to date for Amazon’s 30-year-old e-commerce business,” according to the Post (10/1/24). Khan’s lawsuit—which is joined by 17 state attorneys general—alleges that the retailer is “punishing sellers who offer their goods elsewhere at lower prices,” according to Wired (9/26/23)—keeping prices artificially high not only at Amazon, but at thousands of other sites across the web.
In addition to antitrust enforcement, there’s another reason that Bezos (and his ilk) may prefer Trump. “Further compounding the incentive for some executives to stay out of the race is Democrats’ policy agenda,” the Post (10/28/24) reported. “Harris has backed a plan to raise taxes on many of the country’s highest earners.”
For Bezos’ part, he insists (10/28/24), “I do not and will not push my personal interest.” But now that the halo is off, it’s easier to see this is nonsense.
“With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former Blue Origin employee told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
It’s supremely unhelpful of the New York Times (Upshot, 10/26/24) to compare income of white men without college degrees to white, Black, Latine and Asian-American women with college degrees:
The Times provided no similar graphic making the more natural comparison between white men without college degrees and Black, Latine or Asian-American men without college degrees. Why not?
Someone who did make that comparison is University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who has a blog called Family Inequality (10/27/24). Maybe you won’t be surprised to find that not only are white men without college degrees not uniquely disadvantaged, they’re actually better paid than any other demographic without a college degree. White men with college degrees, meanwhile, are at the top of the income scale, along with Asian-American men with college degrees.
As Cohen writes, the way the New York Times presented the data “is basically the story of rising returns to education, turned into a story of race/gender grievance.” That fits in with the Times‘ long history (e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/16, 3/30/18 , 11/1/19, 11/7/19) of trying to explain to liberals why they should learn to love white resentment.
The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.
Reuters (10/18/24) called October 7 “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”; no similar Nazi comparisons were offered for the (probably far more than) 42,000 Palestinians killed by Israel.
Reuters (10/18/24), for example, produced an obituary headlined “Yahya Sinwar: The Hamas Leader Committed to Eradicating Israel Is Dead”—a less than charming use of terminology in light of the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza.
Since last October, more than 42,000 Palestinians have officially been, um, eradicated—although according to a Lancet study (7/20/24; Al Jazeera, 7/8/24) published in July, the true death toll could well exceed 186,000. Per the view of Reuters, this is really the fault of Sinwar, a “ruthless enforcer” who, we are informed in the opening paragraph,
remained unrepentant about the October 7 attacks [on Israel] despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his Gaza homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.
Never mind that Sinwar’s elimination will have no impact on the genocide, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear: “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow, but our task has still not been completed.”
Delegitimizing resistance
The New York Times headline (10/21/24) seems to express surprise that assassinating a negotiating partner is not a pathway to peace.
Further down in the obituary, Reuters journalist Samia Nakhoul managed to insert some biographical details that hint at reasons besides “evil” that Sinwar chose to pursue armed resistance:
Half a dozen people who know Sinwar told Reuters his resolve was shaped by an impoverished childhood in Gaza’s refugee camps and a brutal 22 years in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab/Israeli war.
This, too, is a rather diplomatic way of characterizing the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that attended the 1948 creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land—an enterprise predicated on perpetual killing, as we are now witnessing most acutely. By portraying Sinwar’s actions as stemming from an intrinsic diabolicalness that made him hellbent on “eradicating” Israel—in contrast to Israel’s actions, which are implicitly restrained until “unleashed” by Sinwar—the corporate media delegitimize resistance while effectively legitimizing genocide.
This longstanding commitment to laying nearly all responsibility for the conflict at Palestinian feet also leads to bizarre headlines like the New York Times‘ “Yahya Sinwar Is Dead, But a Palestinian State Still Seems Distant” (10/21/24). It is the Biden administration’s alleged hope that Sinwar’s killing could “help pave the way for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.” The idea attributes the failure to create a Palestinian state to Sinwar rather than Israel, and ludicrously imagines that genocide, along with the massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure that Israel is committing in Gaza, are logical ways to go about state-building.
That report came on the heels of another Times intervention (10/19/24) that critiqued “Hamas’s single-minded focus on the Palestinian struggle, which had dragged the whole region into the flames”—even while acknowledging that Israel is the party presently responsible for perpetuating the conflict. This particular effort bore the headline: “Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive.” Well, yeah.
‘Terrorist Hamas leader’
Fox News (10/17/24) labeled Sinwar a “terrorist,” but didn’t use the word when noting that he “rose to the top positionthe killing of previous leader Ismail Haniyeh in the explosion of a guesthouse in Tehran”; in fact, it couldn’t even bring itself to mention that Israel had carried out the assassination.
For its part, Fox News (10/17/24) deployed predictable lingo in its memorialization of Sinwar, describing him in the obituary headline as “The Israeli Prisoner Turned Terrorist Hamas Leader.” Indeed, the “terrorist” label never gets old, even after decades of being wielded against enemies of Israel and the United States, the Israeli military’s partner in crime and the primary financial enabler of the current bloodbath. Lost in the linguistic stunt, of course, is the fact that both the US and Israel are responsible for a great deal more acts of terrorism than are their foes.
But pointing out such realities goes against the official line—and so we end up with Sinwar the “Hamas terrorist leader,” as ABC News (10/17/24) has also immortalized him. Time magazine (10/18/24) opted to go with a front cover featuring Sinwar’s face with a red X through it.
CNN (10/17/24), meanwhile, offered space in the second paragraph of its own reflections on Sinwar’s demise to Israeli officials’ spin on the man, noting that they had “branded him with many names, including the ‘face of evil’ and ‘the butcher from Khan Younis,’” the refugee camp in southern Gaza where Sinwar was born.
Given the Israeli butchery to which Khan Younis is continuously subjected these days, it seems CNN might have refrained from taking Israel’s word for it. On just one bloody day this month, October 1, at least 51 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent camp in Khan Younis (BBC, 10/2/24)—a space that had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area.” Israel killed 38 more there yesterday (AP, 10/25/24).
‘The threat remains’
Time (10/18/24): “The corpse of Yahya Sinwar was found in the landscape he envisioned—the dusty rubble of an apocalyptic war ignited by the sneak attack he had planned in secret for years.”
Sinwar is not the only Middle Eastern resistance leader to have been recently eliminated by the Israelis. On July 31, Israel assassinated Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniyeh with a bombing in Tehran, and on September 27, it killed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, in an operation that entailed leveling an entire residential block. (What was that about terrorism?)
On the latter occasion, the Jerusalem Post (10/6/24) got its panties in a bunch over the allegedly “unnerving eulogy of the terror chief” that appeared in the New York Times (9/28/24), whose authors had not only had the audacity to call Nasrallah a “powerful orator…beloved among many Shiite Muslims,” but had also mentioned that the man had helped provide social services in Lebanon.
(That Times article also reported that some Lebanese “felt he used Hezbollah’s power to take the entire country hostage to his own interests,” and it linked to another Times piece—9/28/24—about those who “welcomed Mr. Nasrallah’s death.”)
The Washington Post (9/28/24) went with the noncommittal headline “Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Leader and Force in Middle East, dies at 64,” while simultaneously running an op-ed by Max Boot (9/28/24): “Nasrallah Is Gone. But the Threat of Hezbollah Remains.”
Now that Sinwar is gone, too, rest assured that Israel will continue to exploit all manner of threats to justify unceasing slaughter—and that the media will be standing by with disingenuous and reductionist narratives all the way.
The Los Angeles Times will not be making a presidential endorsement in this election, the first time the paper has stayed silent on a presidential race since 2004. But the decision not to endorse a candidate was not made by an editor. The paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, stepped in to forbid the paper from doing so.
The move sparked a furor over the lack of editorial freedom (Semafor, 10/22/24; KTLA, 10/22/24; Adweek, 10/23/24). The paper lost 2,000 subscribers, and editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, along with two other staffers, including a Pulitzer Prize winner (Guardian, 10/25/24).
Guardian (9/23/16): “The lack of transparency around Soon-Shiong’s reasons for not allowing his paper to make a presidential endorsement has left journalists in the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom frustrated and confused.”
The LA Times was widely expected to support the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, a Southern California resident and former senator from the state. The paper’s editorial board enthusiastically supported Joe Biden in 2020 (9/10/20) and Hillary Clinton four years before that (9/23/16).
According to news reports, the paper had been preparing an endorsement until Soon-Shiong reached across the wall that is supposed to separate the business and editorial wings of a newspaper. He tried to rationalize his decision, according to the Guardian:
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Soon-Shiong told Spectrum News, noting he was a “registered independent.”
On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong tweeted that he had asked the editorial board to instead publish a list of positive and negative attributes about both of the presidential candidates, but that the board had refused.
Soon-Shiong said that the dangers of divisiveness in American politics was highlighted by the responses to his tweet about his decision not to endorse, saying the feed had “gone a little crazy when we just said, ‘You decide.’”
And the LA Times is not alone. The Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post will also issue no presidential endorsement, for the first time since 1980 (NPR, 10/25/24). Former editor-in-chief Martin Baron called the move “cowardice,” telling NPR:
Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
Alarms about editorial freedom
Stat (11/21/16): “Soon-Shiong called it an ‘incredible honor’ to dine with Trump, who ‘truly wants to advance health care for all.’”
Soon-Shiong, who bought the LA Times from Tronc in 2018, attempted to portray himself as a defender of the free press against attacks from then-President Donald Trump (CNBC, 9/7/18). But Soon-Shiong—a doctor who made a fortune in the for-profit medical industry (New Yorker, 10/25/21)—was not shy about his ambitions for a top health position in the Trump administration (Stat, 11/21/16, 1/25/17).
Is Soon-Shiong trying to make nice with Trump? One thing we know about him is that he’s not big on paying taxes; “He hasn’t paid federal income tax in five consecutive recent years,” ProPublica (12/8/21) reported.
He’s also not overly concerned about ethical niceties; Stat (7/20/17) has raised questions about conflicts of interest in his medical business and how they might impact patients. A Politico investigation (4/9/17) of Soon-Shiong’s research foundation found widespread self-dealing:
Of the nearly $59.6 million in foundation expenditures between its founding in 2010 and 2015, the most recent year for which records are available, over 70% have gone to Soon-Shiong–affiliated not-for-profits and for-profits, along with entities that do business with his for-profit firms.
This isn’t the first time Soon-Shiong’s intervention at the paper has raised alarms about editorial freedom. The Daily Beast (10/22/24) reported that earlier this year “executive editor Kevin Merida resigned after Soon-Shiong tried to block a story that accused one of his friends’ dogs of biting a woman in a Los Angeles park.”
Layoffs at the Times earlier this year also sparked outrage from trade unionists and journalists. “A delegation of 10 members of Congress warned Soon-Shiong in a letter that sweeping media layoffs could undermine democracy in a high-stakes election year,” reported Los Angeles Magazine (1/23/24).
There was also a racial element, the Times union said in a statement (Editor and Publisher, 1/24/24):
It also means the company has reneged on its promises to diversify its ranks since young journalists of color have been disproportionately affected. The Black, AAPI and Latino Caucuses have suffered devastating losses.
Bezos is far better known than Soon-Shiong; while it’s not reported that he directly intervened to stop a Post endorsement, like at the LATimes, NPR noted that Bezos depends on harmonious interactions with the federal government, as the company he founded, Amazon, depends on government contracts. Conflict-of-interest questions have long surrounded his control of the paper (FAIR.org, 3/1/14, 3/14/18, 9/19/19; CJR, 9/27/22; Guardian, 6/12/24; CNN, 6/18/24).
Helping a fellow billionaire
NPR (10/25/24): Elon Musk “has become one of the leading boosters of baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in immigrants to illegally vote for them — a conspiracy theory that Trump and other Republicans have made core to their narratives about the 2024 election.”
It’s hard to ignore that in blocking endorsements expected to go to Trump’s opponent, billionaire owners are using their media power to help a fellow billionaire. With the Washington Post, readers can easily assume that Bezos cares more about not offending the powerful than its now-laughable slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Bill Grueskin (X, 10/25/24), a professor at Columbia Journalism School, said that these endorsements are “unimportant politically” because “few votes would be swayed”—the Los Angeles area and the Beltway are solidly blue. But there’s an ominous factor here, he said, because “the billionaire owners are (intentionally or not) sending a signal to the newsrooms: Prepare to accommodate your coverage to a Trump regime.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is likewise using his wealth and his ownership of the social media network Twitter (rebranded as X) to boost Trump (PBS, 10/21/24; NPR, 10/25/24).
And Republican megadonor and billionaire Miriam Adelson “shelled out $95 million to the pro-Donald Trump Preserve America PAC during its third quarter,” Forbes (10/15/24) reported. Her late husband bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal in December of 2015 (AP, 12/17/15), and as the New York Times (1/2/16) reported:
Suspicions about his motives for paying a lavish $140 million for the newspaper last month are based on his reputation in Las Vegas as a figure comfortable with using his money in support of his numerous business and political concerns, said more than a dozen of the current and former Review-Journal staffers and local civic figures who have worked closely with him.
Big money has played an enormous part in US elections, especially since the Citizens United decision eviscerated limits on campaign spending (PBS, 2/1/23). “A handful of powerful megadonors have played an outsized role in shaping the 2024 presidential race through mammoth donations toward their favored candidates,” Axios (10/23/24) reported. These megadonors “skew Republican,” the Washington Post (10/16/24) reported.
Much of the press in the United States has, correctly, portrayed a second Trump term as a threat to democracy and a move toward corrupt autocracy, eroding institutions like the free press and independent justice system (Atlantic, 8/2/23; New York Times, 9/21/24, 10/3/24, 10/22/24; MSNBC, 10/22/24; NPR, 10/22/24). Yet the intervention of Soon-Shiong and his fellow moguls is an indication that our media are already not in democratic hands. Far from it; they are in the hands of the billionaire class. And it is sure to have an impact on this election.
The Wall Street Journal (10/1/24) describes an Iranian missile barrage as a response to “Israel’s restraint”—rather than as a response to an Israeli terrorist bombing in Tehran, which went unmentioned in the editorial.
The media hawks are flying high, pushing out bellicose rhetoric on the op-ed pages that seems calculated to whip the public into a war-ready frenzy.
Just as they have done with Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 10/10/24), prominent conservative media opinionators misrepresent Iran as the aggressor against an Israel that practices admirable restraint.
Under the headline, “Iran Opens the Door to Retaliation,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (10/1/24) wrote that Iran’s October 1 operation against Israel “warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets. This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal.”
The editors wrote:
After April’s attack, the Biden administration pressured Israel for a token response, and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.
‘We need to escalate’
“Bully regimes respond to the stick,” Bret Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) declared—citing the fact that Iran was reluctant to make a nuclear deal with the United States after the United States unilaterally abrogated the last deal.
The New York Times‘ self-described “warmongering neocon” columnist Bret Stephens (10/1/24), in a piece headlined “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” similarly filed Iran’s April and October strikes on Israel under “aggression” that requires a US/Israeli military “response.” And a Boston Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that Iran “launched a brazen attack,” arguing that the incident illustrated why US students are wrong to oppose American firms making or investing in Israeli weapons.
All of these pieces conveniently neglected to mention that Iran announced that its October 1 missile barrage was “a response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Hezbollah and Hamas” (Responsible Statecraft, 10/1/24). One of these assassinations was carried out by a bombing in Tehran, the Iranian capital. But we can only guess as to whether the Globe thinks those killings are “brazen,” Stephens thinks they qualify as “aggression,” or if the Journal believes any country can let such assassinations “become a new normal.”
Likewise, Iran’s April strikes came after Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (CBS, 4/14/24). At the time, Iran reportedly said that it would refrain from striking back against Israel if the latter agreed to end its mass murder campaign in Gaza (Responsible Statecraft, 4/8/24).
‘Axis of Aggression’
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 10/8/24) thinks we’d be safer if “cunning and aggressive dictatorships…finally learned the taste of defeat.”
A second Stephens piece (New York Times, 10/8/24) claimed that “the American people had better hope Israel wins” in its war against “the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran.” The latter is his term for the coalition of forces resisting the US and Israel from Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, which refers to itself as the “axis of resistance.” Stephens’ reasoning is that, since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the country
has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.
The war Israelis are fighting now—the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war,” but is really between Israel and Iran—is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.
This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).
Given this background, suggesting—as the Journal, the Globe and Stephens do—that Iran is the aggressor against the US is not only untenable but laughable. Furthermore, as I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), it’s hardly a settled fact that Iran is responsible for Iraqi attacks on US occupation forces in the country. Stephens’ description of the Navy SEALs who died in the Red Sea is vague enough that one might be left with the impression that Iran or Ansar Allah killed them, but the SEALs died when one of them fell overboard and the other jumped into the water to try to save him (BBC, 1/22/24).
Stephens went on:
Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.
We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.
What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment. More realistically, the “future of freedom” is jeopardized by the US/Israeli alliance’s invading the lands of Palestinian and Lebanese people and massacring them. These crimes suggest that, in the Journal’s parlance, it’s the US/Israeli partnership that is the “regional and global menace.” Or, to borrow another phrase from the Journal’s editorial, it’s Israel and the US who are the “dangerous regime[s]” from which “the civilized world” must be defended.
‘A global menace’
“Iran launched a brazen attack,” the Boston Globe (10/3/24) editorialized—brazenly ignoring Israeli violence toward Iran.
Corporate media commentators didn’t stop at Iran’s direct strikes on Israel, casting Iran as, in the Journal‘s words (10/1/24), “a regional and global menace”:
It started this war via Hamas, which it funds, arms and trains to carry out massacres like the one on October 7, and it escalated via Hezbollah, spreading war to Lebanon. Other proxies destabilize Iraq and Yemen, fire on Israeli and US troops and block global shipping. It sends drones and missiles to Russia and rains ballistic missiles on Israel. All while seeking nukes.
Stephens’ column (10/1/24) similarly argued that “Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.” The Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that “the threat posed by Iran extends beyond Israel’s borders.” Both cited the Houthis in Yemen, among other alleged Iranian “proxies.”
Painting Iran as the mastermind behind unprovoked worldwide aggression helps prop up the hawks’ demands for escalation. But the US State Department said there was “no direct evidence” that Iran was involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, “either in planning it or carrying it out” (NBC, 10/12/23).
As FAIR has shown repeatedly (e.g., FAIR.org, 4/21/21, 8/26/20), it isn’t true that Hezbollah is an Iranian puppet. The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, likewise aren’t mere proxies (Democracy Now!, 2/1/24)—and don’t expect the media hawks to tell you that the Houthis began attacking ships they understand to be Israel-linked in response to the US/Israeli assault on Gaza, and say that they will stop if the US/Israeli war crimes in Gaza end.
Moreover, it’s clear that the Journal has no problem with US arms exports, including when they are used to carry out atrocities against civilians, so its posturing about the harm done by Iranian arms sales to Russia cannot be taken seriously (FAIR.org, 1/27/23).
Propaganda goes nuclear
Uriel Hellman (LA Times, 10/17/24) writes that “the responsible nations of the world have tried myriad methods to thwart this doomsday scenario” of Iran making a nuclear weapon, including “negotiated agreements.” The US has tried making deals with Iran, it’s tried violating those deals—nothing seems to work!
As usual, those who are itching for a war on Iran invoke the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) wrote:
This year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Even with the requisite fissile material, it takes time and expertise to fashion a nuclear weapon, particularly one small enough to be delivered by a missile. But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.
Now’s the time for someone to do something about it.
That someone will probably be Israel.
By “something,” Stephens said he also meant that “Biden should order” military strikes to destroy the “Isfahan missile complex.” “There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,” Stephens wrote suggestively.
The LA Times published two guest op-eds in less than two weeks urging attacks on Iran based on its alleged nuclear threat. Yossi Klein Halevi (10/7/24) wrote:
Today, Iran sits at the nuclear threshold…. The culminating moment of this war to restore Israeli deterrence against existential threat will be preventing Iran’s nuclear breakout.
Ten days later, Uriel Heilman (LA Times, 10/17/24) argued: “With Iran’s belligerence in overdrive, the US and its allies should seriously consider a military option to take out Iran’s nuclear sites.”
The first question posed by CBS‘s Margaret Brennan in the vice presidential debate (10/1/24)—”would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?”—was premised on the claim that Iran “has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon. It is down now to one or two weeks time.”
‘Threshold’ is a ways away
If this New York Times piece (10/2/24) seems to have a different, less alarmist tone than other corporate media reports, perhaps that’s because its author, William Broad, is a science reporter and not someone whose beat is foreign policy.
Readers who aren’t versed in the technical terms used to discuss nuclear proliferation can be forgiven for thinking that a country at “the nuclear threshold” is mere days away from being able to use nuclear weapons against their enemies, as these media warnings seem to suggest. But in reality, as the blog War on the Rocks (5/3/24) explained:
Three distinct elements distinguish a state that has achieved a threshold status. First, the conscious pursuit of this combined technical, military and organizational capability to rapidly (probably within three to six months) obtain a rudimentary nuclear explosive capability after a decision to proceed. Second, implementation of a strategy for achieving and utilizing this status. And third, the application of this status for gain vis-à-vis adversaries, allies and/or domestic audiences. Nevertheless, a threshold state remains sufficiently short of weapons possession and even from the capacity to assemble disparate components into a nuclear weapon within days.
According to a Congressional Research Service document (3/20/24) published in March, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports “suggest that Iran does not yet have a viable nuclear weapon design or a suitable explosive detonation system.”
Estimates of how long it would take for Iran to develop nuclear weapons vary. US intelligence said that Iran could enrich enough uranium for three nuclear devices within weeks if it chose to do so (Congressional Research Service, 9/6/24). Yet as noted by Houston G. Wood, an emeritus professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who specializes in atomic centrifuges and other nuclear issues, it “would take Iran up to a year to devise a weapon once it had enough nuclear fuel” (New York Times, 10/2/24).
Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, likewise told the New York Times that “it would likely take many months” for Iran to develop nukes, “not weeks.” As the Times noted, CBS‘s question in the vice presidential debate “conflated the time it would most likely take Iran to manufacture a bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium with the overall process of turning it into a weapon. ”
What’s more, US intelligence continues to say that Iran “is not currently undertaking nuclear weapons-related activities” (Congressional Research Service, 9/6/24). In 2003, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against building nuclear weapons that has not yet been rescinded (FAIR.org, 10/17/17).
‘Iran won’t stop itself’
“Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments,” the IAEA (3/5/18) said in March 2018. Two months later, the same could not be said to the United States.
Even if Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons, nothing under international law supports the idea that Israel and the US therefore have the right to attack Iran. India would not have been within its rights to attack Pakistan to prevent its rival from building a nuclear weapon.
But media assume different rules apply to Iran. The editors of the Wall Street Journal (10/1/24) contended:
If there were ever cause to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, [Iran’s October attack on Israel] is it…. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon and won’t stop itself. The question for American and Israeli leaders is: If not now, when?
Recent history shows that Iran has been willing to “stop itself” from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran abided by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, under which Iran limited its nuclear development in exchange for a partial easing of US sanctions. It stuck to the deal for some time even after the United States unilaterally abandoned it.
Just before President Donald Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018, the IAEA reported that Iran was “implementing its nuclear-related commitments” under the accord. The year after the US abrogated the agreement, Iran was still keeping up its end of the bargain.
‘Provocative actions’ from US/Israel
Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24): “Relations between the United States and Iran have been so damaged by Trump’s withdrawal that it does not appear as though the deal can be resurrected.”
Iran subsequently stopped adhering to the by then nonexistent deal—often advancing its nuclear program, as Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24) noted, “in response to provocative actions from the US and Israel”:
In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.
In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran’s Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran’s nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.
However, situating Iranian policies in relation to US/Israeli actions like these would get in the way of the Journal’s campaign, which it articulated in another editorial (10/2/24), to convince the public that “If Mr. Biden won’t take this opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, the least he can do is not stop Israel from doing the job for its own self-preservation.”
Of course, the crucial, unstated assumption in the articles by Stephens, Halevi, Heilman and the Journal’s editors is that Iran’s hypothetical nuclear weapons are emergencies that need to be immediately addressed by bombing the country—while Washington and Tel Aviv’s vast, actually existing nuclear arsenals warrant no concern.
This week on CounterSpin: Dropped by her law firm—or, excuse me, resigning from her law firm—after being exposed as an advisor on the post–2020 election call where Donald Trump told Georgia officials to “find” him some votes, Cleta Mitchell has leaned in on the brand of “election integrity.” Platformed on right-wing talk radio, she’s now saying that Democrats are “literally getting people to lie” to exploit laws that allow overseas citizens to vote, so she’s bringing lawsuits. Does she have evidence? No. Is evidence the point? Also no. We speak this week with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave, who serves as counsel to the Intercept, about how Trump’s “Big Lie” attorneys are not so much returning to the field, but actually never left.
Also on the show: In 2018, elite media had apparently moved beyond the kneejerk reportorial pairing of documentation of voter suppression with hypothetical claims of voter fraud. But they were still doing faux-naive reporting of those fraud claims as something other than themselves a deliberate suppression campaign. Then, the shiny object was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach trying to change registration laws in the state. We talked then with Orion Danjuma, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
NPR is adding a new team of editors to give all content a “final review”—thanks to the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
After the public broadcaster came under right-wing scrutiny in the spring for supposed left-wing bias, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin (NPR.org, 5/15/24) announced the organization would be adding 11 new oversight positions, though she wouldn’t say who would be funding them. The hires include six editors for a new “Backstop” team that will give all content, including content from member stations, a “final review” before it can be aired.
The CPB announced its role in a press release (10/18/24) that declared it was giving NPR $1.9 million in “editorial enhancement” funding to help NPR
further strengthen its editorial operations and meet the challenges of producing 24/7 news content on multiple platforms that consistently adheres to the highest standards of editorial integrity—accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.
‘You push people away’
A disgruntled NPR employee’s ax-grinding (Free Press, 4/9/24) prompted CPB to give nearly $2 million to keep an eye on NPR‘s politics.
That language reads as a direct response to the recent right-wing criticism. In April, former NPR business editor Uri Berliner published a lengthy essay in Bari Weiss‘s Free Press (4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that NPR‘s “progressive worldview” influenced its journalism. Berliner’s essay centered around what he claimed was the “most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.”
Berliner was referring to the viewpoints of NPR journalists—he claimed he looked up the voter registration of NPR‘s Washington, DC, staff, and found no Republicans—but suggested that led to skewed reporting, including “advocacy” against Donald Trump.
NPR alum Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) penned a lengthy response to Berliner, noting, among other things, that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, during Trump’s presidency, NPR senior vice president for news Michael Oreskes (WUNC, 1/25/17; FAIR.org, 1/26/17) announced that NPR had decided not to use the word “lie”: “I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”
Montgomery wrote that the real problem with NPR was
an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.
‘Intractable bias’
NPR‘s editor-in-chief Edith Chapin spun the installation of government-funded commissars as “something positive for journalism” (Current, 5/20/24).
Despite the lack of merit to Berliner’s arguments, the GOP jumped at the opportunity to engage in their time-worn ritual of investigating public broadcasting’s “intractable bias,” demanding that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members (FAIR.org, 5/11/24).
Chapin, who in an internal email (X, 4/9/24) about Berliner’s attack stressed the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos,” said Berliner’s piece and the scrutiny it prompted was “a factor” in her decision to add the editorial positions (Current, 5/20/24).
Under the new editorial organization, it appears that all reporting, whether produced by NPR or its member stations, will have to undergo final review by the “Backstop” team (which reports to Chapin herself) before it can be aired or published—which has some staff worried about bottlenecks as well as bias (New York Times, 5/16/24).
Survival through capitulation
Looking at NPR‘s sources (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/18/18) consistently finds a bias not to the left, but to the center and right.
The CPB was created to insulate public broadcasters from political intimidation, offering a degree of separation from government pressures. But since its inception, it has instead been used as a political tool to push PBS and NPR to bend over backwards to programming demands from the right, which has developed a winning formula: accuse public broadcasters of liberal bias, threaten to cut CPB funding, allow it to be “saved” by extracting programming concessions—rinse and repeat (FAIR.org, 2/18/11).
As FAIR wrote 20 years ago (Extra!, 9–10/05), in the midst of that year’s right-wing assault on PBS:
With each successive attack from the right, public broadcasting becomes weakened, as programmers become more skittish and public TV’s habit of survival through capitulation becomes more ingrained.
Public broadcasting’s founding purpose was to promote perspectives that weren’t already widely represented in the media, yet it has consistentlyfailed to live up to that mission. Some PBS and NPR programming tries to be faithful to that standard—particularly local programming from member stations—but FAIR studies (e.g., Extra!, 11/10, 11/10; FAIR.org, 9/18/18) have repeatedly shown that PBS viewers and NPR listeners often get the same, government-dominated voices and ideas they hear on other major media outlets.
Conservative voices in particular, in part because of right-wing pressure, have long found a welcoming home in public broadcasting, hosting PBS shows such as Firing Line, McLaughlin Group, Journal Editorial Report, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered and In Principle. NPR focuses much more on straight news and cultural programming; a FAIR study (7/15/15) of NPR commentators found them to be almost entirely apolitical.
No help seeing America whole
Sarah Jaffe (FAIR.org, 2/1/17): “The norms of ‘balance’ that for-profit media have relied on to avoid offending news consumers…seem utterly useless under an administration that considers lies simply ‘alternative facts.‘”
Now we have the CPB providing funding to NPR to hire editors that will make sure its programming adheres to standards that include “objectivity,” “balance” and “the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.” NPR staffers have every right to be worried about that.
How will the new editors define these terms? FAIR has repeatedly pointed out that objectivity is a journalistic myth; subjective decisions are made every time one story is greenlighted over another, and one source is selected over another.
And if objectivity were possible, it certainly wouldn’t square with a journalistic notion of balance that orders offsetting coverage of Trump party lies with coverage of Democratic lies. It’s not hard for politicians to realize that if “balance” and “objectivity” mean passing along whatever powerful voices say without scrutiny, media will serve as a frictionless delivery system for whatever reality you choose to make up.
Public broadcasting was indeed created to promote diverse viewpoints. The 1967 Carnegie Commission that launched public broadcasting wrote that it should “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and air programs that “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.” But as we’ve shown over and over, it’s not GOP viewpoints that are missing—it’s the perspectives representing the public interest, which are largely absent in corporate media, and which the new CPB funding is not designed to address.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
FEATURED IMAGE: NPR headquarters, Washington, DC (Creative Commons photo: Cornellrockey04)
Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the Gaza First Amendment Alert for the October 18, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There is other news, of course, but we cannot avert our eyes from the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the spreading effects of that murderous effort—including the silencing of criticism or concerns from US citizens on US soil about actions being carried out in our name.
Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He’ll join us to talk about the things we’re not supposed to say and the lives we’re told not to care about—and why we must never stop saying and caring.
The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases.
In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, one of very few humanitarian organizations working still in the region. A real accounting would also include, not just those that we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.
Democracy Now!recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that
Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head. When a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.
The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print—too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, they make sense or, minimally, they’re not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.
As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to other people somewhere else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like antisemitism—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.
Defending Rights & Dissent, online at RightsAndDissent.org, have started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He’s a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He joins us now by phone.
Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.
Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me back. I always say CounterSpin is one of my favorite shows to do, and it is so vital, with the sorry state of corporate media in this country, that we have outlets like yours, because we would never get our message out. Occasionally, occasionally, we break through, and BBC or the Guardian or whoever will call us up, but it’s pretty bleak out there.
Like everyone else, every day I see the horrible images and news coming out of Gaza, now Lebanon and, who knows, maybe Iran next. Pictures of people being burned alive while they’re hooked to an IV. Stories about people being forced to flee or be bombed, then bombed while they flee, then corralled into a refugee center, and then bombed some more. It’s really, really horrific.
And in the midst of this horror show, this genocide that is quickly spiraling into a regional war, with obviously Israel as the aggressor and our government as the financier of it, we’re witnessing this global tidal wave of repression against people who are saying, “Hey, wait a moment. Let’s not drop bombs on children.” Journalists who show us what it looks like to drop a bomb on children are being assassinated.
The young people on college campuses who want to simply peacefully raise their voice are hit with police batons, or have false charges against them. Journalists who report on the ground are killed by snipers and drones in their house. They get text messages telling them that their families will be killed.
And every day, our Congress votes to spend more money to fuel this, and sends these ridiculous letters to the IRS or the DoJ or the FBI, whomever else, telling them to crack down.
And I do want to note that this is a global problem. On October 17, 2024, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, presented to the UN General Assembly her new report on the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression globally. And Defending Rights & Dissent submitted testimony, and is cited in it. So this is a global problem, and you wouldn’t really know it from much of the corporate media.
Chip Gibbons: “”We cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.”
We started the Gaza First Amendment Alert as a project to compile together in one place—I won’t say all of the political repression in the US, because there’s so much it’s impossible to include it all, but the vast majority of it. So attacks on press freedoms, attacks on protest rights, attacks on civil society and attacks on transparency, we are documenting in one place in a biweekly newsletter.
Every congressional office on the Hill received an invitation to subscribe to this letter. I think the only thing more dismal in this country than our corporate media is our Congress offices. I’m sorry, I’m laughing out of despair. And we sent it out to journalists to receive. But there’s also been a really strong outpouring of support from people who work on these issues, from activists who have signed up to receive this newsletter, and have talked about how valuable it is.
And, for the most part, it is focused on the repression in the US. The one exception is we are—because Israel uses US weapons to do so—continuing to monitor Israel’s killing, detention, maiming of Palestinian journalists and international journalists.
And as you know, Janine, because FAIR endorsed this project this summer, Defending Rights & Dissent led a call of over 100 journalists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, to call on [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel, because we cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.
So the bulk of this newsletter focuses on domestic oppression in the US, but we will, every biweekly period, for as long as that happens, monitor the killing of journalists. I would love to have an issue that doesn’t have that in there because no journalists were killed. But in working on the first issue, I had to keep going back and updating the section on the killing of journalists, again and again, because Israel just keeps doing it.
We have seen college students engaging in protests. One of the big things we intended to cover on the inaugural issue was what took place on the anniversary of the war. On October 7, many college students and others who wanted to show their sympathy for the Palestinian victims, their opposition to the war, wanted to hold a protest or vigils. And there was a coordinated effort, that we show in the newsletter, to suppress this.
I get the Anti-Defamation League Campus Crisis Alertnewsletter, which is a great resource on political repression in the US. They don’t intend it as such, but I use it as such. And police departments get that. I know, thanks to a FOIA request filed by Iain Carlos at Noir News, that the Chicago Police Department gets this newsletter.
And like every day for a month, they encourage you to call colleges and send them letters and tell them, “We know colleges love free expression”—I’m not sure we know that anymore—but “even protected expression can create a hostile environment. Even permitted protests can create a hostile environment.”
And they are abusing civil rights law, which is very important. Abusing antisemitism to claim they have to clamp down on political speech, and then telling them you need to put in place a policy for October 7 on how or if—”if” was a big one—you permit protest. And then, of course, encouraging them to cooperate with law enforcement when campus policies are broken about expression.
And many of these campuses have put in very draconian anti-speech policies, policies that would be unconstitutional in any other context, and, if they are public schools, are unconstitutional.
And I think one of the big victories the ADL got was they got the University of Maryland to try to prohibit an interfaith vigil of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, an interfaith vigil mourning the Palestinian victims of this genocide. And the school initially approved it, there was mass public pressure against it, and then the school put together a policy that stated that you could only have “expressive events”—this is a new phrase that we hear a lot: “Expressive events.” “Expression policy…”
JJ: Right—what?
CG: Yes, events where people are expressing themselves. And some people have noted, some of these policies, when you start talking about expression, could be really rather broad.
But you couldn’t have any “expressive events” that were not initiated by the school. And, of course, that is unconstitutional. And Palestine Legal and CAIR took them to court, and the court allowed the vigil to take place. I saw pictures of it. I read news reports that there were a hundred or so students having an interfaith vigil, recognizing people who were slaughtered in a genocide.
An the interesting thing to me was that same day, there was a pro-Israel vigil as well, to mark the Israeli victims and civilians killed on October 7. And there was a member of Congress speaking at it, Steny Hoyer. And we hear again and again about outside agitators on the college campuses, Hillary Clinton, and I think Mike Johnson, basically in agreement that these kids wouldn’t be upset about people being burnt to death in tents with US weapons if it wasn’t for outside agitators, or nefarious Iranian influence. Or one place I saw was Cuban influence. You really are bringing out all of the bad guys.
And yet, when I looked at the vigil, it looked like—I didn’t do an investigation of everyone’s identity, but it looked like University of Maryland students. Whereas the counter vigil seemed to have a lot of pro-Israel advocates and a member of Congress at it.
So I don’t like the idea of outside agitators. You are allowed to invite prominent figures to your school to speak in solidarity with you. But if there’s outside agitators on the campus, who are they, right? Is it the college kids, or is it the members of Congress coming to call for their repression and champion a genocide? I think I know the answer to that.
And so, again, we’ve seen schools like Cornell suspend international students, and put them at risk of being deported. Right before we were about to go to print—not print, it’s an email newsletter; I’m using print in the figurative sense—that decision was reversed, and the student had a victory. But another student at the University of South Florida had to return to Colombia, because they were suspended for political speech.
So that’s where we’re at as a country. And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have any shortage of news two weeks from now. In fact, we already have multiple stories that we are considering for the next issue, including the fact that—you’ll love this—the Heritage Foundation yesterday announced Project Esther, named after Queen Esther from the Bible, to allegedly combat antisemitism. But when you read the opening section of it, they’re talking about a network of “anti-Zionist,” “anti-American” Hamas supporters. So they really mean, as you know—I think most listeners know—they mean pro-Palestinian speech.
And we have members of Congress calling for—I mean, every week in Congress they send a new letter to a new agency, proposing some new bonkers act that they should take against Students for Justice in Palestine. This week, they want them to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is, I mean, FARA is a very broad law. It’s a law I’ve thought a lot about, but it makes zero sense in this context. SJP are not agents of a foreign power. And if you’re claiming that they’re agents of Hamas, which is what this letter claims, from Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, they’ve got a lot bigger problems than the FARA statute.
So if someone were an unregistered agent of Hamas, which no one we’re talking about is, they would not even be indicted under FARA, or asked to register to FARA. They would be charged under the Material Support statute, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction.
Earlier this week, we saw a Palestinian prisoner-support NGO sanctioned under OFAC, which has for decades been used to punish people for giving humanitarian aid in the Occupied Territory, to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism; has not been used in many cases against actual terrorism, but against people who have views the government doesn’t like, cases like Holy Land Foundation, Sami Al-Arian; Muhammad Salah, the grocer from Illinois who was tortured by the Israelis when he was giving aid, and then became the first person ever sanctioned by the US as a terrorist within the US, a US citizen, he had all his assets frozen.
You’ll like this, Janine. Judith Miller participated in his interrogation, and talked about it in one of her books, because the Clinton administration denied the Israeli government’s claims that Hamas was essentially based in Chicago, and she believed Israel. So in order to help them out, she went and met with this American citizen they were torturing, and she gave the interrogator questions. And then the interrogator asked them And then she later testified at his trial that he wasn’t tortured by the Israelis, because she was there, and Judith Miller would have noticed the torture.
JJ: She understood.
Well, listen, as I get older, I recognize that there is a value in simply collecting the harms. You think that everybody knows and everyone will remember, and it’s just not true. There is a value in collecting the harms that are being done, and in showing their coherence and their purposiveness. It’s not random, it’s targeted and it’s principled, in a way that we understand that term.
And there is also tremendous value in lifting up the dissent, the resistance, so that we can never think, later or right now, that everyone is complicit, that no one is speaking out, even if not everyone feels really comfortably placed to do so. Propaganda is weakened when we have other avenues of information and communication. And that seems to be what your work, and particularly this new project, is about.
CG: And the flip side of the “everyone is complicit” argument is, people use it later to evade accountability. I mean, how many times can people say, “Oh, that or this politician or journalists supported the Iraq War, but there was no oneagainst the Iraq War.”
I went to my first protest against the Iraq War in September 2005. I was a sophomore in high school. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. And we were all more right than the New York Times and MSNBC and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. Well, I think Dick Cheney knew what he was doing, but you know what I mean?
JJ: Yes. I was there too. Yeah…
CG: I know you were, I know you were. That’s, as I mentioned before, I first started reading FAIR back during the Bush years. Which we’re back in.
JJ: But the point is that some folks might say, “Oh, you’re doing a newsletter and you’re collecting instances of censorship and firing and repression, and that’s useful,” but it’s not just a collection, it’s also a tool. It’s also a way of speaking, yeah?
CG: Yes. And we’re definitely trying to get this newsletter to be a tool for journalists, to be a tool for congressional staff, to be a tool for other advocates. I mean, anyone can subscribe to it, and I think everyone can benefit from it. But we are doing extremely hard work behind the scenes to try to put it in front of people in the press, to try to put it in front of congressional offices, so they can’t say, “We didn’t know.”
Or they can use it as a resource. Because I know they’re getting the ADL stuff. I know they’re getting the Heritage Foundation stuff. We know police departments get that sort of stuff.
And the other side is extremely well organized. I’ll never forget when I was in college, after the 2009 massacre/bombing/war in Gaza. I mean, I went and met with my congressman’s office, with just a staffer, with some other pro-Palestine activists. And the very first thing he says is, “We hear from AIPAC all the time. We never hear from you guys.”
JJ: Wow. That’s incredible. And that speaks to the need for organization and activism in this case.
And at the same time, we know that when we get organized, when we speak out, elite media will not necessarily hear that voice, or platform that voice.
And I’ll just ask you a specific question: FAIR and CounterSpin, we’ve noted a lot that corporate media cover election issues as though elections were something that happened to politicians, and not something that happens to all of the people that were affected. And with Gaza, with Palestine, with the genocide, the stakes can’t be higher. But how are you seeing Palestine covered as a campaign issue, and what would you do different there? What would you see differently there?
CG: I had to tune out most of the corporate media about a year ago, when I was watching CNN, and they ran this ad about Jake Tapper speaking truth to power. He says, “I have the greatest job in the world. I have powerful people on and ask them questions.” And then he came back from commercial break, he had a member of Congress on, and he goes, I don’t remember what member of Congress. He goes, “Oh, congressman so-and-so, students at Harvard just posted this on Instagram. Do you condemn it?” And I was like, “oh…”
JJ: And that’s news. Yeah.
CG: Speaking truth to power: When you have a member of Congress on, “will you condemn college students at Harvard?”
So it is interesting, because the way the media covers elections in its own right is its own problem. It’s just constantly pushing the candidates to be more warmongering. Maybe you saw that debate where the first question was, “Will you support a preemptive strike on Iran?”—a war crime. Will you support a war of aggression? Not a candidate answered it, I don’t believe. I believe they both gave nonsensical answers, because they had prepared opening remarks and they gave them.
But again, there’s a real chance, and I say this because I’ve worked for a nonpartisan organization, but with that caveat, there’s real questions about how Biden’s blanket support for Israel will impact Harris’s electability. At the end of the day, the murder of Palestinian children is not merely an electoral calculation for the Democratic Party.
And I’ve seen some people in liberal and left circles sort of talk about this, it’s like, “Oh no, Biden’s making a bad electoral calculation,” and had zero humanity towards the Palestinian people, when the murder of the children should be stopped because we shouldn’t be murdering children. It’s not this sort of horse race. The horse race approach to genocide is just something I can’t stomach.
JJ: When I talk to people, they almost offer a Hail Mary, like: The students, the children will save us all; but who’s looking out for the students? Who’s looking out for the kids that somehow are going to save us from this war nightmare that we’re in? There are laws, there are policies, there are things that we can do besides saying, “Well, gee, I hope those kids aren’t too scared of going to jail. I wish ’em well.” Thoughts on that?
CG: Yeah, it is troubling. And if the students are all suspended and arrested and beaten up, they won’t be there to save us. So the student protestors need our solidarity, even if we don’t always agree with the choice of words, or always the choice of tactics. I mean, I was a college student once. I didn’t always make the best decisions.
But they’re out there trying to stop a genocide, in a society where 9/10ths of our Congress, 9/10ths of our local politicians and like 9.9/10ths of our media are all on board and fueling the flames. And they are getting beaten with batons. They’re getting arrested, they’re getting suspended, they’re getting deported. They don’t need our armchair expert analysis, they need our solidarity and our support, and they need us to get out on the streets too.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org, and that’s the place where you can get their Gaza First Amendment Alert. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us once again on CounterSpin.
A spokesperson for Kansas City’s KCXL defended its former Radio Sputnik programming as “produced in Washington, DC, by American journalists who jumped at the chance to not be told what to report on by big media and big corporations” (Desk, 10/15/24).
Russian state radio network RadioSputnik is off the air in the two markets on which it aired in the United States, and the cause of the closure is reportedly US government sanctions.
The Desk (10/15/24), quoting “one source familiar with the decision to wind down the network,” said “it was directly influenced by the US State Department’s imposition of new sanctions on Russia-backed broadcast outlets last month.”
“While Sputnik was not specifically named by the State Department,” the Desk reported, the sanctions did hit Sputnik‘s parent company, a Russian government media agency called Rossiya Segodnya. This “made it difficult to continue leasing time on Washington and Kansas City radio stations where its programming was heard.”
The State Department (9/13/24) accused Rossiya Segodnya of carrying out “covert influence activities”; earlier (9/4/24), it had named Sputnik itself as well as Rossiya Segodnya as “foreign missions.” Significantly, the executive order under which Rossiya Segodnya was sanctioned extends penalties to the property of anyone who “acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly…any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.”
‘Years of criticism’
When Moscow does it, it’s “propaganda”; when Washington does it, it’s the Voice of America (10/16/24).
US government broadcaster Voice of America (10/16/24) said Sputnik‘s departure comes “after years of criticism that its local [Washington] radio station, WZHF, carries antisemitic content and false information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The VoA did not offer any evidence of its claims of antisemitism, other than saying Jack Bergman, a Republican congressman from Michigan, “cited a steady stream of antisemitic tropes.” (Critical profiles of Sputnik‘s US programming have not previously charged it with antisemitism–Washington Post, 3/7/22; New York Post, 3/28/22.)
Sputnik’s departure from US airwaves is sudden but not unexpected. Communications lawyer Arthur Belendiuk, who has represented the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, has been trying to shut down Sputnik via the Federal Communications Commission since February (Radio and Television Business Report, 2/1/24).
Belendiuk maintains that the network “is in violation of commission rules for broadcasting ‘paid Russian state propaganda’” (Radio and Television Business Report, 10/16/24). He told FAIR that while he understood Sputnik had freedom of speech, he also had a “freedom to petition my government.” Bergman, the Republican congressmember, requested that the FCC take action against Sputnik (Inside Radio, 1/5/24).
The pressure has been building against the radio network for some time. VoA reported that the National Association of Broadcasters had issued a statement in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling on “broadcasters to cease carrying any state-sponsored programming with ties to the Russian government or its agents.”
In 2017, three Democratic members of Congress sought an investigation into why it was still on the air despite evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time, Ajit Pai, declined to take action, saying the First Amendment would bar his agency “from interfering with a broadcast licensee’s choice of programming, even if that programming may be objectionable to many listeners.”
Chilling effect on speech
In 2020, the New York Times (2/13/20) called the arrival of Radio Sputnik in Kansas City “an unabashed exploitation of American values and openness.” Those loopholes have subsequently been closed.
I have been interviewed several times on Sputnik programs about my articles here at FAIR (e.g. By Any Means Necessary, 4/26/23, 5/27/23, 9/27/23). I have objected to much of the network’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which its website still calls a “special operation,” as if it’s gallbladder surgery. But I am open to talking as a source to many forms of media.
Sanctions that scare broadcasters against carrying Sputnik do carry a chilling effect on speech; if programmers know that a certain kind of content could open them up to government punishment, most are going to steer well clear of that content.
The feds have made it clear that their punishments are serious. In 2009, New York City small-business owner Javed Iqbal “was sentenced…to nearly six years in prison for assisting terrorists by providing satellite television services to Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar” (New York Times, 4/23/09). This is an outlet that Middle East reporters constantly monitor, as they do with lots of other Middle East media.
The New York Times (2/13/20) called Sputnik “Russian agitprop,” carrying the message that “that America is damaged goods.” The Kansas City Star editorial board (3/4/22) said that listeners to KCXL, which carried Sputnik programming, were “bombarded with pro-Putin talk” thanks to Sputnik. The paper wondered why such programming was airing in the area. “Money talks,” the board said. “Or maybe we should say rubles.”
These critiques are hard to argue with, as you’d be hard-pressed to find investigations of the Russian government or its business elite in such media. Government broadcasters, whether it’s VoA or Sputnik, are not meant to be fair and balanced newsrooms, but vehicles to convey official thinking about the news to the rest of the world.
But Ted Rall, the cartoonist and political commentator who co-hosted the Sputnik show Final Countdown, challenged the idea that Sputnik’s content was government-managed. “We were no one’s dupes,” he wrote in an email to FAIR explaining the end of the network’s airing in the US:
I have worked in print and broadcast journalism for most of my life in a variety of roles at a wide variety of outlets, and I cannot recall an organization that gave me as much freedom to say whatever I felt like about any topic whatsoever.
He said that his show offered “an incredibly interesting, intelligent roster of political analysts,” which he believed were on par with “the finest journalists at NPR, the major broadcast networks or anywhere else.”
‘Growing wave of threats’
The president of the US equivalent of Radio Sputnik said that its operations being shut down in Russia “shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat’” (RFE/RL, (2/20/24). So what does the shutting down of Sputnik show?
Belendiuk, for his part, called Sputnik’s content “divisive.” That’s a term that could be applied to lots of US radio content, like right-wing talk shows and religious broadcasting that consigns nonbelievers to Hell. The FCC’s Fairness Doctrine has been gone for a while (Extra!, 1–2/05; Washington Post, 2/4/21). At FAIR,we have long documented that US corporate media serve a propaganda function for the US government, much of it false or deceptive.
But when official enemy states treat US-owned outlets the way the US is treating Russia’s, that’s considered an assault on a free press. When the US’s anti-Russia broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (2/20/24), was put on a government watch list that “effectively bans RFE/RL from working in Russia and exposes anyone who cooperates with the outlet to potential prosecution,” the outlet reported that its president, Stephen Capus, responded that “the move shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat.’”
And when Russia barred a VoA reporter from entering the country, the CEO of the government agency that runs both VoA and RFE/RL, Amanda Bennett, told VoA (3/14/24):
The Russian government’s decision to ban VoA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin from its country echoes a growing wave of threats to press freedom by authoritarian regimes.
That’s heavy stuff, but ultimately the US is doing the same thing. In the case of Sputnik, sanctions seemed to have crushed the network. RT America fell without overt government pressure, as it shut down its operations after “DirecTV, the largest US satellite TV operator, stopped carrying RT America…a decision based on Russia’s attack on Ukraine” (CNBC, 3/3/22).
RT and Sputnik’s role as disinformation and propaganda outlets is most obvious when they report on issues of political importance to the Kremlin. A prevalent example is Russia’s use of RT and Sputnik to attempt to change public opinions about Ukraine in Europe, the United States, and as far away as Latin America. When factual reporting on major foreign policy priorities is not favorable, Russia uses state-funded international media outlets to inject pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda into the information environment.
Harsh, but again, this is what state broadcasters have been doing for decades, and if we as Americans dislike American outlets being blocked abroad, then we are, at this point, getting a taste of our own medicine.
‘Begin with the least popular victim’
Reporters Without Borders dropped the US’s press freedom ranking in 2024, “thanks in part to consolidation that has gutted local news and forced corporations to prioritize profits over public service” (Axios, 5/7/24).
Actions like the moves against Sputnik are troubling, and not just as another sign of a roiling new Cold War. While the US prides itself on being a model of free expression, journalists here have been concerned for some time now about the nation’s decline in press freedom (Axios, 5/7/24; FAIR.org, 3/16/21).
“In this situation, journalists should be absolutely terrified that the US government will come after them next,” Rall said. “President Biden unilaterally killed a media outlet with the stroke of a pen. Yes, it’s a foreign outlet, but the First Amendment is supposed to protect those.”
For FAIR, the action against Sputnik seems no less dangerous than local government attempts to silence even small domestic outlets like the Marion County Record (FAIR.org, 8/14/23) and the Asheville Blade (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). For example, the New York Times (10/21/24) recently fretted that former President Donald Trump’s statement that “CBS should lose its license” was a sign that if he is elected, he would pressure the FCC to revoke licenses of major network affiliate stations. The recent news about Sputnik makes that idea far more possible.
Rall added that he didn’t believe that the US government would stop after taking action against Russian outlets.
“Any effort at censorship is going to begin with the least popular victim and then creep and spread after that,” he said.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes made this observation in 1936, in his masterwork The General Theory. Nearly a century later, readers and viewers of corporate media face the same fate.
The fundamental problem confronted by these news consumers is not that corporate news outlets consult economists in their reporting; as experts in their field, economists often have important and worthwhile contributions to make. The problem is that these outlets consistently elevate the views of specific economists who serve particular ideological interests over the views of other economists, or even the academic profession as a whole.
The austerity gospel
Simon Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/19/15): “‘Mediamacro’…prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.”
Consider the case of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity mania that followed. The British economist Simon Wren-Lewis (London Review of Books, 2/9/15) has documented how media depictions of austerity diverged sharply from professional economists’ understandings and textbooks’ explanations of macroeconomics. His term for the media’s unique understanding of macroeconomics is “mediamacro,” which is characterized by an obsession with cutting the deficit over and above all other concerns.
In the wake of the banking crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-08, and then the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, standard textbook macroeconomics dictated a runup in the deficit to stimulate the economy out of a downturn. Corporate media, however, bought the arguments of political conservatives and a fringe of academic economists (who nonetheless held positions at prestigious universities), who maintained that austerity, specifically through spending cuts, could return the economy to health.
In the most notorious instance, corporate media outlets opportunistically promoted the findings of a 2010 paper, written by two Harvard economists, that were later famously invalidated due to an Excel error. As Paul Krugman noted in 2013 (New York Times, 4/19/13), this paper was controversial among economists from the start, but this did not stop corporate media from citing it—and its flimsy assertion that there existed a tipping-point for government debt at 90% of GDP, beyond which this debt supposedly imposed a major drag on economic growth—as gospel:
For example, a Washington Posteditorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90% mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.
The view from finance
As Mark Copelovitch (SSRN, 10/27/17) has noted, “The single most important factor [in elevating falsehoods about austerity] has been the media’s willingness to embrace and promote these narratives, while largely ignoring the overwhelming empirical and historical evidence that austerity is deeply contractionary and counter-productive.”
In another instance recounted by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15), after the return of some growth in 2013 in Britain following the election of a Conservative government committed to austerity in 2010, the Financial Times editorial board (9/10/13) declared the Conservatives victorious in their political argument for austerity. This despite the fact that “less than 20% of academic economists surveyed by the Financial Times thought that the recovery of 2013 vindicated austerity.”
Such false right-wing narratives about macroeconomic policy came to dominate media discourse, not merely because political elites adopted these false narratives and thus made them newsworthy, but because corporate media outlets were compliant messengers for elite views and prescriptions.
Why does the media adopt “mediamacro” as its approach to coverage of the economy? One reason proposed by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15) is the influence of City of London (or, in the US case, Wall Street) economists, whose
views tend to reflect the economic arguments of those on the right: Regulation is bad, top rates of tax should be low, the state is too large, and budget deficits are a serious and immediate concern.
Moreover, the political leanings of corporate media outlets, whether or not they are made explicit, may encourage them to seek the expertise of economists of a particular ideological bent. These economists’ views may, in turn, be out of step with the academic mainstream on topics like austerity.
The inflation oracle
The corporate media’s tendency to elevate economists of a specific type hasn’t disappeared in the 2020s. With the onset of Covid and the spike in inflation that followed, media broke out their familiar playbook of consulting prominent economists with extreme, and business-friendly, positions.
The infamous example was the elevation of Larry Summers, who slammed Biden’s 2021 stimulus as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and warned stridently of inflation (Washington Post, 5/24/21). When inflation rose to a high of just over 9% the next year, Summers was hailed by the media as “an oracle: the man who saw it all coming,” as Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman (2/13/23) sarcastically put it.
In one sense, it was true that Summers had seen inflation as a strong possibility, and he did deserve some credit for that. Other economists, notably Paul Krugman, had downplayed the possibility of a jump in inflation and had to eat their words (New York Times, 7/21/22). But the fact that Summers had gotten this one point right, after an illustrious career of getting things wrong, did not exactly justify his skyrocketing status as the go-to voice on inflation, or the heaps of at times fawning media coverage thrown his way (Wall Street Journal, 6/27/22; Fortune, 9/23/22).
Did it justify, for example, Summers garnering six times as many mentions as Krugman on top cable news channels from 2021 through 2023? A Nobel laureate and widely respected commentator, Krugman also happened to be the most prominent proponent of a more dovish, less austere approach to inflation. Though he failed to foresee the initial rise in inflation, Krugman accurately predicted, in contrast to Summers, that the US economy could achieve a “soft landing,” a fall in inflation without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate (New York Times, 5/18/23).
Meanwhile, Summers capitalized on his new status as economic prophet to insist that extreme pain was required to tame inflation. By mid-2022, he confidently proclaimed (Bloomberg, 6/20/22):
We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.
Cherry-picking expertise
Like the views of extreme austerity advocates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Summers’ views in 2022 were acutely out of sync with the mainstream among academic economists, as becomes apparent from surveys of professional economists taken over the course of the inflationary outbreak.
Financial Times/Booth survey of macroeconomists (9/13/22)
One FT/Booth survey taken in the fall of 2022 is particularly informative. It found that most economists thought that the Federal Reserve was on track to contain inflation with its pace of interest rate hikes. Specifically, when asked to react to the statement “Futures markets now suggest the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to about 3.9% by the end of 2022,” only 36% of economists classified the Fed’s actions as “too little too late and insufficient to help keep inflation under control.” The rest either thought that this policy path was sufficient to contain inflation (55%) or thought that it was overkill (9%).
When asked about the toll Fed policy would take on the labor market, academic economists took a moderate stance. Most agreed that the unemployment rate would peak below 6% and that a recession would last for less than a year. Incidentally, only a small minority of economists seem to have foreseen the possibility of inflation returning to target without a recession and with unemployment rising no higher than 4.3%, which is what in fact has occurred. But notwithstanding their apparent excess of pessimism, economists generally agreed that inflation would come under control with nowhere near the punishment Summers was prescribing.
To be fair, these economists were not asked directly what would be sufficient to contain inflation, and if asked directly, it is likely that some segment would have been in Summers’ camp—after all, about a third of the economists surveyed thought that the Fed was doing “too little too late.” But those backing Summers’ full diagnosis would be a fraction of those taking this minority view. So the central point that Summers was in the minority, and likely in quite a small minority, among professional economists is undoubtedly true.
Yet with his quasi-divine status granted by corporate media, Summers could pontificate freely about the need for mass suffering without fear of marginalization for lack of evidence or credibility. So when he prescribed 5% unemployment for five years, all that an outlet like Bloomberg (6/20/22) did was report on his views, no skepticism necessary. And no warning label stating: This is completely out of step with the academic mainstream. In effect, corporate media decided to once again cherry-pick expertise to legitimize austerity policies.
‘Not sensible policy’
James K. Galbraith and Isabella Weber (Boston Globe, 8/22/24) : “Americans still have some common sense…. It shows that all of the efforts of free-market economists to beat it out of them have not yetworked.“
At the same time, alternatives to the dominant austerity paradigm have been treated with caution, if not outright hostility. The New York Times (8/15/24), for example, in a recent piece on Kamala Harris’s advocacy for anti-price-gouging legislation, did consult Isabella Weber, a progressive economist who has become well known for her work on profit-driven inflation. But her testimony was overshadowed in the piece by that of economists with more conservative takes on the issue.
Most notably, the Times relied heavily on the insights of Harvard economist Jason Furman, who helped lead the push for extreme austerity alongside Summers (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22). His first quote in the article had a simple Econ 101 message: “Egg prices went up last year—it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production.” In other words, egg prices went up because of supply issues, and it’s good that prices went up because that spurred more egg production.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t fit with the facts. Responding to this Furman quote, Weber and James Galbraith observed in a separate article (Boston Globe, 8/22/24):
In fact, US egg production peaked in 2019 and then fell slightly, through last year. Egg prices spiked from early 2022 to $4.82 a dozen on average in January 2023, before falling back again, with no gain in production. High prices did not stimulate America’s hens to greater effort. On these points, Furman laid an egg.
It might be assumed that the Times would engage in this sort of basic factchecking of its sources, and not leave it to two progressive economists writing in the Boston Globe to do that for them. But when the source is a Harvard economist who not too long ago was suggesting (wildly incorrectly) that unemployment would have to jump over 6% for two years to tame inflation (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22), apparently skepticism is not in order.
Leaving little room to doubt the leanings of the Times reporters, the article ended with another quote from Furman, this time on Harris’s proposal to go after price gouging:
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
Hand-picked by elites
Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 2/14/24): “For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns.”
If one of the main functions of the media is agenda-setting—deeming certain topics, like government debt, newsworthy and others, like inequality, not so much (FAIR.org, 2/14/24)—another primary function is legitimization: letting audiences know who they should trust and who they should treat with skepticism. Over the course of the recent bout of inflation, corporate outlets have made it clear that those economists who erred on the side of far-reaching austerity were worth listening to. The ones who dissented most strongly from the austerity paradigm were, for the most part, sidelined or only tepidly consulted.
The result has been a constrained debate. Extreme pro-austerity positions have enjoyed high visibility, while progressives have been relegated to the background. This is not because of an imbalance in the evidence. If anything, the side that has been arguing for anti-austerity measures to fight inflation, like temporary price controls, has more evidence for their claims than the side that’s backed harsh monetary austerity. They, at least, haven’t been proven embarrassingly wrong by the experience of the past couple years.
What could help explain the imbalance in coverage is instead the background of different sets of economists. Before being legitimized by corporate media, extremists for austerity like Summers and Furman were legitimized by political status—Summers served in top roles under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Furman served as a key adviser to Obama. Progressives like Isabella Weber have not enjoyed similar political standing.
Thus, we can see a sort of chain of legitimization that runs from a political system dominated by economic elites to a media ecosystem owned by economic elites. If you can secure a top post in politics, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an extremist with views contradicting the consensus among academic economists. Your views should be taken seriously. For progressives, who have largely been excluded from elite politics in recent decades, serious skepticism is in order.
On the face of it, this system makes some sense. But think a little deeper and you can see an insidious chain servicing the dominant players in American society. That chain needs to be broken. Media outlets need to listen to the evidence, not the false wisdom of economists hand-picked by American elites.
Janine Jackson interviewed author and UC/Santa Barbara research professor emeritus George Lipsitz about the impacts of housing discrimination for the October 11, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Some 10 years ago, food delivery service FreshDirect got more than $100 million of incentives to place a warehouse in a populated, poor, largely people of color community in the South Bronx, to bring heavy diesel truck traffic to asthma-inflicted neighborhoods already affected by waste treatment plants and high-traffic highways.
Groups like South Bronx Unite, like Good Jobs for NY, opposed these further health harms to the community, as well as the notion that a handful of insecure, poorly waged jobs could serve as compensation. South Bronx Unites’ Mychal Johnson said: “Of course we want jobs, but we should not have to choose between having a job and having clean air. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work.”
Now we understand that folks are working to reclaim pieces of the affected community called the Harlem River Yard, including allowing access to the Harlem River waterfront, access that’s been cut off to the public for a long time.
That’s just one of thousands of stories that exemplify the ways that racism inflects all kinds of decisions, policies, laws, that we’re told are, nowadays anyway, indifferent to race. That’s a mistaken notion that hobbles our ability to respond effectively to the interconnected harms of white supremacy and myriad US institutions that, to be real, harm everyone, and not just Black and brown people.
His most recent book, that we’re here to talk about, is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. It’s out now from University of California Press.
I will note that George was, for years, the chair of the board of the African American Policy Forum, where I also serve as a board member. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, George Lipsitz.
George Lipsitz: Thank you. So glad to be here.
JJ: Your new book addresses the interconnectedness of laws, policies and practices around housing that, without needing to be overtly coordinated, reinforce one another to produce and reproduce discriminatory outcomes. So we could really pull an opening thread anywhere here.
But when we talk about housing discrimination, I know that many folks’ minds go to redlining, where officially sanctioned protocols meant Black families just couldn’t buy homes in certain neighborhoods, and the thinking is, while certainly that had lasting impacts, it was years ago, and it’s been legally remediated by now.
So while the book talks, importantly, about the inadequacies of the ways that harms have been diagnosed and responded to, maybe we could just start with a breakdown of some of the multiple forms of discrimination in housing that that takes. Why is it that housing is at the center of the spider web of so many other discriminatory dangers?
George Lipsitz: “A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.”
GL: When I say the “danger zone is everywhere,” housing discrimination raises in peoples’ minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on peoples’ life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.
I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.
Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.
It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.
And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.
Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms, the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.
I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.
So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.
JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?
GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrianaccidents. The street lighting is worse.
People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK, deal with the pests and rodents that are in this place.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.
Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes from playing in the street, and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.
Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get non-nutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.
JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.
For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.
GL: Yeah, well, certainly these impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.
Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.
But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.
And similarly with health, that we have an individualized model of health that imagines that people’s genetics, and whether they exercise and whether they eat healthy food, is the key thing in determining their health. But there are also collective issues, like sewage management, garbage collection, coal-burning furnaces and incinerators, lead in paint and gasoline.
All of these things have an impact on health, and they not only need to be studied together, but people involved in fair housing law have to think about health justice. People who are dispensing medical care need to think about the neighborhoods that their patients come from and return to, and the impact that those neighborhoods have on their health, and on the relations between parents and children, and on even whether people are considered valued in this society.
You live in a place that tells you you’re everybody’s lowest priority, you may not have a reason to want to be healthy. And then, if you add to that, the lack of physicians, the high cost of healthcare, the way in which pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies jack up the cost of healthcare, you’re basically engaged in a calculated cruelty in the organized abandonment of large numbers of people.
And this harm is most egregious on children, because they can’t defend themselves, because their physical systems are less able to deal with health menaces. And so we’re basically squandering a large part of the next generation in a country that is increasingly made up of people who are not white, and we’re basically setting those children up for failure. It’s like a time bomb that will go off in the future, and there’s a lot of foreseeable harm that could be prevented.
A key theory of pediatric care is that you don’t just remedy illnesses after they happen. You foresee them in advance and prevent them from happening. We could do that with the environment, we could do that with nutrition. We could do that with giving people a safe, affordable living environment. But we don’t do it, because there’s so much money to be made from injustice.
JJ: I do want to put folks onto the book The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, because there’s no way that we can address all of this in the time that we have. But I want to say, the book is enlightening about many things, and one of them is the importance of just the way that we look at, the way we see societal inequities, and the way we talk about them. And what you’re saying is we’re talking about rejecting this approach that addresses individuals as though they were divorced from community. We’re looking at individual actions by individual landlords, and not looking at systems, and that’s part of the problem.
GL: And this is what the law assumes, that an injury interrupts an otherwise just situation. You sue the individual perpetrator, you’re then made whole, and you go back to being fine.
But what if you’re not fine to begin with? What if there isn’t one individual perpetrator? What if it’s a conjuncture of obstacles in your way? Once you punish that one corporation, they declare bankruptcy, and they open up the next day with a different name.
And once the injured person wins a fair housing settlement, they go back into an innately unfair housing market, where they are disadvantaged in getting loans. They’re disadvantaged in getting insurance. They’re disadvantaged in their relations with the police. They’re disadvantaged in relation to the schools that their children are able to go to.
So multi-axis problems need multi-axis and intersectional solutions. And that means we need to work together. It means that there’s a limit to what any one of us can do as an individual to have good health or housing for ourselves, much less for the whole society.
And that’s why I try to stress in the book the emerging active and engaged public sphere constituency for good health and fair housing, and fair housing councils throughout the country, and advocates and attorneys who take on those cases, public health collectives, environmental justice organizing, community gardens, food co-ops, arts-based health projects like Building Healthy Communities in Boyle Heights, a whole series of community land trusts where people pool resources to take speculation out of the market.
And so people are mobilizing precisely because they realize that as an individual, there’s very little you can do. In the courtroom, the boardroom or the banker’s office, there are limits to what can be done.
Now there should be justice in all of those places, and individuals are entitled to good health, good housing, to the full benefits of civil rights law. But we also need to have an understanding that race itself is a political, not a biological, category, that it functions because people see things a certain way. Racism persists because people believe that people are members of different races, and we need to see racism as structural, systemic, collective.
And good health and good housing can’t just be left to be private commodities to be purchased. They’re public resources, and they need to be protected by the public, and nurtured and sustained.
JJ: I’ll only ask you one final question about news media, because we do see coverage, sometimes, about the difficulties of homelessness, or the problems of companies like Blackstone buying up homes. We see coverage. It’s just that it’s not connecting the dots. The story about why people are homeless is not connected to the story about venture capitalists buying up homes. It’s not connected.
And so to me, it’s what I call “narrating the nightmare.” Something terrible is happening, and look at these harmed people, but somehow we can’t name who’s behind it, or how it could be stopped. “But,” media say, “you can’t say we’re not acknowledging it because look at this one story where we said how harmful it is.”
And it drives me up a wall, because I know that reporters aren’t stupid, and I know that they’re not incapable of thinking systemically. I know they don’t think structural problems are boring, and I know that they don’t understand that regular people could grasp them.
So I guess what I’m saying is that corporate news media suffer from some of the same ailments that you are diagnosing in healthcare and housing, and could benefit from some of the same medicine, I guess.
GL: Yeah, and some of this has to do with the demographics of the news media industry, which is similar to the demographics of the legal profession and the medical profession. There aren’t enough people who have experienced discrimination directly.
But it’s also that a good plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so last year there were a number of stories about bias in home appraisal, in which Black families got a low appraisal for their home and they then got a white friend to sit in for them, and they took down the Jacob Lawrence paintings and the Toni Morrison books. And when it appeared that the home was owned by a white person, it was as much as $500,000 more.
I’m glad they covered this, and this is a good story. And Fair Housing groups have sued about appraisal discrimination, and the National Fair Housing Alliance has a whole campaign about it.
But nobody connected those instances to the systemic problems in the appraisal industry, which Elizabeth Korver-Glenn has written about in her book Race Brokers. They haven’t related that the low home value appraisals are connected to high property tax appraisals, as Andrew Kahrl points out in his great book The Black Tax. So the information is out there, but it’s just that they end the story too soon, and they assume things are going to be all right.
Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play called A Raisin in the Sun, which is about a Black family moving into a white neighborhood. And at the end of the play, the Black people are in the neighborhood, and critics said, “Oh, this is a happy ending.” And Lorraine Hansberry said, “Well, if you think that’s a happy ending, wait until they wake up the next morning and have bricks and rocks thrown at their house, and the neighbors don’t talk to them, and the police harass them.”
And so you can’t end the story too soon. We have to think about all these interconnections.
JJ: Absolutely. And we could and will continue this conversation much further.
But I just want to tell folks that we’ve been speaking with George Lipsitz. He’s research professor emeritus of Black studies in sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. And the book we’re talking about is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, and it’s available now from University of California Press. George Lipsitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
GL: Thank you, Janine. I really appreciate the conversation.
The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region.
A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless. Democracy Now!recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”
The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print. Too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, make sense or, minimally, are not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.
As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism”—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.
Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist. He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS‘s 60 Minutes (10/7/24). (Donald Trump backed out of a similar interview.)
Aside from one televised debate (ABC, 9/10/24), both Harris and Trump have given corporate news outlets remarkably few opportunities to press them on important issues. While Whitaker didn’t offer Harris many softball questions—and included some sharp interrogation on the Middle East—his focus frequently started from right-wing talking points and assumptions, particularly over immigration and economic policy.
FAIR counted 29 questions, with 24 of them going to Harris. Those questions began with foreign policy, which also accounted for the most policy-related questions (7). Whitaker also asked her five questions about the economy, four about immigration, and one more generally about her changed positions on immigration, fracking and healthcare. Seven of Whitaker’s questions to Harris were unrelated to policies or governing; of the five questions to Walz, the only vaguely policy-oriented one asked him to respond to the charge that he was “dangerously liberal.”
‘How are you going to pay?’
A Pew survey (9/9/24) shows little correlation between what voters care about and what 60 Minutes (10/7/24) asked Kamala Harris about.
Economic issues are a top priority for many voters. But rather than ask Harris about whether and how her plan might help people economically, or formulate questions to help voters understand the differences between Harris’s and Trump’s plans, Whitaker focused on two long-standing media obsessions: the deficit and bipartisanship (or lack thereof).
Whitaker first asked Harris: “Groceries are 25% higher, and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?” It’s not clear that people primarily blame the administration for inflation, actually; a Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll in March found that 63% of respondents blamed higher prices on “large corporations taking advantage of inflation,” while 38% blamed Democratic policies (CNBC, 3/12/24).
Whitaker went on to list some of Harris’s more progressive economic proposals: “expand the child tax credit…give tax breaks to first-time homebuyers…and people starting small businesses.”
These are all generally politically popular, but Whitaker framed his question about them not in terms of the impact on voters, but the impact on the federal deficit, citing a deficit hawk think tank:
But it is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?
There is a very popular assumption in corporate media that federal deficits are of critical importance—that is, when Democrats are proposing to provide aid and public services to people. When Republicans propose massive tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, the same media tend to forget their deficit obsession (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).
It is worth noting—since Whitaker did not—that the CRFB found that Trump’s plan, which follows that Republican playbook, would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion. One might also bear in mind that US GDP is projected to be more than $380 trillion over the next decade.
Dissatisfied with Harris’s rather oblique answer, Whitaker insisted: “But pardon me, Madam Vice President, the question was how are you going to pay for it?” When Harris responded that she intended to “make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share of taxes,” Whitaker scoffed: “We’re dealing with the real world here. How are you going to get this through Congress?”
After Harris argued that congressmembers “know exactly what I’m talking about, ’cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about,” Whitaker shot back, “And Congress has shown no inclination to move in your direction.”
Sure, journalists shouldn’t let politicians make pie-in-the-sky promises, but it’s true that Harris’s proposals are supported by majorities of the public. Whitaker did viewers—and democracy—no favors by focusing his skepticism not on a corrupt system that benefits the wealthy, but on Harris’s critique of that system.
‘A historic flood’
Serious efforts to count the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States show little sign of the “flood” touted by 60 Minutes (Pew, 7/22/24).
Whitaker’s framing was even more right-wing on immigration. His first question, framed by a voiceover noting that “Republicans are convinced immigration is the vice president’s Achilles’ heel”:
You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?
Whitaker is referring to Biden’s tightening restrictions so that refugees cannot be granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. It’s certainly valid to question the new policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) has argued they are unconstitutional, for instance.
But Whitaker clearly wasn’t interested in constitutionality or human rights. His questioning started from the presumption that immigration is a problem, and used the dehumanizing language that is all too common in corporate media reporting on immigrants (FAIR.org, 8/23/23):
Whitaker: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?
Harris: It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.
Whitaker: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?
Harris: I think—the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK? But the—
Whitaker: But the numbers did quadruple under your watch.
As others have pointed out, using flood metaphors paints immigrants as “natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion” (Critical Discourse Studies, 1/31/17).
But Whitaker is also using a right-wing talking point that’s entirely misleading. Border “encounters” increased sharply under Biden, but these encounters, as we have explained before (FAIR.org, 3/29/24),
are not a tally of how many people were able to enter the country without authorization; it’s a count of how many times people were stopped at the border by CBP agents. Many of these people had every right to seek entry, and a great number were turned away. Some of them were stopped more than once, and therefore were counted multiple times.
In fact, only roughly a third were actually released into the country (Factcheck.org, 2/27/24).
Whitaker used these misleading figures to paint undocumented immigration as a crisis, which has been a media theme since the beginning of the Biden administration (FAIR.org, 5/24/21). In fact, the percentage of the US population that is unauthorized has risen only slightly—from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022, the latest year available—which is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24).
‘Does the US have no sway?’
Internal controversy over Tony Dokoupil’s confrontational interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24) may have given Bill Whitaker an opening to challenge Harris on whether she was too supportive of Israel.
Whitaker’s first questions to Harris, about the Middle East, represented a shift in tone from ABC‘s questioning at the September debate—where moderator David Muir asked Harris to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Whitaker started his interview by pressing Harris about the United States’ continued support of Israel despite its recent escalations:
The events of the past few weeks have pushed us into the brink, if not into, an all-out regional war into the Middle East. What can Hthe US do at this point to prevent this from spinning out of control?
Harris repeated the Biden administration (and, frequently, media) line that Israel has a right to defend itself, while noting that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and that “this war has to end.” Whitaker pushed back, pointing out that the United States is an active supporter of Israel’s military and, thus, military actions:
But we supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, and yet Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden/Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire, he has resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon, he went in anyway. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Whitaker continued with two more brief questions about the relationship with Netanyahu. It’s possible that his line of questioning was influenced by the controversy within his network over CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview (9/30/24) with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which pushed a pro-Israel line hard enough to prompt charges of unprofessionalism (FAIR.org, 10/4/24; Zeteo, 10/9/24).
The three other foreign policy questions concerned US support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Two of the three asked about ending the war: “What does success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?” and “Would you meet with President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine?” The third asked whether Harris would “support the effort to expand NATO to include Ukraine.”
In contrast to the Middle East line of questioning, Whitaker did not push back against any of Harris’s answers, which expressed support for “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” and to “have a say” in determining the end of the war.
Crucial missing questions
The aftermath of two hurricanes supercharged by climate change didn’t prompt 60 Minutes to ask any questions about climate (CBS, 9/30/24).
Though Whitaker took time to ask Harris what kind of gun she owns and Walz whether he can be “trusted to tell the truth,” he didn’t ask a single question about abortion, other healthcare issues, the climate crisis or gun control. These are all remarkable omissions.
A Pew Research survey (9/9/24) found abortion was a “very important” issue to more than half of all voters, and to two-thirds of Harris supporters. But Whitaker asked no questions about what Harris and Walz would do to protect or restore reproductive rights across the US.
The healthcare system was another glaring omission by 60 Minutes, though it is voters’ second-most important issue, according to the same Pew Research survey; 65% of all voters, and 76% of Harris supporters, said that healthcare was “very important” to their vote.
Healthcare only came up as part of an accusation that “you have changed your position on so many things”: Along with shifts on immigration and fracking, Whittaker noted that “you were for Medicare for all, now you’re not,” with the result that “people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for.” Like a very similar question asked of Harris during the debate (FAIR.org, 9/13/24), it seemed crafted to press Harris on whether her conversion from left-liberal to centrist was genuine, rather than to elicit real solutions for a population with the highest healthcare costs and the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation.
At a moment when Hurricane Helene had just wreaked massive destruction across the Southeast and Hurricane Milton was already promising to deliver Florida its second devastating storm in two weeks, the lack of climate questions was striking. While voters tend to rank climate policy as a lower priority than issues like the economy or immigration, large majorities are concerned about it—and it’s an urgent issue with consequences that can’t be understated. Yet the only time climate was alluded to was in the flip-flop question, which included the preface, “You were against fracking, now you’re for it.”
Similarly, a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four people just over three weeks ago; as of this writing (10/15/24), the Gun Violence Archive reported that gun violence, excluding suicide, has killed 13,424 Americans this year. In 2019, the American Psychological Association reported that one-third of Americans said that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events. In a Pew Research survey (4/11/24), 59% of public K-12 teachers said they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school, and 23% have experienced a lockdown.
Yet the two questions Whitaker asked about guns had nothing to do with these realities or fears, or what a Harris/Walz administration would do about them. Instead, he asked Harris, “What kind of gun do you own, and when and why did you get it?” (Harris answered, “I have a Glock, and I have had it for quite some time.”) Whitaker followed up by asking Harris if she had ever fired it. (She said she had, at a shooting range.)
‘Out of step’
Walz was mostly asked non-policy questions, things like “Whether you can be trusted to tell the truth,” and why his calling Republicans “weird” has become a “rallying cry for Democrats.”
In keeping with the media’s preoccupation with pushing Democratic candidates to the right, the governor was asked to respond to charges that he was “dangerously liberal” and part of the “radical left“: “What do you say to that criticism, that rather than leading the way, you and Minnesota are actually out of step with the rest of the country?”
The right-wing framing of many of the questions asked, and the important issues ignored, might make CBS think about how in step it is with the country and its needs.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Vera Institute of Justice’s Insha Rahman about the immigration conversation for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Unfortunately, we can assume listeners know the popular right-wing lines: Immigrants—that’s shorthand for Black and brown immigrants—are criminals, violent drug criminals especially, but also they’re stealing jobs, draining social services and, in election season, we hear they’re voting illegally in large numbers, because they are, in some way, props for the Democratic Party.
Anyone who wants to dispute those noxious tropes can do so with a search engine. Harder to combat is the overarching and bipartisan framing of immigration and immigrants as a “problem.” How do we replace batting away the latest slur with the reality-based humane conversation we need to move us to the 21st century immigration and asylum policies we could have?
Insha Rahman is vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Insha Rahman.
JJ: Rather than ask you to engage intentionally misleading anti-immigrant talking points, I wonder if you would talk a little about the impacts. What is the fallout of myths and misinformation that might sound laughable or dismissable to many of us—what’s the fallout in the lives of the communities that you work with?
IR: First of all, the Willie Horton playbook of exploiting voters’ fears about crime, and frankly the dog whistles about race and criminality, it’s nothing new. When I say Willie Horton, everybody knows the 1988 ad that was run and allegedly sunk Michael Dukakis’ Democratic bid for president, and it’s a playbook that is old, well worn. We’ve seen it every election cycle.
And so this year, in 2024, if you feel like you’re hearing about immigration and migrants and cats and dogs nonstop, it isn’t anything new. It is really just another page of the Willie Horton playbook.
And it’s not really about immigration or immigration policies. Every poll that we have done, that we have seen, has found that Americans, by and large, understand that immigration is a fundamental part of our society, of our economy, of our communities. We are a country of immigrants. But, when it is wrapped up in a fear of crime, and playing upon racist tropes about crime and criminality, that’s where it has political impact.
And the fallout, we can see: One of the most depressing and staggering polls that I’ve seen recently is that overall support for immigration, which used to be a majority of Americans, including independents and moderate voters, supported immigration to this country. They fundamentally believed immigration is a good thing for our communities, our families, our economy. Now that support has dipped, for the first time, to below 50%. And so there’s a real fallout in terms of support for policy that’s actually smart and sensible.
And then we see it in very real ways in places like Springfield, Ohio, where there has been a lot of legal—I should say, legal—immigration of Haitian migrants to this country, who are fleeing really devastating circumstances in Haiti. We’re watching bomb threats in local schools, immigrant residents of Springfield feeling afraid. In fact, all residents of Springfield feeling afraid, because suddenly the city, that nobody had heard of until September 10 and the presidential debate, is literally in the Klieg lights, and everyday Americans and a lot of politicians are talking about Springfield. So much so that even the Republican governor of Ohio said, “Stop the fearmongering, stop the misinformation. We are just fine. What Springfield needs is our support and help, and not fearmongering and rhetoric about us.”
JJ: I think that media give inadequate attention to the carryover or bleed-through effects. It’s not to say that people who fall for anti-immigrant misinformation, they’re not asking folks before they harass them, “To be clear, you’re Haitian, right? You’re not Dominican. I don’t want to get my hatred wrong.” It’s treated as though these are targeted attacks, and as though they end when one particular incident is resolved, or when the cameras go away. But, of course, the impact on communities goes on and on.
IR: Yeah.
JJ: Changing facts on the ground with law, with policy, with institutional culture can save and can change lives. It does also work to shift the dialogue about what’s possible, about what life looks like after you change that law, for example. What are some of the legal or policy changes that you think could be important right now, that could shift the ground on immigration and asylum?
IR: One of the things that we have seen there’s widespread support for, and that can be done, is just: when there are new immigrants to our cities, to our communities, we make sure that they have the ability to work. Work, employment, is life-changing for everybody, including US citizens and other members of the community, who benefit from more labor. Right now, in many parts of this country, we have more jobs than we have people to fill them, and immigration is a necessary thing; it’s why economists across the country, across the political spectrum, say we actually need immigration. We can’t build a wall and mass-deport people and shut down the borders, because we literally will have an economic crisis in this country. So employment is a really basic thing we can do.
Another thing is, sometimes people hear, folks who are coming to our cities, especially people who are bused up from Texas and other border states, Florida—people resent housing and services and making sure basic needs are met. Well, in fact, that is cheaper than the alternative. And it is good for all of us.
And it’s not for forever: If you help somebody get on their feet with some temporary housing for three to six months, they have a work permit in hand, they have a job, they will not need to be dependent on government services and resources. It is actually better for us to set people up for a small period of time for future success.
And we’ve watched some cities do that really well. For example, Boston did not engage in the kind of fear-mongering about “all these newly arrived migrants, it’s going to be the end of the city, it’s going to destroy us,” which is what we heard from a certain elected mayor in New York City. That wasn’t the approach that Boston took. And, in fact, they’ve had a lot of newly arrived migrants as well, and they’ve managed it. And you’ll see they have really good outcomes, and there’s generally a sense of positivity towards new arrivals there in a way that there simply isn’t in New York City.
Insha Rahman: “There’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services.”
And so, again, there’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services. All of that is a better investment in our communities and our economy than the alternative.
And then we see there’s always been and always will be widespreadsupport for a path to citizenship and legalization for folks who have been here, who are part of the fabric of our communities. And so those are some of the things we could do literally immediately, but at the local level, in terms of cities and states.
And then what we need to see Congress do—and 10 years ago there was, in fact, bipartisan support for more paths to citizenship. And we need to bring the Overton window and shift it back to there, because that’s actually good for all of us.
And one other thing I’ll just mention as a policy point is, even under the law as it is—and I would say we need to update the immigration laws so that there’s more legal paths to citizenship for folks. But even with the laws that we have, making sure people have lawyers, they have some basic due process before they’re facing deportation, means many more people access the asylum laws, other forms of relief under current immigration law, which means it keeps people and families together, it keeps people in jobs.
My organization, the Vera Institute of Justice, we run a national program where we’re helping folks who are facing deportation have access to counsel, and literally people are 10 times more likely to win their case and be able to stay in the country, stay with their families, be in their jobs and in their communities, than if they have to go through deportation proceedings without a lawyer. And there’s no right to a lawyer in those proceedings. And that’s a really big problem for keeping families and communities together.
JJ: Just finally, what would you be looking for in a healthy public conversation about the changes we need to get from where we’re at to where we could be, and maybe who would be in that conversation that isn’t being heard from so much now?
IR: Too often, the conversation about immigration is dominated by politicians who are looking to score cheap political points. And if you listen to their rhetoric, they don’t have a single solution. Mass deportation is not a solution. Building a wall is not a solution.
And you know who actually has, and maybe they’re unlikely players in this, but folks who actually have very clear solutions for how we have a real and thoughtful conversation about immigration, that’s business owners and chambers of commerce. And, again, I made the point earlier that economists are like, “If we just shut down immigration, if we deport everybody, our economy will collapse.” Nobody understands that better than businesses and business owners, and they’re actually a really important voice in this conversation that often gets overlooked.
Just to go back to Springfield, Ohio, that we talked about, you actually saw the local chamber of commerce, and a number of different business owners, go out and speak publicly on the record, on the nighttime news and the newspaper and city council hearings, to say, “We need our immigrant workers and family members and community members, because they’re a vital part of our economy.”
So I actually think that’s a missing voice in this conversation that could help to bring the poles together, because the right likes business. I think the left can live with business, if business is coming at the issues in the right way. And I think there’s an opportunity to really actually bring people together, and have a more reasoned, thoughtful conversation about what the path forward is.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, and the director of Vera Action. Find their work online at Vera.org. Thank you so much, Insha Rahman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Vera Institute of Justice’s Insha Rahman about the immigration conversation for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Unfortunately, we can assume listeners know the popular right-wing lines: Immigrants—that’s shorthand for Black and brown immigrants—are criminals, violent drug criminals especially, but also they’re stealing jobs, draining social services and, in election season, we hear they’re voting illegally in large numbers, because they are, in some way, props for the Democratic Party.
Anyone who wants to dispute those noxious tropes can do so with a search engine. Harder to combat is the overarching and bipartisan framing of immigration and immigrants as a “problem.” How do we replace batting away the latest slur with the reality-based humane conversation we need to move us to the 21st century immigration and asylum policies we could have?
Insha Rahman is vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Insha Rahman.
JJ: Rather than ask you to engage intentionally misleading anti-immigrant talking points, I wonder if you would talk a little about the impacts. What is the fallout of myths and misinformation that might sound laughable or dismissable to many of us—what’s the fallout in the lives of the communities that you work with?
IR: First of all, the Willie Horton playbook of exploiting voters’ fears about crime, and frankly the dog whistles about race and criminality, it’s nothing new. When I say Willie Horton, everybody knows the 1988 ad that was run and allegedly sunk Michael Dukakis’ Democratic bid for president, and it’s a playbook that is old, well worn. We’ve seen it every election cycle.
And so this year, in 2024, if you feel like you’re hearing about immigration and migrants and cats and dogs nonstop, it isn’t anything new. It is really just another page of the Willie Horton playbook.
And it’s not really about immigration or immigration policies. Every poll that we have done, that we have seen, has found that Americans, by and large, understand that immigration is a fundamental part of our society, of our economy, of our communities. We are a country of immigrants. But, when it is wrapped up in a fear of crime, and playing upon racist tropes about crime and criminality, that’s where it has political impact.
And the fallout, we can see: One of the most depressing and staggering polls that I’ve seen recently is that overall support for immigration, which used to be a majority of Americans, including independents and moderate voters, supported immigration to this country. They fundamentally believed immigration is a good thing for our communities, our families, our economy. Now that support has dipped, for the first time, to below 50%. And so there’s a real fallout in terms of support for policy that’s actually smart and sensible.
And then we see it in very real ways in places like Springfield, Ohio, where there has been a lot of legal—I should say, legal—immigration of Haitian migrants to this country, who are fleeing really devastating circumstances in Haiti. We’re watching bomb threats in local schools, immigrant residents of Springfield feeling afraid. In fact, all residents of Springfield feeling afraid, because suddenly the city, that nobody had heard of until September 10 and the presidential debate, is literally in the Klieg lights, and everyday Americans and a lot of politicians are talking about Springfield. So much so that even the Republican governor of Ohio said, “Stop the fearmongering, stop the misinformation. We are just fine. What Springfield needs is our support and help, and not fearmongering and rhetoric about us.”
JJ: I think that media give inadequate attention to the carryover or bleed-through effects. It’s not to say that people who fall for anti-immigrant misinformation, they’re not asking folks before they harass them, “To be clear, you’re Haitian, right? You’re not Dominican. I don’t want to get my hatred wrong.” It’s treated as though these are targeted attacks, and as though they end when one particular incident is resolved, or when the cameras go away. But, of course, the impact on communities goes on and on.
IR: Yeah.
JJ: Changing facts on the ground with law, with policy, with institutional culture can save and can change lives. It does also work to shift the dialogue about what’s possible, about what life looks like after you change that law, for example. What are some of the legal or policy changes that you think could be important right now, that could shift the ground on immigration and asylum?
IR: One of the things that we have seen there’s widespread support for, and that can be done, is just: when there are new immigrants to our cities, to our communities, we make sure that they have the ability to work. Work, employment, is life-changing for everybody, including US citizens and other members of the community, who benefit from more labor. Right now, in many parts of this country, we have more jobs than we have people to fill them, and immigration is a necessary thing; it’s why economists across the country, across the political spectrum, say we actually need immigration. We can’t build a wall and mass-deport people and shut down the borders, because we literally will have an economic crisis in this country. So employment is a really basic thing we can do.
Another thing is, sometimes people hear, folks who are coming to our cities, especially people who are bused up from Texas and other border states, Florida—people resent housing and services and making sure basic needs are met. Well, in fact, that is cheaper than the alternative. And it is good for all of us.
And it’s not for forever: If you help somebody get on their feet with some temporary housing for three to six months, they have a work permit in hand, they have a job, they will not need to be dependent on government services and resources. It is actually better for us to set people up for a small period of time for future success.
And we’ve watched some cities do that really well. For example, Boston did not engage in the kind of fear-mongering about “all these newly arrived migrants, it’s going to be the end of the city, it’s going to destroy us,” which is what we heard from a certain elected mayor in New York City. That wasn’t the approach that Boston took. And, in fact, they’ve had a lot of newly arrived migrants as well, and they’ve managed it. And you’ll see they have really good outcomes, and there’s generally a sense of positivity towards new arrivals there in a way that there simply isn’t in New York City.
Insha Rahman: “There’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services.”
And so, again, there’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services. All of that is a better investment in our communities and our economy than the alternative.
And then we see there’s always been and always will be widespreadsupport for a path to citizenship and legalization for folks who have been here, who are part of the fabric of our communities. And so those are some of the things we could do literally immediately, but at the local level, in terms of cities and states.
And then what we need to see Congress do—and 10 years ago there was, in fact, bipartisan support for more paths to citizenship. And we need to bring the Overton window and shift it back to there, because that’s actually good for all of us.
And one other thing I’ll just mention as a policy point is, even under the law as it is—and I would say we need to update the immigration laws so that there’s more legal paths to citizenship for folks. But even with the laws that we have, making sure people have lawyers, they have some basic due process before they’re facing deportation, means many more people access the asylum laws, other forms of relief under current immigration law, which means it keeps people and families together, it keeps people in jobs.
My organization, the Vera Institute of Justice, we run a national program where we’re helping folks who are facing deportation have access to counsel, and literally people are 10 times more likely to win their case and be able to stay in the country, stay with their families, be in their jobs and in their communities, than if they have to go through deportation proceedings without a lawyer. And there’s no right to a lawyer in those proceedings. And that’s a really big problem for keeping families and communities together.
JJ: Just finally, what would you be looking for in a healthy public conversation about the changes we need to get from where we’re at to where we could be, and maybe who would be in that conversation that isn’t being heard from so much now?
IR: Too often, the conversation about immigration is dominated by politicians who are looking to score cheap political points. And if you listen to their rhetoric, they don’t have a single solution. Mass deportation is not a solution. Building a wall is not a solution.
And you know who actually has, and maybe they’re unlikely players in this, but folks who actually have very clear solutions for how we have a real and thoughtful conversation about immigration, that’s business owners and chambers of commerce. And, again, I made the point earlier that economists are like, “If we just shut down immigration, if we deport everybody, our economy will collapse.” Nobody understands that better than businesses and business owners, and they’re actually a really important voice in this conversation that often gets overlooked.
Just to go back to Springfield, Ohio, that we talked about, you actually saw the local chamber of commerce, and a number of different business owners, go out and speak publicly on the record, on the nighttime news and the newspaper and city council hearings, to say, “We need our immigrant workers and family members and community members, because they’re a vital part of our economy.”
So I actually think that’s a missing voice in this conversation that could help to bring the poles together, because the right likes business. I think the left can live with business, if business is coming at the issues in the right way. And I think there’s an opportunity to really actually bring people together, and have a more reasoned, thoughtful conversation about what the path forward is.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, and the director of Vera Action. Find their work online at Vera.org. Thank you so much, Insha Rahman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
What are the limits of free speech on a college campus? The New York Times has deployed one of its highest-ranking soldiers in the culture war against liberalism to remind us that the speech of white supremacists must be defended, but criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian human rights are going too far.
Times columnist John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University, is a part of the paper’s growing chorus of elite, pearl-clutching commentators (e.g., 6/7/18, 11/9/21, 3/18/23, 2/24/24) who blame society’s ills on an amorphous enemy of tyrannical “wokeness,” which McWhorter (3/21/23) presents as “an anti-Enlightenment program.” The Times embraces the idea, widespread in corporate media (Atlantic, 1/27/21; Newsweek, 7/25/23), that today’s social justice warriors are the true enemies of free speech.
John McWhorter (New York Times, 4/23/24): “Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
McWhorter found a limit to free speech and academic freedom earlier this year. He wrote (New York Times, 4/23/24) that he decided not to subject his students to an exercise where they would listen to the sounds around them, because they would be forced to listen to pro-Palestine protesters’ “infuriated chanting.” He said:
Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans…. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus…. Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?….
The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.
He’s clearly trying to portray leftist protesters as hypocritical and applying double standards: They readily seek to shut down racist speech but find anti-Israel speech “permissible.”
Yet McWhorter himself, so quick to condemn what he says is “a form of abuse” of Jewish students through the “relentless assault” of protesters’ Israel-critical speech—and with no words of reproach for the school president’s decision to “crack down” on the protests and their freedom of expression—applies a very different standard when the campus speech in question is racist, sexist or homophobic.
‘Flagrant unprofessional conduct’
For McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24), “upholding the ideals of free speech” requires not punishing a professor who publicly insults her Black students.
In sharp contrast to his denunciation of pro-Palestine protesters’ speech, McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24) offered a full-throated defense of Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been sanctioned by the school for “flagrant unprofessional conduct,” including “a history of making sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status,” as well as “breaching grade privacy requirements” (Wall Street Journal, 9/24/24).
A faculty panel unanimously recommended Wax be suspended for a year at half salary, publicly reprimanded and stripped of her named chair; Wax has appealed the recommendation and is still teaching.
Wax has said that the US is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” (CNN, 9/25/24). The Daily Pennsylvanian (8/10/17) wrote that, in an interview, Wax “said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior”: “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’…. Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”
Wax made public comments about Black students’ grades that were both a violation of confidentiality and, according to the Penn law school dean, false (Vox, 2/16/23):
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.
The law professor has repeatedly invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to deliver guest lectures in her class, including this semester, after the faculty panel’s recommendation. She will be a featured speaker at a conference sponsored by Taylor’s white supremacist journal American Renaissance (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24)—where, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”
Given McWhorter’s previously stated belief that Jewish students shouldn’t have to listen to speech like “from the river to the sea,” one might expect that he would similarly condemn Wax’s subjection of her Black and brown students to eugenicist, white supremacist speech.
Instead, McWhorter uses the Wax affair to defend the right of free speech, a role he didn’t take on when his own school clamped down on anti-genocide protests (Columbia Spectator, 4/4/24). Her views might be “Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous,” his headline declared, but “She Shouldn’t Be Punished” for them.
‘Living with discomfort’—or not
“We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy…but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member,” a U Penn faculty panel insisted (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24).
McWhorter, as a part of the anti-woke media movement to frame liberalism as the opponent of openness, accepts Wax as a victim of the cancel mob: “Her suspension,” he said, “is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity.”
He wrote: “Upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort—or even anger and injury—that offensive ideas can cause.”
The contrast with his earlier column is striking. If a Black or brown student is subjected to white supremacist speech, by his account, that student’s “discomfort—or even anger and injury” is their problem, and of less importance than protecting free speech. But if a white student is subjected to anti-Zionist speech, McWhorter considers it a “form of abuse” that they should not be expected to simply “be able to tolerate.”
Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.’s statement on the matter makes clear that Wax isn’t being sanctioned for merely breaking liberal conventions of decorum. A faculty review board found that Wax “engaged in ‘flagrant unprofessional conduct’ that breached [her] responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn” from her (University of Pennsylvania Almanac, 9/24/24). The decision resulting from the investigation, to which the statement links, also says that the inquiry board decided against recommending a much tougher punishment, “namely, termination from her faculty position.”
McWhorter deems the disciplinary action “egregious,” yet he voiced no similar complaints about disciplinary actions taken by Columbia and other schools against pro-Palestine protesters. He was also quick to call for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black scholar who had been hounded by right-wing congressmembers over allowing criticism of Israel on her campus (NPR, 12/12/23; FAIR.org, 12/12/23) before being pushed out in a plagiarism scandal. McWhorter (New York Times, 12/21/23) admitted that the school’s plagiarism “policy may not apply to the university’s president,” but said the vibes of the matter trumped procedure, saying “Gay would be denigrating the values of ‘veritas’ that she and Harvard aspire to uphold” if she stayed.
Acceptable and unacceptable restrictions
Columbia University’s suspension of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters (Columbia Spectator, 11/29/23) apparently did not contradict “the ideal of free speech,” in McWhorter’s view, because the university had not “categorically prohibited criticism of Israel.”
McWhorter recognized the parallels between the Wax affair and the pro-Palestine protests, but insinuated the usual, and false, media equation between pro-Palestine and anti-Black speech that paints anti-Zionism as antisemitism (FAIR.org, 12/15/23). He wrote that the protests are another example in which universities have struggled with “identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment”:
Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.
The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.
McWhorter seems to be drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable restrictions on speech: Suspending student clubs, “pushing” demonstrations off campus (with the help of police in riot gear) and firing professors for anti-Israel sentiments are apparently fine by McWhorter, whereas “categorical” prohibitions on anti-Israel speech would cross the line.
It’s remarkable that McWhorter doesn’t see that firing a professor over anti-Israel views is quite obviously a much harsher punishment than Wax faces—or that suspending a professor for a year for specific actions that harmed students is not a categorical prohibition on racist speech.
Enormous chilling effect
Natasha Lennard (Intercept, 5/16/24): “Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics…have been fired, suspended or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.”
What’s more, while he claims there has been no blanket ban on pro-Palestine thought, there have been so many official actions against faculty and students that we now see an enormous chilling effect on speech.
McWhorter did link to the Intercept story (9/26/24) on the firing of a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College for having
shared, on her personal Instagram account…a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
But there’s much more. New York University added “Zionist” to a list of “examples of speech that could violate the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policies” (Washington Square News, 8/26/24), which has FAIR wondering what impact this might have on professors who teach Middle Eastern history.
Steven Thrasher, an acclaimed journalist who has commented here at FAIR, teaches social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where he may lose employment because of his activism against the genocide in Gaza. Democracy Now! (9/5/24) reported that the university “filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped.” However, “students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms, because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation.”
Hyperallergic (9/20/24) reported that at Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, the administration sent
behavioral directives for Barnard employees, specifying that “messaging…supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective” and posting political signs on office doors would go against the college’s community values.
Telling sociologists, historians, political scientists and anthropologists to refrain from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint” is like telling a quarterback not to pass the football. Once again, this is the kind of directive that undoes the kind of open discourse McWhorter says he supports.
Tip of the iceberg
Radhika Sainath (Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/24): “Trying to appease pro-Israel forces by preventing protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza…colleges are rewriting policies that will have dire consequences on university life for years to come.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to campus repression of anti-genocide activists—many of whom are Jewish, despite McWhorter’s attempt to treat criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, wrote about the widespread erosion of freedom on campuses this year at Inside Higher Ed (9/16/24):
Indeed, my office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves. Often, no reason is given.
On one campus, students were slapped with conduct violations for writing an op-ed discussing a Gaza encampment in positive ways. Potlucks for Palestine have been canceled. Professors who reference Gaza or Palestine in their courses are told those courses are not fit for the curriculum, or having their syllabi scrutinized—or turned over to Congress in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Adjuncts have beenfired. Tenure-track professors suspended. Tenured professors investigated.
If universities banned students from wearing Tibetan clothes or canceled “momo night” because these things might offend Chinese students, we could bet good money that McWhorter and the rest of the anti-woke pack would be up in arms, and rightfully so.
But McWhorter is only fighting to protect conservatives, which are classified as political victims in liberal academic society. We have come to expect such hypocrisy from the New YorkTimes and other media’s anti-woke moral panic (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 7/23/21, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). But it’s remarkable that McWhorter feels comfortable being so contradictory and misleading in disingenuous pursuit of “free speech.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”
Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: 
