This week on CounterSpin: The Trump administration is funding a genocide in Gaza—never mind headlines like July 24’s Washington Post: “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths From Hunger Rise.” (No, it’s actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently.)
None of this, while we acknowledge individual regretters, has radically shaken the MAGA base. But now that group, we’re told, may be fracturing, around the Epstein files.
To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men, one of whom mysteriously died in prison while the other mysteriously became president, is a terrible disservice to a story of thinly veiled institutional, professional machinery employed in the systemic criminal victimization of women. But how can we expect elite news media to tell that story when they’re busy wasting ink on Trump denials as though they were something other than nonsense?
There’s a lot going on here; we’ll talk about just some of it with Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of, most recently, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink.
Ken Saro-Wiwa
Also on the show: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has just announced a posthumous pardon for Nigerian writer, teacher and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in November 1995, along with eight of his comrades in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Their crime was nonviolent protest against the exploitation of their land and their people by oil industry giant Royal Dutch Shell. CounterSpin covered it at the time—and then in 2009, we caught up on still-ongoing efforts to bring some measure of accountability for those killings, and Shell’s unceasing human rights and environmental violations, with Han Shan, working with what was then called the ShellGuilty campaign, a coalitional effort from Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth and Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa.
In light of this pardon, which is being acknowledged as necessary but insufficient, we’re going to hear that conversation with Han Shan again this week.
FCC chair Brendan Carr (Bloomberg, 7/24/25) enthused about Skydance‘s promises: “They’ve committed to addressing bias issues. They’ve committed to embracing fact-based journalism.”
The media production company Skydance is acquiring Paramount Global. The deal may be thought largely to be an entertainment merger, as ParamountownsComedy Central, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the Paramount film studio. But Paramount owns broadcast network CBS and its news programming, which means that the deal has enormous implications for journalism—particularly given that it requires federal approval.
The coast certainly seems clear for the merger at this point: Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutesinterview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement. Meanwhile, Paramount‘s soon-to-be-owner has met with “anti-woke” crusader Bari Weiss about a potential partnership with CBS.
Trump has used his institutional power to attack media he dislikes such as ABC and CBS, as well as to defund liberal-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; Variety, 7/18/25; USA Today, 7/18/25). Late last year, Disney settled a similarly ludicrous Trump lawsuit over ABC‘s election coverage (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).
Trump has also used his power to take control of government broadcaster Voice of America, once a Cold War propaganda tool for US power projection abroad, and fill it with content from One America News Network (AP, 5/7/25), a pro-Trump outlet FAIR founder Jeff Cohen once said “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!” (FAIR.org, 10/15/21).
The latest moves from CBS‘s owners mark the latest seismic shift to the right in the US media landscape.
Paramount kisses the ring
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism” (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25).
The lawsuit that Paramount settled to pave the way for the deal preposterously claimed that an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the CBS show 60 Minutes was deceptively edited to favor her over Trump (BBC, 7/2/25). Anyone who cares about journalism or media freedom would have rooted for Paramount and CBS to fight the lawsuit, but Paramount‘s leading stockholder, Shari Redstone, apparently saw the settlement as a small price to keep Trump’s Federal Communications Commission from standing in the way of the lucrative sale. (Trump claims that the combined company has also agreed to air $16 million more in PSAs, described as messages that will “support conservative causes supported by President Trump,” as part of the settlement, though Paramount denies such a side agreement exists—Variety, 7/4/25).
The settlement has been “broadly criticized as capitulation” by CBS staffers (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25). Reuters (7/2/25) reported that one 60 Minutes source said
newsroom staff expressed ‘widespread distress’ about the settlement and concerns about the future of the CBS News prime time news magazine and its hard-hitting brand of journalism.
A filing with the FCC (Deadline, 7/18/25) suggested that an upcoming shift in CBS’s news coverage was part of the deal to get the acquisition approved. It said that Skydance and FCC officials had “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”
Presumably those “varied ideological perspectives” will not include those offensive to Trump, since airing those resulted in Paramount paying a multi-million-dollar settlement. As I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), FCC chair Brendan Carr is a lieutenant in the MAGA movement, and wrote the FCC section for Project 2025, the right-wing policy roadmap for the second Trump administration. While vowing to reduce regulation, he has shown no qualms about using state power to impose ideological limits on broadcast news.
Paramount also promised to install an ombud who would investigate “any complaints of bias or other concerns” at CBS News, and to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs (Wrap, 7/23/25).
‘Sacrificing free speech to curry favor’
Mother Jones‘ Inae Oh (7/18/25) wrote that “the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide.”
As the deal approached, it became clear that CBS’s ability to operate as a fair news provider was slipping, as Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, “announced his resignation, saying he can no longer make independent journalism decisions for the program” (NPR, 4/23/25). With Colbert’s termination, it’s unclear whether any part of the new Skydance empire will escape ideological purification.
CBS‘s announcement that it would cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been read as a muzzling of a prominent critic, not just of Trump, but of the Paramount settlement. The Writers Guild of America East (7/18/25) spelled out the authoritarian moment plainly:
On July 15, during a regular show of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Colbert went on-air and called the settlement a “big fat bribe” in exchange for a favorable decision on the proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance, a charge currently under investigation in California.
Less than 48 hours later, on July 17, Paramount canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a show currently performing first in its timeslot, giving vague references to the program’s “financial performance” as the only explanation. For ten years, the show has been one of the most successful, beloved and profitable programs on CBS, entertaining an audience of millions on late night television, on streaming services and across social media.
Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that the Late Show’s cancellation is a bribe, sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump administration as the company looks for merger approval.
In its first new episode in over a year, the Comedy Central flagship animated comedy South Park (7/23/25), often embraced by conservatives for its eagerness to offend liberals, attacked both Trump and the channel’s owner Paramount. In its raunchy style, USA Today (7/24/25) reported, it “referenced everything from the company’s controversial settlement with the president to its shock decision to cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had previously commented on X (7/2/25), “This merger is a shitshow and it’s fucking up South Park.” It remains to be seen whether the thin-skinned Trump White House will hold up the acquisition in retaliation for the satire.
Trump’s ‘favorite tech company’
Skydance‘s David Ellison “is said to be interested in infusing [Bari] Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News” (CNN, 7/11/25).
There are indications that more ideological restructuring at the network is on its way. CNN (7/11/25) reported that “Paramount’s owner-in-waiting, David Ellison, met with journalist entrepreneur Bari Weiss…about a possible tie-up between CBS News and her startup the Free Press.” The report added that “Ellison is said to be interested in infusing Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News.”
For those who are unfamiliar with Weiss, she is a formerNew York Times editor and writer who gained fame for attacking “wokeness” (Commentary, 11/21)—which for the right is any politics that seeks to address racial and gender inequalities—and her advocacy for Israel and against critics of its government (Intercept, 3/8/18).
While David Ellison donated to former President Joe Biden’s reelection efforts (CNBC, 4/16/24) and other Democratic campaigns, the political commitments of his father Larry Ellison may be more relevant. Larry is the co-founder of the software giant Oracle and, according to the Forbes400 list, the fourth-richest person in the United States, behind Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos and X‘s Elon Musk. As the New York Times (4/2/25) noted, Larry “is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount.”
The elder Ellison is well-known for his contributions to conservative causes (Vox, 2/12/20; Washington Post, 5/20/22). He gave $4 million to a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s presidential bid (Politico, 2/20/16), and $15 million to one backing Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) (Politico, 2/19/22).
Slate (9/14/20) called Oracle the “Trump Administration’s Favorite Tech Company,” as evidenced by the fact that Trump picked Oracle to potentially “partner” with TikTok, giving the Chinese-owned social media company a reliable ideological watchdog in order to avoid a congressionally mandated ban (FAIR.org, 12/6/24).
Shared ‘Zionist values’
A Jerusalem Post article (7/31/24) “written in cooperation with SkyDance”—that is, an advertorial—touted the young executives at Skydance and Paramount as “connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.”
One thing the Ellisons agree on is wholehearted support for Zionism. In 2017, Larry Ellison gave $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/17). Two years ago, the Hollywood Reporter (10/13/23) reported that “Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, has committed $1 million to humanitarian relief efforts in Israel” in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. It quoted the company:
Skydance stands with Israel, strongly condemns the attacks against its citizens, is donating support to the victims of this tragic act of terrorism, and prays for the safe release of innocents hostages.
Last year, the Jerusalem Post (7/31/24) ran a story “written in cooperation with SkyDance” that highlighted support for Israel by David Ellison and Redstone’s son, “Brandon Korff, heir to the Paramount empire.” The article quoted a “source familiar with the details” who described Ellison and Korff sharing “Zionist values” and noted that “both quietly donate quite a bit to the state of Israel and the IDF.”
Redstone herself has been an outspoken Zionist during her time at the head of Paramount; when CBS admonished host Tony Dokoupil for his hostile interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Dokoupil suggested that Coates was an “extremist” on Palestine, Redstone publicly criticized network management (LA Times, 10/9/24).
Given the talks with Weiss and the Free Press, one might expect CBS coverage to skew even further to the right on the Middle East, as well as on the Trump’s administration effort to clamp down on critical speech against Israel’s genocide and its support from the US. While Weiss’s brand is all about free speech, she got her start in politics agitating for the censorship of professors with pro-Palestinian views (Jewish Currents, 7/23/20).
Featured image: The 60 Minutes interview (10/7/25) that CBS is paying Donald Trump $16 million for airing.
Sam Feder is the director of Heightened Scrutiny, a documentary that follows transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he argues before the Supreme Court against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. The film explores the crucial role centrist media played in driving legislation like Tennessee’s, and the broader cultural backlash against trans rights. FAIR senior analyst Julie Hollar, who appears in the film, interviewed Feder for FAIR.
Civil rights Lawyer Chase Strangio in Heightened Scrutiny: “It’s a playbook that will effectively take a misunderstood, maligned, small minority of people and place a larger population’s anxiety of a changing world onto them.”
Julie Hollar: You previously made a documentary, Disclosure (2020), about trans representation in film and television. You’ve said Heightened Scrutiny is something like a sequel to Disclosure. What drove you to make this film?
Sam Feder:Disclosure ends with a warning about the risks of increased visibility. I first met Chase when I interviewed him for Disclosure. He explained that while representation was important, it was crucial for trans people to be pushing for actual material redistribution, and to disrupt the systems that exclude most trans people, impacting their ability to survive. Without the deep, structural change Chase suggested, I worried that we were about to face a significant backlash to the media visibility we were witnessing at the time.
The backlash was even more drastic than I could have imagined. A year after Disclosure came out, hundreds of anti trans bills were being introduced. In just three years, from 2021–2024, we went from zero states banning gender-affirming care to 24 states. Now it’s up to 27 states.
I realized very quickly that anti-trans talking points that had once been confined to right-wing news outlets were now front-page stories in the mainstream media. My colleagues, who had always been strong allies, were parroting the mainstream media, questioning the legitimacy of trans healthcare. And they felt empowered by the coverage they were reading to speak with authority when debating trans rights, because the Paper of Record was saying it, and the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, and on and on and on.
So I wanted to understand this shift, and I wanted to understand why reporters did not uphold the standards of journalism in coverage of trans people. Heightened Scrutiny examines the relationship between the media’s coverage of trans rights and the anti-trans legislation we have seen balloon in the backlash since 2021.
JH: Tell me more about the role of the media that you uncovered, and your focus on the New York Times.
Atlantic (7-8/18): “”Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.” (He’s 22, actually.)
SF: In the film we show that there was a clear shift starting in 2018, with the cover story in the Atlantic by Jesse Singal headlined “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.”
We interviewed the cover model—he was 22 years old at the time of that article! Likewise, the rest of the story is full of misinformation and fearmongering. Fast forward to 2021, and misinformation about trans people is all over the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Washington Post.
And people started to speak up and tell these outlets that they were publishing a lot of misinformation that was dangerous and harmful. And most outlets were willing to hear that criticism, and at least tried to do somewhat better—except the New York Times. They kind of dug in their heels and took it up a notch.
In a matter of six months or so, there were seven front-page stories questioning trans people’s right to healthcare in the New York Times. In early 2023, a group of Times contributors published an open letter about the anti-trans bias that had been steadily increasing. But the Times refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, calling it legitimate and important journalism, and still to this day they promote the voices and ideas of well-known anti-trans thinkers, and perpetuate this anti-trans narrative.
And as Chase explains in the film, in the legal realm, this unprecedented thing was happening, which is that legal briefs were citing these articles. And that is incredibly uncommon with legal briefs about medical care; you usually see citations from scientists and medical experts, you don’t see them quoting articles from newspapers. And they were doing it because that was the only place they could draw on to support their anti-trans legislation.
And it was working; they were able to pass these bills because of the anti-trans media bias that was popping up everywhere. And the New York Times was central in that. There is a scene in the film where Fox News says look, even the New York Times is questioning this medical care, so it must be really bad for adolescents.
Julie Hollar in Heightened Scrutiny: “The news media really set the political agenda in many ways…. They establish what the national discourse is.”
JH: In the film, I talk briefly about FAIR’s 2023 study of New York Times trans coverage, which showed that over the course of a year, the paper devoted more front-page articles to framing trans people as some sort of threat to others’ rights—such as cisgender women and parents—than to the coordinated assault on trans people’s rights. FAIR just published an update to that study, which shows that the Times has gotten even worse in some ways than they were before, including fewer trans sources in front-page stories about trans issues, for instance, and including just as many sources peddling unchallenged anti-trans misinformation as trans sources. How are you as a filmmaker trying to hold the Times accountable? What do you hope audiences might do in response?
SF: When people watch the film, so many are surprised to learn about the trajectory from coverage to law, and how culpable the Times has been in spreading misinformation. This link between the articles and anti-trans bills is devastating; the film shows the direct connection from article to harm.
Just like Disclosure was a field study in representation that could be applied to any marginalized community, Heightened Scrutiny is a field study that can be applied to the ways in which the media has skewed the public’s perception of all marginalized people. At the end of the day, when anyone’s right to bodily autonomy is chipped away at, everyone’s rights are.
I think this is a way to show people an example of the harm. I also hope this film is a tool for supporting those who are on the ground fighting back against the harm—medical providers, lawyers, legislators, etc.
JH: The Times is getting worse, the Supreme Court isn’t saving us. In making the film, did you come across anything that gave you hope or inspiration?
SF: I learned from people I spoke with, in particular Lewis Wallace, who talks about how hope is a practice. Hope is something we have to work for relentlessly and rigorously.
I’m inspired by Mila, the 13-year-old trans girl in the film. She’s this brilliant person, empowered and unflappable in the face of immense struggle. Watching her fight gives me hope. And watching her family showing up to support her every step of the way teaches all of us what love can look like.
There’s still so much to protect. The Skrmetti decision is devastating, but queer and trans people know that we cannot rely on the law. Our ability to survive and thrive does not begin or end with the law. We know how to take care of each other. That also gives me hope.
You know, when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral primary, I also felt real hope, witnessing New Yorkers come together and do something that seemed so impossible. I hope people will rally around trans civil rights the same way.
SF: Yes, the Times included. And seeing people be skeptical of the media, ignore the misinformation, take action together, and do what the media try to tell us is impossible or scary or “too woke”—we need to keep doing that, and giving each other hope.
Filmmaker Sam Feder: “So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about…whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media.”
JH: What do you want people to walk away from your film with?
SF: I want people to see that the SCOTUS case is grounded in popular culture, in mainstream media and social media discourse. So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about whether the risks of gender-affirming care outweighed the need for it, and whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media. The legislation directly responds to the media climate.
Our existence is not a debate. As Jude [Ellison S. Doyle] says in the film: “Trans people are presented as one side of a debate on our lives. I hold the opinion that I exist, and you hold the opinion that I don’t.”
The outcome of this case is going to impact the constitutional rights of all people living in America. That’s lost on many people, but this is going to affect everyone’s access to privacy with their doctors.
JH: And that’s something that just wasn’t highlighted in most of the media coverage of the case, so that most people are not aware of it, based on the news reports.
SF: I absolutely think you’re right about that. There is still a lot we can protect. The fight is not over.
Heightened Scrutiny is screening in New York City at DCTV, July 18–24; in Los Angeles at Laemmle Theatres, July 26–27 and 29; and in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater, July 31 and August 2.
Janine Jackson interviewed media scholar Victor Pickard about the Paramount settlement for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Faced with a groundless lawsuit claiming that an interview with Kamala Harris amounted to election interference in favor of Democrats, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, could have struck a symbolic blow for press freedom by saying, “No,” pointing to any number of legal arguments, starting with the First (for a reason) Amendment.
But Paramount isn’t a journalistic institution. It’s a business with media holdings, and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone was in the middle of doing business, trying to sell the corporation to another Hollywood studio, a move that, perhaps quaintly, requires government approval. That now means approval of this government.
And yet here we are. The Paramount settlement, says Victor Pickard, is, yes, a stunning display of bribery, greed and cowardice. But we need to understand, it’s also a symptom of a deep structural rot in our media today, a system in which profit trumps democracy at every turn.
Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Victor Pickard.
Victor Pickard: It’s great to be back on the show, Janine.
JJ: Well, I hear that Paramount‘s market value has dropped since Shari Redstone threw press independence on the fire to warm shareholders’ hands. It’s almost as if folks thought it wasn’t a valuable journalistic institution.
I want to launch you into the bigger picture of which this is emblematic, but I first want to insert: Shari Redstone inherited Paramount from her father, Sumner Redstone, who, while some of us were working to show there was a conflict, declared it openly.
In 2004, then-head of CBS and Viacom Sumner Redstone stated at a corporate leader confab that he didn’t want to denigrate then–Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, but
from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal, because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people, but from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.
And, later, CBS head Les Moonves—CounterSpin listeners will have heard me say many times—declared laughingly, “Donald Trump is bad for America, but he’s good for CBS, so let’s do it.”
So the structural conflict you’re describing, it’s not a theory. It’s not the stuff of smoke-filled rooms. It’s out there for everyone to see, every day in every way. So the questions have to do with, once we diagnose this problem, what do we do about it?
VP: Thank you for opening up with that softball question. I mean, that is the main problem before us, and everything you just said leading up to this question really lays out that this is a systemic problem that we’re facing, and it requires a systemic fix. It’s not just a case of a few bad apples, or a handful of bad corporations and perhaps a bad journalist, even, but it really is a systemic structural problem. And so we really need to move our frame of analysis from just condemning the latest media malfeasance to really condemning the entire hypercommercialized media system in which we are all immersed, and so clearly serves only commercial values and not democratic values.
So the first step, of course, would be to decommercialize our media, much easier said than done, but that’s something we need to place on our horizon. And not only that, we also need to radically democratize our media, from root to branch, and that means bringing it back down to the local level, making sure that our media are owned and controlled by the public. Even our public media, our so-called public media, aren’t actually owned by the people.
So this is something that we need to work towards. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it’s something we need to start thinking about now.
JJ: I love the idea of a long-term and a short-term plan, and eyes on the prize. So let’s go back to that. It’s not that we’re going to change things legislatively or politically tomorrow, but there are things on the ground locally. There are models we can build on, yeah?
VP: That’s absolutely true. There’s a number of models that exist today, that have existed in our history and that exist around the world, and we really should be looking at some of those to expand our current imagination about what’s possible in the future. Obviously, we have some great independent local media, and those outlets, those institutions, we should be supporting in any way that we can, through donations, subscriptions, whatever we can, to help them. They’re all struggling, like all local media are right now.
We also, even though I made a sort of snarky comment about our public media a moment ago, I think we do need to look to, as I say, save our public media so that we can change it. As we know, the meager funds that we allocate to public media are currently on the chopping block. It comes out to about a $1.58 per person per year in this country, which is literally off the chart compared to most democratic countries around the world. So we need to look at how we can salvage that, but also, again, expand on it, and build, restructure our public media, so that it’s not just public in name but actually publicly owned.
There are other things that we could be doing, but we just have to start with recognizing that the current commercial system is failing democracy, and will always fail democracy.
JJ: When you talk about public media, and this is a thing, of course, folks are being encouraged to think about it now as “ideological” institutions. First of all, and you’ve said it, but they don’t get a lot of government support to begin with.
Neiman Reports (1/24/22): The US is virtually off the chart when it comes to its ratio of GDP to spending on public media.
But at the same time, progressives, we’ve had plenty of complaints about public broadcasting as it exists in this country. It had a beautiful ideal. It had a beautiful beginning. It hasn’t fulfilled that role.
We have complaints about it, but the complaints that we’re now hearing don’t have anything to do with the complaints that we have about it. So the idea of saving public media might land weird to some CounterSpin listeners, but there’s a reason that we need to keep that venue open.
VP: Absolutely. I mean, it is an ideal, just like democracy itself is an ideal, something that we have yet to actually achieve, but it’s something we can’t give up on just because the current iteration of this model that we have in the US, which is a kind of strange one, again, compared to other public media models around the world, it’s actually a misnomer. It’s mostly supported by private capital.
But if we were to actually fund it in accordance with global norms, we could have a very robust public media system that was not dependent on corporate sponsorships, that was not catering to higher socioeconomic groups, that, again, could actually spend more time engaging with and devoting programming for local communities.
So this is something that’s not inevitable. Like our entire media system, there was nothing inevitable with how we designed it. We need to understand the political economic structures that produce the kind of media that we’re constantly critiquing in order to change it, to create an entirely different kind of media system that’s driven by a different and democratic logic.
JJ: Let me just draw you out on that. We spoke last year, and I would refer interested people to that conversation, about separating capitalism and journalism, and talking about different ways of financing media in the service of the public.
And we understand complaints about “state media.” We hear all of that, and any kind of funding structure should be transparent, and we should talk about it.
But I want to ask you, finally, there are creative policy responses going on, and it’s not about kicking the final answers down the field; it’s really just about making a road while we walk it, and making examples of things, so that we can see that, yeah, they work, and they can move us towards a bigger vision.
VP: Absolutely. And as you already suggested, state media and public media are not the same thing. That we publicly subsidize media doesn’t mean it immediately has to become a mouthpiece for the state or the government.
And, indeed, government is always involved in our media. It’s a question of how it should be involved, whether it’s to serve corporate interests or public interests.
I think we can look to what’s happening at the state level, for example, in New Jersey, they’ve long had an Information Consortium network that’s focused on subsidizing various local journalistic initiatives. And it’s a proof of concept of how the state can make these public investments towards publicly accountable media. And we’re starting to see that in many states across the country.
A lot of experiments, some will survive, some won’t. The important thing is that we need to create these non-market means of support for the media that we need. I think that ideal of separating journalism and capitalism, which was always a match made in Hell, we need to find a way to do that, again, to be on our political horizon for the future.
Victor Pickard: “Much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists.”
JJ: Well, I said that was my last question, but I want to ask you another one, because I think a mistake that folks make about FAIR, and possibly about you, is that we’re anti-journalism per se. But we are emphatically pro–good journalism that’s not public relations for power. It’s because we believe in the power of journalism that we are so concerned about these structural constraints.
VP: Exactly. I couldn’t agree more with that statement. And I think much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists. Most journalists don’t go into the profession, they don’t follow the craft, to become rich, or to become mouthpieces of the already powerful. I think it’s generally a noble calling, and we just need to create the institutions and the structures that can allow them to be the great journalist they want to be.
JJ: All right, then. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center, and his most recent book is called Democracy Without Journalism?. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
In Texas, at least 134 people are dead, including 36 children, and a hundred are missing after a devastating flash flood swept through the central part of the state on July 4. A late June/early July heatwave in Europe claimed 2,300 lives across the continent. These events, of the kind made more extreme and frequent by climate change (ABC, 7/7/25; New York Times, 7/9/25), occur as EU leaders roll back climate policy and the Trump administration guts climate protections, staying true to the slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”
Despite this dire backsliding on climate policy, with consequences that are clear as day, it’s business as usual in the realm of business news. Recent pieces in the widely read business publications Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the business section of Reuters misleadingly suggested the fossil fuel industry’s profits and losses happen in a vacuum.
A clear consensus
Global leaders ignoring the climate crisis clearly aren’t making its tragic effects go away. The scientific consensus has been unmistakable for years: Fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change. In order to avoid surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit, beyond which the most devastating impacts from global heating will be felt, we need to phase out fossil fuels—and fast (Union of Concerned Scientists, 1/21/21).
Many journalists have expressed this urgency while covering extreme weather and other impacts, making the connection to human-caused climate change and fossil fuel emissions (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). While these in-depth stories serve as clear explainers in outlets’ science and environment sections, the connection is still being ignored when business is discussed.
If not for the grotesque profits of fossil fuel companies—which knew about their industry’s environmental impact since the 1970s—resistance to a clean energy transition would not exist.
Industry coverage
Reuters (7/8/25) reported that “the US will produce less oil in 2025 than previously expected as declining oil prices have prompted producers to slow activity this year”—with no acknowledgment of the climate impact of this slowdown.
In early July, Exxon and Shell announced lower second-quarter profits from weaker oil and gas trading. Coverage in Bloomberg (7/7/25), the Wall Street Journal (7/7/25) and Reuters (7/7/25) discussed these announcements as indicative of how the rest of the fossil fuel industry will fare in Q2. Stories attributed these dips to Trump’s tariffs, Middle East tensions, excess supply and uncertain demand. Oil prices creeping up over the past two weeks were due to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, projected lower US oil production and Trump tariffs, Reuters (7/8/25) reported.
Meanwhile, reports on renewable energy stocks dipping after the passing of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also failed to mention the consequences of this backslide (Reuters, 7/7/25; Bloomberg, 7/8/25): If we keep our carbon emissions at current rates, we are poised to hit the 1.5°C threshold before 2030, leading to more deadly extreme weather events worldwide (Health Policy Watch, 5/6/24).
Discussing Chevron’s efforts to cut costs, Bloomberg (7/9/25) mentioned low oil prices and an “uncertain outlook for fossil fuels.” A passing mention of an “uncertain outlook” was the closest any of these pieces gets to hinting at the relevant need to phase out fossil fuels and invest in renewables, regardless of geopolitical events and market trends.
Increased demand
The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) euphemized Trump’s wholesale attack on renewable energy as “a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans.”
The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) reported “Oil Age Is Far From Over, OPEC Says,” citing increased energy needs globally as a reason fossil fuels will continue to be extracted. Oil correspondent Giulia Petroni wrote:
Meanwhile, OPEC also said energy policies across major economies are shifting as countries grapple with a growing array of challenges. While ambitious policy goals remain in place, a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans is emerging, particularly in the US and other advanced economies, according to the cartel.
Petroni did not cite any scientists or climate activists to push back against OPEC’s claims, let alone any of the litany of studies, data and reports that warn that if we want life on earth as we know it to continue, we simply cannot keep drilling for more oil. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (9/25/24) explained:
Peer-reviewed science shows there is no room for new coal, oil and gas development under the 1.5°C global warming limit agreed in Paris. In 1.5°C-aligned scenarios, coal production declines by 95% by 2050, and oil and gas production by at least 65%.
Another Journal piece (7/9/25) discussed a decrease in diesel supply, which could increase transport and heating costs next winter. “Lack of refining capacity growth is also a problem in the US, where the green energy movement has turned some refiners away from making diesel, said Flynn of the Price Futures Group,” Anthony Harrup reported—as if it’s a “problem” that green activists have succeeded in steering producers away from a climate-wrecking fuel. (No experts on renewable alternatives were cited.)
The argument that renewable energy sources can’t power the world is also not supported. According to the UN, renewables have the potential to meet 65% of the world’s energy demands by 2030 and 90% by 2050. And contrary to fossil fuel propaganda parroted by corporate media, renewable energy sources are already the cheapest power option in the majority of the world.
The AI boom
Bloomberg‘s report (7/4/25) worried that ending tax credits for renewable energy would fail to “quench the thirst of data centers that power artificial intelligence”—not that it would accelerate the climate catastrophe.
Reports about AI’s profligate energy usage from Reuters and Bloomberg also largely left out discussions about its climate impact. Reuters (7/9/25) did a story on the crisis facing the largest power grid in the country due to AI demand, as chatbots “consume power faster than new plants can be built.” The piece reported Trump ordering two oil and natural gas power plants in Pennsylvania to continue operating through the summer, despite their scheduled retirement in May, without mentioning the effect on climate.
Bloomberg (7/4/25) reported on Trump’s tax package curbing renewables even as AI’s need for power increases. The piece discussed the economic implications of the policy, but left out the dire environmental consequences.
Another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) about AI’s utility needs did briefly make the climate connection. Reporter Josh Saul alluded at the end of the article to the arguments of “critics,” who warn these data centers can “hurt climate efforts by extending the lives of carbon-emitting coal and gas plants.” But he did not quote or cite specific groups, scientists or activists.
Ironic omissions
“Europe’s fleet of coal and gas plants could come to the rescue,” Bloomberg (7/7/25) reported. “The likely comeback for the region’s legacy fossil-fuel plants shows just how important they are.”
More puzzling reporting discussed European countries needing to fill energy gaps with fossil fuels during June and July’s deadly heatwaves.
“Fossil Fuels Set to Fill Europe’s Power Gap as Wind Plunges” (Bloomberg, 7/7/25) quoted an energy strategist from Rabobank: “The longer the wind lull continues amid the scorching heat, the longer fossil fuels will have to fill the evening demand gap in power markets.”
“Europe is steadily refilling storage sites that ended last winter severely depleted after a colder-than-usual heating season triggered hefty withdrawals,” another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) stated. “Still, the region remains vulnerable to sudden shifts in supply or demand—especially as hot weather drives up energy use for cooling.”
“Risks remain as most of July is expected to be hotter than usual across Europe, possibly boosting gas consumption to meet demand for cooling,” said another (Bloomberg, 7/10/25).
This “hotter than usual” weather in Europe has claimed thousands of lives, with research suggesting 1,500 of the 2,300 estimated heat deaths could be connected to climate change, which, as we know, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels (New York Times, 7/9/25). But this clear connection and ironic chicken-and-egg scenario is not explained in any of these articles.
The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) refers to the rolling back of “Biden’s climate law”—but never explains what energy and climate have to do with each other.
The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) covered Trump’s rollback of President Joe Biden’s climate law, which offered subsidies for wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other green projects, in a piece headlined “The Moment the Clean-Energy Boom Ran Into ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’”
The piece quoted Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society and director of the Bureau of Land Management under Biden; Reagan Farr, chief executive of solar developer Silicon Ranch; and Cierra Pearl, a young Maine resident who recently lost her job building solar arrays. These sources decried Trump’s sabotage of the green energy transition, but none of them were cited discussing broader climate impacts.
“The clashing visions have left many developers and workers around the country in a lurch,” Journal oil reporter David Uberti wrote. Uberti made sure to quote a statement by Tom Pyle, president of the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance: “If repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place.” (The $20 billion the fossil fuel industry receives annually in direct US government subsidies was not discussed.)
The impacts Trump’s anti–green energy policies will have on fossil fuel workers are certainly relevant, and it makes sense that business news articles would center broadly defined economic implications. But it is a glaring omission to discuss EVs, renewable energy and the possibility of oil drilling on public lands without any mention of environmental impacts and our all-but-guaranteed surpassing of the Paris Agreement threshold if we continue along this path.
Siloing the connection
Bloomberg (7/10/15) puts a story about how climate change is killing Europeans in its special “Green” section.
These outlets have no shortage of resources to report on climate change—and the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for its ramifications. Some are already doing it in other sections of the paper.
“We need to start acting against climate change and this means, first, trying to reduce the heat in cities,” a Bloomberg piece (7/10/15) about Europe’s heatwave said, quoting environmental epidemiologist Pierre Masselot. “But at the end of the day, all these measures won’t probably be as efficient as just reducing climate change altogether, and so reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.” This article appeared in the site’s “Green” section.
In another piece (7/7/25) regarding AI’s energy demands in the “Green” section, the outlet also makes the connection to climate change. Bloomberg quoted a statement from environmental law organization Earthjustice:
Coal, gas and oil fired power plants spew millions of pounds of health-harming and climate-warming pollution into the air each year, and cost consumers millions of dollars more than cleaner energy sources.
While thorough climate reporting and mentions of the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for global heating are difficult to find in the Rupert Murdoch-ownedWall Street Journal, its “Sustainable Business” section (6/30/25) recently covered how companies are reporting fewer details about how climate change and extreme weather are impacting their business.
In its “Sustainability” section, Reuters (7/1/25) discussed the EU heatwave’s links to climate change and fossil fuel emissions. “Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are a cause of climate change, with deforestation and industrial practices being other contributing factors,” Clotaire Achi, Emma Pinedo and Alvise Armellini wrote. “Last year was the planet’s hottest on record.”
The ‘silent majority’
Recent studies have revealed that between 80–89% of people worldwide are concerned about climate change and want their governments to do more to address it. But this vast majority of global citizens is ignored by reporting that treats the relentless extraction of fossil fuels as a source of profit rather than an existential threat. The climate journalism resource group Covering Climate Now, of which FAIR is a partner, refers to these people as the “silent majority.” Public support is widespread, but public discourse is lagging behind.
Major publications should not relegate the causes of climate change to their science and environmental sections. They need to be front and center in pieces that focus on the industry responsible for driving it, profiting from it and lying to the public about it for decades.
This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about mass deportation for the July 11, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: As is being reported, including by Belén Fernández for FAIR.org, among the myriad horrors of Trump’s budget bill—though not his alone; everyone who voted for it owns it—is the otherworldly amount of money, $175 billion, slated to fund mass deportation. That exceeds the military budget of every country in the world but the US and China. And some $30 billion is to go to ICE, the masked goons that are descending on swap meets and workplaces to carry out what many are calling brazen midday kidnappings.
We knew that this White House would be horrible for Black and brown people, and for immigrants especially, and yet we can still be shocked at how bad and how fast things are happening. Despair might be understandable, but it’s not particularly useful. So what do we do? What can we do?
Joining us now is Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.
JJ: We see the narrative shifting. “Hey, he said it was just going to be violent criminals, or criminals, or people whose crime is administrative, but now, this is getting weird.” What’s happening now, the rounding up of anyone brown, basically, including people who are actively engaged in the legal processes of securing citizenship—we can be outraged, but I’m less sure about surprised, just because there was no “decent” way to do what Trump telegraphed he wanted to do.
At the same time, though, I don’t know that anyone really expected masked men spilling out of vans to snatch up children off the street. So, just first of all, did you even imagine the particular situation we’re seeing right now? You explained back in January how the apparatus were set up, but is this surprising, even at your level of understanding?
SS: I think what’s so shocking about this moment is that the scale of what has happened before is becoming astronomical. So, as you mentioned, $175 billion for immigration enforcement, $30 billion for ICE agents in particular, $35 billion for immigration detention. These are just wild numbers, and I think that is really what is so shocking.
Public Books (3/20/25)
I do think—we’re speaking here on CounterSpin—one of the biggest challenges of the last 20, 30 years of immigration enforcement, and how it’s been portrayed, is that there is a constant framing of immigration as a public safety issue, immigration as a national security issue, which is really not true. Mostly immigration is about labor, it’s about family relationships, it’s about seeking refuge.
And I think what’s so frustrating is that, actually, for many, many years of having this narrative of “some immigrants are deserving and some immigrants aren’t,” the “good immigrant versus the bad immigrant,” what ends up happening is where we’re at now, which it’s like all immigrants are perceived as a problem. And there’s no question that there’s an underlying racism and xenophobia and classism and all the other things at play here.
I think what’s so important for us to understand now, when we’re talking about the way ICE is operating, is that it’s been enabled by that framework—that when you reinforce this idea that some people are deserving, then you kind of expect everybody to be in that category. And in reality, the way the system worked before, is that people were being funneled through the criminal legal system. And this really skyrocketed the number of people who are in deportation proceedings, especially under the Obama administration. So this framework of “we are going to target people who are criminals,” it’s a distraction; the goal is to scapegoat immigrants, and all immigrants, and ignore the crisis of mass incarceration, which ICE is inherently a part of.
JJ: Where is the law in all of this? Is it that there are laws that exist, but aren’t being enforced? Is it that the law has changed, such that what we’re seeing is terrible, but lamentably legal? Do laws need to be changed? I think a lot of folks see masked men spilling out of vans and snatching kids and think, “That can’t be legal.” But is it?
Silky Shah: “They’re actually using immigration enforcement as a pretense to go after people who don’t agree with their ideas.”
SS: Well, I think there are some aspects of this that have been baked into the law for 30 years now, and some aspects that are new. And so I think it’s important to understand that. When you think about it, this initial framing of, “Oh, people are being disappeared and kidnapped,” came when a lot of students who had protested or expressed solidarity with Palestine were being targeted by ICE, many of whom had not had contact with the criminal legal system, many of whom had legal status in some form, including Green Cards and visas.
In that context, 30 years ago, when they passed the 1996 immigration laws, it actually started to expand the category of people who didn’t get due process, who didn’t have the right to due process; that included newly arriving immigrants, and also people who were legal permit residents, or had visas but had some crime, some conviction, that meant that they no longer had a right to make their case before a judge, and were required to be detained, required to be deported.
And so all of that stuff has been happening for decades now, and there are many aspects of what happened. Being separated from your family, even if you have a pregnant wife, all those things are quite normal. And also not having a warrant; I mean, ICE goes after immigrants all the time without a warrant. And a lot of our work has been to help people know their rights, know what is needed. But I think the thing that’s scary is that they’re actually using immigration enforcement as a pretense to go after people who don’t agree with their ideas, people who might be showing support for Palestine, or merely because they are Black and brown, and are an easy scapegoat for this administration.
So I think there are things that are happening outside of the scope of the law, and I think the test cases here are those students who were detained, and also the case of the many people who were sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. I think those are instances where you’re just like, “Wow, that is definitely outside of law, and they’re operating in these ways that are really concerning.” But they’re also using these as strategies to change the law, which is what we saw recently with the men who are being deported to South Sudan, were stuck in Djibouti for many weeks, and now officially are in South Sudan. And the Supreme Court deeming that OK.
JJ: It’s bizarre.
You mentioned last time how much local- and state-level buy-in is required for this whole plan to work. Yes, there’s ICE. Yes, there is the Trump administration, but they do rely on state and local law enforcement, and other officials, to make this play out. Is that still a place to look for resistance, then?
SS: Absolutely. And I think it’s especially important now that we double down on those efforts because, yes, ICE is going to have $45 billion more over the next four years to build more detention centers, and our goal is to block that in every way, and make sure that isn’t permanent. And a lot of our strategy is getting local officials, state officials, to do that work, to say, “No, we don’t want a new ICE detention center in our community.” Once ICE detention exists in the community, people are much more likely to be targeted for deportation. Detention exists to facilitate deportation.
So in places like Illinois and Oregon, for instance, there are no detention centers. And that actually helps protect communities that much more.
And I think, unfortunately, a lot of Democratic governors are responding in ways that are not ideal. I think in places like California and Washington State and other places, there needs to be a lot of work to say no, we have to double down on these policies that have protected immigrant communities, and expand them, and make sure that those transfers to ICE aren’t happening, so that we can limit ICE’s reach as much as possible. It’s still the most effective way to prevent them from getting the scale of deportations they want. The easiest way for them to do this is through these ICE/police collaborations, and stopping that is essential.
But also, in places like Florida, where Ron DeSantis is doing everything possible to work with ICE, and building things like this Everglades detention camp, and having agreements with ICE at every county jail. There’s been numerous deaths, actually, in Florida already, of people who have been in ICE custody. And so it really shows you the harm that that sort of relationship between state and local law enforcement does to make ICE even that much stronger. So I think there is this constant attention on ICE, but we have to understand that ICE operates within a broader apparatus around criminalization and the deportation machine, that many, many law enforcement agencies, including sheriffs, are central to.
JJ: And just to add to that: It’s about money, as you’ve explained. It comes back to money. Prisons—we can call them “detention centers”—bring money to a locality. And so that is part of the unseen or underexplored aspect of this, is that when you build a holding cell, then you’re going to put people in it. And that is part of what explains what’s happening.
SS: Absolutely. I think that this is so about the political economy, and some people have referred to this new MAGA murder bill as a jobs program. If you have this much more money for ICE, this much more money for detention, that means more jobs in these communities. And this is what we saw for years and years during the prison boom, is that many rural communities that were struggling financially were seeing prison as a recession-safe economy, like an ability to bring in jobs.
And especially when it comes to the relationship between sheriffs and ICE, there’s a symbiosis there between the federal government and local counties, that local counties are really depending on its revenue. I think one of our biggest challenges when we’re trying to work to end a detention contract is that fear of losing jobs, and that fear of losing that revenue.
JJ: Let me just ask you, feeding off of that, to talk about #CommunitiesNotCages. What is the vision there? What are you talking about there, and where can folks see another way forward?
SS: Yeah, we launched a #CommunitiesNotCages campaign many years ago, under Trump’s first term, and we’re actually about to relaunch, because the amount of money that’s going to the system, the scale of what’s going to happen, I think we need to bring a lot more people in.
But a lot of it was actually responding to local organizing against detention. So we were seeing, in places like Alabama and Georgia and Arizona and elsewhere, that people were calling attention to the existing detention system and the harm that it was doing, the number of deaths that were happening, people hunger-striking in facilities. We were trying to really do work to get resources to them, make sure people are strategizing together.
And then in places like the Midwest, for years, so many groups were doing work to stop a new detention center from coming in. ICE wanted to have one large detention center in Illinois or Indiana or elsewhere. And they tried to build it in nine or ten different sites, and at every site they were able to organize with local community, or work with the state legislature, to stop detention expansion.
And so what we did was bring a lot of these communities together, the people who are organizing this campaign, thinking about state legislation, thinking about strategies with local counties or city councils, to learn from each other, and figure out, “OK, what can we do?”
Because one of the things we discovered, and we did some research on this, is that when there’s a detention center in your community, so if you have, say, 50 beds for detention, somebody’s two times more likely to be targeted for deportation. If you have 800 beds, somebody’s six times more likely to be targeted for deportation. And so that ability to cut off the detention capacity actually prevented increased deportation.
So we really see #CommunitiesNotCages as a part of the strategy to end this mass deportation agenda, and also really connect to that broader effort against the prison industrial complex and against the crisis of mass incarceration, which does so much harm and are really, I think Mariame Kaba has called them “death-making institutions.” I mean, we’re seeing that numerous deaths have just happened in the last few weeks.
And so we’re really concerned about the conditions right now. I’m the first person to say Trump is building on what’s a bipartisan agenda, for decades now, against immigrants. But the scale of what’s happening, and how abysmal these facilities are becoming, are even shocking to me, as somebody who’s been doing this work for 20 years.
So I think this is the time where we can’t give in. Yes, they got this $45 billion, but actually, we have a lot of ability to stop them from implementing their plans, and we really need to gear up and fight as much as we can.
JJ: Well, that sounds very much like an end, and yet I am going to push for one final question, because we need a positive vision. What we’re seeing, what’s passing for a positive vision on immigration right now is, “But he makes my tacos! He waters my lawn! Don’t come for him!” And it makes immigration feel like noblesse oblige. It’s very nice of “us” that we let “them” live here.
And we can debunk all day: Immigrants dopay taxes, they aren’t stealing jobs. It’s also mean and small as a vision. And I just feel that there’s a positive, forward-looking vision that we could be talking about.
SS: I think one of the most challenging things about the way the mainstream immigrant advocacy efforts over the last 20 years have hurt our ability to make the case for immigrants is that they’ve really reinforced the idea of the good immigrant versus bad immigrant. And when they’re talking about the “good immigrant,” a lot of it really pushes this idea of immigrant exceptionalism or productivity, or immigrants are better than everyone else.
Often there’s this narrative of “immigrants commit less crimes than US citizens,” which just reinforces both anti-Black racism and the idea that immigration is about public safety, which it’s not.
And so again, as I was saying before, immigration is really largely about labor and family relationships, and also the root causes of migration. A lot of the narrative hasn’t allowed us to talk about US empire, and the role that the US has played in destabilizing a lot of other countries and conditions for people across the world.
So when I think about a vision—and I hope that we can move forward in a different way—is that actually part of the reason immigrants have been able to be scapegoated is because the US government and billionaires have created a crisis, an economic crisis, for so many people. And what we really need to understand is that immigrants are central to our community, that we are in this together—like having better healthcare; having better, more affordable housing; having better education opportunities, those things are going to make it easier for us to make the case for immigrants.
So I think, actually, we need to really deeply show that immigration is connected to every issue, whether it be climate, whether it be housing, etc., all these things, and see us in it together and think about this as a broader question of working people, working-class, poor people, and really not exceptionalizing immigrants.
And the other thing I would just say is that in so many ways, immigration detention in particular is being treated as an aside, as this other issue: small, not big, and whatever, there’s mass incarceration, there’s deportation. But now it’s being used as a testing ground for Trump’s authoritarianism. And so we really need to see that, actually, the way they’re operating around immigration creates risks for all of us. And, again, the reason why it’s so important that we see our struggles intertwined, and that we work together on this.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah from the Detention Watch Network. They’re online at DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Thank you so much, Silky Shah, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: The US official stance about the UN is, basically, they’re not the boss of us. But: If it looks like they can make hay with it, then sure. That’s why Secretary of State Marco Rubio is declaring “sanctions” against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, following an unsuccessful pressure campaign to force the UN to remove her from her post. Albanese has long been clear in calling on the international community to halt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—but the thing that broke US warmongers was her naming in a recent report of corporations that are profiting from that genocide. We’ll talk about why talking about profiteering is so key with Iman Abid, director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Also on the show, and to the point: Victor Pickard will join us to talk about corporate actions that make sense as business deals—but, because this country has chosen to run the democratic lifeblood of journalism as just another business, affect everyone relying on news media to tell us about the world. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, ofDemocracy Without Journalism? from Oxford University press.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
President Donald Trump has just signed into law what will go down as perhaps the most significant legislative achievement of his second term in office. Dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislation is set to extend most of the tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, while making deep cuts to social programs and gutting Biden-era climate provisions, among other sweeping changes (FAIR.org, 7/9/25).
The bill will have a remarkably regressive distributional impact. While top incomes will balloon by thousands of dollars, lower-income Americans will actually see their incomes decline. One analysis from before the bill’s final passage found that its major provisions would reduce incomes for the bottom 20% by about 2%.
Tax cuts, after all, are only one part of the bill. More relevant to lower-income Americans is that this bill will deliver the largest cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in US history.
Such a historic weakening of the safety net—the programs that support the finances of lower-income Americans—should warrant not only major attention, but significant scrutiny from national media outlets. And yet, at the New York Times, the approach has been to distract and obscure above all else.
‘Defined by staggering debt’
As Trump slashed $1 trillion from healthcare, the New York Times (6/27/25) stressed the importance of reducing the deficit.
One manifestation of this approach has been the Times’ insistence on elevating the bill’s effect on the debt as a foremost concern. In the week or so leading up to the bill’s passage, in fact, both an editorial (6/27/25) and an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (7/2/25) were dedicated entirely to a discussion of the national debt.
The Daily episode went as far as claiming, “The legislation is defined by the staggering amount of debt that it’s creating.” It then warned of the potential for a debt “doom loop,” whereby rising debt raises borrowing costs and forces the government to issue more debt in order to pay for its existing debt load.
Meanwhile, the Times editorial board opted to focus more heavily on the costs already being imposed by high federal debt. In a piece titled “The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize,” the board highlighted the “staggering amount of money” the government puts towards interest payments each year. The board’s solution:
The government needs to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, and it needs to make long-term changes in Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of spending growth.
In other words, at a time when the Republican Party is gutting the safety net in epic fashion, the New York Times is coyly hinting that Social Security and Medicare will need to be cut.
‘Enough to repair every bridge’
The New York Times‘ own chart (6/27/25) indicates that Trump’s budget bill will have only a modest impact on US interest payments. What did cause interest costs to soar was the political decision to fight inflation through higher interest rates, a decision the Times applauded (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23).
Across both the editorial and the podcast episode, the primary reason put forward by the Times for concern over the national debt was the borrowing costs associated with it. But is the bill’s effect on borrowing costs—the amount of money the federal government will have to spend to pay off the interest on its debts—genuinely that significant of a concern?
The Times editorial board seems to think so. Warning of the ill effects of increasing borrowing costs, the board observed:
The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.
This comparison is useful to a degree. It exposes the priorities of the Trump administration, which seems to value tax cuts for the wealthy above delivering basic public goods.
But the comparison ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. The reality is that $55 billion is a relatively small sum for the US government. It represents only about 0.8% of the 2024 federal budget, and 0.2% of US GDP.
High cost of high interest rates
The interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bills has risen from 0.6% in 2020 to 4.5% today (chart: CNBC).
The total amount the federal government pays in interest—the amount it pays in excess of what it borrowed when it pays back loans—is of course much larger: The Times relays that interest payments are on pace to surpass $1 trillion this year, representing around 15% of last year’s federal budget. As the editorial board notes, this level of spending on interest payments crowds out other, more useful spending by the government. In other words, it does impose a not-insignificant cost.
What the board de-emphasizes or ignores, however, is that high interest payments are really just a symptom of other more fundamental policy choices.
On the one hand, they reflect the political decision to rely on the blunt instrument of interest rates to combat the pandemic-era spike in inflation. The result has been a rise in interest rates on ten-year government bonds, from under 1% in 2020 to above 4% today.
This was not an inevitable development. Other methods exist for combating inflation. But these methods were sidelined in favor of a regressive, debt-inflating approach. Would you know this by reading the Times editorial? Absolutely not.
The incredibly low tax rate
The United States has one of the lowest effective tax rates among wealthy countries (chart: Tax Policy Center).
On the other hand, high interest payments also reflect the political decision to run up the US debt load through tax cuts for the wealthy. This history of tax cuts is discussed by the editorial board, but it is framed as more of a secondary issue. Little would readers know that the crowding-out effect imposed by high interest payments, which the Times depicts climbing above the cost of Social Security in coming years, is dwarfed by the crowding-out effect of low tax revenue.
For such a rich country, the US collects incredibly little in taxes. Its tax revenue registers a meager 29% of GDP, compared to 42% in Canada, 52% in France and 62% in Norway.
Meanwhile, interest payments as a percentage of GDP are set to double over the next 30 years, reaching about 6% of GDP in the 2050s. That’s not even half the revenue deficit the US faces versus Canada—and Canada’s a low-tax country compared to France and Norway!
The Times nonetheless has run no editorial in recent months decrying the US for being such a low-tax country. Even in its editorial about interest payments, a breakdown of the pitiful state of US tax collection by international standards is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a muddled denunciation of the bill’s irresponsible contribution to burdensome borrowing costs.
But, again, the bill’s contribution is tiny. Yes, interest payments are projected to reach 6% of GDP by the 2050s, but they will hit 5% even in the absence of this bill. With this single percentage of GDP boost in borrowing costs, the bill imposes a cost in 30 years that is a fraction of the cost of our tax deficit versus Canada today.
‘People benefit from working’
In its one editorial (5/23/25) on the reconciliation bill’s cuts to the safety net, the New York Times endorsed the idea “that some government benefits should be tied to employment.”
This is not to say that the Big Beautiful Bill will not impose Major Gratuitous Pain. But it is to say that such pain will not be found in an analysis of its impact on borrowing costs.
Rather, where we should look to see clear evidence of negative effects is the savings side of the bill, where Republicans have enacted brutal cuts to the social safety net, cuts that the economist James Galbraith calls “the direct result of bipartisan scaremongering over deficits and debt.”
The Times editorial board has run one editorial (5/23/25) on the bill’s cuts to the safety net. Published over a month before the bill’s passage, the piece was headlined “Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” As it pointed out, the Republican bill would reverse the progress that has been made over the past decade or so in expanding health insurance access to more Americans.
Oddly, however, the editorial extended an olive branch to the GOP, conceding:
We are sympathetic to the idea that some government benefits should be tied to employment. People benefit from working, and society benefits when more people are working.
Explaining the decision to insert this concession into the piece, editorial director David Leonhardt (New York Times, 7/1/25) has since elaborated:
I actually understand why, at a top-line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.
This is a baffling explanation. As worded in the editorial, it appears that the board is expressing sympathy for work requirements for some existing government benefits, and justifying them with reference to the value of work, despite work requirements’ long history of doing nothing to increase employment. Yet Leonhardt gives no example of a current government program that should be saddled with a work requirement. Instead, he merely expresses his opposition to universal basic income, using conservative arguments against the policy in doing so. This level of clarity, however, may be all we can expect from the Times.
Unnoted cutbacks
At least as notable as the contents of the editorials published by the Times on the Big Beautiful Bill is what the Times has failed to highlight about the legislation. After all, the paper has run just two editorials on what is probably the most regressive major piece of legislation in at least a generation. What have these missed? A lot.
For one, the largest cuts to food stamps in history are entirely absent from the Times editorial board’s critiques of the bill. That millions would lose access to food stamps and tens of millions would see their benefits cut is apparently an afterthought for the board. It evidently does not warrant the denunciation that somewhat higher borrowing costs require.
Decimation of clean energy provisions and heavy new restrictions on student loans likewise appear a grand total of zero times in the Times’ editorials on the bill. This is the sort of resistance that the most prominent establishment newspaper in the country has to offer.
‘Big ugly battle’
The situation at the Daily has been better, though it had only a rather low bar to clear. Through the day the bill was signed into law, the show published three episodes on the legislation. The first (6/5/25), titled “The Big Ugly Battle Over the Big Beautiful Bill,” touched on the bill’s attacks on climate provisions in its first half, and devoted its second half to a conversation about cuts to Medicaid.
Food stamps, by contrast, were mentioned in just two sentences. And student loans didn’t make a single appearance.
The following episode (7/2/25), discussed above, centered on the debt, but the third episode (7/4/25) dedicated additional airtime to cuts to the safety net, again including a discussion of Medicaid cuts in the second half of the episode. Its first half also centered the serious negative impacts of the legislation, mostly focusing on the array of tax cuts in the bill, but framing the overall impact as wildly regressive:
The most important thing to know about this package is that it delivers its greatest benefits to the wealthy, and it extracts its greatest cuts on the poor.
The largest cuts to food stamps in American history, however, garnered no airtime. Same goes for the massive pullback in student loans.
A ripple in a tsunami
We found only two New York Times headlines like this one (6/5/25)—out of nearly 800 in its US politics section—that straightforwardly conveyed the impact of the budget bill’s cuts.
Unfortunately, this poor coverage is not limited to Times editorials and the Daily. As it turns out, the news section of the Times has been similarly lacking in serious coverage.
The paper’s US Politics section is case in point. From the start of June through July 4, when Trump signed his bill into law, this section of the Times featured a total of seven articles that mentioned “food stamp(s),” “SNAP” or “food aid” in either their headline or subhead. For “Medicaid,” “health cuts” and “Obamacare,” the number was ten.
But few of these articles bore headlines straightforwardly reporting the facts of what’s projected to happen to millions of Americans as a result of cuts to food stamps and healthcare spending. In total, only two headlines, both about healthcare, really fit this description:
“GOP Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, CBO Says” (6/29/25)
“Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill” (6/5/25)
Other headlines mentioned cuts, but some didn’t even reference that information. For instance, one headline (6/3/25) read, “Trump Administration Backs Off Effort to Collect Data on Food Stamp Recipients.”
Amazingly, at least in the US Politics section of the paper, zero headlines included the phrase “student loans,” despite substantial retrenchment in student loan policy. The term “safety net” appeared in the headline or subhead of only six articles.
With around 800 articles appearing in the Times’ US Politics section during this timeframe, coverage of historic cuts to crucial safety net programs resembled a ripple in a tsunami.
‘Fair to criticize Democrats’
The type sizes conveys the relative importance the New York Times (7/1/25) places on prices paid by politicians vs. those paid by the public.
Nonetheless, when Times editorial director David Leonhardt was asked whether he thinks “Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening,” given the lack of public outcry so far, he gave credit to Republicans for succeeding in minimizing public opposition, and blamed Democrats for failing to make a bigger deal out of the bill:
I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.
The role of corporate media, and more particularly of the New York Times, may never have even crossed Leonhardt’s mind. But, of course, the Times is a critical player in US politics. With around 12 million subscribers and millions of daily listeners to the Daily, the outlet has incredible reach. If it wanted to, the Times could play a significant role in raising public awareness of this bill. The problem is that it seems completely uninterested in adopting this role.
I would argue, therefore, that the paltry public outcry is fundamentally a result of editorial decisions, not least those made at the Times. By refusing to cover cuts to the social safety net with more than minimal urgency, the Times has done a good deal to deprive the Democratic Party and other opponents of the legislation of the sort of informational environment in which public opposition to harmful policies can be effectively mobilized.
Through inaction, through poor coverage, the Times is making a political choice to undermine opposition to some of the Trump administration’s most damaging policies.
In recent years, transgender Americans have seen an exponentially growing assault on their rights.
In the first half of 2025 alone, 942 anti-trans bills have been introduced throughout the country—more than were introduced in all of 2024—and since taking office, President Donald Trump has signed no fewer than 12 anti-trans executive orders.
It’s an attack that the New York Times editorial board called “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans” (2/9/25). The editorial explained that the attacks seek
to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender-neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.
But the irony of the Times‘ condemnation of transphobia was not lost on those familiar with the paper’s history of biased, sensationalistic coverage of trans issues. As transgender journalist and media critic Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning, 2/9/25) put it, “The New York Times does not get to erase its role in how we got here.”
Follow-up study
For years, media journalists and critics, including here at FAIR, have called out the Times’ pattern of platforming transphobes before trans people, spreading dangerous misinformation and framing trans rights as up for debate (FAIR.org, 5/19/23, 8/30/23, 5/28/24).
A 2023 FAIR study (5/11/23) found that in a year of front-page coverage of trans issues, rather than centering the growing assault on the trans community and its impact on that community, the Times largely focused on whether “trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly.”
FAIR conducted a follow-up study looking at the Times’ front-page stories between February 2024 and January 2025. This time we found slightly more coverage, but even fewer trans voices. Even while feigning concern, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in centering trans people and perspectives in coverage of trans issues, while failing to challenge misleading and transphobic right-wing narratives.
Growing frequency, changing subject matter
FAIR found that the New York Times‘ front page featured stories about trans issues 13 times, with an additional 49 pieces that mentioned the word “transgender.” It’s a small increase from the 2023 study, which found nine trans-centered stories and 30 pieces that mentioned but did not center trans issues.
It’s still far less coverage than the paper’s national competitor, the Washington Post, gave trans issues in the 2023 study: 22 front-page stories and 54 front-page story mentions.
FAIR also found a sharp drop in the Times’ use of trans sources, from 19% in the previous period to 11% (14 sources). Where in the last study, each of the nine front-page articles quoted at least one trans source, our new study found three of the Times‘ 13 pieces, or 23%, lacking any trans or nonbinary person’s perspective.
Once again, most of the Times‘ front-page stories about trans issues were not centered on trans people and the issues they face, but on trans people as a problem for cisgender people—whether athletes (“Volleyball Team in Grip of Fierce Debate on Transgender Rights”—11/29/24) or politicians (“Debating Role of Trans Rights in Harris’s Loss”— 11/21/24).
In the last study, six of the nine front-page articles questioned gender-affirming care or pitted trans rights against the rights of others (such as parents or cis women). A year later, those themes are still prominent (four articles), while the paper’s attention to trans issues in the political arena increased, from one article to eight. Yet despite the increased attention—which followed the escalating right-wing anti-trans campaign that took trans rights to the Supreme Court and the center of the 2024 presidential campaign—the paper’s framing still repeatedly adopts or fails to challenge right-wing narratives.
This year, FAIR counted sources that advanced misinformation about trans issues that went unchallenged in the story, such as those that claimed that gender-affirming care is ineffective, experimental or risky, or that used anti-trans talking points that the Times failed to present without critical context. Such sources generalized gender-affirming care as irreversible, exaggerated detransition rates, or claimed that trans women hold a wholesale advantage in women’s sports. Fourteen sources (11%) were in this category—equal to the number of trans people who appeared as sources.
FAIR also found that nine sources (7%) had undisclosed anti-trans backgrounds—lending credence to these sources’ authority on trans issues by concealing their prior anti-trans advocacy or rhetoric. Of these sources, two were allowed to spread misinformation without challenge.
The front-page articles all fell into one of three broad themes: gender-affirming medical care and related court battles (five articles), non-court politics (five articles) and sports and culture (three articles).
Questioning ‘gender drugs’
The New York Times put five pieces covering gender-affirming care for minors on its front page: three covering related court battles in the US and two questioning its efficacy. These five pieces accounted for more than half of the cases of unchallenged misinformation (9)—painting gender-affirming care as risky, experimental and ineffective—and of obscured anti-trans backgrounds (5). Combined, these five pieces had only four trans sources.
The three pieces covering court battles focused largely on the legal technicalities of whether bans on care constitute sex discrimination, rather than how these bans would impact trans minors, adults and their families. They overwhelmingly quoted judges and lawyers, marginalizing the voices of trans people and their families, and leaving unchallenged the premises that care is “experimental” (12/4/24, 12/5/24) and poses “significant risks with unproven benefits” (12/4/24).
Two of the court-related articles followed the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on care for minors in Tennessee (12/4/24, 12/5/24); both quoted Chase B. Strangio, the trans ACLU lawyer representing the families in the case, in his oral arguments, but quoted no other trans people or advocates speaking to how these bans could impact trans people and their families. (The first also quoted a line from the families’ legal argument about parental rights.)
We counted more pieces of misinformation in this New York Times story (4/10/24) than in any other piece in our study.
Both of the pieces questioning care for minors were written by Azeen Ghorayshi, a Times science reporter who has previously been criticized for misreporting the experiences of trans minors and their families, misrepresenting study findings, and promoting unsubstantiated claims that contributed in part to the closure of a St. Louis youth gender clinic. Ghorayshi’s two front-page pieces reveal continued misrepresentation and lack of trans perspectives.
The first was “Britain Limits Gender Drugs for Children” (4/10/24), which recapped the NHS-commissioned Cass Review, while also promoting misinformation pertaining to the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care. (This article contained four pieces of unchallenged misinformation, the most of any in our study period, and only included one trans source.)
The article eagerly accepted the authority of “independent pediatrician” Dr. Hilary Cass in her finding that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” Not only did the piece fail to mention that this claim is disputed by the leading world health authorities and every major medical association in the US, it also omitted that Cass had no prior experience or expertise in working with trans patients, nor did most of her named contributors.
The only challenge Ghorayshi presented to the review, which is littered with serious methodological flaws, was unrelated to the quality of Cass’s research or her lack of credentials. Instead, she mentioned that transgender advocacy groups in Europe have condemned legislative changes informed by Cass’s findings, before quickly describing these changes as “notably different from the outright bans for adolescents passed in 22 US states.” (Ghorayshi didn’t note that Cass contributed to a similarly politically motivated report in Florida, which was used to justify the state’s ban on care.)
‘Unpublished because of politics’
Since Joanna Olson-Kennedy’s study does not have a control group, she was concerned that her data would be misused to suggest that puberty blockers are ineffective—which is exactly what this New York Times article (10/23/24) does.
The second piece, “Doctor, Fearing Outrage, Slows a Gender Study” (10/24/24), and its web version, “US Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says” (10/23/24), insinuate that researcher Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy might have withheld study data because it undermined her pro-gender-affirming care agenda.
Though the print version reached nearly 1500 words, it only quoted three sources, none of which are trans: Olson-Kennedy, who has specialized in the treatment of trans children and adolescents for close to two decades, another researcher critical of her decision to delay publication, and Hilary Cass.
The piece’s central implication is that, because “puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” in the unpublished study data, this undermines the case for gender-affirming care.
But puberty blockers are not prescribed to “improve” mental health—as described by an Erin in the Morning (10/23/24) factcheck, they’re intended to “prevent deleterious effects of puberty.” Puberty blockers give trans kids and their families time to weigh their options and avoid poor mental health outcomes—so the way to know whether puberty blockers are effective is to compare those with dysphoria who receive them with those that do not. Olson-Kennedy’s study does not have a control group; therefore, she is concerned that her longitudinal data, which show neither increase nor decrease on average in mental health, would be misused to suggest that puberty blockers are ineffective—which is exactly what Ghorayshi’s article does.
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” Olson-Kennedy is quoted in the article. And indeed, thanks to the New York Times, it has been: Senate Republicans soon launched an inquiry (12/5/24) into the study, heavily citing the Times article, and linking the release of study data to Britain’s restriction on gender-affirming care.
‘Tapping into fears’
Five articles were related to right-wing political attacks on trans rights, a noticeable increase from the previous study period (which ran one such article). But the increase does not reflect an improvement in coverage. Rather than looking at the impacts on trans people, the Times framed the issue primarily as a political football.
The New York Times (10/9/24) framed anti-trans “fears” as natural, pre-existing phenomena, rather than a political phenomenon that the GOP worked tirelessly to promote.
For instance, the paper published two front-page pieces on the role of trans rights in the presidential election: “Anti-Trans Ads Become Focus for the GOP” (10/9/24) and “Debating Role of Trans Rights in Harris’s Loss” (11/21/24). Each included just one trans source, and also included two guests who had their anti-trans perspectives obscured, along with two pieces of unchallenged misinformation about the biological advantages of trans girls in sports.
These pieces were much more interested in evaluating the political effectiveness of scapegoating as a campaign strategy than they were with the bigotry of the approach or the dangerous implications for the scapegoated minority in question.
National political correspondent Shane Goldmacher led with an explanation that Republican candidates are “tapping into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons.” That frames such “fears” as natural, pre-existing phenomena, rather than a political phenomenon that the GOP worked tirelessly to promote—and that the Times, with such coverage, is abetting.
Goldmacher continued:
Most of the Republican ads do not criticize the transgender community in general. Instead, they zero in on specific wedge cases, such as transgender women and girls in sports, transgender women’s sharing of locker rooms, the use of taxpayer funds for gender-affirming surgery for people in prison and access to transition services for minors, such as puberty blockers.
Yes, trans kids, adolescents and incarcerated people receiving gender-affirming healthcare make up a tinyproportion of the population, and transgender girls in athletics make up a negligible sum at the K-12 and collegiate levels; but how do attacks on trans people receiving healthcare and trans children participating in extracurricular activities not constitute an attack on the “transgender community in general”?
‘Trans rights in Harris’s loss’
The New York Times‘ focus (11/21/24) was on Democrats facing the “challenge” of trans rights; the much more consequential challenge—that of the existential attack by Republicans on trans people—is presented as an afterthought.
In the post-election piece by reporters Adam Nagourney and Nicholas Nehamas—whose web headline was “Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk About Transgender Rights”—the central question was again around political strategy: “Republicans clearly see a political opportunity,” they wrote, while for Democrats, “the question of how the party deals with transgender rights has emerged as a challenge for the years ahead.”
In this narrative, the protagonists are Democrats facing the “challenge” of trans rights; the much more consequential challenge—that of the existential attack by Republicans on trans people—is presented as an afterthought, wedged into two paragraphs at the very end of their lengthy piece: “Activists and others who work with transgender people, particularly transgender youths, say the political debate has resulted in a spike in reports of cyberbullying, online harassment and family tensions.” Nagourney and Nehamas followed this with a quote from Jaymes Black, CEO of the Trevor Project, about the “surge of calls to [the Trevor Project] crisis line.”
The paper also published two separate front-page articles covering transphobia at a Manhattan school board: “Spraying Vitriol, Parents in New York Clash Over What’s Taught” (4/5/24) and “A Culture-War Battle Roils a School Panel in Liberal Manhattan” (12/3/24).
Both pieces largely focused on arguments among parents, teachers and school officials, entirely omitting trans kids’ perspectives and including only one trans adult perspective (in the April 2024 piece). Both articles briefly quoted students expressing their concerns that enabling adult school board bullies to harass trans kids puts the “safety of the ‘most vulnerable students…at stake,’” but these students were afforded much less room to express their opinions than school board bullies themselves.
Scrutinizing trans advocates, not transphobes
This New York Times piece (11/27/24) was much more concerned with the fundamental unfairness of making people “put pronouns in their email signature” than of limiting the rights of gender and sexual minorities.
The one politics piece that centered trans people, “Trans Activists Question Tack Amid Backlash” (11/27/24), incredibly made the case that trans activists are the ones who ought to be under scrutiny at this political moment. It quoted more trans people (3) and advocates (3) combined than any other front-page article, but managed to present them in a way that raised outcry among the trans community (Erin in the Morning, 11/26/24).
“To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism,” the piece by Jeremy Peters began, and went on to describe criticisms and protests of public figures, including author J.K. Rowling, a notorious anti-trans activist, and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), the most prominent Democrat to suggest retreating from trans rights after Democrats’ election losses. “Now, some activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways,” Peters wrote, “and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.”
Peters characterized Rowling—the billionaire author–turned–transphobic activist, who recently founded a “women’s fund” entirely dedicated to funding anti-trans court battles—as simply saying “that denying any relationship between sex and biology was ‘deeply misogynistic and regressive.’” He was less generous with transgender activists, whom he criticized as sounding “too judgmental,” “dogmatic and intolerant” and “unreasonable.” For what, exactly? Peters pointed to social media activists who “police language,” insist “that everyone declare whether they prefer to be referred to as he, she or other pronouns,” and “put pressure on liberal candidates for office to take positions that align with theirs.”
Peters’ headline thesis (published on the web as “Transgender Activists Question the Movement’s Confrontational Approach”) hinged on exactly two trans sources. One of them, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, then–executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, released a statement disputing the Times‘ account:
Yesterday, [the] New York Times ran an article in which I was quoted as saying, “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” and “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Because my quotes were taken out of context, I’d like to clarify what I meant. Those statements were regarding how to persuade every day, undecided people in the public, not people who have already taken actions to oppose our equality.
In advising trans people to concede to bad faith arguments about how advocates are too aggressive in demanding respect, the Times prioritizes those harmed in fictitious hypotheticals over trans people harmed by transphobic narratives in real life. The piece at least includes one source who seems to understand this: Gillian Branstetter of the ACLU, who explained that such arguments attempting to “scapegoat” trans people are built upon a “fundamental unfairness.” They come, she said, from people who are not “interested in compromise and open debate.”
For the most part, however, the piece was much more concerned with the fundamental unfairness of making people “put pronouns in their email signature” than of limiting the rights of gender and sexual minorities.
Trans women (who aren’t) in women’s sports
In coverage of transphobic harassment campaigns, the New York Times (11/29/24) has outrage to spare for the act of bullying itself: just not a critical analysis of the transphobia underpinning it.
The two sports-focused articles continued the Times‘ pattern from last year of questioning the “fairness” of trans girls competing in girls’ sports; a third culture piece focused on religion.
“Olympic Officials Try to Quell Fury Over Fairness” (8/3/24) included no transgender sources or anti-trans misinformation—or, for that matter, a single trans subject. Instead, the piece focused on the transvestigation of Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, describing it as a “swirling controversy” that sparked a “fierce debate about biology, gender and fairness in women’s sports”—without connecting the overtly “political” speculation to a broader trend of rising transphobia.
It even obscured far-right, anti-LGBTQ Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s role in promoting claims that the boxers might be intersex or trans—she’d said of Khelif, “Athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions” (Fox News, 8/1/24). Her opinion was reduced to her statement that the boxing match “did not seem on equal footing.”
“Volleyball Team in Grip of Fierce Debate on Transgender Rights” (11/29/24) described the “complicated mess” confronting the women’s team at San Jose State University, where, after a right-wing website outed a trans player, a co-captain and assistant coach sued the team for allowing her to play. The article didn’t attempt to combat the co-captain’s smears that the player is a “man” or her lawyer’s claim that college administrators “‘have willfully neglected their duty’ to keep sports safe and fair” by allowing trans women to play on women’s teams—though it did mention multiple times that she is not “‘the best or most dominant hitter’” on her team, nor does she “lead any statistical category in her conference.”
(While research is limited on trans athletes’ biological advantages, analysis of existing literature comparing the physical capabilities of cis and trans women non-athletes finds that physical performance begins approaching that of cisgender women at at least two years of hormone-replacement treatments, and that there is a lack of evidence for a wholesale advantage for trans women athletes. Meanwhile, there are numerous benefits of allowing trans adolescents to play with their friends.)
Instead, while reporting the assistant coach’s claim that “she hits and blocks like a dude,” the piece sought its middle ground in the recognition that the player was also being dehumanized. The impression that readers were left with was that her participation may be unfair (though, again, she doesn’t have any advantage over her teammates), but that nonetheless, “she’s being targeted” by a “mob mentality.”
This point of analysis is not unwelcome—but doesn’t address the false premise that including a trans player somehow undermines the fairness of the whole game.
It also reinforced the false notion that the inclusion of trans athletes is a pressing issue in women’s sports, calling it “one of the most explosive issues in American life,” when in fact transgender college athletes are a negligible statistic: In December 2024, President Charlie Baker of the National Collegiate Athletic Association testified to a senate panel that of over 500,000 total college athletes, he believes that fewer than 10 are trans.
It’s clear that in coverage of transphobic harassment campaigns, the Times has outrage to spare for the act of bullying itself: just not a critical analysis of the transphobia underpinning it.
Meanwhile, “Some Christians Seek Truce in the Gender Wars” (5/18/24), by religion reporter Ruth Graham, focused on how some conservative Christian families are working to accept their trans children and offered perhaps the paper’s most nuanced front-page reporting on trans issues. It included three trans sources, one trans-allied advocate source and one allied family-member; it also quoted three transphobes and did not obfuscate their anti-trans positions.
The article included one piece of unchallenged misinformation, paraphrasing otherwise trans-sympathetic Colorado psychologist Julia Sadusky in her fears about “irreversible medical interventions” being administered to trans patients.
Such interventions are, in fact, exceedingly rare, and often deliberately mischaracterized—a small number of young teens are treated with hormone blockers, which are entirely reversible. Some older teens might undergo hormone treatments, which can cause more permanent changes, with the strict guidance of a medical team and parental consent. Vanishingly few trans minors receive surgical interventions.
Lacking analysis of transphobia
None of this is to say that the Times’ coverage hasn’t improved in some ways since 2023. This time around, FAIR found an absence of detransitioners, who in the previous study received disproportionate coverage that created a misleading picture of detransition rates.
FAIR also found that perspectives of family members of trans people were included for very different reasons from the 2023 study. While family members in the 2023 study largely served to cast doubt on the efficacy of gender-affirming care and the reality of gender-diverse experience, this time around, family members acted as advocates for their trans relatives’ interests.
However, for the most part, both quantitative and qualitative analysis finds that while the Times is aware of the outsized scrutiny that trans people received leading up to the 2024 election, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in critical coverage of transphobic scapegoating. Instead of affording trans people space to discuss how scapegoating is detrimental, especially to those most vulnerable (like trans children and their families), the Times seems much more concerned with civility and bothsidesism.
Note: The study looked at articles from the New York Times‘ print edition, as archived on the Nexis news database. The dates cited are the print dates, though the links naturally go to the online edition, typically dated a day earlier and given a different headline.
A FAIR study found that CNN’s primetime coverage of the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests in early June rarely included the voices of the protesters themselves. Instead, the network’s sources were overwhelmingly current and former government and law enforcement officials. The resulting coverage rarely took issue with Trump’s desire to silence the people who were defending their undocumented neighbors—but mainly debated his decision to deploy the California National Guard to do so.
FAIR recorded the sources that appeared in the 5–10 pm timeslot during two key days, June 9 and 10, of CNN’s television coverage of the Los Angeles protests; the shows included were the Lead with Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360 and the Source With Kaitlan Collins.
The sources were categorized by current or former occupation, and on whether they were a featured guest—who typically field multiple interview-style questions from an anchor—or simply a soundbite. Sources that made multiple appearances were counted once for each segment they appeared in. (CNN’s in-house “analysts” or “commentators” were counted as featured guests to reflect their significant impact on the perspectives shared on the shows.)
Out of 85 total sources across the eight broadcasts, only five were protesters, appearing on just three shows. None of the 47 featured guests were protesters or community or immigrant advocates.
By far the most frequent sources were current or former US government officials, with 55 appearances—a whopping 65% of total sources. Thirteen additional sources were law enforcement, and five were current or former military. Together, these official sources accounted for 86% of all appearances. (There were also three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists.)
Of featured guest and analyst interviews, current or former government officials dominated at 49% (23 out of 47). These sources were given the most time to present their perspectives, shaping the narrative around the protests and the government responses. Another 11 featured guests were law enforcement and two were military, so official sources accounted for 77% of all such interviews. The three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists made up the remaining featured guests.
‘Verbally at least hostile’
CNN‘s Kyung Lah (6/9/25) covers protests at LA’s Federal Building—while giving no sign of talking to any protesters.
CNN’s made-for-TV, on-the-ground style of protest coverage in the days following the Ambiance Apparel and Home Depot ICE raids felt little different from when Anderson Cooper stands around in a raincoat during a hurricane. Only this time, CNN reporters were braving an uncontrollable storm of Angelenos.
Much like Cooper’s coat, CNN senior investigative correspondent Kyung Lah (Erin Burnett OutFront, 6/9/25) donned protective goggles—useful should she have encountered tear gas, but also undoubtedly a dramatic flourish perfect for one of CNN’s 30-second TV spots.
That CNN was primarily interested in drama rather than helping viewers understand the protests became abundantly clear as—even with her protective goggles—Lah made no apparent effort to interview any protesters as she and CNN anchor Erin Burnett stood in front of LA’s federal detention center, where federal agents, LAPD and the California National Guard were in a standoff with demonstrators. Instead, they kept a close eye on every thrown water bottle, expressing concern about the crowd’s increasingly “young” demographic as the day went on. “This is a much younger crowd, certainly, verbally at least, Erin, hostile,” Lah reported.
The only protest voices that CNN’s audience heard from throughout both days of primetime coverage came in the form of two brief soundbites captured by correspondent Jason Carroll (Lead, 6/9/25) at a protest for the release of arrested SEIU leader David Huerta the morning of June 9.
Araceli Martinez, the only named protester in the study period with a soundbite on CNN ( 6/9/25).
Araceli Martinez, the only protester identified by name, offered a call to action for all Americans, arguing that the Trump administration’s immigration raids are a threat to “the rights of all people, not just the immigrants, but all of us.” That soundbite reaired on Erin Burnett Outfront and Anderson Cooper 360, both on June 9.
Another protester at the demonstration demanding Huerta’s release had this to say, with the soundbite reairing on Anderson Cooper 360, also on June 9:
We are part of that immigrant community that has made L.A. great, that has made the state of California the fourth largest economy in the world today. So, we have a message for President Donald Trump. Get the National Guardsmen out of here.
Multiple times during the first day studied, Lah held up that union-led protest as a standard of message discipline and nonviolent tactics that those outside the federal building, later in the day, weren’t measuring up to. The folks at the earlier protest were “a very different slice of Los Angeles than what I am seeing” at the federal building, Lah said. The key word there is “seeing,” as she did not interview a single protester on camera.
‘We do very good here with unrest’
CNN‘s Jake Tapper (6/10/25) interviews Rep. Adam Smith, who agrees that “you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, CNN brought on multiple featured guests who framed protesters as violent and law enforcement as the ones pushing for accountability—despite the fact that reported injuries of civilians by law enforcement far outnumbered those of law enforcement by protesters (FAIR.org, 6/13/25). LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman (OutFront, 6/10/25), for example, stated that he would work to “punish” all protesters who engage in “illegal conduct.”
Similarly, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (Source, 6/10/25) warned “anyone who goes out and is protesting in a way that is not peaceful…state and local and regional law enforcement will hold people accountable.”
Rep. Adam Smith told Jake Tapper (Lead, 6/10/25): “I don’t disagree that you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement, but there’s no evidence in this case that the LAPD wasn’t doing that.” Once you parse the double negatives, it’s clear that Smith, like the rest of CNN‘s official sources, accepted the characterization of protesters as violent and argued that the response of California law enforcement was perfectly appropriate.
Most of these state and local government sources were responding to questions about Trump calling in the National Guard and Marines; they were defending the local law enforcement response and challenging Trump’s decision.
CNN‘s Erin Burnett (6/9/25) interviews LA County Sheriff Robert Luna, who assures her his forces were “very good here with unrest.”
One of Burnett’s featured guests, for instance, was LA County Sheriff Robert Luna (OutFront, 6/9/25)—the leader of a police force that community activists say routinely collaborates with federal immigration raids (Democracy Now!, 6/9/25), and had just sparred with demonstrators in the Home Depot parking lot in Compton following the failed ICE raid there (New York Times, 6/14/25).
The primary focus of Burnett’s line of questioning was geared at exposing the political nature of Trump’s calling in the national guard:
Just a very simple question. Do you need the Marines? Do you need the National Guard right now? Or if you were looking at this situation and assessing it as sheriff of LA County, would you say you do not need them?
That’s certainly a critical line of questioning to get at the issue of federal overreach. But Burnett failed to similarly question (or even acknowledge) the violence by local law enforcement—which, by the time of Burnett’s broadcast, included 24 attacks on journalists with weapons like pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, according to Reporters Without Borders (FAIR.org, 6/13/25).
Instead, she left unchallenged Luna’s claims that “if they’re peacefully protesting, they’ll be allowed to do that,” that his utmost priority was “keeping our community safe,” and that his police force does “very good here with unrest.”
In doing so, Burnett framed the story as a question of whether putting down protests against sweeping raids of undocumented workers was the responsibility of federal troops or local law enforcement—rather than questioning why such protests were being met with force, and why local officials weren’t doing more to protect their immigrant communities.
Redefining safety
Democracy Now! (6/9/25) broadened the conversation by allowing protesters like Ron Gochez to take part in it.
Meanwhile, the protesters that received such little consideration from Burnett and CNN could have contributed to a very different definition of safety for CNN’s viewers. Ron Gochez, a community organizer and social studies teacher, who was one of the protesters at the ICE raid on Ambiance Apparel, described on Democracy Now! (6/9/25) how the protests have managed to protect people despite the efforts of local and federal officials:
When we have these protests, they have been peaceful. But when the repression comes from the state, whether it’s the sheriffs, the LAPD or, on Saturday, for example, in Paramount, California, it was the Border Patrol, it was brutal violence….
But what they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people would resist and would fight back. And that’s exactly what happened in Paramount and in Compton, California, where for eight-and-a-half hours, the people combatted in the streets against the Border Patrol…. They had to retreat because of the fierce resistance of the community. And the hundreds of workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape. They were able to go to their cars and go home. That was only thanks to the resistance that allowed them to go home that night.
The Trump administration is intent on testing just how far it can go to crush political dissent, and it’s clear most Democratic politicians and local law enforcement are not going to bat for the most vulnerable communities in its crosshairs. Angelenos know they are fighting for the rights of all of us who reside in the US. But CNN’s refusal to have them on air to discuss their struggle and explain their tactics makes it all the more difficult to raise public awareness. Pretending to challenge the deployment of federal troops, CNN normalizes police violence and silences those truly protecting their communities.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.
Janine Jackson interviewed RootsAction’s Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon about Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Party for the July 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In early June, Raina Lipsitz explained for FAIR.org how media can write about a political candidate in a way that sows doubt about their fitness without attacking them directly. “How to Subtly Undermine a Promising Left-Wing Candidate,” it was headlined.
Since then, Zohran Mamdani, who New York magazine described as “Crash[ing] the Party,” has won the Democratic mayoral primary here in New York City, and things have got a lot less subtle. We have billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman declaring that he will bankroll anyone—you hear that? anyone—who will keep Mamdani out of office. Breaking news as we record, Ackman has said current Mayor Eric Adams will be recipient of his riches—not, as he’s declared, due to any particular fitness on Adams’ part, but because he fills the brief of not being Zohran Mamdani.
Suffice to say, fissures are being revealed, lines are being drawn. And whatever you think of Mamdani or New York City in particular, the question of whether the Democratic Party, as it is, wants to be a part of the future or not is on the table.
And here’s the thing: Plenty of people are not being scared off by the idea that things could change. Elite media have no place in their brain for this concept, and we can expect to confront coverage reflecting that.
Joining me now to talk about this revealing, interesting moment are two people near and dear. Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, author of Cable News Confidential and many other things.
Norman Solomon, also in at FAIR’s founding, is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and author of numerous titles, including War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out in a new paperback edition.
They are, together, co-founders of the independent initiative RootsAction, where Jeff is policy director and Norman is national director. They both join me now by phone from wherever they are. Jeff and Norman, welcome back to CounterSpin.
JJ: They’re talking about Mamdani, but they’re telling us about themselves, and the values they represent all the time. I’m talking about news media.
So it’s worth taking a second to breathe in this New York Times editorial; I call it the “sniff heard round the world”: “He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.”
There’s just one sentence, but there’s a lot to unpack. The “trade-offs” for good governance: It’s hard to think of a clearer example of media’s transmission of the idea that somehow politics isn’t really for people. So, Jeff, Norman, why would anyone ask why people are disaffected with electoral politics, when this is the smart person’s explanation of how they work?
JC: It’s pretty revealing when you look at New York Times editorials, because I think middle-of-the-road news consumers, liberal news consumers, they know not to trust Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, or Murdoch’s New York Post. People understand that’s right-wing propaganda.
The moment we’re in, Janine, as you’re suggesting, it’s a teachable moment. Now people are realizing you can’t trust the New York Times, either. You can’t trust these corporate centrist news outlets.
You bring up a Times editorial. Last August, the Timessaid that they were no longer going to make endorsements in local or state races, but eight days before this primary election, they wrote an editorial that you would’ve thought they wrote so that the billionaires who were funding Cuomo, with this dark money Super PAC known as Fix the City, that was funded by Michael Bloomberg, it was funded by DoorDash, it was funded by Bill Ackman, the hedge fund guy….
It’s almost like the New York Times wrote an editorial attacking Mamdani, after they said they would no longer be making endorsements in local races, it’s almost like they were writing it so they could provide ad copy to Fix the City and attack ads.
Norman Solomon: “Chief Justice John Jay…said, ‘Those who own the country ought to govern it.’ And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media.” (Photo: Cheryl Higgins.)
And I watched the NBA, the pro basketball playoffs, on WABC, channel 7 New York City, and they kept quoting the editorial in the attack ads against Zohran Mamdani. And one of the quotes was, “He’s got an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Another quote, “He shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade.” And then, “We do not believe Mr. Mandani deserves a spot on New Yorker’s ballots.” So you had quote after quote.
When the editorial writers of the New York Times are writing an attack on a mayoral candidate like Zohran Mamdani, and they know that there’s a dark money PAC that’s spending millions of dollars to attack him—basically, they were writing copy. And every time a coach during the NBA playoffs called a timeout, I cringed, because I knew there’d be another attack ad that I’d be watching against Mamdani.
NS: To get into the sports metaphor, in the news department, they’re supposed to be referees; they don’t have their hands on the scale. They’re simply reporting the news. But the tonality of coverage, not just in the New York Times, but elite media generally, has been skeptical to alarmed to setting off the sirens that something terrible might be about to happen if the New York City voters don’t wake up.
And when the New York Times editorials talk about something like trade-offs, what they mean is that there is a transactional world that they believe is about democracy, or should be, their version of democracy. I recalled the statement from the first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, who said, “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media that, after all, have billions of dollars in assets. That’s what they are accustomed to trying to look out for and protect. I think it’s notable that there’s a long pattern, I mean this has been going for decades.
And, again, we’re talking about Fox News and so forth, we’re talking about the New York Times, and in its editorials, the wisdom of its handpicked and, we’re told, very well-informed, erudite editorial board—-a few years ago when Bernie Sanders was surging in the primaries, and it looked like he might be the Democratic presidential nominee, the New York Times went into overdrive of alarm. They published a very big editorial saying Bernie Sanders is just not qualified to be president. He’s dangerous. These socialistic ideas just won’t work.
And after that, years went by, and the New York Times ran a huge editorial about how horrible it is that there’s so much income inequality in the United States, and it’s getting worse and worse, the gap between the very wealthy and the middle class and the poor.
And I think that is really a replica of the split screen approach of the New York Times and the media establishment, which is, on the one hand, to make sure that progressive candidates don’t get very far, if they have anything to say about it as news media outlets. And on the other hand, it’s sort of victims without victimizers, the moaning that there’s poverty and there’s income inequality that’s become so extreme, but there are no victimizers, and certainly Wall Street should be protected rather than attacked.
JC: The beauty of the Mamdani campaign—multiethnic, multigenerational—is there were thousands and thousands of volunteers knocking on doors, and many of them are young. This reminds me of the Bernie Sanders campaign that Norman brought up. Many of them are getting a real education that you can’t trust the right-wing media, and you also can’t trust the media that sees itself as corporate center or corporate liberal.
I love, in the editorial of the Times, eight days before the primary: “Many New Yorkers are understandably disappointed by the Democratic field.” Well, there were some New Yorkers disappointed: It was the New York Times editorial board, which was blasting Mamdani, but they couldn’t, as they usually do, endorse the corporate centrist Cuomo, or be nice to him, because of all of his scandals.
But when it comes to New Yorkers as a whole, they were pretty enthused by the Democratic field, because voter turnout was the biggest in 36 years. So I think what we’re getting here is a real education about how the media spectrum is center-right, including from the New York Times to the New York Post, from the Washington Post to the Washington Times, from MSNBC to Fox News, it’s basically a center-right spectrum. And when a candidate is outside of that spectrum, proposing ideas that are rarely heard inside the center-right spectrum, and is popular, that’s when even the corporate liberal, the corporate centrist media, freak out.
JJ: The first tool in the quiver is blatant Islamophobia. Folks will have seen Senator Gillibrand’s unhinged rant. And we see the distortion and the weaponization of antisemitism. And I just wonder, Norman, Jeff, what you have to say about the idea of using antisemitism as somehow a go-to to attack a candidate who has made very clear—and I mean, again, it’s not about Mamdani, it’s just about the utility of this tool to pull out against anyone who’s trying to do anything different.
NS: It’s really a very strong, powerful and pernicious combination of the zeal to, at all costs, protect corporate power and to protect Israel, which, after all, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both unequivocally reported last December, continues to engage in genocide in Gaza. So this is a very powerful and I think dangerous confluence of the concentration of power in the United States.
And all you have to do is read the screed that was put out, hours after Zohran Mamdani won the primary, by Bill Ackman, whose net worth is upward of $9 billion. And the accusation, and I’m quoting here, was “socialism has no place in the economic capital of our country,” and also accusing Mamdani of being anti-Israel and antisemitic. And so that combination is really part of the—I won’t say witches brew, it’s a warlock’s brew of the power structure in the capital of capitalism in the United States, in New York City.
And we’re seeing this in so many different guises, certainly in media, it is pervasive, whether it is the New York Times or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal, that’s a part of the theme. And it’s also coming from the power structure of the Democratic Party. The two most prominent New Yorkers in Congress, both, as we speak, are refusing to endorse Zohran Mamdani, even though they are Democrats, he’s a Democrat.
And we’ve had, for instance, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, of course from New York City, saying that when he’s asked whether he’s going to endorse, the reply is, Well, Mamdani has to show New Yorkers that his Jewish residents of New York City are people who he wants to protect. Well, that’s preposterous, and it’s really a way of saying that if you are not supporting Israel with its genocide, then we have reasons to think that you wouldn’t protect Jews, which is an absurdity with an agenda. It’s part of a decades-long scam in media and politics in the United States that equates Israel with Judaism, and Israel with quote “the Jewish people.”
JJ: And that erases masses of New York Jewish people and Jewish people around the country; they’re completely erased in this conversation, as though they were not speaking their truth and their values and their opposition to Israeli actions.
JC: Janine, there was a New York Times news story the day after Mamdani won the primary, and it had this reference that Mamdani’s “running on a far-left agenda, including positions that once were politically risky in New York—like describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, calling for new taxes on business.”
Well, FAIR has pointed out that, for decades, the polls have shown that even though we have a very narrow debate in mainstream media between center and right, that on economic issues, the public is very progressive. So Pew did a poll in March, 63% of all US adults want taxes raised on large businesses and corporations. It’s been that way for decades. And the New York Times is telling us that’s “far-left” or “politically risky”?
And then, on the issue of Israel, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs did a poll of US Jews 14 months ago, May of last year, and found that back then, 30% of US Jews and 38% of US Jews under the age of 44, they were calling what Israel was doing in Gaza genocide. Those numbers are much huger now. So there are a couple million Jews in the US that are calling what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide.”
And yet in so many Mamdani articles, I see this comment, “He has emphatically denied accusations that he is antisemitic,” but yet the New York Times and other news coverage keeps emphasizing it.
We have evidence from Trump’s comments and Trump’s policies about his racism; but you don’t see, in every other article or every third article, “Mr. Trump has emphatically denied accusations that he is a racist.” But you keep hearing this in Mamdani coverage, and there’s no evidence at all that he’s antisemitic. He’s just critical of Israeli action in Gaza and elsewhere, as are millions of Jews in this country and around the world.
NS: And very much, this kind of media coverage and messaging, it’s a toxic combination of Islamophobia and willingness to promote Israel as some kind of paragon of virtue, even while the genocide continues. I think there’s no clearer incarnation of this mix than Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, the most powerful Democrat, arguably, in the country. And a few months ago, Chuck Schumer, in an interview with a very approving Bret Stephens, the columnist of the New York Times, said, and I quote, “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.” Well, if that’s Chuck Schumer’s job, he clearly is falling short; he’s falling down on the job. And there’s a real panic here.
And then the other clearer aspect of what Chuck Schumer is providing nationally, in terms of politics and media, is his well-earned nickname, “the senator from Wall Street.” And that has been a nickname that he got decades ago. It got new heights just after the financial crisis of 2008. By the following year, the fall of 2009, he had received more than 15% of all the year’s contributions to every senator, from Wall Street.
And when you look at the last year’s donations, when the Schumer campaign committee had to report to the FEC, the six-year donor total for Schumer was $43 million. And more than a quarter of that just came from the financial sector, the real estate interest and law firms and lawyers.
Well, clearly, the real estate interests are going crazy right now, because they’re afraid of a rent freeze. They’re afraid of social justice. They want their outlandish profits to be remaining in full force. So this is really a class war being waged, through media and politics, from the top down.
JJ: And the energy that we get is very much “let’s you and him fight,” you know? Racism, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism are all tools that powerful rich people take up to protect their power and riches. It’s much beyond Mamdani, it’s beyond Bernie Sanders. It’s beyond any individual candidate. They will pit us against one another, and then maybe we won’t notice that we’re being robbed blind. That’s the big picture, in some ways.
JC: Agreed. The threat of Mamdani is he’s such a unifier, and that people of various ethnicities, generations, they’ve united behind him. They heard his message, in spite of the millions of dollars of attack ads, and mainstream media seem to be freaking out, from right to center.
JJ: I think it’s important to understand that he’s not a unicorn. Sonali Kolhatkar had a show the other day: Across the country, there are people, there are candidates, rising up. There are people who are unapologetic, and they’re resisting the nightmare that you can put Trump’s face on, but it’s not his alone. We know it’s a bigger systemic problem.
We’re talking about Mamdani. Mamdani is not alone. There are folks rising up.
And let me just say, finally, we’re talking about a void, in terms of public understanding and information and energy, and it’s a void that you both have long identified. And that’s why RootsAction exists, right? It’s like people are tired of “Democrat versus Republican,” and want a place to put their energy that is neither of those.
NS: Yeah. Well, the media and corporate power structures, that are so interlaced, to put it mildly, they see genuine democracy as a terrible danger, and any semblance of horizontal discourse in media and politics, and people organizing and communicating with each other, that’s just a terrible threat to the hold that the gazillionaires have on the political process.
Jeff Cohen: “These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas.)
JC: These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.
So you had AIPAC, powerful Israel-right-or-wrong lobby, intervening in Democratic primaries with Republican money, and knocking out progressive congressmembers like Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri. And once you knock out the progressive candidate, and you’ve chosen the Democrat and you’re a right-wing lobby, AIPAC, which loves the Republicans, well, you have both candidates in the race, you cannot lose. That’s not democracy.
And mainstream media understands that’s not democracy when they’re always pointing out, accurately, that the supreme leader of Iran gets to choose and sanction who gets to run for president, who doesn’t. Well, if you’re these billionaires, they believe they should choose both choices for you, and limit those choices, and they freak out when there’s more than just the two choices that they like.
JJ: And then I would say, media make it their job to pretend that, actually, you’re choosing from all the available, reasonable options.
JC: Yeah, if ever there was a time for news media, and thank God we have independent news outlets in New York and elsewhere, and we have nonprofit news outlets in New York and elsewhere. This is a really educational moment about how flawed the democratic system is, how the democracy is so constrained by this money.
And who never complains about campaign finance? The television channels that get all the money from the billionaires to attack a Mamdani in favor of a Cuomo. And now we’re going to get millions of dollars of ads against Mamdani in favor of a very corrupt incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.
But, again, this should be an educational moment about how limited democracy is, and journalists should be explaining the problems of democracy, when the billionaires can have this much power over every aspect of the race.
NS: As we’ve been saying, this is a teachable moment, and it’s a learnable moment. And so many people are learning that the gazillionaires are freaking out.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with authors, activists, RootsAction’s co-founders Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. You can start with their work online at RootsAction.org. It will not end there. Thank you, both Jeff and Norman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.
The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.
The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”
That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.
It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.
We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Salon (7/3/25): “The funds going towards deportation would…be enough to fully fund the program to end world hunger for four years.”
And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.
Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.
Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation:
Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.
Scant attention to ICE expansion
“What happens if we spend more than the military budget of Russia on deportation?” was not a question the New York Times (7/3/25) thought needed answering.
And yet many US corporate media outlets have paid scant attention to this aspect of the bill and refrained from delving too deeply into the matter of what exactly this massive ramping up of ICE portends for American society. According to a search of the Nexis news database, while half (50%) of newspaper articles and news transcripts mentioning the reconciliation bill from its first passage in the House (May 20) to its signing into law (July 4) also mentioned Medicaid, less than 6% named Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.
Even many of those that did mention ICE barely gave it any attention. On July 3, for example, the New York Times presented readers with “Nine Questions About the Republican Megabill, Answered,” which in response to the first question—“Why is it being called a megabill?”—did manage to mention “a 150% boost to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget over the next five years.” However, there was no further discussion in the article’s remaining 1,500-plus words of potential ramifications of this boost—although there was a section devoted to the “tax break for Native Alaskan subsistence whaling captains.”
That was more than CNN’s intervention managed, also published on July 3, and headlined “Here’s Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle.” The article aced a couple of no-brainers, including that “corporate America” would be “better off” thanks to the bill, while “low-income Americans” would be “worse off.” But there was not a single reference to the ICE budget—or who might “struggle” because of it.
‘Detention blitz’
Washington Post (7/4/25): “Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to…companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees.”
This is not to imply, of course, that there are no articles detailing what ICE has been up to in terms of persecuting refuge seekers, visa holders, legal US residents and even US citizens—who supposedly have greater protections under the law—and how all of this stands to get worse, in accordance with the impending deluge of anti-immigration funds.
In its report on ICE’s looming “detention blitz,” the Washington Post (7/4/25) noted that “at least 10 immigrants died while in ICE’s custody during the first half of this year,” and cited the finding that ICE is “now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes.”
The Post article also contained sufficiently thought-provoking details to enable the conscientious reader to draw their own conclusions regarding the ultimate purpose of manic detention schemes. (Hint: it’s not to keep America “safe.”) For instance, we learn that the share prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two largest detention companies contracted by ICE, which have notoriousreputations for detainee mistreatment—“each rose about 3%… as investors cheered the passage of congressional funding likely to result in a flurry of new contracts.”
Lest there remain any doubt as to the centrality of profit flows to the immigration crackdown, the article specifies that GEO Group and CoreCivic “each gave $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to Federal Election Commission data.”
This article, however, came after the legislation was passed.
A Post opinion piece (6/30/25), meanwhile, put a human face on some of ICE’s victims, such as Jermaine Thomas, born to a US soldier on a military base in Germany. Following an incident of “suspected trespassing” in Texas, Thomas was deported by ICE to Jamaica, a country he had never set foot in. Other victims spotlighted by the Post include 64-year-old Iranian immigrant Madonna Kashanian, nabbed while gardening at her house in New Orleans, and a six-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia who was arrested at an immigration court in California while pursuing his asylum case with his family.
It was also possible, if one sought it out, to find reporting on what the cash infusion entails from a logistical perspective: more agents, more arrests, more racial profiling, increased detention capacity, and a deportation system that runs “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours,” as ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons charmingly put it.
‘Police state first’
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (Jacobin, 7/3/25): “Mass deportation wouldn’t only reshape American society and cause the economy to go into a tailspin. It would also lead to a very different relationship between the US populace and law enforcement.”
Gutting Medicaid is certainly an angle on the reconciliation bill that deserved the media attention it got, and will devastate millions in this country. But the massive infusion of money and power to ICE will likewise devastate millions with a ballooning police state that unleashes terror, rips apart families and creates a network of concentration camps across the country. Given ICE’s contemporary track record and de facto exemption from the constraints of due process, the public desperately needs a media that will connect the dots in order to convey a bigger-picture look of what America is up against.
In an interview with Jacobin magazine (7/3/25) on how “ICE Is About to Get More Money Than It Can Spend,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick—a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council—made the crucial observation: “You don’t build the mass deportation machine without building the police state first.”
This is precisely the analysis that is missing from corporate media coverage of the bill. Beyond making life hell for the undocumented workers on whose very labor the US economy depends, ICE has become a tool for political repression as well—as evidenced by a slew of recent episodes involving the abduction and disappearance of international scholars whose political opinions did not coincide with those of the commander in chief of our, um, democracy.
Take the case of 30-year-old Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student and Fulbright scholar studying childhood development at Tufts University in Massachusetts. While walking to an iftar dinner in March, Öztürk was accosted by six plainclothes officers, some of them masked, and forced into an unmarked van, after which she was flown halfway across the country to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Her crime, apparently, was to have co-written an opinion piece last year for the Tufts Daily (3/26/24), in which she and her co-authors encouraged the university to accede to demands by the Tufts Community Union Senate by recognizing the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and divesting from companies with ties to Israel.
Öztürk’s case is hardly an isolated one. There’s Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University who was seized by masked agents outside his Virginia home and swept off to an ICE facility in Texas. There’s Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian former PhD student at Cornell who sued the Trump administration over the crackdown on Palestine solidarity and then self-deported, explaining that he had “lost faith [he] could walk the streets without being abducted.” And the list goes on (Al Jazeera, 5/15/25).
‘Homegrowns are next’
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (NPR, 4/15/25): The Trump administration believes it “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
In the twisted view of the US government, of course, opposing the US-backed genocide of Palestinians equals support for “terrorism”—and in Trump’s view, basically anything that goes against his own thinking and policies potentially constitutes a criminal offense. It follows that Öztürk-style politically motivated kidnappings by the state are presumably merely the top of a very slippery slope that US citizens, too, will soon find themselves careening down—especially as Trump has already exhibited enthusiasm at the prospect of outsourcing the incarceration of US citizens to El Salvador: “The homegrowns are next,” he told Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele.
The line between citizens and residents has been intentionally blurred, with the Trump Justice Department announcing it was “Prioritizing Denaturalization”—that is, stripping citizenship from foreign-born citizens. This draconian punishment has been proposed for Trump’s political enemies, from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to former BFF Elon Musk. Trump has also taken aim at the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, potentially turning millions of other Americans into ICE targets.
Somehow, the elite media have not deemed it necessary to dwell even superficially on the implications of super-funding a rogue agency that has essentially been given carte blanche to indiscriminately round people up—be they undocumented workers, political dissidents, or just somebody who “looks like somebody we are looking for.” As for CNN’s write-up on “who stands to gain from the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” it’s definitely not all the folks currently living in a permanent state of fear, deprived of basic freedoms like movement, speech and thought.
This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.
Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”
Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”
Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).
Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”
‘A Holocaust in Gaza’
Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).
It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.
Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”
Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”
Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”
‘Antisemitism forever!’
Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.
If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.
Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.
Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”
Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).
‘Generated threats of personal violence’
A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.
Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.
Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”
After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.
It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.
Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.
Janine Jackson interviewed Citations Needed‘s Adam Johnson about media in war mode for the June 27, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: We are recording June 26 in medias res, but AP’s latest gives us enough to start:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine doubled down Thursday on how destructive the US attacks had been on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and described in detail the study and planning behind the bombing mission, but they stopped short of detailing how much the attack set back the nation’s nuclear program.
We hear also Trump saying, “I’m not happy with Israel because they have broken the ceasefire” that he, we hear, created, adding that Iran and Israel have been fighting “so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” I can’t say that word on the radio, says the FCC, but Trump can say it because—well, you and I don’t know.
The US went to war with Iran last week without congressional, much less public, approval. But most of us only know what we know through corporate news media, and that’s a problem.
Joining us now is Adam Johnson, media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. He’s coauthor, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of a couple of recent relevant pieces in In These Times. And he joins us now by phone from Illinois. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me.
JJ: So we don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. Maybe we’re not at war, that would be great, but sadly, we do know what corporate news media will do, because they’ll do what they do. We saw them pull out the playbook, scratch out Iraq, Afghanistan, Eastasia, and write in Iran; or maybe scratch down deeper to get to Iran 1953, and here we go again. It’s many things, but one thing for sure that it is is predictable.
AJ: So the primary thing that the news media keep doing, pundits and reporters alike, specifically Jake Tapper at CNN, which we wrote about, is they keep saying “nuclear weapons program.” And the goal, generally, is just to put the words “Iran” and “nuclear” in the same sentence, over and over and over again.
The public will largely fill in the blanks, and the media make no effort to even really point out that they, in fact, don’t have a nuclear weapon, or a nuclear weapons program, which is a really important piece of context to know, but it’s almost never mentioned. And this is according to the US intelligence’s own assessment, DNI, CIA, 19 other different intelligence agencies, all came to the same conclusion, and have since 2007.
However, pundits repeatedly say “nuclear weapons program,” but it’s not a nuclear weapons program. And there’s several instances, like I said, of Jake Tapper saying it, several people in Congress have said it. You could say maybe it’s a slip of the tongue by accident, but when basically no one else on CNN but Jake Tapper does it, it doesn’t really seem like an accident; it seems like he’s very clearly making an assertion. Now, if Jake Tapper has access to secret, proprietary intelligence that the CIA doesn’t have, maybe he should tell them?
And what we saw in the buildup to Trump’s bombing of Iran, which we now know was largely theatrical, thank God, was that the sort of ticking time bomb scenario, that he and JD Vance and others were going to the media with, was obviously, by their own admission, and by the New York Times’ own reporting, not based on any new intelligence. It was “a reassessment of old intelligence,” I believe is how the New York Times put it. There’s another name for that: It’s called ideologically motivated bullshit.
But repeatedly, the CIA, which weirdly was pushing back on this, I guess to their credit, in the Wall Street Journal and CNN, was saying, No, no, no, no. Iran’s increased enriched uranium, but it’s just a bargaining chip. It’s a way of getting the US to come to the table so they can relieve these sanctions which have crippled their economy, the only mechanism they plausibly have to do that. But they made no decision. And even if they did make a decision to build a bomb, it would take upwards of three years.
So this is the context that is completely missing or overshadowed, and there’s going to be a poll coming out. I asked one of these progressive polling groups to add it, and I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but what I’d be curious to know is, what percentage of the American public thinks that Iran currently has a nuclear weapon? I suspect it’s probably 70-some odd, 80%.
Because, again, if you say the word “nuclear” and “Iran” over and over again, people are going to have that impression. They don’t believe—why would they have a civilian program? Even though, of course, over 30 countries have a civilian nuclear program but don’t have nuclear weapons; it’s pretty common. And that is just not part of how the public interprets it.
So the public is widely misled on this issue, which, again, gives the impression of some radical cartoon “terrorist” who’s going to blow up Tel Aviv or Manhattan.
Second to that, you have a lot of the New York Times opinion section, for example, rushing to delegitimize the government, citing a very dubious poll saying 80% of Iranians want regime change, when all other polls show the number is probably closer to 40 or 50.
And, of course, how that regime change happens is very contestable; a lot of people hate Trump, but they don’t want China to come bomb us. That’s a totally different claim, right?
You had laundering of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is a pro-Israel think tank, you had laundering of their claims that Iran is now housing the head of Al Qaeda. This is all a rehash, word for word, of Iraq War stuff.
So the New York Times was doing its part, as were some other outlets. But for the most part, the White House seems to have wanted a “cool bombing” PR thing. And then what some suspect, and I don’t know, this is just idle speculation, is that Israel was suffering more damage than people knew. And unlike bombing South Lebanon or Gaza, Iran can actually fight back, and Israel couldn’t sustain or couldn’t maintain its defense posture.
And so they basically used this as a way of getting a ceasefire that they needed anyway. But not by lack of trying on the part of the Washington Post, which actually called for Trump to keep bombing Iran in their editorial board.
JJ: There are so many questions that are under the table in this conversation, which is what makes me so upset with media. Media pretend they’re posing questions, and so we’re supposed to imagine that they’ve considered them deeply, but to just draw us back to basics: If the question is, “Should the US bomb Iran?” well, the answer is no, because that’s an overt violation of domestic and international law. The Constitution forbids it, the War Powers Resolution forbids it. But for corporate media, it’s like Bryce Greene just wrote for FAIR.org, the New York Times editorial board says, “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.” Of course we can do it, but let’s keep it cute, right? These are illegal actions.
AJ: They did the exact same thing in Iraq on March 2003. They published “No War With Iraq,” But if you read it, it says no war until you let the weapons inspectors do their job.
And then in the month prior, they published an editorial in February 2003, saying if Saddam Hussein doesn’t hand over his biological and chemical weapons, that the US has to use military force. Now that’s an argument for war, because of course Saddam Hussein didn’t have biological and chemical weapons.
AJ: So, yeah, this is the scope of debate. The scope of debate is not, “Is it justified or moral? Why is Israel not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Why do they not have IAEA inspectors?” There’s this kind of faux-liberal world order narrative.
And that’s why the IAEA report was so powerful. It was a 19 to 16 vote, it was almost along party lines, kind of pro-US/Israel, pro-Russia/pro-China.
And then, quickly, the head of the IAEA says, “Oh, no, no, don’t interpret this as us saying that in any way Iran has made a decision or is somehow accelerating an actual nuclear program.” But that’s not how it was interpreted. Like the New York Times, which had it as a head story the day Israel started bombing Iran, to give it this veneer of liberal rules enforcement, which is obviously absurd, because Israel is not subject to any of these rules. It has an estimated 100 to 300 nukes.
So the scope of debate in these editorials and these opinion sections is not “Do we have any legitimacy to be bombing Iran?” but, “Is bombing Iran the best way to stop them from enriching uranium?” which, again, is entirely within their rights under international law. They have a right to a civilian nuclear program, like any other country does.
JJ: And this is the implicit undergirding of corporate media’s debate, that some countries are “good,” and they can have world-destroying weapons—declared, undeclared, whatever. And some countries are, as Van Jones put it on CNN, “not normal.” Because, if we are looking for “normal,” we got Donald Trump! We got masked agents abducting people off the street…
Adam Johnson: “The scope of debate…is not ‘Do we have any legitimacy to be bombing Iran?’ but ‘Is bombing Iran the best way to stop them from enriching uranium?’”
AJ: And we have the US and Israel openly operating a mass starvation campaign through human genocide, not even euphemism. So I guess this is what normal countries do. They have a daily ritual killing of scores, sometimes hundreds of Palestinians that are desperately lining up for grains of rice and wheat. That’s what normal countries do.
And, again, it’s very weird. There’s this zombie liberal “rules-based order” framing that is still going on, despite the fact that there’s an unfolding genocide that’s lost all pretense of international law. And so there’s this “Oh, the US has to be a policeman and police the world” faux-liberal framework that Trump doesn’t take seriously, Netanyahu doesn’t take seriously, but the media, especially the kind of prestige editorial pages and opinion pages, the New York Times and Washington Post, have to maintain that this is still a thing.
And, of course, people like Van Jones and Jake Tapper at CNN, this idea that there’s normal countries, there’s the goodies and then there’s the baddies. And so even though the goody countries are carrying out this almost cartoon evil, completely removing a people in whole or in part from Earth, and an actual explicit starvation campaign, not even hiding it—that’s what they’re calling it; it’s very weird.
In 2003, when they did this, there was a little more kind of post–Cold War credibility, and now there’s zero. And it’s very strange to watch the vestiges of that framework still go on, regardless of the new facts, and the fact that the majority of Americans think that there’s a genocide going on. No one outside of the Washington Post editorial board and the New York Times editorial board buys any of this shit.
JJ: Exactly. And just, finally, when you try to intervene, you find yourself making arguments at a level that you don’t accept. Like, “Well, they shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear capacities, nuclear facilities.” They said “nuclear weapons,” but then they can suck weapons out of it, and they know that it’s still going to be read the same way.
AJ: Yeah, it’s implied.
JJ: And then you also want to say, “Well wait, there’s no evidence of Iran having weaponry.” And then you want to say, “Well, Iran’s allowed to have nuclear weaponry.” And then you have to say, “If we acknowledged Israel’s nuclear weaponry, we wouldn’t legally be allowed to arm them.” So there’s all of these unspoken things, and yet, to silence them is the price of admission to get into “serious people conversation.” And that’s obviously why a lot of people clock out of elite media, because the price of admission is too high.
AJ: It is just not credible, to sit there and talk about international law; you have to have some kind of ostensibly high-minded liberal reason why you’re bombing a country. It’s just not credible, with what we’ve seen over the last two years. It’s very strange. And there’s a kind of think tank/media nexus that has to maintain this fiction, and watching them talk about Iran in such a way that was, again, every kind of terrorist cartoon, every “war on terror” framing, ticking time bomb…. Again, it doesn’t have to make any sense. It’s supposed to just be vaguely racist and vaguely feels true.
But the question in a lot of these panels was like, “What’s the best way to overthrow the regime?” You’d have a liberal on being like, “Well, we need to do the kind of meddling NED stuff and promote groups and this and that, and maybe even arm some ethnic minority groups, and maybe some Kurdish rebels.” And they’re openly just discussing how you overthrow a government.
It’s like, well, OK, so you see them as being illegitimate, can you just provide a list of the legitimate and illegitimate governments for us, and then we can figure out how the US is supposed to take out all the illegitimate ones? The whole thing is so casually chauvinist and casually imperial, they don’t even think about what they’re doing.
JJ: Exactly. Well, where do you see hope, as you are still contributing to media? You believe in journalism; where do you see daylight?
AJ: You know, I don’t. I think social media helps in some ways. Obviously I think it democratized how people receive news coming out of Gaza, but even that’s been manipulated. They see social media CEOs get dragged in front of Congress, and they get disciplined under the auspices of fighting polarization or hate speech or fake news, but it’s all to prevent media that doesn’t fall within that national security directive, quite explicitly.
So I don’t know. I think those algorithms are easily manipulated. I think that the ways in which, even though very few people actually read the New York Times editorial board or watch the Sunday shows, but the ways in which those ideological, agenda-setting institutions still manage to trickle down, and promote seriousness and the concept of seriousness and what is serious and what isn’t, is still very effective. And I don’t really see that changing anytime soon.
JJ: Corporate news media are so many steps removed from human understanding, but they convey so powerfully the air that this is how smart people think. And you can think differently, but that will make you marginal. And even critics are stuck at, like, “don’t drop bombs.” And it becomes this very stale, rehearsed conversation, and we already know where it leads.
And what corporate media won’t do is show the vigor and the work and the intelligence of diplomacy. Media could make peacemaking a heroic effort. Kristi Noem could cosplay as a negotiator. They could sell a different story if they wanted to, is my feeling. So I don’t feel like journalism per se is broken. I feel like it’s being mal-used.
AJ: Yeah, I think to the extent to which they have done that, there’s been people saying, “Oh, the Obama deal was working.” And that’s true to an extent, but the Obama deal was still predicated on a totally arbitrary and unfair sanctions regime that is not applied to other countries. But it is correct that it was working, I mean, if one assumes that “working” is Iran not having enriched uranium. So there were some people saying that.
And Joy-Ann Reid I would like to highlight as someone who did a good job pushing back on a lot of the stuff on CNN. She was fired because of her reporting on Gaza at MSNBC. But she’s reappeared as a pundit on CNN to, I guess, play devil’s advocate, as it were. And she’s done a tremendous job, actually, going on CNN and punching down these idiots. That was kind of nice to see. It’s very rare, though. Who knows if they’ll ask her back after that.
But the debate is like, “how much should we sanction Iran?” on the far left end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is “should we go for regime change and kill hundreds of thousands of people?” Instead of saying, well, OK, if we do believe in these high-minded liberal concepts of an international rules-based order, then why don’t we go back to the drawing table and come up with rules, and actually apply them equally? Come up with a system where the US allies and US client states and to a great extent the US—which of course doesn’t sign a bunch of different treaties, cluster munitions, the ICC, the International Criminal Court—why don’t we come up with an actual rules-based order, instead of just whatever the US State Department and its buddies in Tel Aviv and Riyadh think?
That would be something that would maybe be worth pursuing, but it’s not. It’s this kind of weird, zombie, fake-consistent order, where if you’re deemed as being hostile to US and Israeli and Saudi security architecture in the Middle East, you are seen as per se ontologically evil, and in urgent need of disciplining, and in urgent need of either regime change or bombing or crippling sanctions that ruin your economy.
And that’s just taken for granted. And this is not particularly liberal or very thoughtful or very worldly. It’s knee jerk. It’s chauvinist. It’s obviously oftentimes racist, and that’s what narrows the debate. There’s no sense that we should apply any of these standards to any other country.
JJ: All right then. Well, we’ll end there for now. We’ve been speaking with media analyst Adam Johnson. He’s co-host, with Nima Shirazi, of the podcast Citations Needed. His substack is called the Column, and his work on Iran and other issues, co-authored with Sarah Lazare, can be found at InTheseTimes.com. Thank you so much, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Zohran Mamdani to Kristen Welker (Meet the Press, 6/29/25): “Freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.”
Meet the Press host Kristen Welker (6/29/25) showed courage by interviewing Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary for New York, after he’d been widely attacked by corporate media. But unfortunately, she fell into a trap that has been set repeatedly in recent months to smear Mamdani. She asked him to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” claiming—without offering evidence—that the term “intifada” refers to “violence against Jews.”
I doubt Welker is an Arabic linguist. But as a Palestinian journalist who covered the Intifada and helped introduce the term to Western media, I am appalled by this misrepresentation. Not only is the translation wrong, it’s an insult to the thousands of New York Jews who voted for Mamdani.
For the record, intifada translates to “shake off.” Palestinians used the term to describe their popular resistance against an Israeli occupation of their land that had no end in sight. It emerged amid a steady expansion of illegal settlements, which were systematically turning the occupied territories into a Swiss cheese–like landscape, precisely designed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
As someone who reported on the Intifada and explained its meaning to international audiences, I can say unequivocally: Intifada was used by Palestinian activists to describe a civil resistance movement rooted in dignity and national self-determination.
Metaphor for liberation
The Arabic-language version of the website of the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto “Uprising” as “Intifada”—until blogger Juan Cole (5/1/24) pointed this out. (Creative Commons photo: Phil Kalina.)
Let’s begin with the word’s literal meaning. As noted, in Arabic, intifada simply means “shaking off.” Since many—including Jewish leaders, Christian Zionists and GOP officials—have distorted the peaceful intentions behind the word, I turned to a source that might resonate more clearly with people of faith: the Bible.
In the Arabic version of the Old Testament, the word intifada appears three times, both as a noun and a verb. Looking at its English equivalents in the New International Version (though other translations are similar) offers enlightening context:
Judges 16:20: “Samson awoke from his sleep and thought, ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’”
Isaiah 52:2: “Shake off your dust; rise up, sit enthroned, Jerusalem. Free yourself from the chains on your neck, Daughter Zion, now a captive.”
Psalm 109:23: “I fade away like an evening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust.”
Each of these examples uses the term intifada—shaking off oppression, captivity or anguish—as a metaphor for liberation, not violence.
While Google Translate and other modern tools often render intifada as “popular uprising,” its literal meaning—“to shake off”—captures the spirit with which Palestinians adopted the term. When they launched the first Intifada in 1987—after 20 years under a foreign military occupation—it was an expression of a desire to wake up, rise and throw off the chains of subjugation. It is not inherently antisemitic, nor does it refer by default to terrorism or violence.
While accompanying international journalists covering the protests, I often discussed this with them. In Jerusalem, I explained to LA Times bureau chief Dan Fisher, the Washington Post’s Glenn Frankel and the New York Times’ John Kifner what Palestinians meant by the word. I told them that throughout Palestinian patriotic literature and slogans, two distinctions were always made: The Intifada was a protest against the Israeli occupation, not against Jews or the existence of Israel, and that the ultimate goal was to achieve an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Fisher, Frankel and Kifner included these clarifications in their reports, helping the Arabic term intifada enter the global lexicon with its intended meaning.
‘Bringing terror to the streets of America’
To define “intifada,” Fox News (5/23/25) brought on Douglas Murray, who calls Islam an “infection” and declares that “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.”
But today, as protests against Israel’s devastating war on Gaza mount, the word is being twisted. When Rep. Elise Stefanik grilled the presidents of UPenn, Harvard, and MIT in December 2023 about pro-Palestinian chants invoking “intifada,” she equated the term with “genocide of Jews.”
The university presidents faltered. They should have said clearly: Genocide against Jews—or any people—is abhorrent. But intifada is not synonymous with genocide. To equate a call to end the Israeli military occupation with a call for genocide or violence against Jews is a gross distortion—a bizarre reversal that paints the victims as aggressors.
And yet this distortion persists. [Gillibrand] Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled Mamdani antisemitic. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt—who likely doesn’t speak Arabic—claimed on X that intifada is “explicit incitement to violence.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) added that the word is “well understood to refer to the violent terror attacks.” Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told WNYC public radio (6/26/25), “The global intifada is a statement that means destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.”
Media echoed the politicians’ misrepresentations of intifada. “Many Jews see it as a call to violence against Israeli civilians,” ABC (6/29/25) reported. “Many Jews consider it a call to violence, a nod to deadly attacks on civilians in Israel by Palestinians in uprisings in the 1980s and 2000s,” wrote the New York Times (6/25/25). Of course, “many Jews” do not hear the word that way—but the more important question is, what is the accurate understanding of the word as used by Palestinians?
Fox News (5/23/25) didn’t mince words: “‘Intifada’ Means Bringing Terror to the Streets of America,” it said in a headline, citing notorious Islamophobe Douglas Murray. To the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/1/25), “What Intifada Really Means” is “giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.”
Even liberal podcast host Donny Deutsch repeated the same claim while speaking on MSNBC (Morning Joe, 6/30/25):
I’m outraged that we have a candidate for mayor of New York, Mr. Mamdani, that cannot walk back or cannot condemn the words “globalize the intifada” and his nuance of, “Well, it means different things for different people.” Well, let me tell you what it means to a Jew—it means violence.
Brutal suppression of protest
The First Intifada in the Gaza Strip, December 21, 1987 (photo: Efi Sharir).
The first Intifada embraced principles of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. My cousin, Mubarak Awad, who established the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, encouraged boycotts of Israeli products, labor strikes and grassroots economic development in preparation for statehood. He translated, printed and distributed Arabic translations of Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolence throughout the occupied territories. Mubarak was deported on the eve of the Intifada by then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
After Shamir came Yitzhak Rabin, who called publicly to “break the bones” of Palestinian stone throwers. During the first Intifada, Israeli soldiers and settlers responded to the nonfatal protests with extreme violence. In the first phase of the uprising—a little more than a year—332 Palestinians were killed, along with 12 Israelis (Middle East Monitor, 12/8/16).
This brutality did not suppress the protests, but merely escalated the violence: At the end of six years, more than 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, and 400 Israelis—18 of whom were children—were dead, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.
The same pattern recurred in the second Intifada: Only after the initial protests were met with massively disproportionate force did Palestinians, led by Hamas, turn to suicide bombing as a desperation tactic (Al Jazeera, 9/28/20). To treat the response to the brutal suppression of protest as though it represented the essential nature of intifada is intellectually lazy and politically cynical.
Zohran Mamdani never used the words “global intifada.” But he refused to denounce calls for the world to wake up and speak out against atrocities in Gaza. His victory in the Democratic primary—supported in part by Jewish New Yorkers—shows he is neither antisemitic nor willing to renounce an Arabic word that has been hijacked and misused by people who would rather Palestinians remain silent and submissive under occupation.
Research assistance: Shirlynn Chan
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Daoud Kuttab.
This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres.
Aggression is widely understood as the most serious form of the illegal use of force under international law. At the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials, British Judge Norman Birkett said:
To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 lists seven acts that constitute aggression, including:
The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state of the territory of another State….
Bombardment by the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state, or the use of any weapons by a state against the territory of another state.
In a clear instance of such aggression, 125 US military aircraft (along with a submarine) unleashed 75 weapons against Iran on June 21, including 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), each of which weighs 30,000 pounds (BBC, 6/23/25). The MOPs are the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal (Democracy Now!, 6/23/25).
‘Brilliant military operation’
The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) acknowledged that US intelligence maintained that “Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb”—but he argued that to act “amid uncertainty…is the essence of statesmanship.”
Rather than condemning this blatant violation of international law, US corporate media commentators gushed over what the Boston Globe (6/24/25) called a “brilliant military operation.” The Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) gave President Donald Trump “credit…for meeting the moment.”
To the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25), Trump made “a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect.” “The president acted before it was too late,” he wrote. “It is the essence of statesmanship.”
For the Washington Post’s Max Boot (6/25/25), it’s “good news…that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”
Rather than toasting aggression, these observers could have used their platforms to try to help foster a political climate that prioritizes peace and the international legal principles that could help create a less violent world.
Meanwhile, some opinion mongers thought the US was at risk of insufficiently violating international law. The Post’s editorial board (6/22/25) said Trump
should ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is demolished, as he appeared to claim it was on Saturday. This would mean the destruction of the targeted sites plus any residual weapons-building capacity.
In other words, the authors are glad that the US bombed Iran in violation of international law, and think it might be best to do more of the same.
A Journal editorial (6/23/25) put forth a similar view, warning that Trump will “squander” any “gains” that the US and Israel may have made against Iran if he “lets Iran take a breather, retain any enriched uranium it has secretly stored, and then rearm. But the last fortnight creates a rare opportunity for a more peaceful Middle East.” I’m not a big Orwell fan, but there’s something to his vision of the propaganda slogan “war is peace.”
Upside-down world
Iran “now knows Mr. Trump isn’t bluffing,” the Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) wrote. Does the paper imagine that Iran thought Trump was “bluffing” when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the nation’s top military leader, in 2020?
These celebrations of bomb-dropping occur in an upside-down world, where Iran is an aggressor against the United States. One form of this lie is accusing Iran of wantonly killing Americans or seeking to do so. The Journal (6/22/25) cited “1,000 Americans killed by Iran-supplied roadside bombs and other means”—referring to the dubious claim that Iran is responsible for US soldiers killed during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (Progressive, 1/7/20). Thus, to the editors, “Mr. Trump had to act to stop the threat in front of him to protect America.”
For Boot (6/22/25), Iran is a “predator” that the United States and Israel “will still have to deal with…for years to come.”
It would be nice to be able to assess the evidence for these allegations, but the authors don’t so much as hint at any. What is well documented, though, is that the US has been the aggressor in its longrunning war with Iran.
The US ruling class initiated the conflict by overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 (NPR, 2/7/19), propping up the Shah’s torture regime for 26 years (BBC, 6/3/16; AP, 2/6/19), sponsoring the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helping Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13), supporting Israel’s years-long campaign of murdering Iranian scientists (Responsible Statecraft, 12/21/20), and asphyxiating Iran’s civilian population through economic sanctions (Human Rights Watch, 10/29/19).
In other words, the US has been prosecuting a war against the Iranian people for more than 70 years, and Iran hasn’t done anything remotely comparable to the US, but the corporate media pretends that the inverse is true.
The consent manufacturers went even further, characterizing Iran as a threat to the world more generally. The Journal (6/22/25) said “Iran has been waging regional and terrorist war for decades,” and that “the world is safer” because the US bombed the country. Stephens proclaimed the Iranian government “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a claim Boot (6/25/25) echoed, writing that the nation has a “decades-long track record as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.” Sickeningly, Antony Blinken (New York Times, 6/24/25), a leading architect of the genocide of Gaza’s civilian population, called Iran “a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.”
As usual, none of these writers bothered to say which acts of “terrorism” Iran has backed, never mind provide proof. Of course, if one wanted to make a serious argument that Iran has won the planet’s “state sponsor of terrorism” gold medal, then it would be necessary to show how they trumped, say, US support for Al Qaeda in Syria. For such a case to be convincing, it would furthermore be necessary to assess where bankrolling a genocide ranks in the terror-sponsoring Olympics.
‘A grave nuclear threat’
Max Boot (Washington Post, 6/25/25): “The good news is that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”
In the fantasy world where Iran is a grave danger to the US and indeed the world, then wrongly implying that it has or is about to have nuclear weapons packs a heavier punch. The Journal (6/22/25) said, “President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites on Saturday helped rid the world of a grave nuclear threat.” The editorial would later add, “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted a bomb more than peace.”
Boot (6/25/25) wrote that “preliminary Israeli intelligence assessments [of the US bombing of Iran] conclude that the damage to the Iranian nuclear weapons program was more extensive—enough to set back the program by several years.” Stephens began his piece:
For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.
As FAIR contributor Bryce Greene (6/23/25) recently demonstrated, there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons or is close to having any. Yet the op-ed pages are peppered with insinuations that Iran’s imaginary nukes legitimize the US’s aggression against the country.
After years of insisting it would not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel followed through by launching a wide-ranging attack earlier this month, assassinating nuclear scientists and military leaders and destroying many sites associated with Iran’s decades-long nuclear program. Trump initially stayed on the sidelines, until Saturday when US bombers delivered the coup de grâce, destroying—or at least heavily damaging—a key underground site that only American bunker-buster bombs could reach….
Stopping Iran, whose unofficial national motto is “Death to America,’’ from gaining a nuclear weapon has rightly been a US priority for decades.
Iran’s nuclear program is now damaged but not destroyed.
What’s missing from this chatter is that, even if we lived in an alternate reality where Iran had nuclear weapons or was hours away from having them, attacking them on these grounds would not be legitimate. After all, international law does not grant states a right to attack each other on a preventive (Conversation, 6/18/25) or pre-emptive basis (Conversation, 6/23/25). This crucial point was entirely absent in the coverage I’ve discussed.
Also overlooked are the 90 nuclear warheads that Israel is believed to have, as well as the more than 5,200 that the US reportedly possesses, none of which apparently constitute “a grave nuclear threat,” even as it’s not Iran but the US and Israel that routinely carry out full-scale invasions and occupations of nations in West Asia.
Whether it’s Iran’s supposed support for terrorism or Iran’s nonexistent and non-imminent nuclear weapons, the propaganda follows the same formula: make an unsubstantiated claim about Iranian malfeasance, and use that as a premise on which to defend Washington openly carrying out acts of aggression, perhaps the gravest violation of international law.
If you want the US and Israel to stop killing and immiserating people in Iran, remember this pattern and get used to debunking it. Because, last week’s ceasefire notwithstanding, the US/Israeli war on Iran isn’t over.
Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. His career began as a close aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as LBJ’s de facto chief of staff and then his press secretary, but Moyers spent most of his life in journalism. After the Johnson administration, he was briefly publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, which won two Pulitzers under his tenure before he was forced out for being too left (Extra!, 1–2/96).
Most of Moyers’ journalism, however, appeared on public television, an institution he helped launch as a member of the 1967 Carnegie Commission, which called for public TV to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”
While public TV as a whole has often failed to live up to those ideas, Moyers exemplified them.
Consistently critical
Bill Moyers (The Secret Government, 1987): “Can we have the permanent warfare state and democracy too?”
Moyers was a consistently critical voice on PBS. In 1987, his PBS special The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis offered a searing examination of the Iran/Contra scandal; he followed that up with an even deeper dive into the story three years later for Frontline with High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Moyers’ 2007 documentary Buying the War, aired four years into the Iraq War, offered a critique of media failures in the run-up to war that was rarely heard in corporate media.
His independence made him a thorn in PBS‘s side. Robert Parry (FAIR.org, 9/13/11) explained:
When I was working at PBSFrontline in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs—such as a show denouncing Cuba’s Fidel Castro—to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn’t like, such as Bill Moyers’ analysis of the Iran/Contra scandal.
In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as “balance” to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their “objectivity” and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.
When Moyers hosted the news program Now (2002-04), the right complained—and PBS addressed the complaints by cutting the hour-long show to 30 minutes, while adding three right-wing programs: Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, a show by conservative commentator Michael Medved and the Journal Editorial Report, featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page (FAIR.org, 9/17/04).
Moyers was already heading out the door at Now, passing the torch to co-host David Brancaccio, who largely continued its hard-hitting tradition. Moyers returned to PBS in 2007 with a revival of his 1970s public affairs show, Bill Moyers Journal. When he retired that show in 2010, PBS also canceledNow. Moyers’ brand of independent journalism has been in short supply on PBS ever since.
Moyers diagnosed the problem in an appearance on Democracy Now! (6/8/11):
Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you’re looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don’t want reported. And today, only…a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.
‘Real change comes from outside the consensus’
Bill Moyers on Tavis Smiley (5/12/11): “Voices that challenge the ruling ideology…get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.”
Moyers shared FAIR’s critique of corporate media. On Tavis Smiley (5/13/11), he spoke about the elite bias in the media:
Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.
Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology—two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job—those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.
Jeff Cohen, FAIR’s founder, remembered Moyers’ impact on FAIR:
He was very supportive of FAIR from day one, and always offered encouragement to our staff. He was especially supportive of our studies of who gets to speak on PBS and NPR, and who doesn’t. He helped FAIR find funding for quarter-page advertorials on the New York Times op-ed page, which was then crucial and well-read media real estate, on various issues of corporate media bias or censorship. And he helped us find funding as well for a full-page ad in USA Today, exposing the distortions and lies of Rush Limbaugh.
Already some in corporate media are trying to push Moyers’ dissenting voice to the shadows. The New York Times (6/26/25), in a lengthy obituary devoted mostly to Moyers’ time working with LBJ, found no room to mention Moyers’ Iran/Contra work, or his repeated clashes with and criticisms of PBS. It did, however, find space to quote far-right website FrontPageMag.com, which in 2004 called Moyers a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”
Featured Image: Bill Moyers at Arizona State University, 2017 (Creative Commons photo: Gage Skidmore)
The Sunday morning talkshows have for decades played an important part in shaping political narratives in the United States. They typically bring on high-profile Washington guests for one-on-one interviews, aiming to set the political agenda for the week ahead. But these shows also have consistently marginalized the voices of women and BIPOC people, and those who might represent the public interest, rather than the interests of a narrow, wealthy elite (Extra!, 9–10/01, 4/12).
After Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 and 2024 elections, the Sunday shows had an opportunity to hold up both his campaign promises and his cabinet picks to scrutiny. With his campaigns’ racist attacks on immigrants and diversity initiatives, as well as his movement’s assaults on the rights of women and trans people, inviting guests who more accurately reflect the diversity of the country would seem to be a journalistic imperative. Yet a new FAIR study finds that the Sunday shows’ coverage of the Trump transitions were even more heavily white and male than usual.
We also found that in 2024, when Trump’s rhetoric and cabinet picks became even more extreme, fewer guests voiced criticism of Trump and his cabinet than in 2016. By downplaying critiques of Trump, these shows used their inside-the-Beltway influence to tell insiders that the MAGA presidency should get a more deferential reception the second time around.
Methodology
FAIR documented all guests on ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC‘s Meet the Press from November 13, 2016, through January 22, 2017, and from November 10, 2024, through January 19, 2025. We used the Nexis news database, Archive.org and news outlet websites to obtain complete transcripts. We included all guests invited to speak on the show with the host, whether individually or in groups. (Most panel discussions—which were typically journalist roundtables—were excluded; the exceptions were those conducted in an interview format.)
We documented the guests’ occupation, gender and race or ethnicity, as well as whether they voiced critical or supportive opinions of Trump, his campaign and his cabinet picks. For politicians and other political professionals, we recorded partisan affiliation.
We counted 162 guests in the first Trump transition period, and 186 in the second. (Much of the difference can be accounted for by the fact that Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2016, resulting in only three guests across all shows, rather than the usual 15 to 17.)
From the first to the second transition period, there were some notable shifts in the shows’ guest demographics and views on the president-elect, particularly from nonpartisan guests and guests from the defeated Democratic Party.
Focus on Beltway insiders
The vast majority of guests in both time periods were current and former government officials, in line with the Sunday shows’ focus on Washington insiders. This habit has the effect of marginalizing other kinds of people with deep knowledge about various policy areas, such as academics, NGO leaders, labor leaders, activists or other public interest voices.
In 2016, current and former US officials and politicians made up 86% of all guest appearances. In 2024–25, that number stayed nearly the same, at 84%. In 2016, journalists came in a distant second, at 7%. In 2024, that distinction went to former military officials, with 6%.
Of the partisan sources, Republicans outnumbered Democrats (and independents who caucused with the Democrats) 56% to 40% in 2016–17. Interestingly, Democrats slightly outnumbered Republicans in 2024–25, 49% to 47%. (The remainder were primarily people who had served as appointees under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and one Green Party guest in 2016.)
Historically, Republicans have been overrepresented on the Sunday shows. It’s noteworthy that that wasn’t the case in the transition to the second Trump administration. But at the same time, the number of invited guests who voiced criticism of Trump or his cabinet picks decreased from 2016 to 2024, from 28% to 22%. This can be largely attributed to the fact that far fewer of the Sunday shows’ Democratic guests and nonpartisan guests took a critical position on Trump in 2024—a phenomenon that will be discussed in more detail below.
Skewing (more) male
The Sunday show guests were highly skewed toward men (81% of guests) in 2016; they were even more skewed (84%) in 2024. This was driven primarily by the shift in GOP guests, whose 3.5:1 male-to-female ratio in 2016 skyrocketed to an astounding 24:1 ratio in 2024. (Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway accounted for 15 of the 17 female GOP appearances in the first time period.)
Not every Sunday show guest talked about Trump; other interview topics ranged from political issues, like Middle East policy or the opioid epidemic, to largely apolitical interviews about things like sports or books. In 2024–25, there were 19 of these guests, and they were nearly evenly split along gender lines—meaning the gender split among those talking about Trump was even more skewed towards men.
Fox News was consistently the worst in this category, inviting 89% male guests in 2016 and 90% in 2024, but most of the others weren’t far behind. The high mark in female representation for any show in the study was CNN in 2016, when just 27% of its guests were women. In 2024, CBS bucked the trend as the only show that increased its female representation, moving from 20% to 25%, and also was the only show to invite a trans guest (Rep. Sarah McBride, 11/24/24) during either study period.
In other words, as Trump retook office under the shadow of Project 2025, with its promises to reverse decades of gains on gender equity and reproductive rights, nearly every show moved toward a greater silencing of women’s voices.
Marginalizing women’s voices is consequential. For instance, State of the Union host Jake Tapper (1/5/25) directed questions about Trump nominee Pete Hegseth to two white male guests, Republican Sen. Jim Banks and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. Asked directly by Tapper about the sexual assault claim against Hegseth, Banks waved it off; the only “concerns” Kelly expressed were about Hegseth’s lack of experience.
When CBS Face the Nation (11/24/24) asked similar questions of Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth, she responded directly: “It’s frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr. Trump would nominate someone who has admitted that he’s paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him.” Female guests won’t always raise issues of women’s rights, gender equity or misogyny, nor should they be expected to shoulder that responsibility alone—but they are certainly more likely to.
Overwhelmingly white
The shows also invited overwhelmingly white guests to interview, though that number decreased from 2016 to 2024, from 85% to 78%. While not quite as extreme an overrepresentation as gender, the percentage of white guests still far exceeded their proportion among the general public: In 2024, 58% of the US population identified as non-Hispanic white, down from 62% in 2016.
From 2016 to 2024, Black representation on the Sunday shows decreased from 10% to 5%, while Asian-American guests increased, from less than 1% to 8%. This increase was in part due to repeat appearances by Democrats Duckworth and Rep. Ro Khanna. GOP guests also increased in diversity, due largely to four appearances by Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a member of the Cherokee Nation.
During the 2024–25 time period, neither CBS nor CNN invited any Black guests, and Fox invited no Latine guests, as the Trump team geared up for Day One attacks on anti-racism initiatives and on immigrant communities.
In 2016, then–Rep. Keith Ellison (D–Minn.) said of Trump on ABC (11/13/16):
We oppose his misogyny. We oppose his picking on people of different ethnic and religious groups. And we want to be making clear that if he tries to deliver on his word, that we will be there to say no.
Ellison appeared the next week on CBS (11/20/16), similarly decrying Trump’s “racism, misogyny,” and declaring, “It’s hard to normalize that, and we can never do it.” But eight years later, that racism and misogyny were repeatedly normalized by Sunday show guests—mostly of the white male variety.
Guestlists are not entirely determined by the shows themselves, as administrations choose who to make available as guests, and not every invited guest will agree to appear. Because shows lean so heavily on congressmembers for guest interviews, they also draw from a pool that is demographically skewed (76% non-Hispanic white, 72% male). But the Sunday shows clearly aren’t making any effort to offer voices more representative of the US population, tilting even further white and male than Congress does.
Democrats’ shift on Trump
When a guest spoke about Trump, his campaign or his cabinet picks, FAIR coded those comments as positive, neutral or critical. We defined those who praised Trump, his cabinet picks or his policy positions (as opposed to general Republican positions) as positive; those who do not take an explicit stance on these as neutral; and those who disparaged these as critical. Statements about Trump’s opponents, like Vice President Kamala Harris or Sen. Hillary Clinton, were not considered unless they also included specific references to Trump. The balance of these comments changed markedly between the first and second Trump transitions—particularly among Democratic and nonpartisan guests.
Overall, guest interviews became more neutral in the second transition. In 2016–17, 94% of guests made comments about Trump, and in 2024–25, 90% did so. But in the first transition, 30% of those guests spoke critically, while in the second, only 24% were critical. Neutral takes rose from 19% of sources to 28%. Nearly half the guests who commented on Trump had positive things to say in both transitions: 51% in the first, 48% in the second. It’s notable that there was a marked shift toward neutrality among guests, even as Trump’s rhetoric and cabinet picks became more extreme.
This was particularly noteworthy among those Democratic guests (and independents who caucused with Democrats) who made comments about Trump. In 2016–17, the combined Democratic and independent guests’ comments about Trump were critical 62% of the time, and only 4% of such comments were positive. In contrast, in 2024–25, when far more such guests were invited to appear, only 49% spoke critically, while 11% spoke positively. Trump-related commentary from Democrats shifted from 35% to 40% neutral.
Senators, who make up a large portion of partisan guests, didn’t shift their perspectives much between the years, from 63% to 62% critical. Representatives tilted a little more neutral, but the biggest shift can be seen in which Democrats the Sunday shows invited: more former White House officials in 2016–17 (10, vs. 4 in the second transition), and more officials of the current/outgoing White House in 2024–25 (13, vs. five in the first).
All the guests representing the outgoing administration were either neutral or voiced support for Trump. Meanwhile, in the first time period, seven of the critical Democratic interviews about Trump (and three of the neutrals) were from former presidential appointees. Only three former appointees were asked about Trump in the second transition—all of whom were critical.
It’s predictable that former officials, who are not representing the current White House team that is seeking a smooth transition, feel more free to speak critically. For instance, Norm Eisen, a former special counsel on ethics to Barack Obama, spoke to This Week (12/11/16) about Trump’s conflicts of interest, predicting, “He’s going to be tainted by scandal.”
In contrast, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan offered a more flattering perspective (NBC Meet the Press, 12/1/24):
First I would just say that we’ve had good consultations with the incoming team. We’ve been transparent with them. We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition. Second, I’m glad to see the incoming team is welcoming the ceasefire.
Interestingly, Republican guests also trended slightly more toward neutral comments in the second transition period. Five Republicans (6%) spoke about Trump critically in the first time period, while only three (4%) did so in the second. At the same time, the percentage of Republicans making pro-Trump comments dipped from 87% to 84%. GOP guests making neutral comments increased from 6% to 12%.
A different kind of nonpartisan
Nonpartisan guests, who accounted for 15% of guests in both time periods, shifted even more markedly: Half of those who made comments about Trump expressed criticism in 2016–17, and none did so in 2024–25. Meanwhile, positive comments increased from 21% to 50%.
The types of guests dominating this category also changed: In 2016, the largest group consisted of journalists invited for one-on-one interviews (8); these often made critical remarks about Trump, as when the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius told Face the Nation (12/18/16), “I was struck…by his reluctance to do what typically happens in national security matters, which is seek some kind of bipartisan unified consensus.” Or when the New York Times‘ Dean Baquet said to Meet the Press (1/1/17), “I think that there are a lot of question marks about Donald Trump.”
In 2024, there was only one journalist (radio host Charlamagne tha God—This Week, 11/12/24), while business elites (4) and foreign diplomats (3) dominated.
As one might expect, diplomats tended to express more enthusiasm for the incoming president. “I know they share our goal of wanting to have security and stability,” British Ambassador Karen Pierce said of the incoming Trump administration (Face the Nation, 11/10/24). Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova told Face the Nation (12/15/24): “Let me thank President Trump. He is the one who made a historic decision…to provide us with lethal aid in the first place.”
Business leaders likewise tended to praise Trump. “The American consumer today, as well as corporate America, is quite excited about what the Trump administration is talking about,” IBM vice chair Gary Cohn—a Trump advisor—told Face the Nation (12/15/24). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said to Fox News Sunday (12/1/24): “We need to be able to have the best AI infrastructure in the world….. I believe President-elect Trump will be very good at that.”
With Trump’s threats of retribution a major factor in the second transition, it’s not necessarily surprising that partisan guests might be more wary of voicing criticism—which is all the more reason for the Sunday shows to look outside their usual suspects. Instead, the few nonpartisan guests they invited came from occupations much more likely to say flattering things of the incoming president in order to curry favor.
The declared victory for Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor highlights many things. The power of his campaign, the popularity of his ideas, the importance of grassroots get-out-the-vote mobilization, and the tepid reception for Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as the state’s governor due to a myriad of sexual harassment allegations, all contributed to the surprising—to corporate media, anyway—result.
Earlier this month, FAIR’s Raina Lipsitz (6/13/25) responded to a New York profile (5/20/25) that attempted to undermine Mamdani’s record. In the home stretch of the primary race in the latter half of June, the pressure against Mamdani increased, featuring thoughtless dismissals of his ideas, selective memory and factual inaccuracy in the service of lowering Mamdani’s electoral chances.
That Mamdani emerged from this mess victorious exposes the out-of-touchness of establishment media outlets that twisted like pretzels to scare voters away from the 33-year-old phenomenon. (Readers should know that I ranked Mamdani first in the primary and contributed to his campaign. I’m not unbiased when it comes to who I want to see as mayor, but the analysis of the media that follows, I believe, will withstand scrutiny.)
‘Uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges’
The New York Times‘ attack (6/16/25) on Zohran Mamdani was accompanied by an image centered on the World Trade Center.
The New York Times editorial board (6/16/25) argued that “Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” They explained:
He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing.
At least one poll shows that a rent freeze is overwhelmingly popular (City and State, 4/15/25), and they’re far from unheard of: Rent freezes were a key policy victory under Mayor Bill de Blasio (City Limits, 6/28/16; Politico, 3/15/17; WNBC, 6/17/20), a mayor whose candidacy the board (9/5/17, 11/2/17) had enthusiastically supported.
The landlord class, which has organized against Mamdani’s campaign (Jacobin, 6/23/25), no doubt agrees with the Times‘ argument that if we don’t let rents go up, housing will be unaffordable—though 12 years of steady increases on regulated rentals under the tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn’t seem to make it easier to get an apartment here.
And is the grocery store pitch such a crazy idea? The rising cost of food, despite the Times’ framing, is a very real problem for New Yorkers (Daily News, 5/1/25). The city operates public housing, homeless shelters and hospitals—and a public education system that delivers daily meals to more than 900,000 students.
The Times (12/12/24) positively explored the idea of city-owned stores in its news pages, citing how cities like Chicago and Atlanta were exploring similar missions. But when Mamdani proposes it, the editors present it as a sign of kookiness.
‘The disorder of the past decade’
The New York Times (6/16/25) accused Mamdani of showing “little concern about the disorder of the past decade”—a time period when there were fewer killings in New York City than at any time since the 1950s (chart: Wikipedia).
The paper continued:
Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents. Mr. Mamdani, who has called Mr. de Blasio the best New York mayor of his lifetime, offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.
What disorder is the board talking about? We can guess they mean crime, but the homicide rate in New York City for the past ten years is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. It’s true that Mamdani believes in police reform. The Times editorial board used to champion this cause (7/13/20, 9/13/20), even endorsing a reform-minded democratic socialist defense attorney for Queens district attorney five years ago (6/18/25).
Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, suggested that—”given that crime rates are at or near historic low”—the Times‘ “disorder” is likely “the presence of homeless mentally ill people on the subway and other public spaces.” But, he argues:
Ironically, Mamdani and to some extent [Comptroller Brad] Lander are the candidates who have actual plans to address the kind of disorder that pearl-clutching Times readers are worried about. They understand that the solution to this decades old problem is not endlessly using police to cycle people through jails and hospitals, but instead to develop actual supportive housing and other essential social services.
The Times has capitulated to neoliberal austerity, which accepts that cities have no choice but to cut services and turn the real estate market over to billionaires, and then use policing to manage the chaos that ensues.
As for the idea that Mamdani is somehow just a candidate for “elite progressives” but not the “working-class and poor,” the Times’ own interactive map shows a more nuanced story. While it’s true that Cuomo did well in, for example, the impoverished South Bronx, in Manhattan he won the monied districts like Tribeca and the Upper East and West Side, while Mamdani carried lower-income neighborhoods like Harlem, Washington Heights and the Lower East Side. Mamdani’s funding came mostly from small contributions—he had seven times as many donors as Cuomo (New York Times, 5/6/25)—whereas Cuomo was heavily funded by billionaires and the real-estate industry (City, 6/26/25).
‘A quality of magical realism’
The Atlantic‘s Michael Powell (6/18/25) said Mamdani’s campaign was “exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.”
The Atlantic published two anti-Mamdani articles, with two of them warning that Mamdani is too inexperienced to earn the people’s vote and that his ambitious proposals can’t be achieved. (A third went after his support for the phrase “globalize the intifada—6/24/25.) Former Times writer Michael Powell (6/18/25), like the Times editorial board, scoffed at the grocery store idea, saying, “How would he pay for his most ambitious plans? Tax the rich and major corporations.” His colleague Annie Lowery (6/12/25) joined in:
He is a leftist in the Bernie Sanders mold, with a raft of great-sounding policies. Free buses! Free childcare! Cheap groceries! Frozen rents! But a lot of these are impractical at best. Free buses would deprive the MTA of needed revenue. Free childcare would require a mammoth tax hike that Albany would need to approve, which it has shown no interest in doing.
Similarly, Powell pompously asserts that “Mamdani’s candidacy also has a quality of magic realism, a campaign exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.”
Progressives are often annoyed by the retort “how are you going to pay for it?” because this question only gets deployed against the expansion of healthcare, education and social services, and not jails, policing and subsidies for business. But it also exposes the superficialities of reporters’ knowledge of city affairs.
Many years ago, when I was a reporter at the Chief-Leader, a fellow reporter asked then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg why his budget proposal rested so much on the outcome of the city’s negotiations with its unions. His answer was simple: That’s what government is—it’s services for people, staffed by people. Any administration, in short, has to grapple with how to pay for its priorities, whether those priorities are left-wing or right-wing, and that often involves cutting bloat, consolidating functions and increasing revenue.
Mamdani’s spending plan offends the Atlantic, not because it costs money—the magazine (8/8/21, 3/8/23) has argued against efforts to cut police budgets—but because Atlantic writers and editors don’t like his budget priorities, which validate the New Deal concept of government services for the 99 Percent.
‘Undeniably young’
What Zohran Mamdani got right, according to the New Yorker (6/23/25), is understanding that “social media is where many voters decide if a politician…can be counted on.”
New Yorker coverage has been fairer to Mamdani than the Atlantic was, but Eric Lach’s interview (6/23/25) with the candidate honed in on a swipe favored by the assembly member’s critics, including the New York article FAIR already responded to: his youth. Lach said:
Mamdani has been stymied for several reasons that were apparent before primary day. For one thing, he is undeniably young, and he never found a way to reassure voters that he was truly up for the job of managing the city’s agencies, its $100 billion budget, and its 300,000-person workforce.
Democratic socialist upstarts have often been tagged as unruly whippersnappers who need to stop bothering party elders with competitive primaries. But in a moment where one of the biggest problems of the Democratic Party is its gerontocracy (Newsweek, 12/19/24; The Nation, 5/23/25; Atlantic, 6/19/25), perhaps Mamdani’s ineligibility for AARP membership is a strength.
Lach continued:
The new program of public spending he has proposed is predicated on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, taxes that would have to be approved in Albany. If the big shots in Albany—never a good bet for anything, politically—refuse him, what would become of Mayor Mamdani? No one can say.
Warning that Mamdani’s agenda might cause friction with Albany suggests it might be Lach, not Mamdani, who is too new to the subject matter. The tension between state and city government is age-old, and consistent with every administration.
Once again, Mamdani gets extra scrutiny because of the substance of his agenda. Would Cuomo deal better with the state government he was forced to resign from, with a governor who is the deputy who replaced him? That’s a rhetorical question.
Right-wing rage
Marvel Comics‘ Daily Bugle used to run headlines like “Spider-Man: Threat or Menace?” The New York Post (6/23/25) is less ambivalent about Mamdani.
It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch’s editorial boards savaged Mamdani. The New York Post (6/23/25) called him a “cheap influencer” and “a babyfaced socialist antisemite who’s never accomplished anything except this so-buzzy campaign.” Likewise, Murdoch’s pro-business Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) claimed that “Manhattanites are warning that Mr. Mamdani’s ruinous utopianism could prompt a flight of talent and capital.”
But the onslaught from the more centrist outlets is telling: Like the business establishment, they fear progressive economic policies when it comes to housing, education, transit and public safety, despite all overtures to the contrary.
The good news is that this press assault failed. Perhaps that is because the political advice of the New York Times and Atlantic only still sways opinion in a few enclaves of the upper crust. The rage from the Post, Daily News and Journal probably only reached conservative audiences, who wouldn’t have ranked Mamdani anyway. And perhaps it also is testament to the degree that a grassroots messaging campaign can overcome an onslaught from the corporate media.
The bad news is that this was only the primary: incumbent Mayor Eric Adams will be running in the general election as an independent, and Andrew Cuomo has left that option open. Monied interests will likely double down, hoping to spread enough fear of a Mamdani-run New York City to help sink his meteoric rise—and elite media are rarely far behind them.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.
The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.
So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?
LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.
LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.
LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.
JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?
LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.
Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.
But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.
LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”
So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.
Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.
JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.
LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.
JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.
But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.
LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?
So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.
And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.
JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.
LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.
JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatchpiece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”
And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.
LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.
JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Prosecutors at the 1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared:
War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
After the Trump administration dropped bombs on Iran last weekend, without congressional approval, the media debate wasn’t about legality, much less humanity. The Wall Street Journal offered a video series on The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, “The 30,000-Pound US Bomb That Could Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Bunkers.” But it’s not just boys excited by toys; the very important Wall Street Journal is “examining military innovation and tactics emerging around the world, breaking down the tech behind the weaponry and its potential impact.”
Most big media are consumed right now with whether those bunker busters did their bunker busting or maybe the US needs to buy bigger, better bombs to…do what, exactly? Well, now you’re asking too many questions.
Things you should not question? Statements like that of Sen. John Fetterman that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror.
US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, Substack author at the Column, and co-author, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of some relevant pieces at InTheseTimes.com.
Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Michael Galant about sanctions and immigration for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Federal agents are abducting people off the streets, rolling up on workplaces and playgrounds to tear men, women and children away from their families. Driving off in vans, telling no one where they’re going. They’re interrupting scheduled immigration status appointments to say, We’ve changed the rules, and now you’re out of status and a criminal. Into the van. Raising a question, observing—well, that counts as interference, also now a crime. Sometimes they’re saying that the abduction was an administrative error, after someone has been left in a basement without food or water for a while.
There is much to acknowledge and understand in the current nightmare, but if one question is, “Given it all, why would anyone think it makes sense to try to come to the US to live?” then you’ll need to expand your vision to the global stage, and see the role that US actions have in determining conditions in the countries immigrants are coming from. And why “If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from,” lands different when circumstances in the place they come from will still be determined by US policy.
Michael Galant is senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Michael Galant.
Michael Galant: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: I will say the issue isn’t only with MAGA replacement theory zealots who think that the immigrants are dragging us into criminal chaos. I suspect a lot of “liberals” think that while it’s mean to call immigrants “invaders”—because, after all, “they” do a lot for “us”—still, they’re coming here to take advantage of our superior quality of life, and maybe we just can’t afford that anymore. The “us and them” line is still operative in many people’s understanding of immigration, and that confuses and obscures something, doesn’t it?
MG: Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right that there is this sort of bipartisan consensus that, whatever we might disagree on what the appropriate level of migration is, or with what humanity we should be treating migrants, but they’re still operating on the same terrain, right, the same sort of frame of understanding, of the question of migration. And I think that question itself really needs to be addressed, as you mentioned in the intro, it is often US policies that are themselves determining the conditions that caused migrants to leave in the first place. And it’s oddly rarely questioned in Congress. It’s rarely discussed, why are people leaving in the first place, and, perhaps, why is the US enacting policies that are contributing to those conditions?
JJ: The US interferes in other countries in multiple ways, but you wrote recently about one that goes under the radar—under under the radar, in this context. So talk to us about this piece that you wrote with Alex Main about economic sanctions. And I want to say, you make clear it’s not about a feeling, it’s not about an anecdotal sense about the reasons people have for moving. It’s research, it’s data.
MG: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I want to make clear from the start: Migrants should be welcomed into our communities. They should not be scapegoated, they should not be repressed. And, at the same time, we should not be creating the conditions that force them to leave their homes.
I mean, most migrants are not choosing to leave their community, to leave the only place they’ve ever known, often leave their families, to come to a new country where they risk discrimination, on a whim, right? They’re coming for good reason, and that is typically they’ve seen either violence and insecurity in their homes, or they are facing poverty and lack of economic opportunity.
That should not be a shocking thing. I think if you talk to anybody on the street, they will tell you that migrants are more likely to be coming from poorer countries to wealthier countries. And there’s US involvement in that, and the whole range of potential issues, of which economic sanctions is only one. But I can go into that, as that was the subject of our piece and of our research.
MG: So, effectively, the argument here is pretty simple. There are mounds of evidence that economic sanctions harm people. Sanctions come in many forms, but in their broadest forms, broad economic sanctions, which is those imposed on Cuba and Venezuela, the goal, the intent, is to harm the macroeconomy of these countries, which in turn, of course, affects civilians. It affects their lives, it affects whether they can feed their children. So because there are mountains of evidence that sanctions are harming individuals, there are also mountains of evidence that people migrate due to economic need. One plus one equals two. It is clear that when we impose sanctions on countries and hurt their people, the effect of that is going to be that people migrate to the United States.
But there is also recent research to that effect. So in October of last year, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizationpublished what I think is the first and only systematic cross-national analysis of how sanctions impact international migration. And using data flows from 157 countries, I believe, the authors find that Western multilateral sanctions have increased, on average, immigration from targeted countries by 22 to 24%. So that’s a massive increase as a result of sanctions. And the authors also find that when sanctions are lifted, migration decreases again. So there’s a clear empirical analysis there that one plus one equals two, sanctions harm people, harmed people migrate, sanctions cause migration.
JJ: I think that there is such a miscommunication about economic sanctions in the news media that obscures that very kind of information. They’re often presented as “making Castro squirm,” they’re presented as targeted, and they’re really only going to target leadership in countries. Now there’s a problem with that already, but what you’re saying is, no, there’s no way to simply surgically target an economic sector of a country without having that impact folks, and usually the most vulnerable first.
Michael Galant: “Sanctions are presented as this peaceful alternative to warfare, but often for civilians on the ground, the effects are very similar to war.”
MG: That’s exactly right. Sanctions are presented as this peaceful alternative to warfare, but often for civilians on the ground, the effects are very similar to war.
And “sanction” is a broad term. This does include imposing visa restrictions on individual foreign leaders. Of course, that’s not going to have the same effect as, say, the entire embargo of Cuba. But many of our sanctions regimes are broad, and intentionally so. The implicit logic of them is we hurt this country’s economy, that causes distress among the civilian population, and eventually the civilian population will rise up and overthrow their government.
And so in Cuba, when the embargo was imposed, there was a State Department memo from the time that has since been declassified, where it makes those intentions very plain. It says the goal is to cause hunger in order to overthrow the regime.
These days, government officials, advocates of sanctions, are often much more careful in their word choices. But the implicit logic of sanctions involves the intentional targeting of civilians.
JJ: I think it’s important to interrogate that logic. Some would say it’s hypocritical or cross-purposed to say, “Well, we’re going to sanction their country into hardship…but they can’t come here!” It’s complicated, and yet it makes sense if you’re of a certain frame of mind, I guess.
MG: That’s exactly right. To take one example, and I can also talk through Venezuela, but to take Cuba as an example, because it is one of our oldest, most comprehensive sanctions regimes, sanctions have been in place over six decades now, with the embargo. And there has been some tightening and loosening of sanctions over the years, particularly under the Obama administration. There was a light thawing of relations and the easing of sanctions, and we saw their economy really improved during that time, as hopes improved and the like.
But then when Trump came in the first time, he reversed all the Obama measures, and then tightened sanctions even further. Biden, unfortunately, basically maintained the Trump measures. He made only very small tweaks at the margin. And as a result of that, we’ve seen, from 2020 to 2024, 13% of Cuba’s population emigrated in those four years, 13%. It’s really shocking to imagine, if any of your listeners—many are probably based in the US, some are probably based abroad—imagine 13% of your country’s population immigrating over four years, and a good deal of that immigration is a result of the US sanction that has ended in an economic crisis, and made it much harder for ordinary people to live their lives.
JJ: Media tend to personalize, just to pull us back to media. Here’s a woman who crossed the border, holding her son close, or whatever, and it can be moving and poignant, but I feel that one effect of that is to kind of get people thinking on an individual level: “Well, I would never do that. I wouldn’t make that choice in those circumstances.” In terms of media, the story of migration is of course about people, but if we don’t integrate an understanding of policy and practices, we’re not going to get that story right.
MG: Absolutely. I think we need both. I understand that my organization has a lot of economists, and we’ll talk in terms of numbers, and sometimes that won’t really pull at people’s heartstrings in the way that they need to. And at the same time, on the other hand, you have the case where you talk only in terms of individuals, and don’t understand the broader structural causes, and how US policy contributes to these conditions. So we need both of them. Absolutely. But, yeah, we should not ignore, we should not remove ourselves from the structural causes, because, ultimately, when you look at the world—no one would disagree with you that migration tends to flow from poorer countries to wealthier countries.
And so the “solution” to migration—not that migration is itself a problem—but the “solution” is very clear. It is development of the Global South, allowing the Global South to develop, addressing the many ways in which US and other policies of wealthy countries inhibit the stability, economic and otherwise, of the Global South, and to allow greater shared global peace and stability and prosperity.
JJ: Well, and finally and briefly, that vision is shared. You note in the piece that, while the Biden administration claimed to address root causes, they had an inadequate understanding or representation of those causes, if you will. But there are, finally, other visions out there that acknowledge this.
MG: That’s right. And we’re seeing, of course, there have always been more grassroots people’s movements that have mobilized in solidarity with the Global South in pursuit of a more equitable world order. But now we’re also seeing in Congress, there was a group of progressives led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, and also representatives Ramirez and Kamlager-Dove, who created a new caucus, but it’s specifically about reframing how we understand migration.
And Representative Casar introduced a migration stability resolution, which is all about the actions that would be needed to address how the US contributes to migration. And it includes, just to name a few, how US weapons trafficking feeds cartel violence in Mexico; fixing trade agreements that are designed to work for multinational corporations based in the US, instead of working-class people here and abroad; fixing the inequities in the global financial architecture that result in debt crises in developing countries; addressing the climate crisis; stopping destabilizing US interventions, from coups to military interventions.
This whole gamut of actions is to truly address migration at its root, if we’re not just listening to those who are trying to scapegoat migrants. To truly address migration at its core requires an entire reorientation of how the US relates to the Global South, and Latin America in particular.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Michael Galant, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His piece, with Alex Main, “Economic Sanctions: A Root Cause of Migration,” can be found on their website at CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Michael Galant, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights and Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about freeing Mahmoud Khalil for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: As we record on June 12, the official death toll in Gaza is…something that need not be of specific concern, given ample evidence that no number would, in itself, magically change the indifference of powerful bodies to the ongoing crime of murder, starvation, displacement and erasure of Palestinians by Israel, with critical US material and political support. UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said recently, without trying to compare his experience to that of Gazans, that he has started therapy to deal with his experience, just witnessing trauma on this scale.
But when people speak up about something that bipartisan US politicians and US corporate media support, that criticism becomes suspect, by which is increasingly meant criminal. So here we are with Columbia University graduate—or what Fox News calls “anti-Israel ringleader”—Mahmoud Khalil, charged with no crime, but detained since March.
Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, and journalist and researcher working on a new history of FBI national security surveillance. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.
Chip Gibbons: It’s always a pleasure to be back on CounterSpin.
JJ: There’s always a lot I could talk with you about, but, for today, I know that listeners with horrible news coming at them from all sides may have lost the thread on Mahmoud Khalil. What is the latest on his case, and how good is that latest news? What should we think about it?
CG: As of June 12, when we’re recording this, Mahmoud Khalil is still detained at the LaSalle Immigration Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana. It is a private immigration prison. If you go on their website, they talk about their commitment to family values, but the conditions there—you’ll be shocked to learn this—are not very good. I’m not sure what type of family values they’re talking about.
Recently, a judge has ruled on a preliminary injunction that Mahmoud Khalil brought, asking that the immigration provision that [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio relies on, that gives the secretary of state the power to expel someone from the country if they pose a threat to US foreign policy, is unconstitutional as applied to [Khalil], enjoined Rubio from enforcing it against him, voiding the determination that Rubio made, as well as enjoining the Trump administration from enforcing what Khalil’s lawyers alleged, and what I think is not really just an allegation at this point, is a policy of arresting and detaining noncitizens who criticize Israel or support Palestinian rights. The judge has given the Trump administration until Friday to appeal, and has stayed his own order.
Of all the other similarly situated individuals in immigration proceedings over their pro-Palestine speech, the judges have granted them bail pending a final motion. Khalil submitted a motion for bail. It’s never been ruled on, and now the judge has issued this injunction that could potentially set him free, but has given the government until Friday to file an appeal, and it’s unclear, if the government files the appeal, if that will further stay his time in detention.
And Khalil is a father. His child was born while he was detained. He was not able to attend the birth of his child, and for an extended period he was denied a contact visit with the newborn child until a judge intervened.
And the thing we have to remember here, this is very difficult to keep track of, is that Khalil is really in two separate legal proceedings right now. He’s in an immigration removal proceeding, which takes place in immigration court, and immigration court is not part of the “Article Three”—that’s Article Three of the US Constitution—judiciary.
It is part of the Department of Justice. Immigration Judges work for Pam Bondi, the attorney general. You can appeal an immigration judge’s decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is appointed by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and the attorney general can reverse or modify any decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals. So immigration court is basically a kangaroo court.
At the same time, he’s challenging the constitutionality of this detention, not the removal itself, but the detention as unconstitutional in federal court, with what’s called a federal habeas petition. And the habeas corpus, of course, goes back to before the Magna Carta, but it was enshrined as a basic human right in the Magna Carta, and he’s arguing his detention is unconstitutional.
And the reason for these two proceedings is that immigration courts are very limited in what they can do, beyond the sort of kangaroo court nature that I just described, where the attorney general is usually the party seeking the deportation, and the person making the decision works for the attorney general, and if the attorney general doesn’t like their decision, they can modify it. The Board of Immigration Appeals ruled during the Clinton years that once the secretary of state makes a determination that someone’s presence in the US has adverse foreign policy consequences, they can be removed from the country. There’s essentially no defense, and immigration judges cannot hear constitutional challenges or issues.
On the flip side, federal courts are barred from hearing challenges to the attorney general’s enforcement or commencement of immigration proceedings, but they are allowed to weigh challenges to detention. So Khalil and other similarly situated defendants are using the habeas remedy to challenge the constitutionality of the detention.
In Khalil’s case, it gets very complicated even further, because the government has brought two “immigration charges” against him. One is the claim that his presence poses a threat to our foreign policy. The other is that he misled immigration officials on his application by not mentioning he was part of a student group, which it’s unclear why that would affect his Green Card.
And there’s also allegations about when he did or didn’t work for the British government. He worked at the British Embassy, I think, in Lebanon, and the Trump administration is bringing that up, which I believe was disclosed on his application. And his lawyers have offered information refuting this charge, but the immigration judge has refused to hear it.
The immigration judge, by the way, not only works for the Department of Justice, she’s a former ICE employee. She’s refused to hear it on the grounds that she doesn’t need to make a decision on this, because she has the Rubio determination. And the preliminary injunction only applies, we think, to the Rubio determination, because the judge ruled in the previous ruling he was unlikely to prevail on a constitutional challenge to the misleading application charge.
So that’s sort of the convoluted legal situation we’re in. Khalil is in a removal proceeding in immigration court. He’s in a federal challenge to detention in federal court, and a federal judge has issued an injunction to enforcing the Rubio determination against him, but not the second charge, which an immigration judge has refused to rule on. Rubio’s saying it’s a sole removal basis. And that judge has also issued a stay giving the government time to appeal. So he remains detained even though his detention is likely unconstitutional, and a judge has found that he suffers irreparable harm by this detention.
JJ: I want to lift up a piece that you mentioned that we’re seeing, is that criminality, or the ability to be detained, has to do with something you do having “adverse foreign policy consequences.” I know that folks hear that and are like, “What? What do you mean? If the current administration has certain foreign policy objectives, and I disagree with them, that means if I speak out in opposition, I’m committing a crime?”
CG: So I think we have to remember, and this gets sort of pedantic, but Khalil is not charged with a crime, and the provision is not a criminal provision. It is a provision about whether or not you can be admitted into the US or removed from the US. So Khalil has not been charged with any criminal offense. They’re invoking a provision that says if your presence has adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States…
CG: …signs a piece of paper saying this is true, or it makes determination of it, you can be deported from the US. So this is not a criminal matter.
What does this provision even cover or does not cover is a really fascinating question. And the judge in the Khalil habeas case has stated that it’s unconstitutional as applied to Khalil, because no reasonable person would have notice that this provision could apply to domestic political speech or domestic speech.
He noted a number of instances when it was used in the ’90s by the Clinton administration, but they were all against people who were accused of criminal conduct in foreign countries. So you had a Saudi national who was accused of terrorism in Jordan; you had an alleged paramilitary leader from Haiti. You had a Mexican official who was accused of a number of crimes; but it was not someone who was in this country and engaged in political speech about a foreign government’s genocide, and therefore no reasonable person would have any notice that this statute could apply to their domestic speech.
JJ: I’m going to keep us short for today, although there are much, much and myriad things we could talk about, but you and I both know that once politicians take up an individual case—Julian Assange, Michael Brown, Mahmoud Khalil—we know that then news media bring out the microscopes. Is this really a good guy? How did he treat his mother?I’m seeing some parking tickets here. There might be some particulars to investigate.
There’s almost a vocational effort to make there be something specific about this person that makes it make sense that they are being targeted. And then the effect of that is to tell everyone listening, As long as you don’t do what this guy did, you’re going to be safe. Why is the Mahmoud Khalil case so important to folks who don’t even know who Mahmoud Khalil is, and don’t understand why it matters?
Chip Gibbons: “This is a case about whether or not we have a First Amendment right to criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide in Gaza, or support the human rights of the Palestinian people.”
CG: This is a case about whether or not we have a First Amendment right to criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide in Gaza, or support the human rights of the Palestinian people. The case is currently about an obscure Cold War immigration provision, and whether or not it can be used to deport a lawful, permanent resident, all of which has profound legal questions for individuals in this country who are immigrants or noncitizens. But at the end of the day, we should not believe this will remain only in the noncitizen realm.
The Heritage Foundation, who laid out a lot of the playbook about using deportations to target student activists, has made it clear their final goal is to equate all protests for Palestine with material support for terrorism. In the past, when we’ve seen immigration enforcement abuse for political policing, J. Edgar Hoover during the Palmer raids; the Los Angeles Eight, who were supporters of Palestinian rights who the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations sought to deport, both of those cases preconfigure or forbode larger attacks of civil liberties that eventually affect everyone.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t care about the rights of noncitizens; we should care about everyone’s free-speech rights.
But if you believe this is going to stay with Green Card holders or student visa holders, the goal is to take away your right to criticize a foreign apartheid state’s genocide, with the eventual goal of taking away your right to criticize US foreign policy. And this is the vehicle for doing it. It starts today, with the visa holders and the Green Card holders, but they will come for the natural-born citizens eventually, too, if they get away with this.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
After years of dealing with a corruption-ridden Mayor Eric Adams, beleaguered New Yorkers on June 24 selected a mayoral candidate in the Democratic primary—often the city’s de facto general election. While the city’s ranked-choice voting system meant that the official winner won’t be known until July 1, the presumed victor is the top vote-getter in the first round: state assembly member Zorhan Mamdani.
But for much of this election cycle, it has been easy for a casual consumer of news to believe that only one person was in the running to replace Adams: disgraced former New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
A FAIR analysis of media coverage of the top six Democratic candidates (based on polling through the end of May) found that Cuomo’s name appeared in headlines seven times more often than Zohran Mamdani, who for months had been in second place in opinion polls, and nine times more often than Brad Lander, who typically came in No. 3 in the polls (as he did in first-round voting). The omissions were sometimes egregious; for example, one May 2025 New York Times article (5/17/25) was headlined “Can Cool Kids Get This Mayoral Candidate Elected?” Mamdani was the candidate in question, but his name was relegated to the subhead.
By far the most references
FAIR searched the Nexis Uni news database for US news stories that included each candidate’s name and the words “mayor” and “election.” (We looked on May 28, 2025, going from September 1, 2024, until the date of search.) We then manually filtered out duplicates and false positives. Cuomo received by far the most references, with 411. Lander had the second-most, with 266; Mamdani had only 203.
Cuomo’s mentions increased markedly after he announced his candidacy on March 1, but rumors of his candidacy made him the most-mentioned candidate in most of the preceding months.
FAIR searched Media Cloud‘s New York state and local news database as well, with similar results: Cuomo became the clear leader in mentions in February, with far greater coverage than his competitors in the three months before the election. Cuomo had 141 mentions in New York media in the month of May, versus 84 for Mamdani and 78 for Lander.
Media Cloud analysis of New York Democratic mayoral primary coverage.
Familiarity creates affinity
Maisie Williams as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.
To understand why this matters, consider a different name—Arya.
The first time the name Arya appears on the Social Security Administration’s list of most popular baby names is in 2010, where it crawled onto the list as the 942nd-most popular name for girls. That’s the same year that Game of Thrones debuted with a bang, introducing the country to Arya Stark—a main character and a fan favorite. By 2019, when the show fizzled its way off the air, the name Arya had become the 92nd-most popular baby name for girls in the country.
Despite the truism that familiarity breeds contempt, familiarity can in fact create affinity, according to Kentaro Fukumoto, a professor of political science at the University of Tokyo.
“In psychology, there’s a theory called the mere exposure effect,” Fukumoto told FAIR. “The theory argues that when you’re exposed to something [enough] you start to like it.”
Mere exposure effect is how one goes from not even knowing the name Arya to deciding to name your child Arya. It’s also how we sometimes go from hating a song on the radio to loving it. And it’s why companies—and politicians—run ads. The hope is that if we hear a name often enough, it will unconsciously motivate us to buy the product or vote for the candidate. And there’s some evidence, at least when it comes to politicians, that they’re right.
Name-recognition effect
In 2018, Fukumoto published a study that looked at what happened in Japanese elections when a Japanese national candidate shared a last name with a candidate in a down-ballot race—and thus voters were exposed to that name a lot. Fukumoto found that in districts where candidates shared a name, the national candidate received a 69% boost, compared to how they performed in districts where they didn’t share a name. So, for example, if a national candidate had 10% of the vote share, in districts where they shared a name with a down-ballot candidate, their vote share would become 17% —a sizable jump.
Campaigns use lawn signs in part to increase the familiarity of their candidates’ names (Creative Commons photo: Eric Behrens).
Fukumoto cautions that for major candidates, the effect is likely not as large, but the effect is very important for minor candidates—say, a lesser-known candidate challenging an incumbent. In the New York City mayoral race, Mamdani and the other less-covered candidates certainly were much less well-known than Cuomo, who not only served as governor, but whose father also served as governor from 1983–94.
A 2013 study by researchers at Vanderbilt University also found that name recognition can give candidates a boost. That study took advantage of the fact that a local school had strict routes for parents to drive down, to avoid creating the dreaded overburdened school pick-up line. The researchers placed four lawn signs for a local election with a fictional candidate—Ben Griffin—along one of the routes, and then surveyed all of the parents afterwards. They found that parents who drove along the route with the sign were 10 percentage points more likely than those who didn’t drive along the route to say that they would put Griffin—who, remember, did not exist—in their top three choices for a council seat. And that’s a handful of lawn signs placed along one road.
In aggregate, news outlets prioritizing one candidate over others could shift the outcome of the election. When one considers that the 2021 mayoral primary election was decided by just 7,000 votes, it matters that Lander received roughly 35% less attention, Mamdani 50% less attention, and Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council (and no relationship to Eric Adams), received 62% less coverage than Cuomo.
Bad publicity still publicity
Some of Cuomo’s coverage may have related to his history of scandals (New Republic, 1/26/24)—but a FAIR analysis (4/9/25) found media downplayed that record.
Some of Cuomo’s mentions were likely tied to the continued fallout of his governorship, including his concealment of nursing home deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, and lawsuits tied to the New York attorney general’s report on complaints that he had sexually harassed employees. That report affirmed that Cuomo had sexually harassed members of his own staff as well as other state employees, creating a culture “filled with fear and intimidation.”
But at the same time, many of the candidates in the race were current government officials, who might be expected to generate news coverage in the course of their work. Adrienne Adams has been the speaker of the New York City Council since 2022. Lander is the city’s current comptroller, widely considered the second most powerful citywide office, serving as the chief financial officer and auditor of the city agencies. Mamdani is a New York State Assembly member, and Zellnor Myrie is a New York State senator.
And negative news coverage doesn’t mean negative election impact for candidates receiving outsize media attention—Donald Trump famously received billions of dollars worth of free media in his 2016 campaign, much of it negative.
Thumbs on the scale
The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey (6/12/25) noted that “the political scion with a multimillion-dollar war chest and blanket name recognition could lose to the young Millennial whom few New Yorkers had heard of as of last year”—before going on to argue that “if this is democracy, it’s a funny form of it.”
Further, while the analysis focused on the frequency of occurrences, not the tone, in recent weeks some news outlets have made their support for Cuomo more explicit. The New York Times editorial board said in 2024 that it would no longer endorse candidates for local races, but still this week published a confusingly written piece (6/16/25) that amounted to an endorsement for the former governor. (In April, a FAIR analysis—4/9/25—found the Times’ coverage of the former governor’s record notably forgiving.)
Similarly, Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic (6/12/25) wrote a piece, rife with inaccuracies about voting methods, criticizing the city’s system for primaries as anti-democratic. New York City uses a ranked-choice system, which allows voters to rank mayoral candidates in their order of preference. While mathematicians don’t all agree on which voting systems are the best at accurately capturing voter preferences, there is broad consensus that plurality voting—where the candidate who gets the most votes in a single round wins—is the worst. Like the New York Times editorial, Lowrey’s article ends up as a de facto endorsement for the former governor, but by criticizing the system, it also acts to undermine the election itself. In other words, if Cuomo loses under this system—according to Lowrey—no he didn’t.
It’s unsettling that news outlets that proclaim to be for democracy are putting their thumbs on the scale, providing Cuomo with extensive coverage even as he mostly avoided actually meeting the people he has said he wants to govern.
However, while name recognition is important, news coverage is not the only way to get it. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated Joe Crowley, a Democrat who had served as the US representative for New York’s 14th District for almost two decades, and received almost no media attention before she did so. She did it, in part, by knocking on doors.
Mamdani, who entered the race in the low single digits as a relatively unknown assemblymember, and headed into Primary Day neck and neck with Cuomo in polling, pledged to knock on at least 1 million doors before NYC’s June 24 Democratic primary. Two weeks ago, on TikTok, Mamdani said they were on track to reach that goal 10 days early.
The New York Times (6/18/25) made clear that it wouldn’t mind an unprovoked attack on Iran—so long as it wasn’t done hastily.
In the wake of the US-supported Israeli attack on Iran, and days before the direct US bombing that followed, the New York Times editorial board (6/18/25) argued that “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.”
This language was as shifty as it was deliberate. Rather than oppose a policy of unprovoked aggression and mass murder, the Times editorialists suggested such a campaign was happening too hastily, and it should be preceded by more debate.
The opinion writers at the most important paper in the world were fully in favor of attacking Iran; they only worried that Trump would go about it the wrong way. In fact, the Times’ justification for war was identical to that of the Trump administration’s explanation after the fact. It laid it out in the first paragraph:
A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.
The New York Times‘ echo of the standard Israeli and US propaganda line offers an opportunity to critically examine this most recent justification for aggressive war.
‘Iran is not building a nuclear weapon’
The Trump administration’s top intelligence official saying that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” (Responsible Statecraft, 6/8/25) did not prevent the New York Times from asserting that Iran “has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon.”
The premise here was that Iran is working to build a nuclear weapon, something that forms the backbone of the Israeli propaganda campaign justifying their actions. The only problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever for this position. Not only is there no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, there is no reason to think that if they did, they would be anything other than defensive weapons.
Nowhere in the Times analysis was there any reference to the fact that neither US intelligence agencies nor international monitoring organizations have found evidence of any Iranian intention to build a nuclear weapon. As recently as March 25, 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s director of national intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
While the International Atomic Energy Agency has been critical of steps Iran has taken to make its nuclear power program less transparent in the context of continual threats from Israel and the US to bomb that program, IAEA director Rafael Grossi emphasized in an interview with CNN (6/17/25; cited in Al Jazeera, 6/18/25), after those threats had become reality, “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”
Unilaterally scrapped
“The Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter deal” than the one Obama negotiated in 2015, the Times advised—without mentioning that Trump’s unilateral repudiated the Obama deal (New York Times, 5/8/18).
While the Times editorial did make brief mention of the US’s Obama-era anti-nuclear treaty with Iran, it offered no analysis as to why the Trump administration unilaterally scrapped the deal, despite no violation on Iran’s part. Nor did the paper mention the Biden administration refusal to negotiate a return to the deal. There was no mention of the fact that as Israel launched its first strike against Iran, the Iranians had made it clear that they wished to make a deal with the Trump administration on its nuclear energy program, and were actively negotiating toward that end.
Despite all of the fearmongering about Iran’s alleged aggressive intent and destabilizing potential, the Times ignored ample analysis and evidence to the contrary. As eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer (PBS, 7/9/12) has argued, a nuclear armed Iran could make the region more stable, because of the deterrent power of nuclear weapons.
A 2009 US military–funded study from the RAND corporation (4/14/09) examined Iranian ”press statements, writings in military journals, and other glimpses into Iranian thinking,” and found that it was extremely unlikely that Iran would use nuclear weapons offensively against Israel. Contrary to the Times’ image of Iran as fanatical theocrats bent on Israel’s destruction at all costs, military planners in Iran are well aware of the danger of being wiped off the map by retaliatory US strikes, and plan accordingly. If the Islamic Republic was to get nuclear weapons, predicts RAND, they would be used to deter exactly the kind of unprovoked attack that the US and Israel have launched over the past several days. They would be defensive, not offensive, weapons.
‘A malevolent force in the world’
The IAEA statement cited by the New York Times was the product of intense lobbying by the US (Common Dreams, 6/23/25).
The editorial board explicitly avoided the question of what Congress should do on the question of war with Iran: “The separate question of whether the United States should join the conflict is not one that we are addressing here.” But they had no problem presenting their pros list:
We know the arguments in favor of doing so—namely, that Iran’s government is a malevolent force in the world, and that it has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is part of the United Nations, declared that Iran was violating its nonproliferation obligations and apparently hiding evidence of its efforts.
And their cons list:
Given how much weaker Iran is today than it was then, thanks partly to Israel’s humbling of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter [Iran nuclear deal] today.
While the Times correctly pointed out that the IAEA found Iran to be in “noncompliance” with the nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the Times failed to point out that this came after an intense lobbying effort from Western officials just hours before Israeli strikes. They also ignore Iran’s detailed criticism of the IAEA finding, including its allegations that the findings were based in part on forged documents—a credible allegation, given Israel’s history of fabricating and forging evidence to justify aggression. Iran also noted that some of the “nonproliferation obligations” it had allegedly violated were not codified in the NPT, but instead were part of the agreement that the US unilaterally withdrew from. Nor did the Times make reference to the IAEA chief’s explicit insistence that the agency did not have proof Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon.
‘Let this vital debate begin’
Shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the bombing of Iran “was not and has not been about regime change” (BBC, 6/23/25), Trump posted, “Why wouldn’t there be a regime change???”
Instead of explaining this, the Times went straight to name-calling. One does not have to scrape the annals of the New York Times to predict that the phrase “malevolent force” has never been used to describe any of Washington’s ultra-violent allies, even the ones who have actually built and maintained an illegal stockpile of nuclear weapons. Certainly not Israel, the nation that has put an entire population under military apartheid for decades, and has slaughtered tens of thousands as part of what international rights organizations have labeled a genocide.
The US and Israel have made Iran the target of propaganda campaigns, terrorism, cyber attacks, assassinations, regime change operations and unprovoked attacks on its personnel and home soil. If the Times had included these facts, it would have inhibited the ultimate goal of the editorial: to promote the idea that war with Iran could potentially be desirable—and certainly justifiable. The Times seemed keen to act as a loyal opposition to Trump, while distancing themselves from the manner in which he might enact such a war.
Including the facts of America’s aggressive and provocative behavior against Iran would force them to conclude that the primary force destabilizing the region is not Iran, but the US and Israel. It isn’t Iran whose top papers are weighing the benefits of whether or not to launch a war of aggression against yet another nation. That honor goes to the New York Times, which said of this national discussion of mass murder policy: “Let this vital debate begin.”
After the strikes on Iran, the Trump administration and Israel have not announced full scale regime change war just yet, though there is every indication that such plans are in the works. As with Iraq in 2003, we have seen how easily false claims of weapons of mass destruction, and propaganda about a need to act, can morph into a years-long quagmire of senseless killing in the name of rebuilding a nation according to Washington’s designs. If such a war should be launched against Iran, the Times will have been one of its key supporters.
Research assistance: Emma Llano
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed Cal Poly Pomona’s Farrah Hassen about criminalizing homelessness for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani
Janine Jackson: In 1999, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that “streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there. Bedrooms are for sleeping.” He added that the right to sleep on the streets “doesn’t exist anywhere. The Founding Fathers never put that in the Constitution.”
That absurd out-of-touchness, the failure, not merely of empathy, but of knowledge? Our guest reports that still seems to undergird much of what we are told are policies and laws meant to address homelessness, including at the highest levels.
Farrah Hassen has been tracking the issue for years. She’s a writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. She joins us now by phone from Sacramento. Welcome to CounterSpin, Farrah Hassen.
JJ: I want to ask you about Grants Pass v. Johnson, last year’s Supreme Court case that you wrote about recently for OtherWords, but I’d like to start, as you do, with the acknowledgement that ought to anchor every story we see: that a person who works full time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the United States. That’s the reality, that’s the understanding that any of our responses ought to take on board, or to be judged by, yes?
FH: That’s correct. I mean, we have to consider that backdrop if we are going to talk about the growing problem of homelessness, and the related housing crisis. And, unsurprisingly, homelessness has increased as our government has diminished social safety nets. And we have to consider that when we think about how people fall into homelessness.
JJ: So rather than respond with a commitment to housing and social services, and job and wage growth, what we’ve seen is criminalizing. I couldn’t find it, but I remember Rudy Giuliani saying that he hoped that his crackdown on unhoused people would lead to them just going away, just sort of disappearing. And that seems to be some of the thinking behind, if not the Grants Pass ruling, some of the support for it. So tell listeners a little about what Grants Pass, that decision, did, and then, what didn’t it do?
FH: A year ago, on June 28, in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there is no available shelter. The Supreme Court overturned the 2018 Martin v. Boise precedent that had been decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had said that the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause prohibits cities from penalizing unhoused people for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public property unless they have access to adequate temporary shelter.
And so, for some context, in Grants Pass, like other cities across the United States, the number of people living unhoused easily exceeds the number of available shelter on any given night. Debra Blake was among those Grants Pass residents who were forced to live outside—in her case, for eight years—after losing her job and housing. Moreover, her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. And the city had these anti-camping ordinances that prohibited people like Debra Blake from sleeping or camping in the public, and they interpreted “camping” to even include the use of bedding, like a blanket, to stay warm in the cold.
Anyone who violated these ordinances in the city could be ticketed, could face fines, even subject to criminal prosecution. And the Grants Pass City Council themselves revealed that the underlying goal of these ordinances was to “make it uncomfortable enough for unhoused people in our city so they will want to move down the road.”
And so in Debra Blake’s case, after being banished from every park, accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city of Grants Pass as part of this class action suit, for violating unhoused residents’ constitutional rights. And the Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
But, sadly, Blake never got to see the results. And the city of Grants Pass ended up appealing this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the city’s favor.
And which brings us back to today. And I should also note, going back to the Supreme Court’s decision, that, importantly, it did not say, “Therefore, state and local governments must now criminalize homelessness.” But because the high court found Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances constitutional, many jurisdictions, unfortunately, including in California where I live, have used the court’s decision as a green light to crack down on people living unhoused, including by passing these “anti-camping ordinances,” similar to Grants Pass, which broadly criminalized the act of sleeping or pitching tents or other structures on publicly owned property.
JJ: It’s clear that the issues of homelessness involve many societal factors other than housing. And, at the same time, there’s an Occam’s razor at work here. There’s a reason that “housing first” lands as a call, isn’t there? For people who think, “Well, it’s very complicated. It’s about mental health, it’s about family structure” or whatever, housing first makes a lot of sense, if folks would just think of it that way, yeah?
Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (6/23)
FH: That’s absolutely correct. There is a misconception that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction and mental illness—which is not to say, to be clear, that there are not people suffering from mental illness and addiction among our nation’s unhoused population.
But there was this landmark study in June 2023 by the University of California San Francisco that focused on California, and it found that poverty and high housing costs are, in fact, the driving forces of homelessness. And that’s just more confirmation that housing unaffordability is the primary cause of homelessness, as other research and experts have long noted.
And that’s why, therefore, using the findings of this evidence, punitive fines, arrests, sweeps of encampments do not address the root of the problem, which is, again, the absence of permanent, affordable and, I might add, adequate housing. And so there are more things our country can do instead of criminalizing homelessness, which only traps people into these cycles, these endless cycles of poverty and homelessness, not to mention criminal penalties being inhumane to begin with.
And so housing first, as you mentioned, is one proven, evidence-backed solution here. It prioritizes providing permanent housing as soon as possible to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, without preconditions. It’s in contrast to what some people want, which is treatment first, or treatment only. Housing first also is coupled with voluntary supportive services to help improve housing stability and well-being, especially for those people who may need additional support, additional treatment.
And housing first has had strong bipartisan support for decades. It’s been supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies. And there’s so much evidence that shows that housing first actually works, including in places like Houston, Texas, which notably reduced homelessness by nearly two thirds over a decade. So that’s just yet another example of why, instead of kicking people while they’re down, housing support, combined with other voluntary services, really helped to lift people back up.
JJ: I’ll just only ask you, finally, Farrah Hassen, if you see a particular role for news media here, either for good or for ill, in terms of consideration of this question, which I want to ground folks in the statement that you have in the piece, “Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime.” It’s not bending laws of nature, it’s just informed effort. And I wonder what role you think news media might play there.
Farrah Hassen: “We have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight.”
FH: Oh, thank you. I really do appreciate that question, because underlying that question is, I believe, a larger narrative of how we talk about housing in this country. And you would never know that it’s actually a well-defined and internationally protected fundamental human right that all people—not people who have to be means-tested, or meet certain qualifications—all people are entitled to. Why? Because we all know innately, looking at our own lives, that housing is essential to life, to health, to well-being, but in the United States, it has primarily treated housing as a commodity, and it’s failing to protect this right for large numbers of people.
Homelessness itself, the sheer fact that over 770,000 people last year experienced homelessness, a record high, directly violates this right to adequate housing. So we have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight, as if there are not larger structural factors at play that contribute to housing remaining perpetually unaffordable for more and more people living in this country.
And so obviously the US doesn’t recognize housing as a human right, but I believe we should talk about it more, like we do about the need for Medicare for All, which is rooted in healthcare for all. We need these economic, social and cultural rights, along with civil and political rights, to really be able to live our lives to the fullest. And, fundamentally, that means transforming our nation’s approach to housing policies, and to remember that people shouldn’t be punished as well, as we look back on homelessness, for living in public spaces. People should not be punished for existing.
JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor at Cal Poly Pomona Farrah Hassen. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
After citing Trump administration charges that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, Al Jazeera (6/6/25) included a response from his advocates: “His lawyers have denied that he was a gang member and said he had not been convicted of any crime.”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States on June 6, after being wrongly deported to El Salvador almost three months earlier. Abrego Garcia had been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center since March 15, along with more than 250 other immigrants accused of belonging to the Latin American gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13.
Abrego Garcia’s case drew particular media attention, due to the admission by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that his deportation and subsequent imprisonment were a result of an “administrative error.” For weeks, however, both the Trump administration and the Salvadoran government insisted they were powerless to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
After months of protests from Abrego Garcia’s Maryland community and legal challenges from his lawyers, the father of three was finally returned to the US. But there was a caveat: He would face criminal charges related to an immigrant-smuggling operation that the Department of Justice alleges Abrego Garcia took part in as a member of MS-13.
Though there are plenty of reasons to cast doubt on the charges made against Abrego Garcia, in the seven articles published in the wake of his return, the New York Times (6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/8/25) and Wall Street Journal (6/6/25, 6/7/25, 6/8/25) present them mostly at face value. Given that the publications are the top two largest newspapers in America, their deficient coverage of one of the most important immigration cases of the second Trump administration is noteworthy.
Unreliable sources
The main New York Times story (6/6/25) on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador consists largely of Trump administration officials accusing him of crimes—with no quotes from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contesting those charges.
Only two of the articles (New York Times, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25) mentioned that the charges against Abrego Garcia stem from recent information supplied by jailhouse informants. The articles failed to note that such testimony is notoriously unreliable, as documented by research, and frequently results in wrongful convictions.
Though there are six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the indictment, it appears as though the majority of the charges rely on the testimony of one or two of these individuals. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, told CNN’s Erin Burnett (6/6/25), “The very first question I’m going to be asking is, what were those two people offered to make up these really fantastic, hyperbolic allegations against Mr. Abrego Garcia?”
The DoJ’s stonewalling of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in his civil case should raise further suspicion about why these jailhouse informants decided to come forward now, despite the DoJ’s allegation that Abrego Garcia has been involved with immigrant smuggling since 2016. None of the articles mention that Abrego Garcia had been attending yearly check-ins with ICE since 2019, and that these allegations had not come up during the six years that ICE had been monitoring him, nor were they mentioned during the trial that resulted in a judge granting him withholding of removal.
In their New YorkTimes piece (6/6/25), reporters Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush dedicated two paragraphs to a 2022 traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia that the indictment cites as evidence of a smuggling operation, while curiously omitting the fact that he was not charged with a crime at the time of the incident.
None of the articles mentioned that Abrego Garcia had been in ICE detention for seven months in 2019, at the same time that the DoJ alleges he was leading an immigrant smuggling operation. Also missing in the Times and Journal’s coverage was the fact that the police officer who authored the 2019 report was later terminated for sharing “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker” (USA Today, 4/17/25).
Sidelining advocates
The Wall Street Journal (6/6/25) published several paragraphs alleging crimes by Abrego Garcia with no rebuttal.
Two articles omitted comments from Abrego Garcia’s legal team altogether (New York Times6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25). While the other articles do quote Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, they cited them only about his initial deportation and his return, but not about the criminal charges. Three articles (New York Times, 6/6/25, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/6/25) include the same sole quote from Andrew Rossman, another one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers:
Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along—that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so…. It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.
When given the chance to comment on the criminal allegations, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have been clear that these charges are “preposterous.” Sandoval-Moshenberg told CBS affiliate WUSA9 (6/6/25), “What happened today is the exact opposite of due process, because due process means the opportunity to defend yourself before you’re punished, not afterwards.”
Another one of his lawyers, Chris Newman, who is also the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told WUSA9 (6/6/25) in the same conference:
This administration has shown amazing disregard for the Constitution, for due process and for basic decency. It is engaged in an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, defamation and cruelty directed at Kilmar’s family.
Another member of Abrego Garcia’s legal team, Brian Murray, told MSNBC’s Alex Witt (6/7/25), “Anyone who’s been looking at this case and has been watching this play out would agree this is a political and vindictive prosecution.”
In the days since Abrego Garcia’s release, his legal team has frequently made themselves available to media to speak about the criminal charges and ongoing constitutional issues surrounding his case. At a time when immigrants’ rights to free speech are under attack, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal chose to sideline the voices of their advocates.
This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.
LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”
FAIR found that the New York Times‘ front page featured stories about trans issues 13 times, with an additional 49 pieces that mentioned the word “transgender.” It’s a small increase from the 2023 study, which found nine trans-centered stories and 30 pieces that mentioned but did not center trans issues.
