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  • Demonizing Hezbollah to Legitimize a US/Israel Onslaught on Lebanon

     

    Corporate media’s handling of the US-supported Israeli assault on Lebanon has, like all war propaganda, entailed a campaign to demonize the purported bad guys—Hezbollah, in this case. The coverage of the US/Israeli assault on Lebanon has also evinced a casual disregard for Lebanese lives, and often an outright zest for killing the country’s people.

    One person’s terrorist…

    WSJ: Israel’s Deterrence Lesson for Biden

    The Wall Street Journal (9/29/24) celebrates assassination as “deterrence.”

    Denouncing Hezbollah as a terrorist outfit is pervasive in corporate punditry. A Wall Street Journal editorial (9/25/24) called the group “terrorists” three times, as in, “One lesson of October 7 is that Israel can’t let terrorists build up armies.”

    Another Journal editorial (9/29/24) used the T-word twice before asserting that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader Israel recently assassinated, was “a terrorist whose killers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Europeans.” The claim that Hezbollah is liable for killing “thousands of Americans and Europeans” is extraordinary, but the authors don’t make clear who or what they’re talking about, let alone offer any evidence to support their claim.

    In the New York Times (9/25/24), columnist Bret Stephens said Hezbollah is a “terrorist militia” and a “terrorist group” that “terrorizes its neighborhood.”

    Max Boot of the Washington Post (9/26/24, 9/28/24) called Nasrallah a “terrorist kingpin” and referred to Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization” three times. “It would be nice to think the Lebanese government could now disarm Hezbollah and end its reign of terror,” he mused, describing the organization as “one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups.”

    Violence they dislike

    Two decades out from 9/11, it should be clear to honest observers that the term “terrorism” is politicized to the point of uselessness. The US, Canada and other Western states have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but there is no universally applied objective measure of whether a given group deserves that label, nor is there a neutral body that decides who is and is not a terrorist. The US put Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress on a terror list in 1988, and Mandela’s name was not removed until 2008 (NBC, 12/7/13).

    Amal Saad: The US and other Western powers' designation of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization has effectively empowered Israel to escalate its campaign of state terrorism in Lebanon

    Amal Saad (X, 10/4/24): “The US and other Western powers’ designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization has effectively empowered Israel to escalate its campaign of state terrorism in Lebanon.”

    In practice, to paraphrase what Noam Chomsky said when asked if he thinks Hezbollah is a terrorist organization: “Terrorism” is used by the great powers to refer to violence that they dislike. The US considers Hezbollah a terrorist group, he argued, because the US supports Israeli invasions and occupations of Lebanon, and Hezbollah has twice driven Israel out of the country through successful military campaigns.

    Amal Saad of Cardiff University, a scholar who focuses on Hezbollah, raised the salient point about the US and its Western allies’ listing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization:

    The blanket proscription of Hezbollah, including its civilian and political branches, has created a direct conflict between domestic and international law. By criminalizing these non-military elements, it provides Israel with cover to blur the critical distinction in international law between combatants and noncombatants, enabling it to act with impunity….

    This was showcased by Israel’s strike on Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Unit, along with separate incidents where many other paramedics and healthcare workers were killed while attempting to rescue victims of Israel’s attacks. It was also shown by Israel’s pager attacks on Hezbollah cadres, most of whom were members of its mobilization unit (off-duty reservists and thus noncombatants), healthcare workers and other civilians.

    Lebanon ‘hijacked’ and ‘kidnapped’ 

    NYT: What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict Is Really About

    What the Mideast crisis is “really about,” according to Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 10/1/24): a struggle between “decent countries,” like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and “brutal, authoritarian regimes.”

    Stephens (New York Times, 9/25/24) built on the terrorism theme, writing that Hezbollah has “hijacked” Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies won the majority of seats in Lebanon’s parliament in 2018, and although the bloc lost its majority in 2022, it still won more seats than any other formation (Al Jazeera, 5/17/22). Performing well in elections isn’t “hijacking” a country.

    Nor is it “kidnapping” a country, as Stephens’ Times colleague Thomas Friedman (10/1/24) asserted. Friedman wrote:

    It is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah…were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon.

    Friedman is also wildly oversimplifying the range of views held by people in “the Sunni and Christian Arab world.” The Associated Press’ Bassem Mroue (9/28/24), writing from Beirut, characterized Nasrallah as “idolized by his Lebanese Shiite followers and respected by millions of others across the Arab and Islamic world,” even as Hezbollah lost some of its popularity after intervening on the side of the Syrian government in the war in that country.

    Saad Hariri, the two-time Lebanese Prime Minister and leader of the primarily Sunni Future Movement party, called Nasrallah’s assassination “a cowardly act that we condemn in its entirety.” He offered “heartfelt condolences to [Nasrallah’s] family and comrades,” and added that the killing has brought Lebanon and the region “into a new phase of violence” (LBC International, 9/28/24).

    Lebanese Christian leaders praised Nasrallah, including the country’s former president, Michel Aoun, who called Nasrallah “a distinguished and honest leader who led the national resistance on the paths of victory and liberation” (Newsweek, 9/28/24).

    Reduced to a ‘proxy’

    WaPo: A Death in Beirut

    For the Washington Post (9/29/24), Nasrallah’s assassination was “a much-deserved comeuppance for an Iranian proxy militia.”

    A slight variation on the effort to suggest that Hezbollah should be understood in purely sectarian terms are the ubiquitous reductions of the group to an Iranian “proxy” (Wall Street Journal, 9/29/24, 9/25/24; Washington Post, 9/29/24; Boston Globe, 10/6/24; New York Times, 10/1/24). Stephens (New York Times, 9/25/24) made the same allegation but in more racist, dehumanizing language, writing that “Tehran is the head of the octopus and Hezbollah…is merely one of its tentacles.”

    As I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 4/21/21, 8/26/20), it just isn’t true that Hezbollah is an Iranian vassal. The goal of this narrative is to misrepresent Hezbollah as a foreign imposition without a mass base in Lebanon.

    The point of presenting Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon in the most negative possible light is, of course, to make the US/Israeli onslaught against Lebanon sound legitimate: Readers who think Hezbollah is a terrorist group without any legitimacy in Lebanon are more likely to support a war to crush them than audiences who are aware of facts that don’t fit this narrative—such as the group’s record of building “a vast network of social services, including hospitals, schools and youth programs” (New York Times, 8/14/20).

    Nor, likewise, do simplistic tales that cast Hezbollah as a purely malevolent force capture the widespread popularity the group has at times garnered in Lebanon and elsewhere in Arab majority countries. It won considerable admiration in 2000 when its military forced Israel to end its 18-year occupation of Lebanon (AP, 9/28/24), and, as the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (3/8/16) conceded, when it successfully fought off Israel’s 2006 re-invasion.

    ‘Remarkable restraint’

    WSJ: Biden Tilts at Hezbollah Windmills

    The Wall Street Journal (9/25/24) claimed that Israel has given the last 11 months “over to diplomacy on its northern front.” That “diplomacy” has attacked Lebanon 7,845 times, killing more than 600 people, including at least 137 civilians (Al Jazeera, 9/11/24; Amnesty International, 9/25/24).

    The commentariat has also painted Hezbollah as the aggressor in its struggle with Israel. The first Journal editorial (9/25/24) on Israel’s Lebanon assault said that Israel had given the months since October 7 “to diplomacy on its northern front, even as Hezbollah fired 8,500 rockets and forced 60,000 Israelis from their homes.” The Journal‘s follow-up editorial (9/29/24) praised Israel for supposedly “exhibit[ing] remarkable restraint for nearly a year in response to Hezbollah’s thousands of rocket and missile attacks that have made the country’s north uninhabitable.”

    Carine Hajjar of the Boston Globe (10/6/24) rationalized Israel’s attacks in similar terms, writing that “in the past year, more than 60,000 Israelis have been displaced from the northern region by escalating rocket fire. No country would put up with that.”

    These are complete misrepresentations: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) shows (Al Jazeera, 9/11/24) that Israel was responsible for about 82% of all attacks on either side of the Lebanon/Israel armistice line between October 7, 2023, and September 6, 2024. In roughly the same period, prior to Israel’s most recent escalation, Israel had killed 137 civilians in Lebanon, whereas attacks by armed groups in Lebanon killed 14 civilians in Israel (Amnesty International, 9/25/24).

    Totally absent from the Journal editorials is the significant fact that Hezbollah has consistently indicated that it would agree to a ceasefire with Israel if Israel agreed to end its genocide in Gaza (Reuters, 2/29/24; AP, 7/2/24). Indeed, an Israeli official told NBC (9/28/24) that Israel “took the decision to assassinate Nasrallah after concluding he would not accept any diplomatic solution to end the fighting on the Israel/Lebanon [armistice line] that was not tied to an end to the war in Gaza.”

    Whatever corporate media say, Israel isn’t massacring people in Lebanon because Hezbollah is attacking Israel; it’s massacring them so that it can go on massacring Palestinians.

    Arab lives don’t matter to corporate media

    Al Jazeera: Lebanon sees deadliest day since civil war as Israeli attacks kill 492

    Arab deaths are rarely treated as having serious moral weight in US corporate media (Al Jazeera, 9/23/24).

    The op-ed pages have also demonstrated, at best, a callous indifference to Lebanese life and, at worst, rah-rah enthusiasm for the slaughter of Lebanese people.

    The first Journal editorial (9/25/24) wrote:

    Following the exploding pagers and successful attack on Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force commanders, Israel this week dropped evacuation notices and bombed Hezbollah’s missile stores. Israel says it destroyed tens of thousands of missiles and launchers, most hidden in civilian homes, leaving Hezbollah without half its strategic arsenal.

    Lebanon says more than 550 people have been killed, including terrorists.

    The attacks on the Radwan Force killed 15 Hezbollah members and 31 people in total (NPR, 9/21/24). Wiping out 16 non-Hezbollah persons, including three children (Le Monde, 9/21/24), evidently isn’t enough for the editors to qualify the extent to which this violence was a “success.”

    The subtext of the reference to the “evacuation notices” is that Israel did its due diligence by warning civilians—“death threats” is more apt than “evacuation notices”—but UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani pointed out that these “notices” seemed to presume that civilians would know where Hezbollah’s weapons are stored. The messages, she said, helped spread “panic, fear and chaos.” She went on to say:

    If you warn people of an imminent attack, that does not absolve you of the responsibility to protect civilians. The obligation to protect civilians is paramount. So, whether you’ve sent out a warning telling civilians to flee, [it] doesn’t make it okay to then strike those areas, knowing full well that the impact on civilians will be huge.

    According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (9/23/24), despite issuing these supposed warnings,

    in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the Israeli army deliberately denies civilians enough time to escape the areas being bombed, offering them no real protection from the dangers arising from military operations.

    Moreover, some of those Hezbollah “missile stores” the Journal referred to took the form of “hospitals, medical centers and ambulances,” all of which Israeli airstrikes damaged, as the Lebanese minister of health noted (Human Rights Watch, 9/25/24). The Lebanese Health Ministry also said that Israeli bombs hit “cars of people trying to flee” (Al Jazeera, 9/23/24). That the Journal didn’t mention Israel’s killing of 50 children in its September 23 attacks (CNN, 9/24/24) demonstrates how little value the paper assigns to Arab life.

    The same applies to a Washington Post editorial (9/29/24), which began:

    In a display of military and intelligence prowess reminiscent of its surprise victory over Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has delivered a series of devastating preemptive blows on Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese paramilitary force, culminating in the assassination of its longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah, under a hail of bombs on Friday.

    The piece went on to say that

    Israel seems to prefer not to have to follow up its air campaign by going into Lebanon on the ground, which would be costly for both the Jewish state and civilians of Lebanon inevitably caught up in the fighting.

    Here Lebanon’s dead are erased, their murders cast as a hypothetical possibility rather than a well-documented reality, while Israeli brutality is praised as “a display of military and intelligence prowess.”

    ‘More Hezbollah’s fault’

    HRW: Lebanon: Israeli Strikes Kill Hundreds as Hostilities Escalate

    What the Wall Street Journal (9/29/24) called “a remarkable display of intelligence [and] technological skill,” Human Rights Watch (9/25/24) said “appears to violate the prohibition against booby-traps” under international law.

    When they didn’t ignore civilian deaths, some of these pundits blamed Hezbollah for them. The Journal editorial board (9/29/24) wrote:

    Israel has changed its strategy from tit-for-tat responses to a pre-emptive campaign to degrade Hezbollah’s missile stores, launchers and military leadership. These are all justified targets in war. It’s tragic when civilians are also killed, but that is more Hezbollah’s fault. Nasrallah, who knew he was a marked man, located his hideout under residential buildings.

    Israel’s campaign has been a remarkable display of intelligence, technological skill and above all political will. The sabotage of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies wounded or killed scores of fighters. Its targeted bombings against Hezbollah’s terror masters showed how much Israeli intelligence has penetrated its communications. It continued to bomb Hezbollah targets on Sunday, including military commanders.

    Even if US/Israeli attacks were limited to what the Journal calls “justified targets in war,” the bombers’ obligations wouldn’t end there. It’s inadequate—not to mention callous—to brush aside dead civilians as being “more Hezbollah’s fault.” As Human Rights Watch (9/25/24) explained:

    The attacking party is not relieved from its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians, including the duty to avoid causing disproportionate harm to civilians if the defending party has located military targets within or near populated areas.

    Of course, the US/Israeli airstrikes didn’t just “degrade Hezbollah’s missile stores, launchers and military leadership.” Rather, they “randomly and directly target[ed] civilian buildings, including the buildings of surrounding hospitals and schools,” according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (9/23/24). According to the group, Israel also “used drones to light fires in southern Lebanon’s forests” and burn agricultural land.

    As the UN’s refugee agency put it two days prior to the publication of this Journal editorial, “118,466 Lebanese and Syrian people have been displaced inside Lebanon as Israel airstrikes continue to devastate civilian lives.” It’s patently false to describe such actions as “targeted bombings against…terror masters.”

    Likewise, Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attack (CounterSpin, 9/27/24) didn’t exclusively kill and wound “scores of fighters.” The sabotage killed at least 37 people, including children and medical workers, an apparent violation of the prohibition against booby-traps under international law (Human Rights Watch, 9/25/24). The explosions wounded nearly 3,000, many of them civilian bystanders (CNN, 9/27/24). Calling all this mass maiming and murder “a remarkable display of intelligence [and] technological skill” betrays a racist lust for Arab blood.

    Matthew Levitt of the Boston Globe (9/23/24) was similarly unconcerned with the harm done to noncombatants, and gushed over Israel’s technical mastery: “Israel, in an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger deception, outfoxed Hezbollah” in a “tactical success.” Yet the communication devices blew up “in crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well as in people’s homes,” causing innumerable people to lose one or more eyes or hands or both (Amnesty International, 9/20/24).

    Whether it’s this cold-blooded attitude to people in Lebanon, or offering one-dimensional accounts of Hezbollah’s role in the country that reduce it to mere villainy, pundits appear to be using their platforms to try to get the public to sign off on savage US/Israeli violence.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The Insurance Industry Is the Fossil Fuel Industry’: CounterSpin interview with Derek Seidman on insurance and climate

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed writer/researcher Derek Seidman about insurance and climate  for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Janine Jackson: As we watch images of devastation from Hurricane Helene, it’s hard not to hold—alongside sadness at the obvious loss—anger at the knowledge that things didn’t have to be this way. Steps could have been, still could be taken, to mitigate the impact of climate change, and making weather events more extreme, and steps could be taken that help people recover from the disastrous effects of the choices made.

    As our guest explains, another key player in the slow-motion trainwreck that is US climate policy—along with fossil fuel companies and the politicians that abet them—is the insurance industry, whose role is not often talked about.

    WaPo: Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

    Washington Post (9/3/24)

    Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian. He contributes regularly to Truthout and to LittleSis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Derek Seidman.

    Derek Seidman: Hey, thank you. Great to be here.

    JJ: In your super helpful piece for Truthout, you cite a Washington Post story from last September. Here’s the headline and subhead:

    Home Insurers Cut Natural Disasters From Policies as Climate Risks Grow:

    Some of the largest US insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums.

    I think that drops us right into the heart of the problem you outline in that piece. What’s going on, and why do you call it the insurance industry’s “self-induced crisis”?

    DS: Thank you. Well, certainly there is a growing crisis. The insurance industry is pulling back from certain markets and regions and states, because the costs of insuring homes and other properties are becoming too expensive to remain profitable, with the rise of extreme weather. And so we’ve seen a lot of coverage in the past few months over this growing crisis in the insurance industry.

    Derek Seidman

    Derek Seidman: “The insurance industry itself is a main actor in driving the rise of extreme weather, through its very close relationship to the fossil fuel industry.”

    But one of the critical things that’s left out of this is that the insurance industry itself is a main actor in driving the rise of extreme weather, through its very close relationship to the fossil fuel industry. And in this narrative in the corporate media, the insurance industry on the one hand and extreme weather on the other hand, are often treated like they’re completely separate things, and they’re just sort of coming together, and this “crisis” is being created, and it’s a real problem that the connections aren’t being made there.

    So I guess a couple things that should be said, first, are that the insurance industry is the fossil fuel industry, and its operations could not exist without the insurance industry.

    We can look at that relationship in two ways. So first, of course, is through insurance. The insurance giants, AIG, Liberty Mutual and so on and so on, they collectively rake in billions of dollars every year in insuring fossil fuel industry infrastructure, whether that’s pipelines or offshore oil rigs or liquified natural gas export terminals. This fossil fuel infrastructure and its continued expansion, this simply could not exist without underwriting by the insurance industry. It would not get its permit approvals, it would just not be able to operate, it couldn’t attract investors and so on. So that’s one way.

    Another way is that, and this is something a lot of people might not be aware of, but the insurance industry is an enormous investor in the fossil fuel industry. Basically, one of the ways the insurance industry makes money is it takes the premiums, and it pools a chunk of it and invests those. So it’s a major investor. And the insurance industry, across the board, has tens of billions of dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry.

    And this is actually stuff that anybody can go and look up, because some of it’s public. So, for example, the insurance giant AIG, because it’s a big investor, it has to disclose its investments with the SEC. And earlier this year, AIG disclosed that, for example, it had $117 million invested in ExxonMobil, $83 million invested in Chevron, $46 million in Conoco Phillips, and so on and so on.

    Jacobin: Insurance Companies Are Abandoning Homeowners Facing Climate Disasters

    Jacobin (2/7/22)

    So, on the one hand, you have this hypocritical cycle where the insurance industry is saying to ordinary homeowners, who are quite desperate, we need to jack up the price on your premiums, or we need to pull away altogether, we can’t insure you anymore—while, on the other hand, it’s driving and enabling and profiting from the very operations, fossil fuel operations, that are causing this extreme weather in the first place, that the insurance industry is then using to justify pulling back from insuring just regular homeowners.

    JJ: This is a structural problem, clearly, that you’re pointing to, and you don’t want to be too conspiratorial about it. But these folks do literally have dinner with one another, these insurance executives and the fossil fuel companies. And then I want to add, you complicate it even further by talking about knock-on effects, that include making homes uninsurable. When that happens, well, then, that contributes to this thing where banks and hedge funds buy up homes. So it’s part of an even bigger cycle that folks probably have heard about.

    DS: Yeah, absolutely. This whole scenario, it’s horrible, because it impacts homeowners and renters. If you talk to landlords, they say that the rising costs of insurance are their biggest expense, and they are, in part, taking that out on tenants by raising rents, right?

    But it also really threatens this global financial stability. I mean, with the rise of extreme weather, and homes becoming more expensive to insure, or even uninsurable, home values can really collapse. And when they collapse, aside from the horrific human drama of all that, banks are reacquiring foreclosed homes that, in turn, are unsellable because of extreme weather, and they can’t be insured.

    The big picture of all this is that it leads to banks acquiring a growing amount of risky properties, and it can create a lot of financial instability. And we saw what happened after 2008, as you mentioned, with private equity coming in and scooping up homes. And so, yeah, it creates a lot of systemic financial instability, opens the door for financial predators like private equity and hedge funds to come in.

    JJ: And it seems to require an encompassing response, a response that acknowledges the various moving pieces of this. I wonder, finally, is there responsive law or policy, either on the table now or just maybe in our imagination, that would address these concerns?

    DS: There are organizers that are definitely starting to do something about it, and there are some members of Congress that are also starting to do something about it.

    For this story, I interviewed some really fantastic groups. One of them is Insure Our Future, and this is sort of a broader campaign that is working with different groups around the country, and really demanding that insurers stop insuring new fossil fuel build-out, that they phase out their insurance coverage for existing fossil fuels, for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about today.

    At the state level, there’s groups that are doing really important and interesting things. So one of the groups that I interviewed was called Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and they’ve been working hard, in coalition with other groups in Connecticut, to introduce and pass a state bill that would create a climate fund to support residents that are impacted by extreme weather. (Connecticut has seen its fair share of extreme weather.) And this fund would be financed by taxing insurance policies in the state that are connected to fossil fuel projects. So it’s also a disincentive to invest in fossil fuels.

    In New York, a coalition of groups and lawmakers just introduced something called the Insure Our Communities bill. And this would ban insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, and it would set up new protections for homeowners that are facing extreme weather disasters.

    I spoke to organizers in Freeport, Texas, with a group called Better Brazoria, and these are people that are on the Gulf Coast, really on the front lines. And Better Brazoria is just one of a number of frontline groups along the Gulf Coast that are organizing around the insurance industry, and they’re trying to meet with insurance giants, and say to them, “Look, what you’re doing is, we’re losing our homeowner insurance while you’re insuring these risky LNG plants that are getting hit by hurricanes, and fires are starting,” and trying to make the case to them that this is just not even good business for them.

    And then, more recently, you’ve seen Bernie Sanders and others start to hold the insurance industry’s feet to the fire a little more, opening up investigations into their connection to the fossil fuel industry, and how this is creating financial instability.

    Truthout: As Florida Floods, Insurance Industry Reaps What It Sowed Backing Fossil Fuels

    Truthout (9/27/24)

    So I think this is becoming more and more of an issue that people are seeing is a real problem for the financial system, and it’s something that we should absolutely think about when we think about the climate crisis, and the broader infrastructure that’s enabling the fossil fuel industry to exist, and continue its polluting operations that are causing the climate crisis and extreme weather. So I think we’re going to see only more of this going forward.

    JJ: All right, then, we’ll end it there for now.

    We’ve been speaking with Derek Seidman. You can find his article, “As Florida Floods, Insurance Industry Reaps What It Sowed Backing Fossil Fuels,” on Truthout.org. Thank you so much, Derek Seidman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    DS: Thank you.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Double Standards and Distortion: How the NYT Misreports Sexual Violence in Israel/Palestine

     

    Corporate news media have consistently blundered through their coverage of the violence on October 7, with documented war crimes outshined by—and sometimes disbelieved because of—horrific claims that later proved false. There were not 40 beheaded babies, or babies hung from clotheslines or baked in ovens, and no pregnant woman was discovered with her belly cut open and her fetus stabbed.

    Most of these atrocity stories disappeared after being debunked. But one especially painful and inflammatory claim continues to circulate: that Hamas militants carried out “systematic and widespread” rape on October 7 (New York Times, 2/21/24). This claim has become so embedded in the Israel/Palestine discourse that officials like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to offer it as a reason to support Israel’s ongoing murderous assault on Gaza. And that has happened in no small part due to prominent and repeated coverage from corporate media—most notably the New York Times.

    ‘Weaponized sexual violence’

    Times of Israel: In harrowing detail, NYT reports on weaponization of rape, sexual violence on Oct. 7

    Cited and reprinted around the world (e.g., Times of Israel, 12/29/23), the New York Times‘ “Screams Without Words” report (12/28/23) established systematic sexual violence by Hamas as a core part of the October 7 narrative.

    The paper’s claim—made most influentially in its December 28 above-the-fold investigation “Screams Without Words”—is that “Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7,” that militants tactically carried out “rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”

    Other newspapers cited and republished the Times’ claims, and both the US and Israeli governments have used the Times coverage to further their military and propaganda campaigns. Shortly after the publication of “Screams,” a resolution “condemning rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas in its war against Israel” was passed by the House 418–0, its sponsors citing the Times reporting and its “horrific stories” to buttress the resolution. So too did Israel heavily cite the Times when producing a “special report” on October 7 sexual crimes.

    From the beginning, there were serious problems with the claims of mass rape by Hamas. Yet a new FAIR study finds that, both before and after the publication of “Screams,” the paper devoted significant coverage to promoting that narrative.

    At the same time, reports of escalating Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence against Palestinians—of which there is a long, well-documented history—have found little purchase in the paper of record. When such assaults are mentioned, the study found, the paper almost always buries the news beneath sanitized headlines, using understated, clinical language—strikingly different from the definitive and evocative language they use for allegations of Palestinian violence.

    The most comprehensive evidence

    According to the World Health Organization:

    Sexual violence is any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, or other act directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting.

    The New York Times, however, often uses a more circumscribed definition of sexual violence, restricting it to a limited range of acts, as in this passage (12/4/23): “Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence—rape and sexual mutilation—particularly against women.” Indeed, rape and sexual mutilation constitute sexual violence in conflict, but so do many other acts (public degradation, verbal abuse and threats, nonconsensual touching and many others).

    As it stands, the most comprehensive evidence regarding sexual violence on October 7 was presented by the United Nations (5/17/24) in its examination of crimes committed by all parties between October 7 and December 31, 2023. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported that the available evidence displays “indications of sexual violence” committed by Palestinians on October 7 that “were not isolated incidents,” including “bodies that had been undressed” and “the restraining of women…prior to their abduction or killing.”

    It noted that it “has not been able to independently verify” allegations of rape made by journalists and the Israeli police, and that it had enough evidence to deem some of these allegations false. Notably, “the Commission did not find credible evidence…that [Hamas] militants received orders to commit sexual violence.”

    B'Tselem: Welcome to Hell

    Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem (8/24), documented “repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity, by soldiers or prison guards against Palestinian detainees as an additional punitive measure.”

    That same report—which was limited in scope to the end of 2023—noted witness and victim testimony, as well as ante mortem video footage and photographs, that documented “many incidents in which ISF [Israel Security Forces] systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to [sexual violence] online and in person since October 7.”

    In August 2024, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report—entitled “Welcome to Hell”—about the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israel’s detention camps. Based on interviews with 55 prisoners, as well as relatives of incarcerated individuals, the report deemed Israeli abuses of all kinds, including sexual violence, to be “so systemic that there is no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities.”

    In other words, there is credible evidence of various forms of sexual violence committed by both Palestinians and Israelis. At the same time, there is not evidence of the lurid “systematic and widespread” Hamas rape claims made and spread by the New York Times—while there is evidence that the sexual violence Israel is committing is systematic and widespread, a contrast Times readers would almost certainly be quite surprised to learn, given the paper’s coverage.

    Lopsided coverage

    In our study, FAIR used the Nexis news database and NYTimes.com in an attempt to identify every New York Times news article, opinion piece and newsletter discussing conflict-related sexual violence in Israel/Palestine digitally published during the 11-month period of October 7, 2023, through September 6, 2024. (See footnote for search terms.) Transcripts, letters to the editor, corrections, podcasts and videos were excluded from the sample.

    New York Times Articles about Sexual Violence in Israel/Palestine Crisis, by Alleged Perpetrator

    During the studied interval, we found 195 pieces (149 news articles and 46 opinion pieces) that mentioned allegations of sexual violence in the region. Of those, 158 (or 81%) reference sexual violence against Israeli women and girls by Hamas and other Palestinians. Forty-eight pieces mentioned sexual violence by Israels against Palestinians. (Both these numbers include 11 pieces that discussed sexual violence suffered and perpetrated by both Israelis and Palestinians.)

    When talking about Palestinian violence, opinion pieces—which constituted over a quarter of the references—regularly made unqualified assertions like “Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape” (2/3/24). The Times published an op-ed (11/3/23) by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that asserted that Hamas “tortured children, raped women and destroyed peace-loving communities.”

    News articles turned allegations into facts in the Times’ own journalistic voice, well before any investigations had been completed. The paper (12/5/23) reported, for instance, that Biden “condemned the ‘unimaginable cruelty’ of Hamas attackers who raped and mutilated women in Israel on October 7.”

    Consistent prevarication

    NYT: Stripped, Beaten or Vanished: Israel’s Treatment of Gaza Detainees Raises Alarm

    Even when looking at the maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners, the New York Times (1/23/24) could not bring itself to refer to the mass stripping of prisoners as “sexual violence.”

    In contrast, the 48 Times pieces referencing Israeli-led sexual violence always prevaricated. The vast majority (88%) were news articles, as the paper published only six op-eds referencing such violence. No article, whether news or opinion, labeled it as sexual violence in their own words.

    Twenty-eight of them (e.g., 1/23/24) mentioned that Palestinians are stripped regularly in public with “hands bound behind their backs [and] blindfolded.” Some of these included photographic evidence. Forcible stripping is recognized by international law as sexual violence; nevertheless, none of the 28 called it, as Ira Memaj at The Nation (5/13/24) did, “clear-cut evidence of sexual violence.” Only four of them (12/28/23, 4/17/24, 6/12/24, 6/13/24) characterized the abuse as even potential sexual violence, and even then only in the words of UN reports.

    Twelve of the 48 articles described invasive sex acts—one (6/6/24) noted a Palestinian detainee who “‘died after they put the electric stick up’ his anus,” and another (5/1/24) reported that an Israeli soldier ordered a Palestinian peace activist “to perform oral sex” on him.

    NYT: A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World

    A third of the New York Times‘ descriptions of invasive sexual violence by Israelis against Palestinians involved a 1949 attack that was the basis for a 2023 novel (New York Times, 10/18/23).

    Four of the 12 articles that described invasive Israeli acts referenced the Frankfurt Book Fair canceling Adania Shibli’s award ceremony for her novel Minor Detail, which details the historical rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. Each of these four articles acknowledged that she “was gang-raped and murdered by an Israeli Army unit in 1949” (10/18/23). Strikingly, the only articles that were able to state, both in plain English and not as mere allegation, that acts by Israelis amount to sexual violence or rape concern a 75-year-old case written about in a novel.

    We also made a count of which articles about sexual abuse specifically used the words “rape” or “sexual violence.” We chose those words in particular because they bear legal weight—in international law, “rape” and “sexual violence” are specifically outlined and prohibited as crimes against humanity. When the Times includes one or both of these terms (or doesn’t), it indicates how the paper views a given set of actions, and how it wants its readers to interpret them.

    Out of 195 total stories about sexual violence in the region, 115 used the word “rape” and 76 of them use “sexual violence.” Of the articles mentioning “rape,” 105 (91%) marked Palestinians as the rapists and 11 (10%) of them named Israelis. However, four of the 11 articles about Israeli perpetrators of rape refer to Shibli’s novel. Out of the 76 articles using the word “sexual violence,” 73 (96%) of them reference Palestinians as the perpetrators and nine (12%) of them name Israelis.

    References to 'Rape' and 'Sexual Violence' by Alleged Perpetrator

    ‘Part of a broader pattern’

    NYT: Screams Without Words: Sexual Violence on October 7

    The family of Gal Abdush, featured on the front page of the New York Times to illustrate its “Screams Without Words” report (12/31/23), argues persuasively that their relative could not have been raped, as the Times alleges, given the timeline of events on October 7.

    New York Times articles describing “the sexual violence Hamas militants committed on October 7” (1/19/24) trickled out almost immediately after that day (e.g, 10/10/23), quickly becoming a steady stream. From October 7 through December 27, the day before “Screams” was published online, the Times put out 71 articles mentioning sexual violence, 59 of them pointing to Palestinian perpetrators. (Four of the 12 referencing Israeli perpetrators were about the historical novel.) Many of these presented the claims of “mass rape” as accusations from Israeli officials or others, but some portrayed them as fact—as with a report (12/4/23) that, despite Hamas denials, “ample evidence has been collected” that “its fighters committed sex crimes.”

    On December 28 (appearing in print on December 31), the Times published its bombshell, “gut-wrenching” investigation, evocatively titled “Screams Without Words.” The article asserted in its headline that “Hamas weaponized sexual violence,” and began like a screenplay for a Netflix drama:

    At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.” In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

    As it continued, readers were given more heinous details of more rape victims, and the assertion that “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on October 7.”

    An ‘established’ conclusion

    NYT: U.N. Expert Will Investigate Reports of Sex Crimes by Hamas, Israel Says

    The New York Times (1/10/24) cited itself as a source that had “establish[ed] that the attacks [by Hamas] were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.”

    After “Screams,” the Times‘ news and opinion pieces began to refer to its own investigation to counter Hamas’s denials of ordering its attackers to commit sexual violence on October 7—writing (1/10/24), for instance, that the paper had “establish[ed] that the attacks were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.”

    The Times continued to regularly publish references to sexual violence in its Gaza crisis coverage; our study found the paper’s focus only began to really wane in March, settling by April around a level less than half as high as in the early months. In the final two months of the study period, when its balance finally shifted toward Israeli perpetrators, the paper published only 8 and 4 pieces, respectively, mentioning sexual violence in Israel/Palestine.

    Yet at that point in the crisis, major reports had just been published—including by the Times—that Israeli security forces were systematically using sexual violence against Palestinians. The paper’s coverage of this ongoing Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence increased at this point, but pieces referencing Palestinian-perpetrated sexual violence still outnumbered them 15–11.

    New York Times Articles about Sexual Violence in Israel/Palestine Crisis, by Alleged Perpetrator

    ‘On shaky foundations’

    Intercept: “Between the Hammer and the Anvil”

    The Intercept (2/28/24) reported that the New York Times relied “overwhelmingly on the word of Israeli officials, soldiers and ZAKA workers to substantiate their claim that more than 30 bodies of women and girls were discovered with signs of sexual abuse.”

    To many, “Screams Without Words” seemed a compelling exposé of brutal abuse. But after its release, detractors and scholars spoke out with concerns about its reliability. While there are certainly strong grounds to believe that instances of sexual violence occurred on October 7, that is not what is being contested. As the Intercept (2/28/24) put it:

    The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on October 7.”

    And, in fact, a series of investigative pieces from the Intercept (1/28/24, 2/28/24, 3/4/24) revealed that the Times’ prized cover story was built on shaky foundations, with the paper dismissing assurances from hospitals and hotlines that they had gotten no reports of sexual violence, relying instead on politicized sources with a record of debunked atrocity claims.

    In January, producers of the Times’ Daily podcast pulled an episode based on “Screams,” the Intercept (1/28/24) reported, as the paper of record could not decide whether it should

    run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report.

    Facing internal and external criticism, the Times “went into bunker mode” and pursued a ruthless investigation—not into how the paper could have published such inflammatory allegations based on shaky evidence, but into who leaked evidence of internal dissent. Management employed “Nixonian tactics of leak-hunting and stonewalling” (Nation, 3/1/24). “Frustrated” Times staffers told the Intercept (1/28/24) that the original story “deserved more factchecking and much more reporting. All basic standards applied to countless other stories.”

    ‘Our testimonies are fully accepted’

    Mondoweiss: ZAKA is not a trustworthy source for allegations of sexual violence on October 7

    Mondoweiss (12/30/23) noted that ZAKA, the New York Times‘ main source for its “Screams Without Words” piece, has played “a key role in Israel’s orchestrated propaganda campaign, spreading fake news and vague information in the service of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.”

    Then, in a February article, the Intercept (2/28/24) offered insight into the authors of “Screams.” Leadership at the New York Times selected two inexperienced freelancers in Israel—Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella—to conduct on-the-ground reporting, while Jeffrey Gettleman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent, was responsible for weaving it together. Schwartz formerly worked as an Israeli intelligence officer and was caught liking genocidal posts on social media shortly before the Times employed her.

    Additionally, the breadth of “evidence” was shown to be unreliable. For instance, in the case of two of the three identifiable victims reported in the Times article—sisters killed in the kibbutz Be’eri—both the kibbutz spokesperson and the UN denied the claim, based on all the available evidence (Intercept, 3/4/24). (On March 25, the Times finally added a bracketed disclaimer to its online article that describes video evidence “undercutting this account.”)

    Notably, much testimony came from ZAKA (Intercept, 2/27/24), described by the Times (12/28/23) as a nonprofit “emergency response team” but described by others, like the esteemed Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna, as a “militia” (YNET, 2/15/05). ZAKA’s volunteers are not trained in medical procedures or forensic science; in fact, the organization has actively taken legal action against the use of forensic procedures like autopsies (Behadrei Haredim, 1/1/13).

    Many of the charges ZAKA made in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack turned out to be fabrications; they were responsible for the false claims of babies beheaded and burned in ovens, and pregnant women with their wombs slashed open (Mondoweiss, 12/30/23). Yet such tales, which circulated widely in the immediate aftermath of the incursion, played an important role in legitimizing the massive violence that Israel subsequently unleashed on Gaza.

    “The testimonies of ZAKA volunteers, as first responders on the ground, had a decisive impact in exposing the atrocities in the South to the foreign journalists covering the war,” Eitan Schwartz, a consultant to Israel’s National Information Directorate, told the Israeli outlet YNET (11/12/23; cited in Intercept, 2/27/24). “These testimonies of ZAKA people caused a horror and revealed to the reporters what kind of human-monsters we are talking about.”

    But media outlets rarely explain who it is they are quoting when they relay ZAKA’s lurid atrocity tales. As one ZAKA spokesperson (YNET, 11/12/23) put it:

    Being a voluntary organization without a political agenda leads to openness and more receptiveness…. Our testimonies are fully accepted as if they are dealing with an international humanitarian volunteer or a doctor.

    Moreover, some family members of the only other identified victim discussed in “Screams”—Gal Abdush, the victim whose family is depicted on the cover, and whose story comprises a third of the report—spoke out to refute the Times’ narrative about their relative. They said that it would have been impossible for her to have been raped, given the timing of her death, and that the Times lied and manipulated them (Mondoweiss, 1/3/24).

    Abdush’s sister, Miral Altar—who is a fervent Zionist—wrote, “They are animals, they raped and beheaded people, but in my sister’s case, this is not true.” In an interview on Israeli Channel 13 (1/1/24), Nissim Abdush repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped, and proclaimed that “the media invented it.”

    Unfazed by grave journalistic errors—if not malpractice—Times columnist Bret Stephens (3/5/24) chose to chastise the skeptics, writing, “How quickly the far left pivots from ‘believe women’ to ‘believe Hamas’ when the identity of the victim changes.” The problem, however, is not that people “believe Hamas”—they just don’t believe the New York Times.

    Opting for selective outrage

    The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe

    Among the acts of sexual violence recounted in Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006) was an incident, recorded in David Ben-Gurion’s diary, in which Israeli soldiers based at Kibbutz Nirim “captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl…gang-raped her and in the end murdered her.”

    “Screams” stands out as the most impactful and tone-setting story produced by the New York Times during the studied period. A similarly in-depth, damning and adjective-fueled Times piece detailing Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence does not exist. That absence has nothing to do with the veracity of claims made by Palestinian victims; they are not less verifiable, or less widespread. There’s actually a long history of Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence, and it is extremely well-documented.

    In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006), Israeli historian Ilan Pappé provided many detailed accounts of rape throughout the Nakba. He explained how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary.”

    Furthermore, a recent technical glitch in the Israel State Archives revealed that Aharon Zisling, Israel’s first agriculture minister and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, “said in 1948 that he ‘can forgive instances of rape’ committed by Jews against Arab women” (Haaretz, 1/5/22).

    Despite this history, the paper of record opts for selective outrage. The closest the Times came to publishing anything about Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence that was as damning as “Screams” was a front-page (but below the fold) article (6/7/24) by Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair about Israel’s Sde Teiman detention center—described by a lawyer who visited the site as “more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo” (+972, 6/27/24).

    ‘Where Israel takes Gazans’

    Behind Lines Where Israel Takes Gazans

    This obliquely headlined article (6/7/24) was the closest the New York Times came to putting systemic Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence on its front page—yet readers wouldn’t find it mentioned until well after the jump.

    After CNN (5/11/24) published “Strapped Down, Blindfolded, Held in Diapers: Israeli Whistleblowers Detail Abuse of Palestinians in Shadowy Detention Center,” the Times (6/6/24) offered its own reporting of Sde Teiman in the obliquely headlined “Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans.” (The headline in the print edition was even more obscure: “Behind Lines Where Israel Takes Gazans.”)

    While comparable in length to “Screams,” and damning in the facts it lays out, the article did not focus exclusively—or even primarily—on the sexual violence committed at Sde Teiman; this occupied just five of the 90 paragraphs. It also had a remarkably different tone from “Screams.” It lacked the emotional weight, but also the forthright naming of “sexual violence” or “rape,” even as it included an image of a truckload of bound, blindfolded and stripped Palestinians.

    The two most detailed paragraphs about sexual violence read:

    Mr. al-Hamlawi, the senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.”

    A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus.

    This is how the Times reports on Israeli-perpetrated sexual violence: Impaling people’s rectums with hot or electrified metal rods is just not news enough for its own headlines—nor damning enough to be labeled “rape.”

    Even now, following the release of video footage depicting Israeli soldiers gang-raping a detainee, and Knesset members debating their right to do so, the Times’ equivocation prevails with headlines like “Unrest at Army Bases Highlights a Long Battle for Israel’s Soul” (7/31/24).

    ‘No credible evidence’

    NYT: The U.N. Report on Israeli and Palestinian War Crimes: What We Know

    The New York Times‘ subhead (6/13/24) references “sexual violence…by Hamas,” and not by Israel—though the story said the UN was commission was “unable to independently verify the accusations of rape, sexualized torture or genital mutilation that had been reported in the news media.”

    In June, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory issued its “first in-depth investigation of the events that took place on and since 7 October 2023”—offering the most comprehensive assessment of sexual violence at the time. In the Times’ summary (6/13/24), published one week after its piece on Sde Teiman, Erika Solomon devoted an entire section to the report’s findings on sexual violence, but left much wanting.

    In “The UN Report on Israeli and Palestinian War Crimes: What We Know,” Solomon first used the term “sexual violence” prominently in the subhead, which read:

    The findings cite acts such as sexual violence and the deliberate killing or abducting of civilians by Hamas. They also accuse Israel of collective punishment and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

    For the many readers who don’t bother to read further, the subhead reinforces the notion that sexual violence is what Hamas, not Israel, commits. But the section dedicated to sexual violence acknowledged that the report accuses both sides of sexual violence. Furthermore, Solomon admitted, for the first and only time in the Times’ coverage, buried in the bottom third of the story, that the Commission “found no credible evidence that militants were ordered to commit sexual violence”—discrediting months of reporting in the paper about “Hamas’s campaign of sexual violence”—and that it “was unable to independently verify the accusations of rape, sexualized torture or genital mutilation that had been reported in the news media”—referring to the purported crimes on October 7 so highlighted by the Times.

    The Commission also found that sexual violence is “part of ISF operating procedures,” which Solomon did not report. Overall, the UN report is a damning indictment of the Israeli state’s record of sexual violence, and of the New York Times’ reporting on the issue—neither of which are made at all apparent in Solomon’s report.

    Legitimizing an unlawful occupation

    In Israel/Palestine on Record (Verso, 2007), Howard Friel and Richard Falk explain how

    the enduring pattern of the Times’ maximalist coverage of Palestinian violence and minimalist coverage of Israeli violence obscures the magnitude of Israel’s transgressions.

    In this case, the Times amplified dubious and discreditable stories, serving to legitimize an unlawful occupation. It forced voices calling for justice into a defensive and optically abysmal position.

    Furthermore, as the Egyptian feminist coalition SpeakUp! articulated:

    Exploiting women’s bodies and rape allegations as war propaganda carries profound and extensive implications, affecting not only the immediate conflict but also influencing global attitudes and perceptions about women. This approach undermines the credibility of legitimate cases of sexual violence. It may lead to skepticism and disbelief when survivors share their experiences, perpetuating a culture of silence and impunity.

    As the New York Times’ army of reporters emphasize one thing and de-emphasize another, frame one thing as fact and cast doubt on the other, lie by omission and bury the lead, they remind us that all victims are equal, but some victims are more equal than others (FAIR.org, 3/18/22, 11/17/23).

    *Search terms: FAIR searched for articles containing variations of the terms Israel, Palestine or the West Bank in conjunction with one or more of the following terms: sexual violence, sexual assault (or other variations), sexual abuse (or other variations), rape (or other variations), stripped (or other variations), forced nudity, rectum, oral sex or anus. False positives were excluded from results.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Exposing Bias Against Palestinians, Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Predictably Accused of Bias by CBS

     

    The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

    Random House (2024)

    Acclaimed journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to nonfiction with his essay collection The Message, published on October 1, only to be met with patronizing dismissal and a whiff of racism on CBS Mornings (9/30/24).

    Coates left journalism to spend several years teaching and writing fiction, and intended to return to essay writing by producing a piece similar to George Orwell’s “Why I Write.” What he ended up with was The Message, a collection of three essays that explore “how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.” Coates visits Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine—exploring how the narrative of each place is constructed and perpetuated by journalists and media organizations.

    The longest of the essays, and the most discussed, is on Palestine. Coates goes beyond the now widely accepted call for a ceasefire, or even a call for an arms embargo: He condemns the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and says Israel’s existence as an ethnostate is fundamentally wrong. Coates has been met with praise, but also blatant dismissal—the second response being exemplified on CBS Mornings.

    ‘In the backpack of an extremist’

    CBS's Tony Dokoupil interrogating Ta-Nehisi Coates

    Tony Dokoupil (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24): Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on Palestine “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”

    Host Tony Dokoupil began the interview with an aggressive monologue that effectively dismissed Coates’ and his worldview, painting him as a radical not worth listening to:

    I want to dive into the Israel and Palestine section of the book, it’s the largest section of the book…. I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off, the publishing house goes away…the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.

    It is hard to imagine a white author as celebrated as Coates receiving such an immediate dismissal, not just of their writing, but the very basis of their political beliefs. Dokoupil forwent an attempt to have a substantive conversation by accusing Coates of “extremism.” (The “backpack” reference seemed like an attempt to insinuate a sympathy for terrorism, as Minority Report noted—10/2/24.)

    More than two minutes into the 7-minute long segment, Dokoupil still hadn’t let Coates talk about his own book. The host continued to lambaste the author, suggesting Coates was either ignorant of Middle Eastern history or creating a false narrative:

    I found myself wondering, why did Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very smart guy, very talented guy, why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada…the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?

    And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?

    Coates pointed out that Dokoupil’s narrative is the one constantly perpetuated by corporate media, and that his own concern is “with those who don’t have a voice, who don’t have the ability to talk”—in this case, the Palestinians. He noted that no establishment US news outlet has a Palestinian-American bureau chief, or even correspondent, and spoke of the suffering he saw during his trip to Israel and Palestine.

    Dokoupil chose not to engage with Coates’ criticisms of the Israeli state. Instead, he pointed out acts of violence experienced by Israel—which are greatly outnumbered by the acts of violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians—and continually pivoted the conversation to try and make Coates answer whether or not he believes Israel has a right to exist, rather than engaging with the issues that Coates wrote about.

    In response to the right-to-exist question, Coates said that no country has established their ability to exist through rights, but rather through force: “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.”

    ‘What offends you about a Jewish state?’

    Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS Mornings

    Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24): “I am against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity.”

    Dokoupil accused Coates of writing a book that “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel,” and finally stopped beating around the bush and asked him outright: “What is it that so particularly offends you about a Jewish state? A Jewish safe place, rather than any other country?”

    Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates followed the disingenuous argument that to condemn the state and actions of Israel is to be antisemitic. The exchange between the two exemplifies the issue with Palestine coverage in American media: Israel-centric viewpoints are undeniably the dominant narrative, and challenging that narrative is simply not accepted, even by one in the media fold. Those who do so are either implicitly or explicitly accused of antisemitism and dismissed out of hand.

    The CBS Mornings interview called to mind the recent comments by CNN host Jake Tapper, who spread a lie attributing an antisemitic remark to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and asked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to condemn the nonexistent comment. Tlaib had challenged the arrest of arrest of peaceful pro-Palestine protesters, suggesting that their being singled out for punishment on the basis of their views indicated a bias—and because she did so, she was herself faced with spurious charges of bias.

    Coates stated in both his profile with New York magazine (9/23/24) and an interview with the New York Times (9/29/24) that he knew people would take issue with The Message. He told New York that he knew he would face backlash, and his career would likely suffer for speaking on behalf of the Palestinian people:

    I’m not worried…. I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.

    Dokoupil proved Coates’ expectations were well-grounded. Still, at every point during the nearly 7-minute exchange, he responded calmly and rationally, stating his belief that Israel is an apartheid state, comparable to the Jim Crow–era South: “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”

    Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates was more an interrogation than an interview, and the patronizing tone and racism that Coates encountered on CBS is a part of a media ecosystem that continuously uplifts pro-Israel voices and leaves out pro-Palestine ones.

    Messages to CBS may be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Top Papers Quoted More Wine Importers Than Union Leaders on Port Strike

     

    At midnight on October 1, over 45,000 port workers across the Eastern US began a strike that was to last for three days. This labor action was only the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between workers and bosses in North America, but corporate media never seem to get better at reporting on such disputes.

    In this particular case, the workers’ main demands were pay increases and assurances that automation will not replace them. But strikes in general have one straightforward aim: to demonstrate the power of workers, and thus the necessity of meeting their demands, by depriving the economy of their labor. The International Longshoremen’s Association gained an initial victory in securing a 62% wage increase over six years for its workers. Other issues, like automation, will continue to be negotiated, with a January 2025 deadline.

    It seems, however, that the more a strike affects the economy, i.e., the more effective it is, the harder corporate media try to smear workers as selfish and destructive. To understand where media loyalties lie, one only needs to look at the experts they seek for quotes.

    Big banking, big shipping, big banana

    WaPo: Port strike freezes shipping on East Coast, threatening shortages

    Washington Post (10/1/24): “The effects are expected to ripple through the country, costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars a day and getting worse each day the longshoremen remain off the job.”

    When media report on high finance or business dealings, readers will rarely if ever find a quote from a union leader, much less a rank-and-file worker, in the news reports. However, when dockworkers initiate a labor action, it seems the first call a reporter makes is to a Manhattan office tower.

    Stifel is an investment bank that manages $444 billion worth of assets. It’s perhaps best known for tricking five Wisconsin school districts into losing over $200 million in bum mortgage investments ahead of the 2008 financial crisis (Reuters, 12/8/16).

    Lately, the phones at the bank’s offices have been overwhelmed with reporters seeking comment on the East Coast port strike. Analysts at Stifel have been quoted a total of four times in the Washington Post (10/1/24, 10/1/24) and New York Times (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Post (9/28/24), presumably trying to prevent accusations of favoring finance over accounting, also sought comment from a chief economist at Ernst & Young.

    If, when it comes to the economy, you prioritize banana availability above all other considerations, then corporate media has you covered. The Post (9/30/24) spoke to the Big-Ag lobbying and insurance group the American Farm Bureau Federation, who warned that 75% of the nation’s banana supply was at stake. Not to be outdone, the Times (10/1/24) tracked down their own source for the banana angle, Daniel Barabino, COO at the Bronx’s Top Banana, who warned a two-week strike would hit “all the banana importers.”

    Later reporting by the Baltimore Banner (10/3/24) revealed that banana heavyweights Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita operate their own ships and are outside the trade group that represents management in bargaining, and thus their ships were still being unloaded. In other words, initial forecasts of banana scarcity were greatly overstated.

    Naturally, logistics executives were well-represented in the news pages. The New York Times quoted the directors of two ports (9/24/24), as well as four members of management at different logistics firms (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Washington Post quoted at least seven logistics executives in their coverage (9/18/24, 9/28/24, 9/30/24, 9/30/24), not to mention numerous importers and business owners.

    Missing workers

    NYT: For East Coast Wine Importers, the Port Workers Strike Brings Fear and Uncertainty

    The New York Times (10/1/24) ran an article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for wine importers—but no article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for dockworkers.

    Union leaders were not totally silenced. Since September 24, four ILA leaders have been quoted by the New York Times (9/24/24, 9/26/24, 9/29/24, 10/1/24). For those keeping track, that is two fewer than the six wine importers the Times has quoted in coverage of the port strike (9/30/24, 10/1/24).

    The number of rank-and-file dockworkers quoted by the Times is zero. To be fair, it seems that the union has instructed picketers to not talk to reporters, an understandable measure for message discipline.

    However, in the lead-up to the strike, the Times found time to talk to Christmas tree, clothing and mango importers (9/24/24, 9/30/24). These people were understandably concerned for their livelihoods. However, by failing to interview even one dockworker or any of their families, the Times is showing their readers a picture where only the business owners are concerned for the economy, for their families, for the holiday season.

    Will longshoremen have enough time to spend with their families or have enough money for gifts this Christmas? Readers of the Times have no idea.

    Instead, Times coverage (10/3/24) has focused on Harold Daggett, the union’s president, and his “autocratic” style and “generous salary.” When the only union member profiled by the Times is depicted as rich, corrupt and incompetent, it encourages a dismissal of the union’s struggle as a whole.

    Even once the strike ended, the Times (10/3/24) just couldn’t find a worker to quote. Instead, the piece extensively quoted the chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group, a corporate consulting firm, who was unhappy that the strike had been settled:

    I cannot recall an episode that had so little effect on the economy, led to such a short strike and resulted in such a huge increase in earnings for workers who are already making over $100,000 a year…. We tend to shrug off the costs, but it does affect our ability to build things and export them.

    During the UAW strike, Sarah Lazare noted that the Anderson Economic Group was used by media to decry labor’s threat to “the economy” without mentioning their auto-industry clients (American Prospect, 8/23/23). The firm was also cited on the danger posed by the UPS strike (FAIR.org, 9/26/23). It’s a group you would naturally turn to if your were looking for a quote decrying labor getting a larger slice of the economic pie.

    Loud on wages, silent on profits

    Corporate media coverage of longshoremen’s wages has emphasized that some union members make around $160,000 (Washington Post, 10/1/24). One story even reported that salaries for New York and New Jersey longshoremen range to “over $450,000” (Washington Post, 9/28/24).

    Per the report that the Post seems to be referencing (they don’t bother to give a citation), the Port of New York and New Jersey elects to pay certain workers “special compensation packages,” which are not governed by the collective bargaining agreement. In other words, the Post is using some exceptional cases in the Port of New Jersey and New York, unconnected to the contract that’s up for negotiation, to suggest that some people are being paid nearly half a million dollars to load freight. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the 45,000 dockworkers whose salaries are governed by the collective bargaining agreement are maligned.

    The starting wage rate for a dockworker is just $20 an hour. Given that the top wage (after six years of service) under the current contract is $39, a 40-hour-per-week salary would net a senior worker just over $80,000. To earn in the hundreds of thousands, overtime is clearly needed. However, the New York Times (10/1/24) reports merely that dockworkers “say they have to put in long workweeks to earn that much,” with no elaboration on whether or not that is true.

    When nearly every story on the port strike mentions that dockworkers make up to $100,000 or $200,000, the object is clear: Media want readers to question if these “workers without a college degree” (New York Times, 10/1/24) really deserve a salary commensurate with the 10.5 million Americans in management occupations.

    These ports are up and down the East Coast, including in high-cost-of-living metro areas like New York and Boston. Labor unions are one of the few paths to middle-class security available to most American workers. Yet it is standard practice for labor coverage in corporate media to suggest that workers fighting for their share is tantamount to greediness.

    Economist: Boom times are back for container shipping

    Soaring profits for shipping companies is an important business story (Economist, 6/27/24)—until it comes time for those companies to renegotiate labor contracts.

    Shipping company profits, on the other hand, are rarely reported. When shippers’ high profits are mentioned, they’re often not presented as a fact, but as something that is “argued” by workers (e.g., Washington Post, 10/1/24).

    However, outside of strike coverage, the shipping industry seems to be quite healthy. “Boom Times Are Back for Container Shipping,” according to a recent Economist headline (6/27/24). The windfall profits of the pandemic era, over $400 billion, are believed to be larger than the sum total of profits since containerization was implemented in 1957 (CNN, 9/26/24). Indeed, some of the pandemic-era inflation that has eroded dockworkers’ real wages may be due to the outsized pricing power of the oligopolistic shipping industry (Bloomberg, 1/18/22; The Hill, 2/2/22).

    Why was there little mention of these profits in strike coverage? Readers are encouraged to view longshoremen as greedy and unreasonable, which is less sustainable when worker demands are juxtaposed with record profits. The easiest way to avoid that juxtaposition is to omit profits from the conversation. (In the same way, it’s easier to hate professional athletes for their multi-million dollar salaries when you ignore the billions they are making for the team owners.)

    Frightening readers to management’s side

    NYT: How the Dockworkers’ Strike Could Ripple Through the Economy

    New York Times (10/1/24) warned of “cascading effects — such as layoffs — at American firms, including in the auto industry.”

    The economic effects of the strike have been much-bandied. The cost to the US economy, depending on your source, could amount to $3.78 billion per week (Washington Post, 10/1/24), $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion per week (New York Times, 10/1/24) or a whopping $5 billion per day, according to the brain trust at J.P. Morgan (New York Times, 9/30/24).

    While these numbers are supposed to frighten the reader into siding with management, what they are really doing is demonstrating the importance of labor being paid well and treated well. The fact that dockworkers’ labor is necessary to facilitate up to $5 billion in commerce every day is evidence that their labor is of the utmost importance, and an argument for their being compensated as such.

    Besides serving up run-of-the-mill worker bashing, the Washington Post  (9/29/24, 10/1/24, 10/1/24) has taken the strike as an opportunity to raise the specter of pandemic-era inflation and price hikes. The Post (9/28/24) quoted Ernst & Young chief economist Greg Daco: “A work stoppage could slow progress on bringing inflation under control.” Never mind the fact that inflation has already been tamed (Politico, 9/11/24).

    Other outlets have a more staid forecast, with the New York Times (10/1/24) noting that “a rapid acceleration in inflation” is unlikely.

    Framing a strike as potentially strangling the economy (with little mention of the hardship striking workers would no doubt face) serves to help the reader, whose economic situation is almost certainly closer to the workers, identify instead with the multibillion-dollar logistics companies.

    It’s not that workers are seeking to destroy the economy. However, it is up to the workers to look out for their own interests as labor share continues to decrease, especially in the face of automation (Marketplace, 4/12/24). Most Americans are sympathetic to unions and union members, but when it comes to labor actions, media try demonization above all else.

    False choice

    WaPo: Biden may face tough choices as port strike continues

    This Washington Post article (10/2/24) closes with a warning to President Joe Biden against “an approach to industry highly deferential to labor unions.”

    Corporate media attempted to use the economic chaos apparently on the horizon to paint a less-than-rosy picture for the incumbent Democrats. With the presidential election a month away, the strike has been posed as a tough choice for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris between supporting unions and averting economic destruction. The Washington Post (10/2/24) reported that

    Biden told reporters Tuesday that he would not use a federal labor law to force the longshoremen back to work…. But whether—or for how long—the president will stick to this posture has become a source of speculation in Washington, as Democrats try to project economic stability ahead of the November election.

    Elsewhere, the Post (9/30/24) noted that some economic forecasters “assume that, with the election just weeks away, Biden will intervene in the labor dispute to head off more serious economic costs.” The New York Times (10/1/24) took a similar tone:

    The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, to force an end to a port shutdown…. But some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy.

    The Times failed to actually cite any of these labor experts who said President Biden might use the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial law that began the slow demise of organized labor since 1947. However, this framing supports the idea that a strike is effectively a hostage situation, with the workers putting a gun to the head of the economy, and the government must choose one of those two sides. Left out of the equation are the corporations, who have the power to end the strike immediately by sharing some of their inflated profits with their workers.

    It should not be surprising that corporate media redirect readers’ anger towards workers. US news outlets have a habit of omitting wealth and income inequality from their coverage, and coverage of labor actions is no exception.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate, Insha Rahman on Immigration Conversation

     

     

    Newsweek: How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida's Home Insurance Crisis

    Newsweek (9/27/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: “How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis” was a recent Newsweek headline, on a story with a source saying smaller insurers were “especially in danger.” A layperson might wonder why events we pay insurance for should present a crisis for the industry we pay it to. The unceasing effects of climate disruption will only throw that question into more relief.

    Writer and historian Derek Seidman joins us to help understand what’s happening and how folks are resisting.

     

    Person holding a sign: "I AM AN IMMIGRANT"

    Vera Institute (3/21/24)

    Also on the show: If it comes to issues that many unaffected people are told to care strongly about, immigration from the southern border is high on the list. But how seriously should we attend to a public conversation where believing that your Haitian neighbors want to eat your pets is not a bar to entry? We’ll talk about building a humane dialog on immigration and asylum policy with Insha Rahman,  vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of the TikTok ban.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Media Urge Expansion of Ukraine War—Nuclear Risk Be Damned

     

    Ukraine has for months been asking the Biden administration for permission to use long-range US, British and French weapons to strike deeper in Russian territory, which would be a clear escalation in the war. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the move would cross a red line for him, and recently announced that he was loosening Russia’s nuclear doctrine for using nuclear weapons.

    Despite the risks of such escalation—and a lack of evidence that it would shift the war in Ukraine’s favor—Biden’s public reluctance to loosen his limits has been met in the war-hungry media primarily with derision.

    Lowering the bar

    AP: Putin lowers threshold of nuclear response as he issues new warnings to the West over Ukraine

    Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that “any nation’s conventional attack on Russia that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country” (AP, 9/25/24).

    The US, Britain and France have all supplied Ukraine with long-range missiles, including Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). But Biden has thus far limited their use to border areas. Britain and France are following Biden’s lead on range limitations.

    Last month, in response to further advances by Russia into Ukraine, Ukraine launched a surprise invasion into Russian territory in Kursk. Since then, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pressed the US for more and longer-range missiles, Putin has increasingly raised the specter of nuclear retaliation.

    Under its 2020 nuclear doctrine, Russia could respond with nuclear strikes to nuclear or conventional attacks it deemed a “threat to its existence,” if they came from a nuclear power. His new doctrine lowers the bar, so that a “critical attack” on Russia carried out with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” would be grounds for launching a nuclear response—including against the supporting power.

    In other words, if Ukraine used long-range missiles supplied by a NATO power to launch an attack on Russia that it deemed “critical,” Putin could respond with a nuclear strike, against either Ukraine or against that NATO country.

    Dismissing the nuclear risk

    In the opinion pages of US corporate media, the risk of nuclear war or other retaliation by Putin was quickly dismissed, as outlets pressed Biden for further escalation.

    WaPo: Ukraine needs long-range missiles before winter’s onset

    The Washington Post (9/22/24) encourages the US to offer “NATO training and assistance” to help Ukraine attack targets hundreds of miles inside Russia. What could go wrong?

    The Washington Post editorial board (9/22/24) urged Biden to acquiesce to Zelenskyy under the headline, “Ukraine Needs Long-Range Missiles Before Winter’s Onset.” The board argued that since Putin has issued “red lines” in the past that could prompt nuclear war, and “has not followed through on his threats,” therefore

    there’s no reason to think now he would risk a wider war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a time when his forces are already severely depleted.

    The board suggested that Putin is more likely to “align himself with Iran or its proxies to strike at US forces in the Middle East.” Though it deemed that “a risk worth weighing,” it didn’t discuss it any further. It concluded: “Mr. Biden needs to give permission and set the ground rules quickly.”

    Politico editor-at-large Matthew Kaminski (9/18/24) called Zelenskyy’s request “a fair ask.” He made a similar argument to the Post editors that Putin’s “threatening noises” after each “allegedly escalatory step” from the US never turn into actions.

    The Wall Street Journal editorial board (8/28/24) simply dismissed worries of escalation out of hand:

    The Biden administration fears Mr. Putin might escalate his war if Ukraine puts more of his military at risk, but the war isn’t winding down. Ukraine has been attacking Russian targets with domestically produced drones, and on Sunday President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the “first successful combat use of our new weapon—a Ukrainian long-range rocket drone” designed “to destroy the enemy’s offensive potential.”

    The Hill published a column by Joseph Bosco (10/1/24) that sneered, “Biden is clearly intimidated by Putin’s threats of retaliation, as stated again last week regarding Zelenskyy’s request for longer strike authority.” Apparently readers were supposed to just dismiss those threats, because Bosco didn’t even try to make an argument about them.

    Barely bothering to justify

    WSJ: ATACMS and Russia’s Sanctuary

    The Wall Street Journal‘s response (8/28/24) to worries that giving Ukraine long-range missiles will escalate the war: “the war isn’t winding down” anyway.

    When it came time to justify the escalation, pundits seemed content to make noises about the need for victory, barely bothering to offer actual arguments about why long-range missiles in particular would achieve that goal.

    The Journal editors wrote that Biden’s “latest bad excuse” for not giving Zelenskyy what he wants “is that such strikes wouldn’t make much of a difference.” They cited the neoconservative, military industry–funded Institute for the Study of War, which suggested that even if Russia has already moved 90% of its military aircraft out of reach of those missiles, as Biden officials argued, there were plenty of other things a trigger-happy military could hit. The Journal concluded with the vague claim that “the US can strengthen Ukraine’s position and make negotiations to end the war more likely.”

    The Post also cited the ISW, and wrote weakly that the long-range missiles “could” hit Russian “arms depots, air fields and military bases,” which “perhaps…might force Mr. Putin to draw back his deadly cache further from Ukraine’s borders.”

    Politico‘s Kaminski simply argued that Ukrainians need “a morale and momentum shift,” and “lowering the restrictions on missile use could help.”

    Dubious experts

    NYT: Biden Poised to Approve Ukraine’s Use of Long-Range Western Weapons in Russia

    The New York Times (9/12/24) says a “growing number” of experts think “the administration’s reticence” to give Ukraine long-range missiles “makes no sense”—citing a letter whose 17 signatories were replete with pro-NATO and neoconservative think tank affiliations.

    Establishment media’s news sections were sometimes little better than their opinion sections. The New York Times (9/12/24) splashed on its front page an article about the pressure on Biden to give Ukraine the green light that suggested a growing consensus among experts that Biden’s reluctance is nonsensical:

    To a growing number of military analysts and former US officials, the administration’s reticence makes no sense, especially since, they say, Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk has yet to elicit an escalatory response from Moscow.

    “Easing the restrictions on Western weapons will not cause Moscow to escalate,” 17 former ambassadors and generals wrote in a letter to the administration this week. “We know this because Ukraine is already striking territory Russia considers its own—including Crimea and Kursk—with these weapons and Moscow’s response remains unchanged.”

    Two weeks later—and buried on page 9—the Times (9/26/24) reported quite a different story:

    US intelligence agencies believe that Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States and its coalition partners, possibly with lethal attacks, if they agree to give the Ukrainians permission to employ US-, British- and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, US officials said.

    The intelligence assessment, which has not been previously reported, also plays down the effect that the long-range missiles will have on the course of the conflict, because the Ukrainians currently have limited numbers of the weapons and it is unclear how many more, if any, the Western allies might provide.

    ‘Silver bullet or powder keg’?

    USA Today: Why long-range missiles could be either a silver bullet or a powder keg for Ukraine-Russia war

    USA Today‘s military expert (9/26/24) presents the possibility that “the war would drag on even longer” as a positive consequence to giving missiles to Ukraine.

    The same day, a USA Today headline (9/26/24) read, “Why Long-Range Missiles Could Be Either a Silver Bullet or a Powder Keg for Ukraine/Russia War.” The promised “silver bullet” never fully materialized in the text, but the paper’s sole quoted source—who was given several paragraphs—skewed the article entirely in that direction.

    That source was Fred Kagan of the neoconservative, military industry–funded American Enterprise Institute. Kagan is also affiliated with the Institute for the Study of War (which was founded by his wife, Kimberly Kagan) and was an influential proponent of “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan—in other words, he’s about as hawkish as they come.

    Under the subhead, “How the weapons could help Ukraine fight Russia,” the paper quoted Kagan explaining that long-range missile strikes could “reduce the effectiveness of Russian military action.” It also paraphrased an anonymous “senior Defense official” who, unlike their administration, seemed to favor the move, noting that one “strategic effect” would be that “the war would drag on even longer.” (The official presented this as a positive development, in that it would force Moscow to “to reconsider its costs.”)

    USA Today also gave Kagan the last word, to argue that Putin’s threats are “hollow”:

    “The burden thus far has been put on those advocating for allowing Ukraine to strike legitimate military targets in Russia,” Kagan said. “But I think the burden really needs to shift now to those who say that some fear of an unspecified escalation should continue to cause us to hold the Ukrainians back.”

    Contrary opinions hard to find

    WaPo: Don’t underestimate the risks of escalation over Ukraine

    The usually hawkish David Ignatius (Washington Post, 9/30/24) was one of the few voices in corporate media urging caution about helping Ukraine launch missiles at nuclear-armed Russia.

    It’s been hard to find voices calling for restraint in major corporate media—with a few notable exceptions. One came in a Hill column (9/17/24) under a byline shared by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump, Jr. They warned that “nuclear war would mean the end of civilization as we know it, maybe even the end of the human species.” The op-ed took the opportunity to plug candidate Donald Trump as the one “who has vowed to end this war.”

    Trump, of course, argued in his televised debate with Kamala Harris that “we’re playing with World War III” in Ukraine. What he and his Hill proxies neglected to mention is that Trump, while in office, pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, both of which greatly increased the likelihood of nuclear war or “World War III.”

    Another pro-restraint take came from longtime Post columnist David Ignatius, who just over a year ago reported being compelled by Ukraine’s “moral argument” for using cluster bombs (FAIR.org, 7/8/23). Ignatius (9/30/24) struck a markedly less hawkish tone recently, writing that “the Ukraine conflict is probably as close as we’ve come to the brink of all-out superpower war since the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.” He concluded: “We’re very lucky, on balance, that [Biden] doesn’t play a reckless game.”

    Otherwise, one mostly had to look to outlets in the tank for Trump, or independent outlets like the Nation (9/18/24) and Current Affairs (9/25/24), for skepticism of military escalation.

    As Current Affairs‘ Nathan Robinson points out, even if Biden resists the pressure,

    with the foreign policy “blob” so willing to risk all of our lives, the next president, whether Trump or Harris, may well be less resistant to the pressures that push presidents toward taking extraordinarily risky gambles that imperil all of humanity.

    We could sure use a media more skeptical of that blob, rather than one that gleefully joins in.

    Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • New Yorker Sides With Right Against Childless Cat Ladies

     

    Election Focus 2024New Yorker writer Emma Green’s latest piece, “The Case for Having Lots of Kids” (9/24/24), dives into the right’s election flashpoint that there is something seriously wrong with Americans—especially women—not having enough children. In an interview with Catholic University political economist Catherine Pakaluk, Green disregards a mountain of evidence showing that economic factors play into low birth rates, instead feeding us a narrative that the problem is women’s irreligious collective soul.

    When discussing declining birth rates and the choice to go childless, people often look to the underlying economic factors. And why not, as many studies show the impact economic trends have on life choices. The Washington Post (11/3/23) said in a lengthy piece:

    Hammered by the Great Recession, soaring student debt, precarious gig employment, skyrocketing home prices and the Covid-19 crisis, millennials probably faced more economic headwinds in their childbearing years than any other generation. And, as sociologist Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, told us, it puts them behind on everything you’re supposed to line up before you have kids.

    New York Times: Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children

    New York Times (7/31/24): “The absence of policies that support working families — like paid maternity leave and stable child care — may also be leading couples to believe they’re not prepared to be parents.”

    Similarly, the New York Times (7/31/24) reported that research “indicates that larger societal factors,” including “rising childcare costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future” have created the feeling that it is “more untenable to raise children in the United States.”

    And a review of Birth Strike by former Labor Notes editor Jenny Brown (Review of Radical Political Economics, 8/13/20) explained how women have withheld their reproductive labor in order to force an end to restrictions on reproductive freedom, and instead enact “paid parental leave, affordable childcare and family allowances that would lead women to choose to have more children.”

    To underscore that last point, remember this sad fact: The United States is one of only six countries on earth that doesn’t have national paid job leave for new mothers (New York Times, 10/25/21).

    The National Bureau of Economic Research (Digest, 2/1/12) said that “rising home values have a negative impact on birth rates,” as they represent “the largest component of the cost of raising a child: larger than food, childcare or education.” And housing prices have certainly been increasing since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.

    When Pew Research (7/25/24) asked childless people under 50 who are unlikely to have children about their choices, 44% said “they want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests,” 38% cited “concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment,” and 36% said “they can’t afford to raise a child.”

    ‘True damage of the birth dearth’

    New Yorker: The Case for Having Lots of Kids

    The New Yorker (9/24/24) makes the case for lots of kids: “For these women, giving up their individual freedom by having kids led them to a deeper sense of purpose and joy.”

    “The Case for Having Lots of Kids” lets us know that we’re all wrong, and we should disregard the economic data. It lets Pakaluk, who Green slyly admits published her latest book with a house “known for its rightward bent,” guide the narrative into religious moralism. (The publisher, Regnery, is known for a catalog full of climate denial, Islamophobia, transphobia and conspiracy tomes like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules—FAIR.org, 12/16/22.)

    A “mother of eight children and the stepmother of six,” Pakaluk interviewed religious mothers with many children for her latest book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, to explore how we can address declining birth rates in America. The message of Green’s glowing, one-sided piece on Pakaluk is that the issue of declining birth rates is not economic, but a spiritual rot in contemporary society:

    She argues that the true damage of the birth dearth is not economic disaster but a distortion of our culture and politics. She, and many of her subjects, see a country hobbled by relentless individualism: people turning inward, pursuing their own happiness and success instead of investing in others. “Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair,” she writes.

    It’s no wonder that Pakaluk doesn’t want to answer declining birth rates with more investment in education, childcare and family services, as she co-authored Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? (The Answer Is No—Here’s Why), seemingly a counterpunch to the long history of Catholic economic radicalism, from James Connolly to Dorothy Day.

    ‘God, not subsidies’

    Pew: Younger and Older Adults' Reasons for Not Having Children Differ Widely

    Pew (7/25/24) found that young people have a wide variety of strong reasons for not wanting to have children.

    But Green reports a far more religious reactionary side of Pakaluk: We simply need to destroy our democratic ideals of separation of church and state, so that the clerics can whip the population back to baby-making. Green writes:

    Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how. She is skeptical of the kinds of family policies that progressives and pro-family conservatives advocate, such as increases to the child tax credit or baby bonuses from the government. To Pakaluk, these proposals ignore the fundamental reasons that people have kids, and they also downplay the trade-offs involved….

    Her suggestion? Religion. “Make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families and aid the needs of human life,” she writes. Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another. “People will lay down their comforts, dreams and selves for God, not for subsidies,” Pakaluk argues. To this end, she favors ending government restrictions on religious groups, particularly when it comes to education. “If the state can’t save the American family,” she writes, “it can give religion a freer rein to try.”

    There is no explanation from Green as to why economic incentives like universal pre-school, increased parental leave and affordable housing won’t change the birth rate, nor is there any evidence offered that religiosity will change society for the better. It is just tossed into the discourse, saying women—somehow men who choose not to have children are absent from the discussion—are going to need to change their ways for society’s sake.

    I have spent a lot of time with people of all genders who have chosen not to have children. It’s easy to write off non-breeders as self-indulgent hedonists who’d rather use their time and money for partying and travel, but these people are rare. Mostly, I hear from people who are disabled and have trouble taking care of themselves, let alone others. High-intensity careers can pressure white collar workers to sacrifice personal ambitions, including mate-seeking and family.

    I meet people with mental illness who fear passing on their ailment. Others feel real economic constraints—wages not keeping up with rising costs. There are many who simply aren’t finding the right partner. And, yes, there are people who look around at a world full of war, climate collapse and economic insecurity, and feel nothing but discouragement.

    Not enough white babies?

    Politico: The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population

    Politico (4/28/24): “Throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates…gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.”

    Obviously, Pakaluk is entitled to her opinion. But the problem here is Green, writing for a prestigious liberal magazine, airing this view without any scrutiny or inquiry into the issue of childlessness in America.

    Worse, she opens up this one-sided story by acknowledging the backlash to Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s complaint about “childless cat ladies” (NPR, 7/29/24). Vance is a part of a general attack on Democrats who don’t have their own biological children, especially Vice President Kamala Harris (Politico, 9/18/24). In other words, Green explicitly placed this in an election context, using the supposedly liberal New Yorker to run propaganda for the cultural right, just a little more than a month before Election Day.

    And Green never questions why the birth rate is such a hot topic with someone like Vance to begin with. Yes, there are fears that lower fertility has negative economic consequences (CNBC, 3/22/24)—but little acknowledgement that wealthy countries can easily compensate for a shrinking workforce with, for example, fewer restrictions on immigration.

    There is plenty of reporting on how right-wing natalism can be a response to racial and cultural demographic shifts (Arizona Mirror, 5/13/22; ACME, 6/27/23; Politico, 4/28/24). Green’s own colleague Margaret Talbot made the connection (New Yorker, 8/5/24). It’s hard not to see that worrying we won’t have enough people and at the same time worry that too many people are coming only makes sense if you think some people are better than others.

    It simply can’t be ignored that one of Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, billionaire Elon Musk, is obsessed with increasing birth rates (Bloomberg, 6/21/24), and at the same time has also promoted the white nationalist crackpot Great Replacement Theory (Rolling Stone, 1/5/24). Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson (Poynter, 1/29/24) was wrong when he claimed, “In August 2023, illegal immigration outpaced American births”—but the juxtaposition gives the game away.

    Is Green simply ignorant of all this, or did she leave it out in order to let Pakaluk’s culturally conservative view of parenthood go unsullied by the racist context? It’s hard to tell.

    De-economizing hot-button issues

    New Yorker; The Case for Wearing Masks Forever

    Emma Green (New Yorker, 12/28/22), asserting that a masking advocate’s “talk about empire-building and capital accumulation” was “a key component of Marxist economic theory,” suggested that members of a pro-mask group were “communists.”

    Green may be a familiar name to FAIR readers: I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 1/10/23) about how her coverage (New Yorker, 12/28/22) of the People’s CDC, and the group’s concerns that the Covid pandemic wasn’t being taken seriously enough, rested on red- baiting, ignorance of the history of eugenics and playing down the disease’s impacts. I also noted that this wasn’t her first offense when it came to shoddy Covid reporting (e.g., Atlantic, 5/4/21).

    Her coverage, while not in the extremist galaxy of pandemic denialism, fit into the broader context of corporate media downplaying the pandemic in order to roll back progressive social democratic reforms enacted during the emergency.

    Once again, here she is to tell us to stop looking at a hot-button political issue through a lens that could take us to taxing the rich to increase social services. Instead, view the issue as a de-economized cultural feud—one that puts the liberal New Yorker on the side of the right.

    Messages to the New Yorker can be sent to themail@newyorker.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Western Press Obscured the Sheer Terror of What Israel Had Carried Out’: CounterSpin interview with Mohamad Bazzi on Lebanon pager attacks

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    CBS: Fallout of Israel's reported attack using Hezbollah pagers

    Leon Panetta on CBS (9/22/24)

    Janine Jackson: Speaking of Israel’s remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta told CBS, ”I don’t think there is any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

    Panetta’s remarks were widely reported, mostly straight, but for Fox, where Sean Hannity said Panetta “had the gall to say Israel is engaging in terrorism against the terror group Hezbollah.”

    It seems worth noting: Just before Panetta, CBS viewers heard from a former FBI analyst who said of the explosions in stores, cars and homes that killed some 39 people and injured more than 3,000, including children:

    Tactically, what Israel has done has been brilliant. They have severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. They’ve severely degraded Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli things. They’re really hoping that, strategically, Hezbollah gets the message: Stop firing rockets into our country.

    That “tactic” has led to more death, more destruction and, some say, more chance of a still wider, more devastating war.

    Joining us now to talk about unfolding events and US media’s depictions is Mohamad Bazzi. He’s director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, as well as former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mohamad Bazzi.

    Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.

    JJ: CBS segued from the “brilliant tactic” guy to Leon Panetta by saying that some saw Israel’s action as a “deception one step too far. The United Nations labeled the operation a violation of international law, and it’s raised some eyebrows here at home too.” It’s equally hard to imagine that this wasn’t a violation as that it wouldn’t immediately be condemned as such, had anyone else carried it out, would you say?

    Mohamad Bazzi

    Mohamad Bazzi: “What unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives.” 

    MB: That’s an excellent point. It would certainly have been condemned, let’s say, if Russia had carried out a similar operation, or even something a fraction of this kind of attack, in Ukraine.

    I think one of the things that struck me, and I suspect it struck you and others who watch the Western media, is the sense of marvel over the ingenuity of Israel’s technological prowess. So what we had is a lot of the coverage framed as, “Oh, this is taking a page out of a spy thriller, or a dystopian movie.”

    And in some ways, what unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives. And so many in the Western media were fixating on the novelty of Israel’s attack, and sometimes celebrating it, but they neglected to acknowledge or even consider the sheer terror experienced by tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And this is a society that suffered through years and years of trauma, and this was the latest attack that unfolded in this incredibly pernicious way.

    A lot of the coverage also didn’t get into the question of whether this constituted a war crime. And, on the face of it, it seems to meet the definition of a war crime: Human Rights Watch, a few other rights organizations, issued statements noting that international humanitarian law forbids the use of booby traps, especially with objects that have such important use for civilians. I think it would fit the definition of a war crime, beyond just being an act of terrorism that’s meant to instill terror in a civilian population.

    JJ: Hezbollah, like Hamas, is for many US media consumers almost like a sports team, or like a kaiju, a monster like Godzilla. And I think it might sound strange to some to think that they aren’t solely a military force in Lebanon, but in fact have a much broader role.

    MB: Yeah, a lot of media consumers and listeners in the US don’t get the context. They don’t get the background that Hezbollah is not only a militia, it is not only the militia that’s labeled a terrorist group by the US and by many countries in the EU, but it’s also the most dominant military force in Lebanon, and it’s also the most powerful political party and political movement in the country.

    So Hezbollah runs an extensive social service network. It operates schools and hospitals and supermarkets and credit unions.

    NYT: Device Explosions Are Latest Covert Attack Attributed to Israel

    New York Times (9/18/24): “The attacks…demonstrated Israel’s prowess at using military technology in ways that suggest it can strike anywhere and at any time.”

    One of the things that became clear fairly quickly after the first wave of pager explosions on Tuesday—Hezbollah issued a statement after that wave of explosions saying that it had issued pagers to employees of various units and institutions, meaning they had distributed the devices not only to fighters, but to many civilian workers. That was one reason there were so many civilian casualties in this attack, but there are other reasons as well.

    It’s the act of terror. It’s the imprecise nature, this deliberate setting off of detonations of thousands of small bombs that went off at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon, as people were going about their daily lives. And so the bombs went off in grocery stores and hospitals and sidewalk cafes and barbershops. The next day, on Wednesday, some of the walkie-talkie explosions went off during the funerals of people who had been killed the day before during the pager explosions.

    So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon.

    JJ: Listeners will know that Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging airstrikes since October 8, and this recent escalation comes as Israel continues to target schools and shelters housing the displaced in Gaza. And Gaza is still, you say, the key here to any potential deescalation; even as eyes may move towards Lebanon, Gaza is still at the core here.

    NBC: Biden disparages Netanyahu in private but hasn’t significantly changed U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza

    NBC (2/12/24): “In at least three recent instances, Biden has called Netanyahu an ‘asshole.’”

    MB: Yeah, Gaza is certainly at the core here, and this is the lesson that the Biden administration is refusing to internalize. It’s the most obvious path to deescalation throughout the region, which is to pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire.

    There’s been a ceasefire deal on the table for months now, that Benjamin Netanyahu keeps finding reasons to obstruct, and keeps adding new conditions, and why shouldn’t he? He’s not facing any real pressure from the US; he’s not facing pressure from the Biden administration, which refuses to use the real leverage it has over Israel. And that leverage is in the form of billions of dollars in US weapons that continue to flow to Israel on a daily basis.

    So Joe Biden has decided that he’s not going to use the best leverage he has at his disposal to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire. Instead, he’s going to do this very wishy-washy leaks in the press, where Biden administration aides keep leaking how disappointed Biden has been at, how angry he is at, Netanyahu. There’s a leak a few months ago that Biden privately called Netanyahu an asshole at least three times; I think that was ABC News that reported that, several months ago.

    Responsible Statecraft: Why Is 'Ceasefire' Considered a Dirty Word?

    Responsible Statecraft (1/18/24)

    And it’s obscene, this level of trying to manage the story in this way, trying to get across the idea that the US, which has the upper hand in this situation, is somehow helpless to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire.

    All of the Iranian-allied groups in the region, starting with Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, have made clear that they would stop their attacks if and when the war in Gaza ends. So once there’s a ceasefire, once the fighting stops in Gaza, they too would stop. I’ll remind your listeners that during the last ceasefire, the seven-day ceasefire at the end of November, when there was an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, Hezbollah and the Houthis and other Iranian-allied groups in the region did stop their attacks. So I think there’s evidence that they would stick to this promise.

    JJ: And as you’ve sort of indicated, for the corporate press, it seems the role of the US in the Mideast generally has ranged from “honest broker,” which used to be a term we’d hear a lot, to now it’s kind of “conflicted do-gooder.” It does seem, though, that every day, more and more people are seeing through that depiction, even though, as you would say, some people are clinging to it desperately. There is a more clear-eyed understanding of the US role peeping through around the edges of that storyline, don’t you think?

    Intercept: Most Americans Want to Stop Arming Israel. Politicians Don’t Care.

    Intercept (9/10/24)

    MB: I hope so. And I think the evidence of that is the majority of people in the US that have been telling public opinion polls that they oppose the indefinite arming of Israel in this war and enabling Israel to carry out the huge destruction, the famine, war crimes, everything in the dying Gaza over the past 11 months, and that it’s now importing the same strategy into Lebanon. There’s growing public opposition in the US to this untethered support for Israel, this unconditional support that Biden has promised since October 8.

    And I think that’s partly because people are consuming information from social media, from other sources beyond the legacy media, beyond the corporate media, which isn’t showing anywhere near the level of destruction that’s happening in Gaza. And that isn’t framing the story, as you put it, of the US as an honest broker or do-gooder that’s simply run out of options, and that’s thrown its hands up in desperation, and just waiting for Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire.

    That’s not the kind of leverage that the US has, and it’s nowhere near the role that the US has in all of this. The Biden administration is heavily complicit, and when we see, in the years and decades to come, hopefully when we see some form of accountability in international bodies, it’s fairly easy to expect the US to go up before the International Court of Justice, or US officials to be indicted before the ICC and other bodies, even though we’re not a party to the ICC, to face these kinds of prosecutions for their role in arming Israel, despite the overwhelming evidence of what the Israeli military has been doing in Gaza, and now in Lebanon.

    Al Jazeera: Remembering Aysenur, an activist for Palestine killed by an Israeli soldier

    Al Jazeera (9/12/24)

    JJ: I have to ask you, as a journalism professor and journalist, your thoughts about free speech and assembly, not just Israel’s direct targeting of journalists, the recent raid and shutdown of Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank, the unaccountable killing of activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, but also Cornell University moving to deport a graduate student who took part in a pro-Palestinian protest. It all feels like an attack on witnessing, on knowing what’s going on and what’s being done in our name.

    MB: You’re right, there’s a widespread attack on the act of bearing witness to what’s being done. There’s a widespread attack on the ability of people of conscience to protest, and to disagree with the policies of their governments, especially the policy of the US government to support Israel in this unconditional way. And it’s a sign of the bravery of students, certainly, that have been operating and protesting at campuses across the country, at private universities, at public universities. It’s a sign of their moral commitment to this cause that they’ve persevered despite these threats, despite being suspended, despite some of them, as in Cornell, now facing deportation, because that graduate student could well lose his US visa, and would have to leave the country because of his political actions supporting Palestine and Gaza.

    And so we’re seeing average people taking tremendous risks to be able to express themselves and to say: “No, not in my name. I’m not going to accept my government and my institution supporting this.” And I hope that that’s the start of the turning point here. And I think it’s one of the things that’s contributing to the change in public opinion, where public opinion is turning against the idea of the US arming Israel and supporting Israel indefinitely.

    Pro Publica: Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.

    ProPublica (9/24/24)

    JJ: There are calls now for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to resign after it’s been reported, I believe by ProPublica, that he was in receipt of assessments, from both USAID and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau, that Israel had blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He had that information, Blinken did, when he went before Congress, and said there was no evidence of that.

    Short even of his resignation, though, how many times do US officials need to lie or hide or dissimulate before journalists stop quoting them credulously? Isn’t it just insulting to readers and to the public at some point?

    MB: We certainly have many decades of this, going back to Vietnam, of course, US officials lying about war and lying about US support for allies who commit atrocities.

    The report from ProPublica has been an exception. It’s an excellent report. It just came out in the last couple of days, based on internal leaks, because there are officials in the State Department, and elsewhere in the Biden administration, that find all of this unconscionable, and don’t want to see this continued support.

    And it’s a very important leak, not just because of what it tells us about Blinken and others in the administration, and their ability and willingness to lie to the US public and to lie to the US media, but it also shows us that there’s actually a fairly straightforward path for the Biden administration to stop its weapons transfers to Israel, because those weapons transfers violate US laws. And if they were honest, and they had admitted it, they would’ve had to stop sending weapons, because that’s what US law requires. It’s what the Biden administration’s own guidelines require.

    So that was a tremendously important leak by ProPublica. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some references to it in the past few days, but it’s not getting the widespread attention in the corporate media and in the legacy media that it should be getting.

    It’s certainly getting a lot of attention on social media. People are sharing it, and sharing the documents, and it’s creating these calls for Blinken to resign, or for Biden to do something. But it’s certainly troubling to see the legacy media ignore this as well.

    And it all raises the question, what more do you want? What more can be presented to the media for it to change its approach to covering this war?

    JJ: In addition to the appropriate engagement of that piece of information from that leak, are there any other things that you would like to see more of in US media coverage, or things you’d like to never see again in that coverage?

    MB: I would certainly like to see more humane coverage. It’s a basic ask, and it’s unfortunate that we have to make this ask, but I would like to see more humane coverage of Palestinians, of Lebanese, of other Arabs and Muslims.

    LA TImes: Israel’s growing war with Hezbollah is traumatizing Lebanon. There’s only one path to peace

    LA Times (9/23/24)

    I think one of the things we’ve seen, just in this past week, in the way that the pager explosions and the walkie-talkie explosions were covered—this marveling over Israel’s ingenuity, it ignores the reality on the ground, but it also contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Lebanese and Arabs, this widespread dehumanization that we’ve seen, certainly for decades, but we’ve seen it ramp up to an extreme since Israel launched its war on Gaza.

    So it’s a basic ask, but I would like to see some greater humanization, and just covering those attacks like they would cover other attacks on civilians. It’s not too much to ask for.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mohamad Bazzi, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University. His piece, “Israel’s Growing War With Hezbollah Is Traumatizing Lebanon. There’s Only One Path to Peace,” appeared in the September 23 Los Angeles Times.

    Mohamad Bazzi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    MB: Thank you for having me.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Vance Dossier Shows Not All Hacks Are Created Equal

     

    Election Focus 2024Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling campaign” of “enemy states.”

    Klippenstein is not the first reporter to gain access to these papers (Popular Information, 9/9/24), but most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24). Klippenstein decided it was time for the whole enchilada to see the light of day:

    As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.

    “The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.

    If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous”-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.

    The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that alleged Iranian hacking (9/18/24) was “malicious cyber activity” and “the latest example of Iran’s multi-pronged approach…to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”

    Where’s the beef?

    Substack: Read the JD Vance Dossier

    Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) argued that the Vance dossier ” is clearly newsworthy, providing Republican Party and conservative doctrine insight into what the Trump campaign perceives to be Vance’s liabilities and weaknesses.”

    The Vance report isn’t as salacious as Vance’s false and bizarre comments about Haitians eating pets (NPR, 9/15/24), but it does show that he has taken positions that have fractured the right, such as aid for Ukraine; the report calls him one of the “chief obstructionists” to providing assistance to the country against Russia. It dedicates several pages to Vance’s history of criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement, suggesting that his place on the ticket could divide Trump’s voting base.

    On the other hand, it outlines many of his extreme right-wing stances that could alienate him with putative moderates. It says Vance “appears to have once called for slashing Social Security and Medicare,” and “is opposed to providing childcare assistance to low-income Americans.” He “supports placing restrictions on abortion access,” and states that “he does not support abortion exceptions in the case of rape.”

    And for any voter who values 7-day-a-week service, Vance “appears to support laws requiring businesses to close on Sundays.” It quotes him saying: “Close the Damn Businesses on Sunday. Commercial Freedom Will Suffer. Moral Behavior Will Not, and Our Society Will Be Much the Better for It.” That might not go over well with small business owners, and any worker who depends on their Sunday shifts.

    ‘Took a deep breath’

    WaPo: Why newsrooms haven’t published leaked Trump campaign documents

    The Washington Post (8/13/24) suggested that Vance dossier was different from Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails in 2016 because of “foreign state actors increasingly getting involved” in US elections.

    Are the findings in the Vance dossier the story of the century? Probably not, but it’s not nothing that the Trump campaign is aware its vice presidential candidate is loaded with liabilities. There are at least a few people who find that useful information.

    And the Washington Post (9/27/24) happily reported on private messages Vance sent to an anonymous individual who shared them with the newspaper that explained Vance’s flip-flopping from a Trump critic to a Trump lover. Are the private messages really more newsworthy than the dossier—or is the issue that the messages aren’t tainted by allegedly foreign fingerprints? Had that intercept of material involved an Iranian, would it have seen the light of day?

    In fact, the paper (8/13/24) explained that news organizations, including the Post, were reflecting on the foreign nature of the leak when deciding how deep they should report on the content they received:

    “This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

    Double standards for leaks

    Politico: The most revealing Clinton campaign emails in WikiLeaks release

    Politico (10/7/16) quoted a Clinton spokesperson: “Striking how quickly concern about Russia’s masterminding of illegal hacks gave way to digging through fruits of hack.” This was immediately followed by: “Indeed, here are eight more e-mail exchanges that shed light on the methods and mindset of Clinton’s allies in Brooklyn and Washington.”

    There seems to be a disconnect, however, between ill-gotten information that impacts a Republican ticket and information that tarnishes a Democrat.

    Think back to 2016. When “WikiLeaks released a trove of emails apparently hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman email account, unleashing thousands of messages,” as Politico (10/7/16) reported, the outlet didn’t just merely report on the hack, it reported on the embarrassing substance of the documents. In 2024, by contrast, when Politico was given the Vance dossier, it wrote nothing about its contents, declaring that “questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents” (CNN, 8/13/24).

    The New York Times and Washington Post similarly found the Clinton leaks—which were believed at the time to have been given to WikiLeaks by Russia—far more newsworthy than the Vance dossier. The Times “published at least 199 articles about the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day,” Popular Information (9/9/24) noted.

    FAIR editor Jim Naureckas (11/24/09) has written about double standards in media, noting that information that comes to light through unethical or illegal means is played up if that information helps powerful politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, if such information obtained questionably is damaging, the media focus tends to be less on the substance, and more on whether the public should be hearing about such matters.

    For example, when a private citizen accidentally overheard a cell phone conversation between House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republican congressmembers, and made a tape that showed Gingrich violating the terms of a ethics sanction against him, news coverage focused on the illegality of taping the conversation, not on the ethics violation the tape revealed (Washington Post, 1/14/97; New York Times, 1/15/97).

    But when climate change deniers hacked climate scientists’ email, that produced a front-page story in the New York Times (11/20/09) scrutinizing the correspondence for any inconsistencies that could be used to bolster the deniers’ arguments.

    When Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher wrote a series of stories about the Chiquita fruit corporation, based in part on listening without authorization to company voicemails, the rest of the media were far more interested in Gallagher’s ethical and legal dilemmas (he was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation) rather than the bribery, fraud and worker abuse his reporting exposed.

    Meet the new boss

    Indpendent: Free speech ‘absolutist’ Elon Musk personally ordered the Twitter suspension of left-wing activist, report claims

    Musk personally ordered the suspension of the account of antifascist activist Curt Loder, the Independent (1/29/23) revealed, noting that “numerous other accounts of left-leaning activists and commentators have been suspended without warning.”

    There’s a certain degree of comedy in the hypocrisy of Klippenstein’s suspension. Since right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has claimed that his administration would end corporate censorship, but instead he’s implemented his own censorship agenda (Guardian, 1/15/24; Al Jazeera, 8/14/24).

    The Independent (1/29/23) reported that Musk “oversaw a campaign of suppression that targeted his critics upon his assumption of power at Twitter.” He

    personally directed the suspension of a left-leaning activist, Chad Loder, who became known across the platform for his work helping to identify participants in the January 6 attack.

    Al Jazeera (2/28/23) noted that “digital rights groups say social media giants,” including X, “have restricted [and] suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists.” Musk has likewise fulfilled censorship requests by the governments of Turkey (Ars Technica, 5/15/23) and India (Intercept, 1/24/23, 3/28/23) officials, and is generally more open to official requests to suppress speech than Twitter‘s previous owners (El Pais, 5/24/23; Washington Post, 9/25/24).

    Meanwhile, Musk’s critics contend, he’s allowed the social network to be a force multiplier for the right. “Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a megaphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with,” AP (8/13/24) reported. (Musk is vocal about his support for former President Donald Trump’s candidacy—New York Times, 7/18/24.)

    “Twitter Antisemitism ‘Skyrocketed’ Since Elon Musk Takeover—Jewish Groups,” blasted a Newsweek headline (4/25/23). Earlier this year, Mother Jones (3/13/24) reported that Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents…spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.”

    ‘Chilling effect on speech’

    Suspension notice from X for Ken Klippenstein

    The message Ken Klippenstein got from X announcing he had been kicked off the platform.

    Now Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports. With Klippenstein having been silenced on the network, anyone claiming X is a bastion of free speech at this point is either mendacious or simply deluded.

    Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) explained that “X says that I’ve been suspended for ‘violating our rules against posting private information,’ citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier.” He added, though, that “I never published any private information on X.” Rather, “I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.”

    The journalist (Substack, 9/27/24) claims that his account suspension, which he reports to be permanent, is political because he did not violate the network’s code about disclosing personal information, and even if he did, he should have been given the opportunity to correct his post to become unsuspended. “So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies,” he said. “What else would you call this but politically motivated?”

    Klippenstein is understandably concerned that he is now without a major social media promotional tool. “I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public,” he said. “This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety.”

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Judges in TikTok Case Seem Ready to Discount First Amendment

     

    A US circuit court panel appears ready to uphold a federal law that would effectively ban the popular social media network TikTok because it’s owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The legal attacks on the video platform—which FAIR (8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23, 3/14/24) has written about before—are entering a new phase, in which judicial interpreters of the Constitution are acting as Cold War partisans, threatening to throw out civil liberties in favor of national security alarmism.

    Earlier this year, despite widespread protest (Guardian, 3/7/24), President Joe Biden signed legislation forcing TikTok’s owner “to sell it or face a nationwide prohibition in the United States” (NBC, 4/24/24). Advocates for the ban charge that data collection—which is a function of most social media networks—poses a national security threat because of the platform’s Chinese ownership (Axios, 3/15/24).

    Given that TikTok is a global platform, with 2 billion users worldwide, demands that ByteDance sell it off are in effect another name for a ban; an analogy would be Beijing allowing Facebook to operate in China only if Meta sold the platform to a non-US company.

    ‘Foreign adversary controlled’

    WSJ: TikTok's Bad Free Speech Case

    The Wall Street Journal (9/18/24) stood up for the government’s right to ban speech it doesn’t like, i.e. that of “foreign adversaries.”

    Now TikTok is fighting for its right to remain unbanned in the US court system, taking its case straight to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. All three of the judges, two of whom were Republican appointees, questioned TikTok’s plea that free speech was at stake. The discussion suggested that the ban will survive the appeal, and ultimately be decided by the right-wing-stacked Supreme Court.

    The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial (9/18/24) praising the TikTok ban and the judges who appear ready to validate it, said:

    But Congress didn’t restrict speakers on TikTok. What’s really at issue is Chinese control of the app, and TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. TikTok is welcome to keep operating and its users to keep posting. The law merely says TikTok cannot do so while remaining what Congress calls a “foreign adversary controlled application.”

    The DC Circuit’s panel grasped this distinction. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wanted to know “why this is any different, from a constitutional point of view, than the statute precluding foreign ownership of a broadcasting license?” Good question.

    Ginsburg’s question isn’t as “good” as the Journal thinks it is. Broadcast licenses are finite, as there are only so many FM radio slots in a given geographical location, which requires government management of that limited space. That just isn’t the case with global internet-based media, which have heretofore been accorded the same strong First Amendment protections that pertain to print publications, not the lesser shield granted to broadcast media.

    The editorial went on to quote TikTok’s lawyer saying “‘lots of US speakers,’ including Politico, are owned by foreign entities” prompting Rao to reply, “But not foreign adversaries.” Sri Srinivasan, a third judge on the panel—appointed by Barack Obama, and well-known for his bipartisan appeal (NPR, 5/23/13)—also followed the logic of the “China exception” to free speech, asking whether a Chinese-owned entity should be banned if the US were to go to war with China (Reuters, 9/17/24).

    ‘Skeptical’ of free-speech argument

    Roll Call: Appeals court sounds skeptical of TikTok challenge to potential ban

    “When you have speech in the United States, our history and tradition is we do not suppress that speech because we don’t like those ideas,” a lawyer for TikTok argued (Roll Call, 9/16/24).

    Few other outlets outright agreed with the judges, but many reported that the judges were “skeptical” or showed “skepticism” of the free-speech argument (NBC, 9/16/24; Washington Post, 9/16/24; Roll Call, 9/16/24), while Politico (9/16/24) and the New York Post (9/16/24) said the judges “grilled” the app’s lawyer.

    The leaders of the ominously titled House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party filed an amicus brief (8/2/24) with the appeals court, saying the law does “not regulate speech or require any social media company to stop operating in the United States,” because it is “focused entirely on the regulation of foreign adversary control.”

    This, right here, is key. China is officially designated as an “adversary,” along with Iran and Cuba, despite the fact that China and the US have formal diplomatic relations and do billions of dollars in trade. The suggestion is that US citizens can and should be denied access to news and views that are tied to so-called adversary countries.

    Iran’s Press TV is no objective media outlet by any measure, but would be important viewing for anyone who wants to further understand the Middle East, the same way one might explore Israel’s Haaretz or Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Its website is currently operational, but in 2021 the US government seized “33 Iranian government-affiliated media websites,” including that of Press TV (Al Jazeera, 6/23/21).

    FAIR (8/5/20) has raised the concern that if TikTok is banned because of its Chinese affiliation, then Chinese newspapers and broadcasters, which many people rely on to inform themselves of the Chinese government perspective, could also be censored. These outlets have been feeling federal heat ever since the US State Department, in a move reminiscent of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, forced Chinese state media outlets to register as foreign agents (ABC, 2/18/20; FAIR.org, 2/28/22).

    Unpopular censorship

    Pew: Support for a U.S. TikTok ban continues to decline, and half of adults doubt it will happen

    Support for banning TikTok has fallen from 50% in March 2023 to 32% in July/August 2024 (Pew, 9/5/24).

    Unsurprisingly, the potential ban of the fourth-most popular social media platform in the US is unpopular with the public. Pew Research (9/5/24) reported: “The share of Americans who support the US government banning TikTok now stands at 32%. That’s down from 38% in fall 2023 and 50% in March 2023.”

    That’s not surprising given that users say a ban “would hurt countless people and businesses that rely on TikTok for a significant portion of their income,” according to AP (3/16/24). “TikTok has become an unrivaled platform for dialogue and community.”

    Many Americans are turning to the network for news (Bloomberg, 9/17/24). And TikTok has also been cited for being an important communications tool for labor unions (Vice, 5/7/21; Wired, 4/20/22; Fortune, 9/1/22) and other progressive causes (Politico, 3/27/22; Nation, 1/25/23).  It is easy for some people to disregard the platform as a space for silly videos and memes made purely for entertainment, but clearly it has much more social utility than the scoffers realize.

    TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24). Pulling the plug on such an operation would be as disruptive as suspending postal operations—which, of course, is also on the conservative agenda (New Yorker, 5/2/20).

    ‘Demanding legal scrutiny’

    EFF: Government Has Extremely Heavy Burden to Justify TikTok Ban, EFF Tells Appeals Court

    “Millions of Americans use TikTok every day to share and receive ideas, information, opinions and entertainment from other users around the world, and that’s squarely within the protections of the First Amendment,” noted EFF (6/27/24).

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a press release (6/27/24) that its amicus brief, which was joined by other media freedom groups, addressed the First Amendment concerns of the law:

    ​​The amicus brief says the Court must review the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in April—with the most demanding legal scrutiny, because it imposes a prior restraint that would make it impossible for users to speak, access information and associate through TikTok. It also directly restricts protected speech and association, and deliberately singles out a particular medium for a blanket prohibition. This demanding First Amendment test must be used even when the government asserts national security concerns.

    The argument in favor of this law boils down to McCarthyite anti-China xenophobia: America’s most sacred liberty must be abandoned out of fear of the Red Menace. The paranoia manifests in other ways, too: State governments, mostly those controlled by Republicans, are enacting laws against land ownership by Chinese citizens (Politico, 4/3/24).

    The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would authorize “more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years,” part of which would “subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese ‘malign influence’ globally,” reported Responsible Statecraft (9/11/24). The outlet added, “It’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging,” reminiscent of “the way Russia is accused of covertly funding anti-Ukrainian messaging by US media influencers.”

    Spies don’t need TikTok

    CPR: Is TikTok a National Security Threat?

    TikTok is directly owned by TikTok Inc., a US-based company that is ultimately owned by ByteDance, a company incorporated by Chinese investors in the Cayman Islands. As Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24) noted, “If the CCP wanted TikTok to steal Americans’ data, it would not have chosen this corporate structure that is designed to insulate TikTok from Chinese influence.”

    Even Washington Post columnist George Will (5/15/24), one of the loudest conservative voices in US media, framed the “national security” issue with TikTok as a weak and vague excuse to subvert free speech. “Respect for the First Amendment has collapsed, and government has a propensity for claiming that every novel exercise of power legitimates the next extension of its pretensions,” he said. “TikTok will not be the last target of government’s desire to control the internet and the rest of society’s information and opinion ecosystem.”

    And the “national security” concerns of the US government (Bloomberg, 7/27/24) don’t hold water. The Citizen Lab, published by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, issued a report (3/22/21) on both TikTok and another ByteDance app, Douyin. The report found that both apps “do not appear to exhibit overtly malicious behavior similar to those exhibited by malware.” Researchers did not “observe either app collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, videos or geolocation coordinates without user permission.”

    More recently, the Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24), published by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, found that the corporate structure of ByteDance does not indicate that China’s Communist Party has firm control on day-to-day operations as the US government contends. Further, it argued that party or government control of TikTok would have little value for Beijing:

    First, China has little incentive to spy on ordinary Americans, since most data has no national security relevance. Second, the Chinese Communist Party does not need to subjugate TikTok to spy on the social media of powerful Americans. Chinese state intelligence can obtain valuable information by monitoring users’ behavior and posts on TikTok and other social media applications. Banning TikTok would not solve the problem of foreign intelligence agencies gathering social media data.

    At the same time, Republicans pretend to care about free speech in social media when it comes to claims that Facebook is icing out conservative voices (New York Post, 9/16/24), decrying fact-checking and content moderation by a private entity as censorship. Those sanctimonious appeals to constitutional liberty ring hollow when all the branches of government are working to destroy an entire network.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Mohamad Bazzi on Israeli Terror Attacks

     

     

    Al Jazeera: Hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah have cost them a hand, an eye, even their lives.

    Al Jazeera (9/20/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: On September 17, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, it was hundreds of walkie-talkies—part of an Israeli attack, intended for Hezbollah, that Israel’s defense minister called “the start of a new phase in the war.” Media dutifully reported the emerging toll of dead and wounded, including many civilians, including children. Harder to capture is the life-altering impact of such a terror attack on those it doesn’t kill.

    As every day brings news of new carnage, US citizens have a duty not to look away, given our government’s critical role in arming Israel and ignoring its crimes, and in misleading us about what they know and intend. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, and former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us to talk about the latest events and media response.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Rashida Tlaib, banned books and deportation.

     

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • How Scripps Turned Public Disengagement Into ‘Strong Support’ for Deportation

     

    Election Focus 2024A Scripps/Ipsos poll (9/18/24) reported that “a majority of Americans support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” The phrasing dovetails with the Trump campaign’s promise that such a deportation is exactly what a second Trump administration would undertake.

    Numerous other media outlets (e.g., C-SPAN, CBS News, Reuters, among many others) immediately reported on the findings, given their political significance. “Donald Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Is More Popular Than You Think,” was Newsweek‘s headline (9/18/24).

    An examination of the poll questions and results, however, suggest that this measure of “public opinion” can hardly be taken seriously, because most people display a lack of engagement and, perhaps more importantly, understanding of the issue. By exploiting this lack of information, the pollsters create the illusion of strong public support.

    Unengaged—but opinionated?

    Questions in the poll address several different aspects of immigration, but it’s worth noting this one: “How closely are you following the news on the following topics: The immigration situation at the US/Mexican border?” Just 23% said “very closely.” Another 36% said “somewhat closely,” and 40% admitted “not very” or “not at all closely.”

    In short, a significant portion of the respondents in the poll is unengaged on this issue, while only a quarter is “very” engaged. Yet the poll presents over 90% of its respondents as having meaningful opinions about immigration questions.

    Beyond people’s lack of engagement—which suggests that whatever opinions most of them give are not terribly strong—the Scripps/Ipsos poll also shows that the people it polled lack basic knowledge about the policy issue. This is made plain by responses to a question designed to find out how much people knew about responsibilities for immigration Kamala Harris had been assigned as vice president:

    Which of the following, if any, best describes your understanding of Kamala Harris’ responsibilities as vice president, specifically as it relates to the issue of immigration? 
    She is responsible for securing the southern border 17%
    She is responsible for addressing the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US 10%
    Some mix of both 28%
    She has little to no responsibility 24%
    Don’t know/no response 22%

    If a person is engaged and informed on the immigration situation at the US/Mexico border, they surely will know the answer to this question. Yet a mere 10% of the respondents chose the option that comes closest to explaining her responsibilities, which is highlighted in yellow: to address the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US.

    KFF: Most Adults Are Uncertain When it Comes to the Accuracy of Both True and False Statements About Immigrants

    KFF polling (9/24/24) indicates that many Americans are unsure about what is and isn’t true about immigration.

    Granted, it’s a difficult time to be informed about immigration in this country. A recent KFF poll (9/24/24) found that a large majority of adults have heard false information from elected officials or candidates, such as the claim that “immigrants are causing an increase in violent crime in the US” or that “immigrants are taking jobs and causing an increase in unemployment for people born in the US.” And many of them—51% and 44%, respectively—think those false claims are “definitely” or “probably” true. (Both are also key talking points for the Trump campaign—as is the claim that Harris has been in charge of the southern border under Biden.)

    The news outlets that are supposed to inform the citizenry about issues of public concern haven’t been much help. A FAIR examination (5/24/21) of establishment immigration coverage found it was characterized by “hyperbole about recent migration trends and an inexcusable lack of historical context.”

    But rather than take its respondents’ overwhelming inability to answer a factual question about immigration policy as demonstrating a lack of information and understanding, Scripps framed it in its press release (9/18/24) as merely another opinion: “Voters couldn’t agree on Harris’s role on immigration policy, with 17% saying they believe she is responsible for securing the US/Mexico border and 20% unsure.”

    Masking apathy

    Despite the large segment of the polled population that was shown to be disengaged on the immigration issue, and the overwhelming number who had no idea what Harris’ responsibilities on immigration were, the poll reported 97% with an opinion on whether there should be a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants:

    To what extent do you support or oppose the following: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants?
    Strongly support 30%
    Somewhat support 24%
    Somewhat oppose 20%
    Strongly oppose 23%

    Of course, people can have opinions even if they have little to no information. But in that case, it’s important to at least give respondents an explicit opportunity to acknowledge they don’t have an opinion. The “forced-choice” question above provides no such explicit option.

    Scripps: Though it has strong support, experts say mass deportation would take herculean effort

    The Scripps headline (9/18/24) neglected to clarify that mass deportation has “strong support” from less than a third of the public.

    And although Scripps characterized the results as showing “strong support” for the proposal—”Though It Has Strong Support, Experts Say Mass Deportation Would Take Herculean Effort” was its headline (9/18/24) over a write-up of the poll—in fact, as the table illustrates, the results show only 30% with “strong support.”

    As I explained in a different article for FAIR (9/28/23), people who indicate that they only “somewhat” support a policy proposal typically admit that they really don’t care one way or the other—that they would not be “upset” if the opposite happened to the position they just expressed. The “somewhat” option allows the unengaged to give an opinion and do their “job” as a respondent, even though they are not committed “strongly” to that view.

    The table above shows that approximately half of the poll’s respondents felt strongly about their views—30% in favor, 23% opposed, with roughly the other half unengaged. Those results probably overstate somewhat the degree of public engagement, but it is much more realistic than the notion that 97% of Americans have a meaningful opinion on immigration policy.

    Moreover, even many of those who report feeling “strongly” about it quite likely have no conception of what a “mass deportation” would mean. Instead of asking a vague question to an underengaged and underinformed public, the poll could have examined their understanding of the issue. It could ask respondents what the term means to them, how many immigrants would be involved, what they know about what undocumented immigrants actually do in this country, what impacts they think the deportation of immigrants might have. Asking these kinds of questions—rather than simply polling a campaign slogan—would have more honestly examined what people actually think about the issue.

    The fundamental problem with public policy polling by the media is that they really don’t want to tell the truth about the American public—that on most issues, large segments of the public are simply too busy to keep informed and formulate meaningful opinions. Given that media’s prime function is to give the public the information it needs to make informed choices about civic issues, such disengagement is a warning that news outlets are not doing their job adequately.

    But rather than take the public disconnect as an impetus to do better, media give us example after example of how “public opinion” polling can give the illusion of a fully engaged and informed public. By now, we should all know better.

    Featured image: A Scripps video (9/18/24) falsely claims that the outlet’s poll found “strong support for mass deportations.”

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • CNN’s Tapper Smears Tlaib With Baseless Charge of Bias

     

    CNN‘s Jake Tapper took a baseless accusation made on X and elevated it to a national story, smearing Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib as antisemitic.

    Detroit Metro Times: Tlaib slams Nessel for targeting pro-Palestinian students at U-M: ‘A dangerous precedent’

    Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Detroit Metro Times, 9/13/24) described the indicted protesters as “people that just want to save lives, no matter their faith or ethnicity.” 

    In an interview with the Detroit Metro Times (9/13/24), Tlaib accused Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel of “biases” in her prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters and not other protesters:

    “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib says. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

    Tlaib went on to blame the influence of academic officials for the prosecutions: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.”

    It’s a pretty straightforward charge that drew no particular notice for many days. A week later, Nessel—who is Jewish—posted on X (9/20/24): “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as attorney general. It’s antisemitic and wrong.”

    ‘Quite an accusation’

    CNN: Michigan AG Nessel Accuses Rep. Tlaib of Antisemitic Remark After Tlaib Suggested Protester Charges Were Biased

    Referring to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s prosecution of pro-Palestine protesters, Jake Tapper (CNN, 9/22/24) asserted that “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that…she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not.”

    Nessel’s accusation is clearly groundless, as anyone reading Tlaib’s actual quote can see. But CNN‘s Jake Tapper (9/22/24), interviewing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, presented the false accusation as fact, and used that newly invented fact to try to force Whitmer to condemn Tlaib for something she didn’t do.

    Tapper quoted only one sentence from the Metro Times report—the one beginning “it seems the attorney general decided…”—followed by Nessel’s accusation. Tapper then asked Whitmer: “Do you think that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased was antisemitic?”

    When Whitmer tried to avoid the bait, Tapper pressed on:

    Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not. That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

    Contrary to Tapper’s assumption, some of the protesters charged by Nessel are, in fact, Jewish (CAIR, 9/23/24).

    Tapper’s remarkable misrepresentation had ripple effects in corporate media, as other journalists (and their editors) repeated the smear without bothering to do any factchecking. Jewish Insider‘s Josh Kraushaar (9/22/24) reported on Tapper’s interview and mischaracterized Tlaib’s Metro Times interview as having “claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.” (The article later changed the word “claimed” to “suggested,” as if that were more accurate.)

    CNN‘s Dana Bash (9/23/24) brought Tapper’s interview up on air the next day, comparing Whitmer’s response to Sen. Tom Cotton refusing to condemn Donald Trump’s declaration that if he loses, “it’s the fault of the Jews.” CNN political director David Chalian responded, perpetuating the smear as fact: “It’s not very hard to say that Rashida Tlaib saying that Dana Nessel is pursuing charges because she’s Jewish is an antisemitic thing to say.”

    ‘Never explicitly said’

    USA Today: Tlaib makes antisemitic comments again. Whitmer's response isn't enough.

    USA Today‘s Ingrid Jacques (9/24/24) charged Tlaib with antisemtism even after Metro Times (9/23/24) confirmed that Tlaib never referred to Nessel’s ethnicity.

    The Metro Times published a factcheck (9/23/24) the day after Tapper’s interview, calling the characterization “spurious,” and clarified that “Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism.” It noted that “Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.”

    But even after that piece should have put the issue to rest, USA Today published a column by Ingrid Jacques (9/24/24) that repeated the falsehood in its very headline: “Tlaib Makes Antisemitic Comments Again.”

    Tapper’s initial segment warranted an on-air correction and apology. Instead, he doubled down, bringing on to discuss the matter the next day (9/23/24) the very person who initially smeared Tlaib. Only after giving Nessel a platform to repeat her baseless charge—”Clearly, she’s referencing my religion as to why she thinks I can’t be fair,” Nessel said—did Tapper tell viewers that he “misspoke” in the previous day’s segment, explaining, “I was trying to characterize [Nessel’s] views of Tlaib’s comments.”

    He then asked Nessel:

    What do you make of those today, noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion, and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?

    “Explicitly”? Tlaib never said it, period, which is what any responsible journalist would point out.

    ACTION ALERT: Messages to CNN can be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

    You can also sign a petition calling on CNN to retract its false report.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Throw Everything But the Facts Against Harris’s ‘Price Control’ Proposal

    Debates over whether Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s economic proposals constitute Communist price controls or merely technocratic consumer protections are obscuring a more insidious thread within corporate media. In coverage of Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal, it’s taken for granted that price inflation, especially in the grocery sector, is an organic and unavoidable result of market forces, and thus any sort of intervention is misguided at best, and economy-wrecking at worst.

    In this rare instance where a presidential hopeful has a policy that is both economically sound and popular, corporate media have fixated on Harris’s proposal as supposedly misguided. To dismiss any deeper discussion of economic phenomena like elevated price levels, and legislation that may correct them, media rely on an appeal to “basic economics.” If the reader were only willing to crack open an Econ 101 textbook, it would apparently be plain to see that the inflation consumers experienced during the pandemic can be explained by abstract and divinely influenced factors, and thus a policy response is simply inappropriate.

    Comrade Kamala?

    When bad faith critics call Harris “Communist,” maybe don’t misrepresent her policies as “price controls”? (Washington Post, 8/15/24)

    For all the hubbub about Harris’s proposal, the actual implications of anti-price-gouging legislation are fairly unglamorous. Far from price controls, law professor Zephyr Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) noted that anti-price-gouging laws 

    allow price increases, so long as it is due to increased costs, but forbid profit increases so that companies can’t take advantage of the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that attends emergencies. 

    Teachout situated this legislation alongside rules against price-fixing, predatory pricing and fraud, laws which allow an effective market economy to proliferate. As such, states as politically divergent as Louisiana and New York have anti-price-gouging legislation on the books, not just for declared states of emergency, but for market “abnormalities.”

    But none of that matters when the media can run with Donald Trump’s accusation of “SOVIET-style price controls.” Plenty of unscrupulous outlets have had no problem framing a consumer protection measure as the first step down the road to socialist economic ruin (Washington Times, 8/16/24; Washington Examiner, 8/20/24; New York Post, 8/25/24; Fox Business, 9/3/24). Even a Washington Post  piece (8/19/24) by columnist (and former G.W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen described Harris’s so-called “price controls” as “doubling down on socialism.”

    What’s perhaps more concerning is centrist or purportedly liberal opinion pages’ acceptance of Harris’s proposal as outright price controls. Catherine Rampell, writing in the Washington Post (8/15/24), claimed anti-price-gouging legislation is “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food…. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding.” Rampell didn’t go as far as to call Harris a Communist outright, but coyly concluded: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘Communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

    Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie mounted a similar attack in the Wall Street Journal (8/22/24), ripping Harris for proposing “national price controls” and thus subscribing to a “fantasy economic theory.” Opinion writers in the Atlantic (8/16/24), the New York Times (8/19/24), LA Times (8/20/24), USA Today (8/21/24), the Hill (8/23/24) and Forbes (9/3/24) all uncritically regurgitated the idea that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls. By accepting this simplistic and inaccurate framing, these political taste-makers are fueling the right-wing idea that Harris represents a vanguard of Communism.

    To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. Additionally, many of the breathless crusades against Harris made use of various cliches to encourage the reader to not think deeper about how prices work, or what policy solutions might exist to benefit the consumer.

    Just supply and demand

    “According to the Econ 101 model of prices and supply, when a product is in shortage, its price goes up to bring quantity demanded in line with quantity supplied.” This is the wisdom offered by Josh Barro in the Atlantic (8/16/24), who added that “in a robustly competitive market, those profit margins get forced down as supply expands. Price controls inhibit that process and are a bad idea.” He chose not to elaborate beyond the 101 level.

    The Wall Street Journal (8/20/24) sought the guidance of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who is indeed the author of the most widely used economics textbook in US colleges. He conceded that price intervention could be warranted in markets with monopolistic conditions. However, the Journal gently explained to readers, “the food business isn’t a monopoly—most people, but not all, have the option of going to another store if one store raises its prices too much.” Mankiw elaborated: “Our assumption is that firms are always greedy and it is the forces of competition that keeps prices close to cost.”

    Rampell’s opinion piece in the Washington Post (8/15/24) claimed that, under Harris’s proposal, “supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.” Rampell apparently believes (or wants readers to believe) that grocery prices are currently set by nothing more than supply and demand.

    The problem is that the grocery and food processing industries are not competitive markets. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian (7/14/21) and Food and Water Watch showed the extent to which food production in the United States is controlled by a limited group of corporations:

    A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans…. A few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.

    While there is no strict definition for an oligopolistic market, this level of market concentration enables firms to set prices as they wish. Reporting by Time (1/14/22) listed Pepsi, Kroger, Kellogg’s and Tyson as examples of food production companies who boasted on the record about their ability to increase prices beyond higher costs during the pandemic.

    Noncompetitive market conditions are also present farther down the supply chain. Nationally, the grocery industry is not quite as concentrated as food production (the pending Kroger/Albertsons merger notwithstanding). However, unlike a food retailer, consumers have little geographical or logistical flexibility to shop around for prices. 

    The Herfindahl Hirschman Index is a measure of market concentration; markets with an HHI over 1,800 are “highly concentrated.” 

    The USDA Economic Research Service has found that between 1990 and 2019, retail food industry concentration has increased, and the industry is at a level of “high concentration” in most counties. Consumers in rural and small non-metro counties are most vulnerable to noncompetitive market conditions. 

    The Federal Trade Commission pointed the finger at large grocers in a 2024 report. According to the FTC, grocery retailers’ revenue increases outstripped costs during the pandemic, resulting in increased profits, which “casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs.” The report also accused “some larger retailers and wholesalers” of using their market position to gain better terms with suppliers, causing smaller competitors to suffer.

    Unchecked capitalism is good, actually

    If one still wishes to critique Harris’s proposal, taking into account that the food processing and retail industries are not necessarily competitive, the next best argument is that free-market fundamentalism is good, and Harris is a villain for getting in the way of it.

    Former Wall Street Journal reporter (and mutual fund director) Roger Lowenstein took this tack in a New York Times guest essay (8/27/24). He claimed Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal and Donald Trump’s newly proposed tariff amount to “equal violence to free-market principles.” (The only violence under capitalism that seems to concern Lowenstein, apparently, is that done toward free enterprise.) 

    Lowenstein critiqued Harris for threatening to crack down on innocent, opportunistic business owners he likened to Henry Ford (an antisemite and a union-buster), Steve Jobs (a price-fixing antitrust-violator, according to the Times—5/2/14) and Warren Buffett (an alleged monopolist)–intending such comparisons as compliments, not criticisms. Harris and Trump, he wrote, are acting 

    as if production derived from central commands rather than from thousands of businesses and millions of individuals acting to earn a living and maximize profits.

    If this policy proposal is truly tantamount to state socialism, in the eyes of Lowenstein, perhaps he lives his life constantly lamenting the speed limits, safety regulations and agricultural subsidies that surround him. Either that, or he is jumping at the opportunity to pontificate on free market utopia, complete with oligarchs and an absent government, with little regard to the actual policy he purports to critique.

    A problem you shouldn’t solve

    Roger Lowenstein (NYT, 8/27/24) informed unenlightened readers that high food prices are “a problem that no longer exists.”

    Depending on which articles you choose to read, inflation is alternately a key political problem for the Harris campaign, or a nonconcern. “Perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest political vulnerability is the run-up in prices that occurred during the Biden administration,” reported the New York Times (9/10/24). The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) also acknowledged that Biden-era inflation is “a real political issue for Ms. Harris.”

    Pieces from both of these publications have also claimed the opposite: Inflation is already down, and thus Harris has no reason to announce anti-inflation measures. Lowenstein (New York Times, 8/27/24) claimed that the problem of high food prices “no longer exists,” and Rampell (Washington Post, 8/15/24) gloated that the battle against inflation has “already been won,” because price levels have increased only 1% in the last year. The very same Post editorial (8/16/24) that acknowledged inflation as a liability for Harris chided her for her anti-price-gouging proposal, claiming “many stores are currently slashing prices.”

    It is true that the inflation rate for groceries has declined. However, this does not mean that Harris’s proposals are now useless. This critique misses two key points.

    First, there are certain to be supply shocks, and resultant increases in the price level, in the future. COVID-19 was an unprecedented crisis in its breadth; it affected large swathes of the economy simultaneously. However, supply shocks happen in specific industries all the time, and as climate change heats up, there is no telling what widespread crises could envelop the global economy. As such, there is no reason not to create anti-price-gouging powers so that Harris may be ready to address the next crisis as it happens.

    Second, the price level of food has stayed high, even as producer profit margins have increased. As Teachout  (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) explained, anti-price-gouging legislation is tailored specifically to limit these excess profits, not higher prices. While food prices will inevitably react to higher inflation rates, the issue Harris seeks to address is the bad-faith corporations who take advantage of a crisis to reap profits.

    Between January 2019 and July 2024, food prices for consumers increased by 29%. Meanwhile, profits for the American food processing industry have more than doubled, from a 5% net profit margin in 2019 to 12% in early 2024. Concerning retailers, the FTC found that

    consumers are still facing the negative impact of the pandemic’s price hikes, as the Commission’s report finds that some in the grocery retail industry seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further raise prices to increase their profits, which remain elevated today.

    In other words, Harris’s proposal would certainly apply in today’s economy. While the price level has steadied for consumers, it has declined for grocers. This is price gouging, and this is what Harris seeks to end.

    Gimmicks and pandering

    Once the media simultaneously conceded that inflation is over, and continued to claim inflation is a political problem, a new angle was needed to find Harris’s motivation for proposing such a controversial policy. What was settled on was an appeal to the uneducated electorate.

    Barro’s headline in the Atlantic (8/16/24) read “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart.” He claimed that the anti-price-gouging plan “likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics,” but will appeal to the voters, who “in their infinite wisdom” presumably know nothing about the economic realities governing their lives.

    The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) wrote that Harris, “instead of delivering a substantial plan…squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.” Steven Kamin, writing in the Hill (8/23/24), rued “what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.”

    Denouncing Harris’s policies as pandering to the uneducated median voter, media are able to acknowledge the political salience of inflation while still ridiculing Harris for trying to fix it. By using loaded terms like “populist,” pundits can dismiss the policy without looking at its merits, never mind the fact that the proposal has the support of experts. As Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/19/24) pointed out in relation to Harris’s proposal, “just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”

    If a publication wishes to put the kibosh on a political idea, it is much easier to dismiss it out of hand than to legitimately grapple with the people and ideas that may defend it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to assume the role of the adult in the room, and belittle a popular and beneficial policy as nothing more than red meat for the non–Ivy League masses.

    Inflation and economic policy are complicated. Media coverage isn’t helping.

    Perhaps the second easiest way to dismiss a popular policy is to simply obfuscate the policy and the relevant issues. The economics behind Kamala Harris’s proposed agenda are “complicated,” we are told by the New York Times (8/15/24). This story certainly did its best to continue complicating the economic facts behind the proposal. Times reporters Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek wrote that

    the Harris campaign announcement on Wednesday cited meat industry consolidation as a driver of excessive grocery prices, but officials did not respond on Thursday to questions about the evidence Ms. Harris would cite or how her proposal would work.

    Has the meatpacking industry become more consolidated, contributing to “excessive grocery prices”? The New York Times (8/15/24) couldn’t be bothered to do basic reporting like checking the USDA website—which, in addition to showing clear consolidation, also noted that evidence suggests there have been “increased profits for meatpackers” since 2016.

    Generally, when the word “but” is used, the following clause will refute or contradict the prior. However, the Times chose not to engage with Harris’s concrete example and instead moved on to critiquing the vagueness of her campaign proposal. The Times did the reader a disservice by not mentioning that the meat industry has in fact been consolidating, to the detriment of competitive market conditions and thus to the consumer’s wallet. Four beef processing companies in the United States control 85% of the market, and they have been accused of price-fixing and engaging in monopsonistic practices (Counter, 1/5/22). However to the Times, the more salient detail is the lack of immediate specificity of a campaign promise.

    Another way to obfuscate the facts of an issue is to only look at one side of the story. A talking point espoused by commentators like Rampell is that the grocery industry is operating at such thin margins that any decrease in prices would bankrupt them (Washington Post, 8/15/24). Rampell wrote:

    Profit margins for supermarkets are notoriously thin. Despite Harris’s (and [Elizabeth] Warren’s) accusations about “excessive corporate profits,” those margins remained relatively meager even when prices surged. The grocery industry’s net profit margins peaked at 3% in 2020, falling to 1.6% last year.

    This critique is predicated on Harris’s policies constituting price controls. Because Harris is proposing anti-price-gouging legislation, the policy would only take effect when corporations profiteer under the cover of rising inflation. If they are truly so unprofitable, they have nothing to fear from this legislation.

    The other problem with this point is that it’s not really true. The numbers Rampell relied on come from a study by the Food Marketing Institute (which prefers to be called “FMI, the Food Industry Association”), a trade group for grocery retailers. The FTC, in contrast, found that 

    food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs.

    Yale economist Ernie Tedeschi (Wall Street Journal, 8/20/24) also “points out that margins at food and beverage retailers have remained elevated relative to before the pandemic, while margins at other retailers, such as clothing and general merchandise stores, haven’t.” In other words, if you look at sources outside of the grocery industry, it turns out the picture for grocers is a little rosier.

    British economist Joan Robinson once wrote that the purpose of studying economics is primarily to avoid being deceived by economists. It takes only a casual perusal of corporate media to see that, today, she is more right than ever.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Paul Hedreen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jen Senko on The Brainwashing of My Dad

     

     

    The Brainwashing of My Dad

    The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)

    This week on CounterSpin: Springfield, Ohio, schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country—or, no doubt, in the minds of inspired vigilantes, much worse.

    We spoke with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko in April 2023. The Brainwashing of My Dad—Jen Senko’s film and the book based on it—are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media. We’ll hear our conversation with her this week on CounterSpin.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Donald Trump’s threat to democracy.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ‘Genocide Can and Should Never Be Just a Normal Story’CounterSpin interview with Gregory Shupak on Palestinian genocide

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber’s Gregory Shupak about the Palestinian genocide for the September 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Janine Jackson: The September 11 New York Times reports a fatal Israeli airstrike hitting part of the Gaza Strip that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone. On a separate matter, we read that Secretary of State Antony Blinken rebuked Israel for the killing in the West Bank of 26-year-old US human rights activist Aysenur Eygi.

    While it relayed terrible news, the Times story also contained the mealy-mouthing we’re accustomed to. Blinken rebuked Israel’s killing Aysenur Eygi “after the Israeli military acknowledged that one of its soldiers had probably killed her unintentionally.” People did dig with their bare hands through bomb craters in the dark to search for victims, but “health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.” And while it notes that the UN and other rights organizations have said “there is no safe place in Gaza,” the Times repeats that “Israel insists that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be.”

    What’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank is horrific, the possibility of an expanded war in the Middle East is terrifying, but for elite US news media, it’s as though war in the Middle East, and Palestinians being killed, is such a comfortable story that there’s no urgency in preventing the reality.

    Joining us now to talk about this is media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.

    Gregory Shupak: Hi.

    NYT: Polio Shots Begin in Northern Gaza

    New York Times, 9/10/24

    JJ: So the New York Times September 10 had a story about how health workers are trying to vaccinate children in northern Gaza against polio, but supplies of fuel and medicine are being obstructed by Israeli forces, including one convoy of UN groups that was held at gunpoint for eight hours. So the meat of the Times story is here:

    The Israeli military said in a statement that it had intelligence suggesting that there were “Palestinian suspects” with the convoy, but did not say what they were suspected of doing. In another statement on Tuesday, it said that “Israeli security forces questioned the suspects in the field and then released them.” The episode highlighted the challenges facing humanitarian efforts, like the vaccination campaign, and what UN officials say is increasing Israeli obstruction of aid deliveries to Gaza.

    So Israel holds up a humanitarian group at gunpoint for eight hours, and they don’t offer anything resembling a reason, and the upshot is “this highlights challenges”; “UN officials say” that this is an obstruction of aid. Knowing reporters, we know that some of them are saying, “Look how we pushed back against Israel here. We said they couldn’t say what the suspects were suspected of.”

    But it doesn’t read as brave challenging of the powerful to a reader. And of course we know that that language is a choice, right? So what are you making of media coverage right now?

    GS: Two main observations come to mind, not specifically with regard to the story you’re talking about–although that does continue, as you said, the longer-term trends of this mealy-mouthed refusal to just report what has flatly and plainly and obviously happened, and who’s responsible for it. But setting that aside, I would note a couple of other things that have troubled me.

    One is that I think so much of the Palestinian issue right now has just been metabolized into US election coverage, so that most of what the public is getting on the issue is “how is the political theater going to be affected by the fact that a genocide is occurring in which the US is a direct participant?” rather than more urgent questions, such as “how can this genocide be immediately stopped?” So I think that that’s a real case of focusing on the wrong question.

    I think, likewise, you get some attention to, “Well, how is the Harris campaign going to suffer because the Biden administration, of which she’s a part, has alienated so many Arab and/or Muslim voters in the United States because of the Gaza genocide?” Again, that just reduces the Palestinians and their supporters amongst Arabs and Muslims–not to say that there aren’t many other segments of American society that do support Palestinians to one extent or another–they’re just here reduced to, “Well, how’s this going to factor into the electoral calculation?”

    And so that, I think, is, again, really not at all adequate to the challenge of responding to one of the worst series of massacres that we’ve seen since World War II. In fact, the UN special rapporteur just the other day, said that this is the worst campaign of deliberate starvation since World War II. So just treating this as a subset of US domestic politics is not proportional to the severity of what’s unfolding.

    The second observation I was going to make is that I think, to a really, really depressing extent, the mass murder of Palestinians, the mass starvation of Palestinians, the total destruction of essentially every structure in Gaza by this point, it’s becoming a “dog bites man” story, in that it’s just become, and I hate to use the word “normalized,” because I think it’s totally overused these days, but this is sort of a case study where it’s barely even newsworthy, that really just shocking atrocities are dropping day by day.

    So last week, Israel bombed a shelter within the compound of the Al-Aqsa hospital, I believe it’s the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al-Balah, and this has, as far as I can tell, effectively zero coverage in major English-language American or Western media broadly. But, again, that is a real travesty to just allow this to not be a leading story every day because it keeps happening; in fact, the fact that it keeps happening ought to be in itself proof of how dire and urgent these matters are.

    JJ: You wrote for Electronic Intifada back in July about how even after credible source after credible source confirms that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians, you said “we find ourselves living through a mass public genocide denial,” and without at all trying to be coy, I wonder, are we now at acceptance?

    GS: Yeah.

    JJ: Now it’s just kind of a factor. And I wrote down “dog bites man” because it very much gives that feeling of, “Oh, well, these folks are at war with one another. That’s just a normal story.”

    Gregory Shupak

    Gregory Shupak: “It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism.”

    GS: Yeah, and first of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story, but there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.

    In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savage barbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.

    JJ: Finally, to promote the idea or to support the idea that this genocide is kind of OK, or par for the course, anyway, and that protesting it is misguided, or worse–that requires mental gymnastics, including charges of antisemitism against Jewish people. Jewish people are leaders in the opposition to Israel’s actions, including on college campuses. And I would encourage folks to read Carrie Zaremba’s piece on Mondoweiss about the lengths that university administrators are going to right now to crack down on and impossibleize dissent and political expression.

    But the point is, we still see the dissent. So even the problems that we’re talking about, that media are ratifying and pushing out day after day, people are seeing through them, and there is dissent. And I just wonder what your thoughts are, in terms of, maybe not to use the word hope, but where do you see the resistance happening? You’re a college professor.

    GS: Certainly on campuses and many other places as well. Labor organizations: there was a coalition here called Labor for Palestine, and I know there are similar outfits in the United States and other parts of the world. Religious organizations of all sorts, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, likely others as well.

    I would, in addition, say that certainly, in terms of just getting out analysis and information, that one of the very few advantages or bright spots that we have, I think now as compared to the past, is that it is easier for independent sources like FAIR, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss and others to circulate quickly to wide audiences. And that, I think, has been a big reason why the Palestinian counternarrative has been able to puncture, I think, the public consciousness more so than it could in the past. I think it’s totally the independent educational efforts by the Palestine solidarity movement that has done that.

    WSJ: Welcome to Dearborn

    Wall Street Journal, 2/2/24

    And one major tool at their–perhaps I will dare say our–disposal is independent media, because this is where you’re getting much more information, much more accurate information, and much more rigorous analysis than the fluff and pablum that you get on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, much less the blood-curdling racism you get on the Wall Street Journal and its editorial pages. So I think that this era does have one serious advantage, and that’s that outlets like those that I’ve mentioned have a much greater capacity to reach people who might not otherwise be exposed to this anti-Zionist narrative.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber, and his book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media is still out now from OR Books. Greg Shupak, thanks so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    GS: Thanks for having me.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘There Are More Guns Than Americans, But Most of Them Are Owned by a Minority’CounterSpin interview with Robert Spitzer on gun rights and rules

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed author Robert Spitzer about the history of gun regulation for the September 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

     

    Janine Jackson: Our guest began a piece for Time Magazine:

    Soon after these fearsome weapons began to circulate in society, they developed a notorious reputation. Developed for the battlefield, these guns in civilian hands became the tools of choice in gruesome, highly publicized shootings. Calls for their restriction or banishment escalated, and state legislatures moved to enact new laws.

    The kicker is that he’s talking about the 1920s and the tommy gun, the Thompson machine gun.

    Today’s opponents of efforts to quell gun violence with regulation often hand-wave toward US history—the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment—to bolster their case. And that can be persuasive, if it’s unchecked.

    Checking it is what Robert Spitzer does. He’s adjunct professor at College of William and Mary School of Law, and professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland. He’s the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Gun Dilemma, from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone from Williamsburg, Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Robert Spitzer.

    Robert Spitzer: Good to speak with you.

    JJ: Dispelling myths about the history of guns is important at any time, but it’s crucial right now, as the Supreme Court has explicitly inserted historicity into our ability to make decisions about the place guns have in society. Can I ask you to explain the 2022 Bruen decision, and your reaction to it? What should folks know?

    Slate: On Gun Laws, We Must Get the History Right

    Slate, 10/21/15

    RS: The 2022 Supreme Court Bruen decision was extremely important, and for a couple of reasons. The first was that it expanded the definition of Second Amendment rights, saying that average people now have a Second Amendment right to carry guns with them, out in society, for personal self-protection.

    The other big point from the Bruen decision was that the Supreme Court recast the basis for judging the constitutionality of modern gun laws, and the new standard is that they have to be grounded in some kind of historical tradition of regulating weapons. So lawyers, historians and others have been scrambling since 2022 to examine old gun laws, to try and see if there are analogs or similar laws that compare to modern firearms laws, to try and justify and support the constitutionality of those modern laws.

    Now, as far as I’m concerned, the decision is a terrible decision, in part because it’s ahistorical. For example, weapons-carrying was widely regulated, restricted and even barred in early America. In fact, from the 1600s to the start of the 20th century, every single state in the Union had restrictions against the concealed carrying of dangerous weapons, including, but not limited to, handguns or pistols. So to say that that is now protected under the Second Amendment, based on a reading of history, has history upside down.

    Moreover, this history standard is riddled with vagueness, and it has opened the door to not only a flood of challenges of existing gun laws—laws that had been accepted without question before 2022—but it has also led to contrary conclusions, where judges in one place will decide that historically analogous laws do support the constitutionality of a modern law, and other judges ruling the exact opposite.

    JJ: So there’s no need to automatically exalt any resort to history, as I think you’ve said, when we know the time in which it was forged. But in the case of guns, if I can just draw you out, it doesn’t even square, because as your work explains, gun rights have always been paired with regulations. Talk a little more about that.

    Robert Spitzer

    Robert Spitzer: “Firearms and other weapons were regulated more strictly in the country’s first 300 years than in the last 30 years.”

    RS: Many people think that in the old days, in the early decades and centuries of the country’s founding, that everyone owned guns, that everybody was skilled in the use of guns—or at least adult white men—and that there were no gun restrictions or weapons restrictions to speak of until you get into the 20th century.

    And, really, my research has found and demonstrated that the opposite is true. In many respects, firearms and other weapons were regulated more strictly in the country’s first 300 years than in the last 30 years. From the 1600s, 1700s to the 1800s, states, colonies and localities enacted literally thousands of weapons laws of every imaginable variety. I mean, you would be hard pressed to come up with a gun regulation idea today that didn’t exist 100, 150, 200 years ago.

    Today, in America’s politicized environment, the antagonists in the gun debate view a gain for one side as a loss for the other, what they call a zero sum game. But that was not how gun rights and gun rules were thought of in most of our history. The two were perfectly compatible. Sure, you’d have clashes at times, but they did not pose the kind of polarizing political paralysis, in terms of the gun issue, that seems to exist today.

    JJ: Maybe you’ve answered this, but as a researcher on the actual history of gun restrictions existing alongside the ability to own guns, what role do you see misinformation or misunderstanding playing in this country’s evident inability to take meaningful steps? And how could media or journalists help in that regard?

    RS: I think there is considerable misunderstanding about our own past, and the very idea that you might impose regulations on dangerous weapons doesn’t mean that you’re eliminating them entirely. It means that the government is doing the most important job that any government has, which is to protect the lives, health and safety of its people. That’s the single most important purpose of government.

    And, of course, in a democratic society, you want to protect and guarantee individual rights and freedoms and the rest. But the idea that these two are mutually exclusive when it comes to gun laws is just a fallacy.

    And I think that the news coverage—and I will say, I think news coverage has gotten better, in terms of reporting the knowledge that people have gained regarding our own gun past—needs to try and set aside the old kind of Wild West image of our frontier. Certainly it was an untamed piece of geography and period of time, but if you think of the West of the 19th century, far more people died from disease, died from accidents, died from malnutrition than ever died from guns, frankly. And there were far, far, far fewer actual gunfights in the Wild West than is depicted or has been depicted in popular culture.

    So it’s important to set aside the popular-culture imagery of our historical past, whether it’s the colonial era or the 19th century Western lands, and understand that not only were guns strictly regulated—as I mentioned, every state in the country had restrictions on the concealed carrying of weapons by the start of the 20th century—but those weapons not only included guns, but also included knives and clubs. Over 40 states, for example, had restrictions on the books regarding what were called Bowie knives, the famous large-bladed knife named after the adventurer Jim Bowie.

    And the idea that knives of a class called “fighting knives,” the idea that over 40 states restricted those things, is one indication that public safety was indeed a top concern, and our forefathers and foremothers well-recognized and understood that dangerous weapons were dangerous, and that you were not depriving people of rights if you regulated them, restricted them, and imposed laws pertaining to, let’s say, the time, place and manner for carrying weapons, or other kinds of restrictions.

    JJ: Maybe it follows naturally, but listeners may know of the recent statement from the US surgeon general declaring gun violence a public health crisis, in recognition of the impacts of gun violence, beyond those that are killed—to the wounded, to the families, to the communities, to mental and emotional health. That whole framing is very much at odds with the ownership conversation about individual rights.

    Can I ask you, finally, do you see ways forward that engage all of this? Or are we on maybe separate but complementary tracks, in terms of concrete ways forward? What would you like to see?

    The U.S. has by far the highest child and teen firearm mortality rateamong peer countries

    KFF, 7/8/22

    RS: I think there are a number of ways forward, and I would note, at the outset, that I think the public health and medical communities have contributed significantly an important knowledge and research about the consequences of guns and violence.

    Guns are uniquely destructive. They wreak more havoc on the body than any other interpersonal weapon. Any surgeon could tell you that, the people who staff emergency rooms could tell you that. It is a public health problem, crisis, and I think it’s appropriate and beneficial that those communities have become involved in writing about, researching and talking about the public health consequences, adverse consequences, of prolific firearms.

    Beyond that, there are many public policy alternatives that demonstrably and measurably can reduce, and have reduced in places where they existed, gun harm and gun violence. And most people have heard of things like red flag laws, or universal background checks, or licensing schemes, and other kinds of laws. Some states have those, some states don’t.

    What is needed most, of course, is for the federal government to act more aggressively with respect to those or other gun policy areas. And that’s been extremely difficult, because of the very close competition between the Republicans and Democrats at the national level, in Congress and in the presidency.

    But the states that have adopted stricter laws with respect to guns and gun violence have lower crime rates, lower suicide rates, lower homicide rates than states that have not adopted those sorts of measures. So we know they can make a difference.

    Yes, there are a great many guns in America. There are more guns than Americans, but most of them are owned by a minority of the country; that is, not every home in America has a gun, far from it.

    And the average gun owner wants to do the right thing and the responsible thing. And when you talk to gun owners, and get past their instinctive suspicion of the phrase “gun control” or “gun policy,” and talk about, “Well, what do you think should be the public policy?” What you find is that most gun owners actually support most of the policy ideas to restrict and reduce gun harm that we are talking about in society today. So I think that all suggests some positive and constructive ways that the country can move forward.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Robert Spitzer, of William and Mary School of Law and SUNY Cortland. The Gun Dilemma is out now from Oxford University Press, and the ninth edition of his book The Politics of Gun Control is out this year from Routledge. Thank you so much, Robert Spitzer, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    RS: My pleasure.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • WSJ Calls for Keeping Judiciary in Shadows

     

    Election Focus 2024A New York Times investigation (9/15/24) has given us great insight into Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who—unlike the president and the speaker of the House—enjoys a great deal of shielding from press scrutiny. The paper reported that when a flurry of cases about the January 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol reached the court, the “chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited [former President Donald] Trump.”

    The paper’s investigation drew “on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders” from all partisan stripes. They spoke, reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak said, “on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.”

    It was splashed on the cover of the Sunday print edition for good reason: The Supreme Court is a mysterious institution, and Roberts has long been thought of as a more temperate and prudent judicial conservative, a breed apart from the partisan hacks appointed by Trump. The investigation gives us some illustration of what happens behind closed doors, and drives home the point that Trump has benefited legally from the normal channels of American power, not just the followers of his MAGA cult.

    ‘Damaging to the comity’

    WSJ: John Roberts Gets His Turn in the Progressive Dock

    The Wall Street Journal (9/15/24) called the New York Times report (9/15/24) on the Trump immunity deliberations “slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times.”

    Roberts is probably not a happy man these days. Joining him is the Wall Street Journal, which continues to drive home the point that Supreme Court operations, for the sake of the republic, must be hidden from the public and remain a murky affair. Anyone shining the light too brightly is burning through the Constitution.

    In an editorial (9/15/24), the paper said that the most “damaging to the comity at the court…are leaks about the internal discussions among the justices.” The editorial board said that an “account of the private conversation among the justices after an oral argument…is a betrayal of confidence that will affect how the justices do their work.” It speculated that this “leak bears the possible fingerprints of one or more of the justices.”

    Much of the editorial is a defense of the conservative justices in the Trump cases, as is the paper’s partisan lean. But it goes further, saying that the “intent” of the Times investigation “is clearly to tarnish the court as political, and hit the chief in particular.” It went on:

    The story in the Times is part of a larger progressive political campaign to damage the credibility of the court to justify Democratic legislation that will destroy its independence. That this campaign may have picked up allies inside the court is all the more worrying. We are at a dangerous juncture in American constitutional history, and Mr. Trump isn’t the only, or the greatest, risk.

    In the rest of the Murdoch-owned press, the New York Post editorial board (9/16/24) republished snippets of the Journal editorial and Fox News (9/16/24) also bashed the leaks.

    ‘Malice aforethought’

    WSJ: The Public Has a Right to Know Who Leaked the Dobbs Draft

    For Alan Dershowitz (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/22), the public doesn’t have a right to know that their reproductive rights are about to be taken away, but they do have a right to know who would dare inform them of such a thing.

    A news article painting the Supreme Court as a politicized part of government in 2024 is a little like a scientific inquiry into whether water is wet (CounterSpin, 5/19/23), and it’s easy to disregard the Journal’s anger at the Times as a mixture of partisan feuding and journalistic envy.

    But something else is at work: The Journal has a track record of advocating that the court operate without public scrutiny. When Politico (5/2/22) reported that a draft court decision would soon overturn Roe v. Wade, the Journal went into attack mode.

    Trump-defending legal scholar Alan Dershowitz took to the Journal (10/30/22) to advocate finding out who the leaker was, saying, “Learning and disclosing the source of the leak would strengthen the high court by preventing future breaches.” In a later piece (2/1/23), Dershowitz asserted that “the argument for compelled disclosure is strong because the source didn’t seek to expose any wrongdoing by the government.”

    In direct response to the Politico report, the Journal editorial board (5/3/22) called the leak “an unprecedented breach of trust, and one that must be assumed was done with malice aforethought.” It added that the response to the report was “intended to intimidate the justices and, if that doesn’t work, use abortion to change the election subject in November from Democratic policy failures.” A Journal op-ed (6/24/22) called the leak an “act of institutional sabotage.”

    Sheltered from citizens

    What is going on here is a seemingly bizarre, but not unprecedented, case of a journalistic institution opposing the actual act of real journalism. When the Guardian (6/11/13) reported on widespread National Security Agency surveillance, thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, or when Chelsea Manning was sentenced for leaking intelligence information to Wikileaks (PBS, 8/21/13), a few journalists absurdly asserted that both the leakers and the outlets acted irresponsibly in exposing secret documents (FAIR.org, 5/1/15, 1/18/17, 5/25/17,  4/1/19).

    But other than spot news, journalism is the publishing of materials that weren’t meant to be public. Reporters commonly get their scoops because someone in power gave them a heads up that shouldn’t have happened—a tip on a grand jury indictment, details of an upcoming corporate merger, etc.

    Like its campaign against the leak to Politico, the Journal’s outrage against the Times story isn’t just rooted in its allegiance to conservative policy-making in all three branches of government. The editorial reaction here is the defense of the idea that the court is not a normal branch of government, that it is an esoteric council of secret elites who must operate in the shadows away from the citizenry and, of course, the press.

    In other words, the Journal is against, of all things, journalism that exposes how powerful institutions function.

    Featured image: New York Times photo illustration from its report (9/15/24) on Chief Justice John Roberts’ deliberations.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Study: To US Papers, ‘Identity Politics’ Is Mostly a Way to Sneer at the Left

     

    Election Focus 2024Following the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times’ “Critic’s Notebook” (8/23/24) published an analysis of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pantsuit choices during the event.

    “For the most important speech of her life, the presidential candidate dressed for more than identity politics,” read the subhead.

    “In the end, she did not wear a white suit,” the piece began, later explaining the linkage between the color and its symbolism of women’s solidarity. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman outlined the significance of Harris’ navy blue suit choice in accepting the Democratic nomination.

    New York Times: Kamala Harris, Outfitting a New Era

    The New York Times (8/23/24) said that Kamala Harris came to her convention speech “dressed for more than identity politics.”

    “Ms. Harris made a different choice. One that didn’t center her femininity—or feminism (that’s a given)—but rather her ability to do the job,” Friedman wrote, as if those points were mutually exclusive.

    A politician’s fashion choices are undoubtedly symbolic. Friedman has also recently published pieces about Donald Trump’s use of his suits to define patriotism (6/14/24), JD Vance’s use of his beard to portray traditional masculinity (7/18/24) and Tim Walz’s use of rugged clothing to define his “regular guy” image (8/22/24).

    In each of these instances, the white male politician is using his style to communicate a message about his—and his constituents’—identities. But only in the piece about Harris’ clothing choice does Friedman use the term “identity politics,” lauding her for not defaulting to “when in doubt, women wear white!”

    In fact, a FAIR study of US newspapers found the overwhelming majority of times the vague term “identity politics” was mentioned, it was referring to Democrats and the left.

    What is identity politics?

    Even though the right has taken to derogatorily using it against the left, “identity politics” is commonly understood to mean forming political alliances based on identities like religion, ethnicity and social background.

    That definition applies equally to MAGA Republicans’ explicit or implicit appeals to white, Christian and traditional gender identities as it does to the left’s emphasis on ethnic, sexual and religious minorities. The DNC and RNC’s pep-rally atmospheres are both designed to project unity under political—and politicized—identities.

    But a FAIR study of newspaper coverage during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic national conventions found that news media largely peddle the right-wing application of the term. A search of Nexis’ “US Newspapers” database for the phrase “identity politics” during July 14–21 and August 18–25  turned up 52 articles (some of which were reprints in multiple outlets) that related to the major parties, their conventions, and their presidential and vice presidential candidates.  Forty-five of those articles used the term to refer to Democrats and the left, four used the term to refer to Republicans and the right, and three referred to both groups.

    When Identity Politics is Mentioned in US Newspapers, Which Party Is Being Talked About?

    A New York Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd (8/23/24) was one of the 45 articles that associated “identity politics” with Democrats and/or the left. It applauded Harris for how little she discussed her identity, except for promising that she’d sign a bill restoring abortion rights.

    “Aside from that, she barely talked about gender and didn’t dwell on race, shrewdly positioning herself as a Black female nominee ditching identity politics,” Dowd wrote.

    Harris “dwelling” on her race and gender—as someone who would be the first woman, first South Asian and second Black president in the country’s history—would have been poor judgment, Dowd implied.

    Arizona Republic: Arizona mom shares 'everyday Americans' struggles at RNC: What she said

    “While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics,” the Arizona Republic (7/16/24) quoted an RNC speaker, “we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God.”

    However, in two Arizona publications (Arizona Republic, 7/16/24, 7/19/24; Arizona Daily Star, 7/20/24), another woman emphasized her lived experience as “a single mother” to uphold her support of Trump—without the term “identity politics” being assigned to her. Instead, Sara Workman, one of the “everyday Americans” who spoke at the RNC, was quoted assigning it to Democrats:

    “While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics, we are here tonight because we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God,” she said.

    The irony of criticizing “identity politics” while invoking a line in the Pledge of Allegiance that was added to the oath in 1954 to assert the country’s Christian supremacy was lost on the outlets that published this quote.

    Similarly, a piece referencing Vance playing up his “working-class roots” and “rags-to-riches” upbringing not only didn’t acknowledge the “identity politics” in such a presentation, but granted space to another Republican source to use the label derogatorily against the left (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/17/24). RNC committee member Harmeet Dhillon, was quoted saying Trump’s decision to pick the white, male Vance instead of “a woman or a minority” was “a sign of maturity and confidence in our party being able to succeed based on our ideas, not on identity politics.”

    The ‘balance’ double standard

    Another concerning idea echoed in the press was the assertion that Harris, simply by being a woman of color, would alienate white male voters, and therefore thank goodness she chose a white man as her running mate!

    Detroit Free Press: COMMENTARY 5 things Harris can do at DNC to make this Michigan never-Trump Republican vote Democrat

    In the Detroit Free Press (8/22/24), a Republican wrote that Harris needed to “commit to ending identity politics” to get her vote.

    In a commentary for the Detroit Free Press, headlined “Five Things Harris Can Do at DNC to Make This Michigan Never-Trump Republican Vote Democrat” (8/22/24), guest columnist Andrea Bitley listed “commit[ting] to ending identity politics” as one of her stipulations. It’s “historic” that Harris is a “woman of color,” Bitley wrote, then connected that to an important qualification: “However, returning to the heart and soul of democracy and broad-based politics that don’t play favorites with niche groups will make casting my vote easier.”

    Bitley’s implication is that being Black, South Asian or a woman itself requires special effort to avoid pandering to identity groups—and ignores Donald Trump’s playing favorites with the extremely niche group of billionaires he counts himself among.

    Before Harris officially became the Democratic nominee and announced Walz as her running mate, the Lexington Herald Leader (7/21/24) in Kentucky discussed the possibility of another white man, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, becoming the VP pick.

    “If you’re looking to balance a ticket that’s headed by the first Black and South Asian woman presidential nominee, then having a young white guy provides pretty good balance,” Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political journalist and observer, told the outlet. He added, “We live in an era of identity politics, and his identity is a white guy.”

    The New York Times (7/21/24) also reported:

    Well aware of the cold reality of identity politics, Democrats assume that if Ms. Harris, the first Black and Asian American woman to be vice president, were nominated to the presidency, she would most likely balance her ticket with a white man.

    In other words, the press regularly advises Harris to avoid identity politics at all costs—except when the identity being favored is white male.

    These pieces did at least acknowledge that white and male are identities, but didn’t acknowledge the double-standard of Harris being called to “balance” her ticket out with a white man, when the last 43 of 46 presidencies have been held by white men with white male running mates.

    Both-sidesing

    Boston Globe: America Is at a Turning Point, Yet Again

    Some say Donald Trump is a “threat to democratic values”; others say “identity politics” (and federal regulation) are the “true threat” (Boston Globe, 7/21/24).

    Meanwhile, the Boston Globe equated the dangers of “identity politics” to Trump’s threat to democracy. Guest columnist (and former Washington bureau chief) David Shribman (7/21/24) quoted Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner:

    The Republicans believe the country is halfway to the Soviet gulag. The Democrats believe the country is halfway to Adolf Hitler. They both see this election in apocalyptic terms.

    Shribman continued:

    Both sides—those who believe Donald Trump represents a threat to democratic values, and those who believe that identity politics and an inclination toward a highly regulatory federal government are the true threat—consider this year’s election a moment that will define the country for a generation.

    People on the left believe Trump’s America is “halfway to Adolf Hitler” because many of his supporters are literal neo-Nazis. They believe Trump is a threat to democratic values because he encouraged his followers to carry out a deadly insurrection on the Capitol after he could not accept that he lost the 2020 election, and he is preparing to overturn the 2024 vote.

    People on the right see the US as “halfway to the Soviet gulag” because…Democrats want you to acknowledge slavery and respect they/them pronouns?

    This false equivalence is dangerous, and it is difficult to understand how white supremacy, a worldview based entirely on race, is not considered “identity politics” in this case.

    Rare mentions of the right

    NYT: On Cat Ladies, Mama Bears and ‘Momala’

    Tressie McMillan Cottom (New York Times, 8/19/24): J.D. Vance’s evasions on his “childless cat ladies” line “reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.”

    Out of the four articles that used the term “identity politics” to refer to the right, three were from New York Times writers.

    In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (8/19/24) referred to the “egregious right-wing identity politics” in the context of Vance’s uncreative—and Gileadean—attacks on “childless cat ladies.” The Times‘ TV critic (7/19/24) also referenced the performance of macho male identity politics at the testosterone-laden displays at the RNC, saying, “This is what male identity politics looks like.”

    Lydia Polgreen interrogated the derogatory application of the term “DEI candidate” to Harris, arguing that if Harris is a “DEI candidate,” so is Vance (New York Times, 7/21/24). Polgreen argued:

    All politics is, at some level, identity politics—the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country.

    Pointing out that white is a race, male is a gender and identity plays into all politics are arguments missing from most of the coverage, which failed to truly interrogate what people really mean when they apply these terms only to people of color and other minorities.

    The fourth piece applying “identity politics” to the right came from the right-wing Washington Times (7/16/24) under a headline declaring that Black Republican speakers at the RNC “Put Identity Politics to Rest”—after leaning on their family “histories” that included slavery, cotton picking and “the  Jim Crow South.” “That was where the identity politics ended,” the paper assured readers.

    Invisible identities

    Race theorists like john a. powell have long interrogated the idea of whiteness and maleness being treated as “invisible” defaults:

    White people have the luxury of not having to think about race. That is a benefit of being white, of being part of the dominant group. Just like men don’t have to think about gender. The system works for you, and you don’t have to think about it…. The Blacks have race; maybe Latinos have race; maybe Asians have race. But they’re just white. They’re just people. That’s part of being white.

    San Diego Union Tribune: Biden Is Gone. What Is Next?

    Harris as vice president is a “symptom” of the Democrats’ “perspective…based on identity politics.” (San Diego Union Tribune, 7/21/24).

    This belief that the normal, default human form is white and male is what allows people like Tom Shepard, a longtime San Diego political consultant quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune (7/21/24), to imply that Harris being chosen for the 2020 ticket as vice president is merely a symptom of the Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics, and one of the “fundamental problems” with the party’s policy:

    The Democratic Party, for all of its strengths, has over the last several decades kind of developed a perspective that is based on identity politics, and the reason that Kamala Harris was on the Democratic ticket as vice president is, at least in part, a symptom of that approach.

    It’s the same reason why terms like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), “diversity hire” and “identity politics” are used derogatorily against people of color, women and sexual minorities, disabled people and other underrepresented groups that dare to attempt to achieve equity with white men (CounterSpin, 8/8/24; FAIR.org, 7/10/21).

    Without specificity in definition and equal application to either party’s politicking based on identities, “identity politics” becomes yet another dog-whistle used against those who simply dare to not be white or male.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • What Did ABC Think Voters Needed to Hear From Harris and Trump?

     

    Election Focus 2024The questions ABC News‘ moderators asked in the September 10 presidential debate they hosted between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump could be faulted for not doing much to illuminate many of the issues important to voters. They did, however, ask some surprisingly pointed questions about perhaps the most important issue in this election—the preservation of democratic elections themselves.

    And in sharp contrast to CNN, which hosted the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden in June, ABC‘s David Muir and Linsey Davis made at least some effort to offer real-time factchecking during the debate.

    Economy & healthcare

    Linsey Davis and Donald Trump

    Asked by ABC’s Linsey Davis if he had a healthcare plan, Donald Trump replied, “I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.”

    On the economy—which was identified, along with “the cost of living in this country,” as “the issue voters repeatedly say is their number one issue”—ABC‘s Muir asked only a handful of specific questions. He started out by asking Harris a question that he said Trump often asks his supporters, and which was famously asked by Ronald Reagan during a 1980 presidential debate: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”

    Aside from that rather open-ended query, the only specific questions ABC asked about the economy concerned tariffs, a favorite topic of Trump’s. Muir asked the former president whether “Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs,” while he asked Harris to explain why “the Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place.” (The skepticism of both questions reflected corporate media’s traditional commitment to the ideology of “free trade.”)

    The healthcare questions both candidates got from Davis were superficially similar—”Do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?” to Trump, and “What is your plan today?” for Harris. But Trump’s question was set up by noting that “this is now your third time running for president,” and that last month, when asked if he now had a plan, he said, “We’re working on it.”

    Davis prefaced her query to Harris by noting that “in 2017, you supported Bernie Sanders’ proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run healthcare system”—following the insurance industry-promoted terminology of “government-run” vs. “private,” rather than “public” vs. “corporate” (FAIR.org, 7/1/19).

    Another question had the same theme of citing earlier, more progressive positions Harris had taken when running for president in 2019—on fracking, guns and immigration—and seemingly asking for reassurance that she had indeed changed her mind on these issues: “I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?” The line of question reflects corporate media’s preoccupation with making sure that Democrats in general and Harris in particular move to the right (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

    Abortion

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate

    Trump tells Kamala Harris that her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth.”

    Addressing abortion, a motivating issue for many voters, Davis laid out Trump’s changing positions on abortion rights and an abortion ban, then posed the question:

    Vice President Harris says that women shouldn’t trust you on the issue of abortion because you’ve changed your position so many times. Therefore, why should they trust you?

    While both candidates frequently avoided giving concrete answers, Davis pressed Trump on his position, asking whether he would “veto a national abortion ban,” and again asking, “But if I could just get a yes or no”—helping to make his refusal to answer clear to viewers.

    Perhaps in response to Trump’s claim that Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth,” Davis then asked Harris if she would “support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion.” It’s a bit of a trick question without context, though. Many people say they oppose abortions later in pregnancy; media have long bought into the right-wing notion that “late-term” abortions are beyond the pale (Extra!, 7–8/07). But in practice, abortions later than 15 weeks are exceedingly rare and largely occur because of medical necessity or barriers to care (KFF, 2/21/24)—a nuanced reality that Davis’s question left little space for.

    Immigration & race

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate

    Harris looks on as Trump claims, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats…. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

    Despite Trump’s repeated invocation of a border crisis and vilification of immigrants, ABC only asked him two immigration questions. One asked how he would achieve his plan to “deport 11 million undocumented immigrants”; the other followed up on Harris’s charge that Trump killed a border bill that, as Muir stated, “would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.” Neither of the questions challenged Trump’s narrative of the “crisis” or the idea that further militarizing the border is necessary. (See FAIR.org, 6/2/23.) (ABC did counter Trump’s outrageous claim that immigrants were eating people’s pets.)

    In his sole immigration question to Harris, Muir offered a right-wing framing:

    We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

    The media, like Trump, regularly neglect to put immigration numbers in context. Border crossings have increased markedly under Biden, but so have deportations and expulsions, as Biden kept in place most of Trump’s draconian border policies (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

    And the suggestion that Biden “waited…to act” further paints a false picture of the Biden administration as not having “tough restrictions”—immigrant rights advocates called them “inhumane”—prior to 2024.

    The one question introduced as being about “race and politics” addressed Trump’s race-baiting of Harris: “Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?”

    Democracy

    David Muir questions Donald Trump

    Recalling the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, ABC‘s David Muir asks Donald Trump, “Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?”

    On the crucial issue of democratic rule, ABC did not pull many punches. To introduce his first question on the theme, Muir addressed Trump:

    For three-and-a-half years after you lost the 2020 election, you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks, leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you lost by a whisker, that you, quote, didn’t quite make it, that you came up a little bit short. Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?

    When Trump claimed he said those things sarcastically, and argued that there was “so much proof” that he had actually won in 2020, Muir challenged his claims directly, first noting, “I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” then continuing:

    We should just point out as clarification, and you know this, you and your allies, 60 cases, in front of many judges….and [they] said there was no widespread fraud.

    (Trump interrupted this factcheck with another lie, falsely declaring that “no judge looked at it.”)

    Muir continued his pushback against Trump in his subsequent question to Harris:

    You heard the president there tonight. He said he didn’t say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election that was won by President Biden and yourself.

    Muir’s question to Harris highlighted Trump’s recent social media post declaring that those who allegedly “cheated” him out of victory would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”

    Harris was also asked to respond to Trump’s charge that his numerous prosecutions reflect a “weaponization of the Justice Department.”

    International policy

    Donald Trump debates Kamala Harris

    Harris tells Trump that “the American people have a right to rely on a president who understands the significance of America’s role.”

    ABC devoted the widest variety of specific questions to the topic of international policy—often with the implicitly hawkish perspective debate moderators tend to take (FAIR.org, 12/14/15, 2/11/20, 12/26/23). Muir set up his questions on Ukraine with a prelude that left little doubt what the right answers would be:

    It has been the position of the Biden administration that we must defend Ukraine from Russia, from Vladimir Putin, to defend their sovereignty, their democracy, that it’s in America’s best interest to do so, arguing that if Putin wins he may be emboldened to move even further into other countries.

    Muir then asked Trump, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”—evoking an aspiration for a military victory in the conflict that has seemed improbable at least since the failure of Kiev’s counteroffensive in the spring of 2023 (FAIR.org, 9/15/23). Failing to get the response he wanted, Muir reframed the issue as a matter of making America great: “Do you believe it’s in the US best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no?”

    For her part, Harris was asked, “As commander in chief, if elected, how would you deal with Vladimir Putin, and would it be any different from what we’re seeing from President Biden?”—and also, in response to a false Trump claim, “Have you ever met Vladimir Putin?”

    Muir asked about the end of the US’s 19-year occupation of Afghanistan—presented as a shameful moment, as he invoked “the soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal.” His questions to both Harris and Trump implicitly criticized their connection to the war’s end: “Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?,” Harris was asked, while Trump was asked to respond to Harris’s accusation that “you began the negotiations with the Taliban.”

    ABC‘s moderators asked three questions about the Gaza crisis, which was framed as “the Israel/Hamas war and the hostages who are still being held, Americans among them,” though Muir went on to note that “an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead.”

    Harris was asked how she would “break through the stalemate”—and also to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Muir asked Trump how he would “negotiate with Netanyahu and also Hamas in order to get the hostages out and prevent the killing of more innocent civilians in Gaza.”

    ABC asked one climate crisis question, addressed to both candidates. It took climate change as a fact and asked what the candidates would do to “fight” it. While not a particularly probing question—and disconnected from the debate’s discussions of fracking—it’s a slight improvement over previous presidential debates that have ignored the vital topic altogether (FAIR.org, 10/19/16, 9/22/20).

    Factchecking

    David Muir corrects Donald Trump

    Muir points out to Trump that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

    The presidential debate between Trump and then-candidate Biden was hosted in June by CNN, which made the remarkable decision to not attempt any factchecking during the live event (FAIR.org, 6/26/24). Post-debate factchecks turned up countless fabrications by Trump (and several by Biden), but that was entirely overwhelmed in the news coverage by pundits’ focus on Biden’s obvious stumbles.

    ABC took a different tack, choosing to counter a few of Trump’s more noteworthy lies. Post-debate analysis counted at least 30 falsehoods from Trump and only a few from Harris; Muir and Davis called out Trump four times and Harris none.

    Muir and Davis intervened on some of Trump’s most outlandish fictions. For instance, when Trump claimed that immigrants were “eating the pets of the people that live” in the communities they moved to, Muir noted that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

    In addition to Muir’s pushback against Trump’s election fraud lies, Davis countered Trump’s insistence that Democrats support “executing” babies, drily noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

    ABC also challenged a Trump falsehood that many prominent media outlets continued to propagate long after it was no longer even remotely true (FAIR.org, 11/10/22, 7/25/24): that violent crime is “through the roof.” (As Muir pointed out, “The FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”)

    Of course, the vast majority of Trump’s lies went unchecked, demonstrating the inherent failure of the debate format when one participant exhibits a flagrant disregard for honesty (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).

    ABC did not explicitly correct any of Harris’s claims, in part because there was less misinformation in her rhetoric. Some of Harris’s more dubious statements were of the sort that are often found  in corporate media, such as her allusion to the claim that Covid originated from a Chinese lab, when she blamed President Xi Jinping for “not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid.” There is no more evidence for this than there is for immigrants eating pets in Ohio—but as it’s a media-approved conspiracy theory (FAIR.org, 10/6/20, 6/28/21, 7/3/24), one would not expect debate moderators to call her out on it.

    Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Gregory Shupak on Palestinian Genocide, Robert Spitzer on Gun Rights and Rules

     

     

    NYT: Israeli Bombing in Gaza Humanitarian Zone Kills at Least 19, Officials Say

    New York Times (9/10/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: Corporate US news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip that killed at least 19 people in an area designated a “refuge” for Palestinians, and to include warnings of a possible wider war in the region—but there’s little sense of urgency, of something horrible happening that US citizens could have a role in preventing. We’ll talk about that with media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak.

     

    Apalachee School Shooting: Funeral Plans for Victims

    Fox 5 Atlanta (9/12/24)

    Also on the show: US corporate media have a similar “another day, another tragedy” outlook on gun violence. It happens, we’re told, but all reporters need to do is quote people saying it’s bad yet oddly unavoidable, and they’re done. We’ll hear from Robert Spitzer, a historian of gun regulation and gun rights, about some spurious reasons behind the impasse on gun violence.

     

     

    That studied lack of urgent concern about human life—is that journalism? Why do the press corps need a constitutional amendment to protect their ability to speak if all they’re going to say is, “oh well”?

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ‘We’re Hitting Record Highs, But Still Leaving African Americans in Economic Insecurity’CounterSpin interview with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Algernon Austin on the Black economy

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and CEPR’s Algernon Austin about the Black economy for the September 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    CEPR: The Best Black Economy in Generations – And Why It Isn’t Enough

    CEPR (8/26/24)

    Janine Jackson: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called the “US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me.

    A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic indicators, not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go, as a society that has yet to address deep, historical and structural harms.

    A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That conversation is coming up on today’s show.

    ***

    JJ: Corporate news media tend to report economic news like the weather. Yes, it affects different people differently, but the source, the economy, is just—stuff that happens.

    But there’s really no such thing as “the economy.” There are policies and practices about taxes and lending and wages, and they are as historically embedded, preferentially enforced and as susceptible to intentional change as everything else.

    So how should we read reports about the “best Black economy in decades,” particularly as one question news media rarely include in the daily recitation of numbers is: Compared to what?

    A new research brief engages these questions; the title’s a bit of a giveaway: “The Best Black Economy in Generations—and Why It Isn’t Enough.”

    We’re joined now by the brief’s co-authors. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Algernon Austin.

    Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Thank you.

    Algernon Austin:  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

    JJ: Economic reporting can seem very dry and divorced from life as lived. We read that the country’s GDP is up, or that inflation is leveling off, and a lot of us just don’t know what that means, in terms of whether we are more likely to get a job, or a wage increase, or a home loan. If you can parse that data, though, it does tell us something, if not enough. So let me ask you first, what particular indicators are telling us or showing us that Black Americans are experiencing the most positive economic conditions in generations? What are you looking at?

    Algernon Austin

    Algernon Austin: “If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would…significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.”

    AA: One thing that I pay a lot of attention to is the employment-to-population ratio, or the employment rate, and that’s simply what percent of the population is working. And that’s something that’s very concrete, that people can relate to. And the Black population, historically, has had a significantly lower employment rate than the white population.

    So why we’re in the greatest economy on record is because, if you look at the prime age employment rate, that’s individuals 25-to-54 years old, the Black prime age employment rate, the annual rate for the first half of this year has been at a record high. So that is certainly quite positive news, and something that we should celebrate.

    But as you pointed out, compared to what? Compared to the white prime age employment rate, it’s still below average. And when you do the full calculation of what I call the “Black jobs deficit,” we need about 1.4 million more Black people working to have the same employment rate as white people.

    And what does that mean in terms of income for Black America? If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would have an additional $60 billion, that’s with a B, $60 billion going into Black America, which would significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.

    So that’s the positive: We have a high employment rate. The negative is it’s still lagging, and that lag, that deficit, is still causing a great deal of poverty for Black people.

    JJ: So Algernon, you’ve connected employment and poverty and income right there, which are the key indicators that I’m seeing lifted up in this report. Unemployment is one that is a complicated thing to report because, as we know, sometimes unemployment rates don’t include people who’ve stopped looking for work, and all of that. But you’re saying that unemployment and poverty and income are all connected here. What can you tell us about what those other indicators, the poverty rates, and the income and wealth indicators, what do they add to this picture about good news?

    AA: We pay a lot of attention to the unemployment rate, which is valid; it’s an important indicator. But for populations that face persistent challenges finding work —and I just said that there are about 1.4 million Black people who should be working but who aren’t—you see the unemployment rate undercounts joblessness. Because if people have been repeatedly rejected by employers—so imagine someone who maybe was formerly incarcerated—that individual is less likely to be actively looking for work. And if you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not counted as being unemployed. Or if you’re in an economically depressed area and you look around and you say, “there’s no jobs,” and you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not being counted as unemployed.

    So the unemployment rate is an important indicator, and the Black rate is typically about twice the white rate. Right now, it’s a little bit less than two times, so that’s, again, another positive sign. But it does undercount joblessness.

    Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Yeah. And in terms of income and wealth, we’ve also seen some positive signs. So I think that’s why we’re saying it’s the strongest Black economy in generations, because we see in many of the major indicators that Blacks are at record high. Also in terms of median household income, Blacks in 2022 were at $53,000 median income for households. And so that is a record high for the African-American community. As well as wealth in 2022, where we have the most recent data, it’s at a record high of $45,000.

    Now, just as Algernon had noted, record highs can be great, but relative to what, and what does that mean? The median income for white households is $81,000. So Blacks are still about $30,000 less in terms of median income. And I think most people would understand that $53,000 for a household is not a lot of money.

    And we look at wealth. We also argue that $45,000 median wealth is actually a household that is asset poor, that does not have enough wealth to keep them financially secure. There’s been estimates, well, let’s just put forward that white median wealth is $285,000. So you have that $45,000, compared to $285,000, with past estimates of middle-class wealth beginning around $170,000.

    So we can see that we’re hitting record highs, but we’re still leaving African Americans in spaces of economic insecurity, and that’s why it isn’t enough and we need to do more.

    NYT: Why Are People So Down About the Economy? Theories Abound.

    New York Times (5/30/24)

    JJ: There’s been a phenomenon lately where reporters and pundits seem to say, “People are saying they’re not happy with the economy, but they’re wrong, because look at this chart.” It’s sort of like people are maybe too dumb to know how good they have it.

    But people aren’t dumb. They know they have two jobs and still struggle. They know they have a fairly good income, but they could not survive one medical emergency. But reporting, and some politicking, seems to suggest that if you aren’t doing well, then maybe that’s a you problem, because, after all, “the economy” is firing on all pistons. But people’s opinion about their economic health and their economic situation, Black people’s opinion, comes from a combination of things, you found?

    AA: A lot of the reporting is based on macroeconomic indicators, which are, I’m not disputing them, it’s just that the big picture, national average can mask a lot of variation on the ground, and can be distant from what people are feeling.

    So we’ve been through, because of Covid, because of the lockdowns, because of the shutdown and supply chains, because of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a massive spike in inflation, I think probably more than we’ve seen in a generation. And that has been quite a shock. And I think that affects people’s views of economic conditions.

    We’ve also seen very high interest rates, and that makes it very hard for people to borrow, or increases the cost of trying to get a mortgage, increases credit card debt. We’ve seen, in terms of housing, a real scarcity in housing, and a real spike in housing costs.

    So there’s a lot of things for people to be worried about, to be anxious about. And of course there was the Covid recession, which was massive. So there’s been a lot of economic turmoil, and it’s an error to discount what these recent traumatic experiences are, and the fact that they’re not just experiences, there are real economic consequences that people see every day when they go to the grocery store and pay their grocery bills.

    JJ: And Dedrick, the report says Black Americans are optimistic, pessimistic, multifaceted and complex in terms of their understanding of their own economic situation, and then when they’re asked about the broader picture; and that makes sense as human beings.

    Pew: Most Black adults in the U.S. are optimistic about their financial future

    Pew (7/18/23)

    DA: Yeah, yeah. I did think that was an interesting thing pulled out of our paper, was looking at some past surveys and seeing 67% of African Americans expressed optimism, feeling good to somewhat good, about their financial future, while at the same time, in a different poll, in a Pew poll, we saw that African Americans, 70% said they did not have enough money for the life they want. And these are different things, right?

    Again, if you’re used to ridiculously high unemployment rates in your community, and then it’s getting a little bit better, that might make you feel optimistic that, oh, well, maybe things can get better in my household. But, at the same time, you can still understand that, “but I don’t have enough money to be a homeowner. I’m having a harder and harder time paying grocery bills.”

    So both of those feelings can live within one’s life experience and be real. I think it’s only when you’re trying to just have a very simple explanation of how people feel that we act like they’re in contradiction.

    JJ: Algernon has referred a couple times to consistent challenges faced by Black Americans. I think that’s part of what’s left out of a lot of news media conversations. So let’s just talk about, when you say big numbers, macro numbers, can be trending in a good direction, but they’re not enough, and they’re not going to be enough without something else, what are you getting at? What would responsive policy look like?

    CBPP: End of Pandemic Assistance Largely Reversed Recent Progress in Reducing Child Poverty

    CBPP (6/10/24)

    AA: In response to the Covid pandemic, the federal government expanded the child tax credit, and expanded the earned income tax credit, so that more poor people and more poor people with children would get aid from the federal government.

    And what did we see? We saw a dramatic decline in poverty, dramatic decline in Black poverty, dramatic decline in Black child poverty, as well as for American Indians, for Latinos, and for the white population. So we know what works, we know that we have the power to do it, but, unfortunately, conservatives in Congress decided that they were not going to extend the expanded child tax credit and the expanded EITC.

    So we’ve seen a reversal. So we’ve seen Black poverty rates—and this is using the supplemental poverty measure, that factors in these tax credits—increase again. So it’s unfortunate that policy makers don’t put the policy agenda to fight poverty, and to produce more racial equality, as a higher priority.

    DA: Yes, and I’ll just add to that, I think an important takeaway from this is that though we have some record highs, we don’t need to let up on the economy. We need to put our pedal down to the metal, as the saying goes, in order to continue to build and strengthen. Because even with these record highs, in terms of income, we noted a report that was done last year with the Institute for Policy Studies, that noted that even at the current rate, if you look from 1960 to 2020, it would take hundreds of years before Blacks had equal pay with whites, and it would take almost 800 years for Blacks to have equal wealth with whites.

    And so over the last five years, we’re having some important advances. And so what we need to do is do policies that build off of that, right? Whether it’s to continue to strengthen the earned income tax credits and other such types of credit, I think increased home ownership, there’s a lot of conversation on that. We have to make sure any type of home-ownership advancement is something that disproportionately affects African Americans in particular, but Latinos as well. African Americans have never had the majority of their population as homeowners, and that’s the No. 1 source of wealth for most Americans. So if we can do something in 2025 to really strengthen homeownership for first-time homeowners, that could be something substantial that could help break away from these historic inequalities that have made racial inequality, not just something that occurs through prejudice, but something that can be seen through socioeconomic status.

    AA: We also need targeted job creation. Subsidized employment is the most effective way, so subsidized employment programs targeted to high-unemployment communities. I mentioned that we still need about 1.4 million more Black people working for the Black employment rate to be the same as the white employment rate. So we need to target those high-unemployment communities with effective job creation.

    CEPR: When the WPA Created Over 400,000 Jobs for Black Workers

    CEPR (2/9/23)

    JJ: When I hear “consistent challenges,” I mean, we’re talking about racism, in terms of economic policy in this country, and the harms have been targeted, historically and presently—redlining, loan denial, all of that, the harms have been targeted. But at this moment, supposedly reforms are not allowed to be targeted, because that would be DEI, that would be unfair.

    And I know we’ve talked about, for example, the Covid response was not about race. Great Depression, the WPA was not targeted by race. It was actually something that helped Black people, because it helped everyone. But we’re in this present moment that we’re in, where if you say these people are being particularly harmed, and so at least some remedy should be targeted towards them, we know that that’s going to be politically difficult. And I know that’s a weird question, but I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

    DA: Clearly, racial equality has always been politically difficult, as the history of this country has shown. So it will continue to be politically difficult. I think we have seen, like the War on Poverty, that sometimes in its name might not appear as something particularly focused on African Americans, but it was coming out of the strong Black civil rights movement of that time period, when we saw a substantial decline of Black poverty in particular, all poverty. But many of the policies I did think had a disproportionate impact on African Americans.

    The most effective and efficient way to address disproportionate negative harm is to then put in positive economic impact, particularly on those communities. So we should look at ways of doing that. Sometimes race would be the factor named, but sometimes you can also get it just by focusing on first-time homeowners of certain income and wealth level that would disproportionately have a good amount of African Americans, Latinos, and would have some whites, but would have a disproportionate impact on the community.

    So I think if policymakers are willing—and I think our job as the electorate is to make policymakers willing—and we can get forward these policies, whether we call them DEI policies, or whether we call them trying to ensure that America is majority homeowner, or America is fully employed throughout the nation, there are ways of putting this forward.

    Vox: The future of affirmative action in the workplace

    Vox (7/9/23)

    AA: This is a long struggle. So if you look at the history of the Black civil rights movement, or Black liberation struggle, however you want to characterize it, there have been moments when we’ve moved forward, there have been moments when we’ve moved backwards. So this is just one phase. So it’s important for people to recognize: OK, what’s next? How do we move forward from this particular point? So I think it’s important to regroup and think about how we move forward.

    I’m focused on affirmative action policies, and particularly affirmative action in employment, which still exists, which needs to be protected and fought for, because it will be under attack. The second point that Dedrick was making is that there are ways that may be less efficient for racial justice, but there are ways to make impacts that reduce racial inequality.

    And we saw it, going back to poverty, the expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit had a disproportionate positive impact on reducing Black poverty. It also reduced white poverty, and poverty for all other groups, but because more Black people were poor and in hardship, it had a disproportionate benefit. So although that was a race-neutral program, it did have a disproportionate racial benefit.

    And similarly, I’ve called for targeted subsidized employment, and notice I said targeted to high-unemployment communities. You can go to Appalachia and find majority white communities that are high unemployment, and we should be concerned about those high-unemployment white communities. But if you target job creation to high-unemployment communities, you will disproportionately benefit Black communities, because that’s where the high unemployment is disproportionately concentrated.

    So I think it’s important that we continue on both fronts. Let’s exploit all the race-neutral policies that we can, but also let’s not give up on a race-conscious economic justice fight in addition.

    JJ: I just want to ask you, finally, about news media, about reporting. When, Dedrick, we spoke in 2017, I was talking about a Washington Post piece that said that a rise in middle-class incomes was “unequivocally good news,” even as the same report had some sort of notes in between, one of which was, oh yeah, “yawning racial disparities remain.” And that’s kind of par for the course in news, the idea that racial gaps in economic circumstances and options are lamentable but normal, and kind of a footnote to the real story, which holds an implication that a rising economic tide will eventually lift all boats.

    And that framing and that absence of complexity, while it’s kind of par for the course in corporate journalism, it reflects a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation of the way economic developments affect different groups, which is what we’ve been talking about. And I wonder, from both of you, if you have any thoughts about the role that journalism currently plays in illuminating this set of issues, and about the role that journalism maybe could play?

    Dedrick Asante-Muhammad

    Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: “The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America.”

    DA: Things have changed a lot over the last 30 years, even this idea of racial inequality, minority groups. I mean, now you look at Blacks and Latinos, and Latinos oftentimes, as well, have lower income levels, have lower home ownership levels, and you put these populations together, Blacks and Latino, and they’re about a third of the population. And if you talk about youth and children, you see that the majority of kids in many school districts throughout the country are students of color.

    So no longer can it be kind of, well, there’s an issue with a small part of the population, but the rest of the economy is going strong. The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America—Latinos being the largest group now, African Americans being the second-largest group. So it will be essential, if we’re looking at how the economy can grow, making sure these communities are getting their share of the growth that would get them at a level of true middle class.

    I think that’s one thing I particularly look at in terms of wealth, is that Black America’s never had a strong Black middle class in terms of wealth. You’ve always had a very small population that have had a middle-class economic wealth stability. And, again, the future of reporting on the future of the country really requires understanding those differences, and highlighting that, so we can push the country in the right direction, and how do we move the country forward in a way that is equitable in a manner that it never has been.

    AA: I don’t want to appear to be too self-centered or self-serving, but we need the information presented in this report covered, because I feel both parts of the story have not gotten sufficient media attention. One is that we’re at historic highs on so many different measures that I don’t think has been talked about enough, and two, we still have significant inequality that we haven’t addressed. There’s some positive signs, but we obviously need to do a lot more. And like Dedrick said, we need to keep pressing the gas. We can’t take our foot off the pedal.

    So that’s one thing. The other thing—I try to stress this when I speak to people—is that we’re talking about the United States, and Black people are part of the United States. Latinos are part of the United States. The American Indian or the Indigenous population are sort of part of the United States; some are independent nations, but they’re also interacting with the US economy.

    If you improve the economic conditions of the Black population, you’re improving the economic standing of the United States. If you improve the economic condition of Latinos, you’re improving the economic strengths and health of the United States.

    And it’s important that people understand that, because, unfortunately, people tend to go into a zero sum mode, and not recognize that helping Black people, in terms of public policy, is a way to help the entire country, help the United States. So that’s something that I think reporters can also work on communicating.

    DA: The one thing I’ll add, in terms of what can reporters do, I think reporters need to focus in on expertise, Black expertise, expertise around racial inequality. I’ll just put forward, as recently new president of Joint Center for Political Economic Study, it’s important that Black institutions are utilized and are put at the forefront of conversations around the economy and these issues.

    It’s great that there’s been more conversations around racial wealth divide, and race and economics; there’s been a lot of conversation around DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—movement, and attacks on it. But I don’t feel that they have enough centered on those who have been at the forefront of highlighting these issues, putting forth policy solutions to address them.

    There are a cadre of reporters who have been focused on these issues for the last 20 years, and these reporters need to be at the forefront of the conversation. Too often times, if I do get a call, I’m getting a call from someone who’s reporting this for the first time, and doesn’t even quite understand the reality that there is deep economic inequality, it has been ongoing, and it would take radical change to really get us to a place where we could have some equality. So, again, I think we need to value those who have been focused on this area, and those institutions from these communities, if we really want to report correctly on these challenges.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and with Algernon Austin, director of the Race and Economic Justice Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The brief we’ve been discussing can be found at both JointCenter.org and CEPR.net. Thank you both so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    DA: Thanks for having us.

    AA: Thank you.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Not Reporting on Trump as a Threat to Democracy Is Also a Threat to Democracy

     

    Election Focus 2024New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the  Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”

    Sulzberger details Trump’s many efforts to suppress and undermine critical media outlets during his previous presidential tenure, as well as the more recent open declarations by Trump and his allies of their plans to continue to “come after” the press, “whether it’s criminally or civilly.” He documents the ways independent media have been eroded in illiberal democracies around the world, and draws direct links to Trump’s playbook.

    You might expect this to be a prelude to an announcement that the New York Times would work tirelessly to defend democracy.  Instead, Sulzberger heartily defends his own miserably inadequate strategy of “neutrality”—which, in practice, is both-sidesing—making plain his greater concern for the survival of his own newspaper than the survival of US democracy.

    ‘Wading into politics’

    WaPo: How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America

    New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) says his paper is “taking active steps to prepare ourselves for a more difficult environment” regarding press freedom—but not, crucially, by reporting on Donald Trump as though he were a clear and present danger to democracy.

    “As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence,” Sulzberger writes, “I have no interest in wading into politics.”

    It’s a bizarre statement. Newspapers, including the Times, regularly endorse candidates. Presumably, then, he’s referring to the “news” side of the paper, rather than the opinion side.

    But, even so, you can’t report on politics without wading directly into them. Which political figures and issues do you cover, and how much? (See, for example: media’s outsize coverage of Trump since 2015; media’s heavy coverage of inflation but not wage growth.) Which popular political ideas do you take seriously, and which do you dismiss as marginal? (See, for example, the Times‘ persistent dismissal of Bernie Sanders’ highly popular critiques.) These decisions shape political possibilities and set political agendas, as much as the Times would like to pretend they don’t (FAIR.org, 5/15/24).

    Sulzberger goes on (emphasis added):

    I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. 

    Sulzberger is always raging against critics who, he claims, want him to skew and censor his paper’s reporting (FAIR.org, 5/19/23). The Times must instead be steadfastly “neutral,” he claims. But those very political coverage decisions that media outlets make on a daily basis make it impossible for the outlets to be neutral in the way Sulzberger imagines.

    Neutrality could mean, as he suggests, independent or free from the influence of the powerful in our society. This is possible—if difficult—for media outlets to achieve. Yet the Times, like all corporate media, doesn’t even try to do this.

    Instead, the Times seems to take neutrality as not appearing to take sides, which in practice means finding similar faults among both parties, or not appearing overly critical of one party or the other (FAIR.org, 1/26/24). This strategy didn’t work particularly well when Republicans and Democrats played by the same set of rules, as both parties took the same anti-equality, pro-oligarchy positions on many issues.

    But it’s particularly ill-suited to the current moment, when Republicans have discarded any notion that facts, truth or democracy have any meaning. If one team ceases to play by any rules, should the ref continue to try to call roughly similar numbers of violations on each side in order to appear unbiased? It would obviously be absurd and unfair. But that’s Sulzberger’s notion of “neutrality.”

    It would be brave for a media outlet like the Times to take a stand and oppose Trump’s candidacy. But it would make a big difference if the paper would even do the bare minimum of calling fouls fairly rather than evenly.

    ‘A fair and accurate picture’

    Sampling of New York Times headlines about Biden's age

    Sampling of New York Times headlines raising doubts about President Joe Biden’s age (Campaign Trails, 9/5/24). The Times highlighted more than two dozen stories about President Joe Biden’s age in a single week (CSSLab, 3/24/24); since his withdrawal from the race, the paper has not spotlighted similar concerns about Donald Trump’s competence.

    “It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away,” Sulzberger continues. “At the Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it.”

    A “full, fair and accurate picture” of the election and its stakes are exactly what the Times‘ critics are asking for. Instead, the Times offers a topsy-turvy world in which crime is still a top concern (it’s at its lowest level since the 1960s—FAIR.org, 7/25/24)); inflation has been brought down to near the Fed’s ideal rate of 2%, but it’s still “a problem for Harris” (7/23/24); the nation’s “commitment to the peaceful resolution of political difference” is primarily threatened by neither party in particular (FAIR.org, 7/16/24); and Biden’s age merits more headlines as a danger to the country than Trump’s increasing incoherence–or his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the election.

    It’s not “giving up independence” for a news outlet to try, through its reporting, to prevent a tyrant from taking over the country. There’s no reason the paper can’t put the threats posed by Trump on its front page every day while continuing to offer careful scrutiny of the Harris campaign. But it’s also worth asking: What good is a “free” press if it can’t protect democracy before it’s gone?

    ‘Balance’ at all costs

    Sulzberger concludes by explaining how he plans to confront the looming challenge Trump presents—by preparing for lawsuits and harassment and, most crucially, by not taking sides:

    through it all, treating the journalistic imperative to promote truth and understanding as a north star — while refusing to be baited into opposing or championing any particular side. “No matter how well-intentioned,” Joel Simon, the former head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote last month on what he’s learned studying attacks on press freedom, “such undertakings can often help populist and authoritarian leaders rally their own supporters against ‘entrenched elites’ and justify a subsequent crackdown on the media.”

    Does Sulzberger actually think that by writing a several-thousand-word warning against Trump’s threat to press freedom, but simultaneously announcing that he will resolutely oppose “taking sides” in this election, he is somehow inoculating himself against right-wing populist hatred of the Times, and any future retribution from a Trump presidency?

    The far right has learned how to exploit this central weakness of corporate media, its adherence to “balance” at all costs. Sulzberger might think he’s working to fend off Trump’s attack on an independent press corps; in fact, he’s playing right into Trump’s hands, and working to speed along his own paper’s irrelevance.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Dedrick Asante-Muhammad & Algernon Austin on the Black Economy

     

     

    CEPR: The Best Black Economy in Generations – And Why It Isn’t Enough

    CEPR (8/26/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators,” not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.

    A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘They See These Price Hikes as a Good Thing’CounterSpin interview with Freddy Brewster on supermarket megamerger

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Freddy Brewster about the supermarket megamerger for the August 30, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Lever: Kroger and Albertsons’ Dirty Tricks To Preserve Greedflation

    Lever (8/26/24)

    Janine Jackson: In October of 2022, the largest supermarket chain in the US, Kroger, announced a plan to take over the second-largest supermarket chain in the country, Albertsons, in a merger that would create the country’s third-largest private-sector employer overall—after Walmart and Amazon—a conglomerate of some 5,000 stores and 710,000 employees. What could go wrong?

    A lot of things, the Federal Trade Commission suggested, as they sued to block the merger this February, including less competition, lower quality products and weaker bargaining positions for workers. Legal proceedings began this week.

    Our guest is helping make sense of this story. Writer and journalist Freddy Brewster’s latest piece on the proposed Kroger and Albertsons merger, and the maneuvering behind it, appears at LeverNews.com. He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Freddy Brewster.

    Freddy Brewster: Hi, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

    JJ: If we could first situate this in common sense and lived experience: Americans have been seeing the price of eggs and milk and other staples go way up, to the point where already-struggling people are pressed to the limit. Asking why this is happening, we’ve been told for years now, well, Covid, and related supply chain problems, and inflation. It’s out of companies’ control.

    I have problems already with that, because the notion that companies have to maintain a certain profit margin, no matter what’s happening in the world, is a choice. Companies could always accept less profit, or pay managers less, if keeping prices down was their aim.

    But, OK, Covid, supply chain, inflation: That’s no longer the reality, yet it’s still somehow the story. Did Kroger not just acknowledge in testimony that, oh yes, we did push prices higher than inflation just because we could, but still if you give us more market power, you should believe we won’t do that anymore? I want to ask you about specifics, but this whole baseline, to begin with, almost seems like a joke at the expense of people already struggling. Am I missing something there?

    Freddy Brewster

    Freddy Brewster: “Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices.”

    FB: No, no, you’re kind of right on it. And just add to that, in 2021, Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices, pass the cost on to consumers and keep prices high. In fact, I have a quote right here from Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, from that shareholder call, and it says, “We view a little bit of inflation as always good in our business, and we would expect to be able to pass those costs through to consumers on things that are permanent in nature.” And so, right here, he is admitting that they can use inflation to raise prices, and then keep those prices high.

    JJ: And that sounds like exactly what they’re saying they won’t be doing in this sort of PR talk about lower prices and better choices.

    I went to look up this story, and I found a website called KrogerAlbertsons.com, which opens with this, I find, hilarious disclaimer, and I just want to read it:

    Certain information included in this website is forward-looking, and involves risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the assumptions and beliefs of Kroger and Albertsons companies management in light of information currently available to them.

    And it goes on:

    Such statements are indicated by words or phrases such as “accelerate,” “create,” “committed,” “confident,” “continue,” “deliver,” “driving,” “expect,” “future,” “guidance,” “positioned,” “strategy,” “target,” “synergies,” “trends” and “will.”

    Now companies call this skating where the puck’s going to be, right? You just act as though you’ve already gotten the thing that you’re demanding. And then if the deal doesn’t happen, you’re encouraging people to see it as nature’s path being interfered with, rather than public-protecting processes being followed.

    FB: Yeah, that website is funny, and it’s almost like, if there’s any young people out there who are aspiring to work in PR, you can read that website. It is just like those words that they highlight themselves are rather interesting, and kind of like buzzwords, to be able to push a certain type of narrative that they find benefits them, or would be profitable to their narrative.

    Reuters: Surging grocery prices in focus as US tries to stop Kroger deal

    Reuters (8/28/24)

    JJ: What information is the FTC working with when they set up to question or potentially block this merger? Why are they doing that?

    FB: They want to block this merger because, like you had mentioned earlier on, this merger could result in poor-quality products, higher prices and worse employment options for employees, especially for employees who are trying to unionize or who want to threaten to be able to go work at the competitor.

    Just to give you kind of a sense of Kroger’s market power, in an attempt to allay the concerns from the FTC about this merger, Kroger had promised to sell off 600 stores, slash prices by a billion dollars, and invest a billion dollars in wages if the merger is allowed to go through.

    So what this kind of says and highlights is that Kroger is already buying Albertsons for $24.6 billion, and is willing to invest another $2 billion to bring down prices and to get more wages. That shows that they already have quite a bit of market power. They have $29 billion sitting around that they can use to buy another company and lower prices and give people better wages. Well, why aren’t they lowering prices and giving people better wages right now?

    That statement itself just highlights the market power that Kroger has, and if this merger is allowed to go through, they’ll have even greater market power. And Kroger says that they want this merger to go through to be able to compete with Walmart and Amazon, which may be legitimate, but Walmart and Amazon, they operate in different spheres than what traditional grocery stores do.

    Boise Dev: Albertsons and Kroger supermarket brands

    Boise Dev (2/20/23)

    JJ: Right. So the idea that all four of these companies… we as citizens are meant to be excited about a bigger behemoth getting into the fight with other behemoths.

    FB: Yeah, exactly. And Kroger already owns a handful of common grocery stores that people know about. There’s Fred Meyer, there’s Harris Teeter, they own King Soopers and Ralphs. And then also Albertsons owns Safeway. They own…

    JJ: Acme, I think….

    FB: Shaw’s and Vons. Yeah, exactly. And so all of this would put it all under one roof.

    And then also, if this merger’s allowed to go through, what puts it under that same roof, too, are also all those store-brand products. Like Kroger has Kroger brand salad dressing, for example, or different sauces or snacks or whatever. And Albertsons has the same thing. But then that puts it all under one roof, one house in one store, and that leaves less options for consumers.

    And an expert I talked to highlighted about how when there’s less options, that these companies are focused on profits, and they often use emulsifiers and other things that really aren’t the best to be consuming for the average human, and that can affect health in different ways, weight in different ways.

    JJ: Among other tactics, Kroger is declaring that the FTC’s whole case should be thrown out because it’s unconstitutional, because it involves Kroger’s “private rights.” What legal legs do they think they’re standing on there?

    Vox: The Supreme Court just lit a match and tossed it into dozens of federal agencies

    Vox (6/27/24)

    FB: So, historically, the courts have ruled in favor of these government agencies. The FTC, for example, and similar with the Securities and Exchange Commission, have these internal courts that rule on certain matters. So, for example, the FTC internal administrative court, they hear evidence, kind of like a standard court, and will issue initial decisions. And companies have sued in the past to try to say this is unconstitutional, and has to be fought in federal court. But the courts have largely ruled in favor of these government agencies.

    Up until recently; that’s begun to change. Now the Supreme Court, earlier the summer, ruled that the in-house courts issuing civil penalties for securities fraud, for the Securities Exchange Commission, is unconstitutional. And then, also, there was a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that allowed companies facing an FTC enforcement action to challenge those actions that the companies deemed unconstitutional in federal court, before those actions are deliberated inside the internal FTC court. So it’s a little convoluted, but those are the two main cases that Kroger is relying on to say that the internal FTC court is unconstitutional.

    JJ: Listeners will know that we’ve been instructed to see corporations as people since Citizens United, but if I’m in court and I’m deleting relevant text messages, I’m not sure that I could just say, “Oh, well, you know, stuff happens.” Tell us a little bit about some of the behind the scenes actions, if you will, that seem meaningful here to this case.

    CPI: Judge Accuses Google of ‘Clear Abuse’ in Antitrust Case Over Deleted Employee Chats

    CPI (8/29/24)

    FB: So deleting text messages and internal chats has seemed to become the go-to tactic for business executives facing enforcement actions and regulations from the federal government. Jeff Bezos and Amazon executives were caught using Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app, but it also has the option for auto delete. And so a lot of these messages that they were exchanging between each other were automatically deleted.

    Google executives were also caught deleting messages. So Google has this internal policy where it directs employees to use a feature that automatically deletes Google Chat messages after 24 hours. And Google received an order from regulators to preserve these messages, but a judge found that the executives did not properly notify employees to stop using the auto delete feature, and some messages were deleted.

    And there’s also, in the case of Google, messages that have been preserved that show that some of these executives realized the fact that the auto delete function was not turned off. And so it’s preserved in court documents that show that they know that they were supposed to turn off this auto delete function, but they had left it on.

    But then Albertsons, some of their executives were using auto-delete features on iPhone, and recent filings from the FTC, I’ll just quote right from it, it says: “Of the eight Albertsons executives set to testify at this evidentiary hearing, four exhibited a pervasive practice of deleting business-related text messages,” the FTC found. And these text messages allegedly included details on whether selling off certain stores will remedy the merger’s anticompetitive impacts, and FTC investigators urge the court to view the executive’s testimony with skepticism, meaning that they should view what they have to say in light of these guys deleting text messages talking about details about the merger.

    Chicago Trib: Albertsons-Kroger merger should be allowed, but we need assurance the sale of Mariano’s won’t harm consumers

    Chicago Tribune (8/27/24)

    JJ: Yeah. I’ll bring you back to that big regulatory picture in just a second, but let me just ask you about corporate media response. There’s been some coverage. I’ve seen some coverage.

    It includes things like the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, who weighed in saying that, yes, food prices in America are a real problem, but that it’s “only politicians who want to be seen as doing something about them” that “conveniently focus merely on retail operations, because those are price stickers most voters see.” Well, yeah, OK. But they go on to say:

    In reality, supermarkets are a famously high-volume, low-margin business, and their price increases are downwind from wholesale price increases with those flowing from suppliers with increased costs. And the retail operations have their own costs dominated by the price of labor, which has seen hefty increases in recent years.

    Now, I think listeners can likely parse that: It’s supply chains and it’s unions that are driving those high grocery prices—even as Kroger’s own senior director for pricing admits in testimony that, yeah, we’re actually price-gouging, but if you let us merge, well, we pinky promise to stop. What do you make of media response here?

    FB: Yeah, so I haven’t read that Chicago Tribune article, but I’d imagine that they don’t take in consideration the billions of dollars that Kroger has spent in stock buybacks over recent years. And so it’s not like they’re hurt or cash-strapped in a way that they’re having to pinch pennies to get by. They pay their executives handsomely. They’re paid well, and they have billions of dollars in leftover money to buy back stocks to juice shareholder value. I don’t really see that mentioned too often in corporate media, but that is a key context to consider when it comes to these issues and food prices.

    JJ: Yeah, consumers and workers and competition, those terms get thrown around a lot in stories like this. But the Consumer Federation of America opposes the merger, the Food Workers Union opposes the merger, state attorney generals who are interested in competition oppose the merger. So there’s this gap between media and political rhetoric, and what folks on the ground actually see and have seen happening, it seems like.

    FB: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and folks on the ground know really what’s affecting them, and what’s affecting them largely, as of late, has been high prices at the grocery store. And we know from Kroger’s own internal conversations that they see these price hikes as a good thing.

    JJ: While it is hard, understandably, for many of us to see past the price of eggs, which is alarming, but there is also, as you write about, a long game here that has to do with hobbling government’s ability to protect consumers, or to regulate businesses, period. I think Kroger seems to see, and other businesses seem to see, a longer-term gain here by undermining the whole system.

    FB: Imagine Kroger’s case against the FTC. This is a bit of a prediction from me. I’d imagine it’ll make its way to the Supreme Court, because if the federal court in Cincinnati, where Kroger sued, if they rule in favor of Kroger, then that says the FTC control of courts is unconstitutional, and I imagine the FTC would challenge that or appeal that. And if Kroger loses, I’d imagine they would appeal as well, because they want to be able to fight this in federal courts, which have largely been stocked with corporate-friendly judges over the past few decades.

    FAIR: WSJ Attacks Antitrust Champion Lina Khan Every 11 Days Since FTC Appointment

    FAIR.org (6/23/23)

    JJ: We try to always say, notice those down-ballot elections. Notice those electoral judge positions. All of this is so integral to the rules and policies that govern our lives, but we don’t always see it highlighted as those races or those positions as important as they absolutely are.

    Well, corporate America hate them some Lina Khan, don’t they? I mean, we have seen this, in terms of the FTC. It’s almost like there’s something wrong with a person in a government agency just straight up saying, “I’m looking to protect the public interest here.” It’s almost as though we’re being told to see regulatory agencies as just kind of refereeing the game between big corporations, and we, the public, are just not in it.

    FB: And a lot of these executives, they get brought onto CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and they praise Vice President Harris, and are happy she’s running, but they also pressure her to fire Lina Khan and other regulators. And the news anchors there failed to mention the cases that those business executives or those billionaires have in front of the FTC, or have in front of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Or some of the motivations on why they would want to get rid of regulators who have a strong anti-monopoly type of mindset, and a very pro-consumer mindset. That doesn’t really get mentioned too often on some of these corporate media outlets.

    JJ: What do you think happens now? You’ve indicated it a little bit, but we’re still very much in the midst of this case. What do you think is likely to happen, and what would you look for journalists to be keeping an eye on?

    FB: Yeah, so it’s hard to determine what’s going to happen. I think it’s really going to be interesting on the federal case out of Cincinnati, Ohio, where Kroger sued, challenging FTC’s internal court being constitutional. The current case that’s playing out right now, that’s a temporary halt to the merger. That’ll have some ramifications for sure, but the big one to pay attention to is the Kroger v. FTC federal case out of Cincinnati, and what the ramifications of that will be, because that could also have, if that rules in Kroger’s favor, then that case could be cited to challenge other regulators, their internal administrative courts as well.

    JJ: I won’t put words in your mouth, but I’m guessing that you think that independent journalism has a role to play here, in terms of informing the public about these sorts of things?

    FB: Absolutely, absolutely. Independent journalists have been ones that have been spearheading some of the pro–consumer protection type stuff. This stems back all the way from a consumer protection advocate, Ralph Nader, back in the ’70s, all the way to our current system now. Independent media is very important in our current age.

    And if you are interested about the corporate takeover of America and America’s courts, we have a really good podcast out right now called Master Plan that tracks the beginnings, the origins of how money in politics came to be. Like all good political conspiracies, it goes back to Watergate, in the Nixon administration, that involves the milk lobby, that involves Lewis Powell and the infamous Powell Memo, and then goes all the way to Citizens United and the billions of dollars that are being spent on our current election. So if listeners are interested in that, then they can check out Master Plan.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with writer and journalist Freddy Brewster. The piece we’re talking about, on the Kroger/Albertsons merger, can be found at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Freddy Brewster, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    FB: Thank you so much for having me on.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A Bookstore Brouhaha Confuses Whose Speech Is Being Curtailed

     

    NYT: A Bookshop Cancels an Event Over a Rabbi’s Zionism, Prompting Outrage

    The New York Times (8/21/24), knowing that “outrage” sells, saves for the last paragraph the information that a supposedly canceled author turned down an offer to reschedule his talk in the same bookstore.

    Author and journalist Joshua Leifer is the latest scribe to be—allegedly—canceled. A talk for his new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled when a member of the store’s staff objected to Leifer being joined by a liberal rabbi who was also a Zionist, although still critical of Israel’s right-wing government (New York Times, 8/21/24).

    Leifer’s book is doing well as a result of the saga (Forward, 8/27/24). Meanwhile, the bookstore worker wasn’t so lucky, when the venue’s owner said “he would try to reschedule the event” and said “that the employee” responsible for canceling the event “‘is going to be terminated today’” (New York Jewish Week, 8/21/24).

    It’s worth dissecting the affair and its impact to truly assess who can gain popular sympathy in the name of “free speech,” and who cannot, and how exactly Leifer has portrayed what happened.

    ‘One-state maximalism’

    Atlantic: My Demoralizing but Not Surprising Cancellation

    To Joshua Leifer (Atlantic, 8/27/24), opposition to platforming Zionists is “straightforwardly antisemitic.”

    Leifer is a journalist who has produced nuanced coverage of Israel and Jewish politics for Jewish Currents, the New York Review of Books and other outlets. Reflecting on the bookstore affair, Leifer said in the Atlantic (8/27/24) that Jewish writers like him are in a bind because of the intransigence of the left, saying “Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.”

    He added:

    My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on US military aid—as beyond the pale.

    The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing US policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.

    No ‘destruction’ required

    For me, personally, canceling Leifer’s talk was a bad move. No one would have been forced to listen or attend, and if someone wanted to challenge the inclusion of a moderate Zionist at the event, they could have done so in the question and answer session. Speech should usually be met with more speech.

    But Leifer is somewhat disingenuous about a “zero-sum” game that forces people into the “morally repulsive” concept that “requires Israel’s destruction.” Many anti-Zionists and non-Zionists believe that the concept of one state, “from the river to the sea,” means a democratic state that treats all its people—Arab, Jew and otherwise—equally. Leifer’s counterposing being “committed to Israel’s existence” with “one-state maximalism” suggests that the Israel whose “existence” he is committed to is one in which one ethnic group is guaranteed supremacy over others. People who are committed to the preservation of Israel as an ethnostate are probably going to have a hard time being in a “big tent” with those who “work to end its domination over Palestinians.”

    It is understandable, given the context, that some people might object to a Zionist speaker on a panel while a genocide is being carried out in Zionism’s name. Would the Atlantic have reserved editorial space if an avowed Ba’athist was booted from a panel on Syria?

    And Leifer is hardly being censored, and he has much more than a “little room to maneuver.” He has access to a major publisher and the pages of notable periodicals, and is pursuing a PhD at Yale University. His book sales are doing fine, and the event’s cancellation has, if anything, helped his reputation. (It got him a commission at the Atlantic, after all.)

    Free speech protects everyone

    New Republic: The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism

    Osita Nwanevu (New Republic, 7/6/20) writes in defense of “freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values.”

    Meanwhile, a bookstore worker who expressed a questionable opinion got fired. Free speech debates tend to value the importance and rights to a platform of the saintly media class—the working class, however, doesn’t get the same attention, despite the fact that “free speech” is meant to protect everyone, not just those who write and talk for a living.

    And expressing the opinion that a bookstore should not be promoting Zionism is just as much a matter of free speech as advocating Zionism itself. The First Amendment doesn’t stop publications, university lecture committees, cable television networks and, yes,  bookstores from curating the views and speech they want to platform. As FAIR has quoted Osita Nwanevu at the New Republic (7/6/20) before:

    Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

    Whose speech is punished?

    Science: Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict

    eLife‘s Michael Eisen’s approval of an Onion headline (“Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”) was deemed to be “detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build” (Science, 10/23/23).

    Worse is what Leifer leaves out. While his event should not have been canceled, he fails to put this in the context of many other writers who have suffered more egregious cancellation because they exercised free speech in defense of Palestinians. Those writers include Masha Gessen (FAIR.org, 12/15/23), Viet Thanh Nguyen (NPR, 10/24/23) and Jazmine Hughes (Vanity Fair, 11/15/23).

    New York University has “changed its guidelines around hate speech and harassment to include the criticism of Zionism as a discriminatory act” (Middle East Eye, 8/27/24). Artforum fired its top editor, David Velasco, for signing a letter in defense of Palestinian rights (New York Times, 10/26/23). Dozens of Google workers were “fired or placed on administrative leave…for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel’s government” (CNN, 5/1/24). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor of the science journal eLife (Science, 10/23/23) because he praised an Onion article (10/13/23).

    Leifer’s Atlantic piece erroneously gives the impression that since the assault on Gaza began last October, it has been the pro-Palestinian left that has enforced speech norms. A question for such an acclaimed journalist is: Why would he omit such crucial context?

    ‘Litmus test’

    Atlantic: The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending

    The lead example of “antisemitism on…the left” offered by the Atlantic (3/4/24) was a high school protest of the bombing of Gaza at which “from the river to the sea” was reportedly chanted.

    Leifer has allowed the Atlantic to spin the narrative that it is the left putting the squeeze on discourse, when around the country, at universities and major publications, it’s pro-Palestinian views that are being attacked by people in power. The magazine’s Michael Powell (4/22/24) referred to the fervor of anti-genocide activists as “oppressive.” Theo Baker, son of New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, claimed in the Atlantic (3/26/24) that his prestigious Stanford University was overrun with left-wing “unreason” when he came face to face with students who criticized Israel.

    Franklin Foer used the outlet (3/4/24) to assert that in the United States, both the left and right are squeezing Jews out of social life. Leifer is now the latest recruit in the Atlantic’s movement to frame all Jews as victims of the growing outcry against Israel’s genocide, even when that outcry includes a great many Jews.

    Leifer’s piece adds to the warped portrait painted by outlets like the New York Times, which published an  op-ed (5/27/24) by James Kirchick, of the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, that asserted that “a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” A great many canceled pro-Palestine voices would have something to add to that, but they know they can barely get a word in edgewise in most corporate media—unlike Kirchick, Foer or Leifer.

    Leifer’s event should not have been canceled, and I would have been annoyed if I were in his position, but he continues to have literary success and is smartly cashing in on his notoriety. He should not, however, have lent his voice to such a lopsided narrative about free speech.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • US Press Loses Interest as Winners of French Election Aren’t Allowed to Take Power

     

    One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.

    Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.

    NYT: French Far Right Wins Big in First Round of Voting

    When the far-right won the first round of French elections, that was front-page news in the New York Times (7/1/24). When the left won the second round, that was much less newsworthy to the Times.

    It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.

    Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.

    France is in an unprecedented political situation, in which there is no clear governing coalition in the National Assembly. After the snap elections concluded on July 7, the left coalition New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, beating out both Macron’s centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally (RN). (While the sitting president’s coalition won the second-most seats, it actually got fewer votes than either the left coalition or the far right.)

    These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party.

    Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.

    ‘Institutional stability’

    WaPo: France's leftist coalition fumes over Macron's rejection of its candidate to become prime minister

    When someone in a headline “fumes” (Washington Post, 7/27/24), that’s a signal that you’re not supposed to sympathize with them.

    Where US corporate media do comment on Macron’s denial of the election, their framing is neutral or even defensive of the president’s equivocations. Critiques are couched as attacks from the left; one AP piece published in the Washington Post (8/27/24) reports not that Macron is denying an election, but simply that France’s left is fuming:

    France’s main left-wing coalition on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of denying democracy…. Leftist leaders lashed out at Macron, accusing him of endangering French democracy and denying the election results.

    Left unchallenged are Macron’s claims that he is simply trying his best to preserve stability, election results be damned:

    On Monday, Macron rejected their nominee for prime minister—little-known civil servant Lucie Castets—saying that his decision to refuse a government led by the New Popular Front is aimed at ensuring “institutional stability.”

    AP left out of its story the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), the supposedly most objectionable member of the NFP coalition, even offered to accept an NFP government led by Castets, with no LFI members in ministerial roles, to assuage the fears of centrists. This olive branch did not impress AP, which instead relayed Macron’s call for “left-wing leaders to seek cooperation with parties outside their coalition.”

    Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.

    ‘Scorched-earth politics’

    NYT: France’s Political Truce for the Olympics Is Over. Now What?

    To the New York Times (8/23/24), the idea that a left coalition would try to implement the platform it successfully ran on is a “hard-core stance.”

    The New York Times’ reporting (8/23/24) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.”  Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”

    She went on to admit, however, that Castets, the NFP’s choice for prime minister, “has softened her position from its original hard-core stance”—that is, that the coalition would implement the program it ran on—and that “she says she would pursue something more reflective of minority government position.”

    However, the Times continued, “the biggest party in her coalition, France Unbowed, has a history of scorched-earth politics that makes the pledge for conciliation feel thin.” In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.

    The Times seemed to accept an equation between LFI and the RN, which was founded (as the National Front) as an explicitly neo-fascist movement. The paper reported that it was not only a departing minister from Macron’s party, but “many others,” who

    consider France Unbowed and its combative leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, to be as dangerous to France’s democracy as the extreme right.

    The anti-immigrant agenda of France’s extreme right, as represented by the RN, includes repealing birthright citizenship in favor of requiring a French parent and implementing strict tests of cultural and lingual assimilation. Mélenchon’s LFI, in contrast, favors medical aid for undocumented migrants and social support for asylum seekers.

    Despite the Times’ previous reporting (7/9/24) that LFI is a “hostile-to-capitalism” party, the party’s platform only calls for more state intervention in the market economy, with a critique that is more anti–free market dogma than anti-capitalist, per political scientist Rémi Lefebvre.

    Whether supporting intervention in the market is as extreme as supporting ethnic determination of “Frenchness” is left as an exercise for the reader. But according to the French government’s official categorization (Le Parisien, 3/11/24), LFI is categorized simply as “left,” while the RN is indeed categorized as “extreme right.”

    Despite the sparse and incomplete coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, they must be given credit for covering the story at all. A Nexis review of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS NewsHour reveals next to no reporting on Macron’s refusal to name a prime minister, with no critical reporting whatsoever.

    Since July 23, when Castets emerged as the left’s choice, there have been two brief mentions of Macron’s lack of a decision, on CNN Newsroom (7/24/24) and Fox Special Report (8/23/24). Neither program mentioned Castets, much less the exceptional circumstances faced by the French electorate.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Freddy Brewster on Supermarket Megamerger

     

     

    Lever: Kroger and Albertsons’ Dirty Tricks To Preserve Greedflation

    Lever (8/26/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it—a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And also: If you try to stop us, that’s illegal!

    It could hardly be clearer that the public—consumers and workers—needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com. We hear about that this week on CounterSpin.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ‘They’re Trying to Pass Laws to Make Dark Money Even Darker’CounterSpin interview with Steve Macek on dark money

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed North Central College‘s Steve Macek about “dark money” campaign contributions  for the August 23, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Election Focus 2024Janine Jackson: If you use the word “democracy” unsarcastically, you likely think it has something to do with, not only every person living in a society having some say in the laws and policies that govern them, but also the idea that everyone should be able to know what’s going on, besides voting, that influences that critical decision-making.

    “Dark money,” as it’s called, has become, in practical terms, business as usual, but it still represents the opposite of that transparency, that ability for even the unpowerful to know what’s happening, to know what’s affecting the rules that govern our lives. A press corps concerned with defending democracy, and not merely narrating the nightmare of crisis, would be talking about that every day, in every way.

    Our guest has written about the gap between what we need and what we get, in terms of media. Steve Macek is professor and chair of communication and media studies, at North Central College in Illinois, a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program, and co-editor and contributor to, most recently, Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, out this year from Peter Lang. He joins us now by phone from Naperville, Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, Steve Macek.

    Steve Macek: Thanks for having me, Janine. I’m a big fan of the show.

    Progressive: Dark Money Uncovered

    Progressive (6/24)

    JJ: Well, thank you. Let’s start with some definition. Dark money doesn’t mean funding for candidates or campaigns I don’t like, or from groups I don’t like. In your June piece for the Progressive, you spell out what it is, and where it can come from, and what we can know about it. Help us, if you would, understand just the rules around dark money.

    SM: Sure. So dark money, and Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets gave me, I think, a really nice, concise definition of dark money in the interview I did with her for this article. She called it “funding from undisclosed sources that goes to influence political outcomes, such as elections.” Now, thanks to the Supreme Court case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, and some other cases, it is now completely legal for corporations and very wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcomes of elections.

    Not all of that “independent expenditure” on elections is dark money. Dark money is spending that comes from organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. One sort of organization, I’m sure your listeners are really familiar with, are Super PACs, or, what they’re more technically known as, IRS Code 527 organizations. It can take unlimited contributions, and spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections, but they have to disclose the names of their donors.

    There’s this other sort of organization, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which is sometimes known as a “social welfare nonprofit,” who can raise huge amounts of money, but they do not have to disclose the names of their donors, but they are prevented from spending the majority of their budget on political activity, which means that a lot of these 501(c)(4) organizations spend 49.999% of their budget attempting to influence the outcomes of elections, and the rest of it is spent on things like general political education, or research that might, in turn, guide the creation of political ads and so on.

    JJ: When we talk about influencing the outcome of elections, it’s not that they are taking out an ad for or against a particular candidate. That doesn’t have to be involved at all.

    Guardian: Trump-linked dark-money group spent $90m on racist and transphobic ads in 2022, records show

    Guardian (5/17/24)

    SM: Right. So they can sometimes run issue ads. Sometimes these dark money groups, as long as they’re working within the parameters of the law, will run ads for or against a particular candidate.

    But take, for example, Citizens for Sanity, the group that I talked about at the beginning of my Progressive article: This is a group that nobody knows very much about. It showed up back in 2022, and ran $40 million worth of ads in four battleground states. Many of the ads were general ads attacking the Democrats for wanting to erase the border, or over woke culture-war themes, but they’re spending $40+ million on ads, according to one estimate.

    What we do know is the officials of the group are almost identical to America First Legal, which was made up by former Trump administration officials. America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, that xenophobic former advisor and sometimes speechwriter to Donald Trump. No one really knows exactly who is funding this organization, because it is a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, and so is not required by the IRS to disclose its donors.

    It has been running this year, in Ohio and elsewhere, a whole bunch of digital ads, and putting up billboards, for example, attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown for his stance on immigration policies, basically saying he wants to protect criminal illegals, and also running these general, very snarky anti-“woke” ads saying, basically, Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they only care about race and gender and DEI.

    JJ: Right. Well, I think “rich people influence policy,” it’s almost like “dog bites man” at this point, right? Yeah, it’s bad, but that’s how the system works, and I think it’s important to lift up: If it didn’t matter for donors to obscure their support for this or that, well then they wouldn’t be trying to obscure it.

    And the thing you’re writing about, these are down-ballot issues, where you might believe that Citizens for Sanity, in this case, or any other organization, you might think of this as like a grassroots group that’s scrambled together some money to take out ads. And so it is meaningful to know to connect these financial dots.

    SM: Absolutely. It is meaningful. And since you made reference to down-ballot races, one of the things that I think is so nefarious about dark money, and these dark money organizations, is that they are spending a lot on races for things like school boards or, as I discussed in the article, state attorney generals races.

    There is this organization, it was founded in 2014, called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which is a beautiful acronym, and they have been trying to elect extremely reactionary Republicans to the top law enforcement position in state after state. And in 2022, they spent something like $8.9 million trying to defeat Democratic state attorney generals candidates in the 2022 elections.

    ProPublica: We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority

    ProPublica (10/11/23)

    Now, they are a PAC of a kind, they’re a 527, so they have the same legal status as a Super PAC, so they have to disclose their donors. But the fact is, one of the major donors is a group called the Concord Fund, which has given them $17 million.

    Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) that was founded by Leonard Leo, the judicial activist affiliated with the Federalist Society, who is basically Donald Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, who is largely responsible for the conservative takeover of the federal courts. His organization, this fund that he controls, gave $17 million to RAGA.

    And we have no idea who contributed that money to the fund. We can make some educated guesses, but nobody really knows who’s funneling that money into trying to influence the election of the top law enforcement official in state after state around this country.

    That’s alarming because, of course, some of these right-wing billionaires and corporations have a vested interest in who is sitting in that position. Because if it comes to enforcement of antitrust laws, or corruption laws, if they have a more friendly state attorney general in that position, it could mean millions of dollars for their bottom line.

    JJ: And I think, from the point of view of the public, filtered through the point of view of the press, if you heard there’s this one macher, or this one rich person, and they’re pulling the strings and they’ve bought this judge, and they’ve paid for this policy and these ads, that would be one thing. But to have it filtered through a number of groups that are kind of opaque and you don’t really know, a minority point of view can be presented as a sort of groundswell of grassroots support.

    SM: Exactly. It can create this sort of astroturfing effect where, “Oh, there are all these ads being run. It must be that there are lots of people who are really concerned or really opposed to this particular candidate,” when, in fact, it could be a single billionaire who is routing money for a number of different shells and front groups in an effort to influence the outcome of an election.

    Colorado Newsline: Billionaire ‘dark money’ is behind the Denver school board endorsements

    Colorado Newsline (10/21/23)

    So I think attorney generals races are one kind of down-ballot race where we’ve seen a lot of dark money spent. School board elections are another, and this is something that has been really evident in the past couple of years, where various different Super PACs and other dark money groups have spent millions of dollars, that are affiliated with advocates for charter schools, and advocates for school vouchers have been spending money trying to elect school board members that are pro-voucher and pro–charter school.

    In 2023, City Fund, which is a national pro–charter school group, bankrolled in part by billionaire Reed Hastings, donated $1.75 million from its affiliated PAC to a 501(c)(4), Denver Families for Public Schools, to try to elect three “friendly” pro–charter school candidates for the city school board, and all three of the candidates won.

    And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have children who went through the public system here in Naperville, I didn’t pay very close attention to who was running in those races, or who was backing those people. I just would read about it a couple days before the election. Most people don’t pay very close attention, unless they’re employees of the school district, or have children currently in school. They’re not paying that close attention to the school board elections. And so this influx of dark money could very well have tipped those races in the favor of the pro–charter school.

    JJ: And name that group again, because it didn’t say “charter schools.”

    SM: So the charter school group was City Fund, and it donated money to Denver Families for Public Schools….

    JJ: : For “public schools….”

    SM: Right, which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Yes, and it’s got this Orwellian name, because it’s Denver Families for Public Schools. But what they wanted to do was, of course, create more charter schools.

    JJ: It’s deep, and it’s confusing because it’s designed to be confusing, and it’s opaque because, you know….

    And then, OK, so here come media. And we know that lots of people, including reporters, still imagine the US press corps as kind of like an old movie, with press cards in their hat band, or Woodward and Bernstein connecting dots, holding the powerful to account, and the chips are just falling where they may.

    And you make the point in the Progressive piece that there have been excellent corporate news media exposés of the influence of dark money, connecting those dots. But you write that news media have “missed or minimized as many stories about dark money as they have covered.” What are you getting at there?

    ProPublica: Conservative Activist Poured Millions Into Groups Seeking to Influence Supreme Court on Elections and Discrimination

    ProPublica (12/14/22)

    SM: I absolutely believe that. So it is true, as I say, that there have been some excellent reports about dark money. Here in Chicago, we had this reclusive billionaire industrialist, Barre Seide, who made what most people say is the largest political contribution in American history. He donated his company to a fund, Marble Freedom Fund, run by Leonard Leo, again, a conservative judicial activist.

    The Marble Freedom Fund sold the company for $1.6 billion. It’s hard for the corporate media to ignore a political contribution of $1.6 billion. That’s a $1.6 billion trust fund that Leonard Leo, who engineered the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court, is going to be able to use—he’s a very right-wing, conservative Catholic—to put his particular ideological stamp on American elections and on American culture. And so that got reported.

    And, in fact, there have been some really excellent follow-up reports by ProPublica, among others, about how various Leonard Leo–affiliated organizations have influenced judicial appointments and have influenced judicial elections. So you have to give credit where credit’s due.

    But the problem is that there are so many other cases where dark money is in play. Whether or not you can say it’s determining the outcome of elections or not is another story. But where dark money is playing a role, and it is simply not being talked about.

    Steve Macek

    Steve Macek: “Outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.”

    Think about the last month of this current presidential election. There hasn’t been much discussion about the influence of dark money. And yet OpenSecrets just came out with an analysis where they say that contributions from dark money groups and shell organizations are outpacing all prior elections in this year, and might surpass the $660 million in contributions from dark money sources that flooded the 2020 elections. So they’re projecting that could be as much as a billion dollars. We haven’t heard very much about this.

    I don’t think necessarily dark money is going to make a huge difference one way or the other in the presidential race, but it certainly can make a difference in congressional races and attorney generals races, school board races, city council races, that’s where it can make a huge difference.

    And I do know that OpenSecrets, among others, have done research, and they found that there were cases where, over a hundred different congressional races, there was more outside spending on those races than were spent by either of the candidates. Which is a scandal, that outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.

    JJ: And it’s disheartening, the idea that, while you’re swimming in it, it’s too big of an issue to even lift out.

    SM: And I think that’s also part of the reason why it’s accepted, sort of like the weather. And I think that’s part of the reason why there isn’t as much reporting in the corporate media as there ought to be about legal struggles over the regulation of dark money.

    JJ: That’s exactly where I was going to lead you, for a final question, just because we know that reporters will say, well, they can’t cover what isn’t happening. But it is happening, that legal and community and policy pushback on this influence is happening. And so, finally, what should we know about that?

    Roll Call: Senate GOP bill seeks to protect anonymous nonprofit donors

    Roll Call (5/14/24)

    SM: State-level Republican lawmakers, and state legislatures across the country, are pushing legislation that would prohibit state officials and agencies from collecting or disclosing information about donors to nonprofits, including donors to those 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that I spoke about, that spend money on politics. So they’re trying to pass laws to make dark money even darker, to make this obscure money influencing our elections even harder to track. And I will say there are Republicans in Congress who have introduced federal legislation that would do the same thing.

    Now, the bills that are being pushed through state legislatures, not probably going to be a surprise to anybody who follows this, are based on a model bill that was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which is a policy development organization that is funded by the Koch network of right-wing foundations, millionaires and billionaires. And they meet every year to develop model right-wing, libertarian legislation, that then is dutifully introduced into state legislatures around the country.

    And since 2018, a number of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia, have all adopted some version of this ALEC legislation that criminalizes disclosing donors to nonprofits that engage in political activity.

    And in Arizona, where this conservative legislation was made into law, in 2022, there was a ballot referendum by the voters on the Voter’s Right to Know Act, Proposition 211, that would basically reverse the ALEC attempt to criminalize the disclosure of the names of donors. It would require PACs spending at least $50,000 on statewide campaigns to disclose all donors who have given more than $5,000—a direct reversal of the ALEC-inspired law.

    New Yorker: A Rare Win in the Fight Against Dark Money

    New Yorker (11/16/22)

    Conservative dark money group spent a lot of money trying to defeat this, and yet they lost. And then they spent a lot of money challenging the new law, Proposition 211, in court. And it has gone to trial, I think, three times, and been defeated each time.

    Now, the initial battle over Proposition 211 was covered to some degree in the corporate media, the New York Times, Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who does excellent reporting on dark money issues, discussed it. But since then, we have gotten very little coverage of the court battles that continue to this day over this attempt to bring more transparency to campaign spending in the state of Arizona.

    JJ: So, not to hammer it too hard home, but there are legal efforts, policy efforts around the country, to bring more transparency, to explode this idea of dark money, to connect the dots, and more media coverage of them would actually have an amplifying effect on that very transparency.

    SM: Absolutely right. You would think that media organizations, whether they’re corporate or independent media, would have a vested interest in seeing more transparency in election spending. That would benefit their own reporting, and the reporters. And yet they really haven’t done a great job of covering it.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois, and a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program. The piece we’re talking about, “Dark Money Uncovered,” can be found at TheProgressive.org. Steve Macek, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SM: Oh, it was great. Thank you for having me.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.