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.
A 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 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.
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.”
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.
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’
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‘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 senthere. 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.
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 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 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.
Janine Jackson interviewed theUniversity 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.
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-mouthedrefusal 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 politicaltheater 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: “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, savagebarbarian 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.
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-curdlingracism 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.
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.
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?
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: “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?
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 stricterlaws 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.
A 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’
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’
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.
Following 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.
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.
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.
“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!
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.”
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
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
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.
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.
The 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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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: “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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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: “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.
New 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’
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 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 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.
Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Freddy Brewster about the supermarket megamerger for the August 30, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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: “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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’
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
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?
eLife‘s Michael Eisen’s approval of an Onionheadline (“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’
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.
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.
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’
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’
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 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.
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.
Janine 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.
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.
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 Progressivearticle: 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.
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.
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?
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: “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?
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.
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.
Much like the front page, breaking-news newsletters demonstrate which stories news outlets think deserve the most attention. It’s important real estate: By pushing these stories to readers, they influence the way we think about the world, even what in the world we should be thinking about. Even if readers don’t click through, just seeing the headlines can shape our perceptions. And, as a new FAIR study has found, those headlines often feed into predictable patterns that parrot official narratives, and prioritize clicks over well-informed citizens.
Outlets like the New York Times promise to send readers alerts about “important news.”
Most major outlets produce a variety of email newsletters for readers, which have increasingly broad reach. Subscription numbers are generally not made public, but the New York Times‘ top newsletter, the Morning, reportedly has over 5 million readers daily, and CNNadvertises over 1 million total newsletter subscribers.
To see what kinds of stories outlets present to readers as urgently important, FAIR studied four national outlets that offer unpaywalled breaking news email alerts over the course of two months. We subscribed to alerts from the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and Fox News from April 1 to May 31, 2024, and recorded each alert sent. These outlets advertised that subscribers would receive “24/7 alerts” as the “biggest” and most “important” stories to “stay on top of the news.”
We excluded the occasional roundups of top stories, as these were outside the “breaking news” format. The Times and USA Today periodically offered op-eds as breaking news alerts, and we did include these. FAIR recorded 630 alerts during the study period.
We coded each alert by topic (National Politics, International Politics, Business/Economy, Crime, Entertainment, Sports, Health, Science, Disaster, Personal Advice, Miscellaneous) and subtopic (e.g., Gaza Protests, Abortion Rights, Foreign Aid Bill). Seventy-five alerts were assigned to more than one topic; for instance, a story about the trial of a celebrity might be coded as both Crime and Entertainment.
National politics dominates
Trump’s hush money trial, with its titillating details, was the subject of numerous breaking news alerts (New York Times, 5/7/24).
The outlets put out alerts with varying frequency—USA Today put out the most (224, or almost four per day) and CNN the fewest (83)—but National Politics stories dominated across all outlets, making up 274 (43%) of 630 total alerts. Within these stories, Donald Trump figured prominently, referenced in 121 alerts (44% of all National Politics stories). Eighty-eight of these, or 73% of the total stories about Trump, were about his trials—predominately his criminal trial in Manhattan, which ran through all but the first two weeks of the study period.
The Times, with 207 alerts sent out overall, devoted the highest percentage of its National Politics alerts (79) to Trump’s legal woes (39%), while Fox, with 116 alerts sent out, afforded them 17 articles of 63 National Politics stories—the smallest percentage of the four outlets (27%). Twice—the day Stormy Daniels testified (5/7/24) and the day the jury announced its guilty verdict (5/30/24)—the Times sent three trial-related alerts to its subscribers over the course of the day.
President Joe Biden received far less attention in National Politics stories; he was referenced in 35, or 13% of them. Fifteen of these stories were about the election, of which only two (USA Today, 5/28/24; Fox News, 5/1/24) did not also mention Trump.
Gaza, at home and abroad
After the Trump trials, the top National Politics topics included the university campus protests for Gaza (41), abortion rights (16) and the foreign aid bill (6). (We coded stories about abortion into the Health category as well.)
Twenty-six (61%) of the 41 alerts about campus Gaza protests came from Fox News, accounting for 22% of all Fox alerts across categories, making it the outlet’s single most frequent alert topic. On seven days between April 17 and May 3, Fox sent multiple alerts about the protests; its fixation peaked on April 30, when the network sent five such alerts in a single day.
Fox’s encampment alert subject lines consistently referred to protesters as “agitators,” calling them “anti-Israel” and even “antisemitic” (4/30/24). (The New York Times called them “pro-Palestinian protests,” and USA Today simply referred to them as “protests.”) “Columbia University, Anti-Israel Agitators Fail to Reach Agreement as Unrest Continues” read a typical Fox subject line (4/29/24). “Facilities Worker Says Anti-Israel Columbia University Agitators ‘Held Me Hostage’” read another the next day (4/30/24).
The only Fox News alert (4/26/24) for an international issue other than Gaza was about King Charles’ health.
There were many other Gaza protests occurring around the country during the study period (Democracy Now!, 4/18/24, 4/24/24, 5/22/24, 5/30/24, 5/31/24), yet only one alert (Fox News, 4/9/24) mentioned any besides those on college campuses.
The second-most prevalent news category was International Politics, which had 97 alerts (15% of all). Sixty-three of these (65%) pertained to the ongoing Gaza crisis (not including the campus Gaza protests, which were coded as National Politics). Iran was sometimes mentioned in Gaza-related alerts, but it was also featured in eight unrelated alerts (8%) concerning the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Other recurring topics included Ukraine and the Ukraine War (6%), the shooting of the Slovakian president (5%), British elections (3%), China (3%) and Julian Assange (2%).
Curiously, while Foxadvertises its breaking news alerts as keeping subscribers “in the know on the most important moments around the world,” it only produced seven alerts on international issues—six of them on the Gaza crisis. (The other article discussed King Charles’ return to royal duties after his cancer diagnosis.) That’s just one more alert on Gaza during the entire study period than Fox put out on its peak day of breaking news coverage of the encampments. At the other three outlets, International Politics stories were the second most frequent alerts.
Climate crisis not breaking news
This CNN story (5/7/24) about climate change breaking heat records was not deemed urgent enough to qualify as breaking news.
It’s impossible to argue that the climate crisis isn’t an ongoing urgent news story. Yet the Science/Environment category had the fewest number of alerts, at 24, making up just 4% of alerts tracked. And only seven (1%) of the subject lines that appeared in our inbox referred or even alluded to climate-related topics.
During the study period, there were multiple major climate crisis stories that CNN, USA Today and the Times (but not Fox) reporters covered—but, for the most part, the outlets chose not to include these stories in their breaking news alerts.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that a right-wing outlet like Fox put out no alerts about climate change; its lone science story (4/8/24) was about the April solar eclipse. But CNN and the New York Times did only marginally better. CNN sent alerts for two Science stories, only one of which (4/15/24) was about the climate crisis: “Ocean Heat Is Driving a Global Coral Bleaching Event, and It Could Be the Worst on Record.”
At the same time, CNN‘s website reported on extreme ocean temperatures causing mass marine mortalities (CNN, 4/21/24), extreme heat causing health emergencies (CNN, 4/18/24) and April’s record-breaking heat (CNN, 5/7/24), among other climate change–related topics. On the days that these stories were published, however, CNN only sent out National Politics alerts, or simply no alerts at all.
One of the eight Science stories that the Times pushed was directly about the climate crisis, a story (5/13/24) about federal regulations impacting renewable energy (which we also coded as National Politics). Another Science article (7/3/24) that was not primarily about the climate crisis did mention its role in increasing turbulence experienced on airplane flights.
The Times does offer a paywalled newsletter for stories about climate, called Climate Forward. But they also have a free newsletter called On Politics, offering election-related news alerts—and that didn’t stop them from promoting eight articles directly related to the 2024 presidential election as breaking news.
In its online and print editions, the Times reported plenty of stories related to the climate crisis—but, as at CNN, they simply didn’t deem them important enough to send as breaking news alerts. On April 10, the Times published a story about ocean heat shattering records, and on April 15 it covered the coral bleaching event. Neither were sent as alerts.
The New York Times found mattress reviews more urgent than climate change.
On May 28, the Times published a piece headlined “Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year”; that story wasn’t deemed “important news” that day by the Times’ breaking news alert team, but the “Best Mattresses of 2024” was.
All the outlets studied also failed to send out stories about major flooding disasters in Brazil, Afghanistan and Indonesia (Democracy Now!, 5/13/24, 5/14/24), or about the major heat waves in South Asia that killed hundreds of people (Democracy Now!, 5/28/24; CBS News, 5/15/24). All of these crises are major examples of how climate change is affecting people around the world in drastic ways.
USA Today did best on climate, sending out 13 alerts under the Science/Environment category; four of them discussed climate change, including topics such as carbon emissions and pollution. That’s still less than 2% of the paper’s alerts during the two-month period.
Corporate outlets have long been more than willing to leave climate change out of their stories about weather phenomenons and natural disasters around the world (FAIR.org, 9/20/18, 7/18/23, 6/28/24).
According to data published by the Pew Research Center in August 2023, 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat. According to data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication up until the fall of 2023, 64% of the nation is worried about global warming, 58% believe global warming is already harming people in the US, and 70% think that global warming will harm future generations.
If more than half of the public views global warming and climate change as an urgent issue, why do these major publications not treat it as one?
Crime, entertainment over economy
Many Crime alerts involved celebrities, like one for this Fox News story (4/15/24) about Alec Baldwin.
Although news media frequently report that the economy is “voters’ top concern,” leading into the 2024 election FAIR identified only 40 news alerts as belonging to the Business/Economy beat—6% of all.
Fox and CNN suggested to alert subscribers that Crime stories were more than twice as important, making up 21% of Fox‘s alerts and 19% of CNN‘s. (USA Today and the Times only devoted 7% and 4% of their alerts to crime, respectively.) The violent crime rate has actually gone down 26% (and the property crime rate 19%) since President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, according to the New York Times (7/24/24), but media (including the Times) still focus heavily on the topic (FAIR.org, 7/25/24).
Mass shootings made up 21% of Crime alerts (13) across all outlets, which is not surprising, considering there have already been 348 mass shootings in 2024.
Celebrity crimes made up a large portion of Crime alerts across all outlets, at 25 (40%) out of 62. Many of these stories were about Alec Baldwin (5), OJ Simpson (5) and Scottie Scheffler (5).
Fox’s Crime alerts featured headlines meant to catch a reader’s attention—but not provide a lot of information. Take the May 17 news alert from Fox, “Pelosi Hammer Attacker Learns Fate During Sentencing,” for example. Why not include what the sentence was—30 years in prison—in the alert itself?
On April 15, when three out of four alerts sent out by Fox were about Crime (the fourth was a story about Trump’s hush money trial, coded as National Politics), one was headlined “Search for Kansas Women Takes a Turn as Spokeswoman for Investigators Gives Update.” The “turn” was an announcement that officials had given up hope of finding the missing women alive.
For its part, the New YorkTimes gave its readers more Entertainment alerts (18) than Economy alerts (14), pushing out 46% of all Entertainment stories tracked in the study. The paper also put out the highest number of Personal Advice (81% of all) and Miscellaneous stories (72%). The Times and USA Today were the only outlets to send out Personal Advice stories as breaking news alerts, such as “The Six Best White Sneakers” (New York Times, 5/15/24) and “Being a Bridesmaid Can Be Expensive. Should You Say Yes or No?” (USA Today, 5/5/24).
A few New York Times Personal Advice stories (5/15/24, 5/28/24, 5/30/24) were from Wirecutter, the product-review website the Times bought in 2016. The website states at the top of each article that “when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” (This process is explained in a bit more depth here.) In the Times’ annual report, revenue made from Wirecutter commissions is listed as part of “Other Businesses,” a category that made the Times$265 million in 2023. These Wirecutter stories are not urgent news stories—but they do help the Times make a profit off its readers (FAIR.org, 6/17/21).
Questionable urgency
Stop the presses! The New York Times (4/22/24) reports that some songs on Taylor Swift’s latest album “sounded a whole lot like others she has already put out.”
The New York Times and USA Today sometimes considered op-eds newsy enough to dedicate an entire alert to, in addition to their regular “breaking news.” An op-ed about Gmail’s 20th anniversary warranted an alert, just like the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did. An op-ed on the dangers of sexual choking got the same weight as the news of the ICC preparing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. And in both instances, alerts were pushed on the same day within hours of each other.
The Times also published the most Health stories (21) about seemingly random (rather than breaking news) topics, such as whether oats and apple cider vinegar can really help you lose weight, why we age and tips for a better sex life. (Many of these Health stories were dually coded into Personal Advice.) These types of stories may have surprised readers who subscribed in order to, as the Timesadvertises, “get informed as important news breaks around the world.”
Times alerts of questionable urgency were often sent out with no apparent rhyme or reason, in the midst of other, more obviously newsworthy alerts. For example, on April 24, the Times sent out alerts about abortion laws in Arizona and Idaho, and the US secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine—along with a story headlined “Has Taylor Swift Fatigue Finally Set In?”
Many of the Times’ stories we coded as “Miscellaneous” had obvious clickbait headlines, like “A Hiker Was Lost in the Woods. Snow Was Falling. Time Was Running Out” (4/30/24) and “These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement” (5/8/24). The latter was linked to the New York Times Magazine, the Times‘ weekly Sunday magazine that highlights interviews, commentaries, features and longer-length articles—again, not urgent news.
On May 27, when over 2,000 people died in Papua New Guinea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the tent massacre in Rafah, the Times thought it reasonable to also send alerts about Manhattanhenge, nude modeling and a celebrity obituary that linked to its recently-acquired sports news site, the Athletic. As we’ve seen before (FAIR.org, 6/7/24), the Times enjoys focusing on trending and glamorous topics.
These media outlets offer newsletters that promise comprehensive news alerts about important breaking stories occurring everywhere. After tallying the topics covered, we can confidently state that that’s not what subscribers are getting.
As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel and the US immediatelyblamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC, 7/28/24).
But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.
The New York Times (7/28/24) matter-of-factly described an explosion of disputed origin as a “rocket from Lebanon.”
Despite multiple eyewitnesses describing an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor missile falling on the field during the time of the Majdal Shams strike (Cradle, 7/28/24), the New York Times insisted on spotlighting Israeli and US claims in its headlines, rather than genuinely assessing the facts on the ground.
On July 28, the Times published “Fears of Escalation After Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field,” pinning the blame squarely on Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The next day, reporting on the potential escalations, the Times headline (7/29/24) described the strike as a “Deadly Rocket Attack Tied to Hezbollah.”
While the July 29 subhead acknowledged that Hezbollah denied responsibility, the assertion in the headline undermined any reference to alternative explanations. Attribution to Hezbollah was then repeated without qualification in the first paragraph of the story.
Rebroadcasting government talking points not only does a disservice to newsreaders as Israel has a long history of misleading the public, but it also serves Netanyahu’s goals of justifying an escalation against Hezbollah. Predictably, the New York Times did not contextualize accusations of Hezbollah responsibility with information about Israel’s current objectives for wider war. This continues a long trend of US media outlets obscuring and distorting reality in order to downplay Israel’s aggressive regional ambitions (FAIR.org, 8/22/23).
Israel an unreliable source
Even lying about the murder of a journalist doesn’t make Western journalists skeptical of official Israeli claims (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22).
The first problem is that the New York Times accepts narratives from Israeli military and government officials at face value. From peddling evidence-free claims about Palestinian use of human shields during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 (Amnesty International, 2009; Human Rights Watch, 8/13/09), to dodging responsibility for its assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22), to consistently attempting to conceal its use of illegal white phosphorus munitions across the Middle East (Haaretz, 10/22/06; Human Rights Watch, 3/25/09; Guardian, 10/13/23), the Israeli military has been known to circulate disinformation to the international public for decades. Neither in headlines nor in the text of its pieces does the Times acknowledge this well-established history.
The current assault on Gaza has made the central role of lies in Israel’s public relations arsenal clearer than ever. As early as October 17, there was controversy over the origin of a rocket strike on the Al-Ahli Arab hospital that killed hundreds of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 11/3/23). In the media confusion, Israel released audio it said captured two Hamas militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by Britain’s Channel 4 news (10/19/23) found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together. In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip to substantiate the notion that it had not committed a war crime.
In November, Israel laid siege to Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital facility, leaving behind mass graves. In another dubious public relations campaign, Israel justified its assault on Al Shifa hospital by alleging that there was a Hamas command center underneath the facility, and that no civilians were killed in the operation (FAIR.org, 12/3/23).
What might be labeled “disinformation” when it comes from an official enemy is called “information missteps” from Israel (NBC, 11/18/23).
During and after the assault, Israel pumped out high volumes of low-effort lies (NBC, 11/18/23; New Arab, 11/14/23) to convince the public that there had indeed been a Hamas operations base in the basement, going so far as planting weapons in hospital rooms to insinuate Hamas activity in the area (CNN, 11/19/23). In the face of mounting public ridicule, Israel’s official Arabic Twitter account was compelled to delete a staged video of an Israeli actress boosting the Hamas-hospital-occupation theory while pretending to be a Palestinian Al Shifa nurse (France 24, 11/15/23).
However, after the mainstream outlets expressed skepticism at the claims and acknowledged that Israel had not provided sufficient evidence to back them up (New York Times, 11/17/23; Guardian, 11/17/23), Israel announced that the supposed Hamas base was actually in southern Gaza.
At the same time as the Al Shifa raid, Israel stormed Rantisi Children’s Hospital, and engaged in similarly preposterous propaganda efforts to justify its attack. Noting the presence of hospital gowns, baby bottles and toilets in the children’s hospital, Israeli spokesperson Daniel Hagari declared that this was proof of hostages in the facility (Jerusalem Post, 11/13/23). Hagari (Al Jazeera, 11/17/23) later pointed to what he said was a handwritten list of Hamas fighters hanging from one of the hospital’s walls, holding that “every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift, guarding the people that were here.”
But, this was not, in fact, a damning roll call of Hamas fighters, but instead an Arabic calendar. All that appeared on the calendar were the days of the week, though this was unknown to most of Hagari’s largely non-Arabic-speaking audience (Electronic Intifada, 11/14/23).
Even recently, when Netanyahu visited Washington, DC, the Israeli prime minister gave a speech to lawmakers that was filled with obvious lies, including the contention that during attacks on Rafah, no civilians were killed, save for the two dozen who were murdered in a Hamas weapons depot explosion (New Arab, 7/25/24). This flies in the face of numerousreports detailing fatal bombings and rocket attacks in Gaza’s southernmost city, including a single Israeli missile that killed at least 45 people (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).
It is not possible that the writers and the editors at the Times—the supposed newspaper of record—are ignorant of this seemingly unending series of deceptions. The decision to uncritically accept the word of the IDF regarding the Golan Heights strike demonstrates a deliberate editorial decision to knowingly advance the deceitful public relations goals of a genocidal state.
Justifying a wider war
Two days before the Majdal Sham massacre, Israel was reportedly told that “now is the right time” to escalate its war against Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24).
In light of Israel’s past lies, serious journalism ought to refrain from regurgitating Israeli claims without significant context or qualification. This is especially true when doing so would advance goals as disastrous as Netanyahu’s current aims. In the case of the Majdal Shams strike, media proliferation of Israeli propaganda manufactures consent for escalating the war on the northern border—something Israel has longstated as its goal, and something American officials have long been concerned about.
Multiple generals have bragged about Israel’s combat readiness in the north. In February, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that if a ceasefire was reached in Gaza, Israel would increase its fire against Hezbollah, and later said his government is preparing to send Lebanon into the “stone age.”
Although some in the Israeli press believe that Israel is incapable of handling a front against both Hamas and Hezbollah (Cradle, 6/28/24), statements of readiness have intensified in summer months. The IDF announced on June 18 that it had approved operational plans for a war in Lebanon. Later, Axios (6/24/24) reported that the US envoy to Lebanon warned Hezbollah, “The US won’t be able to hold Israel back if the situation on the border continues to escalate.” Just two days before the Majdal Shams strike, Israeli media reported that Washington had given “full legitimacy” to an IDF campaign in Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24), contrary to apparent earlier efforts to avert a wider war in the Middle East.
On top of neglecting to acknowledge Israel’s flimsy credibility in their Majdal Shams analysis, Times reporters failed to address this readily available information about Israeli military objectives. By ignoring Israel’s strategic aims, they are ensuring the reader doesn’t encounter further reasons to question Israel’s account about the strike.
Who fired the rocket?
Though it included a pro forma denial from Hezbollah, the New York Times (7/30/24) referred throughout this article to a “rocket attack” rather than an air-defense misfire.
When reporting on Israel’s “reprisal” assaults on Lebanon following the strike on the soccer field, the New YorkTimes (7/28/24) again asserted Israeli claims as fact, saying in the first paragraph that “a rocket from Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town,” which “prompted Israel to retaliate early Sunday with strikes across Lebanon.”
Was Lebanon—and implicitly Hezbollah—the source of the explosion that killed the 12 children? The Times does not care to examine this question, which warrants exploration. Israel’s military chief of staff declared that the damage was done with an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket fired by Hezbollah, a claim that was uncritically repeated as fact by the New York Times (7/30/24), despite the lack of independent corroboration. While there has been fighting in the area, and Hezbollah acknowledged that they fired Falaq-1 rockets at the nearby IDF barracks, there is significant reason to doubt that one of these rockets struck the soccer field.
The Falaq-1 was described by Haaretz (7/28/24) as a munition that targets bunkers. But, images from the aftermath of the attack show that the damage to physical structures was far from bunker-busting. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the Hezbollah expert Saad cited military specialists who told her that “if [Hezbollah] had used the Falaq-1, we would have seen a much larger crater…. It would be much, much bigger and there would be much more destruction.”
As discussed above, Israel, well-known for planting or fabricating evidence for propagandistic ends, released images of rocket fragments that it alleged were found at the impact site, though the Associated Press (7/30/24) was unable to verify their authenticity.
A substantial case can be made that the projectile came from the IDF. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, multiple eyewitnesses told Arab news outlets the projectile was a misfired Iron Dome missile (Cradle, 7/28/24; Drop Site, 7/30/24). The New York Times omitted this from its coverage of this event.
Contrary to the mythos behind the high-tech defense system, there have already been several cases of Iron Dome missiles falling on populated areas within Israel since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/11/23; Jerusalem Post, 12/2/23, 7/25/24; Times of Israel, 5/4/23, 8/9/24) with many such instances resulting in civilian injuries and deaths. There was even a report of an Iron Dome malfunction near Majdal Shams, months before the recent July strike.
Bolstering the case for an Iron Dome malfunction, OSINT researcher Michale Kobs noted that the sound profile of the projectile suggested that its speed was constant until it hit the ground. Hezbollah’s projectiles constantly accelerate as they fall on their targets, since they are driven by gravity, whereas Iron Dome missiles are propelled throughout their entire flight.
For their part, the Druze people in the Golan Heights—an Arabic-speaking religious community which has largely declined offers of Israeli citizenship—repudiated Israel’s displays of sympathy for their slain children, rejecting the use of their suffering to advance Israel’s plans for a broader war (Democracy Now!, 7/30/24). Locals even protested a visit from Netanyahu, chanting “Killer! Killer!” and demanding he leave the area (New Arab, 7/29/24).
In the Times reporting on the strike, Lebanese and Syrian denials of Hezbollah’s responsibility for the strikes were acknowledged and reported, but portrayed as predictable denials that did nothing to alter the narrative. By omitting the evidence pointing to Israeli responsibility for the strikes, the New York Times assists Israel in yet another propaganda campaign to mislead the public in order to justify further regional strife and bloodshed.
Featured image: Screenshot from a New York Times video (7/28/24) that claimed to know that the explosion in the Golan Heights was caused by a “rocket from Lebanon.”
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.
Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.
So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.
Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.
Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.
JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?
VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116° Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.
Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.
And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.
JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.
VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”
JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?
VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.
JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.
VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.
JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.
And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?
Victoria St. Martin: “To connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more.”
VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.
But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.
And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that. I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.
I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.
While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.
JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.
VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.
I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest…. I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…
JJ: Opaque.
VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.
JJ: Absolutely.
Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?
VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.
Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.
So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before. There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.
I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.
Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings.
If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:
In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.
Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.
1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.
MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.
2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New YorkTimes (2/26/03).
This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you? We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece, “Dark Money Uncovered,” appeared on TheProgressive.org.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy (8/20/24) described Sen. Bernie Sanders’ speech to the Democratic National Convention as an attempt to “make policy proposals that put [Kamala] Harris in a big-government vise, binding (or pushing) her in a direction that a lot of moderates do not want to go.”
Healy depicted Sanders as
grasp[ing] the lectern with both hands as he unfurled one massive government program idea after another in a progressive policy reverie that must have been music to the ears of every democratic socialist at the United Center.
New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healey (8/20/24): “On Tuesday night, Sanders put Harris on the hot seat.”
Healey followed the standard New York Times line (FAIR.org, 7/26/24) that progressive candidates need to move to the right to win—and scorned Sanders for ignoring that advice: “Harris needs some of those swing-state moderates if she’s going to win the presidency, but the electoral math didn’t seem to be on Sanders’s mind.”
Strangely, though, the specific policies that Healey mentioned Sanders as promoting don’t seem to be particularly unpopular, with moderates or anyone else. Rather, opinion polls find them to be supported by broad majorities:
“Overturning Citizens United“: Three-fourths of survey respondents (Center for Public Integrity, 5/10/18) say that they support a constitutional amendment t0 overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allows the wealthy to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. In the same survey, 60% said reducing the influence of big campaign donors is “very important.” According to the Pew Research Center (5/8/18), 77% of the public says “there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations” can spend on political campaigns.
“Making healthcare ‘a human right’ for all Americans”: A 2020 Pew Research Center poll (9/29/20) found that “63% of US adults say the government has the responsibility to provide healthcare coverage for all.” Another Pew poll (1/23/23) reported 57% agreeing that it’s “the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”
“Raising the minimum wage to a ‘living wage’”: According to the Pew Research Center (4/22/21), 62% of Americans want the federal minimum wage raised to $15 an hour. (Most of the remainder wanted the minimum wage increased by a lesser amount.) According to the think tank Data for Progress (4/26/24), 86% of likely voters do not think the current federal minimum wage is enough for a decent quality of life.
“Raising teachers’ salaries”: The 2023 PDK poll found that 67% of respondents support increasing local teacher salaries by raising property taxes. The AP/NORC poll (4/18) reported that “78% of Americans say teachers in this country are underpaid.”
“Cutting prescription drug costs in half”: A poll from 2023 by Data for Progress found that 73% of all likely voters supported Biden administration initiatives allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs. Health policy organization KFF (8/21/23) reported that 88% of adults support “limiting how much drug companies can increase the price for prescription drugs each year to no more than the rate of inflation.”
Back in 2015, when Sanders was running for president, Healy co-wrote an article for the Times (5/31/15; Extra!, 7–8/15) that declared him “unelectable,” in part because he supported “far higher taxes on the wealthy.” But raising taxes on the rich turns out to be consistently popular in opinion polls (FAIR.org, 4/20/15).
What we’re learning is that progressive policy proposals are deeply unpopular—with the New York Times‘ deputy opinion editor.
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.
Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.
Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.
Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.
Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.
Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.
JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?
ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.
And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.
So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.
So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.
So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.
Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”
And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.
The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”
And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.
And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.
JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.
So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”
And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.
ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.
JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.
ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.
And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.
And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.
JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.
ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.
He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly and morally—questioned the horrific US invasion of Iraq.
Phil Donahue in 1977.
Beginning in the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, consumer rights, gay rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe, warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.
Mainstream media obits have predictably had a focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.
I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration, and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”
But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, congressmembers Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.
No one on US TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a US journalist.
Phil Donahue (right) with Michael Moore—three right-wingers for balance not pictured.
But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq War—she was told she’d need to book three right-wingers for political balance.
Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.
Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indie media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s).
Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him, to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: Body of War.
Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.
He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement, and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.
A version of this post appeared on Common Dreams (8/19/24) and other outlets.
This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.
Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.
Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Recent student-led campus encampments in solidarity with Palestine prompted considerable media conversation. But, according to a new FAIR study examining TV and newspaper discussions in the period from April 21 to May 12, those conversations rarely included students themselves—and even fewer included student protesters.
FAIR examined how often key corporate media discussion forums contain student and activist voices. The Sunday morning shows (ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday) brought on no students or activists, opting instead to speak primarily with government officials.
The daily news shows we surveyed—CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News‘ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour—were slightly better, with six students out of 79 guests, but only two of them were pro-Palestine protesters.
The op-ed pages of the New York Times, WashingtonPost, USA Today and Wall StreetJournal featured two students out of 52 writers, only one of whom was a protester.
Sunday Shows: Student-Free Zone
The agenda-setting Sunday morning shows, which historically skew towards government officials (FAIR.org, 8/12/20, 10/21/23), showed no interest in giving airtime to student or activist voices. For the first weeks following the first encampment set up at Columbia University, when the student protests began to command national media attention, FAIR analyzed every episode of ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday.
Out of 36 one-on-one and roundtable guests across all networks, 29 (81%) were current or former government officials or politicians, and five (14%) were journalists. One academic and one think tank representative were also featured. Of the 29 government sources, only six spoke about having personal experience with the protests, or about universities in states they represent.
No students or activists, and only one academic, were invited to speak on any of the Sunday shows. The one academic, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, didn’t speak about his own experience with the encampments, but about his research on student safety.
Some guests utilized inflammatory language when discussing the protesters, who were never afforded the opportunity to defend themselves. On This Week, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (ABC, 5/5/24), referred to the encampments as “Little Gazas,” and said the students “deserved our contempt” and “mockery.” “I mean, they’re out there in their N95 masks in the open air, with their gluten allergies, demanding that Uber Eats get delivered to them,” he said. Later on, Cotton referred to a keffiyeh—a symbol of Palestinian identity and solidarity—that protesters had put on a statue of George Washington as a “terrorist headdress.”
Jeffrey Miller lies on the pavement, one of four students killed when the National Guard was sent in to suppress protests at Kent State on May 4, 1970.
Three guests were asked about the idea of bringing in the National Guard to quell protests, only one declared it to be a bad idea. The other two gave similarly equivocal answers: Sen. J.D. Vance (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) said, “I don’t know if you need to call in the National Guard,” while Republican congressional candidate Tiffany Smiley (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) responded, “I don’t know if the National Guard is necessary.” But both agreed that some kind of police response was needed to these student protests.
In most other instances, the host would ask a politician for their thoughts on the encampments, to which the guest would respond with platitudes about nonviolence. For instance, CNN‘s Jake Tapper (5/5/24) asked Biden adviser Mitch Landrieu whether groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “causing unrest for the American people.” Landrieu responded, “Everybody has a right to protest, but they have to protest peacefully.”
Framing the questions
Throughout the Sunday show discussions, there was a heavy focus on whether the protests were violent and antisemitic, and next to no explanation of the demands of the protesters. Even though violence by—as opposed to against—campus protesters was very uncommon, politicians continually framed the protests as a threat to safety. White House national security communications advisor John Kirby (This Week, 4/28/24) decried “the antisemitism language that we’ve heard of late, and…all the hate speech and the threats of violence out there.”
Of all 64 questions asked to guests, only one—CNN’s interview with LA Mayor Karen Bass (4/28/24)—mentioned divestment, the withdrawal of colleges’ investments from companies linked to the Gaza military campaign and/or Israel, which was the central demand of most of the encampments. Moreover, this was the only instance in which divestment was discussed by any host or guest on the Sunday shows. On the other hand, 20 of the 36 conversations named antisemitism as an issue.
There were two questions asked about the safety of Jewish students (CNN, 4/28/24, 5/5/24)—by which CNN meant pro-Israel Jewish students, as many Jewish students took part in the encampments. (Forty-two percent of young Jewish Americans say Israel’s response to October 7 is “unacceptable,” according to Pew Research Center polling.) Only one question was asked about the safety of Muslim students (CNN, 5/5/24), even though both groups reported feeling almost equally unsafe.
All questions on violence related to the protesters, and not to counter-protesters or law enforcement. The interview with Bass (CNN, 4/28/24) made no mention of the violent counter-protests at UCLA that sent 25 protesters to the emergency room, but instead focused on hypothetical dangers to pro-Israel students.
Weekday News Shows: Rare Sightings of Protesters
In the same period as the study on Sunday shows, FAIR analyzed every episode of CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News’ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour. These daily programs were chosen as representative, highly rated daily news shows that have a focus on political discussion. Although the evening shows, unlike the Sunday shows, included occasional student voices, they were far outnumbered by government officials, journalists and educators—and only two student guests were protesters.
Of the 79 guests who appeared on these shows, 23 (29%) were current or former government officials and politicians, 19 (24%) were university-level educators and administrators, 18 (23%) were journalists, six (8%) were students and 13 (16%) had other jobs.
These shows showed more variation across the networks than the Sunday shows. Sixty-five percent of PBS NewsHour‘s guests were university-affiliated, for instance, and none were government officials, while almost two-thirds of Hannity‘s guests on Fox News (64%) were government officials and politicians, with no educators or students appearing.
The three student journalists found on daily news shows all appeared together on one episode of the PBS NewsHour (4/30/24).
There were a total of six students invited among the 79 guests, accounting for fewer than 8% of all interviewees. Two of these were pro-Palestine protesters, both appearing on MSNBC‘s ReidOut (4/22/24, 4/30/34). Three were nonaligned student journalists, all appearing together on PBS (4/30/24), and one, a student government leader at Columbia, was an Israeli who supported her government (CNN, 4/30/24).
One of the students on ReidOut (4/30/24), identified only by his first name, Andrew, described the police brutality at Washington University in St. Louis: “I was held in custody for six hours. I wasn’t provided food or water, and I have since been suspended and banned from my campus.”
Andrew was one of just two guests who mentioned police brutality. The other student protester, Marium Alwan, told host Joy Reid (4/22/24) that the Columbia encampment, and all encampments, “stand for liberation and human rights and equality for Jewish people, Palestinians.” When asked about antisemitism, she said they “stand against hateful rhetoric.”
Maya Platek, the only student featured on CNN‘s Lead (4/30/24), was president elect of the Columbia School of General Studies (and former head content writer for the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit). She said that at Columbia, she “would not say that I have been feeling the most comfortable.” She called the idea of divesting from Israel, and suspending Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University, “completely atrocious.”
Completely shutting out student voices, Fox News prioritized right-wing politicians like former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to speak on the protests. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Hannity, 4/30/24) compared the encampments to “Poland pre–World War II” and “Kristallnacht.”
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft (CNN, 4/22/24) was brought on to talk about student protests more often than all student protesters put together.
CNN‘s Lead, the show with the second-highest number of government official guests (35%), featured more centrists than did Hannity. Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz (5/1/24) said that while “it’s their First Amendment right” to protest, for students to say such as “go back to Poland or bomb Tel Aviv or kill all the Zionists” was not acceptable, a message similar to those frequently heard on the Sunday shows.
Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a major donor to Columbia University, was invited to speak about encampments three times (Fox, 4/22/24, 5/1/24; CNN, 4/22/24)—more times than student protesters spoke across all four shows.
Although a slight improvement over the Sunday shows’ complete shut-out of student voices, these daily news shows still had relatively few references to divestment, which came up in 16 interviews (20%), or police violence, mentioned in seven interviews. This compares to 33 interviews (42%) that discussed antisemitism.
Newspaper Op-Eds: Views From a Staffer’s Desk
Free-speech celebrant John McWhorter wrote a column for the New York Times (4/23/24) that wondered why students were allowed to protest against Israel.
The opinion columns of corporate newspapers did no better at including student protesters’ voices than the TV shows. FAIR analyzed every op-ed primarily about the campus encampments in the same time span (April 21–May 12), from the New York Times, USA Today, Wall StreetJournal and WashingtonPost.
In the observed period, the Times published 11 op-eds about the campus encampments, all written by Times columnists. The paper failed to include any students or activists in its opinion section.
Out of nine different Times columnists, only one mentioned visiting an encampment: John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia professor who writes regularly for the paper, was critical of the protests happening at his university. The self-styled free-speech advocate demanded to know, “Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
During the same period, the Washington Post also ran 11 encampment-related op-eds. Ten were written by regular columnists, and two mentioned having visited an encampment. Those two—Karen Attiah (5/2/24) and Eugene Robinson (4/29/24)—wrote positively of the protests. Attiah wrote of her visit:
Around me, students were reading, studying and chatting. Some were making art and painting. I saw an environment rich with learning, but I did not see disruption.
The paper’s only guest column on the encampments was penned by Paul Berman (4/26/24), a Columbia graduate and writer for the center-right Jewish magazine Tablet, who opined that the student protesters had “gone out of their minds,” and that professors were to blame for “intellectual degeneration.” Like the Times, the Post failed to include any students or activists in their opinion section.
‘We bruise, we feel’
In the only op-ed the study found written by a student protester (USA Today, 5/8/24), Columbia’s Allie Wong was able to succinctly state the objective of the encampments: “We are calling to end the violence and genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”
USA Today published fewer encampment-related opinion pieces, but invited more outside perspectives. Of its seven columns during the study period, four were written by regular columnists, one by Columbia student protester Allie Wong (5/8/24), one by pro-Israel advocate Nathan J. Diament (4/22/24) and one by the son of Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel (5/2/24).
In her op-ed, Wong described the police brutality exhibited during her and other protesters’ arrests:
We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls and slammed us into the hallowed ground of brick and concrete. But unlike rag dolls, we bleed, we crack, we bruise, we feel.
Wong’s piece was also the only one in USA Today to mention divestment, and one of only three pieces to mention divestment among all op-eds in the study. (The other two, from the Wall Street Journal, called the divestment demands “useless”—4/30/24—and “a breach of fiduciary obligation”—5/5/24.)
‘Fraternities a cure’
The Wall Street Journal (5/9/24) ran an editorial calling fraternities the antidote to encampments, written by someone who sells insurance to fraternities.
The Wall Street Journal had the most op-eds of the four papers. Its 22 pieces on the encampments included four by educators and one by a student. Unlike most other student and educator voices across our study, however, the student and educator guests on the Journal were highly critical of the protests.
Dawn Watkins Wiese (5/9/24) wrote a column titled “Fraternities Are a Cure for What Ails Higher Education,” asserting that the counter-protesters instigating violence at UNC “acted bravely.” Wiese is the chief operating officer of FRMT Ltd., an insurer of fraternities.
Ben Sasse (5/3/24), president of the University of Florida (and a former Republican senator), charged that the students were uneducated: “‘From the river to the sea.’ Which river? Which sea?” he wrote, suggesting that students didn’t know what they were protesting about.
The one student on the Journal‘s op-ed pages, Yale’s Gabriel Diamond (4/21/24), called for the expulsion of his protesting classmates for being “violent.” According to Yale Daily News president Anika Seth (4/30/24), no violence had been documented at the school’s encampment.
Takeaways: Avoid Demands
Across corporate media, the lack of student and protester voices in discussions of student protests is striking. Virtually every university has student journalists, yet only four of them were found in the study, compared to the more than 50 non-student journalists and columnists, the vast majority of whom gave no sign of ever having been to an encampment.
Despite polling that found Jewish and Muslim students feeling almost equally unsafe, antisemitism was mentioned in 88 different interviews and editorials, while Islamophobia was mentioned in only six interviews and one op-ed (Washington Post, 5/2/24). Divestment was only mentioned 26 times, despite it being the principal goal of the encampments.
The Palestine campus protests were not the first time corporate media avoided the demands of protesters. A 2020 FAIR study (8/12/20) of coverage of Black Lives Matter protests showed a “heavy focus on whether the protests were violent or nonviolent, rather than on the demands of the protesters,” a description that applies equally well to the coverage and commentary examined in this study.
As the Democrats headed toward their convention with momentum for the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket, newspapers have collectively found an August scandal. Major press outlets are amplifying Republican claims that Walz, as governor of Minnesota, let the Twin Cities burn during the 2020 George Floyd uprising. By spotlighting these charges, corporate media are assisting GOP attempts to portray themselves as the party of law and order against a tide of anarchic anti-police chaos.
To recap, Walz, who had spent a quarter century in the National Guard, was governor of the state in the summer of 2020, when white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on camera murdering George Floyd, a Black man, suffocating him to death. Protests in the city erupted and turned violent, and protests popped off around the country.
When the head of the Minnesota National Guard was told by Gov. Tim Walz that the entire force would be mobilized, Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen said his first reaction was, “Whoa, wait a second here, sir” (MPR, 7/10/24).
Walz, originally hesitant to call in military assistance to restore order, eventually called in the National Guard, which Minnesota Public Radio (7/10/24) praised for having “mobilized quickly” and “adjusted on [the] fly for Floyd unrest.” MPR added that it had been the state guard’s “largest deployment since World War II, and it occurred with remarkable speed.”
The “law and order” aspect of this election is muddy. Donald Trump, who makes “tough on crime” conservatism a part of persona in his attempt to return to the White House, is the only presidential candidate in history to be convicted of a felony. Meanwhile, Harris made her career in California as the San Francisco district attorney, and then the state’s attorney general. Despite Walz’s career in the National Guard, the Republicans are drumming up the 2020 George Floyd drama to try to win back the title of the party of order.
Too much of the corporate media are helping the Republicans make this flimsy case—and allowing the debate to revolve around the question of whether Walz was quick enough to use force against Black Lives Matter protests.
‘I fully agree with the way he handled it’
Four years ago, Trump praised Tim Walz’s response to the protests after George Floyd’s murder, calling the governor “an excellent guy” (CNN, 8/8/24).
For starters, then-President Trump had actually praised Walz’s handling of the crisis in 2020 (CNN, 8/8/24). “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said of Walz in a conference call with governors:
Tim Walz. Again, I was very happy with the last couple of days. Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.
Surely this is relevant context for any story about the Trump campaign now attacking Walz’s response to the Floyd protests. (A transcript of the call has been available online at CNN.com since June 1, 2020.)
And it should be hard for journalists to recall the police response as being any kind of hands-off approach. At FAIR (9/3/21), I covered the case of Linda Tirado, an independent journalist who lost vision in one eye after being shot by a Minneapolis cop while covering the protests; she was one of dozens of journalists that summer who sustained eye injuries because of the overzealous police response.
Two years ago, AP (11/30/22) reported, Minneapolis “reached a $600,000 settlement with 12 protesters who were injured during demonstrations after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd.” The ACLU, AP said,
alleged that police used tear gas as well as foam and rubber bullets to intimidate them and quash the demonstrations, and also that officers often fired without warning or giving orders to leave.
At least a dozen Minneapolis police officers were sanctioned for misconduct related to the department’s riot response in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and subsequent crowd control efforts in 2020.
‘Draws fresh scrutiny’
But three major newspapers are repeating the partisan attacks on Walz’s response—that he was basically more or less acting in concert with the protesters and not interested in maintaining order.
The Washington Post (8/13/24) carried the headline “Walz’s Handling of George Floyd Protests Draws Fresh Scrutiny,” with the subhead, “Republicans say Tim Walz was slow to act as violence raged in Minneapolis. Activists say he showed restraint and compassion.” It summarized that former Trump “and his allies are seizing on criticism from other Democrats that Walz was too slow to act to portray him as weak,” making him out to be “another lenient liberal politician, in their telling, who gave a pass to protesters and allowed destruction in their cities.”
The point of this New York Times article (8/14/24) is that after Walz was asked in a nighttime call to send in the National Guard, he slept on it and decided to do so in the morning.
A day later, a New York Times story (8/14/24) ran with the headline “Walz Faces New Scrutiny Over 2020 Riots: Was He Too Slow to Send Troops?” Its subhead: “Gov. Tim Walz’s response to the unrest has attracted new scrutiny, and diverging opinions, since he joined Kamala Harris’s ticket.”
The piece starts out summarizing the case that Walz was slow to respond. In the ninth paragraph, the Times offered a baby-splitting verdict on Walz’s response:
But a reconstruction of the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder reveals that Mr. Walz did not immediately anticipate how widespread and violent the riots would become and did not mobilize the Guard when first asked to do so. Interviews, documents and public statements also show that, as the violence increased, Mr. Walz moved to take command of the response, flooding Minneapolis with state personnel who helped restore order.
This wasn’t the first such story in the Times. Earlier in August, the New York Times (8/6/24) ran the headline “Walz Has Faced Criticism for His Response to George Floyd Protests,” with the subhead “Some believe that Gov. Tim Walz should have deployed the Minnesota National Guard sooner when riots broke out following the police murder of George Floyd.” The third paragraph said:
Looting, arson and violence followed, quickly overwhelming the local authorities, and some faulted Mr. Walz for not doing more and not moving faster to bring the situation under control with Minnesota National Guard troops and other state officials.
‘Make America burn again’
The real problem Heather Mac Donald (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/24) has with Walz is that he believes there’s such a thing as “systemic racism.”
On the same day the Post story ran, the Wall Street Journal (8/13/24) ran an op-ed by pro-police pundit Heather Mac Donald, who said it wasn’t just Walz’s allegedly slow response that was bad for Minnesota, but his entire worldview that sympathized with Black victims of police violence:
In 2022, Mr. Walz declared May 25 “George Floyd Remembrance Day” and has done so each year since. The 2022 and 2023 proclamations invoked “systemic racism” or its equivalent five times. They urged the public to “honor” Floyd “and every person whose life has been cut short due to systems of racism,” and to “deconstruct and undo generations of systemic racism.”
She continued, “Mr. Walz’s belief in ‘systemic racism’ dovetails with Kamala Harris’s worldview. Both portray the police as the major threat to Black Americans.”
Elsewhere in the Murdoch press, Fox News (8/14/24), citing a “former federal prosecutor in Minneapolis who prosecuted George Floyd rioters,” said “Walz’s record as governor on that issue, and several others, including fraud, makes him ‘unfit’ for a promotion to vice president of the United States.” The man quoted here is Joe Teirab, who also just won a GOP House of Representatives primary with Trump’s backing (WCCO, 8/14/24).
A CBS piece (8/13/24) straightforwardly related that “Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, claims Walz ‘actively encouraged’ rioters” in the lead of its story. Fox News (8/7/24), as a sort of GOP public relations arm, was more forceful when it ran the headline “Vance Praised for ‘Absolute FIRE’ Takedown of Harris/Walz ‘Tag Team’ Riot Enablers: ‘Make America Burn Again’” Fox‘s subhead:
“Tim Waltz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. And then, the few who got caught, Kamala Harris helped them out of jail,” JD Vance said.
‘Record is mixed’
Criminologist David Squier Jones pointed out to MPR (8/13/24) that “Americans tend to have an inflated sense of crime occurring in their communities that don’t gel with crime statistics.”
Given that Trump himself had praised Walz’s leadership during the protests, and that the law enforcement response to the protests cannot be framed as too lax, one would think newspaper coverage would apply more skepticism to the Republican claims. Newspaper coverage of these Republican attacks has followed the “Republicans allege this, while Democrats deny it” model, simply rehashing partisan talking points without illuminating the issue.
David Squier Jones, a criminologist at the Center for Homicide Research, offered a much more measured version of the events of 2020 and their aftermath to MPR (8/13/24). While Walz sympathized with the anger toward the police murder of Floyd, he said, contrary to Vance, “I did not see anything, read anything, or hear anything that he encouraged active rioting.”
Jones also noted that Walz’s “record is mixed in terms of encouraging police reforms.” “He has also supported police in terms of increasing funding for police departments throughout the state,” he said. “He’s looking for better policing, not defunding policing, not removing policing, and he is certainly not anti-police.”
Such analysis doesn’t make for great attack-ad copy, but it will probably do more to help citizens cast an informed vote in November than parroting GOP press releases.
A Scripps/Ipsos poll (
