“Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?” Popular Mechanics (6/8/25) asks. Spoiler alert: No.
I like to read science stories, even (maybe especially) when they’re not politically earthshaking. But sometimes what’s on the label is not what’s in the tin.
Take a Popular Mechanics story, “The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests” (6/8/25). The subhead asks the question, “Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?”
To answer that, PM reports on a paper from 2023: “The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City.” That is literally all we learn about the findings of the study that the headline is based on.
It does go on to say that a newer study finds that the answer to the subhead’s question is “no”:
A study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population…. This new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.
Oh. Never mind!
I guess an accurate headline—”Study Finds No Sign Chernobyl’s Dogs Are Radioactive Mutants”—wouldn’t have gotten as many clicks.
“Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth,” Big Think (6/10/26) argues, because someone found a fossil of “a badger-like mammal…biting a small horned dinosaur.”
Another piece appeared in Big Think (6/10/26) under the headline “A Mesozoic Myth: Dinosaurs Didn’t Rule the Earth Like We Think.” Intriguing! Tell us more?
It turns that the argument is basically that even though none of them were “larger than the size of a house cat,” during the age of dinosaurs “there were ancient mammal equivalents of squirrels, shrews, otters, aardvarks, flying squirrels and more.” I put it to you, though, that none of these are the kind of creatures that we think of today as “ruling the Earth.”
Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”
Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.
‘Preemptive strike’
AP‘s headline (6/18/25) highlights that Israel struck “Iran’s nuclear sites and kills top generals”; the article doesn’t note that Iran says the “overwhelming majority” of the 78 people killed at that point by Israel were civilians (Times of Israel, 6/14/25).
From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)
On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Pressreported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.
Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:
Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.
That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.
In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.
‘Potential salvation’
A Washington Post article (6/16/25) manages to blame the Iranian officials for not keeping their people safe from Israeli missiles.
Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”
In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.
On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?
We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”
Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.
‘It’s all targeted’
To the New York Times (6/15/25), mass assassination of Iranian leaders is a “playbook” and “following the script.”
Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”
After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”
Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.
Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.
One way of lifting up this accusation is to say that pro-Palestine leftists hold Israel to a different standard by focusing on Israel and ignoring human rights concerns in other countries. The World Jewish Congress (5/4/22) gives supposed examples of this, such as “accusing Israel of human right violations while refusing to criticize regimes with far worse human right abuses, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Pakistan,” or “rebuking Israel for allegedly violating women’s rights, while ignoring significantly worse abuses carried out by governments and terrorist organizations.”
‘Demonization and double standards’
To the New York Times (6/14/25), saying that people are opposed to Israel and not to Jews is “making excuses.”
The New York Times (6/14/25) recently invoked this in an editorial headlined “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.” To the board’s credit, the editorial talks about how antisemitism plays a big role in the Trump administration’s racist and demagogic rule—although it could have gone further into analyzing how antisemitism is at the center of fascism’s other conspiratorial bigotries: that Jewish masterminds are behind mass immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18) and Black Lives Matter (Fox Business, 12/15/17).
But the editorialists aim at least as much criticism at the left for its vocal opposition against the ongoing genocide and starvation in Gaza. Yes, the editors admit that “criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism,” and insist that they themselves “have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza.” They also said that pro-Israel activists “hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism.”
There’s a “but” coming. “But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction,” the board said, pointing to the “3D test” of “delegitimization, demonization and double standards” that it says is a key test for determining “when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism.” “Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years,” they write:
Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur—an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War—and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.
Let’s take these one at a time. It is depressingly telling that the first line echoes a year-old editorial in the right-wing City Journal (4/14/24) that condemned students for not aiming their protests at Syria, Russia or China. The most obvious answer to these “gotcha” scenarios is that the US and US universities are not funding human rights violations or wars initiated by any of these countries. The protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza are growing in the US precisely because of US support for Israel. Students often want to see their universities divest from Israeli entities as a way to put pressure on Israel, the same way activists mobilized against South African apartheid.
The US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Russia (Reuters, 2/27/22; Politico, 2/28/22; Al Jazeera, 4/24/24), and the US is currently in a trade war with China (CNN, 6/11/25); the State Department has declared it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students (Reuters, 5/29/25). The Trump administration’s new travel restrictions ban people from Sudan and highly restrict entry for Venezuelans (NPR, 6/9/25). The Council on Foreign Relations (3/11/25) estimates that the US has given Ukraine $128 billion to defend against the Russian invasion, and the House of Representatives has an entire committee devoted to investigating China’s ruling Communist Party.
The Times next asks us to “consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist.” Left-leaning groups generally opposeethnostates, and tend not to make an exception for Israel, whose ethnic policies have been condemned as “apartheid” by the world’s leading human rightsgroups. As for expressing admiration for Hamas et al.: You’ll rarely hear US progressives praising Hamas, but you will hear them blaming Hamas’s violence on the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel prior to October 7, 2023.
Antisemitism as pretext
The Times goes on to complain that the word “Zionist,” which it defines as “somebody who supports the existence of Israel,” is used as a slur. But Zionism hasn’t become a thorny word because of antisemitism. Zionists are defending a political system where rights and freedom depend on one’s religion and ethnicity, a concept the small-d democrats of a liberal paper like the Times would otherwise abhor. The word “Dixiecrat” is remembered today only as a bad word, not because these people were from the American Southeast, but because they advocated for segregation.
The Times, as usual, wrongly equates Zionism with Jewishness. There are many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, including sects that view Zionism as a sort of false messianism. There are also many Christian Zionists—who far outnumber Jewish Zionists—who see Israel as a necessary means to the biblically foretold End Times.
The editorial admits that the Trump administration “has also used [antisemitism] as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.” The paper notes: “The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.”
The Times is absolutely right that the Trump administration’s vociferous attacks on antisemitism are ineffective, precisely because they are patently just a stick with which to beat his enemies in academia. But that is the exact same problem that the Times editorial has: If you use charges of antisemitism as a pretense to smear critics of a genocidal government, you are doing nothing to protect Jews.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky:@NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.
The New York Times Magazine (6/1/25) ignored ethical guidelines designed to keep reporting from encouraging suicide.
The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story (6/1/25) that gave in-depth representation to the challenges faced by a chronically sick, disabled woman named Paula Ritchie, age 52. Ritchie dealt with underdiagnosed illnesses and pain, as well as challenges in supporting herself and managing her mental health.
The Times then told the story of Ritchie ending her own life out of despair over her situation. The journalist, Katie Engelhart, observed and documented her suicide, up until the last breath left her body. “I was with Ritchie until the very end,” she posted on X (6/1/25). Engelhart gave lengthy justifications for Ritchie’s choice to end her life, and described several people who supported her in that decision.
Articles like this aren’t common in the media. Suicide prevention is typically regarded as both a social good and an ethical responsibility. In the US and Canada (where the article takes place), suicidal people are involuntarily detained to prevent their deaths. It has long been illegal in Canada (and many US states) to assist or even “counsel” a person to commit suicide.
There are also ethical standards that guide media outlets in reporting on suicide, in order to minimize the risk of glamorizing or idealizing it. These guidelines are based on research showing that the media has an outsized influence when it comes to suicide. Graphic, detailed and sensationalized coverage has been shown to increase the “risk of contagion,” according to one guide. AP News specifically tries to avoid detailing the “methods used” in stories that reference suicide, based on this research.
The Times violated almost all of the published guidelines by personalizing, detailing, dramatizing, justifying and sentimentalizing Ritchie’s suicide, as well as by making it a cover story. The story featured close-up images of the method of Ritchie’s death and what appears to be her post-mortem body.
The World Health Organization urges journalists covering suicide not to “explicitly describe the method used” or “use photographs, video footage or social media links that relate to the circumstances of the suicide,” among other guidelines.
So why wasn’t there generalized outrage or pushback from other media? The only significant outcry came from thousands of disabled people on social media.
The simplest answer is that Ritchie’s suicide was administered by a doctor, and legal in Canada. Media tend to be more accepting of the unacceptable when it is government-sanctioned. In 2021, the country expanded its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law to permit physician-assisted suicide for disabled people who aren’t suffering terminal illnesses. The law and its implementation have been extremely controversial, as the article noted. Similar laws have been passed or introduced across Europe.
The Times article reinforced a popular belief that disability is a fate worse than death. The disabled author Imani Barbarin sums it up in the title of her forthcoming book: If I Were You, I’d Kill Myself. It’s a refrain disabled people are accustomed to hearing, the frightful implication of which is that accommodations aren’t worth the bother, and death is for their own good.
The media has a tendency to reinforce this idea in stories about disability. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (1/20/21), the New York Times (4/10/20, 12/24/20) published stories early in the Covid-19 pandemic suggesting that disability should be considered in determining who had a right to Covid ventilators, based on unproven myths of “quality of life.” The articles cited literal eugenicists as experts, and didn’t invite disabled people to the conversation.
Both sides, and propaganda
In Engelhart’s Times article, she appeared to offer a sensitive and balanced view on the debates around MAiD expansion. Yet the article was laden with ableist rhetoric, medical misinformation and subtle propaganda from the well-funded “right to die” movement. It also left out prominent critical facts about MAiD.
Engelhart omitted that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3/11/25) issued a report in March that condemned Canada’s MAiD, and recommended that the country “repeal” the expanded law and halt plans for future expansion. The report outlined how benefits and healthcare for disabled people are inadequate in Canada, resulting in coercion around MAiD, especially for women and marginalized groups. People have been sharing stories of coercive MAiD practices since it was expanded (e.g., Independent, 6/23/23; New York Post, 11/8/22; X, 6/4/25).
It’s significant that the most powerful international body issued such a strong condemnation of MAiD; it’s something that anyone following the issue should know about, and Engelhart has published a book on MAiD and speaks about it constantly, yet she left it out of her article.
Dying With Dignity Canada’s goals include, according to the Walrus (1/12/24) “making MAiD available to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder” and “expanding MAID to ‘mature minors’ age twelve and older.”
Engelhart did discuss some of the issues exposed by the UN, but she cited “disability rights advocates,” “critics” and “opponents,” not the UN. She also didn’t name or quote these opponents, aside from a few uneasy doctors. None of the many disability rights, human rights and religious organizations that have condemned MAiD expansion were named, and only some of their arguments were discussed. Missing, for instance, was the fact that a promised expansion of disability benefits was tabled just after MAiD expansion was approved, suggesting the government saw the suicide program as another solution, of sorts, to the disability problem.
Also missing from the article was the role of a powerful lobbying group known as Dying with Dignity Canada (DwD), which has raised millions of dollars from corporate and wealthy donors (Walrus, 1/12/24). DwD has had an enormous influence on the Canadian government and media conversations on MAiD. The organization isn’t named in the Times Magazine piece, but its propaganda is subtly woven throughout.
Engelhart has been more explicit about her pro-MAiD leanings in other writings and statements (e.g., Neiman Storyboard, 3/3/21; NPR, 3/9/21), as well as in online responses to comments on her Times Magazine piece.
In search of euphemism
As evidence of her bias, look at the way Engelhart introduced the terminology in the Times article: “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program—what critics call physician-assisted suicide.” It’s a curious attribution. Is there a more direct, factual way to describe what happened to Ritchie than suicide? It’s a subtle nod to DwD, which seeks to remove the “suicide” from assisted suicide. From the organization’s website:
We do not use the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because they stigmatize people who are suffering intolerably and want to access their right to a peaceful death. Suicide is a desperate act of self-harm, while medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy.
The Merriam-Webster definition of suicide is “the act or an instance of ending one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” DwD seems to be attempting to redefine the word to soften what happens with MAiD.
On Twitter, Engelhart has argued that “assisted death” is a less “politically loaded” term than “assisted suicide.” She has also taken issue with the AP for referring to MAiD recipients as “killed.” It’s not propaganda to state that when someone dies, they are “killed” by the cause of death. People are killed by cancer, accidents and self-inflicted wounds as much as by murder.
Engelhart’s efforts to soften the language of assisted suicide calls to mind crime reporters using “police-involved shooting” to say that police have shot someone. The common norms for speaking about suicide and shootings can apply without harm or distortion of the facts.
The Times Magazine article reflected some of the contradictions inherent to DwD ideology that appear throughout Engelhart’s work. For instance, she often compares assisted suicide rights to abortion rights, a DwD talking point. But she also compares it to the merciful “euthanizing” of “beloved pets.” Unlike people who elect abortions, animals do not get to choose their fates, or even express their wishes. Humans project our assumptions onto pets, including that their suffering must be a fate worse than death.
Despite Engelhart’s seeming alignment with the “dying with dignity” movement, to her credit, she did expose that there wasn’t absolute “dignity” in Ritchie’s death. The article ends with a gruesome description of Ritchie’s last moments, including her expression of “horrible” discomfort.
A ‘difficult case’
Dr. Matt Wonnacott, the doctor who approved euthanasia for Paula Ritchie: “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?” he told Engelhart.
Engelhart provided a lot of detail about Ritchie’s medical conditions, but relied on outdated, vaguely sourced and ableist ways of describing chronic illness. Here and elsewhere, her work is mostly sourced to doctors, especially MAiD providers, and patients who want to die, but not the many people who live with and manage complex chronic disease.
As a disabled journalist, I see Ritchie’s story through a different lens than Engelhart. I have many of her conditions, deal with ongoing suffering, sometimes severe, and was suicidal at one point.
Engelhart described Ritchie as if she were too difficult to diagnose sufficiently beyond a collection of symptoms, including head injury, migraine, fatigue, dizziness, long-standing depression and PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet I know that it can take ten or more years for a person to get properly diagnosed with most chronic illnesses, if they are lucky. I also know that chronic illness patients deal with doctors who gaslight, misdiagnose and psychologize symptoms.
The doctor who authorized Ritchie’s suicide, Matt Wonnacott, appears to be one of those. He was a primary source in the story. Engelhart did leave it open for readers to feel uncomfortable with Wonnacott’s approach. Although he acknowledged that Ritchie still had treatment options, he admitted to making decisions to approve assisted suicide based on “gestalt” and “patient choice” more than medicine. On the other hand, Engelhart seemed to take the doctor’s medical assessments at face value, not interrogating his knowledge or biases.
At one point, Engelhart referred to a category of MAiD patients with “functional disorders…that are poorly understood within medicine, and disputed within medicine, and that some clinicians believe have a significant psychological component.” Who are these clinicians? She did not say, but then listed a series of conditions that are not considered, by official diagnostic criteria, to be psychological: “fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable-bowel syndrome, some kinds of chronic headaches.” “Functional” has a history, like “hysteria” before it, of being used as a catch-all for misunderstood women’s illnesses.
As for “chronic fatigue,” it is more properly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. There is an epidemic of it lately, as it is commonly caused by Covid-19. As such, there are countlessrecent studies proving its physiological causes. At one point, Engelhart discussed how Ritchie’s muscles work one minute, then “suddenly buckle” the next, writing: “This suggested that the buckling was due to psychological causes or a lack of effort.” Yet Ritchie seemed to be demonstrating a hallmark symptom of ME known as “post-exertional malaise.”
Engelhart included a lot of detail about Ritchie’s care and medications, with the effect of seeming like every option was exhausted. Yet I am surprised by what is missing. There is no mention of dysautonomia or its treatments, even though Ritchie has difficulty bathing herself and getting out of the bath, both common in that illness. There is no mention of cutting-edge treatments for ME, like antivirals for reactivated viruses, or naltrexone. And there is no mention of the new class of CGRP migraine drugs, which have rescued millions of people from horrible constant pain.
In place of medical investigation, Engelhart uses rhetoric and sentiment to portray Ritchie as a lost cause. She supports this portrait with classist and ableist imagery, like mentioning Ritchie’s “old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins,” her “stained” floors, her trouble bathing and long history of depression. She quotes people in Ritchie’s life who liked her, but also found her difficult, “vicious,” and “loud and excessive.”
I have a different perspective on Ritchie. She comes across to me as resourceful in pursuing help, a strong person who has survived tremendous suffering, and compassionate to others. She is surrounded by friends when she dies. She has common illnesses that have been under-researched due to medical misogyny. And she has been denied cutting-edge treatments due to the profound gulf between research and practice, as well as long-established bigotry in medical care. In my perception, if she had been properly diagnosed and treated, she may or may not have felt differently about ending her life.
Fly on the wall
The Economist‘s cover story (11/21/24) seemed to encourage not just legalizing suicide, but suicide itself.
Engelhart did a skillful job of portraying her own role in Ritchie’s suicide as if she were a passive observer. In a separate interview she gave with the Times about writing the piece, she said she “was trying to be as small a presence as possible in the room.” Yet she also admitted that Ritchie reached for her hand just before she died, so she couldn’t have been that small. Engelhart didn’t reflect, in the interview, on the role she may have played in Ritchie’s fate, or the ethics of her project.
The article emphasized that Ritchie knew she was being interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. She knew that her story would be amplified worldwide, but especially if she continued to end her life. Engelhart’s body of work on MAiD is mostly about people who elect and complete the act of suicide. That validation, alone, could have been a form of encouragement, especially for someone who felt isolated and unheard.
Best practices in suicide prevention are based on studies showing that suicidal people are uniquely and extremely vulnerable to suggestion, and that suicidality is usually temporary. According to a journalism guide from the Trevor Project, which aims to prevent suicide in LGBTQ youth, “More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals.”
With the Times’ story, the worst-case scenario almost happened. One reader, a patient with Long Covid, responded on social media that the article caused him to consider that maybe assisted suicide would be a good option for him. After reading the responses of disabled people, he had more context and changed his mind. (I am protecting his identity.)
There is growing support for the expansion of assisted suicide across the world and in the media (e.g., Economist, 11/13/21, 11/21/24). The pandemic has eased people’s discomfort with preventable death, especially of elderly and disabled people. Engelhart’s book got a lot of attention around the height of Covid-19’s Omicron wave. Meanwhile, the current US administration is suggesting that worthiness for healthcare should be tied to social value.
It’s a key time for news organizations to recall their ethical obligations around reporting on suicide. At the very least, the news shouldn’t stop calling it “suicide” just because those who die have been approved for MAiD due to disability.
Stories of chronically sick people who resist MAiD and/or survive suicide attempts are rarely given as much in-depth treatment or column inches in the media. But those stories might give readers more context in considering how to feel about these policies. The New York Times even gave a flattering interview (11/16/24) to a doctor who has elsewhere been condemned for her unethical and too-eager MAiD practices and has been restricted from practicing everywhere (London Times, 7/19/24; Globe and Mail, 3/9/16).
News outlets should also consider hiring disabled journalists and editors to work on stories like this, or at least journalists who are curious enough to investigate medicine critically. Mainstream writing about health and disability has long ignored the insights of chronic illness patients, unless to use individual cases to speak over collective concerns. We need stories about disability and illness that don’t rely mostly on the medical establishment for expertise, especially given its long history of aligning with eugenics.
The protests emerged as resistance to militarized law enforcement (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25), a dynamic that was often obscured by coverage that focused on the “clash” between protesters and government.
In the early morning of Friday, June 6, several federal agencies carried out militarized immigration raids across Los Angeles (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25). Armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and DEA, tore through these neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, carrying out a new method of targeted raids in workplaces like Home Depot, Ambiance Apparel and car washes (Washington Post, 6/8/25, 6/12/25, LA Times, 6/10/25).
Later that morning, demonstrations formed in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees were believed to be held (Al Jazeera, 6/11/25). Protests grew exponentially over the weekend, spreading not only across California, but also to major cities around the country (Time, 6/9/25).
In response, without state authorization, President Donald Trump federalized and deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to LA to “solve the problem” (CNN, 6/9/25). California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass and other government officials have called this an unprecedented show of force and an abuse of executive power, intended to intimidate and terrorize local communities (Atlantic, 6/10/25; CNN, 6/9/25).
‘Violence’ and ‘anarchists’
While major media sources described these protests as “mostly peaceful,” they nevertheless tended to dwell on what was depicted as rioting and protester violence. In its morning newsletter, the New YorkTimes (6/9/25) set the scene:
Hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids. They clashed with federal agents, leaving burned cars, broken barricades and graffiti scrawled across government buildings downtown.
Is it possible that Trump administration efforts to expel nearly a million Los Angeles residents are “driving chaos at LA immigration protests” (LA Times, 6/10/25)?
The LA Times (6/10/25), citing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, blamed “‘anarchists’ who, he said, were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.” (Law enforcement agencies reported only a handful of minor injuries to officers—KCRA, 6/12/25.) These critiques were interwoven with descriptions of “scenes of lawlessness [that] disgusted” McDonnell, such as setting “Waymo taxis on fire,” “defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti” and looting businesses. And, an ironic, laughable account of the underlying power dynamics at play:
Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.
The article ran under the headline “Protesters or Agitators: Who Is Driving Chaos at LA Immigration Protests?”—never offering readers the possibility that the answer is, in fact, law enforcement. The framing came directly from McDonnell’s attempt, cited in the article, to draw a “distinction” between protesters and anarchists. Yet further down, the piece described what can only be understood as federal troops instigating chaos and violence:
A phalanx of National Guard troops charged into the crowd, yelling “push” as they rammed people with riot shields. The troops and federal officers used pepper balls, tear gas canisters as well as flash-bang and smoke grenades to break up the crowd.
No one in the crowd had been violent toward the federal deployment up to that point. The purpose of the surge appeared to be to clear space for a convoy of approaching federal vehicles.
‘Non-lethal’ weapons?
CNN (6/10/25) framed police munitions as the way cops “responded with force” after protests “devolved into violence.”
One CNN article (6/10/25) offered “A Look at the ‘Less Lethal’ Weapons Authorities Used to Crack Down on Los Angeles Protests.” Reporter Dakin Andone wrote:
Police have used a standard variety of tools to disperse crowds and quell protests that had devolved into violence, with protesters lighting self-driving cars on fire and two motorcyclists driving into a skirmish line of officers, injuring two. A Molotov cocktail was also thrown at officers, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell alleged, condemning the “disgusting” violence.
Authorities have responded with force. So far, CNN has documented the deployment of flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, as well as more traditional gear such as batons.
To CNN, protesters devolve into “violence,” while heavily armed agents of the state respond with “force.”
The article noted that these weapons are not “harmless,” as they have been found to “disable, disfigure and even kill.” Projectiles are meant to cause “‘blunt-force trauma to the skin,’” chemical irritants cause “difficulty swallowing, chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath and a feeling of choking,” and flash-bangs “obscure a target’s vision and hearing.”
Yet the article’s description of the effects of those weapons used in LA remained almost entirely theoretical. The only example it gave of a civilian targeted by one of these “less lethal” weapons was that of Australian 9News correspondent Lauren Tomasi, shot at close range by a rubber bullet while reporting on live TV. (Video footage shows that there was no one close to the line of officers, nor were any protesters closing in.) “The bullet left her sore, but she was otherwise unharmed,” CNN blithely noted.
While it’s good to see media standing up for those who were injured while exercising the freedom of the press (Guardian, 6/11/25), they might have shown similar concern for those hurt while engaging in freedom of assembly.
Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (6/11/25) has documented an astounding 35 violent attacks on journalists, almost entirely by law enforcement, including numerous reporters hit by police projectiles. The Guardian (6/11/25) reported that British photographer Nick Stern needed surgery when police shot him in the leg with a “less-lethal projectile”; Toby Canham, a photographer working for the New York Post, was “hit in the head by a less-lethal round” by a California highway patrol officer and “treated for whiplash and neck pain,” the Guardian said. (Protesters were injured by police munitions as well, as repeatedlyattested by social media, but reporters showed less interest in those injuries.)
The headlines that reported the assault on Tomasi frequently left out the perpetrator: “Australian Reporter Covering Los Angeles Immigration Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet on Live TV,” was how CBS (6/10/25) put it; CNN (6/8/25) had “Australian Reporter Covering LA Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet.” The Sydney Morning Herald (6/9/25) described Tomasi as “caught in the crossfire as the LAPD fired rubber bullets at protesters”—which doesn’t sound like a “crossfire” at all.
Many reports denied the potential for these weapons to cause death by labeling them “non-lethal” (Guardian, 6/8/25, 6/11/25; AP, 6/9/25; LA Times, 6/10/25; USA Today, 6/10/25; Newsweek, 6/10/25) or “less-than-lethal” (New York Times, 6/6/25; NBC, 6/8/25). These descriptors are entirely inaccurate, as studies and reports have documented dozens of deaths caused by “less-lethal” projectiles, as well as hundreds of permanent injuries (BMJ Open, 12/5/17; Amnesty International, 3/14/23; Arizona Republic, 5/13/25).
Reuters (6/11/25) reported on attacks by such weapons under the headline “Journalists Among the Injured in LA as ICE Protests Grow Violent”—a framing that treated the protests as the source of the violence being inflicted on journalists by police.
As an example of leftists who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent,” NBC News (6/12/25) included those who condemned police violence “using expletives and slights.” (Note that the skateboard-wielding protester is the same individual the LA Times—6/10/25—used to suggest “agitators” were “driving chaos.”)
A remarkable NBC News article (6/12/25) blamed protesters for fomenting violence by pointing out police violence. “Some Far-Left Groups Have Encouraged Peaceful Protests to Turn Violent, Experts Say,” was the headline; one of the few examples, under the heading “Assassination culture,” was:
One anti-police group, the People’s City Council Los Angeles, has taken to calling out the actions of officers at the protests, using expletives and slights.
Just before 1 a.m. Tuesday, it posted on X the name and picture of a police officer it said was firing rubber bullets at protesters.
He is “fucking unhinged and unloading on protesters at point blank range,” the post read. “FUCK THIS PIG!!”
Perhaps it was the cop firing rubber bullets at protesters at point blank range who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent”—and not the “expletives and slights” of the witnesses?
‘Diverted public attention’
Sarah J. Jackson (Atlantic, 6/3/20): “When news stories employ sensational images of property damage, using terms such as riot and the even more sensational mayhem and chaos, researchers have noted a rise in public support for law-and-order crackdowns on protest.”
The New York Times editorial board (6/8/25), while critical of Trump’s National Guard deployment, opined that “protesters will do nothing to further their cause if they resort to violence.” The LA Times (6/10/25) expressed that “violence and widespread property damage at protests…have diverted public attention away from the focus of the demonstrations.” What has historically turned the tide against protests, however, is inflammatory reporting that blames protesters for their response to government’s aggressive efforts to suppress freedom of assembly (Penn State University, 6/1/01; Real Change, 3/18/09; Atlantic, 6/3/20).
By framing the problem as unruly demonstrators, the media lend legitimacy to the Trump administration’s attempt to set a precedent for military suppression of dissent. (“If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said of the military parade he arranged to run through DC on June 14, his 79th birthday. “This is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”) Journalists should be focusing not on the broken windows, but on Trump’s very real efforts to break our democracy.
Sure, you may like the idea of a “socialist New York,” but New York magazine (5/20/25) is here with a bunch of anonymous sources to tell you it’s “more complicated.”
There’s an art to writing a profile of a political candidate that sows doubt about their fitness for office without attacking them directly. Done smoothly, it can be more damaging than an overt hit piece.
“Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party,” a recent New York magazine profile (5/20/25) of the New York State Assembly member and New York City mayoral candidate, is a prime example. The headline and subhead (“He’s selling the dream of a socialist New York. The picture inside the Democratic party is more complicated.”) manage to convey knowing sympathy (party-crashing is cool!) and parental concern (a socialist New York is but a “dream,” and party insiders know the reality is “more complicated”).
The story’s author, E. Alex Jung, is not a Free Press columnist but a National Magazine Award–nominated features writer who comes across as sympathetic to but skeptical of Mamdani. Mamdani, he writes,
has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country…showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back—and then posting it all on Instagram.
Jung added that Mamdani
became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined…. His campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls…. The rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday—that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Though the odds of that happening are not good.
Part of subtly and effectively undermining someone is appearing to give them their due. As ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of his rival Mamdani during a recent NYC mayoral debate:
Mr. Mamdani is very good on Twitter and with videos, but he actually produces nothing…. He has no experience with Washington, no experience with New York City.
Like Cuomo, New York acknowledges upfront that Mamdani is an exceptionally strong communicator. It then puts forth a string of criticisms, most from unnamed colleagues and critics of Mamdani, with their own agendas and reasons to resent his rise. An “anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist” dismisses Mamdani supporters as “online kids.” Critics claim he is “drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes.” Because Jung allows anonymous sources to criticize Mamdani at length—he quotes or paraphrases “those with knowledge of the conversations,” “some New York Democratic Party members,” “a Democratic political operative,” “another operative,” “critics,” “detractors” and so on—the reader has no way of independently assessing their motives.
‘Language of the internet’
The New York Editorial Board (2/2/25), “a group of veteran journalists interviewing candidates for Mayor of New York City,” got specifics on the questions New York said were “unclear.”
The profile opens with a shower of trivializing compliments. Mamdani and his “congregation of true believers” are “jubilant and young.” Supporters like Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff and semi-canceled chef Alison Roman represent “power and cool and changing winds.” Mamdani is “a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate” (as a DSA member, I can confirm) with a “short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy”—qualities, Jung writes, that were “seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race.”
Yet in the last six months, he has “transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi.” His campaign videos are “in the language of the internet.”
So far, a reader will have learned that Mamdani is young, cool and online. His campaign pitch—Freeze the rent! Make buses fast and free! Universal childcare!—is catchy, as is his plan to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department of community safety. But how New Yorkers feel about these proposals and “how he would actually do all of this” is “unclear”—whether because Jung neglected to ask, or was unsatisfied with the answer, we’ll never know.
Profiles like this are popular because they are more about personality and style than sober, eat-your-vegetables political analysis. Thus, we learn that Mamdani is “energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a ‘Who’s your brother’s friend?’ kind of way.” It’s a vivid description, and it’s reminiscent of ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill’s blistering dismissal of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She was, McCaskill said, a “bright, shiny new object” whose rhetoric was “cheap” (Business Insider, 12/26/18).
‘Smothering effect on discourse’
New York scorned the “ideological purity” that made Mamdani insist that marginalized workers ought to have gotten the support they needed (New York Times, 10/19/21).
Jung contends without evidence that Mamdani supporters have had “a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left.” He goes on to quote state Sen. Jabari Brisport, who was elected alongside Mamdani in 2020. Unlike most of Jung’s sources, Brisport is a Mamdani supporter and willing to speak on the record. “People were looking for drastic changes in society,” Brisport says of the period in which they were elected.
But according to Jung, the “reality of the chamber was different.” Recounting a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats over whether to tax the rich and expand a fund for undocumented workers who had been denied federal pandemic relief, he implies that Mamdani was outmaneuvered. Legislators eventually agreed to set aside $2.1 billion for the excluded-workers fund—far short of the $3.5 billion that progressives wanted and, it’s important to note, excluded workers needed.
Mamdani and some colleagues indicated to New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie that they would protest the shortfall by voting against the budget, which would have passed regardless. Heastie “warned that the fund would get watered down even more if they didn’t fall in line.” (Heastie denies this.) Mamdani, Jung writes, was “in a panic, unsure of what to do. Accept less than what you believe or risk losing even more?”
Unwilling to risk it, Mamdani ended up voting for a budget he had initially opposed as insufficient. Yet somehow the villain of this story is not Heastie, who apparently threatened to withhold even more money from people in need, but Mamdani, who is implied to have shown poor judgment and “earned a reputation for ideological purity.”
The evidence? He pushed hard for single-payer healthcare, fought side-by-side with city taxi drivers to win hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief from the city, joined a protest encampment by cab drivers outside City Hall, and convinced Chuck Schumer to film a video calling attention to the cabbies’ plight via the story of one whose brother, a fellow driver, killed himself under enormous financial pressure. Where outlets like New York see an obsession with “ideological purity,” others see a willingness to fight.
‘A show pony, not a workhorse’
Politico (4/30/25) blamed Mamdani for the end of a free bus pilot program because he didn’t understand that “you’re either a team player or you’re not.”
Mamdani also got Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris to co-sponsor an eight-bill legislative package known as Fix the MTA, which would have frozen fares, instituted six-minute service on subways, and phased in free buses over four years. He spent $22,000 of his own campaign money to promote it.
It didn’t have the unqualified backing of Gov. Hochul or the MTA, so Mamdani texted Mayor Eric Adams, who had mentioned that he found the dictator Idi Amin fascinating, and arranged a dinner with the mayor and Mamdani’s father, whom Amin had expelled from Uganda. Mamdani then convinced Adams to take a photo with a poster touting free buses, and film a quick video to support the program—all of which led to earned media, and resulted in a fare-free-bus pilot being included in the 2023 budget. “It was a success,” Jung writes.
Some might conclude that Mamdani is resourceful and effective. But Jung cautions us to curb our enthusiasm. “For Mamdani,” Jung writes, “this was an example of his ability to work with someone…whom he was critical of and yet recognized as a potential ally.” But wait: Unnamed legislators told Jung that Mamdani could have extended the bus program during the 2024 budget negotiations, but he “took issue” with a part of the budget that would make it easier for landlords to claim they were doing needed repairs while raising rents on rent-stabilized units—a major loophole in New York’s tenant protections.
According to Politico (4/30/25), when Mamdani told Heastie he planned to vote against the budget because of this, Heastie threatened to kill the expansion of the free-bus pilot. Mamdani refused to back down this time, so Heastie pulled the plug on free buses. (Heastie and Mamdani say this didn’t happen.) “That is literally a material good being delivered to the working class…. And [Mamdani] threw it away for a performance,” an unnamed legislator told Jung.
Despite the allegation that Heastie killed free buses because Mamdani wouldn’t support a budget he believed would harm his constituents, Jung again portrays Mamdani as incompetent: “He appeared to realize he’d made a mistake,” and tried and failed during this year’s budget negotiations “to get free buses back on the agenda, this time by attempting to leverage his district’s capital funds.” (The campaign, again, denies this.)
“That to me demonstrates how he operates—you can talk about doing things, but that alone is not going to achieve those things,” yet another unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. What “some New York Democratic Party members”—again, unnamed—see as Mamdani’s legislative missteps “have given them pause about his ability to govern…. They see him as a show pony, not a workhorse,” Jung writes.
It’s a trope often invoked to discredit social media-savvy progressives. As Caroline Fredrickson, president emerita of the American Constitution Society, said of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 (Guardian, 12/24/19): “A lot of people expected a show pony. But it turns out she’s a workhorse.”
‘Aura of privilege’
“Mamdani’s moral clarity has the aura of privilege,” New York snarked, implicitly contrasting him with—Andrew Cuomo (NY1, 6/12/25)?
In addition to casting doubt on Mamdani’s ability to govern, Jung implies that the everyday New Yorkers who admire him are shallow and naive. “Literally this morning I posted you on my Instagram story!” one young woman tells Mamdani, adding, “I’m so emotional seeing you. Like, you’re real.” As a number of public forums and events have made clear, many Mamdani supporters know and care a great deal about policy, while also using Instagram. But you wouldn’t know that from this profile.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of profiles like these is the suggestion that it’s hypocritical to fight for poor and working-class people when you are not poor or working-class. (Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia professor, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a prominent filmmaker.)
The candidate’s “moral clarity,” which many appreciate, has “the aura of privilege,” Jung writes. He asks about “the combination of the relative privilege in [Mamdani’s] own life and the working-class people at the center of his politics.” But to admirers of, say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, there is nothing suspect or contradictory about rich and upper-middle-class people standing in solidarity with their poor and working-class counterparts.
Jung acknowledges that Mamdani has “given hope to people who are in despair…and looking for someone with real fight.” Yet, ultimately, he sees the “appeal of [Mamdani’s] message” as its “simplicity and memeability”—not specific policies or his willingness to battle for them. The final quote is the most telling: “The thing about being a legislator and making compromises is that poor people make compromises every single day,” an unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. “Poor people know what is important, and sometimes they have to choose between two important things.”
It could be that poor people are born knowing how to prioritize and negotiate. Or it could be that politicians force them to choose between, for example, reliable transit and affordable housing. This profile creates the impression that Mamdani is unwilling to compromise and unfit to govern. But it’s just as plausible that his rejection of such false dichotomies has made some colleagues eager to keep him out of the mayor’s office.
This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone.
We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us.
Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Katya Schwenk about Boeing’s non-prosecution deal for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There’s no need for me to rewrite the AP story on how Boeing and the Justice Department got together and decided no crime was committed when Boeing’s 737 Max planes crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. So I’ll just cite it:
Boeing did not tell airlines and pilots about a new software system, called MCAS, that could turn the plane’s nose down without input from pilots if a sensor detected that the plane might go into an aerodynamic stall.
The Max planes crashed after a faulty reading from the sensor pushed the nose down and pilots were unable to regain control. After the second crash, Max jets were grounded worldwide until the company redesigned MCAS to make it less powerful and to use signals from two sensors, not just one.
The Justice Department charged Boeing in 2021 with deceiving FAA regulators about the software, which did not exist in older 737s, and about how much training pilots would need to fly the plane safely. The department agreed not to prosecute Boeing at the time, however, if the company paid a $2.5 billion settlement, including the $243.6 million fine, and took steps to comply with anti-fraud laws for three years.
Federal prosecutors, however, last year said Boeing violated the terms of the 2021 agreement by failing to make promised changes to detect and prevent violations of federal anti-fraud laws. Boeing agreed last July to plead guilty to the felony fraud charge instead of enduring a potentially lengthy public trial.
But now that we’re up to speed, here’s a reporter whose work, unlike that of AP, is not headlined with a little ticker telling you how Boeing stock is doing. Katya Schwenk is a journalist whose work appears at the Lever, the Intercept and the Baffler, among other outlets. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katya Schwenk.
Katya Schwenk: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
JJ: I used that long quote for information, but I do hope that listeners know that those Indonesia and Ethiopia 737 crashes weren’t the start of all of this. And I know that listeners will have clocked the bit about Boeing agreeing to plead guilty if it would spare them a “lengthy public trial.” So if I kill a few hundred people, I don’t think I can say, “Well, yeah, I did it, and I knew I was doing it, but here’s some change from my bottomless bucket of money, because otherwise I might have to lose my whole summer in court.”
I can’t help but be startled at the reception to this agreement, as though it actually, as a DoJ spokesperson said, “provides finality and compensation for the families and makes an impact for the safety of future air travelers.” Is there any indication of that happening?
KS: Yeah, I think the answer to that is a pretty resounding “no.” I mean, the families do not support this agreement. They had wanted to see Boeing face a trial, face some kind of criminal penalty, face real accountability after the crashes. The families of these people who died in the planes, they had been fighting for years and years to get some small measure of accountability in court.
And it looked like they might actually see that, when the Justice Department had given Boeing a sweetheart deal under the first Trump administration. It was walked back last year; it seemed like Boeing might actually plead guilty. And then this has basically completely undone all of that.
The fine, in terms of, if you think about how much money Boeing has, it’s somewhat negligible. It includes credit for what they’ve already paid in this case. So I think it’s pretty disappointing for everyone who wanted to see Boeing face real public accountability.
JJ: What is a “non-prosecution agreement,” which is coming up a lot in this? What does it do? What does it not do?
KS: Basically, the Justice Department has agreed to drop all criminal charges against Boeing, and has said that so long as Boeing pays this fine, invests more in its “compliance programs,” it will not be moving forward with any criminal charges. It’s dropping the case, basically.
And this is different from what had been the previous sweetheart deal; it’s even better than the first sweetheart deal, which was a deferred prosecution agreement, which basically meant, we’ll wait and see if we’re going to prosecute you. We’ll see if you comply–if you invest more in your anti-fraud programs, in this case. And the deal that was just released today, this is like, they’re not even going to continue monitoring Boeing. It’s just like, total blank slate, charges are gone.
JJ: The idea that if you just throw enough money at it, it’s not a crime, I just know how weird that lands with everybody who is understanding that that just means if you’re rich, you can do what you want. Or if you’re a corporation and you have enough money, you can commit a crime, and we won’t call it a crime because you can pay. It just sounds wrong.
KS: Yeah. This is like the Trump administration approach to white-collar crime and holding corporations accountable, which is part of a longer-term trend in the US government for decades. But corporations, even when, in this case, many, many people died, right, often are given deals that allow them to just pay a big fine, say they’ve implemented reforms, and get away scot free.
And there was a moment where it felt like Boeing might not. There was so much public scrutiny, there was so much pressure on the DoJ to actually hold them accountable, and instead we’re seeing that.
JJ: I just talked with Jeff Hauser, from the aptly named Revolving Door Project, and it seems like cronyism, and “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” has been a part of your focus as you’ve reported this story out for some time now.
Katya Schwenk: “You can really see how close the relationship is between Boeing and people at the highest positions of power in our country.”
KS: Yeah, absolutely. Boeing spends quite a lot of money lobbying Washington. There are people that go into roles at the DoJ or the FAA that have previously worked for Boeing. It’s very much the revolving door at work, and they do quite a lot of business with the federal government.
And so we’ve seen, under the Trump administration, they have granted various giveaways to Boeing. They facilitated a massive deal; the government of Qatar gave Boeing a huge contract to work on fighter jets. You can really see how close the relationship is between Boeing and people at the highest positions of power in our country.
And I think that, definitely, that’s explaining a lot of what’s going on. And I think the more people that we can have paying attention, not only to Boeing, but again to these sort of mechanisms, levers of power, challenging either–I mean, you mentioned the stock price of Boeing is often the focus of a lot of media attention. I think there are many people who would say it’s not good that you have a company responsible for all this air travel that’s totally ruled by Wall Street. And so I think that really needs to be the focus of reporting moving forward, how it’s going, buying influence, who are they answering to? Is it their engineers, is it the flying public? Is it travelers, or is it their shareholders?
JJ: And just finally, if folks do pick up a paper today and look for a story on Boeing, they will likely see a story about how China is scrambling to make something as good as a Boeing plane. That seems to be the way Boeing is showing up in the media right now.
It’s almost as if the story, it’s done. That was yesterday, and now we’re moving on to this corporation that has these deep contracts, military contracts, government contracts. If an individual killed hundreds of people, the story wouldn’t just die because we thought, “Oh, they’re going to go on and do something good, maybe.” It’s a malfeasance on journalism’s part, I feel.
KS: Absolutely. It sends a message, right? It sends a message that you can do something like that, and we’ll move on and we won’t pay attention. So, yeah, I totally agree.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with journalist Katya Schwenk. Her work on Boeing can be found at the Lever and at Jacobin, and no doubt elsewhere. Thank you, Katya Schwenk, very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser about DOGE “after” Elon Musk for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “A Bruised Musk Leaves Washington,” the New York Timestold readers. USA Todaysaid, “Musk Leaves Trump Administration, Capping His Run as Federal Government Slasher.” The Washington Postsaid “his departure marks the end of a turbulent chapter.”
While most outlets acknowledge that the impacts of Musk’s time as “special government employee” are still in effect, and even that many of the minions he placed are still hard at work, the focus was still very much on the great man—What drives him? What will he do next?—rather than on the structures and systems whose flaws are highlighted by the maneuvers of Musk and the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency.
Our guest says now is not the time to take our eye off the ball. Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jeff Hauser.
Jeff Hauser: Hi, great to be here.
JJ: I feel as though we spoke recently because we spoke recently, but for the press corps, there’s a new story. To imagine, as some headlines suggest, that Elon Musk has packed up his toys and left town, so some kind of chapter has concluded—that’s not just inaccurate, but rather worrisomely so, don’t you think?
JH: Absolutely. Elon Musk brought dozens of people with him to Washington, DC, to government. They were very homogeneous, in the sense that none of them were qualified to work at senior levels of government, and they all were motivated by a hatred for public service and a hatred for government protecting ordinary people from the whims of corporate America.
And they remain in government right now. They’re implementing Musk’s agenda, which happens to be pretty similar to Russell Vought’s agenda, which happens to be very similar to Project 2025’s agenda, which was an agenda that Donald Trump disavowed, but is obviously governing with.
JJ: Talk about Russell Vought a little bit. I know he’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, but what else do we need to know about him, in this context?
JH: Russell Vought is sort of like Elon Musk, if Elon Musk had been paying attention to politics for a couple of decades, and minus the allegations of ketamine usage. Russell Vought brings a unique combination of hard-right social views and hard libertarian views on economic policy. He is the personal marriage of all the sort of worst tendencies within the Republican coalition, and he knows what he’s doing.
He had a senior role in the Trump administration go-around one. He thinks that they underperformed, that they could have attacked government more, they could have made the country even “freer” and more supportive of the richest, most rapacious corporations; and he’s determined that they succeed at doing so again. And he spent the four-year interregnum planning, in exquisite detail, how to bring about the devastation of American government–of the professionalization of the American government that has been the project for more than 140 years, since the Pendleton Act and the rise of the civil service in the early 1880s.
JJ: ProPublicarevealed some speeches Vought gave a little while back, and touching on Project 2025, which he’s an architect of, goes right to what you’re just saying. Part of myriad things they want to do is revive Schedule F, which would make it easier to fire large groups of government workers who right now have civil service protections. But what struck me was the quote; this is Vought:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
I have a feeling if that quote were put in front of people, it might provide some light on the project here.
JH: Absolutely. It was hiding in plain sight. They told us what they were going to do, but Donald Trump disavowed it. Donald Trump said, I’m not going to run on Project 2025. This stuff is so extreme. It’s crazy. Obviously I’m not going to do it. But they’re doing it, note for note.
And I can tell you, as somebody who not only does politics but lives in Washington, DC, when you’re in the community, there are a lot of traumatized public servants who really, deeply believe in the mission of their agencies, people who could have made a lot more money and had easier, more comfortable lives outside of government service, but are in government for the right reasons. And they are genuinely traumatized right now, and they have a lot of capacity to do good in the world that was underappreciated. Now they are being radically disempowered, and it’s going to take a very long time; it’s going to take a lot of great energy, to ever rebuild this government that Russell Vought, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are destroying.
JJ: I think it’s so interesting how you say that, even though this Trump administration is acting out the points of Project 2025, the story is still, “Oh, he disavowed it.” And it really highlights the way media have difficulty focusing on what’s happening when they’re so busy listening to what folks are saying, and what other folks are saying about what those folks are saying. But what we really need them to do is to track actual actions.
JH: Absolutely. It’d be great if the media were more focused on letting people understand what it is that the government can be doing, ordinarily does, is doing and should be doing.
I don’t think people have a good understanding of government. Even political junkies who can tell you a lot about Nebraska’s Second District, and the chances of Democrats taking back that house seat, and how that one electoral vote might influence the Electoral College in the presidential cycle—people who know that level of minutia can’t really tell you what the Office of Management and Budget does.
They almost certainly can’t tell you what OIRA, which is a subset of the Office of Management and Budget that focuses on regulatory issues, does. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you about what the civil service does, or the role of the EPA as law enforcement against corporate criminality. They don’t know these things. The media do not convey these things.
And so if there is an abstract threat about government bureaucrats, even political junkies don’t understand, definitely, what that will mean for their real lives. And I think it’s going to become, unfortunately, painfully clear in the coming years what that means. But the process is not immediate, and it’s incumbent upon the media to, as things go wrong, show the causality, show how these bad things were made much more likely to occur by Trump’s actions, by Musk’s actions, by Vought’s actions, by their disdain for public service, and their embrace of corporate titans being able to do whatever they want to do.
JJ: I want to just ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, but I just saw this quote from AP, which said Musk “succeeded in providing a dose of shock therapy to the federal government, but he has fallen short of other goals.” And we’re supposed to take away that providing “shock therapy” to the federal government is somehow benign or necessary or a good thing; it’s remarkable.
But let me ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, and how you hope journalists and others can use the tools and the information that you’re providing?
Jeff Hauser: “Taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage.”
JH: Yeah, I think the quote really actually gets at a lot of what the Revolving Door Project is up to, because we do two types of work. One is pushing back on Trump, on creeping authoritarianism, and rapacious oligarchs destroying the government so they can pillage society.
So we do that work, but we also fight back against neoliberals within the Democratic Party. We’re a nonpartisan organization, and we attack neoliberalism in all of its many forms. And the idea that government required shock therapy, that there were too many people working in government, even though the number of people working in government is the same as it was two or three generations ago, when America’s population was half of what it currently is.
But the notion of this is a nonpartisan idea, that government required shock therapy: That is the marriage of Democratic neoliberals and Republican neoliberals, and that is what allowed Musk and DOGE and Trump to happen. It’s that belief that things really were broken, that there was some legitimacy to the concept of DOGE from the jump. No one should have ever validated the idea of DOGE, or talked about, “Here’s my vision for what government efficiency pursuits would happen.”
Because Musk’s goals were not to cut government spending. In fact, Silicon Valley wants way more financial support for their artificial intelligence data centers and the like. They want subsidies for all sorts of tech projects, and they want a bigger military industrial complex that is more heavily dependent on Silicon Valley. So they want lots of spending, they just want it on their priorities. They want to attack government workers, because those government workers enforce the rules that limit and constrain corporate oligarchs.
So that’s what they wanted. They did not want to reduce the deficit, and taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage. And I’d like the media to be less credulous about people who have obvious economic stakes in public policy, and pretending that the rhetoric that they deploy, especially when they’re known liars, is something that we should take seriously.
JJ: And so the work you’re doing is tracking the ins and outs of what these predations have meant, and what they could mean, and how to stay on top of them?
JH: Yes. We are cataloging under our DOGE Watch feature the ways in which Trump and Musk are attacking the ability of government to protect ordinary people. And we’re also monitoring, separately—we have a website, Hackwatch.us—how ostensible Democratic-aligned, center-left neoliberal pundits, people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, are making things easier for corporate oligarchs, are carrying water for Silicon Valley and are pursuing neoliberalism, because we’re against neoliberalism in all forms.
JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note—for now. We’ve been speaking with Jeff Hauser from the Revolving Door Project. Jeff Hauser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Israeli tanks opened fire last Sunday on a crowd of thousands of starving Palestinians at an aid distribution center in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The victims had gathered in hopes of finding food for themselves and their families, following a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade of the territory. At least 31 people were killed; one Palestinian was also killed by Israeli fire the same day at another distribution site in central Gaza.
On Monday, June 2, three more Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli projectiles while trying to procure food, and on Tuesday there were 27 fatalities at the aid hub in Rafah. This brought the total number of Palestinian deaths at the newly implemented hubs to more than 100 in just a week.
‘Not possible to implement’
Al Jazeera‘s Hind Khoudary (6/3/25): ““The Israeli forces just opened fire randomly, shooting Palestinians…using quadcopters and live ammunition.”
Mass killing in the guise of food distribution is occurring under the supervision of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a sketchy-as-hell organization registered in Switzerland and Delaware. It boasts the participation of former US military and intelligence officers, as well as solid Israeli endorsement and armed US security contractors escorting food deliveries.
Jake Wood—the ex-US Marine sniper who had taken up the post of GHF executive director—recently resigned after reasoning that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.”
Indeed, the GHF, which has temporarily suspended operations to conduct damage control, has managed to align its activities entirely with the genocidal vision of the state of Israel, whose military has killed more than 54,600 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu determined that “minimal” aid should be let into Gaza, lest mass starvation force the US to scale back its support for genocide (which is somehow less problematic than enforced famine).
By entrusting the delivery of this “minimal” aid to the brand-new GHF, rather than the United Nations and other groups that have decades of experience doing such things, the Israelis have in fact been able to call the shots in terms of strategic placement of the aid hubs. Only four are currently in place for a starving population of 2 million, requiring many Palestinians to walk long distances—those that are able to walk, that is—across Israeli military lines.
The hubs are mainly in southern Gaza, which is conveniently where Israel has schemed to concentrate the surviving Palestinian population, in order to then expel them in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s dream of a brand-new Palestinian-free “Riviera of the Middle East” in the Gaza Strip. Even as he authorized the resumption of aid, Netanyahu reiterated his vow to “take control” of all of Gaza. As UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has observed, “Aid distribution has become a death trap.”
Leading with denials
The Washington Post headline (6/2/25) puts Israel’s rebuttal ahead of the charge it’s responding to.
And yet despite all of this, Western corporate media have somehow found it difficult to report in straightforward fashion that the food-distribution massacres have left Palestinians with a rather bleak choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food aid.
So it is that we end up with, for example, the Washington Post’s Tuesday dispatch (6/2/25) from Jerusalem, headlined “Israel Says It Fired ‘Warning Shots’ Near Aid Site; Health Officials Say 27 Dead,” which charitably gave Israel the privilege of refuting what the health officials have said before they even say it. The article quoted the Israeli army as claiming that its soldiers had fired at suspects “who advanced toward the troops in such a way that posed a threat.” It also quoted the following statement from the GHF:
While the aid distribution was conducted safely and without incident at our site today, we understand that [Israeli army] is investigating whether a number of civilians were injured after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone.
Anyway, that’s what happens when you put your aid distribution site in the middle of an Israeli military zone.
Then there was the BBC report (5/31/25) on Sunday’s massacre, headlined “Israel Denies Firing at Civilians After Hamas-Run Ministry Says 31 Killed in Gaza Aid Center Attack,” which went on to underscore that the ministry in question was the “Hamas-run health ministry.” Given Hamas’s role as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, this is sort of like specifying that the US Department of Health & Human Services is “run by the US government”—except that, in Gaza’s case, the “Hamas-run” qualifier is meant to cast doubt on the ministry’s claims. Never mind that said ministry’s death counts have over time consistently “held up to UN scrutiny, independent investigations and even Israel’s tallies,” as the Associated Press (11/6/23) has previously acknowledged.
The BBC headline (5/31/25) likewise presents Israel’s defense before revealing the charge made by the “Hamas-run ministry.”
On Tuesday, though, the AP (6/3/25) chimed in with its own headline, “Gaza Officials Say Israeli Forces Killed 27 Heading to Aid Site. Israel Says It Fired Near Suspects.” The text of the article details how Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is “led by medical professionals but reports to the Hamas-run government,” has calculated that the majority of the more than 54,000 Palestinian fatalities in Israel’s current war on Gaza are women and children, but hasn’t said “how many of the dead were civilians or combatants.”
Meanwhile, Reuters (6/1/25) reported that an Israeli attack near a GHF-run aid distribution point had “killed at least 30 people in Rafah, Palestinian news agency WAFA and Hamas-affiliated media said on Sunday.” In a separate article on Sunday’s massacre, the news wire (6/1/25) wrote that
the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said 31 people were killed with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest from Israeli fire as they were gathered in the Al-Alam district aid distribution area in Rafah.
The latter dispatch was headlined “Gaza Ministry Says Israel Kills More Than 30 Aid Seekers, Israel Denies.”
‘No shortage’
Israel’s most absurd denials can turn into headlines (Le Monde, 4/8/25).
There is pretty much no end to the crafty sidelining by Western corporate media of truthful assertions by “Hamas-run” entities—and the simultaneous provision of ample space to the Israeli military to continue its established tradition of propagating outright lies. Recall that time not so long ago that Israeli officials insisted that there was “no shortage” of aid in the Gaza Strip, despite a full-blown blockade, and the glee directly expressed by various Israeli ministers about not letting an iota of food, or anything else necessary for survival, into the besieged enclave (FAIR.org, 4/25/25).
It is furthermore perplexing why there is even a perceived need to cast doubt on massacres of 31 or 27 or three individuals, in the context of a genocide that has killed more than 54,600 people in 20 months—a war in which Israel has exhibited no qualms in slaughtering starving people, as in the February 2024 incident when at least 112 Palestinians were massacred while queuing for flour southwest of Gaza City (FAIR.org, 3/22/24). Against a backdrop of such wanton slaughter, what are 100 more Palestinian deaths to Israel? Indiscriminate mass killing is, after all, the objective here.
Just as GHF is now engaged in micro-level damage control operations vis-à-vis their militarized distribution of food in Gaza, Israel, too, appears to be in a similar mode, since it’s a whole lot simpler—and helpfully distracting—to bicker over dozens of casualties rather than, you know, a whole genocide.
And the Western establishment media are, as ever, standing by to lend a helping hand. Perhaps we should start calling them the “Israel-affiliated media.”
White House photo (5/30/25) of Elon Musk’s farewell press conference with President Donald Trump.
This week on CounterSpin: An email we got this week tells us: “The radical left is up in arms about DOGE. Just think about it—DOGE has exposed BILLIONS in wasteful spending, and is rooting out fraud and corruption at every turn. They’re making the government work for the people of this great nation once again, as the founders intended, and that is why the left simply can’t stand DOGE.” The ask is that we fill out a survey that represents “our once-in-a-lifetime chance to slash the bloated, woke and wasteful policies in the federal government. Thank you, and God Bless, Speaker Mike Johnson. (Paid for by the NRCC and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.)”
Reports are that Elon Musk is leaving government, going back to make Tesla great again or something. But if that’s true, why did we get this weird, sad email? We’ll talk about how to miss Musk when he won’t go away with Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.
Also on the show: The New York Times has its stories on the Boeing “non-prosecution agreement” in the “Business” section, suggesting that whether planes drop out of the sky is mostly a concern for investors. A huge corporation paying money to dodge criminal charges is evidently not a general interest story. And the families and friends of the hundreds of people dead because of Boeing’s admittedly knowing malfeasance? They’re just another county heard from. If you want reporting that calls crimes “crimes,” even if they’re committed by corporations, you need to look outside of corporate media. We’ll hear about Boeing from independent journalist Katya Schwenk.
The New York Times (12/2/19) apparently doesn’t think Greta Thunberg is an icon Gaza desperately needs.
When Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was fighting for climate justice in her home country and the world stage, the New York Times gave her top billing. She co-authored an op-ed (8/19/21), and was the subject of a long interview (10/30/20).
Acclaimed film director Darren Aronofsky wrote a piece for the Times (12/2/19) headlined “Greta Thunberg Is the Icon the Planet Desperately Needs.” Seeing a photo of her at 15, staging her first environmental protest, he said: “Here was the image—one of hope, commitment and action—I needed to see. An image that could spark a movement.” Her work was highlighted constantly in the Paper of Record (e.g., New YorkTimes, 2/18/19, 8/29/19, 9/18/19, 1/21/20, 4/9/21, 11/4/21, 6/30/23).
Now Thunberg is sailing to Gaza with a group of 11 other activists in what AP (6/2/25) called an “effort to bring in some aid and raise ‘international awareness’ over the ongoing humanitarian crisis.” The Israeli blockade of Gaza and the ongoing military strikes on the devastated territory is leading to a massive starvation crisis (UN News, 6/1/25; FAIR.org, 4/25/25).
No fawning coverage of Thunberg’s activism from the Times this time. No Hollywood big shot saying that he hoped her trip would “spark a movement.”
‘Professional tantrum-thrower’
Fox News‘ Greg Gutfeld (6/3/25) decried Thunberg’s “promiscuity of activism.”
The right-wing press is upset about Thunberg’s voyage and Palestine advocacy, of course. The Israeli military “says it is ‘prepared’ to raid the ship, as it has done with previous freedom flotilla efforts,” reported the Daily Mail (6/4/25), adding IDF spokesperson Gen. Effie Defrin’s remark: “We have gained experience in recent years, and we will act accordingly.” Israeli security sources have reportedly vowed to stop the vessel before it gets to Gaza (Jerusalem Post, 6/4/25, 6/5/25).
The British Spectator‘s Julie Burchill (6/4/25) said:
When we consider child stars through the ages, the girls generally age better than the boys; Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Piper all made the seamless switch from winsome cuties to gifted entertainers. The same cannot be said of Greta Thunberg, though she’s certainly remained consistently irritating. Neither a singer nor a thespian, she is a professional tantrum-thrower, more comparable to the fictional horrors Violet Elizabeth Bott and Veruca Salt than the trio of troupers listed above.
“Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (X, 6/1/25), a ghoulish statement suggesting that an attack on the ship was imminent. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (6/2/25) called the message a “grotesque social media post suggesting a possible Israeli state terrorism attack on peaceful international activists aboard a humanitarian aid ship bound for Gaza.”
The pro-Israel media criticism website HonestReporting (6/4/25) called Thunberg’s participation in the aid mission an “anti-Israel publicity stunt.” “Greta Thunberg’s beliefs are as shallow as her need for attention,” said Fox News host Greg Gutfeld (6/3/25). Rita Panahi of Australia’s Sky News (6/4/25) called Thunberg a “doom goblin.”
These comments aren’t just mean-spirited but ominous, considering that the group’s previous mission was aborted when their ship suffered a drone attack (Reuters, 5/6/25), and an aid flotilla to Gaza 15 years ago ended up with Israeli special forces killing ten activists (Al Jazeera, 5/30/20).
From star to nonentity
Greta Thunberg (AP, 6/2/25): “No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”
And yet while the New YorkTimes (5/2/25) covered the aborted mission and Thunberg’s involvement, it has not yet reported on the current mission and Thunberg’s role. As noted earlier, AP (6/2/25) covered the launch of the current mission, with Thunberg aboard, which was re-run in the Washington Post (6/2/25). She has done interviews with other media from the boat (Democracy Now!, 6/4/25).
How could she have gone from a star in the Times‘ pages to such a nonentity? Given how much attention she received in the Times for leading a movement for climate justice, one might think that her dedication to the strife in Gaza might warrant some attention, too.
For activists and journalists who have covered the press response to the crisis in Gaza, this is all part of the Palestine exception, where liberal groups and outlets might show concern for humanitarian crises around the world, but lower their outrage or stay completely silent on the subject of Palestine.
FAIR (5/22/25) recently noted another example of this phenomenon at the Times. An op-ed by its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25), decried attacks on the freedom of the press around the world, but omitted that the biggest killer of journalists in the world today is the Israeli government.
‘Money from Hamas’
The New York Times (5/14/25) treated the idea that Hamas might be bankrolling an American children’s entertainer as a plausible allegation.
The New York Times (5/14/25) recently covered the backlash children’s entertainer Rachel Griffin Accurso, aka Ms. Rachel, has received from pro-Israel activists for using her platform to speak out for Palestinian children. The most eyebrow-raising bit from the piece:
Last month, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism labeled Accurso the “Antisemite of the Week” and, the New York Postreported, sent a letter urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Accurso is receiving funding to further Hamas’s agenda.
Accurso “posted nearly 50 times about the children of Gaza, most of which is filled with misinformation from Hamas, and only five times about Israeli children,” the group, which monitors statements about Israel on social media accounts of prominent figures, said on its website. “In the case of the Israeli children, she only posted due to widespread public backlash, never condemning Hamas and the Palestinians.”
Accurso, 42, in an emailed response denied having received money from Hamas. “This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” she said.
It’s impossible to imagine that if Accurso had been speaking about Ukrainian children suffering under Russia’s invasion, the Times or any other US establishment outlet would entertain the notion that she was working on behalf of the Azov Battalion or another extremist Ukrainian faction. Alas, this is how the Palestine exception works in US media like the Times.
Accurso and Thunberg’s advocacy for Palestinian civilians is dangerous to those cheerleading the slaughter in Gaza, because their status as clear-eyed and big-hearted people give public legitimacy to the Palestinian cause. The Times invoking the Palestinian exception against them is a part of a larger effort to keep public opinion from turning against Israeli militarism.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky:@NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
New York Timespromo for an upcoming podcast on how “medical treatment for transgender young people, and how the care got pulled into a political fight.”
As Pride month kicks off, the New York Times is releasing a new six-part podcast about medical care for trans youth—a subject on which Times coverage has been shameful.
Reporting on the issue is of critical importance at the moment, given the breathtaking assault on trans rights by the Trump administration, which has issued at least six anti-trans executive orders in its first months. Across the country, 920 bills aimed at trans people have been introduced in the first half of 2025, and the Supreme Court is poised to issue a decision in the Skrmetti case that may legitimize restrictions on gender-affirming care.
But in light of the Times‘ documented anti-trans bias—and the fact that reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, responsible for much of their previous problematic coverage (FAIR.org, 8/30/23, 7/19/24), is centrally involved in the podcast—trans activists are girding for the worst. Ghorayshi has been criticized for misreporting the experiences of trans minors and their families, misrepresenting study findings, and promoting unsubstantiated claims that contributed in part to the closure of a St. Louis youth gender clinic.
FAIR described an article by the New York Times‘ Azeen Ghorayshi (8/23/23) as “a greatest-hits album of all of the Times’ problematic coverage on adolescent gender-affirming care, filled with familiar tropes and tactics the paper of record has used to distort the issue.”
The podcast teaser offers a glimpse of what’s to come: back-and-forth quotes from trans people and those seeking to take away trans kids’ health care, plus some troubling quotes like this one:
If the treatment is barred, some kids will suffer because they can’t access the treatment. If the treatment is allowed, some kids will suffer who get the treatment and later wish they hadn’t. And then the question becomes, how does the court choose which group?
It’s not clear who the speaker is, but the sense the listener gets is that these are equal harms. The reality is that regret over gender-affirming care is extremely low (Medium, 3/24/23), and such care has been shown to greatly reduce the alarmingly high suicide rates among trans youth (HCPLive, 3/8/22).
It’s worth noting that standards for gender-affirming care for youth do not even recommend surgery for children under the age of 18 except in extreme cases. Instead, treatment typically begins—after screenings from both mental health and medical professionals—with entirely reversible puberty blockers.
A voice later in the teaser remarks:
Conservative states want to just, you know, be done with trans people altogether. And when reports come out that show this, you know, two-sided thing and the skepticism and the fact there’s no evidence, this just adds fuel to their fire.
Sign at the Transexual Menace protest at the New York Times (photo: Tyler Albertario).
The claim that “there’s no evidence” to support the value of gender-affirming care is not a fact, but a myth (Psychology Today, 1/24/22)—one promoted by credulous reporting of the British government’s Cass Review by the Times‘ Ghorayshi (FAIR.org, 7/19/24).
The teaser frames the story as one in which “the medicine and the politics have become impossibly entangled.” As media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 6/4/25) observes:
Transgender healthcare didn’t get “pulled into” a political fight—it became the target of a coordinated campaign by anti-trans activists and Republican politicians. But the Times‘ language suggests this is some kind of natural, inevitable conflict rather than a deliberate assault on medical care.
The Transexual Menace, a group of trans rights activists, is picketingNew York Times offices today. “For years now, the New York Times‘ reporting on trans healthcare has given undue credence to anecdotes offered by bigots,” spokesperson Anabel Ruggiero said in a statement. The group is demanding “an end to the Times’ deliberate anti-transgender bias.”
Janine Jackson interviewed guitarist Tom Morello about music as protest for the May 30, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: We know the roll by now: Trump blurts out his latest hateful fever dream, and then anyone seeking favor scrambles to, if not make it make sense, make it happen. Among the latest is a demand that the Federal Election Commission launch a “major investigation” of Bruce Springsteen, who described the Trump White House as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” in a UK concert, even after Trump tweeted that Springsteen “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT,” and “we’ll all see how it goes for him.”
If there’s a “musicians to threaten” list going around, our guest is for sure on it. I suspect he’d be curious if he weren’t. Guitarist Tom Morello has been a member of bands Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, along with myriad other projects, including supergroup Prophets of Rage with Chuck D, and his solo work as the Nightwatchman. He’s also, I understand, co-directing a documentary, and who knows what else. He joins us now by phone from LA. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tom Morello.
Tom Morello: Thank you very much for having me, Janine. Nice to hear your voice.
JJ: This is all as ham-fisted as everything Trump does, and yet that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
TM: Sure.
JJ: Intimidation doesn’t have to hit its ostensible target to have effects. So maybe no one thinks Taylor Swift, for example, is shaking in her boots, but less-powerful and less-protected artists might feel some kind of way. So how would you speak to artists trying to make their way, about how you see the potential role of, in particular, musicians in Trumpian times?
Tom Morello: “I’ve always had the firm belief…that history is not something that happens, it’s something that we make.” (Creative Commons photo: Ralph_PH)
TM: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always believed that dangerous times demand dangerous music, and especially in these troubled times, music, joy and even laughter have suddenly become acts of resistance. There may come a time in the not-so-distant future, we may be at it right now, where the ideas expressed in our songs, and the people who write them and play them, and maybe even those who sit in the audience, may find themselves censored, smothered, evicted and erased. But not today.
I’ve always had the firm belief, and expressed over 22 albums in my career, that history is not something that happens, it’s something that we make, and so I try to encourage both myself and my audience to head out into that world and confront injustice wherever it rears its ugly head, whether it’s in your school, in your place of work, or in your country at large: the threats of the Trump administration is to not just artists, but it’s a McCarthyite fervor that seems to be on the rise. And there’s two ways to respond to it. One is to duck and cover. And the other is to meet the moment.
I’ve been very encouraged; the way that Bruce Springsteen has continued—his response to Trump’s diatribe was to release an album of the show that infuriated Trump. I played a couple of days ago at my alma mater, Harvard University, with a set that not only supported Bruce, but supported the university stance of not bending the knee and kissing the ring and allowing private education facilities to be under the governance of a proto-fascist regime.
So people have to make up their minds who they are and what they’re going to be. My take has always been, if you do have convictions, you need to weave them into your vocation, and let the chips fall where they may. If you don’t have convictions, then by all means, don’t pretend to have them for Tom Morello.
JJ: Boston Mediadescribed the atmosphere at your recent set at Boston Calling as “cathartic defiance.” I suspect you’re happy with that.
TM: I felt that, and I think that it’s cathartic because we live in a world where people don’t know if anyone’s feeling the same way that they do, if anyone’s willing to speak out when the right-wing choir is so loud, it’s like, will anyone stand against it? And when you play a set of my own music, Rage Against The Machine songs, some Bruce Springsteen songs, and rile them up with a good Fred Hampton–like fervor in between songs, people recognize that, “Oh, we are not alone,” and that music is a force that can really steel the backbone of people in times of turmoil and struggle.
JJ: I was bemused by one headline I saw that called that set “expletive-laden,” and that was the headline, and I thought, “Wow, we’ve got ‘grab them by the pussy’ in office, but it’s still worth noting when people don’t show decorum.”
TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is funny. The fact that that’s news, with the rollback of democracy and the mass murder of children and whatnot, if someone uses a cuss word, that that’s going to make the headline, feels absolutely ridiculous.
JJ: It’s ridiculous. Well, all right. Mother’s Day, which just passed, has become about buying flowers for underappreciated women, but some will know that it began as Mother’s Day for Peace, when activists were calling for husbands and sons not to be killed in war. Its founders hated that it became a Hallmark holiday.
Part of what I see you doing is waking present-day listeners to the history of protest music, and music as protest. Using Woody Guthrie‘s “This Land Is Your Land” is a great example of censored, semi-understood, sanitized history. Why does that song mean so much to you?
TM: Sure, sure, sure. Well, I learned “This Land is Your Land,” like most of us did, in the third grade, where they censored out the verses that explained what the song was really about. “This Land is Your Land” is a radical anthem about economic leveling. It was written by Woody Guthrie, and Woody Guthrie knew that music could be a binding force. It could be an elevating power, an uplifting, unifying and transcendent thing, that music can be both a defensive shield and a weapon for change. Authoritarians and billionaires think that this country belongs to them. Woody Guthrie’s song insists that this land is your land.
Woody Guthrie
JJ: And yet the very verses—it’s remarkable, in the sense that we learned to sing it and celebrate it and say, “Yeah, we all believe in this, but not this part that we’re not going to talk about.” It seems emblematic in some ways.
TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah:
As I was walking, I saw a sign there
And that sign said “private property.”
On the other side, it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.
In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple,
Near the relief office, I see my people.
And some are grumbling and all are wondering
If this land is still made for you and me.
And then he sings the chorus, “This land was made for you and me,” answering his own question in a very powerful way.
JJ: I’m pretty sure that anyone singing that today would be told to shut up and sing.
I want to take you, just for a second—I’ve been to Rage shows, and I have seen oceans of young white men scream full-voice, “Some of those who work forces! Are the same who burn crosses!” since before George Floyd, before Michael Brown, before “I can’t breathe.” It’s…interesting, I will say. And it must mean that you’ve seen, for many, many years, a kind of energy, in a kind of place that I suspect many folks didn’t think existed.
TM: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of different buckets the people who enjoy Rage Against The Machine exist in. Some are people who come to the music because they pre-diagnosed to agree with the politics of it.
Some simply enjoy it for the raw power and the aggression and the screaming guitar solos and whatnot, and have no idea what’s going on in the lyrics, that sort of shout along. They’re more than welcome.
Then there are those that are drawn to the songs because of the heaviness of the music, or the aggression of the music, and they come away with a different set of ideas, because that band has a different set of ideas than the other bands that play similar music. Sometimes you see that Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment, where their eyes are opened.
And then there’s the unique bucket of those that believe the songs are right-wing anthems, and are shocked to find that the members of Rage Against The Machine have politics very, very different from their own.
JJ: It’s got to be strange. It’s got to be strange. You know, if I put up a Facebook post and it gets more than 20 views, I get nervous: I’m not trying to be a spokesperson, I’m just trying to speak. You cannot answer every objection to what you’re doing. You cannot come along with every record and interpret it for people. So you have to relax and let it speak, right?
TM: Yeah. The Rage Against The Machine music, and the music in my 22-album career, it’s not a Noam Chomsky lecture. The idea is to make art that is compelling, and makes people jump up and down, or shake their butts or whatever, and then there is a message that’s contained in it. And you can check all the boxes, or one of the boxes, and it’s totally all right.
JJ: Right. Right. Well, you’re a musician because you love music, and you are political because you’re political, and these things come together. So, I mean, unless it’s an article about what strings you prefer, there’s really hardly a way for a music critic to talk about your career, and your various projects, without talking about social and racial justice, or what many insist on calling “politics,” as though that were somehow a separate, denatured category of interest. So I just said, “Shut up and sing.” That’s never made sense as a complaint with you, but it’s really dumb, whoever it’s aimed at?
TM: Well, I mean, “shut up and sing” is exclusively reserved for artists whom you disagree with. It’s not “shut up and sing” if you’re politically aligned. It’s when the cognitive dissonance occurs—like, “I really like this music, but I can’t stand the fact that I’m having my nose shoved in my own prejudices.”
JJ: You’ve been interviewed, you’ve been spoken to a lot, and I can imagine some of the things that reporters come at you with. I remember, years ago, you went on Bill Maher, and had that experience. I wonder, do you ever feel like you need to redirect? I find sometimes I have to say, “Well, I’m not going to respond to that question. I’m going to say something different.” Do you ever need to redirect reporters, mid-conversation?
TM: I would say that I wish sometimes that there was more thoughtful reporting than what I’m exposed to, because to most people who cover music, I’m a unicorn. They don’t have a lot of artists that they’re exposed to that have a lifetime of political engagement. So a casual music journalist tends to ask the same seven questions, over the course of 30 years. I actually look forward to stuff that’s a little bit more on the Bill Maher end of the spectrum, where it’s a little bit more sparring, or it’s a little bit more thoughtful or more in-depth. Because they’re like, “So what’s it like being in a political band?” –that level of discourse.
JJ: Exactly. Well, I would say a word that I would use to describe you, Tom, is “jovial.” You’ve made yourself this big fat target, and you seem to be enjoying yourself, like, “This is what I trained for.” To what do you attribute this willingness to be misunderstood, and even hated?
TM: Well, I mean, I’m not jovial because people hate, let me just make that very, very clear.
JJ: No, clear, clear. You’ve been jovial the 30 years I’ve known you.
TM: Yeah, I think that’s independent. It’s independent. I mean, part of it is having a really, really clear North Star. From 16- or 17-years-old, I can attribute a large measure to my mom, Mary Morello, who is currently 101 years old, and still the most radical and popular member of the Morello family. But there’s always been this social justice North Star that is unbending and uncompromising, and I know what I was put here to do.
I didn’t choose to be a guitar player. That chose me. So I’m kind of stuck finding a way to express my convictions in my vocation, and just no two ways about it. Countless opportunities go away when you say the things I say, play the things I play and believe the things that I believe, and it’s totally fine. There’s a contingent of the audience that is smaller than it would be otherwise. But when people make music, make any art, that is widely and generally loved and absorbed by the vast majority of the population, it tends to be shitty art, and I’ve never been interested in that.
JJ: Jim and I used to say we live our life between two Marx quotes: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” and “I have spoken and saved my soul.”
TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JJ: It’s a difficult engagement; for many people, it’s more difficult today than it ever has been, but for many of us, it’s been difficult our whole lives, and knowing when to speak, and how to also keep ourselves safe, and all of that.
It’s not a time to shy away from resistance. It’s a time to lean in. On a cultural front, that’s what these shows are, my small contribution to withstanding the fascist gale that is blowing.
Just talk, finally, Tom Morello, about how you see the present moment, your role within it, and what you’d like folks to think about.
TM: Well, having been engaged in activism of some sort for, my gosh, 40+ years now, it’s a realization that each of us are a link in the chain. Those of us that have a conviction that the world can be a more peaceful, a more equal, a more just place: The arc of history may bend towards justice, but sometimes it swings back the other way, and that doesn’t mean that you should despair. That means you should realize what is moving the meter are people, no different than anyone listening right now. When there’s been progressive, radical, even revolutionary change, it has come from people no different from anyone listening to this right now.
So while that may sound daunting, the good news is that those people who have moved the meter, from Spartacus to today, have been no different from the people—like, no more money, power, influence, courage, intelligence, creativity. It’s a matter of standing up in your time, and doing it to the best of your ability, and recognizing that, in this particular historical moment, it’s a little bit now or never. If you’ve got feelings, you’ve got to express them. Apply yourself in your place of work, in your school, in your union, in your town, in your country right now. The cavalry is not coming. You’re it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with guitarist, activist, now filmmaker Tom Morello. Thank you, Tom. Love to your mother. Thank you for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TM: Thank you so much. Say hi to the family for me.
In The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that the American ruling class and corporate media regard bloodbaths as being constructive, nefarious or benign. A constructive bloodbath is typically carried out by the US or one of its proxies, and is endorsed in establishment media. The most obvious contemporary example is the genocidal US/Israeli campaign in Gaza, approved by media commentators in the New York Times (2/11/25), Wall Street Journal (3/20/25) and Washington Post (10/24/23).
Headlines from the Washington Post (8/27/12, 8/23/12), New York Times (6/2/11) and Wall Street Journal (6/15/12) treated massacres in Assad’s Syria as what Chomsky and Herman called a “nefarious bloodbath.”
The two other approaches that Chomsky and Herman outline illuminate the corporate media’s approach to Syria. When Bashar al-Assad was in power in Syria and the US was seeking his overthrow, corporate media treated killings that his government and its allies carried out as nefarious bloodbaths: Their violence was denounced in corporate press with unambiguous language, and prompted demands that the US intervene against them.
For David Brooks of the Times (6/2/11), the Assad government was “one of the world’s genuinely depraved regimes,” and thus it was necessary for Barack Obama to “embrace the cautious regime-change strategy that is his current doctrine.”
An editorial in the Journal (6/15/12) saw “Mr. Assad’s efficient butchery” as a reason that the US should conduct an “air campaign targeting elite Syrian military units.” This
could prompt the general staff to reconsider its contempt for international opinion, and perhaps its allegiance to the Assad family. Short of that, carving out some kind of safe haven inside Syria would at least save lives.
The Post published an editorial (8/27/12) saying that “according to opposition sources, at least 300 people were slaughtered in the town of Daraya late last week.” The piece added that this
newest war crime, like those before it, reflects a deliberate strategy. As the Post’s Liz Sly has reported [8/23/12], the Assad regime is seeking to regain control over opposition-held areas by teaching their residents that harboring the rebels will be punished with mass murder.
The paper called the Obama administration “morally bankrupt” for not taking more aggressive military action in Syria.
Embracing Damascus
France 24 (5/1/25): “The latest round of violence follows a series of massacres in Syria’s coast in March, where the Observatory said security forces and allied groups killed more than 1,700 civilians, mostly Alawites.”
In the months since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power, with substantial assistance from the US and its partners (New York Times, 8/2/17), his government has opened Syria’s economy to international capital, arrested Palestinian resistance fighters, indicated that it’s open to the prospect of normalizing relations with Israel, and opted not to defend Syria against Israel’s frequent bombings and ever-expanding occupation of Syrian land. In that context, Washington has embraced Damascus, with Trump praising al-Sharaa personally, and finally lifting the brutal sanctions regime on Syria.
As these developments have unfolded, US media have switched from treating bloodbaths in Syria as nefarious to treating them as benign. A benign bloodbath is one to which corporate media are largely indifferent. They may not openly cheer such killings, but the atrocities get minimal attention, and don’t elicit high-volume denunciations. There are few if any calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice or ousted from government.
Those unaware of the shifts in Syria and US policy toward it might expect the horrors of Syria’s recent massacres to generate a cavalcade of media denunciation. In March, the new Syrian government’s security forces and groups allied to it reportedly killed 1,700 civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority (France 24, 5/1/25), following attacks that Assad loyalists carried out on security and military sites.
Our evidence indicates that government-affiliated militias deliberately targeted civilians from the Alawite minority in gruesome . . . attacks—shooting individuals at close range in cold blood. For two days, authorities failed to intervene to stop the killings.
Amnesty called the killings “reprisals,” a reference to the sectarian view that the Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam, deserve to be collectively punished for the Assad government’s crimes. The group observed that families of Alawite “victims were forced by the authorities to bury their loved one[s] in mass burial sites without religious rites.”
The Druze, a religious minority with Islamic roots that accounts for approximately 3–4% of Syria’s population, have also been massacred. At the end of April, “auxiliary forces to the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” killed 42 Druze in an ambush on the Damascus/Al-Suwaidaa highway, and another ten civilians from Druze community “were executed by forces affiliated with the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). Some of the victims’ bodies were incinerated (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/1/25).
‘Lack of control’
A New York Times op-ed (4/2/25) treated the killing of “hundreds of Alawite civilians” as a sign of ” the government’s lack of control over its own forces.”
Yet commentary on the grisly mass murders of people from these minority groups has been decidedly muted. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New YorkTimes together have published just one op-ed that focused on the killings. The lone piece (WashingtonPost, 3/10/25) pointed out that Syrian government forces have evidently “embark[ed] on the sort of sectarian slaughter of civilians that many had feared when rebel forces gained power three months ago.” Author Jim Geraghty, however, stopped short of issuing the call for US military intervention that characterizes media responses to nefarious bloodbaths.
Other op-eds treated the al-Sharaa government’s violence as little more than a footnote. A Journal editorial (5/9/25) offering a rundown of recent developments in Syria waited until the last line of the sixth paragraph to mention that “government-aligned forces have slaughtered Alawites and attacked Druze,” as if doing so were a minor detail. A Times essay (4/2/25) took nearly 800 words before referencing the massacres:
And in March, when insurgents loyal to the Assad regime clashed with security groups affiliated with the new government and bands of fighters—including some nominally under the control of the government, according to rights groups—responded by killing hundreds of Alawite civilians as well as suspected insurgents, it displayed the government’s lack of control over its own forces and ignited fears that the country was descending into sectarian violence.
Painting massacres of hundreds of civilians from minority groups as a “respon[se]” is far from the full-throated denunciations deployed for nefarious bloodbaths: “killing hundreds of Alawite civilians” evidently does not show that the government is “depraved,” but rather demonstrates its “lack of control over its own forces.”
‘Recent surge in sectarian violence’
A New York Times news report (5/14/25) on a meeting between the US and Syrian presidents referred vaguely to “a recent surge in sectarian violence.”
For the New York Times (5/14/25), the massacres of Alawites and Druze weren’t important enough to warrant mentioning in their rundown of Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa. The paper referred instead to “the unstable situation” in the country and “a recent surge in sectarian violence.” That vague language provided no sense of the severity of the violence, or of the al-Sharaa government’s share in the responsibility for it, highly relevant information in an article about the Washington/Damascus embrace.
The phrase “recent surge in sectarian violence” is particularly obfuscatory, as it wrongly suggests that it’s impossible to assign responsibility for that violence, even though it’s well-established that the government and its allies have done most of the killing (Amnesty International, 4/3/25; Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). The wording also inaccurately suggests that this phenomenon is new, an implication debunked by the Carnegie Endowment (5/14/25):
In 2015, fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, a predecessor of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS], which is led by Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, killed at least 20 Druze villagers in Qalb Lozeh in Idlib governorate. Others were coerced into converting to Sunni Islam, while Druze shrines were desecrated and graves defaced.
Similarly, in August 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra was part of a coalition of armed groups that attacked predominantly Alawite villages, killing 190 civilians, including 18 children and 14 elderly men (BBC, 10/11/13). That track record might have been the basis for expressions of moral outrage against the al-Sharaa government’s “butchery,” but, fortunately for HTS and its partners, their massacres are benign.
The relative indifference with which the corporate media has treated sectarian killings carried out by HTS and allies, both before and since they came to power, could also have something to do with the US’s role in helping foment sectarianism in Syria in the run up to the war in the country (Truthout, 10/9/15).
A New York Times (5/16/25) report on Saudi Arabia and Qatar paying off Syria’s World Bank debt called that move “the latest victory for Syria’s new government as it attempts to stabilize the nation after a long civil war and decades of dictatorship.” Reporter Euan Ward went on to say that “there are still significant challenges ahead for the fractured nation, which has been rocked by repeated waves of sectarian violence in recent months.” At no point did Ward note that the government he said was trying to “stabilize” the nation has been carrying out that “sectarian violence.”
Nor did the Times‘ May 14 or May 16 articles mention, as the Conversation (5/12/25) did, that civil society groups have called for the al-Sharaa government “to issue protective religious rulings for minority communities”—the sort of step a government would take if it were seeking to “stabilize the nation.” “Their appeals have gone unanswered,” the Conversation noted.
The difference in the tenor of coverage of killings by the Assad government and that of the al-Sharaa government’s killings demonstrates the cynicism of corporate media’s humanitarian rhetoric whenever a state in America’s crosshairs is accused of serious crimes. Such preening is not merely hypocritical. It has nothing to do with protecting any population, and everything to do with how the US ruling class generates consent for its blood-drenched empire.
FEATURED IMAGE: Amnesty International’s depiction (4/3/25) of Syrians protesting sectarian killings (photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP).
The New York Times (5/28/25) gave the last word to a Trump official who framed trans participation in high school sports as “violating women’s civil rights.”
California public schools are the latest target of Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which is ramping up an investigation into high school sports after a transgender girl qualified for three track and field events at the upcoming state championships.
The DoJ is alleging that the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports could violate Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex.
The New York Times (5/28/25) covered this latest right-wing attack on trans youth in a fashion all too common for the paper (FAIR.org, 5/11/23): devoid of any perspectives from trans individuals.
The article, by Soumya Karlamangla, quoted four government officials who are against the participation of trans girls in girls sports. After quoting Trump demanding that “local authorities” bar the trans athlete’s participation, the paper turned to Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, who said in a statement, “It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies.” The Times left this claim unchallenged, despite its inflammatory and misgendering language.
It quoted Gov. Gavin Newsom, speaking on his podcast (3/6/25) to far-right influencer Charlie Kirk, calling trans athletes’ participation in female sports “deeply unfair.” And it quoted Bill Essayli, US attorney for the Central District of California, asserting in a statement that “discrimination on the basis of sex is illegal and immoral”—by which he means that including trans female athletes discriminates against other women, and seeks to deny that discrimination against trans athletes is sex discrimination.
The Times made no effort to evaluate Essayli’s claim—for instance, by noting that courts have interpreted Title IX preventing discrimination “on the basis of sex” to also protect trans students.
Against these four anti–trans rights sources, the piece cited only one statement from a coalition of LGBTQ advocates, which pointed out that sports organizations were following “inclusive, evidence-based policies that ensure fairness for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity.” The coalition argued: “Undermining that now for political gain is a transparent attempt to scapegoat a child and distract from real national challenges Americans are facing.”
Physical and mental health benefits
“I’m still a child, you’re an adult, and for you to act like a child shows how you are as a person,” said AB Hernandez, the 16-year-old transgender athlete, referring to the people who “spent hours heckling and harassing Hernandez as she competed” (Defector, 5/28/25).
Including the voices of trans athletes and their families, or of more rights advocates, might have introduced readers to some of the many arguments and evidence that exist in support of allowing trans athletes to compete in alignment with their identities.
Gender nonconforming people are already at heightened risk for suicide, according to a 2020 study. Eighty-six percent of trans youth have considered killing themselves. School belonging, emotional neglect by family, and internalized self-stigma made statistically significant contributions to recent suicidality in this population. Furthermore, a study in the journal Nature (9/26/24) found that state-level anti-transgender laws increased suicide attempts by transgender and nonbinary youth.
Meanwhile, playing school sports confers physical and mental health benefits that should not be denied to trans children. The Human Rights Campaign’s analysis of the 2023 LGBTQ+ Youth survey, by HRC and the University of Connecticut, found that
high school-aged transgender and non-binary student athletes reported higher grades, lower levels of depression, and were less likely to feel unsafe at school than those who did not play sports.
Not biological men
Ohio Capital Journal (6/3/22) noted that a proposed state ban on trans athletes was accompanied by intrusive verification requirements: “If someone is suspected to be transgender, she must go through evaluations of her external and internal genitalia, testosterone levels and genetic makeup.”
The idea that cisgender boys will “pretend” to be trans in order to participate in girls’ sports is preposterous. Not to mention, natural variations, both physical and otherwise, are common in all sports—especially in schools where children are growing rapidly at different paces (HRC). It’s a combination of factors—not just one—that determine athleticism.
In 2024, the Times (4/23/24) reported on a study by the International Olympic Committee that found that while trans women displayed an advantage in handgrip strength over their cisgender counterparts, they are actually weaker in other areas, like jumping ability, cardiovascular fitness and lung function. The main point of the study was that, when it comes to athletics, trans women are not biological men.
Bans on transgender athletes participating in girls’ sports also put cisgender girls at risk. For example, in 2022, House Republicans in Ohio passed a bill banning trans girls from girls’ sports. It includes genital inspection for any girl who is “accused” of being trans (Ohio Capital Journal, 6/3/22). Cisgender athletes are frequently accused of being trans by transphobes claiming to “protect” women (FAIR.org, 8/21/09; Extra!, 10/12).
During the 2024 summer Olympics, Algerian boxing champion Imane Khelif, who is a cisgender woman, was accused of being male. Now World Boxing has announced all athletes must undergo mandatory genetic testing to determine their sex (CNN, 5/30/25).
The Times’ framing, which allowed adult politicians and attorneys to smear already vulnerable trans children as predatory, “perverse” and invasive, without any perspectives from actual transgender people, let alone any proper legal arguments in their favor, fell short of even “both-sidesing” the issue.
As journalist and activist Erin Reed said recently on CounterSpin (5/23/25):
“Both sides” coverage and “the truth is in the middle” coverage and “giving both sides a chance to make their point”—that would be an improvement over what we have right now…. This is not even “both sides” reporting. It’s not even “the truth is in the middle” reporting. These papers have taken a position on this, and it’s a position that’s not supported by the science.
FEATURED IMAGE: AB Hernandez, the 16-year-old Californian at the center of a debate about trans youth participation in sports (Capital & Main, 5/15/25).
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.
Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalistBryce Covert about Medicaid work requirements for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Welcome to USA 2025, where the only immigrants deserving welcome are white South Africans, germ theory is just some folks’ opinion, and attaching work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP benefits will make recipients stop being lazy and get a job.
Everything old is not new again, but many things that are old, perverse and discredited are getting dusted off and reintroduced with a vengeance. Our guest has reported the repeatedly offered rationales behind tying work requirements to social benefits, and the real-world impacts of those efforts, for many years now.
Bryce Covert is an independent journalist and a contributing writer at The Nation. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bryce Covert.
Bryce Covert: Thank you so much for having me back on.
JJ: Most right-wing, top-down campaigns rely on some element of myth, but this is pretty much all myth: that there’s a problem: Medicaid and also SNAP benefits discourage recipients from seeking work, that this response will increase employment, that it will save the state and federal government money, and that it won’t harm those most in need. It’s layer upon layer of falsehood, that you have spent years breaking down. Where do you even start?
BC: That’s a great place to start, pointing out those claims essentially are all false, and I think it’s important to know, the reason we know that those things are false is because we have years of experience in this country with work requirements in various programs, and they have produced the same results over and over again.
So this started, essentially, with welfare, which is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the 1990s, with cash assistance to families, there was a work requirement imposed on recipients in that program that still stands today. And just wave after wave of research has found these requirements did not help increase employment on a long-term basis.
Most people were not actually working after they were subjected to the work requirement, and instead it increased poverty. It reduced the recipients of these benefits. So it essentially didn’t help them get to work, but it did take away the money that they were relying on.
That pattern plays out over and over again, and we have some newer evidence in Medicaid because, up until the first Trump administration, states could not impose a work requirement in Medicaid. The Trump administration allowed waivers to do so. Only one state actually did it. But Arkansas, the state that did impose this work requirement, kicked over 18,000 people off the program with no discernible impact on employment.
JJ: And it has to do with a misunderstanding about who Medicaid recipients are, and their relationship to the workplace, period, right?
BC: Right. Most Medicaid recipients are either working, or have some good reasons for why they’re not working. Either they can’t find full-time work, or they have conflicts, like they’re taking care of family members.
People are disabled, many of them have an official disability and they’re on the actual disability program, but many more are disabled and can’t get on that program. It is a very difficult program to enroll in. The burdens to enrollment are super, super high. And others say it’s because they are in school, or they’re trying to find work, or they’re retired.
So among those who aren’t working, there’s not a lot who are in any good position to go out and start working. And that’s true of a lot of recipients of other public benefits as well. So when you talk about imposing a work requirement on people in Medicaid, what you’re doing is adding administrative burden, which is to say extra steps they have to take to keep getting their benefits, that aren’t going to actually change the situation they’re facing when it comes to their employment.
JJ: When you wrote about Mississippi, I know, with TANF, you were saying you had to prove you had a job, or were searching for one, before you could get help with childcare. And if people would just take a second and think, how do you search for a job or hold a job without childcare? So it’s not even logical. It’s more a kind of moral, strange misunderstanding of why people are outside of the workforce.
BC: I think this applies to other programs, too. It’s hard to get to work if you don’t have health insurance like Medicaid to get yourself healthy and in a good working position. If you’re not able to get food stamps and buy food for yourself, it’s going to be hard to be out there looking for a job.
These are basic necessities, and I think that’s another really important point to make here, is that Republicans have tried to paint lots of different programs as “welfare,” because that word is very stigmatizing. But what we’re talking about with Medicaid is healthcare. We are talking about feeling as if we need to force people to work—although really what we’re doing is forcing them to document on some pieces of paper that they’re working, which is an important distinction—in order to get healthcare, in order to take care of their bodies and be healthy.
Same with food stamps. We’re saying “you must work in order to eat.” These are basic, basic necessities that people need simply to survive.
JJ: And then we hear about the “dignity” of work. You need to work because there’s dignity there, and yet somehow a person whose grandfather owned the steel mill doesn’t need that dignity. Wealthy people who don’t work somehow are outside of this moral conversation.
BC: Yeah, and we’re talking about imposing work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid, which is what Republicans say they want to do, in the service of tax cuts for the wealthy. Essentially, they are literally paying for tax cuts for the wealthy, to return more money to the rich, by cutting programs for the poor. And those rich people, many of them do not work, or these tax breaks help them to avoid work—the inheritance tax, for example. So that moral obligation to work does not apply.
JJ: The New York Timescolumn recently, from four Trump officials—I don’t remember the headline, but it was something like, “If You Can Work, You Must.” They didn’t marshal any evidence. They didn’t have data, just vibes. Those are some racist, racist vibes, aren’t they?
BC: Yes. That is an important point, that all of this cannot be separated out from racism.
I mean, the conversation over welfare and TANF in the 1990s, that was all race. It was about white Americans feeling like Black Americans were getting the dole, and were too lazy to work and had to be forced to work. The numbers at the time did not bear that out. More white Americans were getting cash assistance than Black ones.
But it’s a really deep-seated belief among Americans, and I think when you see, as in that op-ed, for example, or other places where Republicans are trying to call these other programs “welfare,” it’s barely even just a dog whistle. It is pretty blatant that they are trying to paint other programs as things that help Black people who are too lazy to work.
It’s all caught up in that idea, even though, again, the numbers do not bear this out. White people are more likely to be on these programs. We see equal employment rates among both populations. This is not actually a problem to solve for, but it is one I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, really believe.
JJ: I’m going to ask you about media in another second. I just wanted to pull up another point about the racism, which is that it’s not just the mythologizing and the “welfare queen,” that those of us who are old enough will remember. But you wrote about how states with larger Black populations have stricter rules, and how when states were asked for exemptions on pushing these work requirements, they exempted majority white counties. So it’s not just the racism in the rationale, the racism in how it plays out is there too?
BC: Absolutely. I mean, these policies hit Black people more heavily. They are more stringently applied in Southern states that have higher Black populations, that are more hostile to their Black populations. And like you said, in the first Trump administration, when states were seeking exemptions, it was more majority white populations who got them. This is just really a fundamental racist myth we have in this country that’s proven very hard to shake, that Black people are lazy and rely on the government to get by and must be forced to work, when just nothing about the actual numbers and data bears that out.
JJ: I sometimes feel like reporters, even if they’re well-intentioned and trying to make it personal, they can kind of make it a thought experiment for folks who are better off. If you were struggling, wouldn’t you take the time to fill out a form? It’s just paperwork. Couldn’t you go across town to the office and fill out that form? And it just represents a total disconnect, experiential disconnect between anyone who has ever had to deal with this and those who have no idea about it at all and just kind of parachute in and say, Oh wow, filling out a form. What’s the big deal?
Bryce Covert: “This is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.”
BC: Yeah, I think most well-off Americans have no idea how hard it is to apply for these programs, to stay on these programs, the paperwork that’s involved, the time that’s involved. And also when we’ve seen work requirements in Medicaid, for example, they are set up in a very complex way. Arkansas’s website was only available during the working day, and then it would shut down, and you couldn’t log your work requirement hours at night. I think that belies the fact that this is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.
You can see that in the fact that the reason Republicans are talking about work requirements right now is because they need to find spending savings to pay for the tax cuts. If this were not about kicking people off and spending less on benefits, then this wouldn’t be part of this current conversation about their “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” So these are huge administrative burdens, and it’s also a big burden for something that is a deep necessity. I think the mental impact, the emotional impact of being made to jump through these huge hoops for something as basic as food, it’s really extreme.
For example, I recently had to go to the DMV to get my Real ID. I had to go to the office in person. I had to wait for hours. I had to bring all the right paperwork. It was a huge burden, but this was for something that would just make it a little easier to travel on an airplane.
Think about going through the same process, having to show up somewhere in person, waiting for hours, making sure you have all the right documentation, and if you don’t, then you don’t get the thing that you’re seeking, but what we’re talking about is whether or not you get healthcare. What we’re talking about is whether you get food stamps. I think it’s an experience that’s hard for people who haven’t gone through it to grasp.
JJ: To bring it back to today, May 21, some coverage that I’m reading straight up says some 8.6 million people are going to find themselves uninsured. Other stories matter-of-factly describe work requirements, and some Republicans’ anger that they’re not going to kick in sooner, as about “offsetting” the tax cuts for the wealthy, as though we’re just kind of recalibrating, and this is going to balance things in a natural way.
I guess I would say I’m not getting the energy that there are 14 million children who rely on both Medicaid and SNAP, and there’s children who could lose healthcare and food at the same time, and that includes 20% of all children under the age of five. From news media, I’m getting Republicans versus Democrats; I’m not so much getting children versus hunger.
BC: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, these kinds of political debates tend to be covered like they are just political back and forth. Democrats think this, Republicans think that. It is legitimately harder to explain to people what this will mean in real life. I have reported on the impact of work requirements. For example, I went to Arkansas when they were in effect. It’s hard to report on. The people who are impacted are vulnerable. They have chaotic lives. They may not even know that they are subject to it.
Unfortunately, I think it’s likely that if this passes and these cuts are implemented, we will see more stories about what happens, because it will be a little easier to say concretely, “This kid right here doesn’t get food or healthcare anymore.” But it would be nice to have that conveyed ahead of time, so the public understood what was happening before it went into effect.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent reporter Bryce Covert. You can find her work online at BryceCovert.com. Bryce Covert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street (CC photo: David Shankbone)
This week on CounterSpin: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and…Oprah? They’re among the entertainers in Trump’s ALLCAPS sights for, it would seem, endorsing Kamala Harris in the election? And/or maybe saying something unflattering about him or his actions—which, in his brain, and that of the minions who’ve chosen to share that brain, constitutes an illegal political contribution to his opponents, wherever they may lurk.
At a moment when politicians who swore actual oaths are throwing over even the pretense of democracy, or public service—or basic human decency—many of us are looking to artists to be truth-tellers and spirit lifters; to convey, maybe, not so much information as energy: the fearless, collective, forward-looking joy that can sustain a beleaguered people in a threatening time.
There’s a deep history of protest music and music as protest, and our guest is very intentionally a part of it. Tom Morello is a guitarist; part of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and The Nightwatchman, among many other projects. His music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial, economic justice; so we talk about the work of artists in Trumpian times with Tom Morello, this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the embassy shootings, a lawmaker’s arrest and commencement protests.
Janine Jackson interviewed Erin in the Morning‘s Erin Reed about transgender care “questions” for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos was clear in saying that only certain ideological presuppositions would be acceptable from here on in, when the paper canceled a prepared endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, and canceled a cartoon critical of Donald Trump, and a number of other things. And that sound you heard was many people moving the Washington Post from one place to another in their brains.
But the Post is still the leading daily in the lawmaking place of this country, and what they say has influence on people who have influence. So when the Post editorial board described a report on trans healthcare from the Health and Human Services Department—now headed by Robert F. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me” Kennedy Jr.—as “thorough and careful,” that was going to have an impact.
The piece, headed “Good Questions About Transgender Care,” really raised deeper questions about corporate news media and their role in the world we have, and the world we need today.
Erin Reed is the journalist and activist behind Erin in the Morning. She joins us now by phone from Gaithersburg, Maryland. Welcome to CounterSpin, Erin Reed.
JJ: An idea can be utterly discredited—evidentially, scientifically—but can still have resonance for people who just feel like certain things are true. The Post, well, first they point out that this HHS report is “more than 400 pages, including appendixes,” so you’re supposed to sit up straight. But the message is that the HHS report is a review of the existing literature on best practices around healthcare, and that it’s “careful” and “thorough.”
I feel like when anti-trans media is cartoonish, it’s almost easier to bat away. But when something like this comes from a paper of record, it makes it more difficult. So let me just ask you, what are you making of this Post editorial?
ER: Yeah, so a little bit of background. This HHS report was produced specifically because the science on transgender healthcare has been so clear for so long. There’s been repeated study after study, coming out in the most prestigious journals, showing the positive impact of transgender healthcare on those who need it. And so the HHS report was put out in order to give cover to organizations that want to oppose transgender healthcare.
And that’s what we got with the Washington Post editorial page, where the editorial board basically endorses the report. It goes through the report and says that it’s a great report, essentially, and that it raises great questions about transgender healthcare and more.
Whenever I read something like that from the Washington Post editorial board, though, and then I see how that same board and how that same paper treats everything else that RFK Jr.’s healthcare team puts out—for instance, vaccines, autism, fluoridation in water and more—there’s this double standard whenever it comes to transgender healthcare. The paper is willing to point out the lack of science behind this particular department’s positions under RFK Jr. for all of these other things, but it seemingly ignores that whenever it comes to transgender people.
JJ: And yet they refer to—they’re scientistic. They say that this report “concurs with other systematic reviews.” They give all the gesturing towards the idea that this is science here—and yet it’s not.
ER: And the report itself was anonymously written. They didn’t release any of the names of the people who worked on the report; however, they left the EXIF data in. And so you could actually see the person who compiled the report, and it was Alex Byrne, is the one who’s on the EXIF data in the PDF.
And what that says is that they’re not using experts here. Alex Byrne is a philosophy major. That’s not somebody who’s ever worked with gender-affirming healthcare, and not somebody who’s ever worked with transgender people.
Erin Reed: “What we have is another example of the relentless pseudoscience coming out of this healthcare department under RFK Jr.”
We are seeing these attacks on transgender healthcare using these mechanisms, like the RFK Jr. healthcare department, trying to dictate what science is by fiat, trying to say that it doesn’t matter what the studies say, it doesn’t matter that all the medical organizations and the people that work with transgender people say that this healthcare is saving lives. We are going to dictate what is science and what is not.
I read the whole 400-page report. I read all of anything that comes out about transgender healthcare, because that’s my job; I’m a journalist covering this topic.
And the report, if you read it, it’s not a scientific document. It’s not something that has new information. It’s not something that studies transgender healthcare, it deadnames historical transgender figures, it calls transgender healthcare a “social contagion.” And it advocates for conversion therapy of transgender people, explicitly so, in many instances.
And so I don’t think that what we have is a good scientific document that raises important questions on transgender healthcare, like the Washington Post editorial board claims. Instead, what we have is another example of the relentless pseudoscience coming out of this healthcare department under RFK Jr.
JJ: Part of that involves relabeling, and you just mentioned conversion therapy. And I think a lot of listeners will say, “Oh, I’ve learned about what that means. It involves telling queer people they’re not queer, they’re mentally ill.” But the Post has something to say about how—or maybe it’s the report itself—how, Oh, no, no, no, this isn’t conversion therapy. What’s going on there?
ER: Yeah, so the original report advocates for something known as “gender exploratory therapy.” And I have done a lot of investigations on this particular modality of therapy that’s being promoted by people on the anti-trans right.
So gender exploratory therapy, it sounds good. It sounds like something that we want. Like of course, if somebody is transitioning, we would love for them to have a good and open environment to explore their gender identity. And that is what we have right now.
But that’s not what gender exploratory therapy is. Gender exploratory therapy is a very kind-sounding name for a repackaged version of conversion therapy.
Essentially, what this modality of therapy does is, let’s say you’re a transgender youth. You’re 14, 15, 16 years old, and you are considering transitioning. What they will do is, they will take you, and they will try to blame your gender identity on anything other than being trans, repeatedly. They’ll go from thing to thing to thing to thing.
And the important point here is that these therapists will never approve your transition. They will never write a gender-affirming care letter for you. They explicitly won’t do that. If you go to the website of the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association, you’ll find that this group has filed amicus briefs against transgender bathroom usage in schools, or that this group has filed amicus briefs against transgender participation in sports like darts. We see that this is not a neutral sort of modality.
The closest comparison that many of your listeners will probably understand is crisis pregnancy centers, where they’ve used this name “crisis pregnancy centers” to try to say that if you’re seeking an abortion, that this is a good clinic to go to. But if you know anything about crisis pregnancy centers, the way that they work is by delaying abortion until it’s no longer feasible. And that’s the exact same way that GETA works, and that’s what we see being promoted by this report.
JJ: Finally, in terms of media, who we know often or virtually always set things up in a “some say, others differ” framework, they’re quoting the Washington Post editorial and other outlets, acknowledging the place where they say ”critics have been scathing.”—this is the Post—”critics have been scathing about what they see as the report’s biases and shortcomings, but it makes a legitimate case for caution that policymakers need to wrestle with.”
And I would just ask you, finally, to talk about this media idea of somehow the truth is in the middle on issues. And then, also, Oh, all we’re asking for is caution. Who’s against caution? And, additionally, anyone who criticizes it is an activist and an interested party, other than these disinterested scientists and ethicists at the Washington Post.
ER: So I’m actually going to push back slightly and make an even broader point here.
JJ: Please.
ER: “Both sides” coverage and “the truth is in the middle” coverage and “giving both sides a chance to make their point,” that would be an improvement for what we have right now, with transgender reporting and reporting on transgender healthcare.
ER: Because, let me tell you, whenever you look at the New York Times, whenever you look at the Washington Post, and the way that transgender healthcare is covered right now, the experts, the transgender people, the transgender journalists like myself, are not given the space to make their points. They’re not given the space to make the case for scientific healthcare, and for good treatment of LGBTQ people and transgender people.
But you’ll see the New York Times publish three-, four-page spreads attacking transgender healthcare, from people who have made it their job to attack transgender people. You’ll see the editorial board at the Washington Post explicitly advocate for a healthcare report done by the RFK Jr. healthcare team, targeting transgender people. And whenever it comes to the transgender people, and whenever it comes to the experts and the medical organizations and the Yale physicians, they’re written off as just activists.
And so this is not even “both sides” reporting. It’s not even “the truth is in the middle” reporting. These papers have taken a position on this, and it’s a position that’s not supported by the science. It’s a position that’s not being practiced, importantly, by the people who are giving out that transgender healthcare, who are treating transgender people, day in, day out, who see these patients and understand the impact that gender-affirming care has on their lives.
So I guess what I’m just really trying to say is, I wish they would platform transgender people. I wish they would platform the doctors. I wish they would platform the medical organizations, but they don’t.
JJ: It feels like you’re telling me what better reporting would look like, yeah?
ER: I’m trying.
JJ: Erin Reed is the journalist and activist behind Erin in the Morning. Thank you so much, Erin Reed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) published a statement, ostensibly from embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, “citing the war in Gaza as its central grievance and framing the killings as an act of political protest.”
Elias Rodriguez is the suspect in the murder of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, DC, outside a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. Journalist Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) has posted what he believes to be an authentic manifesto of the alleged shooter, a story that was subsequently reported on in the Jewish and Israeli press (Forward, 5/22/25; Israel Hayom, 5/22/25; Jewish Chronicle, 5/22/25). If the document is authentic, it appears the alleged gunman was violently opposed to the bloodbath in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government.
Invoking the Palestinian death toll, the statement said, “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.” It referenced the 1964 attempt on the life of Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saying McNamara’s attacker was “incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam.”
Rodriguez (AP, 5/22/25) reportedly told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
‘Part of global surge’
Details are still emerging about how and why the shooter chose these two people at this particular event. The Washington Post (5/25/25) noted that the victims were both employees of the Israeli Embassy who had attended the Young Diplomats Reception, an annual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, a Zionist organization. There is nothing in the public record that suggests Rodriguez harbored antisemitic sentiments or targeted his victims for being Jews. Rodriguez’ reported statements suggest that the assassinations were motivated by opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” do not appear in his purported manifesto.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (5/22/25) reported that Rodriguez’ Chicago apartment had many political signs, including one that said “‘Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.’” The wire explained, “Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repair the world’ that has come to reflect a shorthand for social justice.” It’s a phrase commonly used by progressive Jews, and dubious decor for an antisemite. (FAIR readers might remember the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, which recently closed—Forward, 4/15/24).
The New York Times (5/22/25) framed the embassy murders as “an extreme example of what law enforcement officials and others call a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”
But a New York Times report (5/22/25) asserted definitively that Rodriguez’ violent action was antisemitic and must be understood in the context of global anti-Jewish hate. “Slaying Outside DC Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism,” announced the headline over the piece by White House correspondent Michael Shear. Its first paragraph implicitly attributed rising antisemitism to the Hamas attack of October 7, describing “a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”
The Times quoted a number of politicians and activists who labeled the shooting antisemitic. Shear wrote, for instance:
The shooting prompted fresh outcries from political leaders around the world, including President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both of whom expressed outrage at what they called evidence of antisemitic hatred. Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that “these horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!”
Another key passage pinned rising antisemitism in the United States on the pro-Palestinian movement:
In the United States, the war and the pro-Palestinian movement have amped up tensions and fears about antisemitism. The shooting at the museum is the type of development that many Jews, as well as some Jewish scholars and activists, have been worried about and warning about. They argue that the explosion of antisemitic language has already led to violent personal attacks.
“You can’t draw a direct line from the campus to the gun,” said David Wolpe, who’s the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School as campus protests broke out there last year.
“But the campuses normalized hate and anathematized Jews,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “Against that backdrop, violence is as unsurprising as it is appalling. After all, ‘globalize the intifada’ looks a lot like this.”
‘Corrosive to America’
The New York Post (5/22/25) said the embassy shooting was “antisemitic terrorism, as is nearly all ‘anti-Zionist’ action.”
None of these statements were ever countered or questioned in the piece, which more or less presented their viewpoint as unchallenged fact. While the Times prolifically cited those quick to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, it failed to acknowledge that a great many American Jews have been protesting against the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza, or to cite scholarship like that of Yael Feinberg, who has found that “there is no more important factor in explaining variation in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being engaged in a particularly violent military operation.”
This Times news story fits neatly into the message of the right’s editorials on the shooting. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/22/25) said that, in light of the shooting,
anti-Zionism, including enthusiasm for the total destruction of Israel and efforts to ostracize its domestic supporters, is corrosive to America and is stirring up old dangers for Jews.
Calling the killings “antisemitic terrorism,” the New York Post editorial board (5/22/25) said, “Rodriguez did just what all those college protesters have been demanding: ‘Globalize the intifada.’”
The Times jumped in on this Murdoch media rhetoric in a news article by Sharon Otterman (5/23/25), saying the killings
cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel.
It included this nugget:
Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while attending a rally or being a member of pro-Palestinian groups does not predict violence, the broader ecosystem being created, particularly online, by groups strongly opposed to Israel, “created an environment that made the tragedy last night more likely.”
Guilt by association
The New York Times (5/18/25) described the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther as an effort at “branding a broad range of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network,’ so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society.’” (It dubiously calls this “an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism.”)
The Times‘ Shear joined the right-wing Post and Journal in framing the attack as an act of antisemitism, as well as building a “guilt by association” narrative, implicating peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters rather than acknowledging any responsibility on the part of Israel’s war and its US backers. They suggest that, to stem antisemitism and acts of political violence against Israel, the logical solution is not to end the genocide, but to suppress and punish pro-Palestinian protest—something that the Trump administration will almost certainly use the embassy worker killings to do even more harshly (Jewish Currents, 5/23/25).
His reporting might have been better informed if he had read the piece by his Times colleague Katie J.M. Baker (New York Times, 5/18/25) about the Heritage Foundation’s agenda to destroy pro-Palestine activism. Baker wrote of Heritage’s “Project Esther“:
It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois.
Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (5/19/25) followed up to note that Project Esther targets “the majority of Jewish House Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for anti-Israel language.” It “describes the Jewish congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as part of a ‘Hamas caucus’ in Congress, one that’s also supported by the Jewish senator Bernie Sanders.” Goldberg observed that “there’s something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism,” because it so often “tags Jews as perpetrators.”
Antisemitic Zionists
Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick told NPR (5/14/25): “If the administration were serious about countering antisemitism, first and foremost they wouldn’t be appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration.”
These passages in the Times allude to a point pro-Palestine advocates have made for a long time, which is that anti-Zionism not only isn’t antisemitism (many Jews are not Zionists, just as many Zionists are not Jews), but that a large part of the right-wing Zionist movement is inherently antisemitic. It’s often rooted in Christian apocalyptic fantasies in which Israel’s creation brings about the End Times.
The bookOne Palestine, Complete, by Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev makes the case that under British rule in Palestine, between World War I and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, the imperialists sided with Zionist forces against the Arabs not despite their Christian antisemitism, but because of it. In a fiery assessment of the recently deceased Jerry Falwell, journalist Christopher Hitchens told CNN’s Anderson Cooper (Anderson Cooper 360°, 5/15/07) that the minister spent his life “fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping antisemitic innuendos into American politics,” along with other right-wing evangelists like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. The white nationalist Richard Spencer admitted that he looked to Israel as a model of the white, gentile Xanadu he desired (Haaretz, 10/19/17).
Here at FAIR (5/1/05, 6/6/18, 11/6/23, 8/9/24, 2/19/25), we grow tired of having to point out that media, in the allegiance to the Israeli government narrative over Palestinian voices, use the insult of “antisemitism” to discredit criticism of Israel. Rodriguez’ alleged actions, of course, are not criticism but violence—murder is murder. But the Times’ evidence-free assertion that this attack was antisemitic adds to the false narrative that support for Palestine is inherently tied to bigotry against Jews.
In fact, news coverage of Jew-hatred should focus on the growing power of the racist right. The worst recent antisemitic incident in the United States was the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (Axios, 6/16/23), carried out by a shooter obsessed with right-wing media tropes about Jews and immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18).
That case was often linked to Dylann Roof, the Charleston church killer. While Roof targeted Black Christians, his manifesto “railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays and Muslims”; Roof said that Adolf Hitler would someday “be inducted as a saint” (New York Times, 1/5/17). In short, anti-Jewish vigilantes put antisemitic ideas in their manifestos, which it appears Rodriguez didn’t do.
By contrast, these chilling ideas are widespread on the right. The QAnon movement, a proximate cohort to MAGA Trumpism, is enmeshed with antisemitic conspiracism (Guardian, 8/25/20; Just Security, 9/9/20; Newsweek, 6/28/21). NPR (5/14/25) reported that its investigation “identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a ‘Nazi sympathizer,’ and a prominent Holocaust denier.” Though the Jewish Democratic Council of America (5/21/25) lists the numerous antisemitic offenses of the Trump administration, that doesn’t seem to steer the coverage of the politics of antisemitism in the Times the way ADL’s spurious equation of pro-Palestinian with anti-Jewish does.
‘A much wider smear campaign’
Guardian (10/3/24): “Among the most violent incidents of the last year were the fatal Chicago stabbing of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume and a Vermont shooting of three Palestinian college students that left one of them, 21-year-old Hisham Awartani, paralyzed.”
It’s worth mentioning that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment has also increased since the October 7 attacks of 2023 (NBC News, 4/13/24; Guardian, 10/3/24; Al Jazeera, 3/11/25). An Illinois man was convicted earlier this year of “fatally stabbing a Palestinian-American child in 2023 and severely wounding his mother,” who reported him saying, “You, as a Muslim, must die” (BBC, 2/28/25). ABC affiliate WLS (5/24/25) reported that in the window of Rodriguez’ home in Chicago, law enforcement found a photo of Wadee Alfayoumi, the 6-year-old victim in this crime.
In New York City, a pro-Israel mob terrorized a random woman mistaken for a pro-ceasefire activist; in addition to hurling rape threats, the crowd was heard chanting “death to Arabs” (PBS, 4/28/25; Battleground, 5/2/25). No arrests have been made at this time (Hell Gate, 5/23/25).
Benjamin Balthaser, an associate professor of English at Indiana University/South Bend who writes widely on Jewish subjects, told FAIR:
Over the past year and a half, we have seen an intensification of claims that all criticism and protest against Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza are just masked antisemitism, culminating with the deportation of students, the defunding of major universities, and the banning of lawful student organizations. The Heritage Foundation, as part of its “Project 2025,” has gone further, to claim that Palestine solidarity organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace are directly connected to armed militant organizations such as Hamas, despite JVP’s commitment to nonviolence and a peaceful solution to the now nearly century-long conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Equating a lone gunman with campus protest not only lacks evidence, it is part of a much wider smear campaign with the sole intent to criminalize legitimate, legal protest for peace and human rights. It not only runs afoul of cherished American principles of the First Amendment, it also cheapens and hollows out any attempt to hold antisemites, such as in Trump’s cabinet, accountable.
What happened in DC was alarming news that needed to be reported. But Shear’s piece, along with propaganda in the Murdoch press, added to the false Israeli line that all the people condemning genocide in Palestine are violent Jew-haters—or, in the case of Jewish activists for Palestine, self-hating Jews.
Featured image: Embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, interviewed by Scripps News (1/23/18) at an anti-Amazon protest in 2018.
Natasha Lennard (Intercept (5/20/25): “News organizations should…have long ago stopped affording the Trump administration such credulous coverage.”
A FAIR post (5/22/25) on New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s selective defense of press freedom (New York Times, 5/13/25) referred to him as someone who “clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs.” Natasha Lennard’s piece in the Intercept (5/20/25) on media coverage of the Trump administration’s arrest of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D–N.J.) illustrates what we mean by this.
McIver, Lennard wrote, was charged with “assaulting” an ICE officer when she “attempted to conduct an oversight visit earlier this month at a massive, new ICE detention facility in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey.” Such oversight is part of representatives’ constitutional duty, and is specifically authorized by law in the case of ICE facilities. Lennard noted that if this had happened in a different country—one not favored by Washington—this would have been reported, accurately enough, as something like, “Regime targets opposition politician with fabricated charges for carrying out oversight.”
But as it happened in the United States, that’s not how leading US news outlets—including the New York Times (5/19/25)—reported it. “Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center” was the Times headline over an article that followed the Times‘ he said/she said stylebook. “Both sides have pointed to videos from the chaotic scuffle…to accuse each other of instigating the altercation.”
As the Intercept‘s subhead remarked, “You’d never know reading the New York Times that charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver are nothing but an authoritarian attack.” The Times article did not provide the context that ICE has been seizing immigrants without due process and shipping them to foreign prisons in violation of court orders—background that is critical to judging whether the prosecution of a lawmaker that attempted to investigate the agency is in good faith.
“Clash” is a useful word if you want to make an unarmed legislator sound like an evenly matched adversary for Homeland Security commandos (New York Times, 5/19/25).
In his essay, Sulzberger warned that without press freedom, people might not know when their rights are being taken away, or democratic structures undermined:
Without a free press, how will people know if their government is acting legally and in their interest? How will people know if their leaders are telling the truth? How will people know if their institutions are acting to the benefit of society? How will people know if their freedoms are being sustained, defended and championed—or eroded by forces that seek to replace truth and reality with propaganda and misinformation?
But if you follow the Times‘ approach to journalism, in which you must never say that something is happening if someone in power claims it is not happening, then your audience won’t know when their government is acting illegally, or denying truth and reality. (“You can’t just say the president is lying,” Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller told a DC panel—Extra!, 1–2/05—expressing an actual rule that was enforced even on the paper’s opinion columnists.)
Journalists inevitably, inescapably, have values, and those values necessarily affect what they communicate to their audiences. If they value democracy, then they communicate to their audience that arrests of opposition lawmakers are dangerous. If, on the other hand, they value the appearance of neutrality above all else, then the message readers will get is: Who’s to say?
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed UNRWA USA’s Mara Kronenfeld about Israel’s aid blockade for the May 16, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: It’s long been said of the turmoil in Israel/Palestine that your understanding is shaped by when you’re told to start the clock. Corporate news media’s deliberate timekeeping sets up the story we’re used to, in which Palestinians are always attacking and Israel is always only responding, and Israel’s long, violent occupation, and now genocidal operations against the people of Gaza, for example, becomes a matter of recurring “clashes” between presumably balanced forces.
Into this landscape comes the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, May 15. For media, talking frankly about the 15,000 Palestinians killed, the at least 750,000 driven from their homes and land, for the 1948 founding of the state of Israel might force a context into coverage of today’s events, beyond vague gestures toward the region’s “troubled history.”
We’re learning how hard some will fight to prevent that understanding. In the struggle to defend Palestinian lives, the protection of history is tied up with the witnessing of today.
Mara Kronenfeld is executive director at UNRWA USA. UNRWA is the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. She joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Mara Kronenfeld.
Mara Kronenfeld: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
JJ: I want to ask you about attacks on aid and about disinformation, but we are recording on May 15. I just wonder, first, what your thoughts are on what this time of remembering, of acknowledgement, means today.
MK: Yes, it’s a day, a difficult day, any May 15, and this is of course the 77th commemoration of the Nakba, but it’s only that much more painful after this morning, hearing that Gaza is yet again, yet another day of major attacks. We’re hearing of upwards of 100 civilians killed just this morning, and 77 yesterday. So it’s a painful reminder that the struggle continues, that Palestinian fathers, mothers, children are under attack, and that Palestinians, like any other people on Earth, want to live free of occupation, and have control over themselves and sovereignty. And this seems well farther off than it has, unfortunately, for a long time.
JJ: Gaza has been under blockade since March, listeners will know, the hunger, the lack of medicine, the repeated displacement, destruction of hospitals—after decades, of course, of occupation—all contributing to the nightmare. But now we also see targeted, lethal attacks on aid workers themselves, and efforts to—you could say “politicize,” but really criminalize the work of aid organizations. This seems new, or is it?
MK: Yeah, there’s been a long-time campaign, frankly, against UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. I wish I could say this is new. I think the vehemence and the coordinated aspects of the attacks are perhaps new, but UNRWA has always represented a threat, in the sense that it appears to guarantee the right of return for Palestine refugees, even though that right of return is embodied under a separate UN resolution. But it represents that, in fact, the 5.6–some million refugees that UNRWA is serving are refugees and, in fact, do hope to return home to a land that is under their sovereign control, in whatever political solution the political parties determine at the right time.
The attack against UNRWA—and by the way, I am the executive director of UNRWA USA, which is actually a separate, independent, US-based NGO. Our mission is really to raise awareness about the work of the UN agency UNRWA, and raise funds for its relief and development programs in the Middle East, of course, for these 5.6 million refugees. But we have seen the propaganda against UNRWA, and, by extension against our small team, absolutely ramp up in the days and months and, unfortunately, now years following the horrific events on October 7.
You can almost directly link the attacks on UNRWA to, yes, the fact that it embodies this right of return, but also UNRWA is simply being attacked because it keeps Palestinians alive. And as we’ve seen in this brutal, 20-month assault on Gaza, on the civilians of Gaza, collective punishment, and now we’re into almost the 70th day of a total blockade on food and medical aid-–again, collective punishment on an entire population, including 1 million children. We’re seeing that any attempt to keep this population alive, educated, sheltered is a threat to this current extremist government in Israel. And that’s the very reason UNRWA is attacked.
JJ: It’s a kind of a pincer move, because there are the actual missiles being dropped on warehouses where UNRWA is working, and on medical centers, and then also this simultaneous drive to say that UNRWA is not a legitimate organization, that really it’s just part of Hamas, and that therefore it should be sued into extinction, is my understanding.
MK: Yes, there’s attacks on many levels, and I will say, and I think it’s worth mentioning here, that there are probably hundreds of accusations against UNRWA by the Israelis. The commissioner general of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini has consistently and continually stated that if there are allegations, then UNRWA needs to see the documentation, needs to see the evidence.
Israel has a history of making allegations, of calling many different independent individuals and organizations “Hamas” or “terrorists” without any evidence. UNRWA cannot respond to every piece of conjecture in an extremely politicized environment. But in the one case where an accusation by Israel, that 19 members of UNRWA’s 33,000 employees may or may not have taken part in the horrific events of October 7, in only nine of these cases where Israel actually presented evidence, I have to say that if authenticated and corroborated—it hasn’t been—but if it could have indicated that [they] were guilty, UNRWA has done the right thing, in the sense of firing these individuals.
UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini has stated emphatically that the engagement of any UNRWA employees in such activities, if so, if it were true, would, in fact, be an appalling betrayal of both Palestine refugees, the United Nations and UNRWA specifically. UNRWA made very clear that it has no tolerance for such activity.
You said in the beginning of your introduction, the corporate media have chosen to tell a much different story, and I can tell you, working at UNRWA USA for five years, a story that’s fundamentally not true. And then you have attacks by certain members of this administration, which try to claim that UNRWA does not have immunity like every other United Nations entity, and that somehow UNRWA, established in 1949 by mandate of the member parties of the UN, is not a subsidiary of the United Nations, when Israel itself calls UNRWA a subsidiary of the United Nations.
The attacks, if they weren’t so dangerous and deadly—as yet, there’s been over 280 UNRWA staff members killed—would be laughable, but unfortunately we are in this crazy media environment, where too many allegations are somehow not checked, or repeated, and there are certain political opinions that hold sway in certain corporate newsrooms. That’s why I can tell you, as an individual, I’m so thankful for your work, for FAIR’s work, and for those who really try to understand what is underneath all of the propaganda and disinformation that we see every day.
JJ: I’m going to ask you a little bit more about media in a second, but I just, as a point of information, because it can get lost: Israel, as an occupier, is required by law to allow aid, is it not? I mean, they’re required by international law to allow aid access into occupied territories.
MK: A hundred percent. That is one violation of international law, absolutely. And we’re talking about, again, into the 70th day of a population of 1.9 to 2 million being denied commercial goods, but a thousand times worse, food and aid.
And I don’t know about you, Janine, but I’ve seen, every day now, more and more photos of children who look malnourished. Just this morning, a horrific image of a child who was bombed, and one leg was severely injured, and the other leg is so skinny, it’s barely there. It is something that I wonder—we all wonder, those of us who are compassionate and thinking individuals—how the world can watch and let this happen, how the uproar is not loud enough to stop the withholding of basic food and medicine, now for over 70 days.
JJ: Many are wondering why the response from the world is not what we think it should be, but we think it merits, and we—you and I—understand that media do play a role there. Using aid as a lure to drive Palestinians south, suggesting that providing food and water to people in Gaza is somehow akin to terrorism. This is part of what Francesca Albanese, I just heard, called “the tapestry of crimes against the totality of the people.” And I know that you and others contend that these crimes are made possible, in part, by dehumanization of Palestinian people, and that news media play a central role there.
MK: Yes, yes, I’ve seen that and it’s been both in my professional and my personal life. I happen to be Jewish, married to a Muslim gentleman, and I think about my own kids, and I think about, in their lifetime, are we going to be more concerned about antisemitism or Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate? And while both are on the rise, I’m more concerned, in fact, about the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs in the media. And I think that this dehumanization of Palestinians is unique, definitely, because of the politicization of this issue. But it does have roots in the dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs that, unfortunately, our country has a long history of.
And definitely the media has played a huge role in furthering this dehumanization. There was a report out on a study of some thousand articles from the major newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times, and this was looking at all the articles, about a thousand articles, following the horrible attacks on October 7.
And what we saw is that “Israeli” or “Israel,” both terms, generally got far more mentions in news stories than “Palestinians” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths massively far outpaced Israeli deaths. And we see really condemnatory adjectives, like “slaughter,” “massacre,” “horrific,” when they’re applied to Israeli citizens, not when they’re applied to Palestinian victims, even at a time when the Israeli military had killed upwards of 6,000 children in Gaza.
And what is extremely frightening is seeing the genocidal language of this extremist government, and seeing almost that idea that we hear from this government that the children of Gaza are born evil; they’re born “snakes.” Imagine a news agency saying this about Jewish people, about my ancestors, that somehow they were born evil, they were born snakes. This kind of language being used has only served to dehumanize and prepare for the genocidal actions we’re seeing right now.
But, unfortunately, our media is culpable in making Palestinian victims, changing them from victims to terrorists, including a million children who are trying to stay alive at this very minute, let alone their mothers and let alone their fathers. We’ve seen Palestinian fathers absolutely dehumanized at a level just outrageous, and which doesn’t match with any of my experiences, my long experiences, living and working in the Middle East region.
JJ: On top of the more than 52,000 people killed since October 7, we have Israeli officials now openly declaring plans to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely, to use destitution and displacement to force Palestinians out, though neighboring countries say they don’t plan to take them. I would say appropriate reporting would not look like this, from the Guardian on May 6, that said that an Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and Palestinians will “leave in great numbers to third countries.” And the Guardian said, this is “raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory.”
I feel that along with the day-to-day dehumanization and erasure of Palestinian lives, there’s also this kind of diplomatic dance that’s always like, It might turn into something that could be bad. There are warnings that it might be something to worry about. And it kind of leaves you to wonder: Media, what would you do if you thought it was ethnic cleansing? Why is it always “about to be,” or it’s someone “claiming that it is”? There’s a hesitancy that, to me, is very frustrating.
Mara Kronenfeld: “Why hasn’t something happened to stop the killing already? And the displacement of 90% of the population?”
MK: Oh yeah. So we’ve seen that around famine, that in other situations in which famine was predicted at the level, it has been predicted at different times than Gaza, it was declared famine. And we just don’t see that kind of collective statement or action when it comes to Gaza.
And what we’re seeing now looks very much like ethnic cleansing. I’m not an international law specialist, but one does wonder why we’re not talking about interventions now, as opposed to some moment in the future, when we’ve already seen likely well more than 52,000 deaths. That’s the count that the Ministry of Health has tried to keep going, despite being nearly bombed out of existence. But the Lancet, the British Lancet, had stated in that second report towards the end of 2024, that the actual death count was probably more like 60,000 in the first six months of 2024. And if we count the second six months, when the bombing was even more brutal, we could be talking of upwards of 120,000 deaths. And at the very minimum, we’re talking about 17,000 children. The true number is probably much, much higher.
So your question is very well taken. Why hasn’t something happened to stop the killing already? And the displacement of 90% of the population, from families displaced over 12 times in the last two years, with just a blanket and the clothes they’re wearing to carry with them from place to place?
The depravity goes on and on. And I found myself repeating the statistics for the last 20 months, and I’m just continually shocked that I’m not seeing, the horror that I feel, I’m not seeing it reflected in the corporate media.
And I tell everyone I talk to that we just can’t rely on traditional media. We have to be looking at video straight from Gaza, we have to be looking at independent news sites, because we’re just simply only going to get a very small part of the story.
JJ: Finally, we see that, despite the virulence, the wildness of the crackdown—student reporters being suspended, being arrested, simply for reporting on police assaults on campus protesters, the circulating of Do Not Hire lists of people who protest, threats to strip nonprofit status from groups that step out of line—it’s just not working. It’s silencing many people, of course, but at the same time, more and more people are speaking up. Stanford students have just started a hunger strike. Polls are showing large numbers of people don’t want their tax dollars going to Israel’s military. They’re trying to make it very scary to condemn this nightmare, and people are doing it anyway.
MK: Yeah, the power of the people has been, frankly, beautiful, something extremely powerful to behold. And we’ve seen that play out at UNRWA USA, where our donor base was just some 7,000 in early October 2023. We saw our donor base grow 146,000 people since October 2023. And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, these donors are from every state in the union, every ethnic background. I can’t tell you how many Jewish people donated on Passover in 2023 and 2024, talking about what Passover means, freeing the oppressed from affliction. We have seen, in just that snapshot of support for us, that American people are compassionate and are caring, and it’s really the elites who are trying to tell a different story, and a false story, that, thankfully, many folks in this country are too smart to swallow.
And I’ll just say that I view my work at UNRWA USA of serving the essential humanitarian needs of a population that is under brutal assault, which genocide scholars, including many, many in Israel, are calling a genocide. It is a badge of honor to provide humanitarian aid for a population that is under collective punishment.
And I’ll tell you that I do this, like so many, because “Never Again” is not just never again for the Holocaust, for Jewish people, for my grandfather who escaped Nazi Germany, “Never Again” is for anybody. And so as hard as this moment is, in terms of the repression in this country, I am honored to work beside my colleagues at UNRWA USA, many Palestinians, and beside all of the brave people in this country who refuse to swallow the narrative, the false narrative, that’s being handed to them.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mara Kronenfeld of UNRWA USA. Mara Kronenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert.
Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25) says the press should ask itself, “Were we open-minded enough to unexpected facts?” It’s a good question.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered an impassioned defense of press freedom to the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which later ran in the Times (5/13/25). At first glance, Sulzberger is repeating what many free press advocates, including myself (FAIR.org, 11/14/24, 2/26/25, 4/25/25), have said, which is that press freedom is under attack, and it is incumbent upon free society to fight back.
Of course, this is A.G. Sulzberger, who clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs, so his otherwise hard-hitting critique of Trump’s all-out assault on the press and his emphasis on “upsetting powerful interests of every type” is directly undermined by his insistence that “our job is to cover political debates, not to join them,” and that “we are nobody’s opposition” and “nobody’s cheerleader.” (FAIR dissected Sulzberger’s virtually identical arguments about the role of journalism under Trump back in September—see FAIR.org, 9/6/24.)
But the notion that journalists don’t play favorites is belied by another passage in Sulzberger’s updated manifesto. He wrote:
A record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years. Many more are subjected to campaigns of harassment, intimidation, surveillance and censorship. Those efforts have been perhaps most obvious and intense in authoritarian states like China and Russia. But a more insidious playbook for undermining the press has emerged in places like Hungary and India. Places where democracy persists but in a more conditional way, under leaders who were elected legitimately and then set about undermining checks on their power.
What’s most striking about this description is what it leaves out. The link is to a press release by the Committee to Protect Journalists (1/16/25), titled “The Number of Journalists Jailed Worldwide Reached a Near All-Time High in 2024.” “China, Israel and Myanmar were the leading jailers of reporters, followed by Belarus and Russia,” the release stated.
Deadliest country for journalists
Committee to Protect Journalists (2/12/25): “The toll of conflict on the press is most glaring in the unprecedented number of journalists and media workers killed in the Israel/Gaza war, 85 in 2024, and 78 in 2023.”
The fact that Israel found itself in a grouping with authoritarian regimes (most of which dwarf it in population, no less) seems like it would be worth a mention, but Sulzberger didn’t agree. He noted the authoritarian turn in India and Hungary—countries that imprisoned three and zero journalists, respectively, according to CPJ—while ignoring Israel, which jailed 43.
Israel is often pitched to Americans as a Western democratic regime in a neighborhood full of backward autocracies. CPJ noted: “A total of 108 journalists were imprisoned in the Middle East and North Africa, almost half of those detained by Israel.” That means Israel’s jailing of journalists significantly overshadows the press repression in places like Egypt (Amnesty International, 7/25/24) and Iran (Reporters Without Borders, 9/11/23), both of which have far bigger populations than Israel.
But Israel’s imprisoning journalists turns out to be the more benign part of its program of suppressing the press. CPJ also released a report (2/12/25) titled “2024 Is Deadliest Year for Journalists in CPJ History; Almost 70% Killed by Israel.” The report said, “At least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel.” The group also investigated Israel’s killing of journalists in Lebanon (CPJ, 10/10/24). Altogether, there were 82 journalists killed by Israel in 2024, 13 times as many as were killed in the next-deadliest countries for journalists, Sudan and Pakistan (with six each).
And the world has known about how dire the situation is for the press in this operation from its earliest stages. Less than two months after hostilities began, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (11/28/23) reported, in a piece called “Israel’s War on Journalists”:
Israel’s assault on Gaza has quickly become the deadliest for journalists covering conflict zones since 1992. No other war in the 21st century has been so lethal for journalists, with 34 killed just within its first two weeks.
I covered this issue for FAIR.org (10/19/23) in the Gaza assault’s early days. But downplaying Israel’s often lethal repression of journalism has been a pattern for the Times generally (FAIR.org, 5/1/24), not just for its publisher.
‘Would-be strongmen’
Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) wrote that “my colleagues and I have spent months studying how press freedom has been attacked in Hungary—as well as in other democracies such as India and Brazil.” But not, apparently, in Israel.
As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time Sulzberger has made such an omission. Last year, he wrote a lengthy article in the Washington Post (9/5/24) about the decline of press freedom in Hungary, Brazil and India. He wrote that these countries are run by “would-be strongmen” who “have developed a style” of repression against the media that is “more subtle than their counterparts in totalitarian states such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, who systematically censor, jail or kill journalists.”
It was an interesting piece, but again, Israel’s war on the press went unmentioned, even though it is a key example of press freedom decline in a Western state where the government has become more illiberal and authoritarian (NPR, 1/12/23; New Statesman, 1/17/23; Foreign Affairs, 2/8/23).
Press freedom in Israel has been on the decline since the invasion of Gaza began in October 2023. In that time, the government has pushed a boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), moved to privatize public broadcasting (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24) and increased censorship (+972, 5/20/24). The country has banned the broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24). After Sulzberger delivered his address, the Israeli government moved to take even more control over broadcasting (Times of Israel, 5/18/25).
Israel’s killing and jailing of journalists, as well as its domestic clampdown and censorship of the press, is arguably at the center of the global crisis in press freedom. The fact that Sulzberger omitted this undercuts his point, because it reinforces the perception that the Times goes out of its way to bury or sanitize unsavory details about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 5/16/25) and advance Israel’s narrative (Literary Hub, 4/30/24)—calling into question his claim that a free press is essential to “arm everyone else with the information and context they need to understand and meet the moment.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Committee to Project Journalists’ image of a van from the Al-Quds Al-Youm TV channel that was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza in December 2024, killing four journalists and a media worker. (Photo: Reuters/Khamis Said)
The World Health Organization (5/12/25) “calls for the protection of health care and for an immediate end to the aid blockade, which is starving people, obstructing their right to health, and robbing them of dignity and hope.”
More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”
With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.
With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”
‘To pressure Hamas’
The New York Times‘ online headline (4/28/25) reduces the prospect of mass starvation to the innocuous phrase “Gaza aid.”
At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).
A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.
For more than a month and a half, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other relief from entering the devastated Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas to free the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages there. It argues that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza has enough provisions despite the restrictions.
That frame looks like a simple sentence, but note that it tacitly requires you to accept that Israel determines whether people in the Gaza Strip can receive the basics for human life—asking why Israel is in charge of Palestinians’ food and medicine is beyond this conversation’s walls.
Then, without even a comma, we are told that the denial of life to all Gazans is “an attempt to pressure Hamas”—Boxerman makes a silent skip over the acceptability of collective punishment there, and a frictionless transmission of Israel’s rationale for its actions. That Israel has itself deprioritized the release of the hostages vis-à-vis the reoccupation of Gaza is off the page. But that Israel “argues” the blockade is lawful and that Gaza has what we’re told to accept as “enough provisions”? Those are statements that the Times suggests can stand alone.
Who you choose to believe
The New York Times (4/28/25) describes the relationship between Israel, which has announced a policy of starving millions of people, and the UN, which is trying to force Israel to allow food aid into Gaza, as “fraught with mutual recrimination.”
But aha, you say, here comes another view—though it’s already set up by being in the responsive, “others differ” position:
The United Nations and aid groups say the blockade has further harmed Palestinians already reeling from more than a year and a half of war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced well over a million and leveled large swaths of the enclave’s cities.
While true, and ostensibly sympathetic, what with the reeling and the leveling, notice how this is not a direct response to the claims in the lead: that the blockade is lawful, and that Gaza has all it needs. It’s just a statement that the people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. And that even that is just a thing the UN and aid groups “say.”
You could tighten this all to the NBC News headline (4/17/25) Belén Fernández clocked in her piece on coverage of Israel’s starvation of Gaza (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”
All of this depends on who you choose to believe, seems to be elite media’s message—with a few winky-wink tips on who to believe.
Boxerman goes on to report:
Ordinary Gazans have lamented the rising price of basic commodities under the pressure of the blockade. In some cases, the restrictions have turned the quest for getting enough nutritious food into a daily struggle.
It’s like an unfunny game of “find the qualifier”: What’s an “ordinary” Gazan, and who are the extraordinary ones who deserve to starve? What defines the “some cases”? Is un-nutritious food freely available? When does a “quest” become a “struggle”?
It’s a perverse way to describe a situation where widespread starvation is not looming or imminent, but well underway. But it’s an excellent way to tell people they don’t necessarily, if you look at it a certain way, need to give a damn.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Biological Diversity’s Ashley Nunes about the selloff of public lands for the May 9, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
From lease sales to expedited permitting processes, the committee’s proposal creates an unprecedented pathway for developing our vast natural resources on federal lands and waters for generations to come.
That’s a response to a piece of the budget reconciliation bill making its way through Congress, and it comes from the American Petroleum Institute. So you can sense what’s up, and why our guest calls this piece of Republicans’ effort to fund Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute.
Ashley Nunes is a specialist in public lands policy at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ashley Nunes.
Ashley Nunes: Thank you, Janine. Good to be with you.
JJ: Let’s timestamp ourselves. We’re recording on May 8, and this is about the House Natural Resources Committee, and theircontribution to the Republican House Reconciliation Bill, that’s going to tell us how to offset the billionaire tax cuts that they want to push through. But it’s not a done deal yet, right?
AN: Right.
JJ: So it’s still in process. There are lots of implications, but what would this plan do, particularly with regard to–I could say public lands, but I really appreciate your phrase, “precious wild places.” What would this do?
AN: So as someone who’s focused on public lands policy, I am most interested in the part of the reconciliation package that’s come out of the House Natural Resources Committee. The proposed Republican budget hands over power to private industries to destroy our public lands and offshore waters. The excessive and indiscriminate development of fossil fuels, minerals and timber will harm wildlife and communities. This reckless development would undermine environmental protections. It would simply make air and water quality worse. And, of course, that’s harmful for wildlife and communities. So this budget wouldn’t just give tax breaks to billionaires, but it would give polluters the green light to raise emissions, destroy wild places and harm endangered species.
JJ: In particular, I know that you look at, for example, Alaska. We’re looking at oil leases in Alaska, we’re looking at Minnesota. There are very specific things, and I wonder if you could just lift up some examples for folks to know what we’re talking about.
AN: Absolutely. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I think I could do some highlights industry by industry.
AN: So let’s start with oil and gas on public lands. This bill would mandate dozens of lease sales every quarter, as you say, also sometimes in very sensitive locations, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There’s also at least 4 million acres on the coastal plains of Alaska for oil and gas, some of the most important bird breeding areas in the country, and really one of the last great wild places, not only in the Arctic, but in the world.
Then if we go to offshore waters for oil and gas, this bill would mandate six lease sales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, and at least 30 lease sales in Gulf waters over the next 15 years. This offshore oil and gas development, when it pushes into sensitive ecosystems and deeper waters, it really risks another tragedy like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill that resulted in loss of human life and non-human life. The Gulf waters are home to the Rice’s whale, the world’s most endangered whale. So oil and gas here is really doing the most.
The other fossil fuel we’re mentioning is coal. This bill would open at least 4 million acres for new coal leasing. Coal is a dying and downright dirty industry, but this bill would have taxpayers subsidizing to keep that industry alive.
So across the board, there’s reduced royalty payments for these fossil fuel companies, for oil, gas and coal. And even though Republicans say that this is a bill intended to raise revenue, polluters get a really good deal here.
So that’s just fossil fuels. And if I could say a bit more, as you said, there’s also mining and timber. These are other extractive industries in the bill. So, mining: The bill undoes protections put in place by the Biden administration, it pushes through contentious mining projects, one of which you mentioned. So reversing a ban on 225,000 acres adjacent to Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota, and then also a ban on a 211-mile mining road that would stretch across unspoiled wilderness in Alaska.
And then for timber, there’s a mandated 25% increase in timber production on public lands. And I fear this puts a target on the biggest and oldest trees, because of their economic value for timber. A bigger tree would produce more timber, but these are also the most ecologically valuable trees for carbon sequestration, habitat protection and wildfire resilience. So this is a huge giveaway to extractive industry that would be hugely harmful for the places we love.
JJ: And maybe to just pull it out a bit, this is opposing what communities want to do with their land, right? Land use is a local issue, and we hear hollering about states’ rights, but this is actually in opposition to what a number of places have said they want to do with their land.
AN: That’s right, Janine, and this is wonky, but there are many provisions, across the bill, that would take away environmental review. And that’s the process that allows the public to have their say, to give their input. So if Congress rubberstamps projects, the public doesn’t have that opportunity.
JJ: It’s so important. The fight to resist clean energy in this country is intense, and it’s also transparent. And those thumbprints are all over this as well. The fossil fuel companies, they’re following tobacco. They’re just going to hold onto it, to the very last penny. And that seems evident in this legislation.
AN: You’re so right. There are provisions, as I said, to reduce royalties on fossil fuels, and that’s the status quo. But there’s also provisions to add rents for clean energy, renewable energy on public lands. So this is really a giveaway to polluters, and it’s to the detriment of that clean energy transition that we need.
JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally: I think transparency is the least that reporters could demand from this process, that has such myriad implications. But what would you like to see from journalism on this set of issues? And maybe what would you like to see less of?
Ashley Nunes: “This budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime.”
AN: There’s just so much to say here, really. I think I would just say a couple of things.
First of all, we were warned that this would happen. This budget bill is the Project 2025 and Agenda 47 playbooks in action. It’s not just “drill, baby, drill,” it’s also “mine, baby, mine” and “log, baby, log.” This proposal uses public resources to enrich private interests. It’s extreme. And if these provisions stay in the reconciliation package, and are enacted, this would be an obscene giveaway of our public resources to private industry, and it would put these places at serious risk. It’s heartbreaking. I think journalists, like you and others, can help people understand what’s at stake.
So, secondly, I would just add that we are living through a climate crisis and an extinction crisis, and this budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime. It would not only cause harm to our cherished landscapes, coastal waters and wildlife, but also to our public health, and our ability to recreate on our public lands across the country. So people want to know what they can do, and ultimately, people need to call their congressional representatives and tell them to vote no, to stop.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. They’re online at BiologicalDiversity.org. Thank you so much, Ashley Nunes, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
It seems like an odd moment for the US media to do a hit job on Brazil’s coffee industry.
Protective tariffs have been used since the 1800s in the US to protect domestic industry and increase employment. As Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and other economists influential on Latin America’s “Pink Tide” argued, tariffs are also fundamental for Global South nations to escape from the prison of agricultural commodity export dependence, by enabling them to industrialize through import substitution.
Regardless of heterodox economists’ arguments in favor of import tariffs, however, there seems to be little sense in the US government imposing tariffs on products that can never be produced nationally, like bananas or coffee. This is what it did on April 2—the day after April Fool’s day—when President Trump announced new, blanket tariffs on all imports from 57 countries around the world.
Compared to other countries (like Cambodia or Madagascar) in the Global South, Brazil, which had a trade deficit with the United States in 2024, got off relatively easy, with 10%. One sector that will hurt, however, is coffee.
Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, and its largest export market is the United States. Brazil exported $1.8 billion, or 15% of its total coffee production, to the United States in 2024. In 2025, US consumers will have to foot the bill for a 10% tariff on a product whose price has already increased by 6.9% this year, due to the effects of climate change weather events on last year’s harvest cycle.
‘Harvested by trafficked slaves’
AP (4/24/25): “Eight Brazilian coffee workers…allege… they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.”
The US’s new tariffs on Brazil came into effect on April 5. Nineteen days later, a Delaware-based NGO named Coffee Watch, which provides no funding transparency on its website, conducted a media blitz against Brazil’s coffee industry. It issued a letter to the US Customs and Border Protection, demanding a halt on all Brazilian coffee imports to the United States. On April 24, the New York Times, Guardian and AP, which sells content to hundreds of sites and newspapers, ran simultaneous articles on Coffee Watch’s campaign.
Coffee Watch built on the stories of eight workers rescued by Brazilian federal labor inspectors from what the Brazil’s government called “slave-like conditions.” These workers came from five of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms. Coffee Watch and other quoted experts extrapolated from their cases to advocate for a complete halt of Brazilian coffee exports to the United States—itself a country where hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work on farms under conditions that could be categorized as “slave-like” within Brazil’s legal framework.
The New York Times article (4/24/25), headlined “Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to US Authorities,” detailed a lawsuit filed against Northern companies, including Starbucks, Nestlé and Dunkin’, on behalf of eight workers from five of the 19,000 farms affiliated with the Cooxupé cooperative. The article, by the Times‘ Ephrat Livni, went on to describe Coffee Watch’s efforts to force the US Customs and Border Protection to block all coffee entering from Brazil.
“This isn’t about a few bad actors,” the Times quoted Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.”
The subheading of the Guardian article (4/24/25) read, “Brazil has been the world’s leading coffee producer due to the forced labor of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians.”
AP (4/24/25) quoted International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs, saying, “Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves.”
More labor rights than US
New York Times (4/24/25): “The laborers end up…harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.”
From reporting like this, the casual reader might think that Brazil’s coffee industry is based on slave labor, and that many or most of the people who work picking coffee are enslaved. This is a greatly misleading depiction of the very real labor issues in Brazil.
Although landless agricultural workers in Brazil, like nearly everywhere else in the world, suffer from low wages, lack of job stability and oppressive labor conditions, Brazil’s coffee farm workers have significantly better labor rights than farm workers in the United States. Nearly half of the US farm workforce are undocumented immigrants with no labor rights whatsoever, in fear of being arrested, imprisoned and/or deported by ICE.
The arguments advanced to justify banning coffee imports from Brazil to the US rely on outliers representing a tiny portion of the workforce, not the norm, as these sensational articles present.
Brazil’s coffee industry provides 580,000 full time jobs and millions of harvest-season temp jobs. According to Coffee Watch’s own letter, the highest number of workers rescued from “slave-like conditions” in any year since 2003 was 333, in 2023.
When Higonnet tells the Times that “thousands” of coffee workers in Brazil work in “outright slavery” (a more than semantic leap from the Brazilian legal category of “slave-like” working conditions), she is misleadingly referring to Coffee Watch’s composite figure of 4,128, cited in Coffee Watch’s letter to Customs as the total number of coffee workers rescued from “slave-like” conditions between 2003 and 2024.
Whereas the number of 221 workers rescued from slave-like conditions in 2024 certainly doesn’t represent the total number of workers subjected to those conditions that year, no methodology is presented to estimate what that undercount might be. The number of Brazil’s federal labor inspectors is 2,800, including 900 new hires this year, and the number estimated by IPEA needed to bring Brazil up to international standards is 3,700, so an undercount is a clear possibility, but it’s certainly a far cry from Collingsworth’s insinuation that most Starbucks coffee purchased from Brazil was produced by “trafficked slaves.”
On the back of slave labor
Guardian (4/24/25): “Starbucks charges like $6 for a cup of coffee, where most of that has been harvested by forced laborers and child laborers.”
Like the United States and most other countries in the Americas, Brazil was built on the back of slave labor, and was the last country to eradicate it, in 1888. The legacy of this today is that it has the highest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa, and huge problems of structural racism, including large but shrinking levels of inequality, and lack of opportunities for the poorest segments of society, which are disproportionately constituted of the 56% of the nation’s population that is Afro-Brazilian.
There is a large population of landless rural workers, who with support from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST in Portuguese) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) have been successfully fighting for land rights since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship in 1985. Today, although millions of landless rural workers toil away in degrading conditions for low wages on farms producing export commodity crops like coffee, sugar and soy—some of which cross the line into violating Brazil’s slave-labor legislation—there is also a growing population of millions of family farmers who don’t employ anyone.
Today, 78% of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms, producing around 48% of the total amount of coffee, are small-holder family farms. If Coffee Watch succeeds in lobbying the US government to halt imports from Brazil, the hardest-hit sector will be the same group that fair trade advocates work to empower. Without millions ferreted away in investment funds and offshore holdings, it’s the family farms that run the risk of financial ruin, not the agribusiness plantations, or companies like Starbucks and Nestlé that work with them. When small farmers lose their livelihood, they often become rural workers themselves, which, as Coffee Watch’s own letter to Border Patrol demonstrates, are among the lowest-paid and most vulnerable labor sectors in Brazil.
Based on the actions of five farms that belong to a cooperative of 19,000 of them, Coffee Watch and the media organizations supporting its campaign are targeting an industry largely composed of family farmers. It’s reminiscent of Operation Car Wash, an “anti-corruption” campaign backed by the US DoJ that bankrupted Brazil’s five largest construction and engineering companies, and caused 4.4 million direct and indirect job losses, under the guise of punishing a handful of corrupt business executives.
Just as was the case with corruption in the construction industry, the directors of the farms, the cooperative and the US corporations they sell to deserve to be held liable for their labor crimes. But punishing the industry as a whole will cause disproportionate suffering for the working class and poor, and raise Brazil’s level of extreme poverty.
Different definitions
Coffee Watch’s letter to acting Customs Commissioner Pete R. Flores cited US and International Labor Organization (ILO) legislation on slave labor used to justify the demand to block coffee imports from Brazil, but uses the Brazilian federal government’s much wider definition of “slave-like” labor conditions for the facts and figures used to back its argument.
Brazil, a nation with a long history of slavery and oppressive labor conditions in rural areas, first recognized modern slavery as a problem in 1995, and widened its definition of “slave-like” labor in 2003 under President Lula da Silva. It created a series of enforcement mechanisms to hold companies accountable for violating labor laws, including a “dirty list” of companies convicted of using slave labor. These employers are required to pay a minimum of 20 months salary at minimum wage to each rescued worker, as well as court fines, and can face up to eight years in prison.
Companies stay on the dirty list for two years and, during this time, are blocked from receiving government contracts or credit. Among the best-known companies that have appeared on the list is FEMSA, the world’s largest bottler of Coca-Cola. FEMSA was put on the list in 2018 after labor inspectors discovered truckers and warehouse workers at one of its Brazilian plants were being forced to work between 80 and 140 hours of overtime per month.
This was one of many cases in which “slave-like” working conditions, although oppressive and illegal, did not mean they were being held captive or forced to work for no remuneration. Brazil’s definition of slave-like working conditions has some overlap with US and ILO law, for example, holding workers in captivity and forcing them to work for very low or no wages. But it also includes things that are legal in the US, even for those US agricultural workers who are not undocumented, let alone the US’s 800,000 prison slave laborers.
As Brazil’s National Justice Council explains, the 2003 change in Brazil’s definition of slave labor represents
significant progress in the fight against this social problem, because it goes beyond lack of freedom, expanding the criminal definition of slavery to include cases of subjection to degrading working conditions, exhaustive work hours or debt bondage.
Coffee Watch’s own letter to Flores states:
The Brazilian approach to forced labor is somewhat more expansive than the ILO’s, as it may allow for prosecution of employers who subject workers to extremely degrading conditions, regardless of whether coercion was present in the employment relationship.
Any single violation of Brazil’s different criteria for slave-like working conditions makes the employer liable. This can include things like excessively long work days, not having an adequate number of bathrooms for the number of workers, making workers rent gloves and other safety equipment from the employer, not compensating workers for transportation to and from the work site, and not providing an adequate amount of drinking water. It would be easy enough for an organization such as Coffee Watch to verify this, but it’s a fair assumption to make that at least some of the coffee workers rescued from slave-like conditions since 2003 were victims of oppressive labor conditions that would not constitute slave labor by ILO or US legal criteria.
Landless rural laborers
This is in no way meant to minimize the oppression of those rural workers in Brazil’s coffee trade who are working in what Brazil’s government calls slave-like conditions. With over 1 million people employed in the sector, however, their situation is an outlier. Much more troublesome are the low wages and lousy working conditions that represent the norm in the industry—especially the fact that most temporary harvest laborers work off the books, outside of many of the safeguards in place to protect worker rights.
Another problem is the low number of labor inspectors—the result of six years of gutting of the Labor Ministry by neoliberal presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, who, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed in 2017, left the government with neoliberal spending caps. These were only partially dismantled by a compromise amendment called the New Fiscal Framework, enacted as Lula returned to power in 2023.
Capping social spending increases at 2.5% per year above inflation may have led to the compromise of only hiring 900 of the 1,800 inspectors needed to bring Brazil up to international labor standards, but the fact remains that Brazil has not reached the goal of one inspector for 10,000–15,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization.
Around the world, landless rural laborers are among the most oppressed, poorest members of the labor force. Nevertheless, Brazilian coffee farms are not regularly raided by masked government police and their workers thrown into prison camps. In this political juncture, US institutions have little moral standing to criticize labor rights for agricultural workers in other countries—especially in countries like Brazil, whose labor rights issues stem in part from the US-backed military dictatorship’s systematic campaign of arrest, torture and murder of labor union leaders.
Fundraising boost
The idea that Trump’s US Customs and Border Protection would act to increase the price of coffee right now, in the name of “human rights,” based on abuses in five coffee farms, is very unlikely. This exposes the move as a publicity stunt, clearly designed to boost fundraising and legitimacy for a new NGO.
If Coffee Watch were focused more on improving the lives of coffee workers than on institutional promotion, it could show solidarity by supporting the MST and CONTAG in their fight to help landless agricultural workers start their own farms.
Taking big corporations like Starbucks and Nestlé to task for failing to obey local labor laws is commendable. But given the long history of US NGOs acting as regime change cheerleaders for the US State Department in Latin America, the priority that many of these organizations place on self-advancement over benefiting their target populations, and the long, cushy relationship between sleazy corporations like ExxonMobil and NGOs like Transparency International USA, can human rights guidelines for the Global South established by a US organization with no funding transparency really be trusted?
You would think a publication like the New York Times would exercise enough due diligence to include the voice of, say, someone from Brazil’s DA office, or an official from an agency that works to monitor, punish and prevent occurrences of slave-like working conditions. Instead, it published a slightly modified press release from Coffee Watch, and the journalists involved probably thought they were doing their good deed for the month.
Featured image: Cachoeirinha farm in Nova Resende, Brazil, on the government’s “dirty list” for labor abuses (photo: Ministry of Labor and Employment).
This week on CounterSpin: As part of its deadly denial of food, water and medicine to Palestinian people, Israel attacked a civilian aid ship endeavoring to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, setting it on fire, injuring crewmembers, cutting off communications. The ship was called the Conscience. Millions around the world ask every day what it will take to awaken the conscience of leaders to stop the genocide of Palestinians, instead of trying to silence the outcry.
Corporate media are complicit, with please-don’t-think-about-it headlines like NBC News‘ “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”
We talk about attacks on aid delivery and media’s role with Mara Kronenfeld, executive director at UNRWA USA (UNRWA being the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA USA being the partner group amplifying and grounding that work).
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Gaza’s starvation and the MOVE bombing.
Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Bartlett Naylor about Trump’s crypto grift for the May 9, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: I read, thanks to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams, that Trump is planning a fancy private dinner for top investors in the $Trump meme coin. It has a dollar sign in front of it, but I don’t know how to pronounce that. But it’s the crypto token that is enriching him hand over fist, and with other crypto-related investments, has reportedly gifted the Trump family $2.9 billion in just the last six months.
I would be ashamed, but I believe that a lot of listeners are with me as I ask, “Huh? It’s a what? That’s doing what?” Here to help us make sense of what’s happening, and why it matters, is Bartlett Naylor. He’s financial policy advocate at Congress Watch, part of the indispensable group Public Citizen. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bart Naylor.
Bartlett Naylor: Many thanks for having me.
JJ: What’s a meme coin? And why would anybody pay money for it?
BN: I don’t know and I don’t know!
So a meme coin is generally a term of derision within the cryptocurrency community for a coin that is simply developed as a joke to make fun of something, to take advantage of an internet theme. Folks have heard of Bitcoin, and a meme coin, like Bitcoin, is simply a digital receipt that you paid money for something. It’s not shares in a company that is an enterprise that, ideally, would make a profit and pay you a dividend. It’s just a digital receipt. With Bitcoin, you could sell that to somebody else, and if they paid you more than you paid for it, you’d make money.
And that’s the idea with Trump’s meme coin, which surprisingly, for such a selfless guy, he named $Trump. So when you buy one, you are basically sending him money, and you’re also having a trading fee, which is where he’s actually made most of his money, which also goes to Donald Trump.
You get nothing, according to him. He even says on the website, “This is not an investment opportunity. You should do this to celebrate me, to celebrate my leadership, my willingness to fight, fight, fight.”
And he announced a few weeks ago that those 220 that buy the most will be invited to a dinner with him. It’s been a little unclear, sometimes he says the White House; other times he says it’s a golf club near Washington, DC.
For background: you can’t do this. The law forbids the president from soliciting gifts. The law also forbids the president from accepting gifts from a foreign state, and this $2 billion that you had mentioned is coming from the United Arab Emirates, a sovereign fund in Dubai, and they’re going to use a separate cryptocurrency called the stablecoin. And, again, that’s a coin that is tied to a fiat currency such as the dollar. One Trump stablecoin equals $1, which basically, when you sent him that, you’re giving him an interest-free loan.
JJ: Soliciting gifts—you’ve just said it, but soliciting gifts is a crime, right? And you wrote to the DoJ, you and others wrote to the DOJ and the Office of Government Ethics, to say just that.
BN: Exactly. And so we are waiting on the edge of our seat that Pam Bondi will file a federal indictment of the president. I speak in jest, of course, and Trump controls the federal prosecutors. So for another three years and ten-ish months, nine months, we will await actual accountability for this.
JJ: I mean, just to be clear, there are laws. I know that our minds are all blown, but there are laws, there are precedents, there are things to rely on. And, you know, I wasn’t a fan of the status quo. I don’t want to return to bipartisan gentility, but there are things where you think, “Wow, I didn’t even know that we needed a law to prevent that, because no one’s ever tried to do that.” Where are we, in terms of response and resistance?
Bartlett Naylor: “A number of senators have called this the biggest corruption in presidential history.”
BN: A number of senators have called this the biggest corruption in presidential history, called for federal prosecution. Senator Ossoff of Georgia, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal, also of Connecticut, have called for an investigation by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. There are calls for this. But of course, we have a captured Congress, a captured Republican Party, and now a captured Justice Department that will not act.
JJ: Well, what would you ask from journalism at this point? It’s strange times that we’re in, and we want to acknowledge that some of the groundwork has been laid in previous administrations. But at the same time, something new is happening. And I just wonder, finally, what you would ask from reporters on this.
BN: Ongoing attention to this crypto grift. Because the two main stories of political influence in the 2024 election were the $280 million by Elmo Musk, to basically buy himself a co-presidency for a while. But the second was a hundred and some million dollars spent by the crypto industry, mostly to defeat anti-crypto lawmakers, the most prominent being Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. And that has sent a chill through all of Congress, and especially Democrats, who otherwise would responsibly be jaundiced about cryptocurrency, but they are voting in favor of it.
There’s going to be a vote today. We actually don’t know the outcome, but it may well enable and give federal imprimatur to the cryptocurrency stablecoin, the kind that Trump just unveiled, this billion-dollar deal with Dubai. And they’re doing that because they’re afraid of political spending from the crypto industry.
The advertisements paid for by the crypto industry don’t say, “Vote for Bernie Moreno because he’s pro-crypto, and vote against Sherrod Brown because he’s anti-crypto.” No, the political spending doesn’t mention crypto at all. It mentions something else, some problem that they made up about Sherrod Brown, or Katie Porter in California, or something else.
Other PAC’s have done the same thing. If their own issue isn’t particularly popular, they pick something else. But voters need to know that crypto is the biggest bad corruption issue with Trump, and they should hold their lawmakers to account if they enable it.
JJ: I’d like to end right there, but I just need to ask you—somebody is like, “What the hell is crypto? What is it that I’m concerned about?” Do you have your quick explanation for people who don’t even know where to start with this issue?
BN: I would call it thin air, a Ponzi scheme. Cryptocurrency was devised by an anonymous person in 2008, as somehow a way to have a payment system that doesn’t rely on banks. And if we all just use his currency, Bitcoin, then we wouldn’t have to rely on the mega banks that crashed the economy in 2008, like JP Morgan. There would be a limited amount of them, and we would just use that.
In fact, it has not caught on, for a number of reasons, as a currency. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to validate the transaction between, let’s say, you and me, and it’s unwieldy. But, again, I will call cryptocurrency thin air.
And I’m actually quoting President Trump of 2018. He also understood that cryptocurrency was a big nothing. He has since realized that he can personally make a lot of money, so he’s grifting away.
JJ: Yep. Times have changed. Well, thank you very much for that.
We’ve been speaking with Bart Naylor of Congress Watch at Public Citizen. They’re online at Citizen.org. Thank you so much, Bart Naylor, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:
The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.
In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to
the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.
Stunning assertion
Jewish Currents (7/17/24): “By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.”
Israel and its backers, however, have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality. The scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon (Jewish Currents, 7/17/24) explained how human shielding discourse has been misapplied to Gaza:
Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.
This corruption of the meaning of “human shields” has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide. At the outset of the October 2023 escalation in Palestine, a Boston Globe article (10/8/23) asserted that Hamas “uses its own civilians as human shields against attacks. Israel warns civilians before it launches attacks and urges that they leave conflict zones.” This was a stunning assertion, given Israel’s prolific record of deliberately killing Palestinian noncombatants, which long predates October 7, 2023 (FAIR.org, 10/13/23).
The New York Times’ editorial board (10/16/23) flatly stated that “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign,” without pointing to any source documenting a single instance of this practice.
The same was true of a piece that appeared a day later in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/23), which said that “Hamas uses the inhabitants of Gaza as human shields.” It described the group as employing a “human-shield strategy.”
Evidence on one side
Such claims have two major problems. One is the lack of evidence for them, and the other is the extensive evidence of Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Consider, for example, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s US-backed 2008–09 assault on Gaza. The UN’s fact-finding mission
found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.
The mission did, however, find credible allegations that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches.”
The UNHRC’s report on Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, fell short of saying that Hamas used Palestinians as human shields. The commission said it was “disturbed by” a “report” that a Hamas spokesperson said people in Gaza should go on their roofs as a way of “shielding their homes from attack.”
The document said that “although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.” That’s quite different from saying that Palestinian fighters actually did compel Palestinian civilians to act as human shields.
But the report said that that’s what Israel did:
The manner in which the Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian civilians to stand in windows, enter houses/underground areas and/or perform dangerous tasks of a military nature, constitutes a violation of the prohibition against the use of human shields.
An Amnesty International report (3/26/15) on Operation Protective Edge noted that
Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.
Another important context for the human shields issue comes from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/11/17). The organization says that, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967,
Israeli security forces Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities.
‘Hamas command bunker’
By describing a raid on a hospital as an effort to “root out Hamas,” the Wall Street Journal (11/10/23) gave credence to unsubstantiated Israeli claims.
Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, corporate media have frequently ignored this body of evidence. The human shields propaganda arguably reached its apotheosis in the run-up to Israel’s November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex at the time, and during and after the assault.
A Wall Street Journal article (11/10/23) on the matter carried the headline “Israeli Forces Race to Root Out Hamas,” with the subhead “Israeli forces face one of their toughest challenges as they converge on strip’s largest hospital.” Taken together, these phrases imply that Al-Shifa has a Hamas presence that ought to be “rooted out.” The piece said that Israeli
troops have converged in the past day on the sprawling facility, which Israel contends holds a major Hamas command bunker underneath the complex, a claim Hamas has denied.
At no point did the authors mention that Israel had presented no credible evidence in support of these allegations (FAIR.org, 12/1/23).
Israel maintains that Hamas built a military command center at the hospital, using its patients and staff as human shields.
The seizure of Al-Shifa, along with whatever evidence the Israelis produce of Hamas’s military presence there, could affect international sentiment about the invasion, as well as the continuing negotiations to free the hostages captured by Hamas last month.
This passage suggests that the question is what type of evidence Israel will provide of Hamas’s supposed operations at Al-Shifa, rather than whether it has any convincing evidence at all. The piece opted to present the supposed command center as a “he said, she said” narrative, but Hamas reportedly said that they were “prepared for an international delegation to conduct a search of the hospitals and their grounds for evidence of such alleged underground tunnels and command centers” (Mondoweiss, 11/13/23).
‘A deadly lie’
Human Rights Watch (11/14/23) found that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”
Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital denied that there was a Hamas command center under the facility (Guardian, 11/14/23). Human Rights Watch (11/14/23), for its part, said:
The Israeli military on October 27 claimed that “Hamas uses hospitals as terror infrastructures,” publishing footage alleging that Hamas was operating from Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also alleged that Hamas was using the Indonesian Hospital to hide an underground command and control center and that they had deployed a rocket launchpad 75 meters from the hospital.
These claims are contested. Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate them, nor seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals.
Nevertheless, a subsequent CNN (11/17/23) report took the “shrug and say, ‘gee, golly, we just don’t know’” approach:
Israel points to the hospital as an example of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.
Since launching an operation at Al-Shifa this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it found a tunnel shaft and military equipment, but it has not yet shown proof of a large-scale command and control center. Hamas denies the allegations. CNN has not verified the claims of either Israel or Hamas.
CNN may not have been unable to verify either party’s claims, but they do their audience no favors by leaving out Human Right Watch’s remarks, or the following from Katrina Penney (Otago Daily Times, 11/16/23), a representative of MSF, which had personnel working at Al-Shifa:
We have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base. In fact to the contrary; the hospital facilities have been trying to treat patients and trying to shelter civilians and their families at levels far beyond their capacity.
Excluding such testimonials gave Israel’s “command center” and “human shields” arguments unwarranted credibility. In contrast to CNN, Maureen Clare Murphy (Electronic Intifada, 11/15/23) offered a much sharper assessment of the available evidence, writing that
Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses Al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.
But such honesty and precision is generally too much to ask of corporate media.
‘A sub-army of slaves’
To establish the “truth” that Hamas uses human shields, Washington Post columnist James Willick (11/14/23) quotes a Post editorial (11/5/23) criticizing Hamas for “provoking Israel militarily—while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels.” By this logic, any non-suicidal military operation against Israel would involve “human shields.”
This dismal coverage of the human shields question was not limited to the reporting on Al-Shifa. Throughout the genocide, corporate media have often treated the idea that Hamas routinely uses Palestinian civilians as human shields as an established fact, while pretending that Israel doesn’t do exactly that.
Nor have media offered any proof of Hamas engaging in this practice in the post–October 7 US/Israeli rampage, as in an in-house Washington Post column (11/14/23) by Jason Willick, headlined “We Can’t Ignore the Truth That Hamas Uses Human Shields.” Hamas, he said, was “trying to increase” the number of dead Palestinian civilians.
A Newsweek op-ed (5/23/24) from Fordham University philosophy professor John Davenport referred to what he called “the stark fact” that Hamas uses “ordinary Palestinians as ‘human shields.’” While voluminous evidence of US/Israeli crimes throughout the genocide was readily available (Middle East Eye, 10/20/23, 5/16/24), Willick and Davenport failed to marshal a single report from the UN or an NGO that substantiated their claim that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.
Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (7/1/24) said that, in the months since October 7, “the Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale.” Haaretz (8/13/24) reported that “random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.”
Still, US media commentators like Bret Stephens (New York Times, 9/3/24) and the Journal’s editorial board (10/7/24) were more interested in making uncorroborated claims that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields than in discussing Israel’s widespread, confirmed use of the practice.
More recently, Haaretz (3/30/25) ran an article by an anonymous senior officer in the Israeli military detailing how “in Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.” The officer explains how no infantry force in the Israeli military goes into a house in Gaza before a human shield clears it, which means “there are four [human shields] in a company, 12 in a battalion and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”
Blaming Palestinians for their own deaths
Reuters (4/6/25) allowed a National Security Council spokesperson to claim without contradiction that aid workers killed by Israel were “human shields for terrorism.”
Even after Haaretz published this account, the New York Times ran an op-ed (4/6/25) asserting that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” as if it were Hamas that kept a slave army of Palestinians for this purpose.
Similarly, a Reuters report (4/6/25) on Israel’s March 23 massacre of 15 paramedics quoted US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes, “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism.” The piece didn’t bother pointing to the lack of proof for Hughes’ claim, nor did it inform readers that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields on a daily basis.
In the same vein, an NBCNews piece (4/7/25) on the paramedics atrocity included the sentence, “The White House on Sunday said Trump held Hamas responsible for the incident because Hamas uses ambulances and ‘human shields.’” Nothing in the article cast doubt on this unsubstantiated assertion, or noted that a senior Israeli military officer had just acknowledged (Haaretz, 3/30/25) that
the highest-ranking personnel on the ground have known about the [Israeli military’s] use of [Palestinians as] human shields for more than a year, and no one has tried to stop it.
To suggest that a meaningful portion of the Palestinians killed in Gaza can be attributed to Hamas using them as human shields—lack of evidence be damned—is to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, while reducing US/Israeli responsibility for the slaughter.
The canard also demonizes Hamas, painting its leaders as brutal savages with no regard for any human life. That in turn rationalizes the US/Israeli assault on Gaza; the narrative suggests that Hamas are so brutal toward their own people that one should cheer for Israel to eradicate them, not only for Israel’s benefit, but ultimately for the Palestinians’—even at the cost of leveling Gaza and exterminating its people.
