This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said. Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particularly in the light of hostility toward efforts to provide those workers a livable basic wage.
Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. And that’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.” And often lead with customers, like one cited in a recent piece in Bon Appetit, who proudly states that he only tips 10%, half today’s norm, because it’s what he’s always done, and “if servers want more, then they should put the same effort in that I took to earn that money.”
As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Kennedy Smith about the proliferation and impact of chain dollar stores for the June 14, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
As the American Prospect (1/19/24) reports, Dollar General has also been fined by New York and sued by Ohio and Missouri for business practices that harm consumers.
Janine Jackson: Some listeners may have seen the story of Dollar General stores in Missouri being caught cheating customers by listing one price on the shelf, then charging a higher price at checkout. It’s a crummy thing to do to folks just trying to meet household needs. And yet it’s just one of many harms dollar stores—some call them deal destinations—are doing to communities across the country. What’s the nature of the problem, and what can we do about it?
JJ: Well, dollar stores are sort of like fancy restaurants. If they aren’t part of your life, you might not even physically notice them. But they’ve been proliferating wildly in recent years. In 2021, as the Institute’s report, “The Dollar Store Invasion,” begins, nearly half of new stores that opened in the US were chain dollar stores, a degree of momentum with no parallel in the history of the retail industry.
Now, I want to talk through specific problems, but could you maybe start by talking about where these stores are and what’s giving rise to them, which connects directly to what they do?
KS: Basically, they are everywhere. They are in 48 states now. They haven’t quite made the leap yet to Hawaii and Alaska, but they began—the two major chains, Dollar General, which is headquartered in Tennessee, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, which is now in Virginia Beach, Virginia—began by radiating out from their headquarters. And so we see heavy concentrations of them sort of in the east and the southeast. They are now marching across the country and entering all kinds of markets.
And they have slightly different profiles. Dollar General tends to be a little more rural. They tend to go into smaller rural communities. Dollar Tree tends to be more suburban, and Family Dollar tends to be located primarily in urban neighborhoods.
And they are being fueled by a variety of factors, including consolidation in the grocery industry and people’s desire to find more affordable food and products in general are driving people to believe that dollar stores are offering them a better value.
And in fact, that’s one of the tricks that the dollar stores play on people, is that they actually are getting poor value and usually paying more in a per ounce or per pound basis than they might be if they were shopping at a traditional, independently owned grocery store or hardware store or office supply store, whatever it might be.
JJ: It sounds like they’re filling a need, like they’re reaching to an overlooked group of people. And it reminds me a little of check-cashing stores, where folks who are oppressed economically in terms of their wages, so they don’t get to bank in a regular way, and then these fill-in spots show up and it’s perverse, you know.
But it’s also just not how a lot of folks think things work. They see these things, oh, these are cheap stores. These are for folks who can’t afford as much as, you know, maybe some others. And this is filling their need. That’s exactly what it’s not doing.
So let’s start on this “17 problems” that you engage in a pullout piece of the Institute’s work on this. What are some of the big things you lift up as the harmful impacts?
KS: Well, I should mention, to begin, that these are 17 of the problems that we hear mentioned most frequently, but there are plenty of others. And there are slight variations around the country. For example, in areas of the country that are susceptible to flooding and to hurricanes, there’s a lot more concern about the environmental impact of these stores and what it might mean in terms of stormwater runoff, because one of the problems with dollar stores in general is that they tend to have a very thin operating model. They’re thinly staffed. They look for inexpensive land. They build cheap buildings if they’re building new buildings. And so they’re not likely to want to afford to put in stormwater retention basins and things like that. So there’s some regional variations.
But in general, the things that we find to be the biggest problems are, one, their economic impact on the community, and two, their sort of social impact on a community. In terms of the economy, they are a direct threat to independent grocery stores. And there are a number of studies now that have come out that have looked at what that impact is.
There’s one that the USDA did last year, which found that basically grocery store sales will decline by 10 percent when a dollar store enters the market. There was one that was done by the University of Toronto and UCLA in 2022 that found after looking at 800-some dollar stores, that when you have three dollar stores within a two mile radius of one another, they’re likely to kill a grocery store that’s there.
And that has a huge impact on a community because grocery stores are really community anchors in many ways and are responsible for providing their community members with healthy food as opposed to the sort of overly preserved things that you’re likely to get at a dollar store, like a box of macaroni and cheese or a box of sugary cereal or something like that. When a community loses its grocery store, it can be devastating.
And the same thing can be true for some of the other categories, industry categories on which dollar stores tend to compete, like hardware and like office supplies and school supplies. Those are important anchor businesses for communities that people don’t want to lose.
On the sort of social side of things, there are a number of problems and probably first and foremost is crime. Because they are so thinly staffed, dollar stores are easy targets for robberies. It’s very easy for someone to come in and just reach into the cash register, grab cash and leave. And communities complain about this all the time. I have literally hundreds of news articles that I’ve clipped about dollar store crime.
They also have poor labor practices. They pay their workers less than the independently owned grocery stores that they’re threatening. They tend to promote workers to assistant manager relatively quickly, which means that they’re then exempt from overtime, and they make them work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They’ve been sued several times, both of the major chains, successfully by groups of workers or former workers for wage theft for exactly that.
There are other things, too. One of the things that we have observed and a researcher actually at the University of Georgia in the Geography Department has reported on and written about is that they tend to target black and brown neighborhoods. Dollar General, for example, 79 percent of its stores tend to be located in majority minority neighborhoods. And we think this is a little bit parasitic. And we also think that they’re looking for places where the community is likely not to have as much influence at City Hall as somebody in another neighborhood. And we think that’s just despicable.
JJ: Well, if I could just bring you back to that economic impact for a second, because it’s not that they are able to deliver better things cheaper, just to spell that out. That’s not what they’re doing.
A More Perfect Union investigation found that Dollar General frequently charges more than its competitors for staple goods but “masks the high cost from consumers by stocking smaller pack sizes.”
KS: Correct. No, they’re selling similar products, but the packaging that they’ll sell them in tends to be smaller. And therefore, on an ounce-by-ounce basis, we find that the products are often actually more expensive for consumers to buy. It’s a practice called “shrinkflation.” There are a couple of other names that it goes by—”cheater sizes.”
JJ: So it’s not, well, they just build a better mousetrap. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not what’s going on.
KS: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that you mention capitalism because in communities that are where a dollar store has been proposed to be built and the community kind of comes out and opposes it, the people who tend to support the idea of the dollar store coming in tend to say, well, that’s just capitalism. That’s just free market economics.
It isn’t. Free market economics are based on having a level playing field. And that’s why all of our major antitrust laws were developed a century ago, because we wanted for small businesses to be able to compete on the same playing field as bigger businesses. One of the things that dollar store chains often do is that they will go to their suppliers, their wholesalers, and say, we want you to offer this product to us, but not offer it to our competitors, do not offer it to grocery stores. Or we want you to make a special size for us of a package that no one else can get. And we can price it the way we want.
Those are blatant violations of federal antitrust laws. And I think that on a federal level, we need to begin paying attention to that. And the same thing at the state level, while communities themselves are doing what they can to fight dollars for proliferation at the local level.
JJ: OK, I don’t shop at dollar stores. I’m just a taxpayer. Why should I care about the issue of dollar store proliferation as a taxpayer?
KS: Well, I think there are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons I would think as a taxpayer is that tax revenue that would normally accrue to the community, and wages that would normally accrue to the community, are now leaving the community, and they’re going to a corporate headquarters where they’re being either reinvested in corporate expansion, or they’re being distributed to shareholders or being used to pay off their investors.
There’s an example that we cite in one of our reports about Haven, Kansas, which had a local grocery store that was there that was paying $75,000 a year in property taxes. So the city was getting that revenue. A dollar store came in, a Dollar General store came in, and within a couple of years, the grocery store couldn’t hold on anymore. The dollar store had eked away just enough of its sales that it couldn’t hold on. And so it closed. The dollar store was paying $60,000 a year in property tax. So the city right off the bat is losing $15,000 a year in property tax revenue that it had before.
But not only that, as a concession to attract the dollar store, the city council had agreed to basically rebate half of the municipal utility taxes that the dollar store developer would have paid for two years. That was $36,000. So now all of a sudden the grocery store is gone and the city is losing $51,000 a year in property tax revenue.
And that’s just an example of tax revenue. We’re not even talking about the wage differential and the fact that dollar stores typically only have one or two staff employed at a time, whereas a grocery store might have 30 or 40 people employed. And the dollar store, Dollar General, is at the rock bottom of the 66 largest corporations in terms of hourly wages. So the community is just losing right and left.
JJ: Right. Well, what happens when communities recognize that, and they resist these dollar stores? I know that the Institute tracks that as well.
KS: Dollar General tends to work with developers who build buildings for them that they then lease for 15 years, usually with three five-year expansion options. And the developer is going to try to minimize costs. And so the developer tends to look for inexpensive land, which tends to be land that is often zoned for agricultural use, or on a scenic byway, or in some kind of rural area, or maybe on the edge of a residential neighborhood.
And to do that, they have to go to the city generally and request a zoning variance. And that’s where the battles tend to develop, is people come out and say, no, we want this area to remain zoned like it is, because there was a reason for that, that we wanted it zoned that way. And we don’t want to change that. I’ve tracked 140 communities now that have defeated dollar stores. And in 138 of those, all but two, they’ve been defeated based on the city denying a zoning variance request.
The other two—it’s something pretty exciting that’s happened recently. In Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana—which is where Hammond and Ponchatoula is, if you know Louisiana—last spring, a developer came to the Planning Commission and submitted plans to build a Dollar General store. It was an unzoned parcel of land. There was no zoning, so he wasn’t requesting a zoning variance. He simply had to have his building plans approved.
The Planning Commission turned him down. And they turned him down based on their police power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the community, which is a completely novel approach. We had not seen that happen before. The developer appealed that to the parish council. The parish council supported the Planning Commission.
The developer then sued. And last September, the trial took place. And then in November, the judge—in a, you know, this is a pretty conservative part of the country—the judge ruled in favor of the parish and said that they were completely correct in using their police power to protect the health and safety of the community by denying that developer the right to build a dollar store there.
JJ: Wow.
KS: This is a kind of groundbreaking thing. There’s another community that we found, Newton County, Georgia, used essentially the same approach. So we’re getting to have now sort of a body of case law that provides a precedent for a community saying, wait a minute, forget, I mean, zoning is one thing, but these stores are unhealthy for our community. They’re not good for the economy. They’re not good for jobs. They’re not good for the environment. They’re not good for crime. And we’ve had enough.
JJ: Well, it sounds as though that community involvement relies a lot on information and on advance information. They have to know that this is in the planning process to know about the points that they could intervene, which is wonderful. But it also suggests, as I know the work does, that there could be interventions from a higher level, including from the federal level. What do you see as potentially useful that could happen there?
KS: Well, at the federal level, we would, of course, like to see stronger and more vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws that we already have on the books. The Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act are all laws that are there to prevent exactly what’s happening with dollar store proliferation. And states can also adopt those same laws at the state level to provide some protection there. And that may be, in some instances, easier than getting federal attention.
States also are being pretty aggressive in looking at things like scanner errors, which you mentioned. In fact, the former attorney general of Ohio—well, first of all, the current attorney general of Ohio has investigated and fined Dollar General a million dollars for scanner violations. Basically, the price someone sees on the shelf is not the price they’re being charged by the scanner when they check out. The former attorney general of Ohio, a guy named Marc Dann, is now putting together a class action lawsuit against the dollar store chains for scanner errors, which he’s estimating Dollar General loan is making hundreds of millions of dollars annually in scanner errors because they’re so huge and they’re almost always in favor of the company and not the consumer.
The adage is, “the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago.” And often communities don’t think about protecting themselves from this sort of proliferation, this kind of predatory business expansion until it’s too late. But for those who are seeing this happening around them in other communities and thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense to put some protection in place right away.
And some of the things that communities are doing are things like what we call dispersal ordinances, which basically say you cannot build a new dollar store within X distance, two miles, five miles of an existing store so that we don’t have the market crowded with them. Or they’re putting in place ordinances like just happened in a town in Oregon that I saw that has put in place a formula business ordinance saying we want to have retail diversity in the community. We don’t want to have 10 identical pizza places. We don’t want to have five identical grocery stores. We want to have diversity. So therefore, we are fine with one dollar store, but not with five.
JJ: Well, finally, information seems key to all of this—information of the actual impacts of dollar stores and then about the possible levers of potential resistance. And that brings me back to news media and reporting. The report itself on the dollar store invasion got coverage, absolutely. But of course, the implications go well beyond covering the report itself as an event. What would you like to see finally more of or less of from news media on this set of issues?
Kennedy Smith: “I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while…. I don’t see much looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.”
KS: That’s a great question. I think I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while. I don’t see much on that. I don’t see much sort of looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.
I’d also like to see more news media tying this to threats to democracy, because if we have major corporations that are able to basically extract this kind of money, this vast volume of money from communities and make it difficult for independently owned businesses to compete, then we’ve changed what the nature of capitalism is. And we need to get back to the roots of what democracy is about. And that really is about having a level playing field for small businesses, for every American to basically have the opportunity to create a business enterprise and thrive and reinvest in their community. And that’s being taken away from us.
JJ: Well, we’ll end it there for now. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find a lot of work on dollar stores, along with much else on their site, ILSR.org. Kennedy Smith thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
One hundred years ago this month, I was reminded by Portside’s “This Week in People’s History” feature (5/29/23), a constitutional amendment passed both houses of Congress, with large majorities, and went to the states for ratification. It remains a proposal, not a law, to this day, because the necessary three-quarters of states didn’t accept it.
The proposal is the Child Labor Amendment, giving Congress authority to regulate “labor of persons under 18 years of age.”
Efforts to protect children from dangerous work continued anyway, of course, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act included prohibitions on children under 14 working in most occupations. Separate rules have been crafted for agricultural jobs (which is its own story).
Popular concerns used for private ends
Notre Dame professor David Campbell (Washington Post, 4/23/23): Because “a bill [that] will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions…sounds wildly unpopular…you have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights.”
In the last four years, state legislatures in at least 28 states have taken up proposals to roll back child labor protections; 12 states have passed such laws.
In April 2023, the Washington Post (4/23/23) reported on the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank with a lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, that’s crucially behind these state-level moves to undermine rules to keep children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. The Iowa state senate had just approved an FGA-maneuvered bill letting children as young as 14 work night shifts.
Post reporters Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl explained how the group has worked systematically, if stealthily, to push state policy to the right on things like restricting access to anti-poverty programs and Medicaid expansion.
Despite what is, on examination, a broad deregulatory agenda, the FGA, with some 115 lobbyists in 22 states, presents child worker bills as part of a cultural debate about “parental rights.” They aim to remove “the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” a representative said. One bill, in Georgia, would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.
Besides a warning to legislators, such a report ought to have been a call to reporters: Beware of “grassroots” efforts that suspiciously mimic the goals and language of this right-wing interest group, with its undeclared intent to use popular concerns to advance private ends.
‘Shocks the conscience’
Steve Benen (MSNBC, 4/19/24): “Republican governance, especially at the state level, is increasingly invested in rolling back child-labor safeguards.”
Over a year later, child labor rules are still in the news: Early June saw a Labor Department lawsuit against Hyundai after a 13-year-old girl was found working a 50- to 60-hour week on an Alabama assembly line (CBS, 5/31/24). It “shocks the conscience,” said one official.
Before that, we had the Louisiana House voting to repeal the law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks (MSNBC, 4/19/24). Many of my child employees want to work without lunch breaks, claimed bill sponsor and Republican state representative and smoothie franchise owner Roger Wilder.
But what about the puppetmasters? A rough Nexis test I did found that over the last three months, a search for the term “child labor” in US newspapers gets 740 results. Add the words “Foundation for Government Accountability” and the number drops to 14.
Does every story on child labor need to mention the advocacy group? Of course not. But if you consider the rollback of child labor laws a problem, connected to other problems, then calling groups like them out adds something key to understanding that problem and how to address it.
Featured image: MSNBC depiction (4/19/24) of a child agricultural worker. An estimated 500,000 minors work in the farm sector in the United States, some as young as 12 years old.
Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about Trump’s guilty verdict for the June 7, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: A Manhattan criminal court found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. This ruling is clearly not the be-all, end-all of a legal redressing of Trump’s myriad crimes; he’s already been found liable in a civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, and he’s facing another three trials for mishandling classified documents, conspiring to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 election, and encouraging the violent January 6, 2021, rampage at the US Capitol.
But commentary from much of the news media—where we learn about what’s happening, what it means, and what we might do about it—is platforming the idea that this might be a disputable issue, that has to do with personal feelings about this particular man. You could joke, “Tell me you’re moving the goalposts without telling me you’re moving the goalposts.” But there are real-world stakes here, and the contortions media are going through to make a convicted felon who boasts of his crimes one side of a reasonable debate is telling us something about Trump and his followers, sure, but it’s also telling us something about news media.
JJ: There seems to be an overarching conversation here, which is that if a legal process convicts someone you like, it must be a political—meaning partisan—action, only aimed at silencing a political opponent. I’m not sure that everyone advancing that idea right now is thinking, really, about the implications, that if you decide the law is just whatever you do or don’t like…. Is murder a crime? What if you like the person who did it, you know?
I want to talk through the specifics and the examples that Media Matters has been putting out, because concrete examples show us that we’re not just giving sweeping characterizations. But I just wanted to ask you, first, for your general response to the effort from some media to say that these crimes aren’t really crimes, it’s really just a political hit job. Are you surprised at all by that response?
Matt Gertz: “A good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit.”
MG: Not really. I think that what we’ve seen over the last nine years, since Trump’s rise began, is that the mainstream press has a big problem coming out and being forthright about Donald Trump’s actions in cases where the right has rallied around him.
And at this point, what we see when we monitor the right-wing media, when we look at what Republicans are saying, is that they are four-square behind him. They are not only denying that he committed the crimes that he was convicted of; they are saying that he is the real victim here, that this is a politicized prosecution, and that now the only recourse is for Republicans to start throwing their own political opponents in jail.
Given the volume and the inflammatory nature of these claims that are coming from the right, I think a good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit. But instead, what we tend to see is a lot of he-said, she-said coverage, in which there is a certain amount of credence being given to these claims, and that just lets them infest the public discourse in a way that is both unhelpful and, I think, in the longer term dangerous.
JJ: Let’s talk about a couple of the particular counter-narratives that we’re seeing now from right-wing media, to address them. One of them is that the charges against Trump are unprecedented, “nothing like this has ever happened before”; that’s one of the popular ideas, along with the idea that the jury and the judge are somehow tainted in some way. What are you seeing there?
MG: What’s unprecedented, obviously, is that a former president has been repeatedly charged with and, in this case, convicted of crimes. It’s also unprecedented for so many of a former president’s closest associates to be charged with and convicted of crimes, but that is also the case here.
What the right has needed to do, to deal with the fact that often Republican prosecutors and Republican investigators are finding all of this Republican criminality, is they’ve created this vast conspiracy theory, this idea of a “deep-state” plot to get to Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. The reality is much simpler: There are a lot of criminals around Donald Trump because he is an incredibly shady person.
And so what we’ve seen is a full-throttle, round-the-clock effort to try to undermine and delegitimize every aspect of, not only this prosecution, but the two federal probes and the one in Georgia that you alluded to earlier. In this case, that involves attacking not only the New York jury, not only the New York prosecutor, but also the judge, and really every aspect of this case. They leave no stone unturned in their efforts to defend Donald Trump.
JJ: I can’t think of a time where someone would say, “Let me tell you what the child of the judge does, and therefore….” It just feels like untested waters that, I guess, I just wish journalists would step up to do more.
MG: I think that’s absolutely right. We really are in uncharted territory; when you see attacks coming in on particular jurors, which we saw early in the trial, and then the excuse-making after the fact that because the trial was in New York City, there was no way Donald Trump could get a fair trial. I mean, you’re really in pretty dangerous territory there.
I will note, by the way, that the claims that Donald Trump could not get a fair trial in New York City came almost immediately after the very same people were bragging about how many people were coming to Donald Trump’s rally in New York, and how he was going to make a real play at winning the state in the 2024 presidential election. You kind of have to pick a lane on that one, but I guess they feel like they can get away with it, because no one will call them on it.
JJ: And hypocrisy is apparently no longer a thing.
I just want to give you a chance to name some names. There are some particular actors and particular outlets that are in this business, and I know that Media Matters does work, not just doing broad, sweeping things, but actually giving examples of particular people, and I think that’s the value. You know, we’re not saying, “The right wing does this.” We’re saying, there are particular instances, and are there any that stand out for you?
MG: Sure. One of them, obviously, I would say Steve Bannon—who is the long-time Trump advisor, and host of the War Room podcast—he spent the days since the verdict making the case for the need for widespread prosecutions of Democrats as a matter of retaliation.
And then you think about someone like Ben Shapiro—the Daily Wireco-founder—who was famously opposed to Donald Trump when he first ran for president back in 2016, but now, due to the incentives of the right-wing press, he’s come around, and said that the charges against Trump were spurious, and entirely made up so that the media and Joe Biden could claim that he’s a convicted felon, that this is all in evidence of incipient tyranny.
Really just a wild level of rhetoric going on through every aspect of the right, as they try to get around the fact that they’re supporting someone who has been convicted of felony charges.
JJ: Just to pivot for a second, and acknowledge the painful hilarity of the idea, and we kind of talked about it, but the idea that an appeal by Trump would be passed to the New York state’s appellate division, a branch of the New York Supreme Court—and “oh my God, they’re all Black women; obviously he won’t get a fair shake.”
Which, first of all, you’re telling on yourself with that, right? Like, obviously Black people and women would hate him because, you know, he’s just like Jesus Christ, who was famously hated by Black people and women.
But also, like so much that we’re seeing on our screens, it’s just not accurate. The women of color on the meme that people are looking at are five of 21 judges who could be selected to sit for the case. In other words, and maybe we’ve said it, but going bold on disinformation is part of the landscape now.
MG: Absolutely, and because of the bifurcation of the news landscape, because you have Republicans bubbled off within their own media sphere, the contrary information doesn’t enter the bubble. They don’t get exposed to the facts or the contradictions that are inherent in what’s going on.
There’s been this big push that I mentioned to declare the Justice Department somehow politicized by Joe Biden, and that is happening at the same time when Joe Biden’s own son is on trial in a federal court for gun crimes. This is an investigation that was launched during the Trump administration, under a Republican attorney general and a Republican FBI director, and is currently carried out by a Trump appointee who Joe Biden kept on.
There’s just not a similar groundswell of people on the left or in the mainstream press who are desperately trying to defend every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, and try to invalidate the entire judicial system for political gain, the way you see happening literally simultaneously regarding the Trump conviction.
JJ: My complaint about corporate news media right now is that I feel like they are just narrating the nightmare, and they don’t acknowledge how insufficient that is right now, in a society with democratic aspirations, as I say, that relies on public information to make choices. And it’s not about how I feel about a political person, it’s what I’m looking for from a press, and I just wonder, what do you think—you don’t need to name names, but what do you think responsible journalism would look like right now? We’ve said it’s contested waters, it’s difficult. It is a hard time, but what would be the role for independent, responsible journalism right now?
MG: I think it would be keeping the focus as much as possible on the stakes over the next several months. We are looking at an election where we have, on the one hand, a fairly normal set of politicians, and on the other hand, you have people calling for radical and dangerous changes at every turn. And I think giving people the full explanation, the implication of Trump’s worldview and the policy changes likely to happen if he becomes president, and has, as we might expect, much more leeway within his own party than he had during his last term, is crucial. I don’t think the American public is getting that sort of information about what the election might mean for themselves, and for the future of the country.
JJ: We’re not talking about Trump versus Biden. We’re talking about what journalists could do to lay clear what the information is, what’s at stake, what Trump has said he will do. You don’t have to be politically partisan to ask more of reporters.
MG: That’s absolutely right.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. They’re online at www.MediaMatters.org. Matt Gertz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.
Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Nicholas Kristof is that guy at the party who reminds you that you haven’t really lived. While you maintain a regular, nine-to-five existence, driving from Point A to Point B, the world has been Kristof’s oyster. With a fully stamped passport, the New York Times columnist can embarrass everyone with his tales from Africa and Asia, marking himself as a true global citizen who yearns for adventure.
Worse, he mobilizes exotic datelines as trump cards to back up his neoliberalism disguised as forward-thinking progressivism: Teachers unions are bad for kids (9/12/12), sweatshops are good for workers (1/14/09) and US imperialism can be a positive force (2/1/02). You, the provincial rube, simply can’t rebut him. “Oh, have you been to Cambodia? No? Well I have.”
Here at FAIR (11/4/21), we were relieved when he announced his resignation from the Times to run for governor of Oregon, taking his vacuous moralism and smug place-dropping to the campaign trail. Upon his disqualification from the election (OPB, 2/18/22), he returned to his coveted perch like he never left at all.
‘BS border move’
Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 6/8/24) makes the liberal case for immigration restriction: “It’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.”
Recently, he has jumped in (6/8/24) to defend President Joe Biden’s reactionary move to shut down the border and end asylum on a rolling basis.
The Biden order “would bar migrants from being granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed” (AP, 6/5/24), a move many immigration advocates have branded as a capitulation to the xenophobic right (Reason, 6/4/24; Al Jazeera, 6/6/24) in his tough reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump (CBS, 6/9/24).
Conservative media weren’t buying it, however. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/4/24) said that the move “might help reduce the flow somewhat if they are strictly enforced, and at least he’s admitting the problem,” but worried that migrants “could still seek asylum at ports of entry using the CBP One mobile app, which would be excluded from the daily triggers.” The National Review (6/5/24) called it “too little, too late” for conservatives. The New York Post editorial board (6/9/24) said the president’s “BS border move has already failed.”
Kristof’s column, by contrast, serves as liberal media support for a policy that is cruel, hypocritical and a further indication that Biden’s only election tactic is to outflank Trump from the right. It is important to see how Kristof, and the Times, wield cosmopolitan journalistic instincts to defend closed borders, xenophobia and outright misinformation that serves the right.
‘Swing the doors open’
Kristof saying that the US has “lax immigration policies” with a “loophole that allowed people to stay indefinitely” is a cruel misrepresentation of Biden’s border policy (LA Times, 2/24/23).
To start off, Kristof said the current code is flawed because of “a loophole that allowed people to claim asylum and stay indefinitely whether or not they warranted it.” This is a talking point made by anti-immigrant and right-wing groups, and claiming that this is a “loophole” implies that there is a flaw in the system that allows criminals to wiggle out of the law.
In fact, it is legal to come to the country to seek asylum. And the system is far less rosy for refugees than anti-immigrant activists—and now Kristof—portray it. Asylum-seeking families are often separated (LA Times, 2/24/23). And while seeking asylum is a guaranteed right under US and international law, the federal government has “severely restricted access to asylum at the border since 2016” according to the International Rescue Committee (7/1/22). The group explained:
A policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” forced certain asylum seekers to wait out their US immigration court cases in Mexico with little or no access to legal counsel. Although a federal court blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to end this program, the Supreme Court later ruled in the administration’s favor. For over three years, MPP impacted more than 75,000 asylum seekers, requiring them to wait out their US court hearings in Mexico—mostly in northern border towns. There they faced the often impossible expectations to gather evidence and prepare for a trial conducted in English while struggling to keep their families safe.
Kristof acknowledged that he, as a white man, is an American because his Eastern European father was allowed into the country as a refugee in 1952. But he went on to say that the US today can’t “swing the doors open,” because “we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced”—as if that’s the question the US faces, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people who actually seek asylum in the US each year. (Of course, Washington could help reduce the global refugee crisis by ending support for the wars, insurgencies and sanctions that to a great extent drive it.)
‘Outcompeted by immigrants’
Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez (Marketplace, 12/12/23): “When immigrants arrive, there are not just more workers that are competing with native workers, but there are more people who demand housing, entertainment, food, education. And so you need to hire more people to satisfy that bigger demand.”
Admitting that immigration has positive economic impact for the United States, Kristof went for the old line that these newcomers threaten US workers, and that “poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages.” Exhibit A is an unnamed neighbor who was forced out of good working-class employment over the decades: “He was hurt by many factors—the decline of unions, globalization and the impact of technology,” Kristof said, but added that “he was also outcompeted by immigrants with a well-earned reputation for hard work.”
First, it is employers, not workers, who have the power to drive down wages. If there is a problem with immigrants being paid less, that’s an issue of exploitation. If Kristof thought about this a little bit longer, he’d realize he’s making an argument for equality among workers, not for dividing them against each other.
But this assumption that immigration depresses wages is itself dubious. The National Bureau of Economic Research (4/24) said:
We calculate that immigration, thanks to native/immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less-educated native workers, over the period 2000–2019, and no significant wage effect on college-educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers.
Zeke Hernandez, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, produced similar findings, noting that immigration causes the economies around these newcomer communities to grow (Marketplace, 12/12/23). And the libertarian Cato Institute (7/26/16) showed that unemployment is lower when immigration is higher.
‘Inflicting even more pain’
Axios (3/13/24): “The immigration increase is a key part of the labor supply surge that helped bring down price pressures last year even amid the economy’s robust growth.”
Kristof also ignored that the current unemployment rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6/7/24) is low at 4% and that, with high demand for labor, inflation-adjusted wages have risen 4.1% over the past year (AP, 6/7/24). Axios (3/13/24) reported that a
surge in immigration last year helps explain the economy’s striking resilience—and if sustained, could allow the job market to keep booming without stoking inflation in the years ahead.
Given that the corporate media have been constantly saying the country is facing a “border crisis,” these facts are hard to square with the notion that immigrants depress native-born workers’ wages.
Kristof went on to say that “native-born Americans may not be willing to toil in the fields or on a construction site for $12 an hour, but perhaps would be for $25 an hour.” Once again, if he really felt this way, then he’d be advocating for general wage hikes—for example, raising the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t gone up since 2009—as labor advocates demand, instead of calling for closed borders. But Kristof isn’t on the Times opinion page to advance labor’s interests.
And that’s when Kristof invokes a sort of liberal MAGAism, saying that while American workers are “self-medicating and dying from drugs, alcohol and suicide, shouldn’t we be careful about inflicting even more pain on them through immigration policy?” Immigrants—living, breathing people—are associated with non-living toxins, evoking the Trumpian smear that immigrants are disease-carrying vermin (Guardian, 12/16/23).
‘Lax immigration policies’
Victoria Sanford (BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17): “Then as now, the US is the engine generating migration through bad foreign policy decisions.”
And it still gets worse. Kristof said:
I’ve also wondered about the incentives we inadvertently create. In Guatemalan villages, I’ve seen families prepared to send children on the perilous journey to the United States, and I fear that lax immigration policies encourage people to risk their lives and their children’s lives on the journey.
I have not been to all the places Kristof has, but I’ve been to a few of them, including Guatemala. People leave these places for the US, not because it is so easy, but in spite of the fact that it is so difficult. They come because they are left with no choice but to leave violence, war and poverty behind.
When a man in Lebanon asked that I take him back with me to the US, he was jokingly invoking the reality that the immigration process is impossible without help. Nor did he think there were so many “incentives” beyond the fact that America’s promise of opportunity was an improvement over his broken country.
And it is curious that Kristof mentions Guatemala specifically. Had he read his own newspaper before writing this piece, he might have seen anthropologist Victoria Sanford (New York Times, 11/9/18; BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17) argue that Central Americans are fleeing the horrific crime that has manifested as a result of Washington’s Cold War interventions and current policies of militarism. Latin American studies professor Elizabeth Oglesby (Vice, 6/28/18) made a similar connection . That’s quite a bit of context to leave out.
‘Feeding into white nationalism’
Arun Gupta (Santita Jackson Show, 6/6/24): ““Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America.”
I was recently on the Santita Jackson Show (KTNF, 6/6/24) to discuss the recent presidential election in Mexico (FAIR.org, 6/4/24). Joining us was independent journalist Arun Gupta, who has reported from the US/Mexico border for the Nation (4/21/20). He said that the violence of these lawless zones at the border, with migrants waiting to come into the US, will only become more chaotic and dangerous with this new policy.
“Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America to protect us from these savage brown hordes,” Gupta said. Tens of thousands of migrants have been killed trying to get into the US, he added, and these refugee camps filling up along the border, where narco crime and corrupt police will take more control, will “become death camps.”
Kristof has spent his career telling American readers to care about wars and humanitarian crises abroad (New York Times, 2/6/10, 3/9/11, 6/16/14, 9/4/15, 5/15/24). Yet here he is, utterly indifferent to creating a humanitarian catastrophe right at his own country’s door, seemingly in order to run positive spin for an incumbent president who is eager to rise a few points in the polls.
In fact, Kristof ends with almost a parody of liberalism:
Are we, the people of an immigrant nation, pulling up the ladder after we have boarded? Yes, to some degree. But the reality is that we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.
In other words, when a Trumpian policy is practiced by a Democratic administration, it is somehow less horrendous. And Kristof fully admits, “as the son of a refugee,” he is selfishly cutting off people much like his father—except from the Global South, not from Eastern Europe.
And this sums up a very central problem with Kristof. For someone who uses globetrotting as his journalistic trademark, he advances a racist idea that the ability to travel and relocate are reserved for people like him—men of the Global North intellectual class and not the wretched of the earth beneath him.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Venezuelans will head to the polls on July 28 to choose their president for the 2025–30 term. Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro faces nine challengers as he runs for a third term.
Over the past 25 years of US-sponsored coups and economic sanctions, Western corporate media have always proven a reliable source of regime-change propaganda to back Washington’s policies (FAIR.org, 12/17/18, 1/25/19, 8/15/19, 4/15/20, 5/11/20, 1/11/23). Coverage builds to a frenzy around elections, whether driven by a (misguided) hope that US surrogates will win, or by a desire to delegitimize anticipated Chavista victories.
With two months to go, Western outlets are busy crafting familiar narratives, and leading the charge is the New York Times. Not busy enough with its genocide-endorsing coverage of Gaza, the paper of record was keen to back yet another key US foreign policy interest. In a flurry of recent articles, the Times laid down plenty of bias, distortions and outright lies.
Rigged reporting
The New York Times (5/6/24) sometimes seemed to think Venezuela’s president was named “Authoritarian.”
In less than one week, the New York Times published three articles about the upcoming Venezuelan election, all of which referred to Maduro as “authoritarian” in the headline, rather than by name, so readers immediately take note of the “bad guy”:
“Meet the Candidate Challenging Venezuela’s Authoritarian President” (5/6/24)
“Reality Show Contestants Compete for an Authoritarian’s Campaign Jingle” (5/9/24)
“Can Elections Force Venezuela’s Authoritarian Leader From Power?” (5/11/24)
The Times’ Julie Turkewitz opened the third piece by claiming that Venezuelans are voting “for the first time in more than a decade…in a presidential election with an opposition candidate who has a fighting—if slim and improbable—chance at winning.”
This framing reinforces the common trope that Maduro’s May 2018 victory was “a sham” (New York Times, 5/11/24; Reuters, 5/17/24), “rigged” (New York Times, 5/6/24), “neither free nor fair” (BBC, 3/6/24) or “widely considered fraudulent” (France24, 3/12/24).
Most outlets have never bothered to back up the claims, but Turkewitz argued it was due to the opposition’s “most popular figures” being barred from running. What she did not mention was that the highest-profile of these figures, far-right politician Leopoldo López, had been convicted of trying to violently overthrow the elected government (Venezuelanalysis, 6/13/17, 2/16/15). The other candidate the Times was presumably referring to, Henrique Capriles—who lost elections in 2012 and 2013—was banned for administrative malpractice while holding public office (Venezuelanalysis, 4/11/17).
The hardline opposition, in coordination with Washington, was wedded to election boycotts and insurrection efforts. The Trump administration reportedly went so far as to threaten to sanction opposition frontrunner Henri Falcón if he did not boycott the election. Juan Guaidó, tapped a few months later to lead a self-proclaimed, US-backed “interim government,” was perfectly free to have run for president in 2018.
Assured victory
The Miami Herald (5/6/24) counts chickens that are far from hatching.
Fast forward six years, and the New YorkTimes (5/11/24, 5/16/24) and other establishment outlets (Miami Herald, 5/6/24; Bloomberg, 5/17/24) seem excited by the hardline opposition’s electoral prospects, telling readers that candidate Edmundo González is leading in the polls, but that the Venezuelan government will not accept the results. In fact, the track record of the past 25 years is that Chavismo has always conceded in the contests it has lost, whereas the opposition and its media backers, when they are defeated at the polls, inevitably cry fraud, to the tune of zero evidence (FAIR.org, 1/27/21, 12/3/21, 11/20/20, 5/23/18).
Pundits are basing their current optimism for their candidate on a historically biased and unreliable polling industry, ignoring polls that predict a similarly lopsided victory for Maduro.
The New York Times (5/11/24) also made reference to the “enormous” turnout in the opposition’s October primaries, suggesting that this presaged a large anti-Maduro vote in the general election. Put aside the fact that the primary figures were shrouded in doubt, and that the organizing commission never released detailed results; the turnout claimed by the opposition was 2.3 million people, in a country with an adult population of 20 million. The governing Socialist Party, by comparison, has 4 million registered members.
Finally, there is also wonderment at the size of opposition rallies (AP, 5/18/24; New York Times, 5/16/24). Not only is crowd measurement a very inexact science, the context is erased by ignoring the constant, massive pro-government mobilizations taking place as well.
Shifting democratic goalposts
It was not Maduro that blocked María Corina Machado from running (Bloomberg, 3/16/24), but Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which upheld her ban on running for office, citing her support for US sanctions, among other disqualifications.
Alongside prematurely cheering an opposition victory, the paper of record has been preparing arguments to dismiss the results should Maduro win. The key one is centered on US favorite María Corina Machado, who is said to be “barred by the government”—or by Maduro himself—from running, a lazily dishonest description common to many corporate outlets (New York Times, 5/11/24, 5/16/24; AP, 5/18/24, 2/28/24; Bloomberg, 3/16/24; Washington Post, 4/17/24).
A far-right zealot and heiress from Venezuela’s elite, Machado has long been a corporate media favorite (New York Times, 11/19/05). She has always been depicted as a champion of democracy despite participating in coup attempts, going on record as endorsing a foreign invasion, and allegedly receiving direct funding from the US.
Machado’s disqualification is the smoking gun used to justify Washington’s reimposition of oil sanctions (more on that below), and to prove that Maduro has not followed through on supposed commitments to hold the “free and fair elections” agreed to with the US-backed opposition in Barbados in October 2023. This is false on two counts.
For starters, many Western sources blatantly lie by stating that the Barbados Agreement allowed Machado to run for president (Washington Post, 4/17/24; New York Times, 4/17/24; Reuters, 4/17/24, 4/12/24; CNN, 1/27/24; BBC, 1/30/24). What the documentexplicitly says is that anyone could be a candidate, provided that they fulfill the requirements established by Venezuelan law and the constitution to run for office. In Machado’s case, she was already serving a political ban, and there was nothing in the agreement suggesting it would be lifted.
Secondly, the Venezuelan government and opposition delegations from the Barbados accords agreed on a procedure for disqualified candidates to appeal before the Venezuelan Supreme Court (Venezuelanalysis, 12/1/23). Machado—under pressure from the US, it’s suspected—filed her appeal. And an appeal, by definition, can be rejected. The Supreme Court pointed to corrupt actions and the jeopardizing of Venezuelan assets abroad to uphold her exclusion (Venezuelanalysis, 1/27/24).
The ‘grip’ of poor journalism
When the same party controls Congress and the White House in the United States, you won’t find the New York Times (5/11/24) complaining that the president has the legislature, the military and the country’s budget “in his grip.”
Apart from misrepresenting the case of one of Venezuela’s most anti-democratic figures, the New York Times (5/11/24) marshaled other arguments to dismiss a potential Maduro victory in advance:
Ahead of the July 28 vote, Mr. Maduro, 61, has in his grip the legislature, the military, the police, the justice system, the national election council, the country’s budget and much of the media, not to mention violent paramilitary gangs called colectivos.
Leaving aside the demonized colectivos and the misconceptions surrounding Venezuelan media (FAIR.org, 5/20/19), the rest of the list is astounding. The legislature was won by the Socialist Party in the 2020 elections, and has the prerogative to appoint Supreme Court justices and the Electoral Council. Corporate pundits would presumably never write that a US president “has Congress in his grip.”
What is worse is Turkewitz’s dismay at Maduro wielding the constitutional responsibilities belonging to the president. The Venezuelan president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and appoints the interior minister who runs the police. And somehow media stenographers expect Venezuela’s elected leader to share control of the budget with the US’s chosen surrogates.
A recycled misrepresentation
This Spanish-language AP piece (2/9/24) retracted a misrepresentation that the New York Times (5/11/24) repeated three months later.
But the pinnacle of poor journalism in the May 11 Times piece was the following paragraph:
Mr. Maduro has hardly indicated that he is ready to leave office. He promised a large crowd of followers in February that he would win the election “by hook or by crook.”
It is unclear why the New York Times writer would expect someone campaigning for reelection to “indicate…he is ready to leave office.” However, it is the second sentence that is an absolute fabrication. In said rally, Maduro is clearly talking about defeating US- and opposition-led coup efforts “por las buenas o por las malas”—the Spanish idiom the Times translates as “by hook or by crook.”
In the video linked, uploaded by a Venezuelan journalist precisely to clarify the context of those words, Maduro lists anti-democratic plots going back to 2002, and vows that the country’s “civilian-military” unity will defeat any possible coup attempt “por las buenas o por las malas”—”by any means necessary,” one might say. There is no reference to the upcoming elections at all.
The Associated Press (2/9/24) had months ago misused the Venezuelan president’s words in the same way. After widespread criticism, the news service attached a note to the Spanish-language report: “The Associated Press improperly used a quote from President Nicolás Maduro as if he had said it in connection with the upcoming presidential election.” That didn’t stop the Times from committing the exact same misrepresentation three months later.
Intensified dishonesty
Reuters (4/17/24) reported that the Biden administration was reimposing sanctions on Venezuela “in response to President Nicolas Maduro’s failure to meet his election commitments.” But the Barbados Agreement did not commit the government to allow any candidate to run, but only those who met legal and constitutional qualifications—and it asked all parties “to respect and comply with the electoral regulations and the decisions of the National Electoral Council.”
The US is not only pushing opposition candidates in Venezuela; it’s also using economic sanctions to undermine Maduro’s presidency. Following the Barbados agreement in October, the US agreed to allow transactions with the Venezuelan oil sector for six months. But US officials claimed that the Maduro government had not fulfilled its commitments and reimposed its sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry on April 18. In tandem, corporate media reintroduced its whitewashing and endorsement of deadly coercive measures (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 6/4/21).
The New York Times and Turkewitz (5/11/24) rolled out some of the main tropes that downplay those sanctions, writing that “Maduro blames sanctions” for the country’s economic troubles. This formulation places the idea that sanctions hurt the Venezuelan economy in the mouth of the demonized Maduro, when even US officials are on the record saying that sanctions are meant to cause economic pain.
The Times went on to say that “the government has been choked” by US sanctions. The implication is that only Venezuela’s leaders are affected by sanctions. But as the Center for Economic and Policy Research (4/25/19) has demonstrated, they are a “collective punishment” that has caused tens of thousands of deaths per year. Yet Turkewitz failed to explain their economic impact on Venezuelans, who widely condemn them—as does most of the international community.
One coordinated mistruth spread by the Times (4/17/24, 5/16/24) and others (e.g., Reuters, 4/17/24, 5/11/24; BBC, 1/30/24) is that crushing US sanctions against Venezuela only began in 2019. In fact, the Trump administration levied financial sanctions against the oil industry in mid-2017 that sent output plummeting. The goal of that media obfuscation is far from subtle: absolve Washington of responsibility for Venezuela’s economic troubles, especially the fall in oil production.
Turkewitz’s article matter-of-factly stated that a Maduro victory on July 28 will “intensify poverty” in Venezuela. Turkewitz is either taking for granted that US economic aggression will continue—without explaining that to readers—or is convinced that Washington’s adversaries are predestined by nature or fate to ruin their economies. Venezuela is in fact set for a fourth straight year of economicgrowth, despite the multi-billion dollar impact of US sanctions. The only thing that seems to always intensify is the New York Times’ imperialist propaganda.
The biggest outside spender in the 2022 Democratic primaries was an unlikely group: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This year, AIPAC—a group backed by Republican mega-donors that is devoted to maintaining strong US support for the far-right government of Israel—is going even bigger, aiming to spend a cool $100 million via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
If the Koch brothers quietly spent millions to sway Democratic primaries, their chosen candidates would be tarred. Same goes for Big Oil, the NRA and other right-wing special interests. But AIPAC is an exception to this rule.
“AIPAC [is] the biggest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries this year,” Politico (6/9/24) reported. AIPAC’s UDP is “by far the biggest outside group in Democratic primaries, with more money flowing from UDP than the next 10 biggest spenders combined.”
Despite being conservative donors’ preferred instrument for hijacking Democratic primaries, UDP is described in media reports as “pro-Israel,” often with little said of its right-wing funding. This glaring omission provides AIPAC with cover to play in Democratic primaries in ways other right-wing groups can’t.
Money from right-wing billionaires
The Washington Post (5/14/24) waited until the 21st of 28 paragraphs to mention that Elfreth (right) had gotten $4.1 million in support from an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC—almost as much as rival Harry Dunn raised altogether.
I recently watched this play out in a nearby congressional district. On May 14, many Democratic primary voters went to the polls without knowing that a leading candidate for Maryland’s safely blue 3rd Congressional District, state Sen. Sarah Elfreth, was backed by right-wing billionaires via AIPAC’s super PAC.
Voters were kept in the dark thanks to deficient reporting. A Washington Post (5/14/24) story on election day, for example, waited until the 21st paragraph to mention that UDP had spent over $4 million on the race; then the Post quickly added: “United Democracy Project says it takes money from Republicans and Democrats.”
That last statement is technically true, and also deceiving.
While UDP’s funders hail from both parties, they share an elite status: Nearly 60% of them are CEOs and corporate honchos, In These Times (6/3/24) found. “But in no world could you even call this a bipartisan group of benefactors. It’s Republicans who know what they’re doing,” wrote Slate’s Alexander Sammon (2/7/24), in a story headlined, “There Sure Are a Lot of Republican Billionaires Funding the Democratic Primaries.” Sammon found that only one of the top ten donors to UDP “can even plausibly be called a regular Democratic booster.”
Among those Republican billionaires, as researched by the muckraking news outlet Sludge (3/4/24): Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who’s given UDP $3 million and donated around $65 million to Republican groups over the past decade, including $17 million to Trump super PACs; hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who’s given UDP $2 million and contributed millions more to Republican causes (and lavished gifts on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito); and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, UDP’s top funder at $5 million this cycle, who’s bankrolled groups that support Israel’s illegal settlements.
Despite its heavy Republican funding, UDP spends almost exclusively in Democratic primaries. (UDP’s parent organization, AIPAC, has a less exclusive focus and backs many Republicans— including over 100 congressmembers who voted to overturn the 2020 election—through a separate political action committee.)
In the May 14 story, however, the Post never used its own authoritative voice to convey the above facts to readers—many of whom, as Democratic primary voters, would be alarmed to learn that right-wing donors were quietly backing a Democratic candidate. By playing dumb to Sarah Elfreth’s conservative support, the Post slyly helped her win.
‘What is broken with Washington’
The Washington Post (5/14/24) made Elfreth’s acceptance of “dark money” an accusation leveled by her opponent Harry Dunn (right)—and quoted another source saying Dunn complaining about it was “exactly what is broken with Washington.”
Of course, newspapers are supposed to be evenhanded, so the Post gave Elfreth’s opponent space to call out AIPAC’s millions—but even here, the coverage was slanted.
UDP’s massive spending “prompted the Dunn campaign to accuse Elfreth of taking ‘dark money’ and lumping her in with far-right Republicans,” the Post reported.
By having Harry Dunn—and not the Post itself—call out Elfreth’s Republican support, the Post turned an explosive issue into a mere allegation from a political opponent.
Then the Post went further, seeking to invalidate not only Dunn’s statement, but the candidate himself. (Dunn is a former Capitol Police officer who won national acclaim for fighting off January 6 insurrectionists.)
The Post wrote:
The Dunn campaign’s efforts to link Elfreth—an established Democrat—to Trump supporters rubbed some Maryland politicians the wrong way. “It just is exactly what is broken with Washington and not what will lead to a more productive US Congress,” said Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson…[who] said the insinuation reflected Dunn’s inexperience in politics.”
Dark money
The Post story, while troubling, wasn’t exceptional. If anything, the Baltimore Banner’s coverage was worse.
The Baltimore Banner (5/12/24) dismissed criticism of Elfreth’s AIPAC help, saying that “criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new.”
In the month leading up to the primary, UDP spent over $100,000 a day boosting Elfreth. This prompted other candidates to call out the influx of outside Republican money. But their protests elicited little more than a yawn from the Banner’s Rick Hutzell (5/12/24). “Criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new,” he wrote.
Hutzell then took to lecturing Elfreth’s opponents, although not with much accuracy. “It’s not dark money,” he insisted. “UDP discloses its donors.”
At least Hutzell got the second part right.
“UDP is legally obligated to disclose its direct donors,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans (4/3/24), “but it may receive donations from corporations and nonprofits whose funders are not public.”
In other words, a donor who wished to provide Elfreth with anonymous support could’ve done so by having a non-disclosing entity, like AIPAC, forward their donation to UDP.
“If these MAGA donors funneled their money through AIPAC or any other nonprofit, then the individual donors would not be identified,” Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert with Public Citizen, told FAIR. “This is dark money in the truest sense of the word.”
‘Forever influence her worldviews’
The Guardian (5/14/22) suggested that AIPAC’s intervention in Maryland’s 3rd district House race might have been motivated to block labor lawyer John Morse, a minor candidate who made Gaza a central issue of his campaign—though the third-place candidate, state Sen. Clarence Lam, was also more critical of Israel than AIPAC would have been comfortable with.
Why AIPAC was involved in this race in the first place was a bit of a mystery, as the two leading candidates, Elfreth and Dunn, held seemingly indistinguishable views on Israel.
When asked about this, a UDP spokesperson (Guardian, 5/14/22) said there were “some serious anti-Israel candidates in this race, who are not Harry Dunn, and we need to make sure that they don’t make it to Congress.”
But UDP didn’t specify who was on its naughty list. Meanwhile, the race was already down to a two-way contest by the time UDP unleashed its millions, so all UDP was doing at that point was thwarting Dunn, who’s also pro-Israel.
Even Elfreth was confounded by UDP’s efforts, or so she claimed. Asked why the group was boosting her, Elfreth told the Banner, “I honest to God have no idea.”
No idea? Four months before announcing her candidacy, Elfreth took her first trip to Israel on what sounds like an AIPAC junket. She visited “a kibbutz that was [later] attacked by Hamas on October 7, an Iron Dome battery, a Hezbollah tunnel on the Lebanese border, the West Bank and religious sites,” Jewish Insider (4/3/24) reported.
In endorsing Elfreth, Pro-Israel America PAC, an AIPAC-adjacent group, wrote, “Sarah has traveled to Israel on a life-changing trip that will forever influence her worldviews.” The group quoted Elfreth as saying, “[I] walked away knowing that I believe—after millennia of the world turning its back on the Jewish people—that the State of Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself.”
Whether or not Elfreth was clueless about AIPAC’s support, one thing was clear: She was determined to keep its millions flowing her way. At an April debate with 16 hopefuls on stage, “moderators asked the candidates if they would swear off corporate PAC money,” Maryland Matters (4/18/24) reported. “Only Elfreth stayed seated.”
She was smart to do so, as AIPAC’s millions can prove decisive. They certainly did two years ago in a neighboring congressional district.
‘The ads started pouring in’
Intercept (7/20/22): Donna Edwards’ “past refusal to unconditionally support funding that enables Israel’s ongoing occupation and destruction of Palestinian communities was more than enough to draw the ire of the conservative pro-Israel donors who mobilized to defeat her.”
In 2022, Donna Edwards was poised to reclaim the House seat she’d vacated six years earlier. “Then the ads started pouring in,” the Intercept (7/20/22) reported:
[UDP] spent $6 million on television spots, mailers and other media…. Other pro-Israel organizations pitched in about $1 million more. The result was one of the most expensive congressional primaries in history, with nearly all of the money coming from outside the district over the course of only a few weeks.
Amid the $7 million onslaught, Edwards’ lead vanished. She lost the Democratic primary to prosecutor Glenn Ivey, who was quick to thank AIPAC after his win.
I keep thinking back to this election and wondering, what if reporters had called out AIPAC for hijacking this local race? At the very least, it would have made it harder for the group to get away with doing the same thing two years later, on behalf of Elfreth.
Collective amnesia
AIPAC’s continued ability to steal Democratic primaries rests on a collective amnesia setting in after each election. Unfortunately, reporters have proven willing to do their part to make this happen.
Last month, the moment Elfreth won, what little coverage there was of AIPAC lessened.
Take the May 14 Poststory discussed above. While AIPAC appeared in its tenth paragraph, once Elfreth won, the story was rewritten, and AIPAC dropped down to the 21st paragraph.
AP‘s story (5/14/24) on Elfreth’s victory mentioned her “endorsements from the state’s teachers union and environmental groups”—but not AIPAC, which provided almost three-fourths of the money spent on behalf of her campaign.
That was better than an AP story (5/14/24) the Post ran, which didn’t mention AIPAC at all.
A Baltimore Sun (5/15/24) story belatedly noted AIPAC’s role, but only after portraying Elfreth as a victim of big money by comparing her to Angela Alsobrooks, a candidate who was up against the biggest self-funder in Senate primary history, liquor store magnate David Trone. “Not only were Elfreth and Alsobrooks…up against nationally known figures…they both also trailed their opponents in fundraising,” the Sun reported. This is only true if you don’t count the help UDP gave Elfreth; counting that money, which the Sun did later mention, she had a spending advantage of more than $1 million.
But once again, it was the Banner that took the cake. In Hutzell’s post-election story (5/17/24), Elfreth was the victim, having been forced to endure TV ads attacking “her over a pro-Israel super PAC spending millions to support her without her knowledge.”
It’s not until the 35th paragraph that Hutzell bothers to name AIPAC, and only in the context of how Elfreth is going to be, of all things, a champion for campaign finance reform.
She wants to pick up where US Rep. John Sarbanes, the man she hopes to succeed, left off on campaign finance reform. Elfreth makes this last pledge without irony, given the criticism she received for the more than $4.5 million that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent on her behalf.
With coverage like this, come 2026, AIPAC will be positioned to continue manipulating Democratic primaries by quietly weaponizing right-wing dollars.
‘Israel not a winning issue’
“UDP’s heavy reliance on right-wing (even hard-right) oligarchs comes into stark relief when looking at its most elite donors,” an In These Times analysis (6/3/24) found.
What’s so cynical is that UDP isn’t upfront about why it’s spending millions in Democratic primaries—at least not until after the election is over.
In explaining its support of Elfreth, UDP highlighted domestic issues, listing abortion rights, climate change and domestic violence—issues that are unlikely to matter much if at all to UDP’s Republican donors. The millions of dollars in ads UDP aired for Elfreth didn’t mention Israel; just like the group’s ads against Donna Edwards from two years earlier. “They know that Israel is not a winning issue,” said James Zogby (In These Times, 6/3/24).
But the moment the election was over, AIPAC declared that Elfreth’s win showed that it’s progressive “to stand with the Jewish state as it battles aggression from the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies.”
In backing Elfreth, AIPAC’s right-wing donors knew exactly what they were doing. And so did Elfreth, notwithstanding her claims of ignorance. Reporters knew the score, too, even if their coverage didn’t reflect that. The only ones kept in the dark were voters.
As the world watched on social media and responded in outrage, US corporate media, once again, provided cover for the perpetrators of Israel’s genocide.
CounterPunch (5/31/24): “When the Israeli bombs strafed the safe zone, the plastic tents caught fire, sending flames leaping two meters high, before the melting, blazing structures collapsed on the people inside, many of them children who’d just been tucked in for the evening.”
Over the Memorial Day weekend, Israel bombed starving Gazan refugees crowded in tents in Rafah, where Israel had told them to go. As Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch, 5/31/24) wrote, leaflets dropped in Rafah a few days before told them to go to “Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” an area set up by the UNRWA refugee agency and designated a UN humanitarian safe zone. The leaflet added, “Don’t blame us after we warned you.”
Nevertheless, without warning, Israel hit the camp with at least eight missiles spreading fire though the encampment of plastic tents (Quds News, 5/26/24). Some refugees burned to death, mostly women and children, leaving them dismembered and charred.
The world saw the terror of the massacre on international and social media. Images showed the area of the strike engulfed in flames as Palestinians screamed, cried, ran for safety and sought to help the injured. “They told people to move there then killed them,” Richard Medhurst (5/28/24) posted.
A boy cries in horror and fear as he watches his father’s tent burn with him inside. A man holds up the body of his charred, now-headless baby, wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. An injured, starving child convulses in pain as a medic struggles to find a vein for an IV in her emaciated arm (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).
Al Jazeera (cited by Quds News, 5/26/24) quoted a Civil Defense source: “We believe that the occupation army used internationally prohibited weapons to target the displaced in Rafah, judging by the size of the fires that erupted at the targeted site.”
US news media reported the tent massacre, some more truthfully than others. But most establishment media repeated Israel’s false claims that it was an accident, weaving disinformation messaging into toned-down descriptions of the scene. With confused syntax, they omitted words like “genocide,” “massacre” and “starvation.” Most left out the language of international law that is best able to explain the unprecedented crimes against humanity that Israel is committing. Corporate reporting left the tent massacre devoid of context and empathy, ignored actions that need to be taken, and ultimately facilitated the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
Embedded with an illegal invasion
By being embedded with Israeli forces, NBC (5/28/24) presented news literally from the IDF point of view.
When NBC News (5/28/24) reported from Gaza that “Israeli tanks reached the city center for the first time, according to NBC News‘ crew on the ground,” it failed to say that the NBC crew was embedded with Israel’s invading force.
The same sentence continued that Israel was “defying international pressure to halt an offensive that has sent nearly 1 million people fleeing Rafah.” But Israel was not just “defying…pressure”; it was in violation of a direct order from the International Court of Justice ICJ to halt its attack on Rafah. Yet NBC reporters rode into Rafah with an army that was ignoring international law to commit further genocide in Gaza.
Compare NBC’s words to those used by Ramy Abdu (5/26/24), chair of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who posted: “In the deadliest response to the International Court of Justice’s decision, the Israeli army targeted a group of displaced persons’ tents in Rafah, killing approximately 60 innocent civilians so far.”
In a post, Francesca Albanese (5/26/24), UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, included International actions that needed to be implemented:
The #GazaGenocide will not easily end without external pressure: Israel must face sanctions, justice, suspension of agreements, trade, partnership and investments, as well as participation in int’l forums.
Such sanctions are rarely discussed in establishment media, but are becoming more urgent, given the New York Times report (5/29/24) that Israel intends to extend the genocide through the remainder of 2024. Though the Times reported on the global outrage and demonstrations against the Rafah massacre, the words “genocide” and “massacre” were not used, nor was there any mention of the possibility of sanctions against Israel.
Instead of sourcing the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or any humanitarian actors in the region, NBC (5/28/24) quoted a UN National Security Council spokesperson:
Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists who are responsible for attacks against Israeli civilians…. But as we’ve been clear, Israel must take every precaution possible to protect civilians.
Israel’s claim that it killed two Hamas leaders became the rationale for the strike, which was repeated extensively on corporate media. Over NBC‘s images of burning tents and killing scenes, the header read, “Dozens killed in Gaza tent camp in an airstrike targeting two Hamas commanders.”
The dead were connected to Hamas whenever possible. At the bottom of the video, the subtitles listed numbers of dead, followed with, “according to the emergency services in Hamas-run Gaza.”
Human rights attorney and Rutgers academic Noura Erakat (5/27/24) exposed the attempt to link murdered children to Hamas. Over the picture of a burned baby, she posted these harsh words:
Have you ever seen a burnt baby? Can you imagine her final, gaping screams? And all Israel had to tell you was “Hamas,” so you look at her and shrug. Your willful ignorance is genocidal.
CounterPunch (5/31/24) quoted Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of disaster relief for US Agency for International Development, saying, “Bombing a tent camp full of displaced people is a clear-cut, full-on war crime” who added, “Even if Hamas troops were present, that does not absolve the IDF of the obligation to protect civilians. It does not turn a tent camp into a free fire zone.”
‘A tragic incident’
Al Jazeera+ media critic Sana Saeed (X, 5/27/24) called the writers of such headlines “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”
On NBC (5/28/24), under the footage of the burning horrors of Rafah, the chyron read, “Netanyahu: Deadly Strike a Tragic Incident.”
In response to Israel’s “accident” claim, journalists, activists and social media users, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, reacted with incredulity and withering criticism of those who asserted it. That was the reaction Axios reporter and CNN analyst Barak Ravid (5/27/24) received when he posted, “Breaking: Netanyahu says the airstrike in Rafah on Sunday was ‘a tragic mistake,’ and adds that it will be investigated.” Katie Halper (5/27/24) replied to Ravid with, “Nice to see you using your position as a journalist to do comms for the Israeli government.”
This was intentional. You don’t accidentally kill massive amounts of children and their families over and over again and get to say, “It was a mistake.” Genocidal maniac Netanyahu told us he wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
She ended with the question, “When are you going to believe him?”
Sana Saeed (5/27/24), media critic for Al Jazeera+, posted the front pages of four print publications that repeated Netanyahu’s accident claim. The New York Times used “Tragic Accident,” while “Tragic Mistake” was preferred by Time magazine, Forbes and the AP. Over the headlines, she called them “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”
‘What Israel shared with us’
The second paragraph of CNN‘s report (5/28/24) featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night.”
But CNN (5/28/24) seemed to be vying for Most Valuable Propagandists by elaborating on the unlikely details offered by the IDF to describe the official Israeli version of what happened. It began with Netanyahu speaking to the Knesset: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night. We are investigating the case.”
After four paragraphs of details of the massacre—“burned bodies, including those of children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage”—CNN returned to the justifications. The long, breathless chain of details began:
A US official told CNN Monday that Israel had told the Biden administration it used a precision munition to hit a target in Rafah, but that the explosion from the strike ignited a fuel tank nearby and started a fire that engulfed a camp for displaced Palestinians and led to dozens of deaths.
But the claims could not be confirmed; “It’s what Israel shared with us,” the official said.
But the attack on Rafah was in no way a single “precision” “hit,” as numerous sources reported that multiple bombs hit the camp. And Al Jazeera (5/27/24) reported that Israeli drone strikes also hit the Kuwaiti Hospital, the only functioning hospital in the area, killing two medics. It also pointed out that no notice to evacuate came before the strike.
Ever-changing disinformation
In an X post (5/27/24), Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill noted the shifting narrative coming from Israel:
Netanyahu now admits Israel carried out the horrifying bombings that incinerated human beings in Rafah last night and turned a refugee camp into hellfire. I assume all the people who claimed it was actually a failed Hamas rocket attack will now rush to correct themselves.
As we observed after the flour massacre (FAIR.org, 3/22/24), Israel’s string of differing false statements immediately following a massacre is an IDF propaganda strategy designed to confuse and delay. Focusing on changing falsities distracts from the massacre and turns the cameras away from the horrible images of US-supplied weapons slaughter. In this way, massacres become normalized.
Repeating and discussing the ever-changing Israeli disinformation of denial, discussing weapons and official statements, also allows US corporate media to avoid easily observed patterns of Israel’s ongoing massacres, in addition to drawing public attention away from the suffering. But on social media, the raw footage and cries of outrage by users indicate that the manufactured emotional distance collapses online.
Some users expressed extreme distress after prolonged viewing of such imagery. One Palestinian organizer (5/27/24) said:
I’m shaking uncontrollably since last night. I can’t get the beheaded baby that was burned alive. The woman’s screaming out of my head. The decomposed bodies of babies out of my head. The girl whose body was stuck to a wall. Hind’s final message to PRCS…. And now. How do you watch all this and not feel your soul dead?
The daughter of Palestinian refugees posted (5/27/24):
The flour massacre, the tents massacre, the hospital massacre, the refugee camp massacre, the “safe corridor” massacre, the endless massacres, in homes, on the streets, in tents, on foot— eight months of massacre after massacre after massacre.
Another user (5/27/24) asked, “Why do so many Israeli mistakes involve launching multiple missiles at people they’ve assured are in safe zones?”
‘Willful media blackout’
It was the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2/29/24) that exposed US corporate media reporting as repeated propaganda in a piece titled, “In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Rafah Horror Was Neither ‘a Mishap’ nor Exceptional.” The editorial scoffed at the use of “tragic mishap” to describe the “horrific incident.” It observed that “it took Netanyahu 20 hours to produce the disgraceful statement, which, as usual, lacked any shred of regret over the death of ‘noncombatants.’”
Haaretz derided the “willful media blackout regarding the scope of death and destruction over the last eight months.” Skeptical about the assertion that “it was not expected to cause damage to noncombatant civilians,” the paper observed that, if true, “this involves an ongoing failure at the strategic level.”
LA Progressive (6/7/24): “In response to this massacre…the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be ‘transparent’ about the assault.”
By May 29, US corporate media began to report extensively that the Israeli bombs dropped on Rafah that burned Palestinian refugees alive were made in the US. A munitions fragment was filmed by Palestinian journalist Alam Sadeq, and was posted on X (5/27/24) by former US Army explosive expert Trevor Ball two days earlier. Much was made of the fact that the ordinance was smaller than the usual 2,000-pound bombs used to destroy Gaza, and were the preferred bombs the Biden administration had sent to Israel.
As the New York Times (5/29/24) put it, “US officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties.” The lengthy report included a drawing of the bomb, the details of its manufacture, and assertions that its use by Israel indicated they tried to kill fewer civilians. Gone were any mention of the “tragic mistake,” and the “exploded fuel tank,” forgotten as yesterday’s fake news.
But a lengthy back-and-forth about how the fire could have started failed to point out the obvious, which comes only at the very end when a retired US Air Force sergeant observes, “When you use a weapon that’s intended as precision and low–collateral damage in an area where civilians are saturated, it really negates that intended use.”
As Israel’s atrocities continue to mount in Gaza, the LA Progressive (6/7/24) wrote that though Biden claimed to care about the loss of civilian life in Gaza, and that an Israeli attacked on Rafah would be a “red line,” “events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.” It added that a month ago, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement “that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden administration,” but Israel responded by rejecting that agreement as well.
In addition, Israel closed off the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza. The authors concluded, “What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians, which the Biden administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.”
Over the last eight months, US establishment media have helped Biden “explain away” such atrocities. They have not stopped repeating Israel’s propaganda, and have acted as willing conduits for Israeli disinformation. It is past time they stopped doing so, and started reporting on what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza, not through the eyes of the IDF.
Across corporate media, journalists and pundits introduced conspiracy theories to discredit the pro-Palestine student protest movement, particularly that they are funded by foreign countries or “outside agitators.”
Joe Scarborough and Hillary Clinton on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe (5/9/24) to talk about “misinformation,” agreeing that student protesters are “extremists…funded by Qatar.”
MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough (5/9/24) went on a rant about the college students who have been staging the protests, suggesting to guest Hillary Clinton that they were influenced by China or Qatar:
I’m going to talk about radicalism on college campuses. The sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or whether it’s from Communist Chinese government through TikTok, calling the president of the United States “Genocide Joe.” Calling you and President Clinton war criminals.
Eventually, he called the students “extremists—I’m sorry—funded by Qatar.”
Clinton responded: “You raised things that need to be vented about.”
Scarborough’s claim that Qatar funds the students likely comes from a Jerusalem Post article (4/30/24), which called the protests “despicable.” The story reported, “Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including the most prestigious ones: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.” Of course, funding universities is not the same as funding student protests; the university administrations that actually received the Qatari funding have often been quite hostile to the protesters.
‘Mr. Putin’s message’
Nancy Pelosi, interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN (1/28/24), accused protesters of being “connected to Russia” because “to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.”
House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) suggested on CNN’s State of the Union (1/28/24) that Russia has played a role in the protests:
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip….. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “you think some of these protests are Russian plants?” Pelosi responded: “I don’t think they’re plants; I think some financing should be investigated.”
Like MSNBC, Fox News (5/2/24) has also pushed the narrative suggesting that China is behind the protests: “China may be playing a significant role in the anti-Israel protests by using TikTok to foment division on college campuses,” Alicia Warren wrote.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the far-right, anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, told Fox that “China is using the curation algorithm of TikTok to instigate protests.”
The presence of pro-Palestinian advocacy on TikTok has been cited by lawmakers as a justification for censoring the social media platform (FAIR.org, 5/8/24). But the messages on TikTok, which is popular among younger people, may simply reflect public opinion among that demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, “Younger adults are much less supportive of the US providing military aid to Israel than are older people.”
In a story headlined, “Campus Protests Give Russia, China and Iran Fuel to Exploit US Divide,” the New York Times (5/2/24) described “overt and covert efforts by the countries to amplify the protests.” The story included some speculation about foreign influence: “There is little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests,” Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu wrote. If there was any evidence, they did not present it.
The journalists blamed the protests for having “allowed” these “foreign influence campaigns…to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel.”
‘Professional outside agitators’
ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN (4/29/24): “There’s no rule that says the school needs to tolerate students or, again, outside activists dressing like they’re in Al Qaeda.”
Beyond foreign influence, another conspiracy theory pushed by corporate media about student protesters is that they are influenced by “outside agitators.” While people who are not students have joined the protests, the term has long been used to delegitimize movements and portray them as led by nefarious actors.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was an early source of this claim, announcing at a press conference (4/30/24) that Columbia students have “been co-opted by professional outside agitators.” He made a similar statement in mid-April as well (4/21/24).
On MSNBC (5/1/24), NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry defended the claim, holding up a bicycle lock with a substantial metal chain that police had found at Columbia. “This is not what students bring to school,” he said. In fact, Columbia sells the bike lock at a discount to students (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).
CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (4/29/24) asked the Anti Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt about the outside agitators, “How many of them are actually students?” “A lot of them are not students,” Greenblatt replied, adding unironically: “You can’t even tell who’s an outside agitator and who’s an actual student.”
CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod tweeted (4/30/24): “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.”
“I really believe they are brainwashed,” Donald Trump (Fox News, 4/30/24) said of student protesters.
Former president Donald Trump made a similar claim on Fox (4/30/24). “I really think you have a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators in here too, and I see it all over. And you know, when you see signs and they’re all identical, that means they’re being paid by a source,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He continued: “These are all signs that are identical. They’re made by the same printer.”
It’s worth noting that a political movement is not like an intercollegiate athletic competition, where it’s cheating for non-students to play on a college team; it’s not illegitimate for members of the broader community to join an on-campus protest, any more than it’s unethical for students to take part in demonstrations in their neighborhoods.
“If you’re a protester who’s planned it, you want all outsiders to join you,” Justin Hansford of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center told PolitiFact (5/6/24). “That’s why this is such a silly concept.”
That didn’t stop the New York Post (5/7/24) from publishing an op-ed by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey headlined “Pursue Anti-Israel ‘Outside Agitators’ Disrupting Colleges—and End the Nonsense for Good.” McCaughey wrote, “Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil ‘looks like a conspiracy.’” It looks like a conspiracy theory, anyway.
Tents situation
NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry (Fox 5 New York, 4/23/24): “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.”
One key piece of evidence offered for the “outside agitators” claim was the uniformity of many of the encampments’ tents. When Fox 5 New York (4/23/24) invited two NYPD representatives to discuss the protests, NYPD’s Daughtry said: “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.” He continued: “To me, I think somebody’s funding this. Also, there are professional agitators in there that are just looking for something to be agitated about, which are the protests.”
“Somebody’s behind this, and we’re going to find out who it is,” Daughtry said.
That students might be observing the world and their role in it, and acting accordingly, was not considered.
Newsweek (4/23/24) quoted Daughtry’s claim with no rebuttal or attempt to evaluate its veracity, under the headline, “Police Investigating People ‘Behind’ Pro-Palestinian Protests.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier (4/23/24) also cited the tents as a smoking gun: “We do see, it is pretty organized. The tents all look the same. And it’s expanding.”
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the look-alike tents at most encampments were not expensive at all. As HellGateNYC (4/24/24) pointed out, the two-person tents seen at Columbia cost $28 on Amazon (where they’re the first listing that comes up when you search “cheap camping tent”), and the ones at NYU were even cheaper, at $15. While many Columbia students receive financial aid, the basic cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the school is $85,000 a year. What’s another $15?
‘Soros paying student radicals’
Fox News (4/26/24): “Progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country…are associated with groups tied to far-left groups with radical associations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
And finally, some news outlets alleged that the student protesters are funded by financier George Soros. For example, Fox (4/26/24) reported that a group that funds National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) received a donation from an unnamed nonprofit that is funded by Soros. Fox was apparently referring to the Tides Foundation, a philanthropy that Soros has given money to; Tides gave $132,000 to WESPAC, a Westchester, N.Y., peace group that serves as a financial sponsor to NSJP in Palestine (PolitiFact, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 4/26/24). In standard conspiratorial reasoning, this three-times-removed connection means that, as Fox put it, protests attended by SJP members are “backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
The New York Post (4/26/24) published a similar piece, headlined “George Soros Is Paying Student Radicals Who Are Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Israel-Hating Protests.”
On NewsNation (5/1/24), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested Soros may be connected, saying that the FBI should investigate:
I think the FBI needs to be all over this. I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by—I don’t know—George Soros or overseas entities. There’s sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.
Soros is a billionaire philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. He has come to represent an antisemitic trope among right wingers of a puppet master controlling events behind the scenes (see FAIR.org, 3/7/22). To put it simply, these supposedly antisemitic protesters are now on the receiving end of antisemitism.
Featured image: New York Post graphic (4/26/24) alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros is bankrolling “Israel hate camps.”
From granular coverage of the career triumphs of nepo babies and the goings-on at elite universities, to deep dives about luxury real estate and ritzy goods and services most people have never heard of, it’s clear that the New York Times’ most cherished subject is the One Percent.
This is driven by prurient fascination with the lives of the rich and powerful, mixed with a priggish desire to shame them for individual consumer choices. (“Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate”—4/10/23.) This reflects the class and educational background of Times staffers, many of whom are status-obsessed graduates of elite institutions whose personal wealth and privilege, or proximity to it, skews their worldview.
The New York Times (5/14/24) reports on how luxury hotels are offering “ever-more-lavish activities for guests,” including a “personalized shopping extravaganza”($2,860), an “Enlightenment Retreat” with “four days of holistic treatments ($5,745) or an “invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process” ($7,500).
Here is the Times (5/4/24) on Dylan Lauren, the paradoxically svelte “candy queen of New York City” and empress of the boutique candy store chain Dylan’s Candy Bar:
Ms. Lauren, who is the daughter of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren, lives on the Upper East Side and in Bedford, N.Y., with her husband of nearly 13 years, Paul Arrouet, 53, who is a managing partner at a private equity firm, and their 9-year-old fraternal twins Cooper Blue and Kingsley Rainbow.
Yachts, butlers and “next-level” hotels are of keen and constant interest. The paper (4/10/23) declared last year:
If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels.
This May alone, the Times ran stories on multimillion-dollar designer “eco-yachts” (“‘silent luxury’ is fast displacing opulence”—5/10/24), luxury hotel experiences (“From cooking with a Michelin-star chef to taking a chauffeured shopping spree in Singapore, hotels and resorts are offering ever-more-lavish activities for guests”—5/14/24), and a new breed of butler employed by “the One Percent of the One Percent” (“The modern butler…is no longer a grandfatherly type in morning trousers that stays in the background, if not out of sight”—5/14/24).
‘Affluent social cohort’
The founders of Betches Media have “the chance to make another $30 million if the company can reach certain revenue and profit targets by 2026” (New York Times, 5/11/24).
The paper finds much to admire in buzzy businesses founded by millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs. Take Betches Media, a women’s humor company that satirizes the “affluent social cohort” of young women who grew up in the “well-to-do” Long Island suburb of Roslyn, and joined sororities while undergrads at Cornell University. Industry watchers “took notice” last fall when the company’s founders sold it to LBG Media for $24 million, the Times (5/11/24) reported. (The term “betch” is meant to “mock the preferences of a type of shallow, higher-income, college-educated woman,” who is also most likely white.) The sale netted the three founders around $8 million apiece. One told the Times she had treated herself to a gold Cartier watch; another said she had refreshed her wardrobe.
Several former Betches employees complained that many of the rank-and-file workers were underpaid, with some earning around $50,000 a year to churn out the content that made the business a success. Yet the focus on the more-affluent-than-ever founders suggests that the Times is more interested in winners who can afford Cartier watches than in the grumbling of those left behind.
The fact that the Betches Media founders attended Cornell is not an incidental detail. The Times’ coverage of Ivy League schools and their alumni sometimes suggests that if a phenomenon didn’t happen at an elite university, it didn’t really happen at all.
A 2021 story (6/7/21) on a Yale Law School kerfuffle dubbed “Dinner Party-gate” claimed that the episode exposed a culture that pitted “student against student” and “professor against professor,” forcing the school to confront a “venomous divide.” Far from being a tempest in a teapot, this was indicative of a broader cultural shift: Students at Yale Law now “regularly attack their professors, and one another, for their scholarship, professional choices and perceived political views.” In a place “awash in rumor and anonymous accusations,” the paper breathlessly continued, “almost no one would speak on the record.”
What exactly was “Dinner Party–gate,” and why did the Times consider it a story of compelling national interest? A group of students alleged that Amy Chua, a “popular but polarizing” professor, had been hosting drunken dinner parties with other students, and possibly federal judges, during the pandemic. Five paragraphs in, and after “more than two dozen interviews with students, professors and administrators,” the Times doggedly reported, “possibly the only sure thing in the murky saga is this: There is no hard proof that Ms. Chua is guilty of what she was originally accused of doing.” Nevertheless, the story persisted for an astonishing 36 paragraphs.
‘We’re not oligarchs’
A New York Times (11/3/17) love story: “When the night was over, they departed to their separate yachts.”
In addition to small private parties that may or may not have taken place at Yale Law School, the Times is always on hand to cover larger and more luxurious private parties. The principals of a 2017 wedding chronicled by the Times (11/3/17) met on a yachting excursion off the coast of Croatia. After the ceremony, “guests were greeted by two trumpeters in medieval attire at the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street,” and the bridal couple, who “created their own family crest” for their wedding invitations, menus, wax seals, programs, napkins and cake, departed the venue atop a white carriage drawn by two white Percherons.
In 2019, the Times (2/22/19) covered the union of law firm associate Yelena Ambartsumian and engineer and executive Miroslav Grajewski. Both are avid art collectors whose romance was fueled by “robust curiosity” and “the desire to build a legacy.” The art they’ve acquired includes pieces “priced in the tens of thousands or more.” (High-end art notwithstanding, the bride assured the Times, “We’re not oligarchs.”)
The couple married at St. Illuminator’s Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Manhattan, and held their reception at Eleven Madison Park, a Manhattan restaurant the Michelin guide describes as a “temple of modern elegance” where “nothing is out of place and everything is custom made, from the staff’s suits to the handblown water vases.” Dinner for two, with wine, now costs $1,314.
Toward the end of the ceremony, the Times reported, the officiant “placed gilded coronets on the heads of the bride and groom, an Armenian tradition anointing the couple as the rulers of their domestic kingdom.”
It’s not just parties and weddings, but the luxury goods and services purchased for them, that catch the Times’ eye. In April, the paper (4/13/24) wrote about the cake designer Bastien Blanc-Tailleur, who creates “opulent confections” for “high-profile clients,” including European aristocrats, movie stars, fashion designers, and Saudi and Bahraini royals. Blanc-Tailleur’s wedding cakes start at 7,500 euros, or around $8,100, while simpler cakes, which start at roughly $3,700, are “relatively more affordable.”
‘Go broke or go home’
“People now look at pictures of others who might have incomes 10 to 100 times what we have,” a New York Times article (7/16/19) observes—referring to social media, though it could be talking about its own lifestyle coverage.
As fascinated as the Times is by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it takes care to note that the luxe life is not for everyone. In a 2019 essay (7/16/19) on “Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties,” the paper tackled tough questions like, “What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost?” (Answer: “Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises.”)
Yet even essays warning against mindless excess tend to glamorize it at the same time. “The cost of bachelorette parties is ever growing, with weekend wedding festivities at destination locales now the norm,” the author noted, adding that millennials like her are “going broke” to attend. She then described a bachelorette outing she was invited to: “a long weekend in Spain from my home in Clifton, England, with an itinerary packed with VIP yacht trips, exclusive booths in glamorous nightclubs, a luxury villa and afternoon teas at high-end restaurants.” Suddenly racking up a little credit card debt doesn’t sound so bad!
Attraction to the sweet life is part of our culture. But readers would be better served by a newspaper that scrutinized rather than fetishized wealth and consumption.
This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.
Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed TheLever‘s Katherine Li about corporations’ First Amendment dodge for the May 31, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will likely know about what’s been called the “right-wing media machine.” It started, you could say, with ideologues and politicians with ideas, generally ideas about how to hurdle us back to at least the 19th century, legally and culturally. They then created think tanks and funded academics to polish up and promulgate those ideas. And they created and funded media outlets to push those ideas out.
It’s not, in other words, a reflection of a fortuitous coming together of like-minded individuals, but an echo chamber forged with the explicit purpose of maximizing a narrow viewpoint into a false consensus. The news article you read, after all, cites a professor and a pundit and a think tank and a guy on the street who read a thing, so it looks like multiple disparate sources who happen to agree.
Something analogous is happening now with corporations claiming the First Amendment says they don’t have to comply with regulations they don’t want to comply with, because those regulations reflect ideas that are “controversial,” and they can’t be compelled to take a public position on a controversial idea, like, for example, that climate disruption is real. It’s a weird, important maneuver, at once complicated and pretty simple, and it’s usefully unpacked in a recent piece by our guest.
Katherine Li is an editorial fellow at the Lever, where the piece, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” appears. She joins us now by phone from Oakland, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katherine Li.
Katherine Li: Hi, Janine, very happy to be here. And let’s unpack this complicated piece.
JJ: Well, before we get to its current—you could say artful—employment, what is the “compelled speech” doctrine under the First Amendment? What do we think was the point of it when it was adopted?
KL: Well, as with the First Amendment, the compelled speech in the First Amendment—the original purpose is to say that the government cannot force people to say something they disagree with. That is perhaps illustrated in a very early compelled speech case that basically says that students do not have to stand up in school and salute the flag or the national anthem if they don’t want to.
Basically, it is to protect people from things that the government is forcing them to do, and it’s kind of to insulate people from government policies that impose things on them. The original intention, I do not believe, and experts I have interviewed for this story do not believe that the intention is for corporates to use such an argument in lawsuits.
JJ: All right, well then, let me just move on to asking you to please lay out for us what you call, in the lead to this informative piece for TheLever.com, “the novel legal strategy” that some corporations are now “pioneering,” you say, which sounds very different than “relying on”; they’re kind of trying to make something new here. Explain what you’re seeing.
KL: So traditionally, like I have just mentioned it, is to protect people from the government imposing things on them. But what is considered as speech has really exploded when it comes to the corporate landscape: Are tax returns and contracts considered speech? What does that mean for our government’s power to look into financial wrongdoing, and prevent tax fraud and prevent money laundering, if all of those things are considered as speech, and the government cannot force anybody to “say” and disclose such information?
So the corporates have definitely spotted that, and they have been trying to argue that these financial documents are considered as speech. So it started with drug pricing, it starts with the Corporate Transparency Act, that once there’s a precedent in the court system that says these things are considered speech, more cases are being invited and more cases are coming in this specific landscape. So basically they are saying that these things are considered speech, and therefore the government cannot compel them to disclose this information.
At first it starts with financial information. And right now we’re seeing that in Medicare drug negotiations, it is also happening. These commercial speeches are, according to the lawyers and experts I have spoken to, they don’t believe that these things should be considered; they don’t believe that this so-called commercial speech should be afforded the same amount of protection as traditional political expression, for example, like protesting or writing something in the media, or being censored or being prevented or being forced to make a certain political expression in the non-commercial sense.
So that is why in the article, and according to my experts, they believe this is a new strategy, that corporates are basically exploiting this argument in order to bring more and more cases, and expand the definition of what speech is.
JJ: Right. So then they seem as though they are complying with a law, or relying on a law, rather than sort of forging this new way.
Well, I think the examples really bring it home for people, what’s happening here, and there are a number of those examples in the piece, and each one is more disturbing and illuminating than the last. But one key one is, California has a new emissions disclosure law, that major companies doing business in California have to make public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. And we can understand why that’s important, because a company can say, “Well, our home office is zero emissions,” and that’s great, but what about your factories? What’s happening there?
So the public needs this information, this is information that the public is looking for, to get through the PR that these companies—fossil fuel companies in this case—might be putting out. And they’re saying, “No, we don’t need to comply with an emissions disclosure law, because that’s speech”?
KL: That is precisely what is happening. And the thing is, these emissions laws, they target companies with annual revenue above $1 billion. That is not asking our local coffee shop or the marketplace around the corner to figure out how much emissions are in their supply chain. It only really applies to large companies, especially oil companies, very large agricultural factory-farming companies.
So what initially caught my eye in the story is actually the arguments they have in the complaints that they filed against the emission disclosures law. The complaint, if you read it very closely, to anybody with common sense, it almost sounds ridiculous. Some of the arguments are saying that they fear that disclosing their emissions would allow activists, nonprofits and lawmakers to single out companies for investigation, which to me is just another word for accountability. I mean, that’s what our nonprofits and lawmaking agencies, it’s what they’re supposed to do, investigate and help create policy that can improve lives. So to me, it sounds like their effort to avoid accountability is very thinly veiled.
If you look at their complaint very closely, they also complain that this law would be compelling them to change their behavior. They complain that this law is changing and shaping their behavior, when, in reality, isn’t that what any laws and regulations are supposed to do? I mean, in any daily-life law, such as, like, hey, you cannot jaywalk, that is aiming to shape our behaviors, it’s aiming to change our behaviors.
So if you read the complaint closely, their efforts to avoid accountability, it’s honestly very thinly veiled. And it is, in a way, further expanding what is considered as speech, and also the whole circular argument that climate change is somehow “controversial.”
I also looked into the threshold of what could be considered as controversial when I first read their complaint. So then the lawyers I was talking to, the question I brought to them was, how low is the threshold to prove that something is scientifically controversial? And it turned out my instincts were correct, that the threshold of that is extremely low. They just have to prove that there’s a dissenting opinion. They don’t really have to prove that it is scientifically sound, and there’s no one to really check that.
JJ: So it’s just laid in a lap of particular courts, or particular decision makers. And it sounds as though they’re saying, particularly with that low threshold—or that very vague, undetermined threshold—that any regulation, because any regulation is about shaping behavior, it sounds like any regulation, they can dispute, because it’s aimed at asking them to do something different. I mean, am I misreading that, or is it really anti- any regulation whatsoever, in some way?
KL: In some way, that’s what it sounds like. Because if the complaint is about changing and shaping behavior, any regulations, that’s the point of it, changing behavior. And what is so wrong, what could be so wrong about forcing someone to lower their emissions at this point? It sounds like they’re saying that they shouldn’t lower their emissions, because either climate change doesn’t matter enough, or that climate change is not real. Like they said, they think it’s controversial.
JJ: Right. Well, just in case folks don’t understand, and of course we’ll send them to TheLever.com to read the piece, but you also have a food distribution and a restaurant supplies company, Cisco, that’s saying that you can’t force companies to read out notices of labor violations to workers, because they don’t want to. They don’t want to make that information available. And if they talk about labor violations in the workplace, well, that’s a “confession of sins,” and they shouldn’t be forced to do that. So this can reach into pretty much any area of our life, yeah?
KL: Yeah, definitely. Companies argue that if there has been a labor dispute, whatever the result is of that dispute, the company would post a sign somewhere in the facility, basically detailing the labor violation. But it doesn’t really achieve the same effect as reading it out in front of everybody, because it’s the difference between passively posting a sign somewhere and actively informing people what happened. And obviously, if a company has labor violations, they likely don’t want their workers to know. And if workers have also suffered the same violation, if the company reads it out, they might become more aware of it.
JJ: Well, it’s funny—if by funny, we mean perverse—because the narrative of capitalism that we often hear is that it relies on everyone being an informed economic actor, an individual actor who is making economic choices based on knowledge. And here we have corporations actively trying to reduce the available amount of information that a person could have to make decisions about what to buy or where to work or anything like that. It’s weird. This is how corporate capitalism subverts this notion that we hear about Capitalism 101, and building a better mousetrap, and all of that sort of thing.
Katherine Li: “They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore.”
KL: Definitely. Well, about the emissions case, part of their complaint is also that they might be more susceptible to boycott. I do believe that in this day and age, especially people of the younger generations, they’re much more aware of climate change, and a lot of times they would choose companies and products based on their perception of whether that company is being socially responsible enough.
So it’s obvious that a lot of corporates have caught up on that, and they’re now afraid that if they disclose how much they’re actually emitting, people are going to stop buying from them. They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore, because there will be a real concrete number for people to go on, and a number they cannot fake.
They could put on their website all they want, that we have this commitment in 10 years, we have this kind of green commitment; we’re going to become zero emissions by 2030. They could say what they want to say on their website, but once there’s a concrete number out there, none of that is going to work anymore. And they’re really afraid of that, clearly.
JJ: Afraid of an informed public.
Well, this only works with a certain kind of judicial landscape. I mean, you have to count on not getting laughed out of court with what looks to many people like a fairly transparent shenanigan, but obviously they believe that, for some reason, courts are going to be open to this particular kind of argument.
KL: Yes, unfortunately, multiple times courts have been open to this particular argument. And in terms of science, in California, the well-known case would be the Monsanto case.
For everyone who doesn’t know, Monsanto is a herbicide company. They make this herbicide called Roundup, and there is a certain chemical in it, where a lot of international scientists have said that it could potentially cause cancer in humans. So because science is never 100%, and that knowledge is constantly evolving, there is a loophole for them to say that there is contradicting science. And as we have later found out, Monsanto, the company, has also commissioned scientific studies to say that their product is safe.
And in California, that stood up in court. Because the court doesn’t really look at whether or not Monsanto has engineered this controversy that they’re claiming, this argument was allowed to pass California Proposition 65, which requires a warning label for a whole host of chemicals that could be cancerous and cause birth defects–Monsanto would not have to put that label on their specific herbicide product, because this whole “scientific controversy” thing was allowed to stand up in court.
So the consequences of that is now this argument was expanded. It’s not just one chemical anymore. It’s the entire mechanism of climate change that is being brought into question.
But the good news here is that sometimes courts are also beginning to hold the line, and recently there have been some positive developments. If you look at the most recent case of the Medicare drug negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, I believe it is the US Chamber of Commerce and different pharmaceutical companies, they were arguing that the Medicare drug negotiations, that the Inflation Reduction Act, is trying to “compel” them to agree with a government-determined price, and that they’re saying that is compelled speech.
So they have brought that point to multiple federal courts, including, most recently I believe, a federal court in Ohio. And these courts have fortunately rejected this argument, basically blocked the case on multiple occasions. So I do believe that courts are becoming aware of that, and that they’re beginning to curb these arguments, because in the past, when they have allowed these arguments to pass, sometimes, likely in the next case, the argument becomes expanded.
JJ: Right. Well, I was going to push you further on that, in terms of, it sounds like courts are cottoning on and pushing back. Are there other policy or legislative responses that seem appropriate here, or is it mainly a matter for the courts? And then, do you have thoughts about—because I have not seen this in other reporting—what media might do in terms of disclosing this, putting some sunlight on this, as part of a pushback against what seems clearly like an anti-regulatory, anti–public information effort?
KL: Well, to answer the first question, I do believe this matter is mainly up to the courts, even though, in terms of lawmaking, there can be laws that make up for what the courts are not doing. At the end of the story that I wrote about this, I mentioned a doctrine called the major questions doctrine. A lot of times what the states are allowed to do and what the states are allowed to regulate, what the federal agencies are allowed to regulate in states, is significantly limited. So a lot of times, these things become left up to courts in a major case, to basically make a decision on whether what the individual states are doing is lawful or not.
I believe that if the federal regulatory agencies oftentimes could have more power to pass more sweeping regulations on these things, and that federal regulatory agencies could have more power to fight these law cases if they are sued on a particular point, for example, like the Inflation Reduction Act…. I believe that federal agencies should be given more power to decide, instead of leaving it up to the courts, because the court doesn’t always hold the line.
They’re beginning to, but, for example, the California emissions disclosure case, it’s still very much up in the air, and it’s an entirely new regulation. No other states have implemented it yet; it’s just California, and there are no federal regulations on how companies could be more accountable for the emissions they’re putting out.
And in terms of how media could report on this, I would say, a lot of times, this type of story, it’s very, very helpful to talk to lawyers, because a lot of the cases that I have found, and also trying to figure out how low the scientific threshold is to basically prove that something is controversial: the lawyers know. They are a treasure trove of past cases, because that is their job. And a lot of times, they really enjoy talking to journalists, laying out their cases, and basically walking you through the steps and loopholes that are in our law, because that is their profession.
I would also say, I can understand that sometimes it’s hard to write about something that doesn’t have a main human character in it. Sometimes it’s hard to make it interesting, and it could be easy to overlook these stories. But personally, I think that even a seemingly boring document could contain very interesting information.
For example, the initial complaint that’s filed against the California Emissions Disclosure Law, if you look at the information closely, it might look like a boring document, but the more you read, you’re like, “Wow, this doesn’t make sense. Am I hallucinating this, or is this real?” So then you go to a lawyer, and verify that information. Is this a trend I’m spotting? Is this a problem? Do you think it’s a problem? And these kind of stories could end up being very interesting.
And I would say that, also, it’s important to look into lobbying data, and frame the story looking at who is responsible, and not only looking at what the problem is. I feel like stories could become much more powerful when you look at the how, the mechanism, the larger mechanism that’s at work, instead of only focusing on one specific event or one isolated event that’s happening. Sometimes the more people, the more professionals, you talk to, you start to see a network and a storyline, and how there’s a loophole, and the mechanism of how things work behind the scenes.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, that’s excellent. We’ll end it there for now.
We’ve been speaking with Katherine Li. She’s editorial fellow at the Lever, online at TheLever.com, where you can find this informative article, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” that we’ve been talking about. Thank you so much, Katherine Li, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Claudia Sheinbaum has made history. A leftist from the ruling party and former head of government for Mexico City, she will be Mexico’s first woman and first Jewish president. But all the US press wants to know is whether she is just going to be a puppet of the big, scary outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.
AP (5/22/24): “Sheinbaum has to be very careful…to avoid appearing to contradict or criticize López Obrador.”
The AP (5/22/24) said Sheinbaum left “many wondering whether she can escape the shadow of the larger-than-life incumbent.” Vox (6/2/24) said, on the issues of government corruption and narco violence, “Now the question is to what extent Sheinbaum will be able to make progress on these concerns while operating under the shadow of her mentor.”
The New York Times (5/30/24) said that “she has an image problem, and she knows it.” The article explained: “Many Mexicans are wondering: Can she be her own leader? Or is she a pawn of the current president?”
A Washington Post (2/28/24) columnist called Sheinbaum AMLO’s “heir,” and wrote that while she “is more of a mystery…she has people worried.” The Christian Science Monitor (5/28/24) also called her AMLO’s “hand-picked successor.” The New York Times (6/4/24) also said that “some observers believe [AMLO] will find a way to continue to exert influence behind the scenes” after he leaves, calling Sheinbaum his “handpicked successor.”
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Americas columnist for the Wall Street Journal (5/26/24), went further, saying Sheinbaum is not just an extension of AMLO, but a threat to democracy itself, as she was “handpicked by the president” and “is a symbol of continuity with his agenda.” She accused Sheinbaum of wanting “to crush pluralism and grab control of the Supreme Court,” forcing Mexico to revert “to a one-party state, as it was during the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.”
By virtue of Mexican law, AMLO can only serve one term. The idea that a party winning two elections in a row, potentially tipping the balance of the court, is somehow a reversion to the seven decades of PRI rule is a bit of a stretch; would Hillary Clinton have created a “one-party state” if she had won the US presidency in 2016? It’s also misleading to call Sheinbaum “hand-picked,” as she won AMLO’s support only after a messy intra-party struggle, as is common in the democratic political battlefield (AP, 10/6/22; Foreign Policy, 6/9/23).
No ‘decent alternative’
For Time (5/30/24), the “tragedy” was that few Mexicans wanted to vote for the candidate who represented the two parties that had governed their country for 72 years before 2018.
Time (5/30/24) also complained that Sheinbaum was the “anointed” AMLO replacement, saying the problem of her victory is “how easily this triumph has been handed to her.” “Most Mexicans don’t necessarily adore the current government,” Alex González Ormerod wrote, but they “simply have not been given a decent alternative to vote for.”
This kind of pabulum is an observation any half-educated analyst could have made about a random election in the United States, France or Iran. Yet the fact that there is not a viable pro-rich political movement in Mexico is treated as an existential crisis for the US press.
If AMLO’s record and Sheinbaum’s proposals for her term were so terrible, one might imagine that opposition parties could take advantage of that. “The majority of her support comes from AMLO,” said Andalusia Knoll Soloff, an independent journalist based in Mexico, in a phone interview. “She appeals to the values of the people of AMLO.” But she added that it is an exaggeration to say she’s made in the mold of the outgoing president, saying it is “untrue that she is a puppet of AMLO.”
What is happening here is the media myth that Sheinbaum, a scientist and successful left-wing politician, somehow lacks any agency of her own, when it is perfectly sensical that AMLO’s party would want to continue many of his policies in a second term. AMLO, like Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, sits in the American media consciousness as a thuggish caudillo who is undermining the goals of US businesses in Latin America, a kind of act of war against the Monroe Doctrine.
‘Pragmatic’ or ‘ideological’?
Politico (6/1/24) wonders whether Sheinbaum will “prioritize efficiency over ideology, or be “a mere puppet of López Obrador” and “follow in his leftist footsteps.”
Thus Sheinbaum is viewed with suspicion. Examine, for instance, this summary from Politico (6/1/24), which wondered whether Sheinbaum would govern as “pragmatist” or “ideologue”:
On one hand, [Sheinbaum’s] an accomplished physicist with expertise in environmental science and a reputation for pragmatism. On the other, she’s a long-time leftist activist, a close ally and champion of López Obrador—a divisive figure who came to power promising to represent the lowest echelons of Mexican society and, during his tenure, increased social spending to a historic high while simultaneously attacking Mexico’s system of checks and balances.
In what world are these two incompatible things? It’s quite easy that someone can be a devotee of science and also prefer politics that help the poor and working class over the rich—just ask Albert Einstein (Monthly Review, 5/1/09) or Carl Sagan (New York Post, 10/5/20).
But Politico made its particular definitions of “pragmatist” and “ideologue” clear later, when it suggested that “a more ideological and leftist Sheinbaum” might “seek more beneficial terms for Mexico” in upcoming trade talks with the US and Canada, while a “more pragmatic Sheinbaum…could find compromises when discussing trade, and agree on a middle ground for investigating cartels with US support without risking Mexico’s sovereignty.” In other words: “pragmatic” means doing what’s best for the US, “ideological” means doing what’s best for the Mexican people she represents.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (6/3/24) also used this dichotomy. “Markets will be looking to see which Claudia Sheinbaum emerges in office—the ideologue or a more pragmatic deal-maker,” the paper said. It added that she “has promised to put the poor first, but that means Mexico’s economy will need to keep growing.” In the Journal‘s worldview, this means “policies that attract foreign capital to expand prosperity.”
A new environmental focus
“For those hoping Mexico will fully embrace climate protection, natural-resource conservation and clean energy policies,” EcoAmericas (4/23) last year said Sheinbaum might be “a ray of hope.”
Sheinbaum’s climate policies for Mexico City, once known for its terrible pollution, have also bolstered her progressive politics. Visitors to Mexico City today find a world-class capital with clean streets and lovely parks, aided by a large public transit system.
[Supporters] point to her time spent governing Mexico City, when she made significant advancements in science by initiating the construction of the world’s largest urban photovoltaic plant, which cost 661 million pesos (US$39 million) to build.
It added that her “administration also established the first rapid-transit network of buses in the city—and in Latin America—that run on electricity.” EcoAmericas (4/23) reported on her environmental policy in Mexico City, saying her agenda included “rainwater harvesting, green-space expansion, watershed conservation, extensive planting initiatives, air-quality improvement [and] waste reduction,” as well as improving the city’s transit system. And the Wilson Center (10/24/23) noted that as environmental secretary in the city government, Sheinbaum oversaw “the creation of the first line of the metrobús, Mexico City’s bus rapid transit system.”
By contrast, AMLO’s unmoored populism put him at odds with climate activists (AP, 8/28/20, 3/23/22, 11/24/23; Guardian, 11/8/22). Sheinbaum has disappointed environmental activists with promises to increase oil production as president, but has also promised a major investment in green energy (New Republic, 5/31/24). She has vowed “to accelerate the energy transition with new solar, wind and hydropower projects” (Argus, 4/17/24). AMLO had “tended to prioritize domestic fossil fuel resources over low-carbon alternatives” (Yale Climate Connections, 4/10/24).
As Reuters (5/28/24) noted, Sheinbaum and the outgoing president are indeed allies, but hardly the same; Sheinbaum, the scientist, took the Covid pandemic seriously, while AMLO fell to anti-mask populism.
There’s a racist connotation against Latin Americans that a second term for a leftist coalition means there is a Svengali calling all the shots without popular consent. With Sheinbaum, there is also the insinuation that a woman could simply not rise to this level without a “strong man” behind her.
It remains to be seen how Sheinbaum will actually govern, but since, like AMLO, she does not promise to accede to every US demand, the US press corps has already settled comfortably into its time-worn tradition of casting the election of a leftist Latin American as undemocratic.
Donald Trump is now the first former US president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty on 34 counts of “in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex” (AP, 5/31/24). Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement (5/30/24) that Trump was found “guilty of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal damaging information from American voters during the 2016 presidential election,” and that his prosecutors “proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump illegally falsified 34 New York business records.”
Trump’s shot at retaking the White House is far from finished (Guardian, 5/30/24), and he may very well evade jail (NBC, 5/30/24), but the right-wing press is howling anyway.
‘A bizarre turducken’
“If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again,” the Wall Street Journal (5/30/24) warned, as “Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/30/24) painted Bragg’s case against Trump as “a bizarre turducken, with alleged crimes stuffed inside other crimes.” It suggested the DA was motivated less by executing the law than by kneecapping Trump’s bid for the White House. The whole affair, the paper said, leads us to more division:
What if Mr. Trump loses the election and then is vindicated on appeal? If Democrats think that too many Republicans today complain about stolen elections, imagine how many more might next year.
The conviction sets a precedent of using legal cases, no matter how sketchy, to try to knock out political opponents, including former presidents. Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor. If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again. Mr. Bragg might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics, and no one can say how it will end.
The New York Post (5/31/24) ran the front-page headline “Injustice,” while its editorial board (5/31/24) argued that Democrats’ happiness at the conviction “itself is ample reason for the court of public opinion to vote [President Joe Biden] out come Election Day.”
The Washington Post (5/31/24) reported on the meltdown at Fox News:
“This is a very sad day for all of us, irrespective of party, irrespective of affiliation,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the network’s 5 p.m. show. “We have seen the criminal justice weaponized to bring down a candidate for president and a former president.”
On her 7 p.m. show, Laura Ingraham called it “a disgraceful day for the United States, a day that America may never recover from,” while 9 p.m. host Sean Hannity called it “a conviction without a crime.”
All too typical
Talkshow host Charlie Kirk (Alaska Must Read, 5/30/24) warned that “there will be an unprecedented push to say that Trump CANNOT be allowed to win, that we CANNOT elect a convicted felon.”
What comes up over and over again in coverage of both the Manhattan hush-money case―as well as two federal cases against Trump, and one election-related case in Atlanta―is that the prosecution and conviction of a former president is without precedent (Fox News, 5/30/24; New York Times, 5/30/24; NPR, 5/30/24). The theory goes that these prosecutions are so divisive, in such a politically volatile moment, that they should force us to weigh the pursuit of justice against political stability.
Yet, for journalists who looked at the Manhattan courtroom, Trump sat there like many other New York politicians and political influencers whose criminality brought them down. Trump, who was born in Queens and made his name in Manhattan, is a businessman shaped by the New York City real estate industry and the political machines around it. That’s an exciting place to be. But it’s also a very corrupt one (WHEC, 8/13/21).
In this context, Trump’s conviction is less a partisan witch hunt or a crossing-the-Rubicon moment for US history, and more another New York politician getting caught up in a scandal that is all too typical of the city and state that made him.
New York, of course, is hardly unique in having a tradition of officials getting caught with their hands in the till. But those who follow New York politics can cite a long line of prominent politicians brought down by corruption investigations.
Sheldon Silver, the lower Manhattan Democrat who for 20 years ruled the state assembly with an iron fist, died in federal custody due to corruption charges (Guardian, 1/24/22).
The Washington Post (5/12/16) could have run this exact same headline about two different New York senate majority leaders over a four-year period.
On the Republican side, former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was convicted, along with his son, for “pressuring companies that relied heavily on government contracts to give his son nominal but lucrative jobs” (Washington Post, 5/12/16). Joe Bruno, Skelos’ Republican predecessor, was also found guilty on corruption charges, though he was acquitted in a retrial (New York Times, 5/16/14).
A Democratic senate majority leader, Democrat Malcolm Smith, was given “seven years in prison after being convicted of trying to bribe his way onto the Republican ballot in the 2013 race for New York City mayor” (Politico, 7/1/15). Smith was followed by Pedro Espada Jr., who was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling from federally funded healthcare clinics (New York Times, 6/14/12).
While former Gov. Eliot Spitzer never saw a courtroom, a federal investigation into a prostitution ring revealed him as a client and ended his political career (NPR, 3/12/08).
The current New York City mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, is under federal investigation for possible illegal connections to Turkey (CBS, 5/21/24). His buildings department commissioner, Republican Eric Ulrich, has been charged with running “a years-long scheme doling out political favors in exchange for more than $150,000 in bribes” (New York Post, 9/13/23).
Prosecution of corruption isn’t confined to the public sector; the former federal prosecutor for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, made a name for himself by going after white-collar criminals (New Yorker, 3/13/17). And let’s not forget the many union leaders nabbed for corruption over the years (New York Post, 7/26/00; New York Times, 5/20/09, 8/5/09; CNN,8/5/23).
Removed from sordid politics
Obviously, in the US consciousness, the president stands above all over elected leaders, including Supreme Court justices and congressional leaders, as well as the top honchos at the state level. The president leads the military, represents the nation on the world stage, and stands (theoretically) as a unifying figure for the American people. But this mythology of a sort of king-like figure not only warps the notion of small-r republican governance, but removes the president from the rest of sordid politics in an extremely dishonest way.
For those who have studied Trump’s career, despite rising to the White House and photo shoots all over the world, he is, in essence, a product of New York City. His business empire, political dealings and image in the tabloid press were created and shaped by New York’s dirty political culture.
The conviction will be the stuff of partisan rabble in the media for days and weeks. But in reality, he’s just another member of the city’s political and business class who got caught committing banal crimes. Media would be better off framing his conviction in the context of how routine it was, given the venue, rather than offering it as a novel soul-searching moment for the nation.
This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public, investors, how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. It’s knowable information, and people have a right to know it, right? The same way restaurants here in New York City have to tell potential customers how they did on their last health inspection; you can eat there or not, but at least you’re making an informed decision.
But no! This past January, the US Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of other industry groups challenged those laws, because, they said, making companies disclose the impact of their actions—in this case, their emissions—would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That, they said, makes the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior.
Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this bizarre notion that regulation should be illegal, essentially, because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. But it’s not just a legal matter; public information, our right to know, is also on the line here, so we should know what’s going on.
Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (4/8/24) cited “experts” who called Nicaragua charging Germany with facilitating genocide “a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.”
When Nicaragua accused Germany of aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month, readers of corporate media might have seriously wondered whether Nicaragua’s case had any legitimacy.
The case targeted Germany as the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, Israel’s biggest supplier, does not accept the court’s jurisdiction on this issue. The object (as Nicaragua’s lawyer explained) was to create a precedent with wider application: that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law.
Many in corporate media took a more jaundiced view. The Financial Times (4/8/24) led by telling readers, “The authoritarian government of Nicaragua accused Germany of ‘facilitating genocide’ in Gaza at the opening of a politically charged case.” The second paragraph in a New York Times article (4/8/24) cited “experts” who saw it “as a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.” The Guardian (4/9/24) qualified its comment piece by remarking that “Nicaragua is hardly a poster child when it comes to respect for human rights.”
Double standards are evident here. If the US government were to do what it has failed to do so far, and condemn Israel’s genocidal violence, Western corporate media would not remind readers of US crimes against humanity, such as the Abu Ghraib tortures, extraordinary renditions, or the hundreds imprisoned without trial at Guantánamo. It’s hard to imagine Washington would be accused of “hypocrisy” (Guardian, 4/9/24) for calling out Israel’s crimes. Any condemnation of Israel by the US or one of its Western allies would be taken at face value—in clear contrast to the media’s treatment of such action by an official enemy country like Nicaragua.
Germany ‘as its finest’
For El País (4/11/24), facilitating mass slaughter in Gaza is “Germany…at its finest,” because it it is “driven by its sense of responsibility stemming from a tragic history.”
Of establishment media, Spain’s El País (4/11/24) was perhaps the most vitriolic in its portrayal of Nicaragua. Its piece on the court case was headlined “The Worst Version of Nicaragua Against the Best Version of Germany.”
“The third international court case on the Gaza war pits a regime accused of crimes against humanity against a strong and legitimate democracy,” the piece explained. “It may be a noble cause, but its champion couldn’t be worse.”
The article, which relayed none of the evidence offered by either side, commented rather oddly that Germany was “at its finest” arguing the case, and that its “defense against Nicaragua’s charges is solid and its legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable”—a comment presumably intended to contrast its legitimacy with “the Nicaraguan dictatorship.”
In addition to its article cited above, the New York Times (4/8/24) had a report more focused on the case itself. However, it was CNN (4/9/24) and Al Jazeera (4/8/24) that stood out as covering the case on its own merits rather than being distracted by animosity toward Nicaragua.
The negative presentation in much of the media was repeated when, later in April, they headlined that Nicaragua’s request had been “rejected” by the ICJ (e.g., AP, 4/30/24; NPR, 4/30/24), with the New York Times (4/30/24) again remembering to insert a derogatory comment about Nicaragua’s action being “hypocritical.” These followup reports largely overlooked the impact the case had on Germany’s ability to further arm Israel during its continued assault on Gaza.
Nicaraguan ‘Nazis’
The New York Times (3/2/23) ran a headline equating the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the German Nazi Party, based on the claim that “the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did.”
Corporate media had been gifted their criticisms of Nicaragua by a report published at the end of February by the UN Human Rights Council. A “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (the “GHREN”) had produced its second report on the country. Its first, last year, had accused Nicaragua’s government of crimes against humanity, leading to this eyebrow-raising New York Times headline (3/2/23): “Nicaragua’s ‘Nazis’: Stunned Investigators Cite Hitler’s Germany.”
The GHREN’s leader, German lawyer Jan-Michael Simon, had indeed likened the current Sandinista government to the Nazis. Times reporter Frances Robles quoted Simon:
“The weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did,” Jan-Michael Simon, who led the team of UN-appointed criminal justice experts, said in an interview.
“People massively stripped of their nationality and being expelled out of the country: This is exactly what the Nazis did too,” he added.
It’s quite an accusation, given that the Nazis established over 44,000 incarceration camps of various types and killed some 17 million people. Robles gave few numbers regarding the crimes Nicaragua is accused of, but did mention 40 extrajudicial killings in 2018 attributed to state and allied actors, and noted that the Ortega government had in 2023 “stripped the citizenship from 300 Nicaraguans who a judge called ‘traitors to the homeland.’”
Robles also quoted Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a member of the Nicaraguan oligarchic family who are among the Sandinista government’s fiercest opponents; Chamorro claimed there was evidence of “more than 350 people who were assassinated.” Even if true, this would seem to be a serious stretch from “exactly what the Nazis did.”
Like most Western reporters, Robles—who also wrote the recent ICJ piece for the Times—gave no attention to the criticisms of the GHREN’s work by human rights specialists, who argued that the GHREN did not examine all the evidence made available to it and interviewed only opposition sources. For example, former UN independent expert Alfred de Zayas castigated its first report in his book The Human Rights Industry, calling it a “political pamphlet” intended to destabilize Nicaragua’s government.
Even if one takes the GHREN account at face value, the Gaza genocide is at least 100 times worse in terms of numbers of fatalities, quite apart from other horrendous elements, such as deliberate starvation, indiscriminate bombing, destruction of hospitals and much more. It’s unclear why the accusations against Nicaragua should delegitimize the case against Germany.
Hague history
In 1986, the New York Times (6/28/86) reported that the ICJ found the US guilty of ”training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces,” and of “direct attacks on Nicaraguan oil installations, ports and shipping.”
Many media reports did mention Nicaragua’s long history of support for Palestine—which undermines the accusation of cynicism underlying the case—but few noted the Latin American country’s history of success at the Hague. As Carlos Argüello, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the Netherlands who took the lead at the ICJ, pointed out, Nicaragua has more experience at the Hague than most countries, including Germany. This began with its pioneer case against the US in 1984, when it won compensation of £17 billion (that was never paid) for the damage done to Nicaragua by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports.
One notable exception to that historical erasure came from Robles at the Times (4/8/24), who did refer to the 1984 case. But the point was clearly not to remind readers of US crimes, or to demonstrate that Nicaragua is an actor to be taken seriously in the realm of international law. The two academics she quoted both served to portray the current case as merely “cynical.”
The first, Mateo Jarquín, Robles quoted as saying that the Sandinista government has “a long track record…of using global bodies like the ICJ to carve out space for itself internationally—to build legitimacy and resist diplomatic isolation.” Robles didn’t disclose Jarquín’s second surname, Chamorro. Like her source in the earlier article, he is a member of the family that includes several government opponents.
Robles also quoted Manuel Orozco, a former Nicaraguan working at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, whose major funders include the US Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute, notorious for their role in promoting regime change, including in Nicaragua. Orozco told Robles that “Nicaragua lacks the moral and political authority to speak or advocate for human rights, much less on matters of genocide.”
‘Effectively siding with Germany’
AP (4/30/24) missed the significance of the ICJ holding that, “at present, the circumstances are not such as to require” an order forbidding Germany to ship weapons to Israel—namely, that Germany maintained that it already halted shipments of such weapons (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24).
On April 30, the ICJ declined to grant Nicaragua its requested provisional measures against Germany, including requiring the cessation of arms deliveries to Israel. Headlining this outcome, the Associated Press (4/30/24) said the court was “effectively siding with Germany.” The outlet did, however, continue by explaining that the court had “declined to throw out the case altogether, as Germany had requested,” and will hear arguments from both sides, with a resolution not likely to come for years.
That was better than NPR‘s report (4/30/24), which only mentioned that the court was proceeding with the case in its final paragraph.
But German lawyer and professor Stefan Talmon (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24), clarified that the court’s ruling “severely limits Germany’s ability to transfer arms to Israel.”
“The court’s order was widely interpreted as a victory for Germany,” Talmon commented. “A closer examination of the order, however, points to the opposite.” He concluded that although the ICJ did not generally ban the provision of arms to Israel, it did impose significant restrictions on it by emphasizing Germany’s obligation to “avoid the risk that such arms might be used to violate the [Genocide and Geneva] Conventions.”
And Talmon pointed out that the court appeared to make its decision that an order to halt war weapons shipments was unnecessary based on Germany’s claim that it had already stopped doing so.
“By expressly emphasizing that, ‘at present’, circumstances did not require the indication of provisional measures, the Court made it clear that it could indicate such measures in the future,” Talmon wrote.
Establishment media, seemingly distracted by the “hypocrisy” of Nicaragua challenging a country whose “legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable,” mostly failed to notice that its legal efforts were therefore at least partially successful: It forced Germany to back down from its unstinting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and alerted German politicians to the fact that they are at risk of being held accountable under international law if they transfer any further war weapons.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by John Perry.
“Do you condemn Hamas?” This question is a familiar response from corporate journalists and pro-Israel advocates whenever anyone urges the Israeli military to stop its offensive in Gaza (Declassified UK, 11/4/23; Forward, 11/10/23; Jewish Journal, 11/29/23). If you denounce Israel’s response to the attacks without condemning Hamas, the insinuation goes, you are defending the militant group and the killing of Israeli civilians.
If you don’t start off by condemning Hamas’ attack, the British pundit Piers Morgan (Twitter, 11/23/23) said, “why should anyone listen to you when you condemn Israel for its response?”
The International Criminal Court surely condemned Hamas when an ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought arrest warrants for Hamas’ three principal leaders along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister (Reuters, 5/21/24). That hasn’t helped the ICC in the press. By condemning both Hamas and Israel leaders for illegal acts of violence, the ICC is delegitimizing Israel, editorialists say.
‘A slander for the history books’
The New York Post (5/20/24) was outraged by “the ICC’s morally perverse bid to seem ‘fair’ by also seeking warrants for some leaders of Hamas.”
“Lumping them together is a slander for the history books. Imagine some international body prosecuting Tojo and Roosevelt, or Hitler and Churchill, amid World War II,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/20/24) said. It added that “Israel has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tons of aid, and 28,255 aid trucks, in an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians.”
For the record, the UN has estimated that Gaza needs 500 truckloads of humanitarian aid a day—so nearly four times as many as Israel has allowed in. Israeli soldiers have reportedly helped protesters block aid trucks (Guardian, 5/21/24), while the IDF has relentlessly targeted medical facilities (Al Jazeera, 12/18/23). And Israeli “forces have carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 2023,” according to Human Rights Watch (5/14/24).
The New York Post editorial board (5/20/24) engages in the same logic, saying Hamas leaders are “cold-blooded savages—who target innocent civilians for murder, rape and kidnapping,” while Israel is pure at heart: “law-abiding, democratic victims, who merely seek to eradicate the terror gang.”
Back on Planet Earth, Israel has targetedhospitals, journalists, schools and aid workers. The United Nations has declared a famine is underway (AP, 5/6/24), and its data show the death toll for Palestinians since October 7 is nearly 30 times larger than for Israelis, a testament to the conflict’s imbalance of might and ferocity. The UN estimates nearly 8,000 Gazan children have been killed (NPR, 5/15/24).
‘Digging its own grave’
For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (5/21/24), the “decision to seek the arrest of three Hamas leaders along with Netanyahu” was part of a strategy to destroy Israel, “as it places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.”
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (5/21/24), who is loved by the right-wing fanatics at the New YorkPost (4/28/17, 8/27/19, 12/29/19, 2/11/21) for his backward views on social issues and his desire to rob his critics of free speech rights, said that by going after both Israeli and Hamas leaders, the court was part of an “overall strategy” to bring about Israel’s downfall through alienation, as the equivalency “places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.” In other words, it treats Israel as being morally equivalent to a group that has killed less than 1% as many children.
The Washington Post‘s opinion page (5/21/24) featured multiple sides in response to the news, including human rights scholar Noura Erakat, who said, if anything, Khan was too easy on Israel. But the Post’s roundtable also featured former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Avi Mayer, a pro-Israel public relations professional who left that paper amid turmoil (Forward, 12/15/23). He said comparing Israel to its “cruel and implacable foe against which it is defending itself will be met with wall-to-wall resistance and steely determination.”
The Post also featured Bush II and Trump administration hawk John Bolton, who ignored the accusations against Hamas altogether, saying the “ICC has finally and irreversibly begun digging its own grave”—not just because of the charge against Israel, but because the court is “untethered to any constitutional structure, unchecked by distinct legislative or executive authorities, and utterly unable to enforce its decisions.”
The Post could have found much more nuanced voices to critique Khan. Mayer is hardly a scholar looking at the situation with cold eyes; he’s a dedicated promoter of Israeli policy who only briefly worked as a newspaper editor (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 3/21/23). Bolton’s entire persona revolves around opposing the notion of international justice (Politico, 9/23/18; Washington Post, 10/10/18); the ICC could have opened a cat shelter and he would have found a way to argue that this harmed US interests. Meanwhile, one of the legal advisors who had recommended seeking arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders was a former Israeli diplomat and Holocaust survivor (Forward, 5/23/24).
Across the pond, the editorial board of the Telegraph (5/21/24), the main print voice of British conservatism, said that the “moral equivalence” of Hamas and Israeli leaders was “absurd.” The London Times (5/21/24) simply said the ICC’s action wouldn’t help the situation in Gaza.
These views reflect the official line of the White House (CNN, 5/20/24), 10 Downing Street (Politico, 5/21/24) and Netanyahu (Reuters, 5/20/24).
An unsurprising outcome
Chief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, a British lawyer, compared Israeli actions to the British government saying “let’s drop a 2,000-pound bomb on the Falls Road” in response to IRA attacks (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).
You just can’t win, can you? Had the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants only for Israeli leaders, we can only imagine that these same outlets would condemn it as a one-sided interpretation of the war. In other words, there is simply no scenario in which criticism or scrutiny of Israel can take place.
For those who have actually studied conflict and human rights, it is just not surprising that an international body would recognize war crimes by both the military of a recognized government and an armed faction dubbed a “terrorist” group. A United Nations panel found that while the separatist Tamil Tigers committed atrocities in the last days of the Sri Lankan civil war, the final government offensive caused the “deaths of as many as 40,000 civilians, most of them victims of indiscriminate shelling by Sri Lankan forces” (Washington Post, 4/21/11).
A 2020 Human Rights Watch report noted that Syrian and Russian government forces in the Syrian Civil War used “indiscriminate attacks and prohibited weapons,” while opposition groups carried out “serious abuses, leading arbitrary arrest campaigns in areas they control and launching indiscriminate ground attacks on populated residential areas.”
The news that the ICC was indicting members of a militant anti-government group along with leaders of the government that group opposes falls into that same unsurprising category.
In fact, Khan told the London Times (5/25/24) that he believed Israel had a right to defend itself and seek the return of the October 7 hostages, but not to enact collective punishment on the Palestinians. And “he did not understand, given his warnings to comply with international law over the past months, why anyone was surprised” at his announcement (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).
Some editorial boards have been calling for an end to the butchery in Gaza (LA Times, 11/16/23; Boston Globe, 2/23/24). But there is still a loud, booming editorial voice that is in line with official thinking in Washington: There is no red line for Israel. Anything goes. No matter what atrocity it commits, editorialists will ignore it and proclaim Israel the victim.
The New York Times has become notorious for its role in laundering right-wing transphobia for its largely liberal audience (see, e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/22, 5/11/23, 5/19/23). A recent article (5/20/24) about local school politics serves as yet another example of how the paper’s anti-trans agenda most likely flies under the radar of most readers—making its propaganda that much more effective.
The headline read, “NYC Parents Rebuked for Questioning Transgender Student-Athlete Rules.” The subhead explained further:
Over a dozen Democratic elected officials criticized a parent group that asked for a review of rules that let students play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
It’s a framing clearly intended to portray the parents as reasonable—they just want to ask questions and review some rules!—and the city officials as censorious. After all, who rebukes people for just wanting to have a conversation?
‘Asked the city to review’
The New York Times (5/20/24) framed a story about a transphobic resolution as “parents” being attacked for merely “questioning.”
The article, by education reporter Troy Closson, began by describing “a group of elected parent leaders”–representing District 2, one of six Manhattan school districts–who “asked the city to review education department rules allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.”
“Elected,” so they must be representative, and simply “asked…to review,” so there’s presumably nothing anyone should get upset about. At least, as far as Times readers would be able to tell.
And what was the response? Closson tells readers:
The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, called the proposal “despicable” and “no way in line with our values.”
Democratic officials also have responded to the parent council swiftly, and angrily.
In a letter made public on Monday, a coalition of 18 Democratic elected officials from New York called the proposal “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful” to the city’s children.
New York City’s Democrats sure sound extreme! Closson did finally give readers at least a glimpse of the other side’s perspective:
The officials argued that while some parents say they were “simply asking for a conversation,” the resolution “was based in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric” that has helped fuel harassment and mental health issues for young people. They demanded that the council formally rescind the resolution.
Toward the end of the piece, Closson acknowledged that, according to another council member, the council “received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution.”
Crossing ‘political lines’
The Times gave no further context about the resolution or the people behind it that could possibly make the officials’ reactions make sense.
Instead, to help readers understand how out of the mainstream those Democratic officials are, Closson wrote, “But opinions on this issue don’t necessarily break neatly along political lines.” He offered a poll of “registered voters statewide” that found about two-thirds support barring trans athletes from competing with others who share their gender identity, with Republican respondents 30 percentage points more supportive than Democrats.
Of course, New York state is far more conservative than New York City (5–4 Democrat to Republican statewide, versus about 7–1 in the city), so it’s not a very useful barometer of NYC public opinion.
But perhaps more importantly, is it really the opinions of ill-informed voters that should matter here? Or is it the safety and well-being of the city’s public school students?
Like most Times articles about trans politics that FAIR has analyzed (FAIR.org, 5/6/21, 6/23/22, 5/11/23), Closson’s piece marginalized the voices of those most impacted. The piece quoted no students; it quoted one trans person—an “educator who runs a local after-school program”—who opposed the resolution. The rest were officials and parent council members.
A pointless ‘review’
The New York Times didn’t mention that the rules the resolution called for “reviewing” in fact are required under state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression (CNN, 5/11/24).
Reading about the incident in outlets focused on education news, you get a very different understanding of the situation—including what the resolution could do. And there’s much more backstory to these “concerned parents” than the Times lets on.
First of all, as ACLU lawyer (and trans parent in District 2) Chase Strangio pointed out at the meeting, New York City school guidelines on trans youth athletes already align with state law.
Indeed, when a Republican county executive tried to ban trans athletes from competing on women’s teams in nearby Nassau County, the state attorney general sent him a cease-and-desist letter for contravening New York’s law against gender identity discrimination. A state judge (CNN, 5/11/24) struck down the executive order shortly before the Times article on the school council resolution, suggesting that any sort of “review” of the city’s school anti-discrimination policy would likewise serve no purpose—other than scoring cheap political points by targeting a vulnerable student population.
That would be nothing new for some of the supposedly representative and reasonable leaders involved. For the real story here, you need a little bit of context about those leaders.
Community education councils in New York City, unlike school boards in many places, have no authority to change school policies; their resolutions are nonbinding and their role is advisory only. In part because of this—and because prior to 2021, council positions were filled by PTAs, not by popular vote—awareness of and participation in the elections are both extremely low, making them easy targets for small but organized activist groups. (In the 2021 elections, only 2% of eligible voters participated.)
Out of PLACE
PLACE co-founder Maud Maron (The City, 4/28/23) called New York City schools an “oppressor woke environment where DOE employees make them pledge allegiance to their LGBTQI+ religion.”
In New York, just such a group took advantage of that low-hanging fruit: PLACE NYC. Founded in 2019 to oppose city efforts to address some of the worst school segregation rates in the country by reforming screened admissions and gifted programs, PLACE-endorsed candidates won a whopping 40% of council seats in the 2023 elections (The City, 4/28/23).
PLACE does not advertise a particular stance on LGBTQ issues, but its leadership overlaps with other “parent rights” groups that take anti-trans positions, including the far-right Moms for Liberty.
The anti-trans resolution in New York City’s District 2 passed by 8 votes to 3. Of these eight concerned council members, seven were endorsed by PLACE in the 2023 elections, including three who are in leadership roles at the organization.
Leonard Silverman, president of the council, was quoted by the Times; it didn’t mention that he is also a founder of PLACE. PLACE treasurer Craig Slutkin was another “yes” vote.
Another founder (and former president) of PLACE, Maud Maron, sponsored the anti-trans resolution. Maron is a well-known local activist, a proud member of the Moms for Liberty who, in an unsuccessful long-shot bid for Congress last year, advocated for a trans youth athlete ban. Maron and fellow council and PLACE member Charles Love spoke at a recent Moms for Liberty panel (Chalkbeat, 1/18/24).
‘No such thing as trans kids’
A city councilmember characterized PLACE leaders’ private texts as “demeaning, transphobic smears that are reminiscent of playground bullies” (The74, 12/14/23).
Back in December, education news site The74 (12/14/23) reported on a leaked WhatsApp chat among Maron, fellow council and PLACE member Danyela Egorov and other parent leaders. In it, Maron declared that “there is no such thing as trans kids.” When a parent expressed concern about how many LGBTQ kids were in her child’s school, Maron responded, “The social contagion is undeniable.” She also falsely claimed of gender-affirming hormone therapy: “Some of these kids never develop adult genitalia and will never have full sexual function. It’s an abomination.”
Three months later, Maron called an anonymous high school student who penned a pro-Palestinian op-ed in their school paper a “coward,” and accused them of “Jew hatred” in the New York Post (2/24/24). After numerous parent and official complaints about her conduct, the NYC Department of Education (The74, 4/18/24) investigated and issued an order last month to Maron to
cease engaging in conduct involving derogatory or offensive comments about any New York City Public School student, and conduct that serves to harass, intimidate or threaten, including but not limited to frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety.
This very relevant context was reported just a few weeks before Closson’s Times article.
PLACE and its controversial members and history are well known among local education activists and reporters. So Closson, who specifically covers the Times‘ “K–12 schools in New York City” beat, would appear to be either remarkably uninformed about his beat or intentionally obscuring the background to his story.
‘An attempt to roll back protections’
Chalkbeat‘s report (4/23/24) put the focus on “protections for trans students,” not on “questioning” parents.
Meanwhile, Chalkbeat (4/23/24), which covers education news in a handful of large US cities, covered the council meeting with the headline “An Attempt to Roll Back Protections for Trans Students in Sports Angers NYC Students and Families.”
Unlike Closson, reporter Liz Rosenberg quoted a number of people directly impacted by the resolution: a local trans teen, a local seventh grader who had started a Gay/Straight Alliance, and a parent who had moved to New York from Florida to protect her young trans child from the anti-trans laws there.
Rosenberg explained Maron’s history, including the cease-and-desist letter she had received only a week before the meeting. She quoted experts who described the documented negative impacts on trans kids when exclusionary or restrictive anti-trans laws are enacted, including a sharp rise in K–12 hate crimes against LGBTQ students.
Over at The74 (3/22/24), Marianna McMurdock also provided the back story on Maron. She noted, as Closson did not, that “dozens of community members spoke out against the gender resolution with only one expressing support.” According to McMurdock, the messages received by the council about the resolution were even more lopsided than Closson reported: 173–2.
Where Closson wrote that it was “unclear…whether the issue has affected sports teams in the city,” but that “some parents worried that their children could be disadvantaged or injured if transgender girls joined girls’ teams,” even non-local outlet Politico (3/20/24) noted directly that there was no evidence that any cisgender girls in the district had been harmed by the city schools’ policy.
In other words, it’s not terribly difficult to provide the kind of context that helps readers understand what’s “true and important” about this story. But on trans issues, the New York Times has proven itself time and again less interested in what’s true and important than in acting as a trojan horse for organized right-wing transphobia.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed historian Ellen Schrecker about the attack on academic freedom for the May 24, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Any accounting of the impact of Israel’s Gaza assault on scholarship, on learning, has to start with the reduction to rubble of all 12 universities in Gaza, with the incalculable loss that entails, and the reported killing of at least 90 professors. But as the Intercept’s Natasha Lennard writes:
Israel’s attempted eradication of intellectual life in Gaza echoes far beyond the territory, with US universities ensuring that some professors vocal in their support of Palestine can no longer do their jobs either.
We are now learning of how many academics and teachers around the country are seeing their jobs targeted as part of a purge, aggressively encouraged by funders and—mostly, but not only—Republican politicians.
It’s being called a new McCarthyism. But our guest, an expert on McCarthyism, suggests we understand other elements at play that make today different from, say, anti-Vietnam college protests in the 1960s, including the fact that today’s political repression aims not just at teachers themselves, but at what gets studied and taught.
Historian Ellen Schrecker is author of numerous books, including The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and she’s editor, with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, out now from Beacon Press. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ellen Schrecker.
Ellen Schrecker: Thank you for having me on your program.
JJ: There are a number of differences between student (in particular) protests today, and that of the 1960s. For one thing, today’s student protesters remember previous student protesters, and their impact on history. And I would say, also, the availability today of more person-to-person information sources, avenues outside of “all the news that’s fit to print.” But you note that the playing field of the university, as a site, as a place for voicing dissent, is itself importantly different. Tell us about that.
ES: Yes, that’s really the key issue now. Every time there is an attempt to repress free speech and academic freedom, I’m always asked, how does this compare to McCarthyism? And I’m a trained historian, so I sort of put in a lot of nuance, and I’ll say, “Oh, it depends….” But I don’t do that anymore, because it’s worse than McCarthyism. Much worse.
And that is really because the university of 2024 is a very different place than the academic community in the late 1960s. In the 1960s, American universities were expanding. They had a great reputation. People loved them. State governments and the federal government were throwing money at the universities.
And that’s no longer the case. And what we’re seeing is a very much weaker system of American higher education than had existed during what was called the Golden Age of American higher education, in the late 1950s and 1960s.
So I’d like to talk about what has changed between that period and now, and why what’s happening today is so much worse.
When we look at McCarthyism itself—and up until recently, it was probably the longest-lasting and most widespread episode of political repression in the modern American university—what we saw was an attack on individual faculty members. It was part of a broader purge of left-wing scholars, movie stars, government officials. It was running throughout large sectors of American society, not specifically targeting the universities, but they probably accounted for a quarter or fifth, maybe, of the victims of McCarthyism, in the sense that these were the people who were losing their jobs as a result of the inquisition.
To my knowledge, there were about a hundred people, more or less—probably more, because people kept this stuff secret, so they could keep their jobs—who were fired. And they were fired specifically because they had had some kind of connection with the American Communist movement earlier in the 1930s and ’40s, and did not want to cooperate with the ongoing anti-Communist inquisition that we now call McCarthyism. (Although we should have called it Hooverism, if we really understood how it operated.)
But anyhow, what’s interesting, and what’s very different, of course, from today, is that these people were being fired for their external political activities, or former political activities, and were never questioned about their teaching or scholarship. That was simply not of interest. It was their political work, or former political work.
That’s not the case today. What is happening today is that there is a huge movement attacking all of American higher education. It’s been ongoing now for 40 years. It started as a response to the ’60s, to the student movement of the ’60s, to the originally nonviolent civil disobedience. These students were protesting, very much like students today, against what they saw as a dreadful moral calamity, a dreadful American participation in the Vietnam War. Certainly that was the main thing, but also, they were very involved with the movement for racial justice.
And as they tried to get some kind of action to end the war—which they actually did do, but it wasn’t obvious at the time—and trying to open up American society to racial equality, they became frustrated and noticed that their own institutions, universities, had been collaborating in some way with these injustices that they were seeking to rectify.
And so that’s why you get this sort of campus-focused movement on the part of students, because, after all, this was the only institution they could affect. They may not have been particularly realistic; in retrospect, maybe they should have emphasized electoral politics a lot more than they did, but that’s rewriting history. What we need to learn from history is the fact that as a result of the student unrest of the ’60s—which was essentially nonviolent on the part of the students, and only became particularly violent when universities and political bodies sought to repress it, just like today, of course—what we’re seeing on campuses is police violence; the kids have been remarkably restrained, much more so than in the ’60s, actually. They’re just sitting on the ground in their tents.
They’re not bothering anybody, except, of course: if you look at this from the perspective of 40 years of repression against higher education, that is in large part, not entirely by any means, but in large part the product of a very self-conscious conspiracy, and I don’t use the word “conspiracy” a lot, on the part of a group of very wealthy businessmen and intellectuals who were seeking, as early as the 1960s, to roll back the political reforms of the ’60s, and impose a more right-wing, neoliberal political culture on the United States, that contained, as one of its main focuses, an attack on higher education.
Because these wealthy conservatives felt that the kind of dispassionate and educated, evidence-based scholarship that was coming out of universities was attacking them, and they wanted to destroy the reputation of higher education. And they did so very self-consciously, by undermining the institutions of higher learning, by circulating propaganda about how universities have been taken over by left-wing professors, by—the word that they use today is “woke”—the forces of “woke” left-wing radicals, by weak-kneed administrators who are capitulating to these powerful forces.
Well, that wasn’t the case at all. What happened was universities themselves changed in response, not just to this attack, but also in response to a very strong economic pullback on the part of the state legislatures and the federal government that had been funding them so well up until the end of the ’60s.
So what we’re seeing is universities that then, for the past 40 years, have been responding to a very different financial economic situation, an economic climate that was punishing them, and they had to respond, administrators did, not by taking a more positive approach to what’s going on, and trying to sell what American higher education was doing for the country, for individuals, they thought to placate these forces of reaction.
But they also responded by seeking other sources of income, when state funding shrank, and that’s key. And what did they do? They raised tuition, slowly at first, but then quite significantly. So we now have, of course, the student debt problem, which I think it’s up to $1.8 trillion of student debt. And we have people being very upset about how much higher education costs, when in so many other countries, it seems to be free.
They also look for other sources of income: donors. The leaders of higher education began to curry favor with these very wealthy billionaires, many of whom were funding this attack on higher education. So we’re seeing that, and we’re also seeing universities themselves following a corporate agenda, on the assumption that this is what they can do to get favor with the new donors.
Ellen Schrecker: “Universities have also ignored their faculty members, and this is why they have put up, I think, such a pathetically weak and collaborationist response to the current repression.”
But also because they have imbibed the neoliberalism that came about beginning in the 1970s, and continuing through til today, whereby the public good sort of disappears from the agenda and it’s intensely individualistic. Even a higher education now is something that’s good for individual people, and its role as a benefit to the rest of society has long since disappeared, which is really a total travesty.
Anyhow, as a result, universities have also ignored their faculty members, and this is why they have put up, I think, such a pathetically weak and collaborationist response to the current repression.
The final point here is that the way that the universities have been weakened is by ignoring their faculty members, but also by destroying the faculty: Over the past 40 years or so, very gradually, the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members has declined to the extent that 75% of all instruction is now being offered by faculty members who have no academic freedom.
These are what we call contingent workers. They are part-time or contract temporary workers who have no academic freedom, no economic security. They can be fired at any time for any purpose or no purpose at all. And they are not in a position to fight back, and their administrations do not support them when they’re attacked from the outside.
They’re very good teachers. They’re equally qualified with the tenured and tenure-track faculty members, but have terrible salaries. They often are hired to teach one course for one semester for $3,000 or so, that’s the average pay, and can be fired at any time.
And I think we have to realize that this is a structural problem that needs to be addressed before we can really fight back and preserve the jobs of people who are now particularly threatened, especially after October 7, by another group, a very powerful political group of supporters of Israel.
JJ: The fact that, of the many professors who’ve been fired, only one of them, as far as we know right now, had tenure—it is the adjuncts, it is the people who are basically at-will workers who are easier to just be cut off by these universities. So part of it is, it is this structural thing where you undermine the very idea that as a professor you would have some kind of job security, you would have some kind of protection.
ES: Exactly. Yes.
JJ: Let me just say, we have seen a number of professors putting themselves, sometimes physically, between students and police. We have seen professors standing up for, not only their own rights to speak, but their students’ rights to protest. And I would just say, because we’ve talked about this before, that faculty/student support and coalition-building, that’s part of a tradition too.
ES: Exactly. And what we’re seeing, for the first time, really, since the 1960s, is faculties beginning to organize themselves in support of causes that many of us support. And that should be protected by the universities and has not been, because the administrations over the past 40 years have been seeking to curry favor with these right-wing billionaire donors, and have been living in a kind of right-wing bubble.
They don’t know students, they don’t care about students. What they care about is getting money, getting support, growing their institutions, growing them in a way that will appear on the US News & World Report status ranking, without really paying attention to the kind of education they’re giving their students.
And it’s been shown, there’s evidence that the predominance of these temporary and low-paid contingent workers are unable to give their students the kind of education they deserve. And that’s a very significant problem. But, together, what we’re seeing is a real beginning, however, of a new awareness that we’re all in this together.
I would argue that the most powerful way to fight against this probably is through unionization, through organizing unions that can get contracts that include language supporting academic freedom. That’s very important. That seems to be the only way that these gig, part-time and temporary professors can gain a measure of economic security, so that they can speak out and keep their jobs.
I mean, this is really destroying free speech within American society, because universities have traditionally been, and certainly at the moment still are, spaces where there is more support for intellectual freedom than anywhere else in American society.
So it’s very important that faculty members begin to fight back, begin to form coalitions, can begin to argue for a serious pushback against these forces that, as we know, have been passing laws, certainly since 2020, in red states and in some blue, to sanction free speech and ideas that the right-wing Republicans do not think are appropriate. And this is a terrible threat to our whole democratic system.
JJ: The book talks about how we can’t just rhetorically defend academic freedom and free speech; we have to act, and the book is part of that. So I would just ask you, finally, this new book, The Right to Learn, I want to say, it’s not a tome; it’s immensely readable. I just would ask you, what do you and other contributors hope that this book will do in the world? How do you look for it to be used?
ES: OK, we wrote this book more than two years ago, and I remember feeling it recently: “Oh my God, it’s out of date. How can it be used?” Well, it’s more relevant now than it was then. The situation has really worsened enormously since October 7.
What we were hoping to do is give people some intellectual ammunition, the facts about what’s going on on American campuses, and how people have been distorting history, have been distorting constitutional measures, have been distorting the function of academic freedom, and how people can fight back, give people information that they need, so that then they can go out and become active on their campuses, recruit colleagues, recruit students, start teach-ins, start doing whatever they can to create a buzz on their campuses, which certainly is happening.
But we’ve got to mobilize. We’ve got to organize. People have to have the information, and that’s what we felt was a necessary precursor for mounting a serious campaign to take back power on our campuses, to bring the faculty back into action as it has never been before. And we’re really asking for something very revolutionary, I guess.
What we’d like to see is a much more democratic university, that isn’t under the sway of these reactionary politicians and businessmen. And it’s going to be hard to do. It’s going to require a lot of action, but we want that action to be well-informed, and we hope that this book will be useful, be a weapon. It’s not going to save the world, obviously, but it’s our contribution to this campaign.
JJ: Thank you so much for that. We’ve been speaking with Ellen Schrecker, author of books, including The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University. That’s available from the New Press. The new book we’re talking about is called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom That’s out now from Beacon Press. Thank you so much, Ellen Schrecker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
CUED (5/15/24): “A large share of Amazon warehouse workers report facing financial strain, including difficulties meeting basic needs.”
A new report (5/15/24) from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago reflects the largest nationwide study of Amazon workers to date, some 1,500 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states. The big takeaway: Roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity, with a third relying on public assistance programs.
Now, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has heard of the Center. The paper quoted it in a 2022 piece (12/10/22) about robots that led with the news that “Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys.” Oh, and “other companies are making progress, too.”
And even in a 2020 piece (9/3/20) on how overworked and exhausted warehouse workers were “bracing for a frenzied holiday rush.” Though beleaguered Amazon workers came in at the end, after Kohl’s and Wayfair, Best Buy and Target and so on. Bezos’ paper allows some pointed criticism of Amazon; it’s just often in “opinion” pieces, like a 2020 oped from Alex Press (4/25/20).
So we’ll wait and see if the paper gives proper news coverage to what is incontrovertibly a news story: the clear association, as report co-author Beth Gutelius put it, between “the company’s health and safety issues, and experiences of economic insecurity among its workforce.”
Featured Image: Photo of Amazon warehouse worker from CUED report (5/15/24).
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24).
This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to remember. And of course to protest. The violent, state-sponsored attacks on college students and faculty across the country, who are standing in solidarity with Palestinians and opposed to colleges’ investment in the war and occupation, are showcasing many things—among them the abandonment by many educational institutions of their responsibility to protect not only students, but the space in which they can speak and learn freely.
When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself, but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”
We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Ian Vandewalker about small donors for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what “democracy” means, many will say, “One person, one vote.” If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it’s not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that’s still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they “don’t believe in democracy like we do.”
Now we see more and more people saying, “Well, democracy shouldn’t actually mean everyone gets equal voice (but we would like to keep using the label).” You can forgive a person for being a bit confused. And since courts have declared that money is speech, you can forgive a person for being more confused. That’s the landscape in which the latest fillip seems to be that people who give small amounts of money to political campaigns somehow have outsized voice?
Here to help us make sense of that is Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ian Vandewalker.
JJ: I will say, when I first saw the headline of your report, “Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction?,” I thought, “Huh? Who would say that?” It turns out it’s a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsall, who wrote, “For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties.” And then David Byler at the Washington Postwrote, “Small-Dollar Donors Didn’t Save Democracy. They Made It Worse.” So this is not like a subreddit, obscure line of thought. Before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face on it, what is the argument here?
IV: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing, because anybody can be one. But if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz—people who try to attract a lot of attention with extremist or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is, what small donors are really doing is encouraging these people who are showboating, and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.
JJ: So the idea, though, is it that these small donors aren’t real, that they’re kind of orchestrated? That these folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point? And it’s not that actually it’s people who can only give $12?
IV: Right, I mean, I think there’s something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream media and social media clickbait, does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps: “The world’s going to come crashing down if you don’t send me $12.”
So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, “I can engage a national small-donor fundraising base by saying crazy things.” That exists. Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don’t actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House.
JJ: So first of all, I like how you go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks go, “Well, there’s a political system and there’s a media system, and they’re different.” You’re already saying, “No, these things are intimately integrated.”
IV: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And, look, the internet has been a huge beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in. But one of the other effects of that has been this clickbait world of, say the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small-dollar fundraising.
There’s a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small-dollar fundraising, or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district?—I think is a question we should also look into.
JJ: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base. And so what do you say in this piece about, when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find?
Ian Vandewalker: “Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors…has increased even faster.”
IV: So first of all, there’s lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they’re going to engage their voter bases, and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance.
As I said, small donors, they give to people they’ve heard of, so one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it’s certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven’t mentioned yet is big donors. Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 millions, has increased even faster. So that’s actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system, is the big money, and those people give to extremists as well.
So it’s hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money.
JJ: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don’t have a million dollars, their throwing in their money wherever they throw it is throwing off the system. It makes you ask, “Well, what’s the system?” Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird.
IV: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the things, the sort of thought experiments I like to do with these arguments is, well, replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, OK, that’s just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate. And it’s hard to say that that’s, as you say, a problem with the system itself.
JJ: Obviously, every election year is important, but hoo boy, 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are going to be engaging this?
IV: Yeah, I think for reporters it’s important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It’s easy to say, “Oh, Marjorie Taylor Green raised a bunch of small money,” but there’s data out there that can show you, what are small donors actually doing across the entire system. And that’s a very different story.
And as for reforms, the Brennan Center supports a small-donor public financing system that matches small donations. So it amplifies those amounts from regular people, to make them competitive with the big donors. And that changes the way the candidates fundraise, and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people’s voices, and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that’s good for representative democracy, because politicians are listening to the voters in another way.
JJ: All right, then, and we’ll have another conversation about the role of money in politics generally, and why do you have to have money to participate? That’s a whole bigger conversation.
IV: Yes, definitely. There’s a lot to say about the uniquely American way of running politics with private dollars and the biggest donors calling the tune.
JJ: All right, then. Well, for now, we’ve been speaking with Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Ian Vandewalker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
After pro-Israel billionaires and millionaires met with Eric Adams, one attendee summarized “items ‘discussed today,’ including donating to Adams, using group members’ ‘leverage’ to help persuade Columbia’s president to let New York police back on campus, and paying for ‘investigative efforts’ to assist the city.” (Washington Post, 5/16/24)
An exposé by the Washington Post (5/16/24) showed the degree to which wealthy pro-Israel businesspeople coordinated with each other to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to take drastic action against college campus protests against the genocide of Palestinians. It’s a remarkable piece of reporting, by Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton, that points to a pervasive problem in American politics: that the wealthy enjoy outsized influence with the political class, while the rest of us drift in the wind.
The story is based on transcripts of a WhatsApp groupchat called “Israel Current Events,” whose participants included “billionaires and business titans.” One message by a billionaire’s staffer “told the others the goal of the group was to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel,” the Post reported. A person identified only as “a staffer” told the group, “While Israel worked to ‘win the physical war,’ the chat group’s members would ‘help win the war’ of US public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.” The article reported that the chats revealed collaboration with Adams:
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member [Joseph] Sitt, founder of the retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s OK if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The piece revealed that groupchat members, aware that “Columbia had to grant Adams permission before he could send city police to the campus,” strategized about how to apply the group’s “leverage” to Columbia president Minouche Shafik, including contacting the university’s board of trustees.
‘An all-too-familiar trope’
The New York Post (5/17/24)—which regularly accuses George Soros of being the puppet master behind all progressive causes—attacked the Washington Post: “Intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.”
Needless to say, City Hall wasn’t too happy about the piece. One of the mayor’s deputies, Fabien Levy, quickly responded on Twitter (5/16/24) that “the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all-too-familiar antisemitic trope.”
His multi-post thread concluded:
@WashingtonPost & others can make editorial decisions to disagree with the decisions by universities to ask the NYPD to clear unlawful encampments on campuses, but saying Jews “wielded their money and power in an effort to shape American views” is offensive on so many levels.
The Washington Post, of course, did not report that “Jews” had “wielded their money and power”—but that “some prominent individuals” had, distinguished not by religion or ethnicity, but by their politics.
The mayor himself called the story “antisemitic in its core” (Good Day New York, 5/20/24) and doubled down on this point when speaking to reporters (New York Post, 5/21/24). The Anti-Defamation League (Twitter, 5/20/24) said that the Washington Post should be
ashamed of publishing an article that unabashedly (and almost entirely on anonymous sources) plays into antisemitic tropes by inferring a secret cabal of Jews is using wealth & power to influence governments, the media, the business world & academia.
The Adams administration’s effort to redirect scrutiny away from the latest credible charge of coziness with wealthy donors found a friendly audience in right-wing media. Fox News (5/17/24) gave Levy’s claims headline status, and the New York Post editorial board (5/17/24) said that the Adams administration “smells a whiff of antisemitism in the WaPo report,” because “intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.” Yes, that’s the same New YorkPost that obsessively ties every political cause to the left of Emperor Palpatine to the Jewish philanthropist George Soros (e.g., 8/1/22, 1/22/23, 1/25/23, 7/24/23, 12/9/23, 4/26/24, 4/26/24). It is also interesting to note that two Rupert Murdoch outlets, thought to be Republican stalwarts, are once again acting as in-kind public relations agents for a Democratic mayor, a testament to Adams’ right-wing agenda—the New York Post endorsed him (5/20/21) and continues to cheerlead for him (1/27/24) as he approaches the end of his first term. For the Murdoch empire, politics (including shielding Israel) sometimes comes before party.
ABC (4/24/24) reported that at Passover Seders celebrated in campus antiwar encampments, “some set aside an empty seat at the Seder table for hostages abducted from Israel on October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise terror attack. Others put an olive on the Seder plate to recognize solidarity with Palestinians.”
A tired accusation
The accusation that the student protest movement against the genocide of Palestinians is “antisemitic” has become more and more tired. Many Jews are mobilizing in these protests (ABC, 4/24/24). As a result, many Jewish protesters face state violence (Al Jazeera, 5/3/24) and censorship (FAIR.org, 12/15/23) for speaking out against the Israeli military. Yet the Adams administration, Fox and the New York Post continue to hurl the insult, this time at the Washington Post, signaling that they have no more honest way to defend the behavior exposed by the Post. It would be just as ridiculous to claim that Jeff Sharlet’s reporting (Washington Post, 8/16/19) on the influence of Christian lobbying in Washington is anti-Christian, or investigations into the millions of dollars Saudi Arabia spends in the US to sanitize its image (Guardian, 12/22/22) are anti-Muslim. Federal investigators are probing Adams’ financial relationship with Turkey (Politico, 12/22/23; New York Times, 5/20/24), and there’s been no serious discourse that the scrutiny is somehow anti-Muslim. Is reporting on the growing influence of the Indian BJP and the Indian nationalist government in Washington (Intercept, 3/16/20; Jacobin, 3/4/23) anti-Hindu? When we talk about the Israel lobby, we don’t even necessarily mean Jewish advocates; that lobby consists heavily of right-wing evangelical Christians (Jerusalem Post, 1/27/24). Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who announced he wouldn’t hire Harvard grads who signed a letter critical of Israel (New York Post, 10/16/23), is Presbyterian. The arms industry supports Israel as well, strictly from the profit potential of protracted violence in the Middle East (Reuters, 10/16/23). Establishment attacks on outlets that expose corruption are evidence of good journalism (FAIR.org, 6/17/21, 1/12/24, 2/2/24). Such attacks are meant to stifle the press, and keep them from being a check on power. In this case, they are meant to shut down dissent against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
False charges of antisemitism have been an effective tool for the right in the past (FAIR.org, 8/26/20). The good news is that this may be starting to change.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about election transparency for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Voting Booth (5/9/24) has investigated Trump loyalists’ election denial strategies.
Janine Jackson: The Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump has proven surprisingly tenacious, perhaps, in part, because it is so big and vague, and perhaps, in part, due to a corporate press corps that are constitutionally incapable of saying sometimes there are not two sides with the truth in the middle.
Based on the tenacity and the utility of that lie, Trumpists are continuing the work of undermining US electoral processes in the run up to the 2024 race. Besides saying, “Trump! Am I right?” is there more we might do to break through the disinformation and gird ourselves for similar future efforts?
Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency and other electoral issues for VotingBooth.media. He joins us now by phone from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.
Steven Rosenfeld: Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.
JJ: I want to ask you about the Election Education channel that you’ve written about, but first, just some context. Even if you don’t think anyone’s going to go back and say Trump actually won, there is a possibility of creating enough chaos, confusion and controversy around elections that people can say, “Well, I don’t know what went on, so I’ll believe who I want to believe.” Trumpists don’t have to convince you of the Big Lie if they sow enough doubt. That’s kind of the playing field we’re on.
SR: Well, that is true. If you think about what happened since 2020, there were 60-something lawsuits, election challenges filed after election day by Trump and his allies in the Republican party and other nonprofits that are aligned with Republicans. Courts, unlike state legislatures and political campaigns, actually have rules of evidence. You’re not allowed to lie in court. If you go into court and you present lies and you can’t back things up with evidence or facts that can be duplicated by somebody else, you’ll lose your law license, and that’s what’s happened with Rudy Giuliani and a whole bunch of others.
But winning in the court of legal opinion is not the same as winning in the court of public opinion. So what’s happened since 2020 is these legislators in states like Arizona and other places have created these audits and these investigations where the goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month, especially on the television channels and the online platforms that are favored by the Trump supporters and right wingers, and just plant those seeds of doubt.
Steven Rosenfeld: “The goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month…and just plant those seeds of doubt.”
They have people on these channels and they talk about technical things that no one could understand, but people would just nod and go “Okay, okay,” and so what you ended up getting was you can win in court but lose in the court of public opinion. So these folks have basically been winning the propaganda war, and they’ve been doing it just as you said, by planting seeds of doubt and basically saying political tribal loyalties, “How could that possibly happen?” All this kind of stuff. And that’s brought us to today.
JJ: It’s a particular example, it’s not a sole example, but it is a kind of epicenter of this kind of thing: You looked at the Election Education channel on Telegram. Tell us a little about what that is and what they are up to that is currently and potentially meaningful.
SR: When I was on the floor of the Arizona recount, which was in an old basketball arena in Phoenix, this was run by the Cyber Ninjas, and the state senate in that state said we’re going to take possession of all the ballots in Maricopa County, which is, I forget, second or third largest jurisdiction in the country. So, 1.2 million ballots. They had a lot of volunteers come in who were basically patriotic citizens who thought, “My God, something went wrong. I gotta do something to help figure out what happened.”
So a lot of these folks are emblematic of the grassroots wing of the “election integrity movement” or the pro-Trump part of the Republican party. They call themselves an election integrity movement. They went to other platforms like Parler and Telegram, and they stayed in touch there.
Now, this is not the same as the people who have really tried to become professional agitators, the people like Mike Lindell and others who’ve gone around the country speaking at Republican Party county meetings and have basically turned their livelihoods into holding forth with all these conspiracies that were based on things they claimed were happening and couldn’t be proven and “invisible hidden hands” and “the world’s out to get us” kind of stuff. And I’m not making any of this up. I won’t get into the details. The point is the details are really hard to follow, but people just nod and go along.
But below that, to answer your question, is on these pro-Trump, right of center social media platforms, you have these channels. They’re sort of pages where people share information and they talk and they communicate and they have a community there. And I would periodically go and see what these folks are saying. And I found this one channel on Telegram, which is one of the platforms, and it’s called the Election Education channel, and it’s run by a woman who is based in Washington state, and she is different than the folks who are in Trump’s immediate orbit. Because the folks in Trump’s immediate orbit will say—there’ll be a lot of cliches: “It was stolen.” “It was electronically hacked.” “Oh, they’re fabricating voters.” “Oh, they’re making up voter lists.” “Oh, they’re stealing ballots.”
These folks instead, at this Election Education channel, they decided to try to learn about the way elections work. And what I mean by that is there are a lot of subsystems and steps with a lot of bureaucratic and technical procedures that really follow the start to the finish of elections. So the whole voter registration system has its own rules and its own data, and then the whole ballot counting system, the vote counting system, is another set of computers and analytics and records and data. So they’ve discovered this and what they’ve tried to do is they’ve tried to teach themselves about it because they don’t trust talking to election officials and election officials most often don’t really want to talk to them or they lose patience.
So what’s happened is these folks, especially on this Election Education channel, I found more than a hundred really pretty well done graphics. It’s not like a bumper sticker, but they’re charts that can be read in five or ten seconds, and they have identified all these little steps and technicalities of running elections, and everywhere possible, they’ve tried to figure out, “How can this be used against us?”
So they’re emblematic of the phrase or cliche that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, because they’re starting with something that’s factual and they just spin off the deep end. And they come from this mindset, “Well, anything that can be done against us will be done against us. And if anything is possible, it means it probably is happening somewhere. And even if people are trying to operate in good faith, like poll workers, they don’t know what’s happening invisibly inside their machines.” And they just go on and on this way.
And this is really different from the people surrounding Trump at the end of 2020 because they’re not just targeting the candidate, they’re targeting the system. When things get close in the fall, if they are close, it’s going to be a zillion targets.
JJ: So they’ve identified, they’ve broken down the different steps in the election process, and they’re saying, every step of the way, there can be subterfuge.
The Atlanta Voice (5/7/24) on new restrictive voter registration laws in Georgia: “The victory is sweet especially for some that believe the 2020 Presidential election was ‘stolen’.”
SR: Let’s just put this in the context of what you’re hearing about right now. So in early May, the governor of Georgia signed a bill that allows mass election challenges or challenges of voter registrations. And this had been in law before, and literally less than 10 people in 2020 tried to challenge the voter registrations of over a hundred thousand voters who obviously predominantly lived in the democratic epicenters, the blue cities, lower income communities, college campuses and things like that.
So the governor signed a bill allowing this to actually be expanded six months from now towards the ’24 presidential election in November. What you have in these narratives as a backdrop to what you read on the Trump social media channels is, “The Democrats are fabricating voters. The voter lists are actually not up to date, and that’s on purpose, because what they’re doing is they’re finding people who are not voting and they’re filling out ballots in their names, and they’re doing this electronically, and they’re doing this with mailed out ballots, and they’re doing it on Election Day so that when they find out that people haven’t come in, they can just push through five or ten thousand votes as needed, and this is how they’re going to screw us.”
And that level of paranoia—I could tell you practically why that is very unlikely, because there are too many other checks and balances in the actual data and records to get away with something like that where it wouldn’t be caught very early and immediately and quarantined and found and fixed and corrected. But the point, what I’m saying is, this is the rhetoric and the crazy-making around just this one little step at the start of the process.
So what people in the mainstream media and in election defense circles have not acknowledged is this same level of focus and what I would call craziness or paranoia, they’ve got scripts or scenarios every step of the way through the final certification, which comes weeks after Election Day. They don’t trust the machines, or they don’t trust the testing. They don’t trust how ballots might be delivered from a voting site to a counting center. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.
They don’t know what they don’t know. So what do I mean by that? They do not know, or they never say, what security measures might be in place to quarantine problems. They don’t know what other data or records occur upstream might be used to double check and say, “Wait a second, this isn’t right. It doesn’t match.” They don’t know, and they never say, what is the scale of proposed impacts here, are we talking about ten or a hundred or a thousand votes?
So it becomes this crazy-making, spinning kind of mindset that will never be satisfied. And even if you respond to one thing, there’s always going to be something else. It’s always going to be a “What about this?” and “What about that?”
JJ: Well, I want to say a few things—that you’ve actually said, but just to lift them up—for one thing, to show that it’s a rhetorical kind of thing, these folks are not saying, “If you did this, then I would believe that the process was clean.” They’re not offering solutions, they’re not offering things that might be done to be introduced in the process, and then we would accept the results. They are emphatically not doing that.
And then let me just tack onto that, you have written, actually, voting systems are not black boxes; there is data, there is ballot-centered evidence that can be verified. So it’s two things; it’s both, there are things that we can use to check and to make these processes transparent, and also, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want agreed-upon, evidentiary-based things that we can all see and say, “All right, this actually went according to rules.”
SR: That’s exactly right. For example, the attorney general’s race in Arizona, after the official result was in, there was a several hundred-vote margin, which means it went to an official recount. It turned out that in one county they didn’t count 500 votes, 500 ballots. And people knew what to look for to basically make sure that the number of voters equals the number of ballots. Very early on they would’ve seen there was an inventory problem, there was a mismatch. But instead it took nine weeks, nearly. It was late December before that recount was over. And in that nine week period, you can just imagine the volume of partisan propaganda that occurred.
So what’s happening is these folks, they’re learning about how elections work, they don’t know, or they didn’t know then, where to look to basically solve the most basic questions. Does the number of ballots equal the number of voters? And then you can drill down. You can make sure that the votes on each ballot, if they’re not totally sloppy, match what’s in the final spreadsheet. And if you want to argue about the sloppy ballots, you can find them very quickly. That’s what lawyers argue over in recounts, “Do I have a vote? Is it for my candidate or the other candidate or neither of us?” And they don’t do any of that.
JJ: Well, finally, I know that you have heard, “Let’s just not talk about these people. That only elevates them, that only spotlights them.” And I guess I see what people are saying? But at the same time, Trump won in 2016, he became the freaking president based on all manner of nonsense and straight up lying. And so I don’t know what we get from ignoring that, but we should certainly come at it smarter.
And so I want to ask you, what would you be asking from reporters? And I want to say, especially at the local level—you know, we can get big chin-scratching ideas pieces in the national media, but local reporting on the election is going to be really meaningful. “What happened here? What actually happened?”
What role do you see for reporters who aren’t, like you, specifically dedicated to issues of electoral processes and transparency, but they’re going to be the ones that we look to for reporting claims of fraud or claims of poll worker bias and so on in November. What would you like to put in reporters’ minds, maybe?
The Detroit Free Press (11/5/20) debunked a widely-shared Trumpist claim that late-arriving ballots were smuggled into a Detroit counting center.
SR: Well, I can tell you very simply, most local reporters, and this is also true of the people who come to observe elections, they don’t know what they’re seeing. They’re standing behind a stanchion or at a distance and they don’t really know what people are looking at as they’re shuffling ballot return envelopes or ballots, or looking at a computer screen to check signatures or something else.
What I would hope is that people who actually know the way things work could do some proactive education to tell journalists who are going to be covering the swing counties and the swing states to literally help them understand what they are seeing as the process inches forward. It’s not hard to do if you know what to look for.
There aren’t that many key decision points, and at least at that point, at the very worst, if the counting takes days or weeks, and the editors are saying, “I need a story by five o’clock, what are you going to do? What do you got?” At least then, you will actually be covering what’s real instead of covering the made-up crazy things, like “The ballots are being smuggled in the next room.” At least it could come back to what’s real, as opposed to what’s made up. And I think that’s the best we can hope for, is to try to nip the disinformation rumors in the bud. And that’s where they’ll start, in these swing counties, in these swing states, with these local reporters and local influences.
JJ: Alright, then we’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld. You can find his piece, “Trump Loyalists Preview Strategies to Upend 2024 Election,” online at VotingBooth.media. Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NOAA (4/15/24) found temperature levels in every ocean high enough to cause coral bleaching.
Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing once-colorful coral reefs around the world to bleach a ghostly white. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the planet’s fourth mass coral-bleaching event on record—the second in the last decade.
While they might look like plants, corals are actually invertebrate animals related to jellyfish. They get their vibrant colors from tiny algae that live on them and provide them with food. But when ocean temperatures become too hot, corals get stressed and expel the algae, losing their food source and color. Starving coral can recover if their environments improve, but the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that even with the Paris Agreement’s allotted warming of 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, 70–90% of the world’s coral reefs will still die.
Because coral reefs provide such vibrant ecosystems for sea life, mass coral death will impact economies and food security for humans as well. By protecting coasts, sustaining fisheries, generating tourism and creating jobs, it is estimated that coral reefs provide ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars each year (MIT Science Policy Review, 8/20/20; GCRMN, 10/5/21).
ABC News (7/25/23) reported last year that “ocean temperatures have a strong connection to climate change”—but didn’t mention what climate change is connected to.
In the past year alone, we’ve seen staggering and unprecedented ocean temperatures amid widespread heatwaves. Last summer, water temperatures of more than 100°F were recorded off the coast of Florida (ABC, 7/25/23). Scientists say the El Niño weather phenomenon, solar activity and a massive underwater volcanic eruption have played a role in recent supercharged ocean temperatures, but the biggest cause of this coral crisis is undisputed: climate change. The IPCC reports that it’s “virtually certain” ocean temperatures have risen unabated since 1970, absorbing more than 90% of excess heat from the climate system. We also know that the burning of fossil fuels changes the climate more than any other human activity does.
Therefore, in order to give the public the most complete understanding of what’s going on—and how we can fix it—reporting on coral bleaching should not only link the phenomenon to climate change, but link climate change to its main culprit: the fossil fuel industry. While much reporting deserves credit for clearly making this connection, some reports from major outlets were still behind, implying the climate crisis might be some sort of act of God, rather than something humans have caused—and have the power to mitigate.
Good news about bad news
Coral bleaching is bad news, but I’d like to take a rare moment to highlight the good news, too: A lot of reporting on this crisis was thorough, setting a solid example of how the increasing number of climate change-related phenomena should be reported on.
Vox (4/26/24) spells it out: “Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period.”
Vox (4/26/24) dedicated a whole piece to climate change’s effects on coral, making that fossil fuel connection. Senior environmental reporter Benji Jones wrote:
Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” [NOAA marine scientist Derek] Manzello said.
The New York Times (4/15/24) made the fossil fuel connection, too, in an article by Catrin Einhorn: “Despite decades of warnings from scientists and pledges from leaders, nations are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.”
NPR dedicated an episode of All Things Considered (4/17/24) to scientists’ work to breed heat-tolerant corals and algae, in hopes that they can help restore reefs. The piece, by Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman, outlined this work’s promise—and its limitations. Heat-tolerant algae may not share as many nutrients with the coral, potentially causing the coral to grow more slowly and reproduce later. Regulators will need to assess whether these lab-grown corals are safe for wild populations and their ecosystems as a whole. Logistically, the sheer amount of heat-tolerant coral needed to replace affected reefs is vast, and it’s only a temporary solution.
“It’s not our ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Australian coral biologist Kate Quigley:
Maybe that gets us to 2030, 2050, for a very few number of species that we can work with. If we don’t have an ocean to put them back in that’s healthy, no amount of incredible technology or money is worth it.
The episode ended with an acknowledgment that these scientific mitigations are meant only to buy time while humans work to halt climate change, which will require “cutting heat-trapping emissions from the largest source—burning fossil fuels—and switching to alternative energy sources like solar and wind.”
All Things Considered’s coverage of the scientists’ work was impactful because it took time to explain that creating these heat-tolerant corals was an important mitigation, but that the ultimate solution is to cut fossil fuels. Without the latter, the former would be in vain.
Capable of accountability
As a media critic for an organization that’s been at this since 1986, to me it’s heartening when news outlets’ work actually improves. It’s definitely not yet time to pop the champagne—there’s still a chronic lack of clear reporting linking climate disasters to fossil fuels, as FAIR has noted in coverage of last year’s wildfires (7/18/23, 8/25/23), climate protests (9/29/23), the potential breakdown of a crucial Atlantic current (7/31/23), overstating the potential of new carbon-capture technology (1/4/24) and more. But these few coral-focused pieces offer hope that some outlets might be improving their climate reporting practices to include accountability. At the very least, it proves they are certainly capable.
Aside from the effects of the climate crisis becoming harder and harder to ignore each year, there is a commendable movement to train journalists on how best to report on climate through a number of initiatives and organizations. There’s a lot of work to do, but these stories indicate progress since Big Media was applauding Big Oil’s efforts to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 (Extra!, 3–4/90) and giving platforms to “scientists” on Big Oil’s payroll who asserted climate change was not occurring (Extra!, 11–12/04, 5–6/07).
The new denial
CNN (5/9/24) waited until the the 24th paragraph (out of 24) to tell readers that we “need to curb climate-warming carbon emissions.”
Climate denial today is more nefarious. Due to the unanimity and widespread knowledge of the scientific consensus, respectable outlets can no longer parrot views that the Earth isn’t warming. What they can do is bury or gloss over information on its primary cause, who profits off of it, and what needs to be done to prevent it from getting much worse.
In a piece on the potential of artificial reefs to mitigate this crisis that linked coral bleaching to climate change, CNN‘s Michelle Cohan (5/9/24) waited until the very last paragraph to mention the need to “curb climate-warming carbon emissions.” There’s nothing untrue about that statement, but it doesn’t tell you where those emissions come from, and leaves open the interpretation that “curbing” emissions can come from carbon capture and storage—a strategy that is largely industry greenwashing (FAIR.org, 1/4/24).
Despite likely short-form word limits, a solutions-oriented piece like this does a disservice to readers—and the scientists working on saving corals—by giving such an incomplete sketch of the necessary long-term change. It would benefit from a clear explanation that a) we need to phase out fossil fuels and b) alternative energy sources already exist, are reliable, and are more affordable than fossil fuels already. It’s not arduous or wordy to do so. All Things Considered did most of it in one sentence.
An ABC piece (4/15/24) by Leah Sarnoff and Daniel Manzo covered the coral-bleaching event, but only mentioned climate change in passing toward the end. Otherwise, “warming oceans” were just depicted as something that happened, with no clear connection or cause.
In an article expressing the dire condition of the reefs, the Washington Post‘s Rachel Pannett (4/18/24) likewise made the link to climate change only once: “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs globally,” said Roger Beeden, the chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. There was another quote from a research director with the Australian nonprofit Climate Council, who merely noted that the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is “a disaster at our doorstep.”
It’s important to express the dire condition the reefs are in, and the devastating risks it poses to ocean and human life. But by only mentioning “climate change” in passing, and not discussing its causes, it comes across as a natural but unfortunate phenomenon. Not highlighting its causes means not highlighting its solutions, either. The result is a potentially paralyzing doomsday narrative that is more likely to dampen than galvanize necessary climate action—especially against fossil fuels.
‘Heat stress’
The word “climate” never appears in this Washington Post piece (4/15/24).
Another Washington Post piece (4/15/24), by Amudalat Ajasa, mentioned the “heat stress” on corals, but not even climate change, let alone the culpability of fossil fuels. This piece quoted NOAA’s Manzello, saying that this global event should be a wake-up call, but didn’t elaborate on what that wake-up call would be for. Wake up to do what? This piece didn’t explain.
The piece also took a grave tone, describing the ghastly reefs off the coast of Florida, Australia and the Caribbean island of Bonaire. It quoted Francesca Virdis, a chief operating officer at Reef Renewal Bonaire: “It’s hard to find a silver lining or a positive note with everything happening.”
The article explained the role of El Niño—a naturally occurring climate pattern that warms areas of the Pacific every 2–7 years—and the hope that it will soon let up and give way to La Niña, its cooler counterpart, but did not explain that the phenomenon plays a smaller role than ongoing, human-caused warming. The aforementioned Vox piece also discussed the role of El Niño, but was sure to specify that reefs have been collapsing long before this current crisis.
The feeling of alarm is justified, but journalists should remind readers that the coral bleaching crisis—and climate change as a whole—are not totally uncontrollable acts of nature. We know what is to blame. While it may be too late to avoid breaching the 1.5°C limit even if we cut emissions tomorrow, the sooner we cease burning fossil fuels, the more catastrophic impacts we’ll avoid.
The message is urgent and dire, but there’s plenty that humans—especially those in power—can do, and there’s plenty journalists can do to make the public aware.
FEATURED IMAGE: NOAA photos of a coral before and after bleaching. (This particular coral recovered from the event.)
This week on CounterSpin: You and I may know that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump through various mysterious sorts of skullduggery. That does not mean that we can whistle past the fact that many people who vote do believe that. Many of those people are activated in a way that goes beyond easily ignorable segments on OAN, and has meaning for November. Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We’ll hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril.
Also on the show: You and I may believe that democracy means, at its core, something like “one person, one vote.” That doesn’t mean we can whistle past the fact that many voting people do not believe that. Indeed, some elite media–designated smart people have determined: “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We’ll explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn says “good media” (by which he most certainly means the New York Times) is a “pillar of democracy.” Talking to Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the Semafor news site (5/5/24), Kahn elaborated:
One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.
By way of explaining “the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election,” Kahn summed up how he sees the Times covering Campaign 2024:
It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
I put it to you that presenting that as the first thing to say about the election—which candidate is more pro-establishment?—is both a peculiar view of what’s at stake in 2024 and, at the same time, a good way to skew coverage toward one of the two major-party candidates: Donald Trump.
‘Issues people have’
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn talked to Semafor (5/5/24) about the “big push” his paper is making to “reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism.”
But Kahn is committed to denying that the Times—the most powerful agenda-setting news outlet in the United States—has any say over what issues are considered important:
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one—immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?
Should the Times stop covering the economy? No, of course not. But it should stop covering it in a way that overemphasizes inflation over other measures of economic health. In 2023, as increases in wages outpaced inflation in the United States, the paper talked about “inflation” six times as often as it talked about “wage growth” (FAIR.org, 1/5/24).
On immigration, the Times should not be treating calls from local Democratic leaders for greater resources to help settle refugees as “growing pressure” on Biden “to curb record numbers of migrants crossing into the United States” (New York Times, 1/4/24; FAIR.org, 1/9/24).
What Times critics are calling for is not censorship, as Kahn pretends, but a recognition that the paper is not merely holding up a mirror to the world, but making choices about what’s important for readers to know—and that those choices have real-world consequences, including in terms of the issues voters think are important.
Kahn defended his paper as giving “a pretty well-rounded, fair portrait of Biden”—stressing that it had covered what it saw as the positive achievements of his administration in foreign policy, which provides some insight into the core politics of the New York Times:
his real commitment to national security; his deep involvement on the Ukraine war with Russia; the building or rebuilding of NATO; and then the very, very difficult task of managing Israel and the regional stability connected with the Gaza war.
The fact that Kahn thinks that Biden’s handling of Gaza reflects well on the president suggests that Kahn’s father having been on the board of CAMERA (Intercept, 1/28/24)—a group dedicated to pushing news media to be ever more pro-Israel—may not be the irrelevant antisemitic dogwhistle that Kahn dismissed it as.
‘Some coverage of his age’
Surely the New York Times (2/9/24) running at least 26 stories on the subject in a week had something to do with Joe Biden’s age being “at the center of 2024.”
At the same time, Kahn acknowledged that his paper has had “some coverage about [Biden’s] frailty and his age”—but insisted that a regular reader is “not going to see that much” about that.
As it happens, there was a study done of how much the New York Times writes about Biden’s age. The Computational Social Science Lab (3/8/24) at the University of Pennsylvania found that in the week after special counsel Robert Hur cited how old Biden was as part of his decision not to indict him for mishandling classified documents, the Times ran at least 26 stories on the topic of Biden’s elderliness—”of which one of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern.” (The study looked only at stories that appeared among the top 20 stories on the Times‘ website home page, a measure of the importance the paper accorded to coverage.)
By way of comparison, CSS Lab noted that when, about the same time, Trump announced “that if he regained power he would pull the US out of NATO and even encourage Russian invasions of democratic allies if their financial commitments were not to his liking,” the Times ran just 10 articles on the issue that made it to the top of its home page.
About two weeks after this burst of coverage, CSS Lab noted a second wave of Times stories about how old Biden was—based on a poll that found that voters were indeed concerned about the subject:
Critically, this second burst was triggered not by some event that generated new evidence about Biden’s age affecting his performance as president, but rather the NYT’s own poll that pointedly asked respondents about the exact issue they had just spent the previous month covering relentlessly…. None of this second wave of articles acknowledges the existence of the first wave or the possibility that poll respondents might simply have been parroting the NYT’s own coverage back to them.
Turning situations into crises
Establishment media have displayed no more urgency about the prospect of Trumpists stealing the 2024 election than they had two years ago (FAIR.org, 2/16/22).
That’s the same pattern that we see with the immigration and inflation stories—and, in the runup to the 2022 midterms, with the “crime wave” issue (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). Corporate media—not the New York Times alone, of course, but the Times does play a leading role—have the ability, through their framing and emphasis, to turn situations into crises. And they have chosen to do this, again and again, in ways that make it more likely that Trump will return to the White House in 2025—with an avowed intent to do permanent damage to democracy.
The prospect does not seem to faze Joe Kahn. “Trump could win this election in a popular vote,” he told Smith. “Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair.”
It’s a stunningly ignorant comment, given that elections in the United States are not run by the federal government; the Republican Party has been working tirelessly at the state and local level since 2020 to put itself in a position to overturn the popular vote (FAIR.org, 2/16/22). To the extent that the process has federal oversight, it’s largely through a judicial branch in which the GOP-controlled Supreme Court holds supreme power.
But then, why should I expect Kahn to have a deeper understanding of how elections work than he does of how media and public opinion work?
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights‘ Ahmad Abuznaid about the Rafah invasionfor the May 10, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Beltway reporters have access to things others can’t see, but can they see things that aren’t there? That question was brought to mind by a May 8 piece by New York Times chief White House reporter Peter Baker, in which he interpreted Biden’s evident decision to “pause” delivery of certain types of bombs to Israel as “meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits.”
Israel’s plans to storm the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Baker explains, “have been a source of intense friction with the Biden administration for months.” That friction was evidently expressed in the unfettered delivery of weapons during those months, and the publicly expressed support for the catastrophic violence that has killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of Palestinians, destroyed their homes and infrastructure, and denied their access to humanitarian aid.
Others, more focused on actions than vibes, saw this step as “overdue but necessary,” if it is part of some serious effort to condition any US support for Israel on ending the bloodshed.
Ahmad Abuznaid: Thank you, Janine. Thanks for having me.
JJ: An invasion of Rafah, we were told, would be an uncrossable “red line” for Biden, but luckily enough, a New York Times headline says, “Attack Not Seen as Full Invasion”—“seen as” being the kind of slippery language media use to suggest something they’d rather not say: that only some people’s definitions matter. What do we know about what’s happening in Rafah right now? Is it surprising, and why would we accept that it doesn’t amount to invasion?
AA: Well, we shouldn’t accept that assessment. Israelis have been saying they’re going to invade Rafah, no matter what. They said they would continue with their “mission,” no matter what. Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a speech and said, despite any pressures or response from outside forces or international forums, Israel will continue.
So I think what’s really the question here is whether President Biden issued his red line in actual red or in pencil. We’re going to find out, because technicalities as to how they view the invasion of Rafah aside, not only has it already occurred, but they’ve clearly made the statement again that they’re going to continue. So I think, really, the ball is in President Biden’s court. Will he continue to be bullied around and told what to do by Netanyahu, or will he act like he’s the president of the US, and call for an end?
JJ: Is the pause, as it’s been called—some people have been saying he stopped giving weapons; that’s not it. It’s been called a pause or a delay in the delivery of certain types of bombs. Is that meaningful? How meaningful is that?
AA: No, that’s not meaningful. And I’ll tell you why. Because in the last few months, there has been shipment after shipment after shipment to Israel. And so to now say that you would pause, or have paused, certain munitions is a little too little, too late. Israel may not, in fact, need what you paused in order to, again, conduct its invasion of Rafah.
So are you going to end the genocide, President Biden? That’s the central question. People aren’t asking for a pause right now. They’re asking for an end to the genocide, and an end to military weaponry to Israel. So it’s clear President Biden is still not reading the room.
JJ: Yeah, yeah. In general, it feels as though the options or the hopes are so tamped down. Ceasefire seems like the ultimate thing that we can call for, but ceasefire doesn’t bring people back to life. It doesn’t put Gazans back in their destroyed homes. I mean, obviously, cease fire, but where would that fit in with what else needs to happen?
AA: Yeah, I mean, the ceasefire is the most immediate demand, and that’s why if President Biden had made this threat via weapons months ago, there literally may have been thousands of lives saved. And so the ceasefire is still the first and most urgent demand, because we’re trying to save lives.
The people of Rafah are not only facing, again, the incredibly brutal and violent genocidal assaults, they’re also facing forced starvation. There was this huge conversation around aid trucks beginning to increase, and now here we are again with aid trucks essentially coming to a halt. So the genocide is real, and that’s the first and most important demand in this moment.
Ahmad Abuznaid: “We need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again.”
But beyond that, after what the US taxpayer, after what the West, after what elected officials have witnessed, how can they continue to go back to the status quo of supporting the state of Israel, even if there’s a ceasefire? I would argue that it’s clear to most Americans at this point that the Israeli government cannot be trusted with our weapons. They’ve taken it so far at this point, with their genocidal conduct, there’s actually no turning back.
And so ceasefire fits in, again, prominently, because we need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again, and to make sure this can never happen again, that means that the state of Israel must not receive any more US arms, period. The US should no longer protect Israel at the International Criminal Court, period. The US should no longer protect the state of Israel at the International Court of Justice, period.
These are all ways that Israel deserves to be isolated in this moment. And, in fact, many countries are already taking that necessary step. We’ve seen Colombia, for instance, cease any relations with the state of Israel, and that’s what’s required of the world right now, especially of the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be one of those leaders of the “free world,” and supportive of people’s self-determination and calls for freedom and justice. If the US is truly that, this is the moment to show it.
And so we’re way beyond the ceasefire. We need a ceasefire immediately, but we need to see some divestment from the Israeli apartheid state, divestment from the genocidal state, and sanctions on the genocidal apartheid state.
JJ: There’s a feeling that the masks are off. Legislators in this country aren’t saying, as they supply Israel with money and bombs and political shielding and international bodies, they aren’t saying, “We hope for peace, but it’s hard. And Israel is our friend.” They’re now saying, “If you don’t full-throatedly support Israel’s ethnic cleansing project, you’re a terrorist supporter, which by the way means you’re a terrorist, and we will see that you are treated accordingly.”
That sentiment has always been there, of course, but it’s still shocking what people are now OK saying out loud–and doing, like HR6408, legislation to define pro-Palestinian groups as terrorist-supporting, and strip their tax exempt status. How are groups like US Campaign for Palestinian Rights responding to these very overt and meaningful legislative threats?
AA: Look, they’ve attempted to stifle BDS and criminalize boycotting of Israel. They’ve attempted to make people pay via loss of state-awarded contracts, and agreements, right? You would sign this pledge. We’ve seen, of course, lawsuits and lawfare utilized, such as the lawsuit that was levied against the US Campaign. And you know what? We fought that and we won.
And so this is actually another overreach, another violation of our constitutional rights, another mode of repression against Palestinian organizing and activism. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t going to stop us. If they think that a piece of legislation like this is going to cause us to cease our advocacy, our activities, our organizing, our shutting it down for Palestine, then they’ve miscalculated. So what we’ll see is that this will be utilized by the state to attempt to repress and suppress the movement, just like the anti-BDS laws, just like these lawfare expeditions.
But it won’t stop. They won’t silence us, they won’t stop us, and if, at the end of the day, we have to suffer through losing tax-exempt status, I think the organizations that right now are doing anything they can to stop a genocide, I think they’ll gladly sacrifice tax-exempt status. But I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s clearly a violation of our First Amendment rights, and our constitutional rights to organize in this country.
JJ: It seems like something has fundamentally changed in terms of the US public, and of course we’re seeing it with college students, but it’s been there before. It feels like flailing on the part of the administration, and on the part of people who want an uncritical support for anything that Israel does, and want support for genocide. The students are just driving them mad. And yet there they are, still doing it. Does this feel like a shift to you? I know you’re not a psychic, but does it seem like something is changing?
AA: Oh, it’s absolutely changing. Millions of people have taken action in the last few months, and that’s been calls, letters, petitions, direct action, civil disobedience, marches, protests, rallies, birddogging, you name it. And now we see encampment, and the students, just like they rose up against the war in Vietnam, just like they rose up for the civil rights movement, just like they rose up against the war in Iraq, the students will continue to be just a huge, huge part of this movement.
And right now, they’re speaking clearly to this country, not only about Palestine, and our need to get a ceasefire and to divest. Their demands are super clear. They’re super prepared. They’re super disciplined and intentional. I’m so proud of them. But not only are they making these demands clear for us in relation to Palestine, they’re also giving us, in plain sight, a contradiction for us to understand and grapple with domestically.
Do we want continued militarization of police, not only in our communities, but on our college campuses? This is what we’re witnessing: riot gear, dispersal techniques used on our students at Ivy League institutions, at non–Ivy League institutions. Literally, the weight of policing being levied against students from the ages of 17 to 20.
And it’s not only a concern that we’re seeing this, obviously, under a supposed Democratic, progressive president; we can see that this is something we should be concerned about, not only now, but in the future here for this country, as we see this intense militarization of our college campuses.
JJ: Let me just say, to me, on some level, the media’s focus on “leverage,” that focus on “Joe is kind of irked at Bibi. Uh oh”—it feels condescending to me, this Great Man theory of history that’s going on. It’s a personal conversation between Joe Biden and Netanyahu. It seems to make a mockery of international law and of human rights, frankly. And I just wonder, what other lenses could media be using? What other things could media be focusing on, that would take it away from “there’s a personal fight between these two guys, and somehow millions of people are affected by it.”
AA: Yeah, I think what media can do is continue to center the horrific nature of this Israeli assault, this genocidal assault on Gaza, the statistics, the data, the stories, the devastation that we’re seeing in Rafah right now. I think centering those voices and that experience, and then thinking about, again, our role, is where the focus needs to be.
The conversations between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu are for them to have. What we’re asking for is action. And we’re not going to be satisfied with these leaks of displeasure or of tension or of fracturing friendships. This isn’t about friendships. This is about stopping a genocide. And unfortunately, right now, not only are we not stopping it, we’re arming it and supporting it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ahmad Abuznaid. He’s executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Thank you so much, Ahmad Abuznaid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee (4/17/24) relied on the New York Times for its narrative of how Brazil is “eroding basic democratic values and stifling debate.”
The Republican-led US House Judiciary Committee released a report on April 17 titled “The Attack on Free Speech Abroad and the Biden Administration’s Silence: The Case of Brazil.” The report accused the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court of censorship, based on an interpretation rooted in US law and Twitter company policy.
The GOP report criticizes the court’s investigation and series of rulings that resulted in the deplatforming of 150 Twitter accounts. Many of these accounts belonged to individuals under investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police for their roles in a coup attempt on January 8, 2023, which tried to close Brazil’s National Congress. Its ultimate goal was to shut down the court, arrest three of its judges—including Justice Alexandre de Moraes—and install a military dictatorship.
The report came on the heels of a campaign promoted by Twitter owner Elon Musk. The ultra-billionaire had started to attack Brazil’s highest court days after Michael Shellenberger, a former PR executive who now calls himself an investigative journalist, posted a thread titled “Twitter Files—Brazil.” Shellenberger claimed to show that de Moraes—a conservative appointed by right-wing President Michel Temer—had pressed criminal charges against Twitter (rebranded as X) for refusing to turn over user data on political enemies. Musk viralized the “Twitter Files,” along with a Portuguese-language video in which Shellenberger called de Moraes a totalitarian tyrant.
Days later, Brazil’s former secretary of digital rights, Estela Aranha, unmasked the fraud. Confronting Shellenberger publicly on Twitter, she demonstrated that he had cut and pasted together paragraphs selected from the company’s internal communications on a variety of different issues to create a false narrative (FAIR.org, 4/18/24). The paragraph about criminal charges referred not to de Moraes, but to GAECO, the Sao Paulo district attorney’s office’s organized crime unit, which pressed charges after Twitter refused to turn over user data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine-trafficking organization. Shellenberger apologized in Portuguese, admitting he had no proof that de Moraes had pressed charges against Twitter, then left Brazil.
The eight-page congressional report parroted Musk and Shellenberger’s criticism of the deplatforming of Twitter users, and claimed that ordering the removal of specific posts constitutes “censorship.” Surprisingly, for a report authored by a committee chaired by inner-circle Trump ally Jim Jordan, the most cited journalistic source for the document is the New York Times.
‘Going too far?’
The New York Times (9/26/22) reported that Brazil’s highest court had taken a “repressive turn,” “according to experts in law and government”—with experts who disagreed with that assessment largely ignored in the Times‘ reporting.
A Times article (9/26/22) published five days before Brazil’s 2022 first-round presidential election, headlined “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?,” was cited seven times in the Judiciary Committee report. Its central argument is that, “emboldened by new powers the court granted itself in 2019,” Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court—especially de Moraes, who oversaw the Superior Election Court during the 2022 elections—had taken a “repressive turn.”
To fit its narrative, the Times cherry-picked excerpts from the March 14, 2019, decree issued by then–Chief Justice José Dias Toffoli:
The court would investigate “fake news”—Mr. Toffoli used the term in English—that attacked “the honorability” of the court and its justices.
Compare this to the actual paragraph:
Considering the existence of fraudulent news (“fake news”), slanderous accusations, threats and misdeeds cloaked in animus calumniandi [attempt to defame], defamandi [defamation] and injuriandi [injury], which undermine the honor and security of the Federal Supreme Court, its members and their families, it is resolved, in accordance with Article 43 and our internal rules, to start an inquiry to investigate the facts and corresponding offenses in all their dimensions.
Whereas a casual reader of the Times piece, making an association with Donald Trump’s bad-faith use of the term “fake news,” might assume that the decree extends power to the court to repress any speech that offends them personally, the language in the decree, which was upheld as constitutional in a 10-1 vote by the Supreme Federal Court in 2020, clearly links the investigation to four crimes under Brazilian law: fraud, attempt to defame, defamation and injury.
Toffoli’s decree spurred healthy debate among legal scholars, but the powerful Order of Brazilian Lawyers (OAB), which has seven times higher membership than the American Bar Association and manages Brazil’s equivalent of the bar exam, immediately endorsed the investigation. This fact was left out of the Times article, which skewed the debate to suit its narrative by providing one positive, one neutral and five negative quotes from Brazilian “experts” on the investigation.
A different system
US Marshals kill an average of 22 suspects and bystanders a year (Marshall Project, 2/11/21).
Brazil and the United States have very different legal systems. The United States Marshals are the enforcement arm of the US federal court system, with one of its primary functions being to assess, investigate and mitigate threats against judges.
With expanded powers that enable it to arrest fugitives, US Marshals averaged 90,000 arrests a year between 2015 and 2020, killing 124 people in the process. This included innocent bystanders like a teenage girl killed by US Marshal Michael Pezzelle in Phoenix, Arizona, when he opened fire on a vehicle she was sitting in—which, despite coverage in USA Today (2/11/21), was not deemed a worthy enough example of judicial overreach to be covered in the Times.
The US Supreme Court has its own police force, with 189 officers, which operates intelligence and investigation units. Although its power to initiate investigations is more limited than the Brazilian Supreme Court, it recently conducted an investigation on the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Brazil does not have a judiciary police force. According to the 1988 Constitution, the attributes of judiciary police enforcement are granted to the (notoriously corrupt) state civil police; in the case of the Supreme Federal Court, these powers have been delegated to the federal police. It was the failure of this system to adequately respond to the rise of threats against Supreme and Superior Electoral Court ministers that led Chief Justice Toffoli to issue his decree delegating power to de Moraes to start and oversee federal police investigations of such threats.
Threats against judges
At the time Toffoli issued his decree, in 2019, there had been a surge in threats against judges, especially those in the Supreme and Superior Electoral courts, which had initiated an election fraud investigation against the Jair Bolsonaro presidential campaign in October 2018. This increase in threats against the judiciary parallels a similar scenario with the rise of Trumpism in the United States, where the annual number of violent threats against judges rose from 926 in 2015 to 4,511 in 2021.
Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said that Eduardo Bolsonaro’s threats against the Supreme Federal Court “smell of fascism” (El País, 10/21/18).
One example of a menacing statement that was widely shared on social media was made by Bolsonaro’s son, congressmember Eduardo Bolsonaro, eight days before the second round of the 2018 presidential elections. Investigative journalist Patricia Campos Mello had published an article in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper (10/18/18) exposing a group of millionaires—including some, like Luciano Hang, who are portrayed as harmless business executives in the Times article—for spending R$12 million to spread slanderous disinformation against the elder Bolsonaro’s electoral rival, Fernando Haddad, on Meta‘s WhatsApp platform. This campaign included targeting evangelical voters with doctored photos falsely claiming that, as mayor, Haddad had distributed baby bottles with penis-shaped nipples to students in Sao Paulo’s public pre-school system.
Three days later, in a video seen by hundreds of thousands of people, Eduardo Bolsonaro said:
To shut down the Supreme Court, we don’t even have to send a single jeep or soldier. íIf you capture a Supreme Court justice, do you think anyone will protest in their defense?
Across Brazil, hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters upped the ante, including retired army Col. Carlos Alves. In a widely circulated YouTube video (10/22/18), Alves threatened to shut down the Supreme Federal Court, and slandered Superior Electoral Court president Rosa Weber. This triggered requests by the Supreme Court and the commander of the army to open a new investigation against Alves, which was conducted by the Federal Police.
Toffoli’s decree was issued in response to the growing threats and the inability of the justice system to respond efficiently to them. The immediate result of his designation of de Moraes as head of the investigation was that he became the target of a hate campaign by Bolsonaro’s internationally connected support network, which then worked to build a legal argument that, as a victim of their threats, he was unqualified to investigate his aggressors. Meanwhile, the attacks against the Supreme Court and Electoral Court intensified during a four-year build-up that culminated in the 2023 coup attempt.
As the idea of destroying the Supreme Federal Court and installing a dictatorship became the primary rallying cry of the Bolsonarista far right, de Moraes ordered the arrest of congressmember Daniel Silveira, who, as Rio de Janeiro city councilor, once submitted a bill that would have enabled military police to harvest the organs of their shooting victims.
The New York Times article framed his imprisonment and subsequent eight-year, nine-month sentence as the result of a single live stream with a few vague threats. In fact, it was the result of an investigation by the attorney general’s office into Silveira’s four years of systematically inciting the violent abolition of the democratic rule of law. Silviera had abused his authority as an elected official to repeatedly call on the army to shut down the Supreme Federal Court, while disobeying court orders to cease and desist.
A script for a coup
UOL (1/12/23) published a detailed coup recipe found at the house of Bolsonaro’s justice minister.
It may be news to the Republicans who cited the Times in their report on “censorship,” but Brazil’s legal system has all kinds of significant differences from that of the US. It may not be standard practice in Brazil for an investigation judge to rule on the results of his own investigation, but the Times didn’t think it was significant enough to dwell on as a sign of judicial overreach in its 37 articles on Operation Car Wash when Judge Sergio Moro did it during his now-reversed witch hunt against Lula.
Furthermore, Brazil’s speech laws, closer to France or Germany’s than to those in the US, are based on a harmony of rights, meaning that no essential right can be used to infringe on another essential right. This means, for example, that the kind of advocacy for pedophilia promoted by an organization like NAMBLA, viewed as protected free speech by the ACLU, would be illegal in Brazil, due to its infringement on the right to health and happiness for children, as laid out in its Statute of the Child and Adolescent. It means that, like in Germany, advocacy for Nazism is a crime, as it is deemed to infringe on the human rights of the groups that have been historic victims of Nazism.
And it means that in Brazil’s short election seasons, certain types of speech are prohibited if they infringe on the essential right of fair and balanced elections. In practical terms, this means that negative campaign ads and spreading disinformation about other candidates is illegal, and in every election season, the Superior Electoral Court orders candidates to take hundreds of ads off the air for violating these principles, as it did to both Jair Bolsonaro and Lula in the 2022 election season (FAIR.org, 4/18/24).
During the three months following the Times article, two Bolsonaro supporters were arrested trying to detonate a bomb in Brasilia’s airport, and another group of supporters staged a violent attack on Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters camped out in front of military barracks demanding that they take action and shut down the Federal Supreme Court.
On January 8, following the details of a written plan for a coup d’etat seized in Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Anderson Torres’ house, a crowd invaded the National Congress and the Supreme Federal Court building with the goal of pressuring Lula to declare a state of siege, which would have turned national security over to the armed forces. Meanwhile, high-tension electrical towers were sabotaged across the country.
News designed for ‘bad actors’
The New York Times (8/20/1939) has been running “Nazi next door” pieces for a long time now.
This also isn’t the first time the GOP has used Times reporting to advance a right-wing agenda. Lawmakers across the country have repeatedly cited Times articles to justify restricting and even criminalizing gender-affirming health care for trans youth (GLAAD, 4/19/23).
When confronted with the Times‘ role in empowering—in GLAAD’s words—”the already powerful to do even more harm,” publisher A.G. Sulzberger (CJR, 5/15/23) dismissed such concerns, scoffing at critics who think “news organizations should not publish information that bad actors might misuse.” “In general,” he responded,
independent reporters and editors should ask, “Is it true? Is it important?” If the answer to both questions is yes, journalists should be profoundly skeptical of any argument that favors censoring or skewing what they’ve learned based on a subjective view about whether it may yield a damaging outcome.
In other words, Sulzberger claims that the Times is just reporting the facts; it’s not their fault if “bad actors” are misusing those facts. It’s the old “objectivity” argument, repackaged in a time when even many within the news industry are acknowledging that objectivity is impossible. But the trouble is, as FAIR showed with the paper’s trans coverage, Times reporting fails Sulzerberger’s own “true” and “important” test (FAIR.org, 5/19/23).
Likewise, in the case of the paper’s Brazil/Twitter coverage, the problem is not that the Times‘ good reporting is being misused by bad actors; it’s the paper’s bad reporting that’s directly feeding yet another right-wing smear campaign.
Looking back at the timing of the article, five days before Brazil’s first-round presidential election, the lack of context and the imbalanced skewing of the Brazilian legal community’s robust debate around Toffoli’s decree in favor of its detractors, it’s no wonder that it’s now being cited by Republican officials.
After a second congressional subcommittee hearing on “censorship” in Brazil, held on May 7, it seems clear Republicans are preparing to use “Biden’s support for censorship in Brazil” as a bullet point for Trump in the upcoming presidential elections. Keep this in mind as the New York Times continues its coverage on “freedom of speech” in Brazil.
Nicholas Kristof is that guy at the party who reminds you that you haven’t really lived. While you maintain a regular, nine-to-five existence, driving from Point A to Point B, the world has been Kristof’s oyster. With a fully stamped passport, the New York Times columnist can embarrass everyone with his tales from Africa and Asia, marking himself as a true global citizen who yearns for adventure.
