Category: zSlider

October 22, 2024

US Sanctions Shoot Down Sputnik Radio

A spokesperson for Kansas City’s KCXL defended its former Radio Sputnik programming as “produced in Washington, DC, by American journalists who jumped at the chance to not be told what to report on by big media and big corporations” (Desk, 10/15/24).

Russian state radio network Radio Sputnik is off the air in the two markets on which it aired in the United States, and the cause of the closure is reportedly US government sanctions.

The Desk (10/15/24), quoting “one source familiar with the decision to wind down the network,” said “it was directly influenced by the US State Department’s imposition of new sanctions on Russia-backed broadcast outlets last month.”

“While Sputnik was not specifically named by the State Department,” the Desk reported, the sanctions did hit Sputnik‘s parent company, a Russian government media agency called Rossiya Segodnya. This “made it difficult to continue leasing time on Washington and Kansas City radio stations where its programming was heard.”

The State Department (9/13/24) accused Rossiya Segodnya of carrying out “covert influence activities”; earlier (9/4/24), it had named Sputnik itself as well as Rossiya Segodnya as “foreign missions.” Significantly, the executive order under which Rossiya Segodnya was sanctioned extends penalties to the property of anyone who “acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly…any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.”

‘Years of criticism’

When Moscow does it, it’s “propaganda”; when Washington does it, it’s the Voice of America (10/16/24).

US government broadcaster Voice of America (10/16/24) said Sputnik‘s departure comes “after years of criticism that its local [Washington] radio station, WZHF, carries antisemitic content and false information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

The VoA did not offer any evidence of its claims of antisemitism, other than saying Jack Bergman, a Republican congressman from Michigan, “cited a steady stream of antisemitic tropes.” (Critical profiles of Sputnik‘s US programming have not previously charged it with antisemitism–Washington Post, 3/7/22; New York Post, 3/28/22.)

Sputnik’s departure from US airwaves is sudden but not unexpected. Communications lawyer Arthur Belendiuk, who has represented the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, has been trying to shut down Sputnik via the Federal Communications Commission since February (Radio and Television Business Report, 2/1/24).

Belendiuk maintains that the network “is in violation of commission rules for broadcasting ‘paid Russian state propaganda’” (Radio and Television Business Report, 10/16/24). He told FAIR that while he understood Sputnik had freedom of speech, he also had a “freedom to petition my government.” Bergman, the Republican congressmember, requested that the FCC take action against Sputnik (Inside Radio, 1/5/24).

The pressure has been building against the radio network for some time. VoA reported that the National Association of Broadcasters had issued a statement in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling on “broadcasters to cease carrying any state-sponsored programming with ties to the Russian government or its agents.”

The Washington Post (3/7/22) also noted:

In 2017, three Democratic members of Congress sought an investigation into why it was still on the air despite evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time, Ajit Pai, declined to take action, saying the First Amendment would bar his agency “from interfering with a broadcast licensee’s choice of programming, even if that programming may be objectionable to many listeners.”

Chilling effect on speech

In 2020, the New York Times (2/13/20) called the arrival of Radio Sputnik in Kansas City “an unabashed exploitation of American values and openness.” Those loopholes have subsequently been closed.

I have been interviewed several times on Sputnik programs about my articles here at FAIR (e.g. By Any Means Necessary, 4/26/23, 5/27/23, 9/27/23). I have objected to much of the network’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which its website still calls a “special operation,” as if it’s gallbladder surgery. But I am open to talking as a source to many forms of media.

Sanctions that scare broadcasters against carrying Sputnik do carry a chilling effect on speech; if programmers know that a certain kind of content could open them up to government punishment, most are going to steer well clear of that content.

The feds have made it clear that their punishments are serious. In 2009, New York City small-business owner Javed Iqbal “was sentenced…to nearly six years in prison for assisting terrorists by providing satellite television services to Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar” (New York Times, 4/23/09). This is an outlet that Middle East reporters constantly monitor, as they do with lots of other Middle East media.

The New York Times (2/13/20) called Sputnik “Russian agitprop,” carrying the message that “that America is damaged goods.” The Kansas City Star editorial board (3/4/22) said that listeners to KCXL, which carried Sputnik programming, were “bombarded with pro-Putin talk” thanks to Sputnik. The paper wondered why such programming was airing in the area. “Money talks,” the board said. “Or maybe we should say rubles.”

These critiques are hard to argue with, as you’d be hard-pressed to find investigations of the Russian government or its business elite in such media. Government broadcasters, whether it’s VoA or Sputnik, are not meant to be fair and balanced newsrooms, but vehicles to convey official thinking about the news to the rest of the world.

But Ted Rall, the cartoonist and political commentator who co-hosted the Sputnik show Final Countdown, challenged the idea that Sputnik’s content was government-managed. “We were no one’s dupes,” he wrote in an email to FAIR explaining the end of the network’s airing in the US:

I have worked in print and broadcast journalism for most of my life in a variety of roles at a wide variety of outlets, and I cannot recall an organization that gave me as much freedom to say whatever I felt like about any topic whatsoever.

He said that his show offered “an incredibly interesting, intelligent roster of political analysts,” which he believed were on par with “the finest journalists at NPR, the major broadcast networks or anywhere else.”

‘Growing wave of threats’

The president of the US equivalent of Radio Sputnik said that its operations being shut down in Russia “shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat’” (RFE/RL, (2/20/24). So what does the shutting down of Sputnik show?

Belendiuk, for his part, called Sputnik’s content “divisive.” That’s a term that could be applied to lots of US radio content, like right-wing talk shows and religious broadcasting that consigns nonbelievers to Hell. The FCC’s Fairness Doctrine has been gone for a while (Extra!, 1–2/05; Washington Post, 2/4/21). At FAIR,we have long documented that US corporate media serve a propaganda function for the US government, much of it false or deceptive.

But when official enemy states treat US-owned outlets the way the US is treating Russia’s, that’s considered an assault on a free press. When the US’s anti-Russia broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (2/20/24), was put on a government watch list that “effectively bans RFE/RL from working in Russia and exposes anyone who cooperates with the outlet to potential prosecution,” the outlet reported that its president, Stephen Capus, responded that “the move shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat.’”

And when Russia barred a VoA reporter from entering the country, the CEO of the government agency that runs both VoA and RFE/RL, Amanda Bennett, told VoA (3/14/24):

The Russian government’s decision to ban VoA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin from its country echoes a growing wave of threats to press freedom by authoritarian regimes.

That’s heavy stuff, but ultimately the US is doing the same thing. In the case of Sputnik, sanctions seemed to have crushed the network. RT America fell without overt government pressure, as it shut down its operations after “DirecTV, the largest US satellite TV operator, stopped carrying RT America…a decision based on Russia’s attack on Ukraine” (CNBC, 3/3/22).

And the US State Department (1/20/22) said:

RT and Sputnik’s role as disinformation and propaganda outlets is most obvious when they report on issues of political importance to the Kremlin. A prevalent example is Russia’s use of RT and Sputnik to attempt to change public opinions about Ukraine in Europe, the United States, and as far away as Latin America. When factual reporting on major foreign policy priorities is not favorable, Russia uses state-funded international media outlets to inject pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda into the information environment.

Harsh, but again, this is what state broadcasters have been doing for decades, and if we as Americans dislike American outlets being blocked abroad, then we are, at this point, getting a taste of our own medicine.

‘Begin with the least popular victim’

Reporters Without Borders dropped the US’s press freedom ranking in 2024, “thanks in part to consolidation that has gutted local news and forced corporations to prioritize profits over public service” (Axios, 5/7/24).

Actions like the moves against Sputnik are troubling, and not just as another sign of a roiling new Cold War. While the US prides itself on being a model of free expression, journalists here have been concerned for some time now about the nation’s decline in press freedom (Axios, 5/7/24; FAIR.org, 3/16/21).

“In this situation, journalists should be absolutely terrified that the US government will come after them next,” Rall said. “President Biden unilaterally killed a media outlet with the stroke of a pen. Yes, it’s a foreign outlet, but the First Amendment is supposed to protect those.”

For FAIR, the action against Sputnik seems no less dangerous than local government attempts to silence even small domestic outlets like the Marion County Record (FAIR.org, 8/14/23) and the Asheville Blade (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). For example, the New York Times (10/21/24) recently fretted that former President Donald Trump’s statement that “CBS should lose its license” was a sign that if he is elected, he would pressure the FCC to revoke licenses of major network affiliate stations. The recent news about Sputnik makes that idea far more possible.

Rall added that he didn’t believe that the US government would stop after taking action against Russian outlets.

“Any effort at censorship is going to begin with the least popular victim and then creep and spread after that,” he said.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 18, 2024

To Be a Media Expert on Economics, It Helps to Have the Right Politics

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes made this observation in 1936, in his masterwork The General Theory. Nearly a century later, readers and viewers of corporate media face the same fate.

The fundamental problem confronted by these news consumers is not that corporate news outlets consult economists in their reporting; as experts in their field, economists often have important and worthwhile contributions to make. The problem is that these outlets consistently elevate the views of specific economists who serve particular ideological interests over the views of other economists, or even the academic profession as a whole.

The austerity gospel

Simon Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/19/15): “‘Mediamacro’…prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.”

Consider the case of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity mania that followed. The British economist Simon Wren-Lewis (London Review of Books, 2/9/15) has documented how media depictions of austerity diverged sharply from professional economists’ understandings and textbooks’ explanations of macroeconomics. His term for the media’s unique understanding of macroeconomics is “mediamacro,” which is characterized by an obsession with cutting the deficit over and above all other concerns.

In the wake of the banking crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-08, and then the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, standard textbook macroeconomics dictated a runup in the deficit to stimulate the economy out of a downturn. Corporate media, however, bought the arguments of political conservatives and a fringe of academic economists (who nonetheless held positions at prestigious universities), who maintained that austerity, specifically through spending cuts, could return the economy to health.

In the most notorious instance, corporate media outlets opportunistically promoted the findings of a 2010 paper, written by two Harvard economists, that were later famously invalidated due to an Excel error. As Paul Krugman noted in 2013 (New York Times, 4/19/13), this paper was controversial among economists from the start, but this did not stop corporate media from citing it—and its flimsy assertion that there existed a tipping-point for government debt at 90% of GDP, beyond which this debt supposedly imposed a major drag on economic growth—as gospel:

For example, a Washington Post editorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90% mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.

The view from finance

As Mark Copelovitch (SSRN, 10/27/17) has noted, “The single most important factor [in elevating falsehoods about austerity] has been the media’s willingness to embrace and promote these narratives, while largely ignoring the overwhelming empirical and historical evidence that austerity is deeply contractionary and counter-productive.”

In another instance recounted by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15), after the return of some growth in 2013 in Britain following the election of a Conservative government committed to austerity in 2010, the Financial Times editorial board (9/10/13) declared the Conservatives victorious in their political argument for austerity. This despite the fact that “less than 20% of academic economists surveyed by the Financial Times thought that the recovery of 2013 vindicated austerity.”

Such false right-wing narratives about macroeconomic policy came to dominate media discourse, not merely because political elites adopted these false narratives and thus made them newsworthy, but because corporate media outlets were compliant messengers for elite views and prescriptions.

Why does the media adopt “mediamacro” as its approach to coverage of the economy? One reason proposed by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15) is the influence of City of London (or, in the US case, Wall Street) economists, whose

views tend to reflect the economic arguments of those on the right: Regulation is bad, top rates of tax should be low, the state is too large, and budget deficits are a serious and immediate concern.

Moreover, the political leanings of corporate media outlets, whether or not they are made explicit, may encourage them to seek the expertise of economists of a particular ideological bent. These economists’ views may, in turn, be out of step with the academic mainstream on topics like austerity.

The inflation oracle

The corporate media’s tendency to elevate economists of a specific type hasn’t disappeared in the 2020s. With the onset of Covid and the spike in inflation that followed, media broke out their familiar playbook of consulting prominent economists with extreme, and business-friendly, positions.

The infamous example was the elevation of Larry Summers, who slammed Biden’s 2021 stimulus as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and warned stridently of inflation (Washington Post, 5/24/21). When inflation rose to a high of just over 9% the next year, Summers was hailed by the media as “an oracle: the man who saw it all coming,” as Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman (2/13/23) sarcastically put it.

In one sense, it was true that Summers had seen inflation as a strong possibility, and he did deserve some credit for that. Other economists, notably Paul Krugman, had downplayed the possibility of a jump in inflation and had to eat their words (New York Times, 7/21/22). But the fact that Summers had gotten this one point right, after an illustrious career of getting things wrong, did not exactly justify his skyrocketing status as the go-to voice on inflation, or the heaps of at times fawning media coverage thrown his way (Wall Street Journal, 6/27/22; Fortune, 9/23/22).

Did it justify, for example, Summers garnering six times as many mentions as Krugman on top cable news channels from 2021 through 2023? A Nobel laureate and widely respected commentator, Krugman also happened to be the most prominent proponent of a more dovish, less austere approach to inflation. Though he failed to foresee the initial rise in inflation, Krugman accurately predicted, in contrast to Summers, that the US economy could achieve a “soft landing,” a fall in inflation without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate (New York Times, 5/18/23).

Meanwhile, Summers capitalized on his new status as economic prophet to insist that extreme pain was required to tame inflation. By mid-2022, he confidently proclaimed (Bloomberg, 6/20/22):

We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.

Cherry-picking expertise

Like the views of extreme austerity advocates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Summers’ views in 2022 were acutely out of sync with the mainstream among academic economists, as becomes apparent from surveys of professional economists taken over the course of the inflationary outbreak.

Financial Times/Booth survey of macroeconomists (9/13/22)

One FT/Booth survey taken in the fall of 2022 is particularly informative. It found that most economists thought that the Federal Reserve was on track to contain inflation with its pace of interest rate hikes. Specifically, when asked to react to the statement “Futures markets now suggest the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to about 3.9% by the end of 2022,” only 36% of economists classified the Fed’s actions as “too little too late and insufficient to help keep inflation under control.” The rest either thought that this policy path was sufficient to contain inflation (55%) or thought that it was overkill (9%).

When asked about the toll Fed policy would take on the labor market, academic economists took a moderate stance. Most agreed that the unemployment rate would peak below 6% and that a recession would last for less than a year. Incidentally, only a small minority of economists seem to have foreseen the possibility of inflation returning to target without a recession and with unemployment rising no higher than 4.3%, which is what in fact has occurred. But notwithstanding their apparent excess of pessimism, economists generally agreed that inflation would come under control with nowhere near the punishment Summers was prescribing.

To be fair, these economists were not asked directly what would be sufficient to contain inflation, and if asked directly, it is likely that some segment would have been in Summers’ camp—after all, about a third of the economists surveyed thought that the Fed was doing “too little too late.” But those backing Summers’ full diagnosis would be a fraction of those taking this minority view. So the central point that Summers was in the minority, and likely in quite a small minority, among professional economists is undoubtedly true.

Yet with his quasi-divine status granted by corporate media, Summers could pontificate freely about the need for mass suffering without fear of marginalization for lack of evidence or credibility. So when he prescribed 5% unemployment for five years, all that an outlet like Bloomberg (6/20/22) did was report on his views, no skepticism necessary. And no warning label stating: This is completely out of step with the academic mainstream. In effect, corporate media decided to once again cherry-pick expertise to legitimize austerity policies.

‘Not sensible policy’

James K. Galbraith and Isabella Weber (Boston Globe, 8/22/24) : “Americans still have some common sense…. It shows that all of the efforts of free-market economists to beat it out of them have not yet worked.“

At the same time, alternatives to the dominant austerity paradigm have been treated with caution, if not outright hostility. The New York Times (8/15/24), for example, in a recent piece on Kamala Harris’s advocacy for anti-price-gouging legislation, did consult Isabella Weber, a progressive economist who has become well known for her work on profit-driven inflation. But her testimony was overshadowed in the piece by that of economists with more conservative takes on the issue.

Most notably, the Times relied heavily on the insights of Harvard economist Jason Furman, who helped lead the push for extreme austerity alongside Summers (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22). His first quote in the article had a simple Econ 101 message: “Egg prices went up last year—it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production.” In other words, egg prices went up because of supply issues, and it’s good that prices went up because that spurred more egg production.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t fit with the facts. Responding to this Furman quote, Weber and James Galbraith observed in a separate article (Boston Globe, 8/22/24):

In fact, US egg production peaked in 2019 and then fell slightly, through last year. Egg prices spiked from early 2022 to $4.82 a dozen on average in January 2023, before falling back again, with no gain in production. High prices did not stimulate America’s hens to greater effort. On these points, Furman laid an egg.

It might be assumed that the Times would engage in this sort of basic factchecking of its sources, and not leave it to two progressive economists writing in the Boston Globe to do that for them. But when the source is a Harvard economist who not too long ago was suggesting (wildly incorrectly) that unemployment would have to jump over 6% for two years to tame inflation (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22), apparently skepticism is not in order.

Leaving little room to doubt the leanings of the Times reporters, the article ended with another quote from Furman, this time on Harris’s proposal to go after price gouging:

“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Hand-picked by elites

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 2/14/24): “For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns.”

If one of the main functions of the media is agenda-setting—deeming certain topics, like government debt, newsworthy and others, like inequality, not so much (FAIR.org, 2/14/24)—another primary function is legitimization: letting audiences know who they should trust and who they should treat with skepticism. Over the course of the recent bout of inflation, corporate outlets have made it clear that those economists who erred on the side of far-reaching austerity were worth listening to. The ones who dissented most strongly from the austerity paradigm were, for the most part, sidelined or only tepidly consulted.

The result has been a constrained debate. Extreme pro-austerity positions have enjoyed high visibility, while progressives have been relegated to the background. This is not because of an imbalance in the evidence. If anything, the side that has been arguing for anti-austerity measures to fight inflation, like temporary price controls, has more evidence for their claims than the side that’s backed harsh monetary austerity. They, at least, haven’t been proven embarrassingly wrong by the experience of the past couple years.

What could help explain the imbalance in coverage is instead the background of different sets of economists. Before being legitimized by corporate media, extremists for austerity like Summers and Furman were legitimized by political status—Summers served in top roles under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Furman served as a key adviser to Obama. Progressives like Isabella Weber have not enjoyed similar political standing.

Thus, we can see a sort of chain of legitimization that runs from a political system dominated by economic elites to a media ecosystem owned by economic elites. If you can secure a top post in politics, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an extremist with views contradicting the consensus among academic economists. Your views should be taken seriously. For progressives, who have largely been excluded from elite politics in recent decades, serious skepticism is in order.

On the face of it, this system makes some sense. But think a little deeper and you can see an insidious chain servicing the dominant players in American society. That chain needs to be broken. Media outlets need to listen to the evidence, not the false wisdom of economists hand-picked by American elites.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 18, 2024

‘Housing Discrimination Is Collective, Cumulative, Continuing’: CounterSpin interview with George Lipsitz on the impacts of housing discrimination

Janine Jackson interviewed author and UC/Santa Barbara research professor emeritus George Lipsitz about the impacts of housing discrimination for the October 11, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Grist (3/10/15)

Janine Jackson: Some 10 years ago, food delivery service FreshDirect got more than $100 million of incentives to place a warehouse in a populated, poor, largely people of color community in the South Bronx, to bring heavy diesel truck traffic to asthma-inflicted neighborhoods already affected by waste treatment plants and high-traffic highways.

Groups like South Bronx Unite, like Good Jobs for NY, opposed these further health harms to the community, as well as the notion that a handful of insecure, poorly waged jobs could serve as compensation. South Bronx Unites’ Mychal Johnson said: “Of course we want jobs, but we should not have to choose between having a job and having clean air. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work.”

Now we understand that folks are working to reclaim pieces of the affected community called the Harlem River Yard, including allowing access to the Harlem River waterfront, access that’s been cut off to the public for a long time.

That’s just one of thousands of stories that exemplify the ways that racism inflects all kinds of decisions, policies, laws, that we’re told are, nowadays anyway, indifferent to race. That’s a mistaken notion that hobbles our ability to respond effectively to the interconnected harms of white supremacy and myriad US institutions that, to be real, harm everyone, and not just Black and brown people.

UC Press (2024)

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. He’s the author of many books, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place among them.

His most recent book, that we’re here to talk about, is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. It’s out now from University of California Press.

I will note that George was, for years, the chair of the board of the African American Policy Forum, where I also serve as a board member. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, George Lipsitz.

George Lipsitz: Thank you. So glad to be here.

JJ: Your new book addresses the interconnectedness of laws, policies and practices around housing that, without needing to be overtly coordinated, reinforce one another to produce and reproduce discriminatory outcomes. So we could really pull an opening thread anywhere here.

But when we talk about housing discrimination, I know that many folks’ minds go to redlining, where officially sanctioned protocols meant Black families just couldn’t buy homes in certain neighborhoods, and the thinking is, while certainly that had lasting impacts, it was years ago, and it’s been legally remediated by now.

So while the book talks, importantly, about the inadequacies of the ways that harms have been diagnosed and responded to, maybe we could just start with a breakdown of some of the multiple forms of discrimination in housing that that takes. Why is it that housing is at the center of the spider web of so many other discriminatory dangers?

George Lipsitz: “A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.”

GL: When I say the “danger zone is everywhere,” housing discrimination raises in peoples’ minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on peoples’ life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.

I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.

Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.

CNN (3/6/15)

It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.

And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.

Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms, the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.

I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.

So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.

JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?

GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrian accidents. The street lighting is worse.

People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK, deal with the pests and rodents that are in this place.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.

CBS (9/19/22)

Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes from playing in the street, and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.

Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get non-nutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.

JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.

For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.

GL: Yeah, well, certainly these impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.

Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.

But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.

Guardian (2/26/20)

And similarly with health, that we have an individualized model of health that imagines that people’s genetics, and whether they exercise and whether they eat healthy food, is the key thing in determining their health. But there are also collective issues, like sewage management, garbage collection, coal-burning furnaces and incinerators, lead in paint and gasoline.

All of these things have an impact on health, and they not only need to be studied together, but people involved in fair housing law have to think about health justice. People who are dispensing medical care need to think about the neighborhoods that their patients come from and return to, and the impact that those neighborhoods have on their health, and on the relations between parents and children, and on even whether people are considered valued in this society.

You live in a place that tells you you’re everybody’s lowest priority, you may not have a reason to want to be healthy. And then, if you add to that, the lack of physicians, the high cost of healthcare, the way in which pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies jack up the cost of healthcare, you’re basically engaged in a calculated cruelty in the organized abandonment of large numbers of people.

And this harm is most egregious on children, because they can’t defend themselves, because their physical systems are less able to deal with health menaces. And so we’re basically squandering a large part of the next generation in a country that is increasingly made up of people who are not white, and we’re basically setting those children up for failure. It’s like a time bomb that will go off in the future, and there’s a lot of foreseeable harm that could be prevented.

A key theory of pediatric care is that you don’t just remedy illnesses after they happen. You foresee them in advance and prevent them from happening. We could do that with the environment, we could do that with nutrition. We could do that with giving people a safe, affordable living environment. But we don’t do it, because there’s so much money to be made from injustice.

JJ: I do want to put folks onto the book The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, because there’s no way that we can address all of this in the time that we have. But I want to say, the book is enlightening about many things, and one of them is the importance of just the way that we look at, the way we see societal inequities, and the way we talk about them. And what you’re saying is we’re talking about rejecting this approach that addresses individuals as though they were divorced from community. We’re looking at individual actions by individual landlords, and not looking at systems, and that’s part of the problem.

GL: And this is what the law assumes, that an injury interrupts an otherwise just situation. You sue the individual perpetrator, you’re then made whole, and you go back to being fine.

But what if you’re not fine to begin with? What if there isn’t one individual perpetrator? What if it’s a conjuncture of obstacles in your way? Once you punish that one corporation, they declare bankruptcy, and they open up the next day with a different name.

And once the injured person wins a fair housing settlement, they go back into an innately unfair housing market, where they are disadvantaged in getting loans. They’re disadvantaged in getting insurance. They’re disadvantaged in their relations with the police. They’re disadvantaged in relation to the schools that their children are able to go to.

So multi-axis problems need multi-axis and intersectional solutions. And that means we need to work together. It means that there’s a limit to what any one of us can do as an individual to have good health or housing for ourselves, much less for the whole society.

And that’s why I try to stress in the book the emerging active and engaged public sphere constituency for good health and fair housing, and fair housing councils throughout the country, and advocates and attorneys who take on those cases, public health collectives, environmental justice organizing, community gardens, food co-ops, arts-based health projects like Building Healthy Communities in Boyle Heights, a whole series of community land trusts where people pool resources to take speculation out of the market.

And so people are mobilizing precisely because they realize that as an individual, there’s very little you can do. In the courtroom, the boardroom or the banker’s office, there are limits to what can be done.

Now there should be justice in all of those places, and individuals are entitled to good health, good housing, to the full benefits of civil rights law. But we also need to have an understanding that race itself is a political, not a biological, category, that it functions because people see things a certain way. Racism persists because people believe that people are members of different races, and we need to see racism as structural, systemic, collective.

And good health and good housing can’t just be left to be private commodities to be purchased. They’re public resources, and they need to be protected by the public, and nurtured and sustained.

LA Times (5/29/22)

JJ: I’ll only ask you one final question about news media, because we do see coverage, sometimes, about the difficulties of homelessness, or the problems of companies like Blackstone buying up homes. We see coverage. It’s just that it’s not connecting the dots. The story about why people are homeless is not connected to the story about venture capitalists buying up homes. It’s not connected.

And so to me, it’s what I call “narrating the nightmare.” Something terrible is happening, and look at these harmed people, but somehow we can’t name who’s behind it, or how it could be stopped. “But,” media say, “you can’t say we’re not acknowledging it because look at this one story where we said how harmful it is.”

And it drives me up a wall, because I know that reporters aren’t stupid, and I know that they’re not incapable of thinking systemically. I know they don’t think structural problems are boring, and I know that they don’t understand that regular people could grasp them.

So I guess what I’m saying is that corporate news media suffer from some of the same ailments that you are diagnosing in healthcare and housing, and could benefit from some of the same medicine, I guess.

New York Times (11/2/22)

GL: Yeah, and some of this has to do with the demographics of the news media industry, which is similar to the demographics of the legal profession and the medical profession. There aren’t enough people who have experienced discrimination directly.

But it’s also that a good plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so last year there were a number of stories about bias in home appraisal, in which Black families got a low appraisal for their home and they then got a white friend to sit in for them, and they took down the Jacob Lawrence paintings and the Toni Morrison books. And when it appeared that the home was owned by a white person, it was as much as $500,000 more.

I’m glad they covered this, and this is a good story. And Fair Housing groups have sued about appraisal discrimination, and the National Fair Housing Alliance has a whole campaign about it.

But nobody connected those instances to the systemic problems in the appraisal industry, which Elizabeth Korver-Glenn has written about in her book Race Brokers. They haven’t related that the low home value appraisals are connected to high property tax appraisals, as Andrew Kahrl points out in his great book The Black Tax. So the information is out there, but it’s just that they end the story too soon, and they assume things are going to be all right.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play called A Raisin in the Sun, which is about a Black family moving into a white neighborhood. And at the end of the play, the Black people are in the neighborhood, and critics said, “Oh, this is a happy ending.” And Lorraine Hansberry said, “Well, if you think that’s a happy ending, wait until they wake up the next morning and have bricks and rocks thrown at their house, and the neighbors don’t talk to them, and the police harass them.”

And so you can’t end the story too soon. We have to think about all these interconnections.

JJ: Absolutely. And we could and will continue this conversation much further.

But I just want to tell folks that we’ve been speaking with George Lipsitz. He’s research professor emeritus of Black studies in sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. And the book we’re talking about is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, and it’s available now from University of California Press. George Lipsitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GL: Thank you, Janine. I really appreciate the conversation.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 18, 2024

Chip Gibbons on Gaza First Amendment Alert

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region.

A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless. Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print. Too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, make sense or, minimally, are not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism”—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist. He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 16, 2024

60 Minutes Pushed Harris Right on Econ, Border, While Ignoring Other Vital Issues

With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS‘s 60 Minutes (10/7/24). (Donald Trump backed out of a similar interview.)

Aside from one televised debate (ABC, 9/10/24), both Harris and Trump have given corporate news outlets remarkably few opportunities to press them on important issues. While Whitaker didn’t offer Harris many softball questions—and included some sharp interrogation on the Middle East—his focus frequently started from right-wing talking points and assumptions, particularly over immigration and economic policy.

FAIR counted 29 questions, with 24 of them going to Harris. Those questions began with foreign policy, which also accounted for the most policy-related questions (7). Whitaker also asked her five questions about the economy, four about immigration, and one more generally about her changed positions on immigration, fracking and healthcare. Seven of Whitaker’s questions to Harris were unrelated to policies or governing; of the five questions to Walz, the only vaguely policy-oriented one asked him to respond to the charge that he was “dangerously liberal.”

‘How are you going to pay?’

A Pew survey (9/9/24) shows little correlation between what voters care about and what 60 Minutes (10/7/24) asked Kamala Harris about.

Economic issues are a top priority for many voters. But rather than ask Harris about whether and how her plan might help people economically, or formulate questions to help voters understand the differences between Harris’s and Trump’s plans, Whitaker focused on two long-standing media obsessions: the deficit and bipartisanship (or lack thereof).

Whitaker first asked Harris: “Groceries are 25% higher, and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?” It’s not clear that people primarily blame the administration for inflation, actually; a Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll in March found that 63% of respondents blamed higher prices on “large corporations taking advantage of inflation,” while 38% blamed Democratic policies (CNBC, 3/12/24).

Whitaker went on to list some of Harris’s more progressive economic proposals: “expand the child tax credit…give tax breaks to first-time homebuyers…and people starting small businesses.”

These are all generally politically popular, but Whitaker framed his question about them not in terms of the impact on voters, but the impact on the federal deficit, citing a deficit hawk think tank:

But it is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?

There is a very popular assumption in corporate media that federal deficits are of critical importance—that is, when Democrats are proposing to provide aid and public services to people. When Republicans propose massive tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, the same media tend to forget their deficit obsession (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).

It is worth noting—since Whitaker did not—that the CRFB found that Trump’s plan, which follows that Republican playbook, would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion. One might also bear in mind that US GDP is projected to be more than $380 trillion over the next decade.

Dissatisfied with Harris’s rather oblique answer, Whitaker insisted: “But pardon me, Madam Vice President, the question was how are you going to pay for it?” When Harris responded that she intended to “make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share of taxes,” Whitaker scoffed: “We’re dealing with the real world here. How are you going to get this through Congress?”

After Harris argued that congressmembers “know exactly what I’m talking about, ’cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about,” Whitaker shot back, “And Congress has shown no inclination to move in your direction.”

Sure, journalists shouldn’t let politicians make pie-in-the-sky promises, but it’s true that Harris’s proposals are supported by majorities of the public. Whitaker did viewers—and democracy—no favors by focusing his skepticism not on a corrupt system that benefits the wealthy, but on Harris’s critique of that system.

‘A historic flood’

Serious efforts to count the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States show little sign of the “flood” touted by 60 Minutes (Pew, 7/22/24).

Whitaker’s framing was even more right-wing on immigration. His first question, framed by a voiceover noting that “Republicans are convinced immigration is the vice president’s Achilles’ heel”:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Whitaker is referring to Biden’s tightening restrictions so that refugees cannot be granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. It’s certainly valid to question the new policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) has argued they are unconstitutional, for instance.

But Whitaker clearly wasn’t interested in constitutionality or human rights. His questioning started from the presumption that immigration is a problem, and used the dehumanizing language that is all too common in corporate media reporting on immigrants (FAIR.org, 8/23/23):

Whitaker: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?

Harris: It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

Whitaker: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?

Harris: I think—the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK? But the—

Whitaker: But the numbers did quadruple under your watch.

As others have pointed out, using flood metaphors paints immigrants as “natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion” (Critical Discourse Studies, 1/31/17).

But Whitaker is also using a right-wing talking point that’s entirely misleading. Border “encounters” increased sharply under Biden, but these encounters, as we have explained before (FAIR.org, 3/29/24),

are not a tally of how many people were able to enter the country without authorization; it’s a count of how many times people were stopped at the border by CBP agents. Many of these people had every right to seek entry, and a great number were turned away. Some of them were stopped more than once, and therefore were counted multiple times.

In fact, only roughly a third were actually released into the country (Factcheck.org, 2/27/24).

Whitaker used these misleading figures to paint undocumented immigration as a crisis, which has been a media theme since the beginning of the Biden administration (FAIR.org, 5/24/21). In fact, the percentage of the US population that is unauthorized has risen only slightly—from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022, the latest year available—which is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24).

‘Does the US have no sway?’

Internal controversy over Tony Dokoupil’s confrontational interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24) may have given Bill Whitaker an opening to challenge Harris on whether she was too supportive of Israel.

Whitaker’s first questions to Harris, about the Middle East, represented a shift in tone from ABC‘s questioning at the September debate—where moderator David Muir asked Harris to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Whitaker started his interview by pressing Harris about the United States’ continued support of Israel despite its recent escalations:

The events of the past few weeks have pushed us into the brink, if not into, an all-out regional war into the Middle East. What can Hthe US do at this point to prevent this from spinning out of control?

Harris repeated the Biden administration (and, frequently, media) line that Israel has a right to defend itself, while noting that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and that “this war has to end.” Whitaker pushed back, pointing out that the United States is an active supporter of Israel’s military and, thus, military actions:

But we supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, and yet Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden/Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire, he has resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon, he went in anyway. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Whitaker continued with two more brief questions about the relationship with Netanyahu. It’s possible that his line of questioning was influenced by the controversy within his network over CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview (9/30/24) with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which pushed a pro-Israel line hard enough to prompt charges of unprofessionalism (FAIR.org, 10/4/24; Zeteo, 10/9/24).

The three other foreign policy questions concerned US support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Two of the three asked about ending the war: “What does success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?” and “Would you meet with President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine?” The third asked whether Harris would “support the effort to expand NATO to include Ukraine.”

In contrast to the Middle East line of questioning, Whitaker did not push back against any of Harris’s answers, which expressed support for “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” and to “have a say” in determining the end of the war.

Crucial missing questions

The aftermath of two hurricanes supercharged by climate change didn’t prompt 60 Minutes to ask any questions about climate (CBS, 9/30/24).

Though Whitaker took time to ask Harris what kind of gun she owns and Walz whether he can be “trusted to tell the truth,” he didn’t ask a single question about abortion, other healthcare issues, the climate crisis or gun control. These are all remarkable omissions.

A Pew Research survey (9/9/24) found abortion was a “very important” issue to more than half of all voters, and to two-thirds of Harris supporters. But Whitaker asked no questions about what Harris and Walz would do to protect or restore reproductive rights across the US.

The healthcare system was another glaring omission by 60 Minutes, though it is voters’ second-most important issue, according to the same Pew Research survey; 65% of all voters, and 76% of Harris supporters, said that healthcare was “very important” to their vote.

Healthcare only came up as part of an accusation that “you have changed your position on so many things”: Along with shifts on immigration and fracking, Whittaker noted that “you were for Medicare for all, now you’re not,” with the result that “people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for.” Like a very similar question asked of Harris during the debate (FAIR.org, 9/13/24), it seemed crafted to press Harris on whether her conversion from left-liberal to centrist was genuine, rather than to elicit real solutions for a population with the highest healthcare costs and the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation.

At a moment when Hurricane Helene had just wreaked massive destruction across the Southeast and Hurricane Milton was already promising to deliver Florida its second devastating storm in two weeks, the lack of climate questions was striking. While voters tend to rank climate policy as a lower priority than issues like the economy or immigration, large majorities are concerned about it—and it’s an urgent issue with consequences that can’t be understated. Yet the only time climate was alluded to was in the flip-flop question, which included the preface, “You were against fracking, now you’re for it.”

Similarly, a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four people just over three weeks ago; as of this writing (10/15/24), the Gun Violence Archive reported that gun violence, excluding suicide, has killed 13,424 Americans this year. In 2019, the American Psychological Association reported that one-third of Americans said that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events. In a Pew Research survey (4/11/24), 59% of public K-12 teachers said they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school, and 23% have experienced a lockdown.

Yet the two questions Whitaker asked about guns had nothing to do with these realities or fears, or what a Harris/Walz administration would do about them. Instead, he asked Harris, “What kind of gun do you own, and when and why did you get it?” (Harris answered, “I have a Glock, and I have had it for quite some time.”) Whitaker followed up by asking Harris if she had ever fired it. (She said she had, at a shooting range.)

‘Out of step’

Walz was mostly asked non-policy questions, things like “Whether you can be trusted to tell the truth,” and why his calling Republicans “weird” has become a “rallying cry for Democrats.”

In keeping with the media’s preoccupation with pushing Democratic candidates to the right, the governor was asked to respond to charges that he was “dangerously liberal” and part of the “radical left“: “What do you say to that criticism, that rather than leading the way, you and Minnesota are actually out of step with the rest of the country?”

The right-wing framing of many of the questions asked, and the important issues ignored, might make CBS think about how in step it is with the country and its needs.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 11, 2024

‘Americans Understand That Immigration Is a Fundamental Part of Our Society’: CounterSpin interview with Insha Rahman on immigration conversation

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vera Institute of Justice’s Insha Rahman about the immigration conversation for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Unfortunately, we can assume listeners know the popular right-wing lines: Immigrants—that’s shorthand for Black and brown immigrants—are criminals, violent drug criminals especially, but also they’re stealing jobs, draining social services and, in election season, we hear they’re voting illegally in large numbers, because they are, in some way, props for the Democratic Party.

Anyone who wants to dispute those noxious tropes can do so with a search engine. Harder to combat is the overarching and bipartisan framing of immigration and immigrants as a “problem.” How do we replace batting away the latest slur with the reality-based humane conversation we need to move us to the 21st century immigration and asylum policies we could have?

Insha Rahman is vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Insha Rahman.

Insha Rahman: Thanks for having me, Janine.

Guardian (9/15/24)

JJ: Rather than ask you to engage intentionally misleading anti-immigrant talking points, I wonder if you would talk a little about the impacts. What is the fallout of myths and misinformation that might sound laughable or dismissable to many of us—what’s the fallout in the lives of the communities that you work with?

IR: First of all, the Willie Horton playbook of exploiting voters’ fears about crime, and frankly the dog whistles about race and criminality, it’s nothing new. When I say Willie Horton, everybody knows the 1988 ad that was run and allegedly sunk Michael Dukakis’ Democratic bid for president, and it’s a playbook that is old, well worn. We’ve seen it every election cycle.

And so this year, in 2024, if you feel like you’re hearing about immigration and migrants and cats and dogs nonstop, it isn’t anything new. It is really just another page of the Willie Horton playbook.

And it’s not really about immigration or immigration policies. Every poll that we have done, that we have seen, has found that Americans, by and large, understand that immigration is a fundamental part of our society, of our economy, of our communities. We are a country of immigrants. But, when it is wrapped up in a fear of crime, and playing upon racist tropes about crime and criminality, that’s where it has political impact.

And the fallout, we can see: One of the most depressing and staggering polls that I’ve seen recently is that overall support for immigration, which used to be a majority of Americans, including independents and moderate voters, supported immigration to this country. They fundamentally believed immigration is a good thing for our communities, our families, our economy. Now that support has dipped, for the first time, to below 50%. And so there’s a real fallout in terms of support for policy that’s actually smart and sensible.

Christian Science Monitor (9/19/24)

And then we see it in very real ways in places like Springfield, Ohio, where there has been a lot of legal—I should say, legal—immigration of Haitian migrants to this country, who are fleeing really devastating circumstances in Haiti. We’re watching bomb threats in local schools, immigrant residents of Springfield feeling afraid. In fact, all residents of Springfield feeling afraid, because suddenly the city, that nobody had heard of until September 10 and the presidential debate, is literally in the Klieg lights, and everyday Americans and a lot of politicians are talking about Springfield. So much so that even the Republican governor of Ohio said, “Stop the fearmongering, stop the misinformation. We are just fine. What Springfield needs is our support and help, and not fearmongering and rhetoric about us.”

JJ: I think that media give inadequate attention to the carryover or bleed-through effects. It’s not to say that people who fall for anti-immigrant misinformation, they’re not asking folks before they harass them, “To be clear, you’re Haitian, right? You’re not Dominican. I don’t want to get my hatred wrong.” It’s treated as though these are targeted attacks, and as though they end when one particular incident is resolved, or when the cameras go away. But, of course, the impact on communities goes on and on.

IR: Yeah.

JJ: Changing facts on the ground with law, with policy, with institutional culture can save and can change lives. It does also work to shift the dialogue about what’s possible, about what life looks like after you change that law, for example. What are some of the legal or policy changes that you think could be important right now, that could shift the ground on immigration and asylum?

Washington Monthly (5/21/24)

IR: One of the things that we have seen there’s widespread support for, and that can be done, is just: when there are new immigrants to our cities, to our communities, we make sure that they have the ability to work. Work, employment, is life-changing for everybody, including US citizens and other members of the community, who benefit from more labor. Right now, in many parts of this country, we have more jobs than we have people to fill them, and immigration is a necessary thing; it’s why economists across the country, across the political spectrum, say we actually need immigration. We can’t build a wall and mass-deport people and shut down the borders, because we literally will have an economic crisis in this country. So employment is a really basic thing we can do.

Another thing is, sometimes people hear, folks who are coming to our cities, especially people who are bused up from Texas and other border states, Florida—people resent housing and services and making sure basic needs are met. Well, in fact, that is cheaper than the alternative. And it is good for all of us.

And it’s not for forever: If you help somebody get on their feet with some temporary housing for three to six months, they have a work permit in hand, they have a job, they will not need to be dependent on government services and resources. It is actually better for us to set people up for a small period of time for future success.

And we’ve watched some cities do that really well. For example, Boston did not engage in the kind of fear-mongering about “all these newly arrived migrants, it’s going to be the end of the city, it’s going to destroy us,” which is what we heard from a certain elected mayor in New York City. That wasn’t the approach that Boston took. And, in fact, they’ve had a lot of newly arrived migrants as well, and they’ve managed it. And you’ll see they have really good outcomes, and there’s generally a sense of positivity towards new arrivals there in a way that there simply isn’t in New York City.

Insha Rahman: “There’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services.”

And so, again, there’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services. All of that is a better investment in our communities and our economy than the alternative.

And then we see there’s always been and always will be widespread support for a path to citizenship and legalization for folks who have been here, who are part of the fabric of our communities. And so those are some of the things we could do literally immediately, but at the local level, in terms of cities and states.

And then what we need to see Congress do—and 10 years ago there was, in fact, bipartisan support for more paths to citizenship. And we need to bring the Overton window and shift it back to there, because that’s actually good for all of us.

And one other thing I’ll just mention as a policy point is, even under the law as it is—and I would say we need to update the immigration laws so that there’s more legal paths to citizenship for folks. But even with the laws that we have, making sure people have lawyers, they have some basic due process before they’re facing deportation, means many more people access the asylum laws, other forms of relief under current immigration law, which means it keeps people and families together, it keeps people in jobs.

My organization, the Vera Institute of Justice, we run a national program where we’re helping folks who are facing deportation have access to counsel, and literally people are 10 times more likely to win their case and be able to stay in the country, stay with their families, be in their jobs and in their communities, than if they have to go through deportation proceedings without a lawyer. And there’s no right to a lawyer in those proceedings. And that’s a really big problem for keeping families and communities together.

JJ: Just finally, what would you be looking for in a healthy public conversation about the changes we need to get from where we’re at to where we could be, and maybe who would be in that conversation that isn’t being heard from so much now?

IR: Too often, the conversation about immigration is dominated by politicians who are looking to score cheap political points. And if you listen to their rhetoric, they don’t have a single solution. Mass deportation is not a solution. Building a wall is not a solution.

New York Times (9/30/24)

And you know who actually has, and maybe they’re unlikely players in this, but folks who actually have very clear solutions for how we have a real and thoughtful conversation about immigration, that’s business owners and chambers of commerce. And, again, I made the point earlier that economists are like, “If we just shut down immigration, if we deport everybody, our economy will collapse.” Nobody understands that better than businesses and business owners, and they’re actually a really important voice in this conversation that often gets overlooked.

Just to go back to Springfield, Ohio, that we talked about, you actually saw the local chamber of commerce, and a number of different business owners, go out and speak publicly on the record, on the nighttime news and the newspaper and city council hearings, to say, “We need our immigrant workers and family members and community members, because they’re a vital part of our economy.”

So I actually think that’s a missing voice in this conversation that could help to bring the poles together, because the right likes business. I think the left can live with business, if business is coming at the issues in the right way. And I think there’s an opportunity to really actually bring people together, and have a more reasoned, thoughtful conversation about what the path forward is.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, and the director of Vera Action. Find their work online at Vera.org. Thank you so much, Insha Rahman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IR: Thanks for having me, Janine.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 11, 2024

‘Americans Understand That Immigration Is a Fundamental Part of Our Society’: CounterSpin interview with Insha Rahman on immigration conversation

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vera Institute of Justice’s Insha Rahman about the immigration conversation for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Unfortunately, we can assume listeners know the popular right-wing lines: Immigrants—that’s shorthand for Black and brown immigrants—are criminals, violent drug criminals especially, but also they’re stealing jobs, draining social services and, in election season, we hear they’re voting illegally in large numbers, because they are, in some way, props for the Democratic Party.

Anyone who wants to dispute those noxious tropes can do so with a search engine. Harder to combat is the overarching and bipartisan framing of immigration and immigrants as a “problem.” How do we replace batting away the latest slur with the reality-based humane conversation we need to move us to the 21st century immigration and asylum policies we could have?

Insha Rahman is vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Insha Rahman.

Insha Rahman: Thanks for having me, Janine.

Guardian (9/15/24)

JJ: Rather than ask you to engage intentionally misleading anti-immigrant talking points, I wonder if you would talk a little about the impacts. What is the fallout of myths and misinformation that might sound laughable or dismissable to many of us—what’s the fallout in the lives of the communities that you work with?

IR: First of all, the Willie Horton playbook of exploiting voters’ fears about crime, and frankly the dog whistles about race and criminality, it’s nothing new. When I say Willie Horton, everybody knows the 1988 ad that was run and allegedly sunk Michael Dukakis’ Democratic bid for president, and it’s a playbook that is old, well worn. We’ve seen it every election cycle.

And so this year, in 2024, if you feel like you’re hearing about immigration and migrants and cats and dogs nonstop, it isn’t anything new. It is really just another page of the Willie Horton playbook.

And it’s not really about immigration or immigration policies. Every poll that we have done, that we have seen, has found that Americans, by and large, understand that immigration is a fundamental part of our society, of our economy, of our communities. We are a country of immigrants. But, when it is wrapped up in a fear of crime, and playing upon racist tropes about crime and criminality, that’s where it has political impact.

And the fallout, we can see: One of the most depressing and staggering polls that I’ve seen recently is that overall support for immigration, which used to be a majority of Americans, including independents and moderate voters, supported immigration to this country. They fundamentally believed immigration is a good thing for our communities, our families, our economy. Now that support has dipped, for the first time, to below 50%. And so there’s a real fallout in terms of support for policy that’s actually smart and sensible.

Christian Science Monitor (9/19/24)

And then we see it in very real ways in places like Springfield, Ohio, where there has been a lot of legal—I should say, legal—immigration of Haitian migrants to this country, who are fleeing really devastating circumstances in Haiti. We’re watching bomb threats in local schools, immigrant residents of Springfield feeling afraid. In fact, all residents of Springfield feeling afraid, because suddenly the city, that nobody had heard of until September 10 and the presidential debate, is literally in the Klieg lights, and everyday Americans and a lot of politicians are talking about Springfield. So much so that even the Republican governor of Ohio said, “Stop the fearmongering, stop the misinformation. We are just fine. What Springfield needs is our support and help, and not fearmongering and rhetoric about us.”

JJ: I think that media give inadequate attention to the carryover or bleed-through effects. It’s not to say that people who fall for anti-immigrant misinformation, they’re not asking folks before they harass them, “To be clear, you’re Haitian, right? You’re not Dominican. I don’t want to get my hatred wrong.” It’s treated as though these are targeted attacks, and as though they end when one particular incident is resolved, or when the cameras go away. But, of course, the impact on communities goes on and on.

IR: Yeah.

JJ: Changing facts on the ground with law, with policy, with institutional culture can save and can change lives. It does also work to shift the dialogue about what’s possible, about what life looks like after you change that law, for example. What are some of the legal or policy changes that you think could be important right now, that could shift the ground on immigration and asylum?

Washington Monthly (5/21/24)

IR: One of the things that we have seen there’s widespread support for, and that can be done, is just: when there are new immigrants to our cities, to our communities, we make sure that they have the ability to work. Work, employment, is life-changing for everybody, including US citizens and other members of the community, who benefit from more labor. Right now, in many parts of this country, we have more jobs than we have people to fill them, and immigration is a necessary thing; it’s why economists across the country, across the political spectrum, say we actually need immigration. We can’t build a wall and mass-deport people and shut down the borders, because we literally will have an economic crisis in this country. So employment is a really basic thing we can do.

Another thing is, sometimes people hear, folks who are coming to our cities, especially people who are bused up from Texas and other border states, Florida—people resent housing and services and making sure basic needs are met. Well, in fact, that is cheaper than the alternative. And it is good for all of us.

And it’s not for forever: If you help somebody get on their feet with some temporary housing for three to six months, they have a work permit in hand, they have a job, they will not need to be dependent on government services and resources. It is actually better for us to set people up for a small period of time for future success.

And we’ve watched some cities do that really well. For example, Boston did not engage in the kind of fear-mongering about “all these newly arrived migrants, it’s going to be the end of the city, it’s going to destroy us,” which is what we heard from a certain elected mayor in New York City. That wasn’t the approach that Boston took. And, in fact, they’ve had a lot of newly arrived migrants as well, and they’ve managed it. And you’ll see they have really good outcomes, and there’s generally a sense of positivity towards new arrivals there in a way that there simply isn’t in New York City.

Insha Rahman: “There’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services.”

And so, again, there’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services. All of that is a better investment in our communities and our economy than the alternative.

And then we see there’s always been and always will be widespread support for a path to citizenship and legalization for folks who have been here, who are part of the fabric of our communities. And so those are some of the things we could do literally immediately, but at the local level, in terms of cities and states.

And then what we need to see Congress do—and 10 years ago there was, in fact, bipartisan support for more paths to citizenship. And we need to bring the Overton window and shift it back to there, because that’s actually good for all of us.

And one other thing I’ll just mention as a policy point is, even under the law as it is—and I would say we need to update the immigration laws so that there’s more legal paths to citizenship for folks. But even with the laws that we have, making sure people have lawyers, they have some basic due process before they’re facing deportation, means many more people access the asylum laws, other forms of relief under current immigration law, which means it keeps people and families together, it keeps people in jobs.

My organization, the Vera Institute of Justice, we run a national program where we’re helping folks who are facing deportation have access to counsel, and literally people are 10 times more likely to win their case and be able to stay in the country, stay with their families, be in their jobs and in their communities, than if they have to go through deportation proceedings without a lawyer. And there’s no right to a lawyer in those proceedings. And that’s a really big problem for keeping families and communities together.

JJ: Just finally, what would you be looking for in a healthy public conversation about the changes we need to get from where we’re at to where we could be, and maybe who would be in that conversation that isn’t being heard from so much now?

IR: Too often, the conversation about immigration is dominated by politicians who are looking to score cheap political points. And if you listen to their rhetoric, they don’t have a single solution. Mass deportation is not a solution. Building a wall is not a solution.

New York Times (9/30/24)

And you know who actually has, and maybe they’re unlikely players in this, but folks who actually have very clear solutions for how we have a real and thoughtful conversation about immigration, that’s business owners and chambers of commerce. And, again, I made the point earlier that economists are like, “If we just shut down immigration, if we deport everybody, our economy will collapse.” Nobody understands that better than businesses and business owners, and they’re actually a really important voice in this conversation that often gets overlooked.

Just to go back to Springfield, Ohio, that we talked about, you actually saw the local chamber of commerce, and a number of different business owners, go out and speak publicly on the record, on the nighttime news and the newspaper and city council hearings, to say, “We need our immigrant workers and family members and community members, because they’re a vital part of our economy.”

So I actually think that’s a missing voice in this conversation that could help to bring the poles together, because the right likes business. I think the left can live with business, if business is coming at the issues in the right way. And I think there’s an opportunity to really actually bring people together, and have a more reasoned, thoughtful conversation about what the path forward is.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, and the director of Vera Action. Find their work online at Vera.org. Thank you so much, Insha Rahman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IR: Thanks for having me, Janine.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 11, 2024

For NYT’s ‘Free Speech’ Maven, Racism Needs Protection, Gaza Protests Don’t

What are the limits of free speech on a college campus? The New York Times has deployed one of its highest-ranking soldiers in the culture war against liberalism to remind us that the speech of white supremacists must be defended, but criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian human rights are going too far.

Times columnist John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University, is a part of the paper’s growing chorus of elite, pearl-clutching commentators (e.g., 6/7/18, 11/9/21, 3/18/23, 2/24/24) who blame society’s ills on an amorphous enemy of tyrannical “wokeness,” which McWhorter (3/21/23) presents as “an anti-Enlightenment program.” The Times embraces the idea, widespread in corporate media (Atlantic, 1/27/21; Newsweek, 7/25/23), that today’s social justice warriors are the true enemies of free speech.

John McWhorter (New York Times, 4/23/24): “Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”

McWhorter found a limit to free speech and academic freedom earlier this year. He wrote (New York Times, 4/23/24) that he decided not to subject his students to an exercise where they would listen to the sounds around them, because they would be forced to listen to pro-Palestine protesters’ “infuriated chanting.” He said:

Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans…. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus…. Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?….

The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

He’s clearly trying to portray leftist protesters as hypocritical and applying double standards: They readily seek to shut down racist speech but find anti-Israel speech “permissible.”

Yet McWhorter himself, so quick to condemn what he says is “a form of abuse” of Jewish students through the “relentless assault” of protesters’ Israel-critical speech—and with no words of reproach for the school president’s decision to “crack down” on the protests and their freedom of expression—applies a very different standard when the campus speech in question is racist, sexist or homophobic.

‘Flagrant unprofessional conduct’

For McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24), “upholding the ideals of free speech” requires not punishing a professor who publicly insults her Black students.

In sharp contrast to his denunciation of pro-Palestine protesters’ speech, McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24) offered a full-throated defense of Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been sanctioned by the school for “flagrant unprofessional conduct,” including “a history of making sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status,” as well as “breaching grade privacy requirements” (Wall Street Journal, 9/24/24).

A faculty panel unanimously recommended Wax be suspended for a year at half salary, publicly reprimanded and stripped of her named chair; Wax has appealed the recommendation and is still teaching.

Wax has said that the US is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” (CNN, 9/25/24). The Daily Pennsylvanian (8/10/17) wrote that, in an interview, Wax “said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior”: “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’…. Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

Wax made public comments about Black students’ grades that were both a violation of confidentiality and, according to the Penn law school dean, false (Vox, 2/16/23):

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.

The law professor has repeatedly invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to deliver guest lectures in her class, including this semester, after the faculty panel’s recommendation. She will be a featured speaker at a conference sponsored by Taylor’s white supremacist journal American Renaissance (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24)—where, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

Given McWhorter’s previously stated belief that Jewish students shouldn’t have to listen to speech like “from the river to the sea,” one might expect that he would similarly condemn Wax’s subjection of her Black and brown students to eugenicist, white supremacist speech.

Instead, McWhorter uses the Wax affair to defend the right of free speech, a role he didn’t take on when his own school clamped down on anti-genocide protests (Columbia Spectator, 4/4/24). Her views might be “Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous,” his headline declared, but “She Shouldn’t Be Punished” for them.

‘Living with discomfort’—or not

“We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy…but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member,” a U Penn faculty panel insisted (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24).

McWhorter, as a part of the anti-woke media movement to frame liberalism as the opponent of openness, accepts Wax as a victim of the cancel mob: “Her suspension,” he said, “is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity.”

He wrote: “Upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort—or even anger and injury—that offensive ideas can cause.”

The contrast with his earlier column is striking. If a Black or brown student is subjected to white supremacist speech, by his account, that student’s “discomfort—or even anger and injury” is their problem, and of less importance than protecting free speech. But if a white student is subjected to anti-Zionist speech, McWhorter considers it a “form of abuse” that they should not be expected to simply “be able to tolerate.”

Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.’s statement on the matter makes clear that Wax isn’t being sanctioned for merely breaking liberal conventions of decorum. A faculty review board found that Wax “engaged in ‘flagrant unprofessional conduct’ that breached [her] responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn” from her (University of Pennsylvania Almanac, 9/24/24). The decision resulting from the investigation, to which the statement links, also says that the inquiry board decided against recommending a much tougher punishment, “namely, termination from her faculty position.”

McWhorter deems the disciplinary action “egregious,” yet he voiced no similar complaints about disciplinary actions taken by Columbia and other schools against pro-Palestine protesters. He was also quick to call for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black scholar who had been hounded by right-wing congressmembers over allowing criticism of Israel on her campus (NPR, 12/12/23; FAIR.org, 12/12/23) before being pushed out in a plagiarism scandal. McWhorter (New York Times, 12/21/23) admitted that the school’s plagiarism “policy may not apply to the university’s president,” but said the vibes of the matter trumped procedure, saying “Gay would be denigrating the values of ‘veritas’ that she and Harvard aspire to uphold” if she stayed.

Acceptable and unacceptable restrictions

Columbia University’s suspension of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters (Columbia Spectator, 11/29/23) apparently did not contradict “the ideal of free speech,” in McWhorter’s view, because the university had not “categorically prohibited criticism of Israel.”

McWhorter recognized the parallels between the Wax affair and the pro-Palestine protests, but insinuated the usual, and false, media equation between pro-Palestine and anti-Black speech that paints anti-Zionism as antisemitism (FAIR.org, 12/15/23). He wrote that the protests are another example in which universities have struggled with “identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment”:

Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.

The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.

McWhorter seems to be drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable restrictions on speech: Suspending student clubs, “pushing” demonstrations off campus (with the help of police in riot gear) and firing professors for anti-Israel sentiments are apparently fine by McWhorter, whereas “categorical” prohibitions on anti-Israel speech would cross the line.

It’s remarkable that McWhorter doesn’t see that firing a professor over anti-Israel views is quite obviously a much harsher punishment than Wax faces—or that suspending a professor for a year for specific actions that harmed students is not a categorical prohibition on racist speech.

Enormous chilling effect

Natasha Lennard (Intercept, 5/16/24): “Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics…have been fired, suspended or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.”

What’s more, while he claims there has been no blanket ban on pro-Palestine thought, there have been so many official actions against faculty and students that we now see an enormous chilling effect on speech.

McWhorter did link to the Intercept story (9/26/24) on the firing of a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College for having

shared, on her personal Instagram account…a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

But there’s much more. New York University added “Zionist” to a list of “examples of speech that could violate the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policies” (Washington Square News, 8/26/24), which has FAIR wondering what impact this might have on professors who teach Middle Eastern history.

Steven Thrasher, an acclaimed journalist who has commented here at FAIR, teaches social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where he may lose employment because of his activism against the genocide in Gaza. Democracy Now! (9/5/24) reported that the university “filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped.” However, “students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms, because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation.”

Hyperallergic (9/20/24) reported that at Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, the administration sent

behavioral directives for Barnard employees, specifying that “messaging…supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective” and posting political signs on office doors would go against the college’s community values.

Telling sociologists, historians, political scientists and anthropologists to refrain from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint” is like telling a quarterback not to pass the football. Once again, this is the kind of directive that undoes the kind of open discourse McWhorter says he supports.

Tip of the iceberg

Radhika Sainath (Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/24): “Trying to appease pro-Israel forces by preventing protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza…colleges are rewriting policies that will have dire consequences on university life for years to come.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to campus repression of anti-genocide activists—many of whom are Jewish, despite McWhorter’s attempt to treat criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, wrote about the widespread erosion of freedom on campuses this year at Inside Higher Ed (9/16/24):

Indeed, my office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves. Often, no reason is given.

On one campus, students were slapped with conduct violations for writing an op-ed discussing a Gaza encampment in positive ways. Potlucks for Palestine have been canceled. Professors who reference Gaza or Palestine in their courses are told those courses are not fit for the curriculum, or having their syllabi scrutinized—or turned over to Congress in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Adjuncts have been fired. Tenure-track professors suspended. Tenured professors investigated.

If universities banned students from wearing Tibetan clothes or canceled “momo night” because these things might offend Chinese students, we could bet good money that McWhorter and the rest of the anti-woke pack would be up in arms, and rightfully so.

But McWhorter is only fighting to protect conservatives, which are classified as political victims in liberal academic society. We have come to expect such hypocrisy from the New York Times and other media’s anti-woke moral panic (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 7/23/21, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). But it’s remarkable that McWhorter feels comfortable being so contradictory and misleading in disingenuous pursuit of “free speech.”

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 11, 2024

George Lipsitz on the Impacts of Housing Discrimination

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

UC Press (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 10, 2024

Demonizing Hezbollah to Legitimize a US/Israel Onslaught on Lebanon

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

One person’s terrorist…

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

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

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

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

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

Violence they dislike

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lebanon ‘hijacked’ and ‘kidnapped’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reduced to a ‘proxy’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Remarkable restraint’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arab lives don’t matter to corporate media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The piece went on to say that

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

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

‘More Hezbollah’s fault’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 10, 2024

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

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

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

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

Washington Post (9/3/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacobin (2/7/22)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insure Our Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truthout (9/27/24)

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

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

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

DS: Thank you.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 7, 2024

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

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

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

‘Weaponized sexual violence’

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

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

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

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

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

The most comprehensive evidence

According to the World Health Organization:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lopsided coverage

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

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

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

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

Consistent prevarication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Part of a broader pattern’

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

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

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

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

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

An ‘established’ conclusion

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

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

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

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

‘On shaky foundations’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Our testimonies are fully accepted’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opting for selective outrage

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where Israel takes Gazans’

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

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

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

The two most detailed paragraphs about sexual violence read:

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

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

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

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

‘No credible evidence’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legitimizing an unlawful occupation

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

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

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

Furthermore, as the Egyptian feminist coalition SpeakUp! articulated:

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 4, 2024

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

Random House (2024)

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

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

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

‘In the backpack of an extremist’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What offends you about a Jewish state?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 4, 2024

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

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

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

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

Big banking, big shipping, big banana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missing workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loud on wages, silent on profits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frightening readers to management’s side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 4, 2024

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

Newsweek (9/27/24)

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

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

Vera Institute (3/21/24)

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

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

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
October 3, 2024

Media Urge Expansion of Ukraine War—Nuclear Risk Be Damned

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

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

Lowering the bar

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

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

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

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

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

Dismissing the nuclear risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barely bothering to justify

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

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

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

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

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

Dubious experts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Silver bullet or powder keg’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contrary opinions hard to find

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 2, 2024

New Yorker Sides With Right Against Childless Cat Ladies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘True damage of the birth dearth’

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

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

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

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

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

‘God, not subsidies’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not enough white babies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De-economizing hot-button issues

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
October 1, 2024

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

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

Leon Panetta on CBS (9/22/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responsible Statecraft (1/18/24)

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

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

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

Intercept (9/10/24)

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

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

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

Al Jazeera (9/12/24)

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

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

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

ProPublica (9/24/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LA Times (9/23/24)

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

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

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

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

MB: Thank you for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 30, 2024

Vance Dossier Shows Not All Hacks Are Created Equal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s the beef?

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

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

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

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

‘Took a deep breath’

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

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

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

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

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

Double standards for leaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet the new boss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Chilling effect on speech’

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 27, 2024

Judges in TikTok Case Seem Ready to Discount First Amendment

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

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

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

‘Foreign adversary controlled’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Skeptical’ of free-speech argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unpopular censorship

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

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

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

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

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

‘Demanding legal scrutiny’

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

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

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

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

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

Spies don’t need TikTok

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 27, 2024

Mohamad Bazzi on Israeli Terror Attacks

Al Jazeera (9/20/24)

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

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

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

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

September 26, 2024

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

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

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

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

Unengaged—but opinionated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masking apathy

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

To what extent do you support or oppose the following: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants?

Strongly support	30%
Somewhat support	24%
Somewhat oppose	20%
Strongly oppose	23%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.

September 24, 2024

CNN’s Tapper Smears Tlaib With Baseless Charge of Bias

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Quite an accusation’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Never explicitly said’

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

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

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

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

He then asked Nessel:

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 23, 2024

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

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

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

Comrade Kamala?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just supply and demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unchecked capitalism is good, actually

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

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

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

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

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

A problem you shouldn’t solve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gimmicks and pandering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
September 20, 2024

Jen Senko on The Brainwashing of My Dad

The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)

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

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

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

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 19, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregory Shupak: Hi.

New York Times, 9/10/24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GS: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal, 2/2/24

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

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

GS: Thanks for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 19, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Spitzer: Good to speak with you.

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

Slate, 10/21/15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KFF, 7/8/22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RS: My pleasure.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 18, 2024

WSJ Calls for Keeping Judiciary in Shadows

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

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

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

‘Damaging to the comity’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Malice aforethought’

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

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

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

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

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

Sheltered from citizens

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 18, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is identity politics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘balance’ double standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both-sidesing

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

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

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

Shribman continued:

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

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

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

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

Rare mentions of the right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invisible identities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on FAIR.
September 13, 2024

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

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

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

Economy & healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abortion

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

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

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

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

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

Immigration & race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Factchecking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt

This post was originally published on FAIR.