FAIR

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510.mp3

 

This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza—because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper whined recently: “We’re covering these protests and covering free speech versus security on campus. This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court.”

Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about, but act to change, US enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault.

(photo: Jim Naureckas)

“I don’t know that the protesters are, from a media perspective, accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” Tapper said. If you listen closely, you can hear him say, “We, as media, don’t want them to accomplish anything, except to be presented, as protestors have throughout US history, as a nuisance and an interference with grownup conversation. And we, as media, will use our actual power to sell that idea.”

People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal US support for Israel’s actions, used to summarily reducing any criticism of Israel to antisemitism, even when it comes from Jewish people, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical—first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the US press and their handlers, who are so used to driving the narrative they don’t know what to do except yell “shut up shut up shut up” and send in the cops. In the name of, you know, principled debate.

We talk about latest developments in Gaza with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Abuznaid.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at protester/press relations, “outside agitators” and TikTok censorship.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Banter.mp3

 

The post Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah Invasion appeared first on FAIR.

 

During the summer of protests that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, journalists and readers alike began taking a hard look at how much news reporting relied on police sources. In particular, the standard use of “police said” articles—where the main or only source of information came from law enforcement—was leading the media to publish information that was outright wrong.

Journalists learned some lessons from the Black Lives Matter protests (Washington Post, 6/30/20)—and promptly forgot them.

In their first media statement on Floyd’s death, Minneapolis police claimed that officers had observed Floyd “suffering medical distress and called for an ambulance”; it was only when cellphone video emerged that it was reported that police were in fact kneeling on Floyd’s neck at the time (NBC News, 5/26/20).  To many, it was all too familiar a pattern: Five years earlier, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) had based its reporting on the police killing of Freddie Gray almost entirely on official police statements, downplaying eyewitness reports that officers had thrown Gray headfirst into a van shortly before he died of neck injuries.

“What the police tell you initially is a rumor,” Mel Reeves, an editor at the then-86-year-old African-American newspaper the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder told the Washington Post (6/30/20). “And a lot of the times it’s not accurate.” CNN (6/6/20), in a report on how camera footage often ended up disproving police claims, went further: “Videos from several recent incidents, and countless others from over the years, have shown what many Black Americans have long maintained: that police officers lie.”

Yet four years later, when protests broke out on college campuses calling for universities to divest from companies that support the Israeli government’s campaign of killing civilians in Gaza, US media forgot those lessons—and ended up repeatedly misinforming readers as a result.

‘Trying to radicalize our children’

Nahla Al-Arian could more accurately described as a retired elementary teacher visiting the campus that her journalist daughter graduated from.

The morning after the New York Police Department arrested 282 people at Columbia University and the City College of New York during protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, MSNBC’s Morning Joe (5/1/24) welcomed New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD deputy commissioner of public information Tarik Sheppard as its sole guests. “At what point was it known to you that this was something more [than students] and that there were people who maybe had plans for worse than what some of the students were up to?” MSNBC anchor Willie Geist asked Adams. The mayor replied:

We were able to actually confirm that with our intelligence division and one of the individual’s husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level…. These were professionals that were here. I just want to send a clear message out that there are people who are harmful and are trying to radicalize our children.

Co-anchor Mika Brzezinski nodded in approval. When Adams added, “I don’t know if they’re international, we need to look into that as well,” Brzezinski softly said, “Yes.”

The story of the terrorist’s wife had first been put forward by city officials the previous evening, when CBS New York reporter Ali Bauman posted on Twitter, now rebranded as X (4/30/24; since deleted, but widely screenshotted), that “City Hall sources tell @CBSNewYork evidence that the wife of a known terrorist is with protestors on Columbia University campus.” At 1:47 am, CNN (5/1/24) issued a “breaking news” alert identifying the couple, Nahla and Sami Al-Arian, and showing a photo of Nahla on campus that Sami had posted to Twitter.

The next morning, Jake Offenhartz of the Associated Press (5/1/24) tracked down this “professional” agitator: Nahla Al-Arian was a retired elementary school teacher, and Sami a former computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida. He had been arrested in 2003 at the behest of then–US Attorney General John Ashcroft and charged with supporting the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. After spending two years in jail awaiting trial, he was acquitted on all but one charge (a jury was deadlocked on the remaining count), and eventually agreed to a plea deal in which he and his wife moved to Turkey.

Nahla Al-Arian had visited the protests a week earlier with her daughters, both TV journalists, one a Columbia Journalism School graduate. Nahla stayed for about an hour, she told the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (5/3/24), listening to part of a teach-in and sharing some hummus with students, then returned to Virginia, where she was visiting her grandchildren, when Columbia students occupied a university building and police moved in to make arrests.

‘Look at the tents’

“Look at the tents,” NYPD official Kaz Daughtry told Fox 5 (4/23/24).  “They all were the same color, the same ones that we saw at NYU, the same ones that we see at Columbia.”

This wasn’t the first time the NYPD had alleged that outsiders were behind the campus protests. A week earlier, after the Columbia encampment had resulted in an earlier round of arrests at the behest of university president Minouche Shafik, Fox 5 Good Day New York (4/23/24) brought on Sheppard and NYPD Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry as its guests. “The mayor is describing some of the people there as professional agitators,” said anchor Rosanna Scotto. “Are these just students?”

“Look at the tents,” replied Daughtry. “They all were the same color, the same ones that we saw at NYU, the same ones that we see at Columbia. To me, I think someone is funding this.”

After an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (4/24/24) asserted that “Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses”— actually, one protestor at Yale and one at the University of California, Berkeley, were former fellows at a nonprofit funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—the New York Post (4/26/24) wrote that “copycat tent cities have been set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia—all of them organized by branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine.”

At the same time, as Wired (4/25/24) reported, dozens of Facebook and Twitter accounts had posted identical messages about the tents, saying: “Almost all the tents are identical—same design, same size, same fresh-out-of-the-box appearance. I know that college students are not that rich or coordinated.”

Snopes (4/29/24) later investigated the Post’s claims, and found no evidence that Soros had funded Students for Justice in Palestine. Meanwhile, Hell Gate (4/24/24) had checked Daughtry’s theory of a secret tent-funder through advanced data gathering: They googled it. As it turned out, there was a simpler explanation for why students across the city were using similar tents—they were the cheapest ones available online, for as little as $15. “My God,” reported the news site, “looks like what we’ve got on our hands is a classic case of college students buying something cheap and disposable.”

‘This is what professionals bring’

NYPD’s Tarik Sheppard presented as evidence of “outside agitators” a bike lock with the same Kryptonite logo as the locks sold by Columbia (photo: Christopher Robbins/Hell Gate).

The same Morning Joe appearance by Adams and Sheppard introduced another household item that, police claimed, was a clear sign of outsiders being behind the protests. “You brought in a pretty staggering visual,” Brzezinski said to Sheppard. After he spoke about how “outside agitators” wanted to “create discord,” she prodded him, “Tell us about this chain.”

Sheppard lifted up a heavy metal chain, which clattered noisily against his desk. “This is not what students bring to school,” he declared. (“Don’t think so!” replied Brzezinski.) “This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities…. And this is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall.”

That night, Fox News (5/1/24) ran the clip of Sheppard brandishing the chain, with anchor Sean Hannity calling the situation “a recipe for disaster.” The New York Daily News (5/1/24) quoted Sheppard’s “not what students bring to school” statement as well, without any attempt to check its accuracy.

Almost immediately, the “professional” chain story began to unravel. Less than 20 minutes after the Morning Joe segment, New York Times visual investigations reporter Aric Toler (5/1/24) tweeted that the exact same chain was not only used by Columbia students, it was in fact sold by the university’s own public safety department, under its “Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program.” At an NYPD press conference later that morning, The City reporter Katie Honan then showed the school’s listing to Sheppard, who insisted, “This is not the chain.”

Toler later tweeted a photo comparing the two, which appeared almost identical. Hell Gate editor Christopher Robbins, who was at the press conference, provided FAIR with a still frame from a video showing that the chain presented by Sheppard was attached to a lock with the same Kryptonite logo as is advertised on the Columbia site.

‘Mastermind behind the scenes’

The NYPD’s Daughtry went on Newsmax (5/3/24) to hold up a copy of an Oxford University Press book as evidence that an unspecified “they” is “radicalizing our students.” Daughtry’s copy appears to be a facsimile; the actual book is four inches by six inches (Screengrab: Independent, 5/4/24).

Two days after Adams and Sheppard appeared on Morning Joe, Daughtry tweeted photos of items he said were found inside Hamilton Hall after the arrests, writing:

Gas masks, ear plugs, helmets, goggles, tape, hammers, knives, ropes and a book on TERRORISM. These are not the tools of students protesting, these are the tools of agitators, of people who were working on something nefarious.

That same day, Daughtry went on Newsmax (5/3/24; Independent, 5/4/24) and held up the cover of the book in question, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. “There is somebody—whether it’s paid or not paid—but they are radicalizing our students,” he declared. Police, he said, were investigating the “mastermind behind the scenes.” Right-wing news organizations like the National Desk (5/3/24) and the Center Square (5/6/24)  immediately picked up on the report of the “disturbing” items, without speaking to either protestors or university officials.

The Terrorism book, it turned out, was part of an Oxford University Press series of short books—think “For Dummies,” but with a more academic bent—that was carried by Columbia itself at its libraries (Daily News, 5/4/24). Its author, leading British historian Charles Townshend, told the Daily News that he was disappointed the NYPD was implying that “people should not write about the subject at all.” The Independent (5/4/24) quoted a tweet from Timothy Kaldes, the deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy: “How do you think we train professionals to work on these issues? No one at NYPD has books on terrorism? You all just study Die Hard?”

Media covering campus protests in the rest of the US similarly relied heavily on “police said” reporting, especially in the wake of the arrests of student protestors. CNN was an especially frequent perpetrator: Its report on mass arrests of protestors at Indiana University (4/25/24) ran online with the headline “At Least 33 People Detained on Indiana University’s Campus During Protests, Police Say,” and led with a police statement that students had been warned “numerous times” to leave their encampment, with the network stating blandly that “individuals who refused were detained and removed from the area.” Students later told reporters that they had been hit, kicked and placed in chokeholds by police during their arrests, and an Indiana State Police official confirmed that one officer had been placed on a rooftop with a sniper rifle (WFIU, 4/29/24).

The following week, CNN (5/1/24) reported on “violent clashes ongoing at UCLA” by citing a tweet from the Los Angeles Police Department that “due to multiple acts of violence,” police were responding “to restore order.” In fact, the incident turned out to be an attack by a violent pro-Israel mob on the student encampment (LA Times, 5/1/24). News outlets have a history of using terms like “clashes” to blur who instigated violence, whether by right-wingers or by the police themselves.

‘”Police said” not shorthand for truth’

Student journalists have largely been able to cover the encampments without relying on police forces to tell them what reality is (New York Focus, 5/2/24).

Law enforcement agencies, it’s been clear for decades, are unreliable narrators: It’s why journalism groups like Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation (10/27/22) have called for news outlets to stop treating police statements as “neutral sources of information.”

Following the murder of George Floyd, the Washington Post (6/30/20) wrote that “with fewer reporters handling more stories, the reliance on official sourcing may be increasing.” It quoted Marshall Project editor-in-chief Susan Chira as saying that police should be treated with “the same degree of skepticism as you treat any other source…. ‘Police said’ is not a shorthand for truth.”

There are, in fact, plenty of ways to report on the arrests of protestors without relying on the word of police officials: The Columbia Spectator (5/4/24), the Columbia radio station WKCR-FM and Columbia Journalism School students (New York Focus, 5/2/24) all contributed reporting that ran rings around the officially sourced segments that dominated the professional news media, despite a campus lockdown that at times left them unable to leave classroom buildings to witness events firsthand.

They found that Columbia protestors who occupied Hamilton Hall—described by Fox News (4/30/24) as a “mob of anarchists” — had in fact been organized and nonviolent: “It was very intentional and purposeful, and even what was damaged, like the windows, was all out of functionality,” one photographer eyewitness told the Spectator, describing students telling facilities workers, “Please, we need you to leave. You don’t get paid enough to deal with this.’

Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student, told the Spectator:

One officer had the nerve to say, “We’re here to keep you safe.” Moments later, they threw our friends down the stairs. I have images of our friends bleeding. I’ve talked to friends who couldn’t breathe, who were body-slammed, people who were unconscious. That’s keeping us safe?

It was a stark contrast with what cable TV viewers saw on MSNBC, where, as Adams and Sheppard wrapped up their Morning Joe segment, Brzezinski thanked them for joining the program, adding, “We really appreciate everything you’re doing.”

That’s no wonder: If you only talk to one side in a dispute, you’re more likely to end up concluding that they’re the heroes.

The post On Campus Gaza Protests, Media Let Police Tell the Story—Even When They’re Wrong appeared first on FAIR.

 

As US lawmakers’ agitation over TikTok culminates in a law that threatens a nationwide ban if the social media platform isn’t sold to a US buyer within nine months, an emergent media narrative finds a silver lining. Every legislative move targeting TikTok, the story goes, has the potential to inspire much-needed regulation of tech behemoths like Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple.

But by conflating the US’s legal treatment of TikTok—a subsidiary of the Beijing-based ByteDance—with that of its own tech industry, media obscure the real reasons for the law’s passage.

False comparisons

Did the TikTok law really break the “tech law logjam,” as the headline (New York Times, 4/25/24) asserts? Probably not, the story acknowledges.

This was apparent in a New York Times piece (4/25/24) headlined “TikTok Broke the Tech Law Logjam. Can That Success Be Repeated?” Author Cecilia Kang described the recently instated divest-or-ban law—passed as part of a package with aid to Israel and Ukraine—as an instance of “reining in the tech giants.” The article suggested that the ban might be a harbinger of broader regulation of the tech industry in the public interest, such as antitrust legislation or mental-health guardrails.

Kang cited multiple sources who doubted that the ultimatum would spur regulation of US tech companies, arguing that lawmakers influenced by industry lobbying and 2024 campaign strategies would balk at the notion of curtailing US corporate power.

It’s fair to note  that the TikTok law was unlikely to have this effect. But lobbying and campaigning aren’t the only, or even the primary, explanations for this. A simple review of the legislation shows that it’s not a form of good-faith regulation meant to protect the populace, but an effort to either seize or severely weaken TikTok in the name of US interests.

Kang’s thesis was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)

If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”

Pretext for censorship

Mitt Romney on Gaza (Common Dreams, 5/6/24): “The way this has played out on social media…has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.

The censorial intentions of the legislation have been thrown into sharp relief by congressional Republicans. In an address on April 24, the day President Joe Biden made the ultimatum law, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R–Neb.) fretted that “nearly a third” of users between the ages of 18 and 29 used TikTok as a regular news source. (Results from a November 2023 Pew survey confirm this.) This was cause for alarm, according to the senator, because the platform featured a heightened concentration of “pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas” videos as part of a dastardly plot by the Chinese government.

Senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R–Utah) reinforced Ricketts’ fearmongering in early May, asserting at a forum with Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “the number of mentions of Palestinians” on TikTok generated “overwhelming support to shut [TikTok] down” (Common Dreams, 5/6/24). Romney’s source for this wasn’t clear, but his message was: TikTok simply wouldn’t be tolerated as a source of information that contradicted official narratives.

Likewise, Rep. Mike Lawler (R–NY) (Intercept, 5/4/24) told the centrist advocacy group No Labels that the Gaza protests are

exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package, because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.

With “a big bipartisan push in both chambers to crack down on TikTok,” NBC (4/16/23) sees “a window of opportunity to pass new regulations in…the tech industry.”

The right-wing lawmakers were far from the first to harbor this sentiment; criticisms like this had been simmering for months (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 3/14/24). (These admissions that Congress went after TikTok based on its content will likely help the lawsuit ByteDance filed arguing that the law mandating either a sale or a ban is unconstitutional—Hollywood Reporter, 5/7/24).

Ignoring this context, Associated Press (3/24/24) presented the same inaccurate characterizations as the New York Times. Paraphrasing Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), AP reported that the TikTok law—which, at the time, was merely a bill the House had passed—“is the best chance to get something done after years of inaction” on tech regulation. The moral content of what, exactly, was being done didn’t seem to matter to the news agency. Instead, AP opted to uncritically publish Warner’s insinuation that young TikTok users urging their congressional representatives to vote against the ban were “manipulated” by the “Communist Party of China.”

AP’s report echoed an equally faulty NBC News summary (4/16/23) of congressional approaches to the tech industry. Though the story was published prior to any TikTok legislation, it remarked on a “big bipartisan push” to “crack down” on the company. The piece went on to group what was then a more abstract—but thoroughly jingoistic—movement against TikTok with regulation regarding such unrelated user-protection concerns as “deep fakes, voice phishing scams and powerful chatbots like Chat GPT.”

Domestic rewards

Facebook parent Meta paid a consulting firm to get out the message that “TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

Absent from these reports is yet another reason a ban or forced sale of TikTok won’t necessarily lead to domestic regulation: US tech giants stand to benefit from the law. As the New York Times itself (4/24/24) reports, “Meta could draw up to 60% of TikTok’s American ad revenue, while YouTube could take another 25% or so.” Not coincidentally, at least one US tech firm was involved in manufacturing public antipathy toward TikTok: According to the Washington Post (3/30/22), Meta, a direct TikTok competitor, paid a Republican consulting firm to orchestrate a smear campaign against TikTok. The effort included planted op-eds and letters to the editor in “major regional news outlets” nationwide.

Coupling this information with the US’s historical refusal to regulate its own tech industry, why, one might wonder, would the US suddenly change course? And wouldn’t this mean that a US-owned TikTok would operate effectively unchecked, just like current US tech corporations?

But such questions aren’t meant to be asked in a narrative that launders reactionary policymaking as a potential regulatory boon. The TikTok ultimatum, we’re told, isn’t a drastic measure to stifle statements of support for Palestine or any other political speech to the left of the State Department line; it’s, to borrow from the New York Times (4/25/24), a “success.”

Featured image: Detail from BreakThrough News video on TikTok (10/28/23) about a pro-Palestine march in Dallas—the kind of content a new law is aimed at suppressing.

The post TikTok Law Is an Attempt to Censor, Not a Warning to Big Tech appeared first on FAIR.

An emerging complaint the corporate media have against the nationwide—and now international—peace encampments is that many student protesters won’t speak to them. The problem, pundits and reporters say, is that these encampments have designated media spokespeople, and other protesters often keep their mouths shut to the press.

Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/24), based, apparently, on talking to no protesters, concluded that “they weren’t a compassionate group. They weren’t for anything, they were against something: the Israeli state, which they’d like to see disappear, and those who support it.”

Conservative pundit Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/24) said of her trip to the Columbia University encampment:

I was at Columbia hours before the police came in and liberated Hamilton Hall from its occupiers. Unlike protesters of the past, who were usually eager to share with others what they thought and why, these demonstrators would generally not speak or make eye contact with members of the press, or, as they say, “corporate media.”

I was on a bench taking notes as a group of young women, all in sunglasses, masks and kaffiyehs, walked by. “Friends, please come say hello and tell me what you think,” I called. They marched past, not making eye contact, save one, a beautiful girl of about 20. “I’m not trained,” she said. Which is what they’re instructed to say to corporate-media representatives who will twist your words. “I’m barely trained, you’re safe,” I called, and she laughed and half-halted. But her friends gave her a look and she conformed.

Peter Baker (Twitter, 5/4/24), the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, supportively amplified the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter’s claim, saying the protests are “not about actually explaining your cause or trying to engage journalists who are there to listen.”

A reporter for KTLA (4/29/24) complained that his news team was not granted access to the encampment at UCLA, and Fox News (4/30/24) had a similar complaint about the New York University protest:

Fox News Digital was told that the outlet was not allowed inside, and only student press could access the gated lawn. A local ABC team and several independent reporters were also denied. However, Fox News Digital witnessed a documentary crew and a reporter from Al Jazeera reporting inside the area.

One has to wonder: What could make activists suspect that the network that produced “Anti-Israel Agitators: Signs of ‘Foreign Assistance’ Emerge in Columbia, NYU Unrest” (4/26/24), “Pressure Builds for Colleges to Close or Shut Down Anti-Israel Encampments Amid Death Threats Toward Jews” (4/26/24) and “Ivy League Anti-Israel Agitators’ Protests Spiral Into ‘Actual Terror Organization,’ Professor Warns” (4/21/24) wouldn’t give them a fair shake?

Organized structure

A New York Times news report (5/2/24) ties protests to the US’s official enemies, despite “little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests.”

What is clear is that the student protesters across the country have organized a structure where many participants who are approached by media defer to appointed media liaisons (Daily Bruin, 4/27/24; KSBW, 5/3/24; Daily Freeman, 5/4/24; WCOS, 5/4/24).

For Baker and Noonan, this is evidence that the protests are at best not serious, and at worst not democratic. Indeed, corporate media, at every turn, have attempted to sully calls to halt a genocide as some kind of perverted anti-democratic extremism (Atlantic, 4/22/24; New York Times, 4/23/24, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 5/6/24, 5/6/24; Free Press, 5/6/24).

But why would such a communications structure even be considered unusual? Most organizations that corporate journalists cover have dedicated spokespeople to handle media inquiries, while others stay silent. Noonan’s experience is no different than how many street reporters interact with the cops; ask a cop for a comment and you’ll get sent over to the public information officer. You’ll rarely if ever see a news story that complains or even notes that a government or corporate employee directed a reporter to talk to the press office.

It’s true that in the worlds of business and bureaucracy, restrictions on employee speech can hamper investigative reporting  (FAIR.org, 2/23/24). But the media discipline at these encampments seems more like a way to keep the message clear. Vox-pop free-for-alls at these encampments could make it harder for news consumers to figure out what the protests are about; the demands and the aims of the movement might be muddled if every participant sounded off into the nearest reporter’s microphone.

With the current media strategy, Baker and Noonan really don’t have to wonder what the messages are: The encampments want their campuses to divest from Israel, and now students are protesting their administrations and the police violence against free speech and assembly. They are not entitled to the time of every individual protester.

It’s also all too easy for corporate reporters or right-wing commentators to find one loose cannon at a protest who can be prompted to go off-message during an interview, giving media outlets the ability to paint protesters generally as unhinged and ignorant. The fact that the Gaza encampment protesters have such a structure in place is a sign of political maturity, because they have found a way to keep the message simple and unified.

“The college kids are showing a precocious message discipline to reporters hostile to the substance of their protest,” Chase Madar, a New York University adjunct instructor, told FAIR.

Insinuating illiberalism

Baker and Noonan don’t express alarm that student reporters covering the protests have been subjected to extreme violence by the police (CNN, 5/2/24, 5/2/24), a very real form of state censorship. Nevertheless, Noonan and Baker insinuate that an aversion to speak to the corporate press signifies the movement’s illiberalism.

Perhaps establishment media are a little bitter that student reporters at places like Columbia University’s WKCR are doing a better job of covering the unrest than some salaried professionals in the media class (AP, 5/3/24; Washington Post, 5/4/24; Axios, 5/4/24).

If anything, what Baker and Noonan are lamenting is that the discipline of the students is making it harder for corporate media to misrepresent, ridicule and embarrass students who are protesting the US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. They’re telling on themselves.

Featured image: Fox News depiction (4/30/24) of the Columbia University encampment it complained it had been shut out of.

The post Media Scorn Gaza Protesters for Recognizing Corporate Reporters Aren’t Their Friends appeared first on FAIR.

 

As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.

CNN‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) blames the peace movement for “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” 

Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.

By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’

“They didn’t let me get to class using the main entrance!” complains Eli Tsives in one of several videos he posted of confrontations with anti-war demonstrators. “Instead they forced me to walk around. Shame on these people!”

Bash continued:

Now protesting the way the Israeli government, the Israeli prime minister, is prosecuting the retaliatory war against Hamas is one thing. Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable, and it is happening way too much right now.

As evidence of this lack of safety, Bash pointed to UCLA student Eli Tsives, who posted a video of himself confronting motionless antiwar protesters physically standing in his way on campus. “This is our school, and they’re not letting me walk in,” he claims in the clip. Bash ominously described this as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”

Bash was presumably referring to the rise of the Nazis and their increasing restrictions on Jews prior to World War II. But while Tsives’ clip suggests protesters are keeping him off UCLA campus, they’re in fact blocking him from their encampment—where many Jewish students were present. (Jewish Voice for Peace is one of its lead groups.)

So it’s clearly not Tsives’ Jewishness that the protesters object to. But Tsives was not just any Jewish student; a UCLA drama student and former intern at the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, he had been a visible face of the counter-protests, repeatedly posting videos of himself confronting peaceful antiwar protesters. He has shown up to the encampment wearing a holster of pepper spray.

One earlier video he made showing himself being denied entry to the encampment included text on screen claiming misleadingly that protestors objected to his Jewishness: “They prevented us, Jewish students, from entering public land!” (“You can kiss your jobs goodbye, this is going to go viral on social media,” he tells the protesters.) He also proudly posted his multiple interviews on Fox News, which was as eager as Bash to help him promote his false narrative of antisemitism.

‘Attacking each other’

“Security and [campus police] both retreated as pro-Israel counter-protesters and other groups attacked protesters in the encampment,” UCLA’s student paper (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24) reported.

UCLA protesters had good reason to keep counter-protesters out of their encampment, as those counter-protesters had become increasingly hostile (Forward, 5/1/24; New York Times, 4/30/24). This aggression culminated in a violent attack on the encampment on April 30 (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24).

Late that night, a pro-Israel mob of at least 200 tried to storm the student encampment, punching, kicking, throwing bricks and other objects, spraying pepper spray and mace, trying to tear down plywood barricades and launching fireworks into the crowd. As many as 25 injuries have been reported, including four student journalists for the university newspaper who were assaulted by goons as they attempted to leave the scene (Forward, 5/2/24; Democracy Now!, 5/2/24).

Campus security stood by as the attacks went on; when the university finally called in police support, the officers who arrived waited over an hour to intervene (LA Times, 5/1/24).

(The police were less reticent in clearing out the encampment a day later at UCLA’s request. Reporters on the scene described police in riot gear firing rubber bullets at close range and “several instances of protesters being injured”—LA Times, 5/3/24.)

The mob attacks at UCLA, along with police use of force at that campus and elsewhere, clearly represent the most “destruction, violence and hate” at the encampments, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But Bash’s description of the UCLA violence rewrote the narrative to fit her own agenda: “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.”

When CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam reported, later in the same segment, that the UCLA violence came from counter-protesters, Bash’s response was not to correct her own earlier misrepresentation, but to disparage antiwar protesters: Bash commended the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles for saying the violence does not represent the Jewish community, and snidely commented: “Be nice to see that on all sides of this.”

‘Violence erupted’

“For me, never again is never again for anyone,” says a Jewish participant in the UCLA encampment (Instagram, 5/2/24).

Bash wasn’t the only one at CNN framing antiwar protesters as the violent ones, against all evidence. Correspondent Camila Bernal (5/2/24) reported on the UCLA encampment:

The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago, but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least 15 injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers. But despite what CHP described as a dangerous operation, an almost one-to-one ratio officers to protesters gave authorities the upper hand.

Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used “what appeared to be rubber bullets,” but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.

Earlier CNN reporting (5/1/24) from UCLA referred to “dueling protests between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those supporting Jewish students.” It’s a false dichotomy, as many of the antiwar protesters are themselves Jewish, and eyewitness reports suggested that many in the mob were not students and not representative of the Jewish community (Times of Israel, 5/2/24).

CNN likewise highlighted the law and order perspective after Columbia’s president called in the NYPD to respond to the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. CNN Newsroom (5/1/24) brought on a retired FBI agent to analyze the police operation. His praise was unsurprising:

It was impressive. It was surprisingly smooth…. The beauty of America is that we can say things, we can protest, we can do this publicly, even when it’s offensive language. But you can’t trespass and keep people from being able to go to class and going to their graduations. We draw a line between that and, you know, civil control.

CNN host Jake Tapper (4/29/24) criticized the Columbia president’s approach to the protests—for being too lenient: “I mean, a college president’s not a diplomat. A college president’s an authoritarian, really.” (More than a week earlier, president Minouche Shafik had had more than a hundred students arrested for camping overnight on a lawn—FAIR.org, 4/19/24.)

‘Taking room from my show’

“The majority of news since the war began…has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN staffer told the Guardian (2/4/24).

Tapper did little to hide his utter contempt for the protesters. He complained:

This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court, talking about maybe bringing charges. We were talking about the ceasefire deal. I mean, this—so I don’t know that the protesters, just from a media perspective, are accomplishing what they want to accomplish, because I’m actually covering the issue and the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis—not that they’re protesting for that—less because of this.

It’s Tapper and CNN, of course, who decide what stories are most important and deserve coverage—not campus protesters. Some might say that that a break from CNN‘s regular coverage the Israel’s assault on Gaza would not altogether be a bad thing, as CNN staffers have complained of “regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza” (Guardian, 2/4/24)

The next day, Tapper’s framing of the protests made clear whose grievances he thought were the most worthy (4/30/24): “CNN continues to following the breaking news on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have disrupted academic life and learning across the United States.”

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.

The post As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies appeared first on FAIR.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503.mp3

 

Media 2070

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.

Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.

Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503TorresWatson.mp3

 

The post Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice appeared first on FAIR.

 

A Washington Post “expert” (4/26/24) assured readers that divestment is “way more complicated” than protesters think.

In a piece on how the nationwide protest campaign against the Israeli slaughter in Gaza came to be, the Washington Post (4/26/24) explained that the central demand of the protests—university divestment from companies that support the genocide—is, well, stupid.

The article reported: “Experts say student requests for divestment are not only impractical but also are likely to yield little if any real benefit.”

“How universities invest their money makes disinvestment complicated,” declared one such expert—”Chris Marsicano, a Davidson College assistant professor of educational studies who researches endowments and finance.”

“First, it’s impossible to know just how and where universities’ endowments are invested,” he maintained, because “schools are notoriously close-mouthed about it, revealing as little as they can.” Yes, which is why, as the Post noted, investment transparency is the second of three demands from Columbia University protesters, and a key issue in many other encampments.

But not so fast, Marsicano warns: “Disclosing investments can lead to complications large and small,” including “the possibility that a university disclosing its decision to sell or buy stock could affect the price of that stock.”

Surely that will keep a lot of protesters up at night—the fear that their university’s sale of stock might cause Boeing’s stock price to drop.

Doing Israel’s supporters a favor?

The Wall Street Journal‘s James Mackintosh (4/30/24) compared the Gaza protests to “misguided demands to quit investments in fossil fuel companies to slow climate change.”

But they need not worry, assured James Mackintosh, senior market columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who offered some friendly advice in “Dear Columbia Students, Divestment From Israel Won’t Work” (4/30/24).  “The impact of even a lot of universities selling would be negligible,” he wrote. In fact, any financial impact from divestment would be counter-productive:

Selling the shares cheaply to someone else just leaves the buyer owning the future profits instead, at a bargain price. The university would have less money to spend on students, while those who are pro-Israel, pro-oil or just pro-profit would have more.

The economic logic is so compelling, you have to wonder why supporters of Israel aren’t supporting the divestment movement, rather than pushing for laws that make divestment from Israel illegal.

But, really, why is anyone even talking about divestment, when it can’t even happen? As former Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks told CNN (4/30/24):

The economy is so global now that even if a university decided that they were going to instruct their dominant management groups to divest from Israel, it would be almost impossible to disentangle…. It’s not clear to me that it’s really possible to fully divest from companies that touch in some way a country with such close political and trade ties to the US.

Helping spark a movement

Columbia Spectator (4/13/16): “During that fateful month in 1985, a protest movement in favor of divestment from the National Party of South Africa’s apartheid regime rocked Columbia to its core.”

So, divestment would be dangerous, self-defeating and impossible, is what we’re hearing from corporate media. Why are students even bothering?

At Columbia, protesters are well aware of the history there, where students blockaded Hamilton Hall for three weeks in April 1985 to protest the university’s investments in South Africa. A committee of the school’s trustees recommended full divestment in August 1985, a recommendation the board adopted in October 1985.

The first secret negotiations between the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the South African government about ending apartheid began in November 1985.

Obviously, this wasn’t just a result of Columbia’s protest—but the divestment campaign there helped spark a nationwide movement that spread beyond campuses, establishing a consensus that South Africa’s behavior was unconscionable and had to change.

It’s hard not to suspect that corporate media are telling us so firmly that divestment can’t work because they’re worried that it can.

 

 

 

 

 

The post Divestment Can’t Work, Media Tell Protesters—Even Though It Has appeared first on FAIR.

 

“Journalism is not a crime,” a Biden administration official accurately notes in one of the New York Times‘ profiles (3/29/24) of imprisoned US reporter Even Gershkovich.

A devoted New York Times reader might get the impression that the paper cares deeply about protecting journalists from those who seek to suppress the press.

After all, the Times runs sympathetic features on journalists like Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained by Russia over a year ago. The paper (6/3/22) has written stingingly of Russia’s “clamp down on war criticism,” including in a recent editorial (3/22/24) headlined “Jailed in Putin’s Russia for Speaking the Truth.”

It has castigated China for its “draconian” attacks on the press in Hong Kong (6/23/21). The Times has similarly criticized Venezuela for an “expanding crackdown on press freedom” (3/6/19) and Iran for a “campaign of intimidation” against journalists (4/26/16).

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in his keynote address at the 2023 World Press Freedom Day, spoke forcefully:

All over the world, independent journalists and press freedoms are under attack. Without journalists to provide news and information that people can depend on, I fear we will continue to see the unraveling of civic bonds, the erosion of democratic norms and the weakening of the trust—in institutions and in each other—that is so essential to the global order.

‘Targeting of journalists’

“More journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel/Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (12/21/23) reported.

Yet since October 7—as Israel has killed more journalists, in a shorter period of time, than any country in modern history—the Times has minimized when not ignoring this mass murder. Conservative estimates from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) estimate that 95 journalists have been killed in the Israel/Gaza conflict since October 7, all but two being Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Other estimates, like those from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (4/4/24), place the number closer to 130. All told, Israel has killed about one out every 10 journalists in Gaza, a staggering toll.

(Two Israeli journalists were killed by Hamas on October 7, according to CPJ, and none have been killed since. Other tallies include two other Israeli journalists who were killed as part of the audience at the Supernova music festival on October 7.)

CPJ (12/31/23) wrote in December that it was “particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.” It noted that, in at least two instances, “journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed.” This accusation has been echoed by groups like Doctors Without Borders. Israel has demonstrably targeted reporters, like Issam Abdallah, the Reuters journalist who was murdered on October 13 (Human Rights Watch, 3/29/24).

In a May 2023 report, CPJ (5/9/23) found that the IDF had killed 20 journalists since 2000. None of the killers faced accountability from the Israeli government, despite the incidents being generally well-documented. Despite its demonstration that Israel’s military has targeted—and murdered—journalists in the past, important context like this report is generally absent from the Times. (The CPJ report was mentioned at the very end of one Times article—12/7/23.)

We used the New York Times API and archive to create a database of every Times news article that included the keyword “Gaza” written between October 7, 2023, and April 7, 2024 (the first six months of the war). We then checked that database for headlines, subheads and leads which included the words (singular or plural) “journalist,” “media worker,” “news worker,” “reporter” or “photojournalist.” Opinion articles, briefings and video content were excluded from the search.

Failing to name the killer

In the only two New York Times headlines (e.g., 11/21/23) that identified Israel as the killer of journalists, Israeli responsibility was presented as an allegation, not a fact.

We found that the Times wrote just nine articles focused on Israel’s killing of specific journalists, and just two which examined the phenomenon as a whole.

Of the nine headlines which directly noted that journalists have been killed, only two headlines—in six months!—named Israel as responsible for the deaths. Both of these headlines (11/21/23, 12/7/23) presented Israel’s responsibility as an accusation, not a fact.

Some headlines (e.g., 11/3/23) simply said that a journalist had been killed, without naming the perpetrator. Others blamed “the war” (e.g., 10/13/23).

During this same six-month period, the Times wrote the same number of articles (nine) on Evan Gershkovitch and Alsu Kurmasheva, two US journalists being held on trumped-up espionage charges by Russia.

From October 7 until April 7, the Times wrote 43 stories that mentioned either the overall journalist death toll or the deaths of specific journalists. As noted, 11 of these articles (26%) either focused on the death of a specific journalist or on the whole phenomenon. But in the vast majority of these articles, 32 out of 43 (74%), the killing of journalists was mentioned in passing, or only to add context, often towards the end of a report.

Many of these articles (e.g., 10/25/23, 11/3/23, 11/21/23, 12/15/23) contained a boilerplate paragraph like this one from November 4:

The war continues to take a heavy toll on those gathering the news. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that more news media workers have been killed in the Israel/Hamas war than in any other conflict in the area since it started tracking the data in 1992. As of Friday, 36 news workers—31 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese—have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the group said.

Saying that “the war” was taking a heavy toll, and listing the number of journalists “killed in the Israel/Hamas war,” the Times‘ standard language on the death toll for reporters omits that the vast majority have been killed by Israel. It does note, however, that these deaths occurred “since Hamas attacked Israel,” suggesting that Hamas was directly or indirectly to blame.

The first New York Times article (11/10/23) to focus on the killing of journalists—after 40 media worker deaths—blamed “the war” in its headline, rather than Israel.

It took a month for the Times to write a single article (11/10/23) focused on what had become “the deadliest month for journalists in at least three decades.” This November article, published on page 8 of the print edition, and apparently not even deserving of its own web page—named “the war” as the killer, managing for its entire ten paragraphs to avoid saying that Israel had killed anyone.

Again, the writing subtly implied that Hamas was to blame for Israel’s war crimes (emphasis added):

At least 40 journalists and other media workers have been killed in the Israel/Hamas war since October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, making the past month the deadliest for journalists in at least three decades, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

There was no mention of Israel’s long pattern of targeting journalists.

Obscuring responsibility

It took until January 30, nearly four months and at least 85 dead journalists into the war, for the New York Times to address this mass murder in any kind of comprehensive manner. This article—“The War the World Can’t See”—aligned with the Times practice of obscuring and qualifying Israeli responsibility for its destruction of Gaza. Neither the headline, the subhead nor the lead named Israel as responsible for reporters’ killings. Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of scores of reporters appeared almost incidental.

“Nearly all the journalists who have died in Gaza since October 7 were killed by Israeli airstrikes, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists”: We had to wait until the 11th paragraph of a story on the 116th day of the slaughter for the New York Times (1/30/24) to publish this straightforward admission.

The lead positioned the mass death of journalists and the accompanying communications blackout as tragic consequences of “the war”:

To many people outside Gaza, the war flashes by as a doomscroll of headlines and casualty tolls and photos of screaming children, the bloody shreds of somebody else’s anguish.

But the true scale of death and destruction is impossible to grasp, the details hazy and shrouded by internet and cellphone blackouts that obstruct communication, restrictions barring international journalists and the extreme, often life-threatening challenges of reporting as a local journalist from Gaza.

Remarkably, we have to wait until the 11th paragraph for the Times to acknowledge that Israel is responsible for all of the journalists’ deaths in Gaza. Palestinian accusations that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists were juxtaposed, in classic Times fashion, with a quote from the Israeli military: Israel “has never and will never deliberately target journalists,” spokesperson Nir Dinar said, and the suggestion that Israel was deliberately preventing the world from seeing what it was doing in Gaza was a “blood libel.”

This rebuttal was presented without the context that, as discussed earlier, Israel has for decades been accused by human rights groups and other media organizations of intentionally targeting journalists. The article leaves the reader with the general impression that a terrible tragedy—not a campaign of mass murder—is unfolding.

This review of six months of the New York Times’ coverage exposes a remarkable selective interest in threats to journalism. Despite Sulzberger’s lofty rhetoric, the Times seems to only care about the “worldwide assault on journalists and journalism” when those journalists are fighting repression in enemy states.

The post NYT Not Much Concerned About Israel’s Mass Murder of Journalists appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the National Employment Law Project’s Sally Dworak-Fisher about delivery workers for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Dworak-Fisher.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: Less than four months after it came into effect, Seattle is looking to “adjust”—as it’s being described—the app-based worker minimum-payment ordinance calling on companies like Uber and DoorDash to improve labor conditions for employees.

Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson described the ordinance’s impact on the local economy as “catastrophic.” The Seattle Times reports that the “whiplash reversal comes as both drivers and businesses complained about the added cost of delivery, largely in the form of service charges added by the companies in the wake of the new law”—”in the wake of” being the load-bearing language here.

Common Dreams (3/28/24)

The story of a recent piece by our next guest is in its headline: “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It.” So here to help us break down what’s going on is Sally Dworak-Fisher, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. She joins us now by phone from Baltimore City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sally Dworak-Fisher.

Sally Dworak-Fisher: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Though more and more people are taking on gig work—for reasons largely to do with the conditions of non-gig work—I think it’s still safe to say that more mainstream news media consumers use app-based delivery systems than work for them. And reporters know what they’re doing when they explain this story by saying, for instance, “Companies like DoorDash have implemented regulatory fees in response to the new law, causing the cost of orders to go up.” What’s being skipped over in that formulation, or that explanation, of what’s happening here, that there was a new law and now costs have gone up? What’s missing there?

SD: Sure. Well, it’s not a surprise that companies might choose to pass on some percentage of new costs to consumers, but they’re by no means required to, and compliance with bedrock pay standards, or any workplace law or social safety net, is part of running a business. If you need to charge a certain amount so you can pay your employee a minimum wage, you don’t normally issue a receipt that says, this is due to the minimum wage law. The practice of specifically pointing the finger at some new law seems really designed to make customers angry at the law, and pit them against the workers. It’s a business choice, it’s not a requirement.

And businesses could choose to, for instance, not pass on the entire cost of the law, or not pass on any of it, if they can afford to do that within their profit margin. So this particular situation, where customers are getting receipts that, in effect, blame the law, seems like a play to pit workers and consumers against one another.

JJ: Absolutely. In your piece that I saw in Common Dreams, you note that charging new service fees is an effort to “tank consumer demand and available work.” What are you getting at there? Why would a company want to draw down consumer demand, and then, more specifically, why would they want to lessen available work?

SD: My point there was just that, in so doing, they can also again create an outcry, a backlash, with workers themselves also saying, “Hey, the law isn’t working as intended. We need to change it.” But, really, it’s a manufactured crisis, and it’s not the law that’s to blame there. It’s really the policy of the business that’s to blame.

JJ: And we don’t see media, at least that I’ve seen, digging into that kind of elision, that kind of skip.

Seattle Times (4/26/24)

SD: Another interesting thing to note would be, so they add a $5 fee that’s purportedly because of the new legal requirements. But it’ll be interesting to know how much of that fee from all those people is really going through the compliance, versus how much is going to profit. And their data is not easily shared.

JJ: And I wanted to ask you about that data. Companies are saying these new service charges are a necessary counterbalance to increased labor costs. Though according to, at least, the Seattle Times, they have declined to release internal data. So we’re being asked to trust the very companies that fought tooth and nail against this ordinance, against paying workers more. We’re just supposed to trust their explanation of what the impact of that ordinance has been. That is, as you say, an information deficit there.

SD: Yes, and I think that they closely guard their information, and don’t turn it over to policymakers. It’s sort of shadow-boxing, in a way, because they have all the information. So I would hope that policymakers would make them show their work, in effect.

JJ: Or at least make a point of the fact that they’re not; that they’re making assertions based on something that they’re not proving or illustrating. We can call that out.

SD: And that was part of our point, is that this law has only gone into effect two months ago. Just be cognizant of the fact that this is a choice that the companies are making to raise these service fees. And before you go about rushing to judgment on anything, demand the data, and see what’s going on.

CounterSpin (4/3/20)

JJ: When I spoke with Bama Athreya, who hosts the podcast the Gig, she was saying that there’s a glaring need for a bridge between labor rights advocates and digital rights advocates. Because these companies, they’re not making toasters. Their business model is crucial here, and part of that involves, in fact, data, and that, beyond our regular understanding of workers’ rights, there needs to be a bigger-picture understanding of this new way of doing business.

SD: That dovetails with something that we talk about frequently here, which is the algorithmic control and the gamification of the work. These corporations are really well-versed in touting flexibility, but the day-to-day job of an app-based worker is highly mediated, monitored, controlled by algorithms that detail how much they’ll be paid, when they’ll be paid, when they can work. There’s a whole lot of algorithms and tech that come into play here. But I do just want to say, it doesn’t make them special. These are just new ways of misclassifying workers as independent contractors.

JJ: It’s just a new shine on an old practice.

Another thing that Bama Athreya pointed out was that it’s often presented to us as, “Well, I guess you’re going to have to pay $26 for a cup of coffee, because the workers want to get paid more.” And that’s the pitting workers versus consumers angle that a lot of elite media take.

Intercept (1/7/22)

But also, if we look at other countries, companies like Uber say, “Well golly, if you make us improve our labor practices, I guess we’ll have to”—and then they kick rocks and look sad—“I guess we’ll just have to go out of business.” And then a government says, “Well, yeah, OK, but you still have to follow the law.” And then they say, “Oh, all right, we’ll just follow it.” They can do it.

SD: And I think they’ve admitted that. I believe that the Uber CEO, after California passed AB 5, which is a law regarding who’s an employee and who’s an independent contractor in that state, Uber, I’m pretty sure, was on record saying, “Well, we can comply with any law.”

And, honestly, I think that really gets into, what do we as a society want in terms of our policies? Do we want just any business? Don’t we have minimum wage laws for a reason? If you can’t make it work while still paying a living wage, then consumers aren’t in the business of subsidizing that. I’m sorry, but not every business is entitled to run on the lowest wage possible.

JJ: And I wish a lot of the folks were not saying, out of the same mouth, that capitalism is this wonderful thing where if you build a better mousetrap, then you succeed, and if you don’t, well, you don’t. And that’s why they have to be rewarded, because of the risk they take. When then, at the same time, we’re saying, oh, but if you want to fall afoul of certain basic human rights laws, we’ll subsidize that, and make sure you get to exist anyway. It’s a confusing picture.

SD: I mean, should we bring back child labor?

JJ: Yeah. Hmm. You thought that would be a less interesting question than it turns out that it is.

Let me just ask you, finally, what should we be looking for to happen from public advocates, which we would hope elected officials would be public advocates, and also reporters we would hope would be public advocates. What should they be calling for, and what should they notice if it doesn’t happen? What’s the right move right now?

Sally Dworak-Fisher: “Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor.”

SD: I think whatever can be done to support the movement. There’s movements across states of app-based workers demanding accountability, and really trying to shine a light on what’s really going on here. I think the more reporting on that, and exposing—you know, every worker should have flexibility and a good job, but the flexibility that’s offered app-based workers is not necessarily the flexibility that a regular reader might assume.

In 2018, NELP issued a report with another organization, called Uber State Interference, and we really identified these ways that Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor. And now, coming out of the pandemic, as workers are successfully organizing again, like they’ve been doing in Seattle and New York City and Minneapolis, the companies are orchestrating a backlash. So understanding the context of what’s going on, and exposing it, would go a long way in solidarity with the workers.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sally Dworak-Fisher from the National Employment Law Project; they’re online at NELP.org. And her piece, “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It,” can be found at CommonDreams.org. Thank you so much, Sally Dworak-Fisher, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.

SD: A pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.

 

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Janine Jackson interviewed Sam, representative from National Students for Justice in Palestine, for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426.mp3

 

National Students for Justice in Palestine

Janine Jackson: There is a long and growing list of US college campuses where encampments and other forms of protests are going on, in efforts to get college administrations to divest their deep and powerful resources from weapons manufacturers, and other ways and means of enabling Israel’s war on Palestinians, assaults that have killed some 34,000 people just since the Hamas attack of October 7.

One key group on campuses has been SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s not a new, hastily formed group; they’ve been around and on the ground for decades.

We’re joined now by Sam, a representative of National Students for Justice in Palestine. Welcome to CounterSpin.

Sam: Thank you for having me.

Middle East Eye (4/8/24)

JJ: I can only imagine what a time this is for you, but certainly a time when the need for your group is crystal clear. Individuals who want to speak up about the genocide in Palestine are helped by the knowledge that there are other people with them, behind them, but also that there are organizations that exist to support them and their right to speak out. I wonder, is that maybe especially true for students, whose rights exist on paper, but are not always acknowledged in reality?

S: Yes and no. I think a lot of people definitely want to support students, because what we’re doing is very visible, and also I think people are more willing to assume good faith from 20-year-olds. At the same time, also, free speech on college campuses, especially private campuses, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. So if you’re on a campus, that means that it is sometimes harder to speak out, especially because we’re seeing students getting suspended, and when they get suspended, they get banned from campus, they get evicted from their student housing, sometimes they lose access to healthcare. And, basically, the schools control a lot more of students’ lives than any institution does for adults in the workforce, for example.

JJ: Right. So what are you doing day to day? You’re at National SJP, and folks should know that there are hundreds of entities on campuses, but what are you doing? How do you see your job right now?

S: SJP is a network of chapters that work together. It’s not like they’re branches, where we are giving them orders; they have full autonomy to do what they want within this network.

So what we’re doing is what we’ve been trying to do for our entire existence, which is act as a hub, act as a resource center, provide resources to students, connect them with each other, offer advice, offer financial support when we can. One thing we’re really trying to do is pull everything together, basically present a consistent narrative to the public around this movement.

New York Times (4/29/24)

JJ: Speaking of narrative, the claim that anyone voicing anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian ideas is antisemitic is apparently convincing for some people whose view of the world comes through the TV or the newspaper. But it’s an idea that is blown apart by any visit to a student protest. It’s just not a true thing to say. And I wonder what you would say about narratives. It’s obviously about work, supporting people, but on the narrative space, what are you trying to shift?

S: I mean, I’m Jewish. I’m fairly observant. I was at a Seder last night. When people say the pro-Palestinian movement is antisemitic, they’re lying. I’m just flat-out saying I think a lot of people, on some level, know that this isn’t about Jews. This isn’t about Judaism. It’s about the fact that Israel is committing a genocide in our people’s name. And if you support it, that is going to lead people to make a bunch of bad inferences about you, because you’re vocally supporting a genocide.

This weaponization is meant to shift focus away from Gaza, away from Palestine, the people who are being massacred, the people whose bodies they found in a mass grave at a hospital yesterday. The point is to distract from the fact that there is no moral case to defend what Israel was doing. So the only thing that Zionists have going for them is just smears, attacking the movement, tone-policing, demanding we take stances that they’re never asked to take. No one ever asks pro-Israel protestors, “Do you condemn the Israeli government,” because Israel is seen as a legitimate entity.

First of all, I want to clarify, this is about Palestine. I don’t want to get too far into talking about how the genocide, the Zionist backlash to the movement, affects me as a Jewish person, because I have a roof over my head. There’s not going to be a bomb dropping into my home.

The narrative that we’re really trying to put out is this, what we’re calling the Popular University for Gaza, and it’s an overarching campaign narrative over this. Basically, the idea is that everything that’s happening is laying bare the fact that universities do not care about their students, or their staff, or their faculty, who are the people who make the university a university, and not just an investment firm. They care about their investments and profit and their reputation and, essentially, managing social change.

Columbia University Press Blog (2/27/19)

So what we’re doing is, as students, making encampments, taking up space on their campuses. And a crucial part of these encampments is the programming in them. It’s drawing on the traditions of Freedom Schools in the ’60s and in the South, and also the Popular University for Palestine, which was a movement, I think it’s still ongoing, in Palestine, basically educators teaching for liberation, teaching about the history of Palestinian figures, about resistance, about colonialism.

But the idea is that students are inserting themselves, forcibly disrupting the university’s normal business; and threatening the university’s reputation is a big part of it, and just rejecting their legitimacy, establishing the Popular University for teaching, where scholarship is done for the benefit of the people, not for preserving hegemony.

With this whole thing, we’re trying to emphasize, basically, that our universities, they have built all these reputations and all these super great things about them, but they don’t care about the people in them. So we’re going to take the structures that make up them, which are the people within them, and essentially turn them toward liberation, and against imperialism, against the ruling class.

Reuters (4/29/24)

JJ: Well, thank you very much. I want to say it’s very refreshing, and refreshing is not enough. A lot of folks are drawing inspiration from hearing people say, “The New York Times is saying I’m antisemitic. Maybe I should shut up, you know? Media are saying I’m disruptive. Oh, maybe I should quiet down.” I don’t see any evidence of shutting up or quieting down, despite, really, the full narrative power, along with other kinds of power, being brought against protesters. It doesn’t seem to be shutting people up.

S: No, because that’s the thing, is students have had enough, students are perfectly willing now to risk suspension, risk expulsion, because they know that, essentially, the university’s prestige has been shattered. Even me, I’m currently in school, I’m a grad student. I’ve realized, so far I’ve been OK, but even if I did get expelled, or forced to drop out of my program, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. That’s a tiny sacrifice compared to what people in Palestine are going through. We are willing to sacrifice our futures in a system that increasingly doesn’t give us a future anyway. I think that’s another big part of it, is the feeling that, basically, even if you get a degree, you’re still going to be living precariously for a decade.

And another thing is, also, that today’s college seniors graduated from high school in the spring of 2020. They never really had a normal college experience. Their freshman year was online, so they never developed the bonds with that university, traditional attachment to the university. And also, the universities, the way they handled Covid generally has been terrible, and just seeing them completely disregard their students during the pandemic, I think, has really radicalized a lot of students. Basically, they’re willing to defy the institution.

This is first and foremost about Gaza. It’s about the genocide, it’s about Palestine. It’s not about standing with Columbia students. They have repeatedly asked: Don’t center them; center Gaza. And, basically, we reject the university system as the arbiter of our futures, the arbiter of right and wrong. And we’re going to make our own learning spaces until they listen to us and stop investing our tuition dollars in genocide.

So yeah, free Palestine.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sam from Students for Justice in Palestine, NationalSJP.org. Thank you so much, Sam, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

S: Yeah, thanks for having me.

 

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