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Gay Gordon-Byrne on Right to Repair, Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Ex-President Conviction

FAIR - March 15, 2024 - 10:52am
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240315.mp3

 

(image: Repair.org)

This week on CounterSpin: About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to say that even though you bought a tractor or a washing machine or a cellphone, it’s not really “yours,” in the sense that you can’t fix it if it breaks. Even if you know how, even if you, frankly, can’t afford to buy a new one. More and more people, including lawmakers, are thinking that’s some anti-consumer, and anti-environment, nonsense. We get an update from Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240315Gordon-Byrne.mp3

 

Juan Orlando Hernández
(photo: Alan SantosPR)

Also on the show: “Former President of Honduras Convicted in US of Aiding Drug Traffickers” is the current headline. You’d never guess from the reporting that Juan Orlando Hernández was a US ally, that the US supported the 2009 coup that went a long way toward creating Honduras’ current political landscape. Instead, you’ll read US Attorney Jacob Gutwillig telling the jury that a corrupt Hernández “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.” Because Americans, you see, don’t want to use cocaine; they’re forced to by the wiles and witchery of Honduran kingpins—and, thankfully, one of them has been brought to justice by the US’s moral, as reflected in its judicial, superiority. That’s the narrative you get from a press corps uninterested in anything other than a rose-colored depiction of the US role in geopolitical history. We hear more from Suyapa Portillo Villeda, advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, as well as author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240315Portillo.mp3

The post Gay Gordon-Byrne on Right to Repair, Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Ex-President Conviction appeared first on FAIR.

House Votes Against TikTok—and for More Cold War

FAIR - March 14, 2024 - 3:03pm

A bipartisan effort to effectively ban the social media network TikTok in the United States has taken a great leap forward. The House of Representatives voted 352–65 that the network’s parent company ByteDance must divest itself from Chinese ownership.

Lawmakers contend that “TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a national security risk because Beijing could use the app to gain access to Americans’ data or run a disinformation campaign” (New York Times, 3/13/24). While proponents of the legislation say this is only a restriction on Chinese government control, critics of the bill say this constitutes an effective ban.

The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate. That doesn’t make its passage in the House any less chilling, especially when President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law if it reaches his desk (Boston Herald, 3/13/24).

‘Profound implications’

Below the scary headline, Politico (3/11/24) acknowledges that “there have been no concrete examples publicly provided showing how TikTok poses a national security threat.”

I have written for almost four years (FAIR.org, 8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23) about how the US government campaign against TikTok has very little to do with user privacy, and everything to do with McCarthyism and neo–Cold War fervor. Before the vote, a US government report (Politico, 3/11/24) said that the “Chinese government is using TikTok to expand its global influence operations to promote pro-China narratives and undermine US democracy.”

Sounds scary, but fears about TikTok‘s user surveillance, or platforming pernicious content or disinformation, apply to all forms of social media—including US-based Twitter (now known as X) and Facebook, which let political misinformation flow about the US elections (Time, 3/23/21; New York Times, 1/25/24). And the Chinese government point of view flows freely on Twitter: Chinese state media outlets CGTN and Xinhua have respectively 12.9 and 11.9 million followers on the network owned by Elon Musk.

The Global Times (3/8/24), owned by China’s Communist Party, predictably called the legislation a “hysterical move” against Chinese companies. But the American Civil Liberties Union (3/5/24) was also alarmed:

The ACLU has repeatedly explained that banning TikTok would have profound implications for our constitutional right to free speech and free expression, because millions of Americans rely on the app every day for information, communication, advocacy and entertainment. And the courts have agreed. In November 2023, a federal district court in Montana ruled that the state’s attempted ban would violate Montanans’ free speech rights and blocked it from going into effect.

Bipartisan support

“There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China,” Seth Mnuchin told CNBC (3/14/24)—as though the Marxist-Leninist state should be the model for US media regulation.

We can’t write this off as MAGA extremist paranoia. In fact, 155 Democrats voted for the bill (AP, 3/13/24), joining 197 Republicans. Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres  (Twitter, 3/12/24) said TikTok “poses significant threats to our national security,” and that the “entire intelligence community agrees.” While the bill may not pass the Senate, it does enjoy some bipartisan support in the upper house (NBC, 3/13/24).

Former President Donald Trump reversed course, and now opposes new restrictions on TikTok (Washington Post, 3/12/24), in part because of his hostility toward TikTok competitor Facebook, which would benefit from a TikTok ban. Trump might have been hyperbolic in calling Facebook “the enemy of the people,” but it is true that Facebook owner Meta is behind the political push against its competitor (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

Former Trump Treasury Secretary Seth Mnuchin is enthusiastic about the bill, however—because he hopes to be TikTok‘s new owner. “I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin told CNBC’s Squawk Box (3/14/24). “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

Mainstream conservative outlets like the Economist (3/12/24) and Wall Street Journal, at least, have united signed on to the crusade. The Journal editorial board (3/11/24) wrote:

Xi Jinping has eviscerated any distinction between the government and private companies. ByteDance employs hundreds of employees who previously worked at state-owned media outlets. A former head of engineering in ByteDance’s US offices has alleged that the Communist Party “had a special office or unit” in the company “sometimes referred to as the ‘Committee.’”

The Journal’s editors (3/14/24) followed up to celebrate the House bill’s passage. “Beijing treats TikTok algorithms as tantamount to a state secret,” it wrote. This is another way that TikTok resembles US-based social media platforms, of course—but for the Journal, it’s “another reason not to believe TikTok’s denials that its algorithms promote anti-American and politically divisive content.”

The Wall Street Journal (3/11/24) complains that on TikTok, “pro-Hamas videos trend more than pro-Israel ones”–which is also true of Facebook and Instagram (Washington Post, 11/13/23). (By “pro-Hamas,” of course, the Journal means pro-Palestinian.)

In other words, while the US government can’t legally block content it deems politically questionable on Facebook and Twitter, it can use TikTok’s foreign ownership as means to attack “anti-American” content. The paper ignored the issue of censorship and anti-Chinese fearmongering, and denounced “no” votes as either fringe Republicans swayed by Trump, or left-wingers whose political base is younger people who simply love fun apps.

The National Review‘s Jim Geraghty (3/3/23) earlier scoffed at Democratic lawmakers who continue to engage with TikTok:

Way to go, members of Congress. This thing is too dangerous to carry into the Pentagon, but you’re keeping it on your personal phone because you’re afraid you might miss the latest dance craze that’s going viral. And if the last three years of our lives have taught us anything, hasn’t it been that anything that comes to us from China and “goes viral” probably isn’t good for us?

Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, a major backer of the legislation, took to Fox News (3/12/24) to say that Chinese ownership of TikTok was a “cancer” that could be removed, that the problem wasn’t the app itself but “foreign adversary control.”

Vehicle for anti-Chinese fervor

It’s important to remember that people use TikTok to educate and organize, not just amuse—boosting efforts to unionize workers at Amazon and Starbucks, for example (Wired, 4/20/22).

This anger toward TikTok—which, just like other social media networks, is full of brain-numbing content, but has also been used as a platform for social and economic justice (NPR, 6/7/20; Wired, 4/20/22; TechCrunch, 7/19/23)—is not about TikTok, but is rather a vehicle for the anti-Chinese fervor that infects the US government.

Think, for example, how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) embarrassed himself by repeatedly asking TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a Senate hearing if he had ties to China’s Communist Party—despite repeated reminders that Chew is Singaporean, not Chinese (NBC, 2/1/24). Is Cotton ignorant enough to think Singapore is a part of China? Or was the lawmaker using his national platform to make race-based political insinuations, in hopes of bolstering the fear that Chinese government agents are simply everywhere (and all look alike)?

That fear is already potent enough to bring together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to line up against the First Amendment. are doing just that, using a social media app to ramp up a Cold War with China. The targeting TikTok is an attack on free speech and the free flow of information, as the ACLU has argued, but it’s also part of a drumbeat for a dangerous confrontation between nuclear powers.

The post House Votes Against TikTok—and for More Cold War appeared first on FAIR.

‘That’s What US Capitalism Does Right Now. It Jettisons Its Elders.’ CounterSpin interview with Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders

FAIR - March 14, 2024 - 10:18am

 

Janine Jackson interviewed May First’s Alfredo Lopez about Radical Elders for the March 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308Lopez.mp3

 

Yes! (Winter/24)

Janine Jackson: The Winter 2024 issue of Yes! magazine focuses on elder issues, which turns out to mean every issue, really. There are profiles of older people living lives full of purpose, in counter to a societal and media narrative about the superfluousness of those outside of sponsor-desirable demographics.

But questions of healthcare, of self-reliance and political power, of media visibility and the intersectionality of concerns—those are questions for all of us who hope to live in a caring, humane society. Considering them through the prism of age can bring them into a sharp focus.

A longtime activist and founder of May First Movement Technology, Alfredo Lopez is a founder and advisor with the group Radical Elders. He joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Alfredo Lopez.

Alfredo Lopez: Yeah, thank you. It’s always great to speak with you, and I appreciate the conversation.

JJ: Well, thank you. You’ve been organizing and writing and teaching for economic and racial justice for a long time. I think we maybe first had you on the show in 1996, talking about censorship of labor advertising. What led you and others to create Radical Elders? What was the particular need you saw, or space that needed filling?

Alfredo Lopez: “I found a bunch of liberal organizations that sought to reform this and that, expand this and that, or reestablish particular programs.”

AL: Well, a couple of things. First and foremost, to be honest, I got old. So I became an elder, and I was a radical elder. I’ve been in our movement about—not about, 58 years is the amount of time that I’ve spent in the left of this country, very wonderful years, but starting to get old; I’m now in my seventies.

And I was looking around for something that focused on the very specific issues and the particularity of the issues that I faced as a human being in my seventies, and that many people who I knew in my age bracket were facing. And I found nothing.

I found a bunch of liberal organizations that sought to reform this and that, expand this and that, or reestablish particular programs that have been dismantled, etc. But nobody really framed the issue from the political perspective that has actually framed my life.

And a bunch of people were feeling that way that I knew. And so we got together, and we started discussing the possibility: What about creating a left-wing elders organization? Is that conceivable? Is it feasible? And what is the potential of doing that?

And part of the potential is that people over the age of 55 represent nearly 30% of the population of this country, a humongous chunk of the US population. And, for the most part, they are people who are targeted by the increasingly oppressive and restrictive human treatment that emanates from the crisis of this society.

But also, they tend to be rightward drifting, as a population, as a huge population. And we as left-wing people should be doing something about that. We should be thinking in terms of that community, because as we looked around, not only weren’t there organizations, but our entire family within the left-wing movement of this country, which does wonderful work in a bunch of areas, had no specific program for elder people.

And so we launched the organization with that intent of actually publicizing the issue, organizing elders, but also, very frankly, moving the left to a greater level of consciousness about what the major struggles and issues are within the elder community, elder population, and what the potential of that population is politically. That was what we started about three years ago. We officially launched the organization two years ago, and we’ve been functioning for the last two years.

FAIR.org (11/8/19)

JJ: Well, thank you. You and I know corporate, advertiser-driven news media are very happy with a divide-and-conquer vision that extends to generations. So we see news media constantly pitting young people versus older people, as though Social Security, for example, is just straight-up draining wealth from young people, to funnel it to greedy seniors. Media narratives are part of the fight here, yeah?

AL: Yes, absolutely. More than at any other moment, in my opinion, in my life, anyway, and perhaps in the entirety of history, our media mold consciousness in ways that drive people and guide people and affect the outcomes of human interaction. It’s more than ever, ever, ever before. And that is, to a large extent, media’s role.

So yeah, you do have it. And I bristle in ways that I hadn’t before, because now in this organization, I’m so much more conscious of this stuff. Commercials that make fun of older people, making fun of elders.

In fact, we have such an anti-elder consciousness that for the first time in my life, the major issue in the presidential election is, who’s older? I mean, is this guy too old?

Now, I’m not saying that Joe Biden—I’m not even going to talk about Donald Trump, Donald Trump should be disqualified for every reason on Earth, obviously, starting with the fact that he’s a fascist leader, but Joe Biden, it’s possible that he is past his prime and does not have the faculties, or the capabilities to lead.

But look at the way they frame the conversation. Is he too old? What does that mean, is he too old? Everything that we do and say about elders is the distortion of reality.

Now, I’m not arguing that Joe Biden should be president of the United States. As far as I’m concerned, we should restructure everything. There shouldn’t be a president of the United States, and I think that he’s demonstrated some of his problems most recently with the wholesale massacre of people in Gaza. But the framing of it as an age issue is an indication of how this propaganda has worked. And it works all the time.

And you’re right about Social Security, it’s a very, very important issue. Social Security, first of all, has never actually done what it was supposed to do. The purpose of Social Security was supposed to be, after you get finished working, you retire, you have a sustainable wage. That’s never been a sustainable wage. And right now, Social Security is a joke, because effectively, when you measure it against the cost of living in the last 20 years, we’ve lost a third of the Social Security. Literally, it has gone down by a third, given the cost of living and other cuts that you see.

I’ll give you an example of the myth of Social Security. People say, in relationship to Medicare, in relationship to medical insurance, that medical insurance is free for Social Security recipients. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, they take a portion of your Social Security payment to pay for the program. Second of all, if you want real health insurance, including hospitalization, all the stuff you’re going to need as you get older, you have to have a special program for that. I personally pay nearly $400 a month for my so-called free insurance. There are people who pay much, much more.

So yeah, all of this is mythological. Our position on Social Security is Social Security shouldn’t exist. What should exist is a sustainable wage, a living capability for all people, elders, over the age of whatever we choose; if it’s 65, so be it, but all these people should have sustainable life, and there should be a sustainable life program.

That’s what makes us radical. We’re not like the Association of Retired People. We’re not like all these other elder associations that call for reforms of this and that. Essentially, our reform starts at the impact of these programs, and not their nuts and bolts.

The impact of any social welfare or Social Security system, social insurance system, should be the sustainability of people’s lives. People should have a sustainable life, should be able to afford what they need, and they should have full medical health insurance, full wellness care, everything involved in the prolonging of life. We should, as a population, never be jettisoned. And that’s what US capitalism does right now. It jettisons its elders.

Radical Elders

JJ: I want to give you an opportunity to make clear what is clear to me, which is that Radical Elders is not a backward-looking group. Being a radical elder means being interested and invested in the future.

AL: That’s correct. “We ain’t done yet” is our slogan. I just want to say, we’ve worked very hard for this. We are also an intentional organization, and for an organization in our demographic—our members are all over the age of 55, many of them are in the sixties, seventies and eighties. So these are people, many of whom were around in the 1970s, 1960s.

And we are intentional. That means that we work very hard to make sure that a high percentage—in our case, it’s more than half—of the leadership and representational bodies of our organization are people of the global majority, what’s called people of color, like myself and like a whole bunch of other people, and also more than half women.

And these are intentionality commitments that, while many of the younger revolutionaries say, “Oh, well, that’s great. We do that automatically,” for our generation, as you know, Janine, this is not automatic in any way, shape or form. Our generation is quite used to a bunch of white men screaming at each other in the room, and kind of adding us onto the leadership bodies as tokens, as gestures.

We commit ourselves to this because we understand, obviously, that these populations, I mean, you’re talking about, for the case of Social Security, there are a lot of people who don’t get Social Security, because they’ve been in professions and jobs that do not allow for contributions to the Social Security system. Most of those people are people of the global majority, are people of color, and the great majority of them are women. And to talk about Social Security, it’s not a topic of conversation, because they don’t got none. And we have members who are in that kind of a situation. So it kind of changes your conversation about all the issues.

And so we’re getting ready to converse about these things more. We do a lot of online activities as an organization. We are, to a large extent, an online organization, because we’re old, we can’t travel as much, etc., etc. And that’s where the left is going, online, in a lot of ways.

We’re having this huge activity March 16. We’re calling it a Day of Action, and we’re getting ready to put the final touches on it. It’s an amazing day, with all kinds of stuff happening all day long, and people can tune into that. And to learn more about our organization, what you do is you go to RadicalElders.net. That’s our website that has all the information you need.

JJ: All right then, well, we’ll end it, just for today. We’ve been speaking with Alfredo Lopez of May First Movement Technology and Radical Elders online at RadicalElders.net.

Alfredo Lopez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. Thank you.

AL: Thank you.

 

The post ‘That’s What US Capitalism Does Right Now. It Jettisons Its Elders.’<br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'> CounterSpin interview with Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders appeared first on FAIR.

NYT’s Morning Newsletter Blames Everyone but Israel for Israeli Crimes

FAIR - March 13, 2024 - 5:03pm

 

With over 17 million subscribers, the Morning, the New York Times’ flagship newsletter, is by far the most popular newsletter in the English-speaking world. (It has almost three times as many subscribers as the next most popular newsletter.)

Since October 7, as Israel has waged an unprecedented war on Palestinian children, journalists, hospitals and schools, the New York Times’ highly influential newsletter has bent over backwards to blame everyone but Israel for the carnage.

Waging a legitimate war

According to the Morning—led by head writer David Leonhardt—Israel’s war on Gaza is a targeted operation designed to eliminate Hamas. The Morning propagates this narrative despite well-documented declarations of collective punishment and even genocidal intent by high-ranking Israeli officials—a tendency that South Africa has forcefully documented in their case before the ICJ (UN, 12/29/23). Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s comments on October 12, 2023, are typical: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.”

This sentiment has been echoed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, multiple cabinet-level ministers and senior military officials. Speaking from a devastated northern Gaza, one top Israeli army official said (UN, 12/29/23): “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”

The Morning (10/13/23) expresses what it sees as the main problem with mass death in Gaza: “The widespread killing of Palestinian civilians would damage Israel’s global reputation.”

Despite these statements and the body of supporting evidence, the Morning has consistently portrayed the war on Gaza as a focused campaign targeting the military infrastructure of Hamas.

For instance, in one October edition (10/13/23), Leonhardt and co-writer Lauren Jackson explained, “Israel’s goals are to prevent Hamas from being able to conduct more attacks and to reestablish the country’s military credibility.”

In similar fashion, in a late January edition (1/28/24), the Morning argued that Israel’s 17-year-long blockade of Gaza is primarily designed to debilitate Hamas—rather than to collectively punish Gazan civilians, as many analysts and human rights groups have argued:

For years, Israel has limited the flow of goods into Gaza, largely to prevent Hamas from gaining access to military supplies.

The Morning did, in the same edition (1/28/24), quote Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comments in the immediate aftermath of October 7:

After the Hamas-led October 7 terrorist attacks, Israel ordered what its defense minister called a “complete siege” of Gaza. The goal was both to weaken Hamas fighters and to ensure that no military supplies could enter.

This is, however, a downright fictional interpretation of Gallant’s quote (Al Jazeera, 10/9/23), given that the Morning failed to quote the next words out of his mouth:

There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.

Blame the terrorists

The Morning (10/30/23) insists that “Hamas is responsible for many of the civilian deaths” caused by Israel—a division of responsibility it would never apply to civilians killed by Hamas on October 7.

The Morning consistently has argued that Hamas makes densely populated civilian areas legitimate targets for Israeli attacks by conducting military operations nearby. This deflects blame from Israel and frames civilian casualties as a necessary evil, as in the October 30 edition of the newsletter:

Hamas has hidden many weapons under hospitals, schools and mosques so that Israel risks killing civilians, and facing an international backlash, when it fights. Hamas fighters also slip above and below ground, blending with civilians.

These practices mean that Hamas is responsible for many of the civilian deaths, according to international law.

Similar rhetoric was deployed in this December edition (12/20/23):

Hamas has long hidden its fighters and weapons in and under populated civilian areas, such as hospitals and mosques. It does so partly to force Israel to make a gruesome calculation: To fight Hamas, Israel often must also harm civilians.

The Morning has not yet found it pertinent to report on, for instance, the Israeli soldiers who dressed as doctors to gain access to the Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank, and proceeded to assassinate three Palestinian militants in their hospital beds.

To the Morning (11/14/23), Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians is unavoidable:

The battle over Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza highlights a tension that often goes unmentioned in the debate over the war between Israel and Hamas: There may be no way for Israel both to minimize civilian casualties and to eliminate Hamas.

It repeats this line again in a late January edition (1/22/24), once again framing the mass murder of civilians as a “difficult decision”:

The Israeli military faces a difficult decision about how to proceed in southern Gaza…. Israel will not easily be able to eliminate the fighters without killing innocent civilians.

And again in the October 17 edition:

Longer term, there will be more difficult choices. Many steps that Israel could take to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza, such as advance warnings of attacks, would also weaken its attempts to destroy Hamas’s control.

These themes are repeated across all editions of the Morning, and echo throughout the New York Times’ reporting on Israel. Israel’s motivations in the war (beyond eliminating Hamas) go unquestioned, while the openly genocidal statements made by high-ranking politicians and military leaders go unacknowledged.

And when Israeli mass murder of Palestinian civilians is mentioned, it is constantly qualified by the line that Hamas is fully or partially to blame.

‘Civilian death toll in Gaza’

David Leonhardt assures readers of the Morning (12/7/23) that “military experts say that there is probably no way for Israel to topple Hamas without a substantial civilian toll.” The possibility that this means that Israel should therefore not try to “topple Hamas” is not addressed.

Let’s break down one emblematic newsletter (12/7/23) written by Leonhardt in December, in which he “puts the [civilian death] toll in context and explains the reason for it.”

Leonhardt began by qualifying the Palestinian death toll—around 17,000 at time of writing in early December. First, he delegitimized the Gaza Health Ministry, which, he wrote, “seems to have spread false information during the war.” Though he acknowledged that “many international observers believe that the overall death toll is accurate…as do some top Israeli officials,” he wrote that “there is more debate about the breakdown between civilian and combatant deaths.” Leonhardt went on:

A senior Israeli military official told my colleague Isabel Kershner this week that about a third of the dead were likely Hamas-allied fighters, rather than civilians. Gazan officials have suggested that the combatant toll is lower, and the civilian toll higher, based on their breakdown of deaths among men, women and children.

Leonhardt only informs readers that Hamas has spread false information, while neglecting to mention Israel’s documented history of lying to the press (IMEU, 10/17/23; Intercept, 2/27/24). He also declined to investigate the implausibility of his source’s figure: At this point in the war, about 30% of Palestinian fatalities were adult men, meaning the Israeli figure implies that essentially every adult man killed by Israel was a Hamas fighter—all civilian men being miraculously spared.

Next, Leonhardt attempted to explain “who is most responsible for the high civilian death toll”—concluding, even before describing them, that “different people obviously put different amounts of blame on each.”

First he named Israel, and contextualized and rationalized Israel’s war crimes:

After the October 7 attacks—in which Hamas fighters killed more than 1,200 people, while committing sexual assault and torture, sometimes on video—Israeli leaders promised to eliminate Hamas. Israel is seeking to kill Hamas fighters, destroy their weapons stockpiles and collapse their network of tunnels. To do so, Israel has dropped 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza’s densely populated neighborhoods.

Note that Leonhardt framed the war as a campaign only to “kill Hamas fighters, destroy their weapons stockpiles and collapse their network of tunnels,” despite the evidence that Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure, journalists, healthcare workers and aid workers—actions backed by the aforementioned statements of genocidal intent.

Though Leonhardt briefly mentioned that Israel’s war has drawn international criticism, he made no mention of international law and concluded with his refrain that Israel can hardly avoid causing the deaths of “substantial” numbers of civilians:

Nonetheless, military experts say that there is probably no way for Israel to topple Hamas without a substantial civilian toll. The question is whether the toll could be lower than it has been.

Next, Leonhardt turned to his condemnation of Hamas:

The second responsible party is Hamas. It hides weapons in schools, mosques and hospitals, and its fighters disguise themselves as civilians, all of which are violations of international law.

This approach both helps Hamas to survive against a more powerful enemy — the Israeli military—and contributes to Hamas’s efforts to delegitimize Israel. The group has vowed to repeat the October 7 attacks and ultimately destroy Israel. Hamas’s strategy involves forcing Israel to choose between allowing Hamas to exist and killing Palestinian civilians.

Hamas is simply not prioritizing Palestinian lives.

It is notable that—unlike with Israel—Leonhardt did not attempt to contextualize Hamas’ actions by noting the horrifying conditions that Israel has imposed on Gaza for years, or the over 900 Palestinian children killed by Israel in the decade preceding October 7. To Leonhardt, history is only relevant when it justifies Israeli aggression.

While Leonhardt states unequivocally that Hamas is violating international law, he does not find it worthwhile to investigate Israel’s flagrant and abundantly documented violations of international law. He also does not mention the Palestinian right to resist occupation, a right enshrined under international law.

This unequal treatment leads straight to the jarringly contrasting conclusions, in which he essentially excuses Israel’s genocidal war as unavoidable, while he condemns Hamas for “simply not prioritizing Palestinian lives.”

Leonhardt’s December 7 piece is not an aberration: It is emblematic of the language, selective contextualization and framing that the TimesMorning newsletter wields to provide ideological cover for Israel’s crimes.

The post NYT’s Morning Newsletter Blames Everyone but Israel for Israeli Crimes appeared first on FAIR.

‘This Court Is Not Going to Protect Us From Donald Trump’CounterSpin interview with Ian Millhiser on Trump and Supreme Court

FAIR - March 13, 2024 - 10:54am

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Vox‘s Ian Millhiser about the Supreme Court’s protection of Donald Trump for the March 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308Millhiser.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: The Supreme Court ruled this week that states can’t keep Donald Trump off of presidential ballots, despite his myriad crimes and active legal entanglements. But as New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall noted, the more politically consequential decision came on February 28, when the court set a hearing on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for his role in fomenting the violent January 6, 2021, effort to overturn the election, for the week of April 22.

Edsall suggests the delay is a gift to Trump and a blow to Biden, because a failure to hold a trial means Democrats won’t be able to “expand voters’ awareness of the dangers posed by a second Trump term.” A trial, you see, would produce a lot of reporting about Trump’s role in the insurrection that could inform and presumably sway voters.

New York Times (3/6/24)

I think it’s fair to ask ourselves why journalists couldn’t do that reporting anyway, whether the “surprisingly large segment of the electorate” that Edsall says has “either no idea or slight knowledge of the charges against Trump” couldn’t just possibly learn about those things from the press corps, even without the shiny object of a trial to focus on.

Ian Millhiser reports on the Supreme Court and the Constitution, even when former presidents are not in the dock, as a senior correspondent at Vox. He’s author of, most recently, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America, and also, relevantly, 2015’s Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. He joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ian Millhiser.

Ian Millhiser: Good to be here. Thanks so much.

JJ: Your February 28 report is headlined “The Supreme Court Just Handed Trump an Astonishing Victory.” So please spell it out for us why it’s a victory, and why it’s astonishing to a longtime court watcher such as yourself.

Vox (2/28/24)

IM: I had assumed that the courts were going to try to stay neutral on Donald Trump, and neutral on the election, and so what neutrality means is, we knew from the oral argument in the ballot disqualification case that the courts weren’t going to remove Donald Trump from the ballot. We already knew that wasn’t going to happen. But I thought the flip side of it was that the Supreme Court wasn’t going to actively try to boost Trump’s candidacy by delaying his trial, by pushing it until after the election, but that’s what they did.

By scheduling this hearing in April, the trial can’t happen until after the Supreme Court resolves this immunity appeal, and so they made the decision to, the practical implication of this is, that the trial almost certainly will not happen until after the election, if it happens at all.

When the Supreme Court hands down such a consequential decision, it’s supposed to explain itself. The way the Supreme Court works is that when it does something, the majority of the justices who agree with one outcome write an opinion explaining why they did what they did, and then the justices who dissent write a dissenting opinion explaining why they disagree. And the court didn’t even have the decency here to explain why.

I mean, maybe there’s some possible justification for pushing Trump’s trial until after the election, but at the very least, they owed us an explanation for why they handed down this extraordinarily consequential decision. And the fact that they thought that they could do this without explaining themselves, I think raises very serious questions about whether the Supreme Court will be neutral on the question of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden should win the 2024 election.

JJ: Well, I think people understand that the law does not equal justice in the way that we might understand it, but it sounds like you’re saying this is messed up on the level of law itself.

Vox (4/12/23)

IM: When you look at the long arc of US history, the law doesn’t always resemble the law. In 1870, we ratified the 15th Amendment. That’s the amendment which says the government is not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race when deciding who was allowed to vote. And that amendment was in effect for maybe five years during Reconstruction, and then it just evaporated.

For 90 years, the Supreme Court did not enforce that. We had 90 years of Jim Crow, 90 years of Black people being told they did not have their equal citizenship rights, even though it’s right there in the Constitution, saying explicitly that they’re supposed to have it. Because politically there wasn’t enough support for giving Black people the right to vote, and the Supreme Court just went with those political winds.

If you look at the history of the First Amendment, during war time, people were thrown in jail during World War II because they opposed the draft, because they gave a speech opposing the draft. For most of the late 19th and early 20th century, there was very aggressive enforcement of something called the Comstock Act—which is still on the books; this could come back at any time—which bans pretty much any kind of art or literature or anything that in any way involves sex. People were tried and convicted for selling the famous portrait The Birth of Venus. It’s a nude portrait. People were convicted of crimes because they sold reproductions of famous works of nude art, despite the fact that we have the First Amendment.

So the reason I’m describing this long history here is, I think we Americans need to have a realistic sense of what we can expect from the courts. The courts don’t always ignore the law. They don’t always follow the political winds. I can point you to plenty of examples of the Supreme Court being courageous against powerful political—I mean, the reason why Nixon had to resign is because the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over incriminating evidence.

So the Supreme Court sometimes follows the law. It sometimes does the right thing. But if you look at the long arc of American history, all I can say about the Supreme Court is “sometimes.” And apparently sometimes is not now. Sometimes is not now.

This court is not going to do anything to protect us from Donald Trump. It has made that perfectly clear. It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says. It doesn’t matter that there’s an entire provision of the 14th Amendment saying that if you are in high office, and you engage in an insurrection, you can’t hold office again—doesn’t matter. Supreme Court’s not going to enforce that provision.

And that doesn’t mean that we should all abandon hope, but it does mean we cannot rely on the courts at all. Donald Trump will be defeated at the ballot box if he’s defeated anywhere.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to hope in just a second, but I just felt a need to intercede. My ninth grade government teacher was convinced, and not without cause, that we really weren’t going to retain very much from his class. And he had one thing, which was that every now and again he would just randomly holler out, “What’s the law of the land?” And we would yell back, “The Constitution!” That seems more painful than quaint right now.

Ian Millhiser: “When the chips are down, the Constitution is only as good as the worst five people who sit on the Supreme Court.”

IM: Yeah, we like to tell ourselves a good story about the United States. One of the purposes of public schools is to inculcate enough a certain sense of what our values should be. The nation we aspire to be is a nation where the Constitution matters. The nation that we aspire to be is one where somebody who tries to overthrow our government does not get to serve in government ever again. That is who we hope to be.

I think it is right that our public schools try to inculcate those values in us, because the way that you get Supreme Court justices who will actually share those values is by having this massive civic effort to teach us all that the Constitution matters and that we should enforce it.

But when the chips are down, the Constitution is only as good as the worst five people who sit on the Supreme Court. If those people did not internalize the lesson that you and I learned in the ninth grade, there’s nothing we can do about it.

JJ: And I’ll just bring you back: You’ve said it before, when I spoke to you last time, you said it doesn’t surprise you that this institution that’s always been controlled by elites has not been a particularly beneficent organization in American history. That’s before Clarence Thomas. That’s before the guy who likes beer. This is the history of this Supreme Court.

And so while we can and should be outraged and worried and more, what we can’t be is surprised that the Supreme Court is not swooping in now to save us from Donald Trump and whatever, heaven help us, a second Trump presidency might usher in. So let me just ask you again, finally, what is to be done? Because giving up is not an option.

IM: I think a lot about a line from President Obama’s first inaugural address, where he said, “We must choose our better history.” The United States has always had two histories. We have always, always, aspired to be a nation where we have political equality, where we can follow the rules of the road, where we have a Constitution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”: Those are the words that created our nation. That has always been one of our histories.

And the other history is that we enslaved people. The other history is Jim Crow. The other history is Jim Crow–like treatment of Asian Americans out on the West Coast. The other history is Korematsu. The other history is Clarence Thomas flying around on all these billionaires’ jets.

And that has always been our history too. We have always faced a choice between, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” and the other thing. And sometimes we have elections where that choice isn’t as readily apparent. This is an election where that choice is immediately apparent.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with reporter and author Ian Millhiser. You can find his work on the Supreme Court and other issues on Vox.com. Ian Millhiser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IM:  Thank you.

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WSJ Speaks Out Against Threat of Politicians Responding to Voters

FAIR - March 12, 2024 - 3:37pm

 

The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) is concerned that they live among us. They are Arab Americans. And what are they doing to threaten the United States? Voting.

The Journal’s editorial board sounded the alarm in response to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian American and a member of the left-wing voting bloc known as the Squad, calling for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan presidential primary. “Will Dearborn, Michigan, Determine US Israel Policy?” the headline wondered ominously. The subhead explained: “The pro-Palestinian Democratic left wants to force Biden to stop the war in Gaza against Hamas.”

At issue was that Tlaib’s mobilization of the large Arab-American community of Dearborn, Michigan, against Biden’s pro-Israel stance could put Michigan in play in the 2024 presidential election, thus potentially swaying the incumbent to be more critical of Israel.

Voting as subversion

The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) frames the question of whether to keep supplying an Israeli war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians as “another test of how much Mr. Biden is willing to bend to the left.”

Expressing alarm at the idea of a president adjusting policy in response to democratic pressure, the Journal warned that the “left’s threats are already influencing Mr. Biden’s foreign policy”: As “domestic criticism of Mr. Biden’s support for Israel has increased…Mr. Biden has become much more critical of Israel.”

The editorial board continued:

The problem is that if the Arab Americans in and around Dearborn begin to set US policy, Hamas and Iran will be the beneficiaries. Ms. Tlaib and others claim not to support Hamas or the October 7 massacre, but the ceasefire they want would have the effect of leaving its fighters alive and free to rebuild their terror state. The suffering in Gaza is terrible, but the main cause is Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields.

What the financial class’s top paper is saying is that an ethnic voting bloc in Dearborn might “claim” not to be a Fifth Column—but in fact they are at best unwitting stooges, and at worst lying traitors, effectively supporting official enemies of the US government. (The Journal‘s logic would delegitimize virtually all opposition to US violence—since ending such violence would no doubt be welcomed by its ostensible targets, who are by definition enemies.)

Of course, opposition in Michigan to Biden’s Israel policy extends well beyond Arab Americans (or Muslims). A recent poll of likely voters found that nearly 74% of Michigan Democrats favored a unilateral ceasefire. And voters yesterday in Minnesota—a state with no sizable Arab-American population—cast “uncommitted” votes in such high numbers that it has stunned political analysts and raised alarms about the president’s viability in the general election (Reuters, 3/6/24; NBC, 3/6/24). A “no preference” campaign did surprisingly well in the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts (WBUR, 3/6/24).

Arab Americans in Michigan do have a small degree of political power now, because Michigan is a critical swing state. But that’s not a unique position for an ethnic enclave in American politics. Does the Journal also have a problem with the outsized role South Florida’s Cuban-American population plays in a state with so many electoral votes (Politico, 11/4/20)? Is the Journal concerned with the influence Hasidic voting blocs have on New York City’s politics (New York Times, 10/30/22)?

The uncommitted vote was successful; the AP (2/28/24) called it a “victory for Biden’s anti-war opponents,” reporting that the state will send two uncommitted delegates.

‘America’s jihad capital’

While the Wall Street Journal‘s subhead (2/2/24) refers to “politicians in the Michigan city [who] side with Hamas,” the only official mentioned is Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who criticized Biden for “selling fighter jets to the tyrants murdering our family members.”

This editorial came just a few short weeks after the paper ran an op-ed (2/2/24) by Steven Stalinsky of the pro-Israel group MEMRI. Stalinsky declared Dearborn “America’s Jihad Capital,” reaching back to stale 9/11 hysteria:

Support for terrorism in southern Michigan has long been a concern for US counterterrorism officials. A 2001 Michigan State Police assessment submitted to the Justice Department after 9/11 called Dearborn “a major financial support center” and a “recruiting area and potential support base” for international terror groups, including possible sleeper cells.

That piece claimed that the problem in Dearborn was that its Arab-American residents were would-be criminals. “What’s happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats,” Stalinksy said. “It’s potentially a national security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention.”

The fallout from the op-ed was immense. Fox News (2/5/24), which like the Journal is a part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, reported that Dearborn’s mayor said that “city police increased security at places of worship and major infrastructure points as a ‘direct result’” of the article. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (2/3/24) tweeted that the op-ed “led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.” Biden, along with Michigan elected officials and Arab-American community leaders, condemned the article (Detroit News, 2/5/24).

State Rep. Alabas Farhat (AP, 2/6/24) co-sponsored a resolution demanding a retraction and public apology, saying the piece “fanned the flames of hatred and division in our country during a time when hate crimes are on the rise.” He added, “It makes it so that it’s normal to question how patriotic your neighbor is.”

The Journal editorial board doubled down with its own racist, Islamophobic tirade. This vilification of Arab-Americans is the same kind of thinking that led this country to force Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the face of a war against Japan. Enlightened society would like to think that times like that have been relegated to the dustbin of history, but the fact that we’re seeing this today in the Journal is proof that scary times are here again.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

 

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LA Times Shortchanges Readers With Deficient Explanation for Rising Food Prices

FAIR - March 11, 2024 - 5:14pm

 

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez (3/10/24) offers, as an example of “fighting inflation,” a woman for whom cereal “has replaced meat for her at lunch and dinner.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (3/10/24) had some tips for elders dealing with high prices for food—one of which was featured in the headline:

Cereal for Dinner? It’s One Way to Beat Supermarket Inflation

Despite cereal being offered as a cost-saving way to eat, Lopez didn’t mention that leading cereal maker Kellogg’s has been singled out for price-gouging—raising its price per unit 17% in 2023, far above the inflation rate, thereby boosting the company’s profits in 2023 by a whopping 540% (Quartz, 2/27/24).

But “profits” is a word you won’t find in Lopez’s column. Corporate greed (FAIR.org, 4/21/22, 6/1/23; CounterSpin, 2/9/24) is conspicuously missing from his list of reasons that prices go up:

Inflation is tied to rising labor costs, continued post-pandemic supply chain interruptions, avian flu and the impact of extreme weather—heat waves, wildfires and flooding—on global food production.

Rather than suggesting that consumers fill up on excess profits, Lopez could have encouraged his readers to participate in the upcoming three-month boycott of Kellogg’s products—organized under the hashtag #LetThemEatCereal (Salon, 3/10/24).

ACTION ALERT: The LA Times‘ Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

FEATURED IMAGE: Creative Commons photo by Like the Grand Canyon.

 

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US Media and Factcheckers Fail to Note Israel’s Refutation of ‘Beheaded Babies’ Stories

FAIR - March 8, 2024 - 3:00pm

 

The Washington Post (11/22/23) said it couldn’t make a definitive assessment of whether Biden’s atrocity claims were true. But Israel’s official casualty list (11/11/23) had already debunked them.

In late November, the Washington Post (11/22/23) factchecked President Joe Biden’s repeated claims that babies had been beheaded during Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel.

Biden’s remarks during a November 15 news conference triggered the factcheck:

Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again, like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burning women and children alive.

Despite acknowledging a lack of confirmation of such atrocities, the Post stopped short of branding Biden’s statements false, and declined to dole out any of its iconic Pinocchios.

“It’s too soon in the Israel/Gaza war to make a definitive assessment,” Post Factchecker Glenn Kessler wrote, noting that even the most basic facts weren’t yet known.

“The Israeli prime minister’s office has said about 1,200 people were killed on October 7, down from an initial estimate of 1,400,” he said, “but it’s unclear how many were civilians or soldiers.”

An authoritative count

That statement isn’t true. While the exact number killed amid the extreme violence and chaos of October 7 may never be finalized, an authoritative count of civilian deaths—as well as data that definitively refutes claims babies were beheaded—was available to anyone with access to the internet little more than a month after the attack.

That’s when Bituah Leumi, or National Insurance Institute, Israel’s social security agency, posted a Hebrew-language website (11/9/23) with the name, gender and age of every identified civilian victim and where each had been attacked.

Two days later Bituah Leumi (also transliterated as Bituach Leumi) posted an English-language news release (11/11/23) publicizing the website as a memorial to the civilian victims of the “Iron Swords” war—Israel’s name for Hamas’s attack and Israel Defense Forces’ response. (The news release refers to “695 identified war casualties,” but there are no wounded; all the victims are listed as “killed.”)

The journalistic importance of the memorial website was shown less than a month later, when Haaretz (12/4/23), Israel’s oldest newspaper, used the social security agency’s data to debunk some of the most sensational atrocities blamed on Hamas.

‘Proved untrue’

Haaretz (12/4/23) reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most sensational atrocity claims were “inaccurate.”

Haaretz’s 2,000-word, English-language article was cautious, with allowances for mistaken and exaggerated reports from traumatized observers describing horrific scenes of carnage. But unlike the Washington Post’s factcheck, the Israeli newspaper didn’t pull its punches, flatly concluding that some of the claims of atrocities “have been proved untrue.”

Chief among the claims disproved was that Hamas fighters deliberately slaughtered dozens of babies—beheading some, burning and hanging others.

“According to sources including Israel’s National Insurance Institute, kibbutz leaders and the police, on October 7 one baby was murdered, 10-month-old Mila Cohen,” the Haaretz article stated. “She was killed with her father, Ohad, on Kibbutz Be’eri.” The child’s mother survived.

In addition to a single infant, the social security agency’s list of victims includes only a few other young children. Haaretz’s reporters were able to determine the circumstances of each of their deaths:

According to the National Insurance Institute, five other children aged 6 or under were murdered, including Omer Kedem Siman Tov, 2, and his 6-year-old twin sisters Arbel and Shachar, who were killed on Kibbutz Nir Oz. There was also 5-year-old Yazan Zakaria Abu Jama from Arara in the southern Negev, who was killed in a Hamas rocket strike, and 5-year-old Eitan Kapshetar, who was murdered with his parents and his 8-year-old sister, Aline, near Sderot.

Haaretz also used the social security data to refute allegations made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Biden that Hamas targeted and tortured children:

There is no evidence that children from several families were murdered together, rendering inaccurate Netanyahu’s remark to US President Joe Biden that Hamas terrorists “took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.”

‘Details still sparse’

The Washington Post (12/4/23) acknowledged the Haaretz story the same day it was published, with a one-paragraph “update” inserted into its November 22 factcheck. While crediting Haaretz with doing a “detailed examination of unverified accounts of alleged atrocities disseminated by Israeli first-responders and army officers,” the Post downgraded the Israeli newspaper’s conclusion, saying only that “no accounts of beheaded or burned babies could be verified.”

While the Post noted that Haaretz “could document only one case of a baby being killed in the Hamas attacks,” the update did not explain that the source of that critical fact was an agency of the Israeli government. Nor did the Post alter the factcheck’s inconclusive, mishmashed “Bottom Line”:

Almost two months after the Hamas attack, details are still sparse on claims of beheading of babies. One IDF official says he found a decapitated baby; a first responder says “little kids” were beheaded, though an exact number was not provided. Forensic records that would document the cause of death have not been released. There also are reports of at least two beheadings of adults—a soldier and a Thai worker. First responders say they viewed these bodies.

There is little dispute that many of the civilians killed by militants on October 7 died in especially brutal ways. But caution is still warranted, especially at the presidential level, about statements that babies were beheaded. The available evidence does not need exaggeration.

An unnecessary retraction

PolitiFact (11/21/23) retracted this story (10/20/23) because it didn’t include Israeli claims about mutilated babies that—according to Israel’s official records—didn’t exist.

The Post wasn’t the only factchecker that wavered when judging reports of slaughtered Israeli babies. The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact retracted its story (10/20/23), headlined “How Politicians, Media Outlets Amplified Uncorroborated Report of Beheaded Babies.”

PolitiFact took the embarrassing action after being savaged by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, better known as CAMERA.

CAMERA, which Haaretz (9/5/16) described as “a right-wing media watchdog that routinely attacks news outlets over their coverage of Israel,” blasted PolitiFact as “unethical,” “sloppy and misleading” (11/8/23) for failing to include in its story all reports of mutilated babies made by Israeli military spokespeople, government officials and emergency response workers.

PolitiFact (11/21/23) conceded “our initial story was incomplete,” and published a revised story (11/21/23) that included many of those comments. The new version also quoted an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson stating “that verified testimonies state some people were beheaded, but they could not confirm how many.”

Like the Post’s Factchecker, PolitiFact drew no conclusions about the truth or falsity of those claims, declining to issue a rating on its “Truth-O-Meter.”

‘Details still emerging’

Snopes (10/12/23) says it’s still too soon to say whether babies were beheaded on October 7, thought it promises, “We will update this story once more information comes to light.”

The factchecking website Snopes (10/12/23, last updated 12/18/23) also declined to provide a definite answer to the question posed in its headline: “Were Israeli Babies Beheaded by Hamas Militants During Attack on Kfar Aza?”

“At present, details are still emerging from communities affected in Israel, the death tolls are still being counted, and the manner of many deaths have not yet been confirmed,” Snopes stated.

In one of eight updates, Snopes cited Haaretz’s December 4 “analysis of child deaths during the October 7 attack.” But, as with the Washington Post’s update, Snopes did not mention that the newspaper had used Israeli social security data in its investigation.

FactCheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, (10/13/23) did find that a Facebook video was correct in saying “that ‘no evidence has been provided’ for the viral claim that ‘40 babies’ were ‘beheaded’ by Hamas.”

But a November 14 update, included in the story, quoted the head of Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine saying that “many bodies” of victims he had examined were “without heads.” But he couldn’t determine whether the decapitations were deliberate or the result of explosions.

FactCheck has not published any more on the issue.

The missing proof

FAIR.org (10/20/23): “The claim about beheading babies was…a shocking story that served to turn off logic and critical thinking.”

There’s a reason why the major factchecking organizations hesitate to pass judgment on the widespread claim of slaughtered babies: They rightly conclude that the lack of verifying evidence, such as photos or autopsy reports, does not conclusively prove the claims are false.

FAIR contributor Saurav Sarkar made that precise point in his report (10/20/23) lambasting “corporate media” for “their repetition of the shocking, unsubstantiated claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in its violent attack on a kibbutz in southern Israel on October 7.”

“So we have a story, and that story was generated in a grossly irresponsible way, and then repeated over and over,” Sarkar stated. “But what proof do we have that the story is false? After all, even if it was reported badly, and repeated without additional substantiation, it might be true.”

Bituah Leumi, the Israeli social security agency, provided that missing proof when it posted the official list of victims that showed only one infant was killed in the attack.

The mainstream US news media ignored that authoritative evidence.

‘War on truth’

AFP (12/15/23) reported that data from Israel’s social security agency “invalidates some statements by Israeli authorities in the days following the attack.”

The first major news outlet outside of Israel to use data from the social security agency’s website was the French wire service Agence France-Presse.

The AFP’s 1,000-word, English-language dispatch, headlined “Israel Social Security Data Reveals True Picture of October 7 Deaths,” was picked up by France24 (12/15/23), the Times of India (12/15/23), the financial weekly Barron’s (12/15/23) and a scattering of small newspapers, including the Caledonian (Vermont) Record (12/15/23).

The AFP story covered much the same ground as Haaretz’s analysis, listing the same slain infant—Mila Cohen—and five other young victims under 7 years old in refuting claims of wholesale slaughter of babies.

While Google searches found no US mainstream media reporting on the Israeli social security agency’s data, several independent journalists did.

Gareth Porter, an American historian and journalist whose credentials go back to the Vietnam War, cited the social security data in an article in Consortium News (1/6/24) that argued that the Netanyahu government sought to build support for the invasion of Gaza by “inventing stories about nonexistent atrocities and planting them with credulous US news outlets.”

In February, Jeremy Scahill used that data to make the same case in a 8,000-word article, headlined “Netanyahu’s War on Truth,” in the Intercept (2/7/24), the investigative website he helped found.

Both journalists credit the December 15 AFP dispatch as the source of the Israeli social security data. (Porter’s story provides a link to the Times of India; Scahill links to France24.)

Earlier this week a third independent journalist, Glenn Greenwald (3/3/24), quoted the December 4 Haaretz report, which used the Israeli social security data, in a YouTube video, titled “October 7 Reports Implode: Beheaded Babies, NY Times Scandal & More.”

Emotion-inflaming stories

Media focus on the imaginary beheaded babies helped Israel get away with killing hundreds of actual babies (Al Jazeera, 1/25/24).

In the months since the Haaretz and AFP reports were published, Bituah Leumi has updated its civilian death count to 779, including 76 foreign workers, as more victims are identified (Jewish News Syndicate, 1/15/24.).

But a detailed examination this week of the 16-page list of victims on the memorial website found no additional infants or young children—only those already accounted for by Haaretz and AFP—and a total of 36 children under 18 years old.

Mila Cohen remains the only infant reported killed in the October 7 attack.

US corporate media’s failure to cite the social security agency’s data to forcefully refute claims of butchered babies and other outrages comes at a high cost. Such emotion-inflaming stories continue to foul the public debate over whether Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians (AP, 2/29/24)—two-thirds of those women and children (PBS, 2/19/24)—is a criminally disproportionate response to the Hamas attack.

Al Jazeera (2/29/24) broke down the Palestinian death count further, citing Gaza Health Ministry figures:

The ministry said of the 30,035 people killed so far in the conflict, more than 13,000 were children and 8,800 women. At least 70,457 people have been injured, of which more than 11,000 are in critical condition and need to be evacuated.

In January, when the Health Ministry had estimated the number of children killed at 10,000, Al Jazeera (1/25/24) published the names of more than 4,200 Palestinian dead under 18 years old. Of those children named, 502 were under 2 years old—that is, infants.

Unfounded horror stories about Hamas’s infant victims that should have been debunked were still being repeated by Biden (12/12/23) at a campaign fundraiser more than two months after Israel was attacked:

I saw some of the photographs when I was there—tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman—totally, completely inhuman.

This time the Washington Post didn’t factcheck Biden—even though the White House stated months earlier that the president had never seen such photos (CNN, 10/12/23).

Still no Pinocchios.

 

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Voters Won’t Miss Sinema—but Corporate Media Already Do

FAIR - March 8, 2024 - 1:17pm

 

When Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I–Ariz.) announced that she would not seek re-election in 2024, few of her constituents likely mourned. After launching her political career with the Green Party and running for Senate as a moderate Democrat, Sinema veered ever rightward, carving out a reputation for cozying up to industry lobbyists while leaving her voters out in the cold. (She left the Democratic Party in December 2022.) But corporate media, whose commitment to centrism over the public interest mirrors Sinema’s own, offered praise for her supposed achievements, and bemoaned the “partisanship” they blamed for bringing her down.

Axios (3/5/24) painted Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s retirement as “the latest in a series of crushing blows to Senate bipartisanship.”

“Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-Ariz.) decision not to seek re-election has dealt the latest in a series of crushing blows to Senate bipartisanship,” wrote Axios‘s Zachary Basu (3/5/24), “hollowing out a centrist core that has suffered under years of intensifying polarization.”

Ignorant voters just don’t understand Sinema’s value, Axios suggested: “Despite her broad unpopularity, Sinema will leave Congress with a virtually unparalleled record as a bipartisan negotiator.”

“Sinema has been an influential yet polarizing figure in the Senate and has frequently worked to broker compromise between Democrats and Republicans,” declared CNN (3/5/24), citing the recent bipartisan border deal. (Ultimately rejected by the GOP, that bill would have shredded immigrant rights, enabling mass deportations and restoring the Trump administration’s asylum ban, in exchange for funding the US-backed wars in Gaza and Ukraine—Truthout, 12/21/23).

The Washington Post (3/5/24) described Sinema as “central to many bipartisan pieces of legislation that have become law.” Alas, “people close to Sinema said she had begun to worry that her bipartisan brand of dealmaking was no longer in demand with voters in a polarized era.”

The AP‘s Jonathan Cooper (3/6/24) offered a similar diagnosis: “Sinema’s border-security ambitions, and her career in Congress, were swallowed by the partisanship that has paralyzed Congress.”

Sinema’s real record

The New York Times (3/5/24) called Sinema “an enigmatic figure who often kept colleagues guessing about her intentions and defied convention.”

But what is this “unparalleled record” of Sinema’s, really? What did her “bipartisan brand of dealmaking” accomplish?

Many articles quoted from Sinema’s video announcement, which she posted to social media: “Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year.”

Sinema’s record demonstrated the exact opposite. She became notorious for not listening or trying to understand or work with the people she was supposed to represent: holding no press conferences or town halls, and consistently refusing to meet with or speak to constituents when approached (Mother Jones, 10/7/21). Possibly her most viral moment—giving a cutesy thumbs-down to doom a $15 minimum wage amendment to the 2021 Covid relief bill—was an expression of neither civility nor understanding.

The New York Times‘ Kellen Browning and Kayla Guo (3/5/24) mentioned the thumbs-down, explaining that it “infuriated progressives.” That’s true enough, but to suggest that only “progressives” would be upset at the then-Democrat’s refusal to vote for a policy that had the support of 61% of Arizona’s voters (and a whopping 89% of the state’s Democrats) falsely makes the policy itself seem left-wing—and Sinema, therefore, a “moderate.”

NPR (3/5/24) offered a similar skew:

Sinema often found herself at odds with the more progressive wing of her party. She opposed raising taxes on the wealthy and ending the filibuster to make it easier for Democrats to pass legislation in the Senate.

But astute listeners would recall that it wasn’t just “the more progressive wing of her party” she was at odds with on those issues; it was every Democrat in the Senate, save for Joe Manchin. Sinema and Manchin were the only Democrats standing in the way of raising taxes on the wealthy and ending the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, which strong majorities of Democratic voters also supported.

The Times continued, “Activists have criticized what they say is her eagerness to side with business interests over the campaign promises she made to Arizona voters.”

The Guardian (10/11/21)recounted how the one-time progressive activist became the pharmaceutical industry’s “lead blocker in the fight to prevent the government from negotiating drug prices.”

One might think that the job of a newspaper would be to evaluate such criticisms, so that readers know whether or not they’re substantiated. In fact, the Times itself (9/27/21) reported in 2021 that Sinema held fundraisers with industry opponents of the Build Back Better bill even as she played a central role in negotiations over the legislation. Politico (10/15/21) noted at the time that only 10% of her campaign fundraising that quarter came from Arizona residents; Data for Progress (10/27/21) found that Sinema and Manchin took in three times as much lobbying money as the average senator.

During her Senate campaign, one of Sinema’s key popular positions was cutting prescription drug prices. But once in the Senate, and with Big Pharma dollars lining her pockets, she blocked a bill to do just that (Guardian, 10/11/21).

Corporate media seem to think running an occasional piece revealing a politician’s actual influences satisfies their responsibility to hold the powerful to account—while surrounding that reporting with an avalanche of coverage that blithely ignores those revelations. The end result is an overall picture of an admirable moderate who defends tradition and keeps extremists on both left and right from mucking things up (FAIR.org, 10/6/21).

To our most influential journalists, reaching across the aisle to election deniers is a greater good than securing the public’s right to vote, right to healthcare or right to a living wage.

Move to the ‘center’

Politico (3/6/24) described Arizona as state where “centrist maverick Sen. John McCain dominated politics for decades”—echoing a myth that has dominated political reporting for decades (Extra!, 5–6/08).

Sinema’s exit had journalists speculating about what impact it will have on the swing state’s Senate race.  To benefit, Republican candidate Kari Lake and Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego “will likely be forced to pivot hard to the center,” Politico‘s Ally Mutnick and Ursula Perano (3/6/24) wrote.

They continued: “Both candidates, however, face clear hurdles in selling those moderate bona fides to an unabashedly swing state.” You see, Lake has “vehemently denied the validity of the 2020 election election. And she is still sticking to some of the rhetoric.”

What about Gallego? Well, Politico explained:

Senate Republicans—even the relative moderates among them—say Gallego’s progressive record will be a tough sell in his home state.

Gallego decided to challenge Sinema, after all, out of anger that the Arizona independent was stymieing key Democratic legislative priorities. And he was urged on by progressives when he did so.

So the “right” is refusing to accept election results and the “left” is…well, Politico doesn’t bother to tell readers anything about Gallego’s actual policy positions, just that he recently left the Progressive Caucus, and that Republicans say he has a “progressive record.” And, since corporate media equate progressives with extremism—despite most of their policy ideas garnering widespread popular support—that means Lake and Gallego are just two sides of the same coin.

The post Voters Won’t Miss Sinema—but Corporate Media Already Do appeared first on FAIR.

Ian Millhiser on Supreme Court Trump Protection, Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders

FAIR - March 8, 2024 - 10:40am
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308.mp3

 

Vox (3/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Among the multitude of harms that could rain on this country should Donald Trump become president again, he could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning by violence the results of the 2020 election. Not to put too fine a point on it, Trump could declare himself above the law—and that’s just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal case wherein Trump declares himself immune to criminal prosecution. The Court can move quickly; they hopped right to the decision that Trump can’t be removed from presidential ballots in the states. But this, we’re to understand, will take, huh, maybe until after the election, to mull. Vox Court-watcher Ian Millhiser says he tries to reserve his “this is an exceptionally alarming decision” voice, but this occasion calls for it. We hear from him this week.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308Millhiser.mp3

 

Also on the show: Corporate news media have an anti-elder narrative that’s as stupid as it is cruel. “Keep up or you’re in the way,” the line goes, “if you aren’t working 40 to 60 hours a week, you’re a societal drain.” It’s a weird position, erasing and marginalizing elderly people, given that the elderly are a sizable portion of the population, and a community we all get to join if we’re lucky. Alfredo Lopez is a longtime organizer and activist, and a founder of the new group Radical Elders. We talk with him about the space the group seeks to fill.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308Lopez.mp3

 

The post Ian Millhiser on Supreme Court Trump Protection, Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders appeared first on FAIR.

Applause for Lunar Failure Follows Decades of Space Program Cheerleading

FAIR - March 7, 2024 - 12:25pm

 

“In a historic lunar accomplishment, the first private spacecraft to land successfully on the Moon touched down on February 22,” the journal Nature (2/23/24) trumpeted the following day.

That first paragraph of its story began under a photograph of the spacecraft and the caption: “The spacecraft Odysseus passed over the Moon on 21 February before successfully landing on 22 February.” The photo was credited to “Intuitive Machines/NASA CLPS.”

ABC‘s David Muir (2/22/24): “We have just learned now the landing was a success.”

ABC News anchor David Muir (2/22/24) opened the network’s evening broadcast the day of the touchdown with news of “the first US attempt at landing on the Moon in more than 50 years.”

“We have just learned now the landing was a success,” Muir said.

TV network coverage included celebratory applause in the mission’s control room in Houston, and NASA administrator Bill Nelson (CNN, 2/23/24) declaring: “The US has returned to the Moon. Today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships.”

‘Still a success’?

NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to design, build and fly Odysseus.

“Houston, Odysseus has found its new home,” declared Stephen Altemus (USA Today, 2/22/24), the company’s president and CEO.

But success turned out not to be the best word to describe what happened.

AP (2/25/24): “The first private US spacecraft to land on the moon broke a leg at touchdown before falling over.”

As the Associated Press reported on February 25:

The first private US spacecraft to land on the Moon broke a leg at touchdown before falling over, according to company officials who said Wednesday it was on the verge of losing power.

“The lander came in too fast, skidded and tumbled over as it touched down near the Moon’s south pole last week,” said Altemus. The lander, named Odysseus, was still alive and generating solar power but expected to go silent soon. Late Wednesday night, the company said the lander might linger into Thursday.

AP’s aerospace writer, Marcia Dunn, quoted Altemus saying that flight controllers would “’tuck Odie in for the cold night of the Moon’ so in two to three weeks, once lunar night lifts, they can try to regain contact.”

But, her piece continued: “Mission director Tim Crain said it’s uncertain if Odysseus will wake up. The extreme cold of the lunar night could crack the electronics and kill the batteries.”

Still, the headline of USA Today on February 28 was “Odysseus Lander Tipped Over on the Moon: Here’s Why NASA Says the Mission Was Still a Success.” The article began:

The Odysseus lunar lander came in hot and fast during a dramatic Moon landing a week ago, which appeared to send the spacecraft toppling onto its side. The position of the craft seemed to obstruct some of its antennas from pointing toward Earth, while its solar panels were in far from an ideal position to generate energy from the overhead sun. Flight controllers feared the worst and raced against time to get as much data as they could before the energy-deprived Odysseus heaved its final gasp and went silent. But concerns that the sideways landing spelled doom for the mission have been naught: As of Wednesday afternoon, Odysseus is still beaming back valuable intel.

On Thursday, February 29, Odysseus fell silent.

‘Love affair with space program’

(Common Courage, 1997)

From the start, much of the media have been highly supportive of the space program—serving, indeed, as cheerleaders. I wrote the book The Wrong Stuff, about the use of atomic power and nuclear material in space, after breaking the story in The Nation in 1986 on how the next mission of the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle would have involved lofting a plutonium-fueled space probe.

In the book, I cited an article by William Boot, “NASA and the Spellbound Press,” that appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review (7/1/86), of which he was former editor. He found “gullibility” in the press:

Dazzled by the space agency’s image of technological brilliant, space reporters spared NASA the thorough scrutiny that might have improved chances of averting tragedy—through hard-hitting investigations drawing Congress’s wandering attention to the issue of shuttle safety.

“US journalists have long had a love affair with the space program,” Boot said. “In the pre-[Challenger] explosion days, many space reporters appeared to regard themselves as participants, along with NASA, in a great cosmic quest. Transcripts of NASA press conferences reveal that it was not unusual for reporters to use the first-person plural,” wrote Boot, with such statements such as, “When are we going to launch?”

I interviewed John Noble Wilford, space reporter for the New York Times, who acknowledged that

there’s still a lot of space reporters who are groupies. Some are turned on by rockets and science fiction, and they got into it because of that, and they tend to be the least critical. They go along because it’s fun. But I think the mainline reporters are more skeptical when NASA says this, this and this.

Still, Wilford said, “some of the things that NASA does are so great, so marvelous, so it’s easy to forget to be critical.”

In his book Mars Beckons: The Great Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space (Knopf, 1990), Wilford himself perhaps forgot to be critical. He waxed poetic about how “a fleet of cargo ships, possibly powered by a new kind of rocket using nuclear-electric propulsion,” would provide supplies for a base on the Moon. From there, on a nuclear-powered rocket, Wilford wrote, “people would be ready to make the greater stride, to Mars.”

CBS reporter Bruce Hall, who covered the space program, had an article in Editor & Publisher (7/12/86) headlined “Could the Media Have Prevented Shuttle Disaster?” Hall wrote:

We now know that NASA was playing space-age Russian roulette and lost…. We had become lackadaisical. We were being spoonfed by a very good NASA public affairs office. And when we did turn up something, editors and show producers had no interest.

‘No second home’

Discover (9/8/23) points to “major challenges right now that would largely preclude tourists from visiting Mars, mostly because of the radiation…which can damage the human body and cause all sorts of degenerative diseases.”

In recent times, there has been some more critical reporting on space issues. In a recent issue of Discover magazine (9/8/23), “Road Trip to the Red Planet,” Sara Novak wrote about “what it would be like to stay or live on Mars.” Putting a damper on billionaire fantasies of Mars colonization, she noted, “Mars is an arid, inhospitable desert, with temperatures reaching minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit regularly.”

What’s more, the Red Planet would not be “habitable without spacesuits and a completely enclosed environment, because the planet’s air is about 95% carbon dioxide.” Novak added:

Colonists on Mars would face other challenges, too. For starters, it would be difficult to grow plants in Mars’ regolith, or soil, which contains poisonous compounds of chlorine in molecules called perchlorates. All of the elements that we take for granted on Earth would not exist on Mars.

Or take the book published last year, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (PenguinRandomHouse, 2023). In it, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote:

The truth is that settling other worlds, in the sense of creating self-sustaining societies somewhere away from Earth, is not only quite unlikely anytime soon, it won’t deliver on the benefits touted by advocates. No vast riches, no new independent nations, no second home for humanity, not even a safety bunker for ultra elites. Yet we find ourselves in a world where space agencies, huge corporations, and media-savvy billionaires are promising something else. According to them, settlements are coming, perhaps as soon as 2050 or so.

The Weinersmiths provided a reality check: “Even if we thought space settlements would take pressure off of Earth’s seas and lands, they will absolutely not arrive in time to thwart an environmental calamity.”

Fantasies of escape

Jacobin (2/23/24) notes that Elon Musk has proposed “an indentured labor package where workers take out a loan to pay for their tickets” to Mars.

Or consider the article last month in Jacobin (2/23/24), “Get These Rich People Off the Moon”:

Texas start-up Intuitive Machines has achieved the first Moon landing by a private firm. It’s dumping rich people’s detritus on the lunar surface—a grim sign of how the superrich plan to plant their flag beyond our own planet…. As well as a lot of expensive thing-a-me-scopes, the company dropped off Jeff Koons’ prized marbles…a set of 125 one-inch balls representing the eight phases of the Moon in different colors.

Author Peter Howson noted that

Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander had been supposed to dispose of at least 70 dead rich people (and one rich dog) on the lunar surface…. Elon Musk famously sent a Tesla Roadster as the dummy payload for the 2018 Falon Heavy test flight…. Other than allowing billionaires and private companies to benefit from taxpayer-funded pipe dreams and advertising, the value of going to the Moon for all mankind is not at all clear.

Peregrine’s failed Moon mission in January carried the ashes of science fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Roddenberry, along with five NASA experiments. NASA paid Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic $108 million toward that mission, which underwent what was described  by the New York Times (1/18/24) as a “propulsion malfunction” that led to it being aimed back at the Earth. “American Company’s Moon Lander Disintegrates in Earth’s Atmosphere” was the headline of the Times‘ piece, by Kenneth Chang who, the Times noted, “has reported on four failed Moon lander missions, and three successful landings, since 2019.”

The Times last month also ran a piece (1/19/24) headlined “Racing to Land, or Crash, on the Moon.” One part was headed, “64 Years of Moon Crashes.” It said:

Robotic spacecraft have made a series of impacts, belly flops and hard landings—some intentional, others unplanned—since 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 became the first probe to hit the Moon.

Space “is one of the most extreme environments imaginable,” as the European Space Agency emphasizes on its website.

Insert atomic power—and NASA is now again moving ahead with nuclear-propelled rocket projects—and use of nuclear materials into the equation, and the threats to life are many, many times multiplied.

We reside on this exquisite blue marble in space that sustains life—and we so need to be stewards caring for the Earth, not indulging in dangerous, ultra-expensive and most dubious fantasies of escape.

The post Applause for Lunar Failure Follows Decades of Space Program Cheerleading appeared first on FAIR.

‘We Need to Separate Capitalism and Journalism’

FAIR - March 6, 2024 - 10:16am
CounterSpin interview with Victor Pickard on the crisis of journalism

Janine Jackson interviewed U Penn’s Victor Pickard about the crisis of journalism for the March 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240301Pickard.mp3

 

 

Janine Jackson: The fact that every news program is peppered with advertising, even on public broadcasting; that the newspaper you hope will give a fair accounting of, for example, economic inequality, will bring you that story next to an ad for $2,000 shoes; the fact that the cost of learning about the world means sifting through mountains of media designed to get you to buy stuff, via outlets that are themselves owned by massive, profit-driven corporations—well, for many of us, that’s just how it is.

But it isn’t how it is everywhere, or how it’s always been, or how it has to be. Changing things isn’t just a matter of policy or law, but of reimagining the role of journalism in our public life.

Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality and Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victor Pickard.

Victor Pickard: Thanks so much for having me, Janine.

JJ: I guess I’ll ask you to start by just outlining what you see as the core troubles with what we’ve got now, the current media landscape. What sets it on a course that runs afoul of democracy, or democratic aspirations, as I say?

NPR (10/11/23)

VP: There are so many troubling signs right now. It’s difficult to know exactly what to focus on, but to speak in really broad strokes, I would point to the massive recent layoffs, especially in our newspaper industry. The LA Times recently cut over 22% of its newsroom. Before that, the Washington Post had cut about 10% of its employees.

And these, of course, are both billionaire-owned newspapers. Until recently, they were considered the success stories in our new, very challenging digital age for journalism.

But I think this all points to a bigger picture. In many ways, what we’re seeing are the continuing death throes of an industry that’s reached a point of no return. And if we turn back to 2005—and of course at that point, it’s not as if we were living through a perfect golden age for journalism—but since 2005, we’ve seen about two-thirds of our newspaper journalists and about a third of newspapers disappear. And this is creating vast and expanding news deserts, where tens of millions of Americans have access to little or no local news media whatsoever. And it’s creating all kinds of problems for any semblance of democratic self-governance.

And, of course, when we’re talking about the newspaper industry, it’s not as if it’s just about nostalgia, but it happens to be the primary source for most original news and information and original reporting that permeates through our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose newspapers, we lose local journalism, and that’s a tragedy for all of us.

JJ: I think many folks might think, “Oh, I don’t even read the newspaper.” But the work that newspapers do then shows up on television and on radio, and maybe it’s the behind-the-scenes investigation, the actual reporting, and you think, “Well, I don’t read the paper, so it doesn’t affect me.” But, of course, it obviously affects the whole climate of what we know, what we know about what the government is doing, what we know about what is happening around the world, right? So you don’t have to read a paper to be affected by this.

VP: Exactly. I mean, even hearing word-of-mouth information from our neighbors, or gleaning commentary from various social media feeds, or looking at cable television, if you listen closely, most of the original news information still traces back to the beleaguered newspaper industry. And, of course, things like what’s happening with the local school board or city hall or our state legislatures, these are all beats that traditionally and historically have been covered by newspaper reporters, and those beats are rapidly disappearing.

The Conversation (2/13/24)

JJ: I do think that folks can see, if they’re looking, the layoffs and the closing of outlets, and as you mentioned, lots of people live in kind of flyover towns, where they can get news from the nearest big city, hundreds of miles away, but there’s nothing local and serious. In a recent piece with NYU’s Rodney Benson, you take issue, though, with what some folks have presented as the savior, as a way forward, namely benevolent billionaires.

VP: That’s right. And there’s long been this kind of wishful thinking that, OK, if the advertising model for supporting journalism is no longer viable, and if people aren’t paying enough for their news and information, then maybe we can look to these so-called benevolent billionaires to swoop in and save the day.

And, at best, they were always expected to maybe save a newspaper here and there. But even those hopes are proving to be ill-founded, and even billionaires face various kinds of sticker shock when they’re losing tens of millions of dollars a year on their pet projects. So I don’t think, and this was never a systemic fix to begin with, but I don’t think that they can even save some of our major newspapers, as was previously hoped.

JJ: Let’s turn to the forward-looking, I guess. You talk about non-reformist reforms, which, I love that language, and I’ll ask you to kind of say what you mean there, but I also wanted to just kind of throw in there, are there lessons or models from other countries that could be meaningful here?

VP: I do think it’s always useful to look internationally, and also historically, at some of our own experiments that we’ve tried here in the US, to expand our imagination about what’s possible, to glean best practices. And I think, at the very least, we can point to some, actually many, democracies, most democracies around the planet fund robust public broadcasting systems, public media systems, which I think is always a good conversation starter, to at least begin imagining what might our public media system look like if we start living up to global norms, and actually funding our systems accordingly.

But then, also, to look at how countries like Norway and Sweden, some of the Western and Northern European countries, are directly funding their newspaper industries, or at least indirectly subsidizing them. And I think these are all things that we could start thinking about, especially as it’s so clear that there simply is not a commercial future for many kinds of journalism, especially local journalism. So we have to start thinking outside of the market, and really pushing for a paradigm shift, when we see journalism as not just a commodity whose worth is determined by its profitability on the market, but rather as a public service upon which democracy depends.

JJ: What do you mean when you talk about reforms as being non-reformist? What are you getting at there?

VP: It’s kind of a wonky phrase, but what I’m really trying to get at is, we’ve often heard of this dichotomy between reform versus revolution: Can we radically change our core systems overnight, or is this more of a gradual reformist process that we make small tweaks as we can? And there’s actually a middle road, where I think we can focus on these structural reforms in the short term, with an eye towards a more radical distant horizon, where we’re really seeking to transform the system.

And this is sounding a little bit abstract, but to give a few examples, if we today recognize that we need to salvage the journalism that’s still being practiced, so we would try to transition these failing commercial models into nonprofit or at least low-profit institutions, with an eye towards a more ambitious project, where we really try to build out a new public media system, so a system that’s not reliant on benevolent billionaires or other forms of private capital, but instead is reliant on public financing, that’s federally guaranteed, but locally owned and controlled and governed.

And I think that’s what we need to place on the horizon, to have this sort of long-term, might-take-decades-to-get-there, but to really have that as our north star, instead of constantly reacting to whatever problem is arising at the moment.

JJ: I like that you mentioned that you don’t have to only look overseas. You can also look to our own history. Some people may remember that public broadcasting in this country began with some lovely language about providing “a forum for controversy and debate,” and for including voices that would “otherwise be unheard,” specifically that commercial networks didn’t want to air.

So, in other words, public media weren’t intended to be a more edumacated version, a less shouty version, of the same perspectives we got from commercial media. They didn’t write the Public Broadcasting Act so we could get Masterpiece Theater.

But we know it lost its way with a congressional short leash for funding. So now we have PBS programs bringing us stories about weapons while being sponsored by Lockheed Martin.

You’ve already started to tell us about your vision of what public media could look like. I’d ask you to expand on that, but also, we know that, as Americans, we’re told to hate the government; private is always better. As soon as you talk about government funding or state funding for broadcasting, people talk about state censorship, as though there were no such thing as corporate censorship. But talk a little bit more about what your vision of public media could be.

Victor Pickard: “The government is always involved in our news information systems. But the question is, how should it be involved?”

VP: That’s right. And to get there, I will hit on a couple of points you just mentioned in passing, which is this notion that the government isn’t involved in our media system. It’s a libertarian fantasy. The government is always involved in our news information systems. But the question is, how should it be involved? Should it be serving corporate interests, or should it be serving public interest? And that’s really, as a democratic society, a question we should always be grappling with, in trying to design our news information systems, so that they are privileging democracy over profit imperatives.

And if you look at our history, public media subsidies are as American as apple pie. Going back to the postal system, which initially was primarily a newspaper delivery infrastructure that we heavily subsidized. In today’s dollars, it would be tens of billions of dollars towards disseminating news and information to far-flung communities across the country.

The same was true for broadcasting, for the internet: that came about through massive public subsidies. And certainly looking at our lost promise of public broadcasting, that was always meant to be an alternative, a structural alternative, to the commercial system, to this systemic market failure that’s always there with commercial media outlets.

So I think we need to recover that initial ideal, and really try to not just build out and redesign our public infrastructures, but entirely reimagine them. We could be using post offices, libraries, public broadcasting stations, these all could be outlets to serve as these public media centers where every community across the country would have its own anchor institution of newsrooms that look like the communities they purportedly serve, to make sure they’re owned and controlled by journalists and community members themselves.

So this is the kind of non-reformist reform vision that I think we should be working towards. Again, it’s not happening tomorrow, or even next year, but that’s something we need to work towards.

JJ: It’s interesting, the idea that government somehow is not involved in the media that we have. I seem to remember Bob McChesney saying something like, when the government gives out broadcast licenses, they aren’t setting rules; they’re picking winners.

VP: That’s right. Yeah, I mean, those licenses are essentially monopolistic privileges for these corporations to use the public airwaves. And that’s a tremendously valuable public resource that we all should be able to benefit from. And this is just one example of where we really need to take media out of the market. We need to separate capitalism and journalism, which was always a very troubling union, to say the least.

JJ: And then, of course, in an election year, when you start to see those election ads, you have to remember that this is politicians and political parties just dumping money into media outlets for political advertising.

VP: That’s right. It’s essentially a payola system, pay to play. And we’re constantly being bombarded with these kinds of corporate messages, when we’re not discussing the climate crisis, we’re not discussing growing inequality, and so many crises facing us today. And that’s ideally what a publicly owned and controlled—so not just public in name only, but actually serving the public—a system based on those logics, I think, could try to live up to these democratic ideals.

JJ: I so appreciate projects like the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, that shift the focus, as we’re talking about, from shoring up existing outlets toward asking whether the community’s information needs are being met. I love that language means something, and that is a categorically different project.

VP: Yeah, that’s exactly how it should be framed: based on needs, not the profit imperatives of a small number of investors and advertisers and media owners.

And I’m glad that you mentioned the New Jersey project, because this is a proof of concept that we’re seeing replicated in other states as well, similar programs taking off in California, most recently, Wisconsin and Illinois. DC is looking at a news voucher program.

So there are all these exciting projects and experiments that show that government can indeed play a very productive role in guaranteeing the level of news and information that all members of society should have access to. It’s a way of empowering local communities, and I really think we need to see more of this, but, of course, we also need to scale it up beyond just state governments, to a federal government level that can really guarantee that sort of universal service ethic to all members of society.

CounterSpin (5/6/22)

JJ: And I would encourage folks to go back and listen to an interview that I did, with Mike Rispoli from Free Press, specifically about that New Jersey project. It wasn’t like a foundation coming in and saying, “Let’s do this.” It involved early, formative input from a whole range of community groups. It really is a bottom-up conversation.

And I think that also reflects a recognition that it’s the already marginalized, economically and otherwise marginalized, that suffer currently the most from media distortions, and from the problems we’re discussing with media. So this way forward is not just—and I appreciate that you’re saying that it takes time—but it’s not just an end goal. The process itself is something good, I think.

VP: That’s absolutely right. And Mike Rispoli knows better than anyone I’m aware of that this really needs to begin with community organizing. It must be a grassroots effort. It can’t be dropped in. As important as the foundations are in trying to feed this growing nonprofit sector, we really have to make sure we’re not just decommercializing media, but we’re also democratizing media. And I think those kinds of efforts that begin with local communities, making sure that they’re involved at the ground floor, is so key. And I’m cautiously optimistic we’re going to be seeing more of these experiments take root across the country.

JJ: And then, once you see it working—as you say, proof of concept—there’s an imagination effort that needs to happen. And I think people are tired and beleaguered and have other things to do. So to have a project happen and see, “Oh yeah, that can happen,” that is a tremendous addition of energy towards making it happen in other places and other times, because people see that it is genuinely possible, and they won’t be throwing their energy down a hole.

VP: That’s so true. And so much of this is, as you say, about really expanding our imagination about what is possible. We’ve been so conditioned to think that if the market doesn’t support something, that it’s just going to have to wither away, as unfortunate as that might be. And these kinds of experiments show there is something we can do about it. We do have agency, we can intervene. These are political choices, and we can choose to have a much more democratic media system that serves us all.

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, it might sound a little bit afield, but I don’t think so. The subhead on the book is Confronting the Misinformation Society, and we sometimes say at FAIR that if our purpose was to make the New York Times suddenly much better, well then we would just pull up the covers, because that’s not happening. But we do think that we help people understand how to read the New York Times, and not to be affected or influenced by it in exactly the same way that they might have.

And so I just wanted to ask you, where does media literacy fit into this? It’s not a no/but, it’s a yes/and, because at the same time, we need to be helping folks navigate the system that we’ve got, so that they can see the omissions and the need for better.

Oxford University Press (2019)

VP: That’s exactly right. It needs to always be an essential tool in our toolbox for really trying to decipher the predictable patterns in our heavily commercialized media system. And I think that is a way of building up agency. It’s not going to structurally transform the entire system, but I think if we understand the structural critique, that we see the political economy behind these news outlets, we understand what are the commercial logics that are driving them to tell these kinds of stories and not others, to talk to these people and not other people, I do think that that is so important for us to do, and that’s certainly what I’ve dedicated my career to doing, and I’ll continue doing my best to try to really cultivate this critical consumption of our news media.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Victor Pickard. The book Democracy Without Journalism? is available from Oxford University Press, and you can find the piece “Saving the News Media Means Moving Beyond the Benevolence of Billionaires” on TheConversation.com, as well as Common Dreams and various other places. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VP: Thank you, Janine. It was so great talking to you.

The post ‘We Need to Separate Capitalism and Journalism’ appeared first on FAIR.

‘What in the Slaughter of Palestinians Is So Important to the US?’

FAIR - March 5, 2024 - 1:06pm
CounterSpin interview with Trita Parsi on Gaza assault

Janine Jackson interviewed the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi about the Gaza assault for the February 23, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240223Parsi.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: After the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was, here in New York City, a palpable feeling of horror and loss, and it was combined with a sense of dread of what might be to come. There’s something of that now, even as we reel from the toll of death and destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza, we’re forced to see that things could still get worse. Will there be a wider war? Is it already happening, and what can we do about it?

Trita Parsi is co-founder and executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Trita Parsi.

Trita Parsi: Thank you so much for having me again.

JJ: I would ask you please to sort of bring us up to date. It’s February 21 when we’re recording, and we know that things are changing every minute, but what do you see brewing, or already happening, regionally as a consequence of Israel’s assault on Gaza? Of course, please talk about Gaza, but I’m also interested in what you think may be follow-on actions in the region that we should be paying attention to.

Trita Parsi: “There’s a sense of frustration that everything they’re doing to try to compel the US to take a more balanced approach is failing.” (image: Center for American Progress)

TP: Let me quote, without naming the name, what a diplomat from a regional power told me this last week. This is a country that is a very close ally of the United States. His point was that the region is turning so much against the United States, that in five years he envisions that the Middle East will be far more connected with Russia and China, and that those two countries will have far more influence in the region than the United States will, because of what the Biden administration is doing in Gaza, in terms of allowing and enabling this horrible slaughter and massacre that is taking place there.

And this is from a diplomat of a country that doesn’t want to see the region moving that direction. There’s a sense of frustration that everything they’re doing to try to compel the US to take a more balanced approach is failing. And the ultimate cost of that is not only paid for by the people in Gaza and the peoples of the region, but ultimately US interest itself, because the region as a whole is turning against the United States.

And I think there’s another aspect here that is also important to keep in mind. Another observer pointed out that, in many ways, this is worse than what happened during the Iraq War. First of all, the pace of killing, and the proportion of children and women, of course, is far greater than it was in Iraq.

But it’s also the fact that in the invasion of Iraq, France and Germany stood up against the United States, put up significant opposition, and it was very clear they were not on board. And that meant that that invasion did not take on a Huntingtonian clash-of-civilizations dimension. It was the neocons and their neo-imperialist project, rather than that clash of civilizations.

This time around, Europe has taken an embarrassing position, particularly in the UK. And as a result, this may end up adopting more of that Huntingtonian direction, which will then not only have a very negative effect, ultimately, for the US’s relationships in the region, but also for Europe’s.

Some countries are standing out: Ireland, Spain, Belgium, to a certain extent Portugal as well. And many of the Europeans, of course, with the exception of the UK, have voted in favor of ceasefires. But in terms of actually putting pressure on the United States, hardly any of them.

Politico (6/13/11)

JJ: Well, I’m from Delaware, so I’ve known about Joe Biden for a while. But for many people, he is this avuncular, self-effacing guy who played water guns with the press corps on his lawn as vice president. But he seems to be showing that he’s not just tolerant of war, or inept at extricating from it. He seems to believe in it. So as US citizens engaging with the president that we have…. That’s the question, bleh!

TP: This is one of the things that is so perplexing to people, that this conflict has arisen an ideological side of Biden that has always been there, but it’s never been this prominent and this decisive. And this is very important, because he does not have his administration fully with him.

There’s been a lot of reports about the dissent that exists in the White House, at the State Department and elsewhere in the US government; there’s been resignations, there’s been significant dissent cables, there’s been staffers at the White House that hold vigils in favor of the ceasefire outside the White House in the evenings, letters signed by White House interns against the very president they are interning for. This is unprecedented.

But there’s actually additional opposition at even higher levels, that has not been reported in the press yet, which may not necessarily come from the same standpoint. It’s not necessarily because of the sympathy for the Palestinians, but it’s because of recognition of the significant costs this will have for Biden, or anyone associated with Biden, or the reelection campaign prospects of Biden, etc. So there’s more to it than what we have seen in the press, yet so far we have seen nothing from Biden in which he’s willing to budge.

And I think it’s important to note, Biden himself and the Democrats have defined this election, against what most likely will be Trump, as a question about the survival of American democracy. If that is the case, then one truly has to ask oneself, what is it in the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza that is so important to the US that Biden is not only willing to risk escalation in the region and getting dragged into another war, he’s not only willing to risk his own reelection—we’ve seen what’s happening in Michigan and many other states—but he’s apparently, based on his own statements, also willing to risk American democracy? This does not check out.

JJ: Right. Well, I’m not a silver lining type, but I do see people waking up every day—not becoming cynical, but becoming critical. Very critical. Just not accepting what’s put on their plate every morning by the Times or the Post, and asking questions, and reading widely and internationally. So I guess, finally, I just want to ask you, where do you find hope? Where do you see suggestions or ways to move forward?

PBS NewsHour

TP: I think it’s an important question, because it is important in the very, very otherwise dark time to try to identify where potential hope may exist. I find hope in the fact that I know that it’s not just Muslim or Arab Americans that are objecting to this. If you’re a young person today, you’re not seeing the same state that Biden saw when he was young, when he thought he perceived Israel to be the underdog, etc. You are seeing a country that is massacring, and based on the videos of their own soldiers, seems to take great joy in the massacres that are taking place.

And that’s going to have a profound and longstanding impact on the manner in which the United States will be approaching Israel on these issues, and the extent to which it will be willing to pay such a high cost to protect and provide Israel with political and diplomatic immunity. And it’s not clear to me that this generation will be able to turn the ship, so to say, in time, given the pace that Biden has now undermined the US’s goal.

JJ: I think that many folks are not used to not thinking of the United States as the shining city on a hill, and that we are coming for a reckoning in which we need to understand the US’s place as a country in the world. And we’ll be looking for journalists to help us situate that and do that. And I know I already said finally, but finally finally, what would you look for from news media in the present moment?

TP: Oh, where to begin on that? It’s been an absolute disgrace how this has been covered in most places. Let me just give you one example, on a detail that is nevertheless crucial: the way the activity of the Houthis was being reported. As you know, they’ve been attacking ships in the Red Sea, which has cost the Israelis quite a lot; it’s a tactic that they have been using that, in and of itself, actually is oftentimes violating international law.

But most of the reporting in the beginning did not even mention that the demand that the Houthis had was a ceasefire. So it was left unstated what they were doing this for, leaving readers with the impression that they’re just doing it because they’re crazy. And also leaving them the impression—in fact, sometimes in the news media, it was stated as such—that Biden felt that his hands were tied, and as a result he needed to take military action.

No mention that they actually had a demand. That demand was a ceasefire. It’s not that the newspapers need to endorse that demand, but they need to inform the public that that is why they’re doing it, which then can have an impact on how the public itself makes up its mind as to whether it’s worth going to war over this issue, as to, actually, is there a potential other way.

Particularly mindful, in fact, of another piece of information that took the media a very long time to report, which is that during the six days in which there was a ceasefire in November of last year, there were no attacks by Iraqi militias against the United States, and there was only one attack by a Houthi, by my count. So there was a dramatic reduction of attacks during the ceasefire. So that we know that there are strong data points suggesting that a ceasefire would also lead to a cessation of the Houthi attacks, of the Iraqi militia attacks. How can they deprive the American public from such crucial information at a moment when the United States government is weighing whether to take military action?

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. You can find their work online at ResponsibleStatecraft.org. Trita Parsi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TP: My pleasure. Thank you so much.

 

The post ‘What in the Slaughter of Palestinians Is So Important to the US?’ appeared first on FAIR.

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