FAIR

 

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’

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

Bash continued:

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

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

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

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

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

‘Attacking each other’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Violence erupted’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Taking room from my show’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Media 2070

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing Israel’s supporters a favor?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helping spark a movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Targeting of journalists’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failing to name the killer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obscuring responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

Common Dreams (3/28/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seattle Times (4/26/24)

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

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

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

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

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

CounterSpin (4/3/20)

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

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

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

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

Intercept (1/7/22)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

National Students for Justice in Palestine

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

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

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

Sam: Thank you for having me.

Middle East Eye (4/8/24)

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times (4/29/24)

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

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

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

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

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

Columbia University Press Blog (2/27/19)

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

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

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

Reuters (4/29/24)

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

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

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

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

So yeah, free Palestine.

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

S: Yeah, thanks for having me.

 

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The Washington Post (4/15/24) published a glowing profile of two former public school teachers who had “grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist.”

In the latest multi-thousand word feature depicting America’s “education culture war,” the Washington Post’s “They Quit Liberal Public Schools. Now They Teach Kids to Be Anti-‘Woke’” (4/15/24) fawningly profiled Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, the founders of the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K–12 school that aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools.”

The piece was written by Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who regularly contributes longform features that platform anti-trans and anti–Critical Race Theory views through a palatable “hear me out” frame, while including little in the way of opposing arguments—or fact checks (FAIR.org, 5/11/23, 2/12/22, 8/2/21).

This profile of the Fontanillas—two former California teachers who left their jobs and moved to Florida in 2020, “disillusioned” by school shutdowns and colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement—shows the Post once again depicting efforts to address racial and gender bias as a bigger problem than racial and gender bias themselves.

‘Direct from the classroom’

“The claim that public schools teach left-wing ‘indoctrination, not education’ had become a commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians and pundits,” Natanson wrote:

But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools—and offer families an alternative.

The irony of the Fontanillas founding a far-right Christian school to fight “indoctrination” is lost on Natanson, as she, too, uncritically repeated these claims, as though the couple’s experience as teachers legitimized the far-right ideologies they peddle.

Natanson reported that Kali’s social media presence has attracted people to her school—despite her being “regularly suspended for ‘community violations.’” The article does not specify what those violations are, but on Instagram, Kali herself shared a screenshot of her account being flagged for disinformation, and another video talking about how a post she made about “newcomers” (i.e., migrants) received a “violation,” in calls to get her followers to follow her backup account.

The piece refers to her ideas—including referring to Black History Month as “Black idolatry month” and encouraging her followers to be doomsday preppers—as “out there.”

Kali is half Black and half white, and Joshua is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent—a fact that is mentioned alongside the couple’s gripes with the idea of slavery reparations and the concept that America is systemically racist.

Hate and conspiracy theories

The punchline here is that Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 4/5/24) ought to be able to call members of groups she dislikes “freaks.”

Kali brags that the more right-wing her ideas, the more families she attracts to her school. “But they also spurred thousands of critical messages from online observers who contended she was indoctrinating students into a skewed, conservative worldview,” Natanson wrote.

The “hate” that these videos “inspire,” Natanson wrote, is from commenters who oppose Kali’s messages:

Online commenters regularly sling racial slurs and derogatory names: “slave sellout roach.” “dumb fukn bitch.” “wish dot com Candice Owen.” “Auntie Tomella.”

Never mind the hate and conspiracy theories Kali spews in her videos. A recent video on Kali’s Instagram begs followers to follow a backup account, because a video she made about migrants was taken down by Meta as a violation of community standards. She says she believes her account has been “shadowbanned”—or muted by the platform.

Even the posts that remain unflagged by Instagram are full of bigotry and disinformation, including a cartoon of carnival performers being let go from a sideshow because they’re “not freaks anymore,” a compilation video of trans women in women’s restrooms with text that reads “get these creeps out of our bathrooms,” and a photo of a trans flag that demands, “Defund the grooming cult.”

An ad Kali posted for an emergency medical kit claimed that the FDA had “lost its war” on Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that the right has latched onto as a panacea for Covid-19. In reality, the lawsuit the FDA settled with the drug company involved an acknowledgement that the drug has long been used to treat humans, not just livestock—but for parasites, not viruses (Newsweek, 3/22/24). The National Institutes of Health (12/20/23) report that double-blind testing reveals ivermectin is ineffective against Covid.

Evidence of ‘indoctrination’

For Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 1/9/24), the “facts” are transphobic, and “feelings” are to be disregarded—other people’s feelings, anyway.

Kali, who regularly mocks trans women and left-wing activists, apparently couldn’t take the heat. The backlash got so bad, Natanson writes, that

coupled with her chihuahua’s death and an injury that prevented her daily workouts, it proved too much for Kali. She went into a depressive spiral and had to take a break from social media. She barely managed to film her lessons.

In the Fontanillas’ lessons, the existence of white Quakers who fought against slavery is proof that racism is not institutionalized in the US. It’s also evidence of an “overemphasis” on reparations, even though, as Natanson mentioned toward the very end of the piece, many Quakers did take part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later chose to pay reparations.

In addition to Covid shutdowns, other evidence of left-wing “indoctrination” offered by the Fontanillas included a quiz that asked students to recognize their privilege, the use of a Critical Race Theory framework in an ethnic studies class, announcements for gay/straight alliance club meetings (with no announcements made for Joshua’s chess club meetings), and the work of “too many” “left-leaning” authors—like Studs Terkel, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman—in the English curriculum.

Natanson includes a positive testimonial from a mother whose son Kali tutored before her political shift rightward, who remembers how “Kali let him run around the block whenever he got antsy,” and a screenshot of a review from a current student, who says they “love love LOVE” Kali’s teaching, because it exposes “the stupid things on the internet in a logical way.” Natanson also quotes an employee of the company that handles the logistics for Southlands Christian Schools, the entity from which the Fontanillas’ school gets its accreditation, who says, “Josh and Kali are good people, they have a good message, there is definitely a market for what they’re doing.”

The only opposition to the Fontanillas’ arguments in the nearly 3,000-word piece, beyond incoherent social media comments, come in the form of official statements and school board meeting soundbites.

Natanson includes a statement from the school district the Fontanillas formerly worked, saying that the ethnic studies class Kali resigned over was intended to get students to “analyze whether or not race may be viewed as a contributor to one’s experiences.” Another statement from the district denied Joshua’s claims that his school privileged certain clubs over others, and upheld that its English curriculum followed California standards.

The only direct quotes from students opposing the Fontanillas are two short comments from students at a school board meeting who said they enjoyed the ethnic studies class. It does not appear Natanson directly interviewed either student: One statement was taken directly from the school board meeting video, and the other from a local news article. The lack of any original, critical quotes in the piece raises the question: Did Natanson talk to anyone who disagreed with the Fontanillas during her reporting on the article?

Bigger threats than pronouns

The Washington Post profile presents the Fontanillas as pious and principled—leaving out any imagery of their hate-filled ideology.

The article included a dramatic vignette of the couple bowing their heads after seeing a public art exhibit with pieces depicting a book in chains and a student wearing earrings that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS”—”just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray,” Natanson wrote.

While thus passing along uncritically the Fontanillas’ take on what’s wrong with the world today, the article made no mention of more substantial threats bigotry poses to children and society at large.

LGBTQ youth experience bullying at significantly greater rates than their straight and cisgender peers (Reisner et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2021), and bullying is a strong risk factor for youth suicide (Koyanagi, et al., 2019). LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their straight and cisgender peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). However, bullying of LGBTQ youth occurs less often at LGBTQ-affirming schools (Trevor Project, 2021).

A recent study found that about 53% of Black students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression, and 20% said they were exposed to racial trauma often or very often in their lives (Aakoma Project, 2022).

Individuals of Black and Hispanic heritage have a higher risk of Covid infection and hospitalization from than their white counterparts (NIH, 2023). Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker (4/24/23) found that during the pandemic, communities of color faced higher premature death rates.

The migrants at the US border that Kali demonizes in her videos are seeking asylum from gang violence, the targeting of women and girls, and oppressive regimes propped up by US policy.  Undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely as US citizens to be arrested for violent crimes (PNAS, 12/7/20). They are also being turned away at higher rates under Biden than they were under Trump (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

Not the censored worldview

Far from being suppressed, the “anti-woke” movement is very effective at suppressing ideas that it disagrees with (Pen America).

The idea that left-wing “propaganda” is “infiltrating” public schools is upside-down.  If there’s a particular ideology that is being systematically censored in this country, to the point where it deserves special consideration by the Washington Post, it is not the Fontanillas’.

Since 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to ban Critical Race Theory in schools. Eighteen states have already imposed these bans or restrictions (Education Week, 3/20/24). The right is pushing for voucher schemes that transfer tax revenues from public to private schools, including to politicized projects like Exodus Institute (Progressive, 8/11/21; EPI, 4/20/23).

In the first half of this school year alone, there were more than 4,000 instances of books being banned. According to PEN America (4/16/24), people are using sexual obscenity laws to justify banning books that discuss sexual violence and LGBTQ (particularly trans) identities, disproportionately affecting the work of women and nonbinary writers. Bans are also targeted toward literature that focuses on race and racism, Critical Race Theory and “woke ideology.”

It is dangerous and backwards for the Washington Post to play along with this couples’ delusion that they are free speech martyrs—even as their “anti-woke” agenda is being signed into censorious law across the country.

The piece ended back in the virtual classroom with the Quakers, as Natanson takes on a tone of admiration. Kali poses the question to her students, “What does it mean to live out your values?”

“Kali smiled as she told her students to write down their answers,” Natanson narrated. “She knew her own.”

 

The post WaPo Lets Bigots Frame School Culture War Conversation…Again appeared first on FAIR.

 

Reuters (4/23/24)

The bodies of over 300 people were discovered in a mass grave at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, a Gaza city besieged by Israeli forces. The discovery of these Palestinian bodies, many of which were reportedly bound and stripped, is more evidence of “plausible” genocide committed by Israel during its bombardment of Gaza. Over 34,000 Palestinians have died thus far, with more than two-thirds of the casualties being women and children (Al Jazeera, 4/21/24).

Yet this discovery prompted few US news headlines, despite outlets like the Guardian (4/23/24), Haaretz (4/23/24) and Reuters (4/23/24) covering the story. Instead, headlines relating to Palestine have predominantly focused on protests happening at university campuses across the country—an important story, but not one that ought to drown out coverage of the atrocities students are protesting against.

Israel’s Haaretz noted that

emergency workers in white hazmat suits had been seen digging near the ruins of Nasser Hospital. They reportedly dug corpses out of the ground with hand tools and a digger truck. The emergency services said 73 more bodies had been found at the site in the past day, raising the number found over the week to 283.

The bodies included people killed during the Israeli siege of Khan Yunis, as well as people killed after Israel occupied the medical complex in February (Guardian, 4/22/24). They were found under piles of waste, with several bodies having their hands tied and clothes stripped off (UN, 4/23/24; Democracy Now!, 4/25/24). Similar mass graves, containing at least 381 bodies, were found at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital after Israel withdrew from occupying that complex on April 1 (CNN, 4/9/24).

The discovery of these mass graves “horrified” UN rights chief Volker Turk (Reuters, 4/23/24). But it has yet to prompt so strong a reaction from several major US news outlets.

Limited response

PBS NewsHour (4/22/24)

In comparison to the widespread coverage from international outlets, the US response has been limited at best. Newsweek (4/23/24) published an article that included claims from the IDF that the deaths were a result of a “precise” operation against Hamas near Nasser Hospital:

About 200 terrorists who were in the hospital were apprehended, medicines intended for Israeli hostages were found undelivered and unused, and a great deal of ammunition was confiscated.

The article centered on the US response to the reports of mass graves. Along with CNN (4/23/24), Newsweek included quotes from the IDF that called reports of mass burials of Palestinians by the Israeli army “baseless and unfounded.” Rather, the IDF said, they were merely exhuming the bodies to verify whether or not they were Israeli hostages.

The Washington Post (4/23/24) relegated the news to a small section of their live updates feed: “UN Calls for Investigation of Gaza Mass Grave; IDF Says It Excavated Bodies.”

CNN and PBS (4/22/24) both published relatively well-rounded reports of the discovery, noting reports of 400 missing people and allegations of IDF soldiers performing DNA tests on the bodies, along with accounts of people still searching for their loved ones amidst the rubble. CNN released an update April 24:

At least 381 bodies were recovered from the vicinity of the complex since Israeli forces withdrew on April 1, Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said, adding that the total figure did not include people buried within the grounds of the hospital.

The update was also released to CNN‘s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter.

As FAIR (11/17/23, 2/1/24, 4/17/24) has repeatedly noted, coverage of the war has widely been from an Israel-centered perspective. The CNN and PBS articles, however, along with an NBC video, prominently included quotes from Palestinians searching for family members.

New York Times (4/23/24)

The same cannot be said for outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, who cited sources from the UN and the Palestinian Civil Defense—a governmental organization that operates under the Palestinian Security Services—but didn’t include additional first-hand accounts from Palestinian civilians.

The Times said that “it was not clear where the people discovered in the mass grave were originally buried.” It didn’t mention that several family members of the deceased remembered where they buried them, but were no longer able to find them, they said, due to IDF interference (CNN, 4/23/24):

Another man, who said his brother Alaa was also killed in January, said: “I am here today looking for him. I have been coming here to the hospital for the last two weeks and trying to find him. Hopefully, I will be able to find him.”

Pointing to a fallen palm tree, the man said his brother had been temporarily buried in that spot.

“I had buried him there on the side, but I can’t find him. The Israelis have dug up the dead bodies, and switched them. They took DNA tests and misplaced all the dead bodies.”

Playing catch-up

Democracy Now! (4/25/24)

As mentioned above, US news outlets have had considerable coverage of pro-Palestine university protests, particularly since April 18, when more than 100 demonstrators were arrested at New York’s Columbia University (FAIR.org, 4/19/24). News of these protests have dominated US headlines since (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 4/25/24; AP, 4/25/24; The Hill, 4/24/24); while the discovery of mass graves just a few days later has received next to no coverage in comparison. In the case of the New York Times, for instance, they published just two stories (4/23/24, 4/25/24) about the mass graves since the news broke on April 21, while publishing seven stories about the campus protests in the span of two days.

The New York Times has been telling writers not to use words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the violence in Gaza, a leaked internal memo revealed (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24). Accordingly, the Times used the phrase “wartime chaos” to explain the mass graves, as if they were merely a side effect of war, not the result of intentional bombing campaigns.

While some prominent US media outlets are beginning to report on this discovery (ABC, 4/25/24; AP, 4/23/24; HuffPost, 4/24/24), they are playing catch-up with their international counterparts, whose reporting makes up a majority of search results on Google. Even articles that do appear on the first page rely heavily on reports from official spokespeople (e.g., Spectrum News, 4/23/24; The Hill, 4/23/24).

The UN’s Turk (4/23/24) has called for an independent investigation into the mass graves, saying “the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime.” Corporate news outlets have been quick to note that the claims of bodies being found with their hands tied “cannot be substantiated,” despite consistent reports from both Palestinian officials and the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights about the condition of the bodies.

 

 

The post News of Mass Graves Isn’t Much News to US Outlets appeared first on FAIR.

 

The International Court of Justice in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The next month, in a lawsuit aimed at ending US military support for Israel, a federal court in California ruled that Israel’s actions in the Strip “plausibly” amount to genocide (Guardian, 2/1/24). Shortly thereafter, Michael Fakhri (Guardian, 2/27/24), the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said of Israeli actions:

There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza—other than to deny people access to food….

Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian. In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide. This means the state of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable—not just individuals or this government or that person.

In March, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese released a report concluding “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” During its campaign in Gaza, Israel’s “military has been heavily reliant on imported aircraft, guided bombs and missiles,” and 69% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023 have come from the US (BBC, 4/5/24).

The Washington Post (3/30/24) hopes the US can get back on the same page with “mainstream Israelis” who are “willing to see the war through to finish off Hamas.”

In this context, corporate media, which have long been strong supporters of both the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the US imperial violence undergirding it, face a dilemma. At this stage, corporate media cannot simply conceal the daily horrors that are unfolding, particularly as much of their audience is exposed to it whenever they open a social media app. So media’s challenge is to frame the “plausible” genocide in a way that will not undermine long-term US/Israeli domination of Palestine. In this context, many corporate media analysts acknowledge the grave harm done to the Palestinians in Gaza—without also saying that it must end.

A Washington Post editorial (3/30/24), for example, lamented how “hunger threatens Gaza’s civilians, who, through displacement, disease and death, have already paid a horrible price.” (“Israel is forcing hunger on Gaza with US support” would be better, but I digress.) Subsequently, the paper noted that “objective conditions for the 2 million or so people in Gaza, most displaced from ruined homes, are horrendous.”

The editors’ prescription in “the short run” was “a six-week truce with Hamas, during which the militants would release at least some of their hostages and relief supplies could flow into Gaza more safely.” At that point, Palestinians can resume paying that “horrible price” in “horrendous” conditions, such as having “the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history” (New Yorker, 3/21/24).

‘The weapons it needs’

David French (New York Times, 4/7/24) thinks the question of “whether Israel’s behavior as it battles Hamas complies with the laws of war” is “worth answering in full when the fog of war clears.”

Columnist David French likewise wrote in the New York Times (4/7/24) that “the terrible civilian toll and looming famine in Gaza are a human tragedy that should grieve us all,” but endorsed “giving Israel the weapons it needs to prevail against Hamas.” He favorably compared the Biden’s administration’s lavishing Israel with weapons to Donald’s Trump’s remark that Israel has “got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.” French said:

Though I have some qualms with the details of the Biden administration’s approach, its directional thrust—providing military aid while exerting relentless pressure for increased humanitarian efforts—is superior. It’s much closer to matching the military, legal and moral needs of the moment.

“Israel,” French asserted, “possesses both the legal right and moral obligation to its people to end Hamas’s rule and destroy its effectiveness as a fighting force.” French’s argument was that the US should keep arming Israel, but ensure that more aid reaches Palestinians in Gaza. The absurdity of this position is that Israel’s use of that “military aid” is what causes “the terrible civilian toll and looming famine in Gaza.”

At the time French was writing,  at least 27 Palestinians in Gaza had already starved to death, 23 of them children (Al Jazeera, 3/27/24). As the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification System, a hunger-monitoring coalition of multinational and nongovernmental organizations, noted in December:

The cessation of hostilities and the restoration of humanitarian space to deliver…multi-sectoral assistance and restore services are essential first steps in eliminating any risk of famine.

Commenting on the report, famine expert Alex de Waal (Guardian, 3/21/24) said that

Israel has had ample warning of what will happen if it continues its campaign of destroying everything necessary to sustain life. The IPC’s Famine Review Committee report on 21 December authoritatively warned of starvation if Israel did not cease destruction and failed to allow humanitarian aid at scale.

In short, the large-scale famine about which French professed concern can only be averted by ending the Israeli onslaught that he supports. (At least French has “qualms” about that, though.)

Reversing reality

The LA Times (4/9/24) insists “it is Hamas that keeps the war going,” even as it blames “Israel‘s retaliatory actions” for “leading the US to reassess the two nations’ relationship.”

A Los Angeles Times editorial (4/9/24) expressed concern for “the level of death and destruction in Gaza” and wrote that, in a February news conference, “Biden was particularly critical—appropriately so—of the inability of humanitarian relief workers to get food and water to Gaza’s 2.3 million people, many of whom face famine.” The piece went on to call for “hostage releases and a lasting ceasefire.”

Yet the article’s penultimate paragraph read: “It is Hamas that keeps the war going by continuing to hold the hostages it brutally kidnapped in its October attack.”

That’s not accurate. Days earlier (Times of Israel, 4/6/24), the group reaffirmed its position in the “hostage negotiations,” demanding a

complete ceasefire, withdrawal of the occupation forces from Gaza, the return of the displaced to their residential areas, freedom of movement of the people, offering them aid and shelter, and a serious hostage exchange deal.

In contrast, the White House advocated a “pause in fighting” and “temporary ceasefire.” Washington’s Israeli client likewise sought a short-term break in the fighting, saying “that, after any truce, it would topple Hamas” (Reuters, 4/7/24).

Thus, the reality was exactly the opposite of what the LA Times said: The Israeli/US side wanted to take a short break from slaughtering Palestinians, whereas the Palestinian side was insisting on the “lasting ceasefire” that the paper claimed to favor. Whatever the editors purport to want, regurgitating anti-Palestinian propaganda that essentially blames Palestinians for their own genocide, rather than the US/Israeli perpetrators, is hardly an effective way to contribute to ending the killing.

I’ve cited four authoritative sources either saying that Israel is committing genocide, or that there are reasonable grounds for interpreting the evidence that way. Yet none of the opinion articles I’ve analyzed here contained the word “genocide,” even as each one suggested that it was worried about the well-being of Palestinians in Gaza. If corporate media were serious about that, they would accurately name what the US and Israel are doing. Instead, US media outlets are pretending that a genocide isn’t happening and, when the war on Gaza eventually ends, this approach will make it easier to act as if one hadn’t taken place, and as if the US and Israel have a right to rule Palestine.

 

The post Acknowledging the Horrors of Gaza—Without Wanting to End Them appeared first on FAIR.

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

 

Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew)

This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (emphasis added) canceling their valedictorian’s commencement speech out of professed concerns for “safety.” A Vanderbilt student is on TikTok noting that their chancellor has run away from offers to engage them, despite his claim to the New York Times that it’s protestors who are “not interested in dialogue”—and Columbia University students have set up an encampment seen around the world, holding steady as we record April 25, despite the college siccing the NYPD on them.

Campuses across the country—Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on—are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians, and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We’ll hear from Sam from National SJP about unfolding events.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Sam.mp3

 

(CC photo: Edenpictures)

Also on the show: App-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees, and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media, happy to typey-type about the worry of more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy…bicycle deliverers. We asked Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down.

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

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Banter.mp3

 

The post Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine, Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers appeared first on FAIR.

 

Uri Berliner (Free Press, 4/9/24) blamed what he saw as NPR‘s problems on the way that “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” reads the headline of a recent essay in the Free Press (4/9/24), a Substack-hosted outlet published by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. The author, senior NPR business editor Uri Berliner, argued that the broadcaster’s “progressive worldview” was compromising its journalism and alienating conservatives, including Berliner himself—who subsequently resigned.

Berliner’s screed was the latest instance of a trend in which legacy-media staffers publicly grouse that their workplaces are overrun by left-wing firebrands. Former New York Times assistant opinion editor Adam Rubenstein recently did so in the Atlantic (2/26/24). Two months before that, James Bennet, previously the editorial page editor at the Times, spent 16,000 words lamenting that the Times had “lost its way” in the Economist’s 1843 supplement (12/24/23).

Readers were invited to view these critics as brave iconoclasts at odds with the radical doctrines of their former employers. But the records of NPR and the New York Times show just how misleading this characterization is.

Right-wing embrace

The tirades shared several themes, including resentment of the 2020 protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd. Rather than letting “evidence lead the way,” Berliner complained that NPR management “declared loud and clear” that “America’s infestation with systemic racism…was a given.” He rebuked NPR for supposedly “justifying looting” in relation to the demonstrations, citing an interview (8/27/20) with In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil. Conveniently, Berliner didn’t note NPR’s repeated scolding of looters (6/2/20, 8/11/20, 10/28/20) before and after that interview.

Adam Rubenstein (Atlantic, 2/26/24) presents his career at the New York Times—where he was hired to seek out “expressly conservative views” because he had “contacts on the political right”—as evidence of the paper’s left-wing bias.

Both Rubenstein and Bennet condemned the Times’ handling of an op-ed (6/3/20) by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that they took part in publishing. Appearing during the uprisings, the op-ed called for the deployment of the military to suppress protests. (In Bennet’s view, Cotton wanted to “protect lives and businesses from rioters.”) After much reader—and staffer—outrage at the bald incitement of racist violence, the Times appended a note stating regret over the piece, and both editors left the newspaper.

Embittered by the Times’ response, neither Rubenstein nor Bennet paused to consider that a paper that had not only commissioned a fascistic op-ed by a neocon senator, but had published that same senator multiple times before—in one case, to celebrate the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani (1/10/20)—might not be beholden to the left.

Bennet also complained that the Times was “slow” to report that “Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab”—which is true; the Times‘ coverage of the lab leak theory in 2020 was decidedly (and appropriately) skeptical (2/17/20, 4/30/20, 5/3/20; see FAIR.org, 10/6/20). The paper did eventually jump on the bandwagon of the evidence-free conspiracy theory, with David Leonhardt promoting it in his popular Morning newsletter (5/27/21).

James Bennet (1843, 12/24/23) blames the rise of Trump on journalists’ forfeiting “their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas”—which is odd, because his argument is that journalists shouldn’t arbitrate truth or broker ideas.

Berliner, too, took umbrage at his employer’s treatment of the lab theory:

We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

But NPR did budge. An episode of Morning Edition (2/27/23) featuring Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Gordon promoted the Energy Department’s admittedly shaky assertion, lending credence to a hypothesis informed far more by anti-China demagoguery than by scientific evidence (FAIR.org, 6/28/21, 4/7/23). This wasn’t the first time NPR had advanced the theory: In a 2021 segment of Morning Edition (6/3/21), media correspondent David Folkenflik suggested that news organizations publicizing the lab-leak claim were “listen[ing] closely.”

‘Good terms with people in power’

Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) diagnosed NPR‘s actual problem: “NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.”

The perceived lack of lab-leak coverage was one of many examples Berliner cited to make the case that NPR sought to “damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” Yet, as NPR alum Alicia Montgomery wrote for Slate (4/16/24):

I saw NO trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Uri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump’s voters and his administration fairly. We went full-bore on “diner guy in a trucker hat” coverage and adopted the “alt-right” label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms with people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings.

Contrary to Berliner’s allegations, Montgomery noted that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” When a colleague “asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,” they were met with silence.

On the subject of Israel and Palestine, Berliner condemned what he perceived as NPR’s “oppressor versus oppressed” framing. Rubenstein, meanwhile, remarked that a colleague once told him, “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable.” It’s possible that a New York Times journalist said this, even if Rubenstein’s anecdotes elicited skepticism. But the coverage of the Times, and of NPR, contradict this sentiment.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that media platforms resemble, in Rubenstein’s words, “young progressives on college campuses,” when they soften Israeli militarism through human-interest stories (NPR, 12/27/23; FAIR.org, 1/25/24), deem Israeli sources more worthy than Palestinian ones (FAIR.org, 11/3/23) and discourage the use of words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to refer to Israel’s Gaza assault (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24).

Warmly welcomed rebukes 

Politico (12/14/23) accepted Bennet’s depiction of a struggle at the Times between “traditional journalistic values like fairness, pluralism and political independence,” and “the ideological whims of the paper’s younger, left-leaning staffers.”

Undermining the self-assigned pariah status of Berliner, Rubenstein and Bennet, corporate media have normalized, even endorsed, the authors’ polemics.

The New York Times (4/11/24) reported that NPR had been “accused of liberal bias”—the word “accused” implying that insufficient appeal to the far right was a misdeed. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board (4/14/24) called Berliner’s essay “nuanced and thoughtful,” and commended his “courage” in adopting what the Tribune considered a dissident stance among news organizations. Berliner offered “good lessons for all news organizations,” the paper concluded.

A month prior, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait (3/1/24) defended Rubenstein’s rant, breezing past its disdain for racial justice activists to insist on the veracity of a detail about a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. Chait wrapped the piece with a grumble about the “left-wing media criticism” that dared to doubt Rubenstein; right-wing media criticism, of course, was safely in Chait’s good graces.

The day 1843 published Bennet’s harangue, Politico (12/14/23) ran a splashy profile portraying Bennet as the victim of left-wing tyranny. The publication described Bennet as “armed” with damning email correspondence and verbatim quotations from the end of his tenure at the Times, depicting him as a lone soldier battling those who “pushed the paper to elevate liberal viewpoints and shun conservative perspectives.”

The real heretics

Criticism from the left is something the New York Times won’t tolerate (New York Post, 2/16/23).

NPR and the Times themselves, while articulating some disagreement with their critics, largely accepted those critics’ premises. In an internal email, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin indulged Berliner’s demands to appeal to the right, stressing the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos.” (NPR staffers have since written an internal letter urging a more forceful defense of the outlet.) Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s response to Bennet sympathized further, presenting a rightward shift as a point of pride: “Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.”

The New York Times’ message stands in stark contrast to one it sent not long before. In February 2023, over 1,200 Times contributors signed an open letter expressing alarm about the paper’s demeaning coverage of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people, noting that three Times articles had been referenced as justification in anti-trans legislation. Rather than taking these concerns into consideration, or even recognizing their legitimacy, the paper declared it was “proud of its coverage.” Sulzberger went on to exalt said reportage as “true” and “important” (FAIR.org, 5/19/23).

In this media milieu—in which it’s more acceptable to support reactionaries in power than the people whose lives they attempt to destroy—the real “heretics” prove not to be those issuing critiques from the right, but from the left.

 

The post Right-Wing Critiques Miscast NPR, NYT as Lefty Bastions appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed author Dave Lindorff about his book Spy for No Country for the April 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419Lindorff.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: The success of the movie Oppenheimer showed that there is interest in the human beings involved in the Manhattan Project: the choices, beliefs, situational ethics, if you will, of those involved in the World War II program to develop the atomic bomb.

Another key figure, likewise reflective of the human complexities involved in creating and deploying this devastating technology, has remained relatively unknown, until now. Ted Hall was just 18 years old when he was recruited to Los Alamos, where he became a key scientist behind the bombs known as Little Boy and Fat Man, and eventually a spy, delivering nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. His story was the subject of the 2022 documentary A Compassionate Spy, by acclaimed Hoop Dreams director Steve James.

Prometheus Books (2024)

Our guest was a co-producer of that film, and is author of a new book, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, from Prometheus Books. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets, and is author of Marketplace Medicine, and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Lindorff.

Dave Lindorff: Thanks for having me on.

JJ: Well, we can’t presume listeners who knew who Robert Oppenheimer was even before the movie have even heard the name Ted Hall before. So in bold strokes, what did he do, and when or in what context?

DL: Ted Hall is really fascinating; because he was so young, he’s been overlooked, I think, by historians, even of that era of the development of atomic energy. And part of the reason, too, is that he was never prosecuted, even though, in 1950, he was one of the first people identified as an atomic spy at Los Alamos, with the final decryption starting to happen of the Soviet spy cables that the precursor to the NSA had been collecting from Soviet consulates.

Yet, despite Hoover getting that information in 1950, and interrogating him, and his Harvard roommate courier, for three hours, the case went nowhere. And the book explains why.

JJ: Folks may not remember, or it might be a little confuddled: The Soviet Union was an ally during World War II.

DL: That’s a very important point to make, that people have to realize as they learn about this guy.

JJ: Yeah. So as much as we might want to ascribe motivation, especially after the fact, we can never see inside another person’s head. But what is the sense of what Hall thought he was doing? He wasn’t, for instance, a Communist himself.

DL: No, he was not a Communist when he was a spy. He did briefly join the party, he and his wife that he married after the war; they both became party members for a few months because, as they said, it was the only organization they felt was combating the segregation in the US, and that was defending workers’ right to organize.

JJ: When we say: “what did Ted Hall do?” What did he do, and why do we think he did it?

DL: Well, he was so smart, incredibly brilliant, and it was recognized when he got there. He was assigned to be working on the development of the implosion system for the plutonium bomb, which was a very complicated bomb. The uranium bomb was very simple, you just had to refine enough U-235, which is a minute portion of uranium ore, in order for it to work. But with plutonium, it was so unstable that it was very hard to work with in large quantities.

So he was working on that project. He understood the entire details of the plutonium bomb, and he realized that Germany was not going to get the bomb—it was being bombed to smithereens in 1944, when he was hired—and that the US was going to come out of the war with a monopoly on the bomb, which he thought would be a catastrophe for the world, I think, correctly.

So he decided the only thing to do was to give Soviets the bomb, so that there would be two countries with the bomb, that would prevent each of them from using it.

JJ: I’ve heard it said that, put simply, Oppenheimer thought he could somehow get nuclear weaponry eliminated, or under international control, but, as you say, Hall thought that mutually assured destruction would keep this technology from being used. Is that it?

DL: Yeah.

Decider (11/30/23)

JJ: I appreciated a review of the film A Compassionate Spy in Decider that said: “Is Ted Hall a hero or a traitor? Note to everyone everywhere: You don’t need to answer that question.” In other words, agreeing with him and his actions isn’t necessary. It’s really more about the complexity of truth, that questions exist for which there are no satisfying answers. But I think it’s difficult for folks to put themselves back in the head of a person making that choice at that time.

DL: Well, you have to know what people were thinking at that time. At that time, for example, there was a dinner hosted by the British scientists who’d been brought over at a late period; I guess they came in early 1944 from England to help speed up the development of the bomb. And there was a dinner that they hosted, and they had invited Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the whole Manhattan Project. And over dessert, people were starting to say—this happened in the spring of 1944—that they shouldn’t really build the bomb, because the Germans weren’t going to get the bomb. And why were they developing it? And Grove said, well, as you know, the bomb was not really to target Germany; it was to help control the Soviet Union.

And that went around the camp. Because Los Alamos had these rules, that Oppenheimer insisted on, that there was absolute openness within the heavily guarded walls of the camp. But outside, there was no discussion about what they were doing. It was all top secret, and nobody knew what was happening inside that fence.

What they didn’t know was that there were spies within it, and one of them was Ted Hall. He certainly heard the scuttlebutt that the Russians were the real target, and that was very disturbing to him, and to many of the scientists, who felt that the Soviets were doing most of the dying and most of the fighting against the Germans at that time, and that they were our ally.

JJ: You touched on it, but let me just ask you directly: Why wasn’t Ted Hall prosecuted? Why wasn’t he treated the way that Oppenheimer was?

Edward N. Hall (Wikipedia)

DL: It’s an amazing story. It turns out that Ted’s older brother, 11 years older than him, had taken charge of his early education and encouraged him to go to Harvard when he was 18. And this brother, Ed Hall, actually became the top rocket scientist for the Air Force, and he developed the engine for the Atlas, the engine for the Titan, the engine for the Thor missile. And he invented the whole concept of ICBM with solid fuel, the Minuteman; that was his creation, and his idea of having hundreds of them in silos as a prevention of nuclear attack on the US was sold by him to the Defense secretary at the time, in the ’50s, and then to Eisenhower.

So he was so important to the Air Force—I got his FBI file, after they first told me there wasn’t one; I got over a hundred pages—that Hoover was hoping that he was going to catch him as a spy, Ed Hall, as a spy, as well as Ted Hall. And the Air Force shut him down. They basically refused to let him question Ed about his own history, just whether he knew anything about his brother, and he denied it. And then, by late 1951, Ted was taken off of the security index, and they stopped monitoring his mail and his funds.

Nobody ever knew that, why he didn’t get investigated. And it’s just astonishing, because, Janine, the most important thing about this story, and it’s another thing that Americans don’t know: As soon as the war ended, the US started, in the Manhattan Project and then later the Atomic Energy Commission, working feverishly to figure out a way to mass produce atomic bombs. And by ’48, they were producing them at a hundred a month. And why were they doing that, when they thought that there’d been no spies in the project, and that the Soviet Union would not get an atomic bomb for at least eight or ten years after this one—you know, the two bombs invented by the US, and tested on the Japanese?

So the reason was, they were preparing to attack the Soviet Union. There was even a day, they estimated in 1954, that they were calling “A-Day,” when it would be impossible to attack the Soviet Union preemptively, because they’d have the bomb by then and be able to slip one into a harbor in the US as retaliation. And that all fell apart when the Soviets detonated a carbon copy of the bomb that Ted was working on, in 1949.

JJ: In media, Dave, we know that US/Russia relations are super simplistically presented. It’s like Rock’em Sock’em Robots, you know, or King Kong vs. Godzilla. And the fact that there are human beings making choices, with the information that they have at the time and their thoughts about how what they’re doing might be used, it’s both difficult to think about and it’s easy to obscure. And so some folks now are rattling the nuclear saber, if only rhetorically, again. What do you think is the value of lifting up Ted Hall’s story right now?

Dave Lindorff: “He did what Oppenheimer wouldn’t do…. And the result was that we have not seen an atomic bomb used since Nagasaki.”

DL: First of all, he proved to be right. He did what Oppenheimer wouldn’t do, by actually sharing the secrets, and making it possible for there to be two countries with the bomb. And the result was that we have not seen an atomic bomb used since Nagasaki. We’re on 79 years and counting since those two bombs were dropped, and none has been used, because of multiple nations having the bomb. You just can’t do it.

Now, whether that’ll hold, it’s always been pretty precarious, but it’s the best that they’ve come up with, is just having mutual assured destruction. It’s not a good system, but it’s here.

I personally think that it’s bluster still, because all the game-planning, when they look at what happens if we use an atomic bomb, or we reply with an atomic bomb when one is used, it always escalates within hours or days into a full-scale global strategic nuclear bombing and destruction of the Earth.

JJ: Right. Well, let me ask you, finally, from a journalism or media perspective: some reviewers, of the film in particular, have said, essentially, humanizing Ted Hall at all— and the film talks a lot with his wife, Joan—humanizing him is bias, because he was a traitor, the end.

And then other people say, well, we don’t really need Wikipedia-style history. We don’t need news from nowhere, that it’s a disservice to just present sort of Big Good vs. Big Evil, and that starting from a human perspective helps us locate ourselves within this broad sweep of events that, once they’re done, can seem inevitable. And I don’t imagine that you would’ve been attracted to a story that was kind of cut, paste, print. The complexity, was that part of the draw for you?

DL: Yes, absolutely. I mean, think about what he did. At the one hand, he thought that the bomb was a horrible, horrible thing. At the other, he was working feverishly trying to help them get it, because when he was hired, he thought it was important to get it before the Germans did. And then when he found that wasn’t the case, he was still working on it, because he knew that it was going to be built, with him or without him. And yet, that meant he was contributing to when it was finally used, because he wanted to be able to give all the information to the Russians. He knew that there were going to be bombs used if that didn’t happen.

And I think that’s correct, that it must have been torture for him to know that he had helped create what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet he felt it was the right thing that he had done. So it was very complicated.

JJ: All right, then, well, we’ll leave it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Dave Lindorff. The new book, Spy for No Country, is out from Prometheus Books. Thank you so much, Dave Lindorff, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DL: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

 

The post ‘A Monopoly on the Bomb Would Be a Catastrophe for the World’: <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 Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country appeared first on FAIR.