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‘Free Speech’ Fan Elon Musk Enlists State Allies to Silence Critics

FAIR - March 27, 2024 - 4:33pm

 

I wrote last November (FAIR.org, 11/22/23) about how Twitter owner Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters—alleging the group’s research “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” Musk’s social media platform—was an episode of a right-wing corporate media mogul using his wealth to crush free speech.

“Much appreciated!” declared Elon Musk in response to the Missouri attorney general’s probe (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24). “Media Matters is doing everything it can to undermine the First Amendment. Truly an evil organization.”

Now Musk’s friends in government are joining his efforts to silence his critics. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is suing Media Matters to demand internal documents, because he, like Musk, believes the group “manipulated Twitter‘s algorithm to create a report showing advertisements for normal companies on the platform appeared next to not-normal content, or what Bailey calls ‘contrived controversial posts,’” causing advertisers to flee (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24).

Bailey said in a statement (3/25/24):

My office has reason to believe Media Matters engaged in fraudulent activities to solicit donations from Missourians to intimidate advertisers into leaving X, the last social media platform committed to free speech in America….

Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy X, because they cannot control it. And because they cannot control it, or the free speech platform it provides to Missourians to express their own viewpoints in the public square, the radical “progressives” at Media Matters have resorted to fraud to, as Benjamin Franklin once said, mark X “for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.” Missourians will not be manipulated by “progressive” activists masquerading as news outlets, and they will not be defrauded in the process.

Bailey clearly wants to get into the fray that has caught up with right-wing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton (11/20/23) announced he was launching an investigation into “Media Matters, a radical anti-free speech organization.” He cited Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act as grounds for looking into whether Media Matters “fraudulently manipulated data on X.com“:

We are examining the issue closely to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.

As the government of Texas threatened to bring charges against a nonprofit organization for publishing a study of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, Musk posted the attorney general’s press release on X (11/20/23) and gloated, “Fraud has both civil and criminal penalties.”

McCarthyist witch hunt

It’s easy to write off Bailey and Paxton as partisan hacks who are using the power of the state as a public relations tool to win adulation in MAGA-land. But Musk’s ability to use the partisan prosecutors and the courts to engage in a McCarthyist witch hunt against the corporation’s critics is highly concerning.

A federal judge dismissed Musk’s complaint that the Center for Countering Digital Hate had “embarked on a scare campaign” (Verge, 3/25/24).

At around the same time as Bailey announced his crusade, federal Judge Charles Breyer dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (Verge, 3/25/24), saying that the company suing CCDH for researching hate speech on the site was “about punishing the defendants for their speech.” It’s good news that a sensible judge can protect free speech. But how long can that last against one of the world’s richest people, who has made it clear he has an agenda to silence critics, and the collaboration of powerful officials?

Former President Donald Trump left his mark on the judiciary, appointing “more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight” (Pew Research, 1/13/21). And Bailey and Paxton are not the only state attorneys general who are aligned with Trump and his political positions; Paxton was able to get 16 others to join with him in petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election (New York Times, 12/9/20).

Rather than turning Twitter into an open free-speech utopia, Musk’s administration of Twitter has been marked by aggressive censorship (Al Jazeera, 5/2/23). Reporters Without Borders (10/26/23) said that Musk’s removal of guardrails against disinformation has been so disastrous that it “regards X as the embodiment of the threat that online platforms pose to democracies.” After the National Labor Relations Board said that Musk’s SpaceX fired workers critical of him (Bloomberg, 1/3/24), the company argued that the NLRB’s structure was unconstitutional (Reuters, 2/15/24).

Musk is clearly inclined to use courts and friendly officials to censor his critics, as well as to shred labor rights. If Trump is elected later this year—which is entirely possible (CNN, 3/9/24)—Musk will have the ability to fuse his desire and resources to shut down critics with emboldened far-right government allies.

Bailey’s outrageous statement might seem silly and destined for the same fate as Musk’s case against the CCDH, but it portends a highly chilling environment if the courts and government agencies fall further into the hands of the right.

The post ‘Free Speech’ Fan Elon Musk Enlists State Allies to Silence Critics appeared first on FAIR.

‘In Even the Best Coverage There Is No Accountability for the Fossil Fuel Industry’CounterSpin interview with Evlondo Cooper on climate coverage

FAIR - March 26, 2024 - 2:46pm

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Evlondo Cooper about climate coverage for the March 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Cooper.mp3

 

Media Matters (3/14/24)

Janine Jackson: Climate disruption is, of course, one of the most disastrous phenomena of today’s life, affecting every corner of the globe. It’s also one of the most addressable. We know what causes it, we know what meaningful intervention would entail. So it’s a human-made tragedy unfolding in real time before our eyes.

To understate wildly, we need to be talking about it, learning about it, hearing about it urgently, which is why the results of our next guest’s research are so alarming. I’ll just spoil it: Broadcast news coverage of the climate crisis is going down.

Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome to CounterSpin, Evlondo Cooper.

Evlondo Cooper: Thank you for having me. I’m excited about our conversation today.

JJ: We’re talking about the latest of Media Matters’ annual studies of climate crisis coverage. First of all, just tell us briefly what media you are looking at in these studies.

EC: So we’re looking at corporate broadcast network coverage. That’s ABC, CBS and NBC. And for the Sunday morning shows, we also include Fox BroadcastingFox News Sunday.

JJ: All right. And then, for context, this decline in coverage that you found in the most recent study, that’s down from very little to even less.

Media Matters (3/14/24)

EC: Yeah, so a little context: 2021 and 2022 were both record years for climate coverage, and that coverage was a little bit more than 1%. This year, we saw a 25% decrease from 2022, which brought coverage to a little bit less than 1%. We want to encourage more coverage, but even in the years where they were doing phenomenal, it was only about 1% of total coverage. And so this retrenchment by approximately 25% in 2023 is not a welcome sign, especially in a year where we saw record catastrophic extreme weather events, and scientists are predicting that 2024 might be even worse than ’23.

JJ: Let’s break out some of the things that you found. We’re talking about such small numbers—when you say 1%, that’s 1% of all of the broadcast coverage; of their stories, 1% were devoted to the climate crisis. But we’ve seen, there’s little things within it. For example, we are hearing more from actual climate scientists?

EC: That was a very encouraging sign, where this year we saw 41 climate scientists appeared, which was 10% of the featured guests in 2023, and that’s up from 4% in 2022. So in terms of quality of coverage, I think we’re seeing improvements. We’re seeing a lot of the work being done by dedicated climate correspondents, and meteorologists who are including climate coverage as part of their weather reports and their own correspondents’ segments, a bigger part of their reporting.

So there are some encouraging signs. I think what concerns us is that these improvements, while important and necessary and appreciated, are not keeping up with the escalating scale of climate change.

Media Matters (3/14/24)

JJ: It’s just not appropriate to the seriousness of the topic. And then another thing is, you could say the dominance of white men in the conversation, which I know is another finding, that’s just kind of par for the elite media course; when folks are talked to, they are overwhelmingly white men. But it might bear some relation to what you’re seeing as an underrepresentation of climate-impacted populations, looking at folks at the sharp end of climate disruption. That’s something you also consider.

EC: Yeah, we look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.

So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

CBS (7/17/23)

Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”

EC: Totally.

JJ:  And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”

EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”

But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.

CNN (3/3/23)

JJ: And then take it to your next story about Congress, or your next story about funding, and connect those dots.

EC: Exactly. I mean, climate is too often siloed. So you could see a really great segment, for instance, on the Willow Project, at the top of the hour—and this is on cable, but the example remains—and then later in the hour, you saw a story about an extreme weather event. But those things aren’t connected, they’re siloed.

And so a key to improving coverage in an immediate way would be to understand that the climate crisis is the background for a range of issues, socioeconomic, political. Begin incorporating climate coverage in a much broader swath of stories that, whether you know it or not, indirectly or directly, are being impacted by global warming.

JJ: It’s almost as though corporate media have decided that another horrible disaster due to climate change, while it’s a story, it’s basically now like a dog-bites-man story. And if they aren’t going to explore these other angles, well, then there really isn’t anything to report until the next drought or the next mudslide. And that’s just a world away from what appropriate, fearless, future-believing journalism would be doing right now.

Evlondo Cooper: “It doesn’t have to be about just showing the destruction and carnage. There are ways that you can empower people to take action.”

EC: It’s out of step, right? Pull up the poll showing bipartisan support for government climate action, because, whether people know it or not, as far as the science, —and there’s some deniers out there, but anecdotally, people know something is happening, something is changing in their lives. We’re seeing record-breaking things that no one’s ever experienced, and they want the government to do something about it.

And so it’s important to cover extreme weather and to cover these catastrophes. And I know there’s a range of thought out there that says if you’re just focusing on devastating impacts, it could dampen public action. But to me, to your point, report on it and connect it to solutions, empower people to call their congressperson, their representative, their senator, to vote in ways that have local impacts to deal with the local climate impacts.

It doesn’t have to be about just showing the destruction and carnage. There are ways that you can empower people to take action in their own lives, and to galvanize public support.

And the public wants it. The public is asking for this. So I think just being responsive to what these polls are showing would be a way to immediately improve the way that they cover climate change right now.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Evlondo Cooper of Media Matters for America. You can find this work and much else at MediaMatters.org. Evlondo Cooper, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EC: Thank you for having me.

 

The post ‘In Even the Best Coverage There Is No Accountability for the Fossil Fuel Industry’<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 Evlondo Cooper on climate coverage appeared first on FAIR.

‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’ 

FAIR - March 25, 2024 - 4:42pm

 

Janine Jackson interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his documentary Stripped for Parts for the March 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Goldsmith.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: Documentary filmmakers don’t start when the camera rolls. The work involves not just gathering knowledge on a topic, but establishing relationships—sometimes with people who have no reason to trust that a camera in their face will lead to anything good for them.

Likewise, documentary filmmakers are not done when the film is finished, especially in the media-everywhere-all-the-time world we live in now. Simply creating something is not the same as guiding it to who might want or need to see it, to helping it have impact.

Among his other work, Rick Goldsmith is the filmmaker behind two important films about journalism in the United States: Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. His newest film is the third in this focused trilogy; it’s called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. And he joins us now to talk about it. He’s joining us from Oakland, California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rick Goldsmith.

Rick Goldsmith: Hi, Janine, thanks so much for having me on the show.

JJ: Smart as we all are nowadays, I think the idea of capitalism as market-based, which seems to mean based on human choices—that’s been sold so well as a story that there are people thinking, well, as much as I relied on my local newspaper, I guess it was just losing so much money that it wasn’t a sustainable business. And so it had to die.

The layoffs, the closures, what many people see as news media moving from “far from perfect” to “what the hell,” is presented as sad but somehow inevitable. And I think this film intervenes in that storyline. But was there a particular spark or a particular question that set you off to make Stripped for Parts?

FAIR.org (4/11/22)

RG: There was an event that happened about six years ago, now, and it was called the Denver Rebellion. And what happened was the newspaper men and women at the Denver Post kind of rose up against their owner, who was a hedge fund. And it was newly understood that hedge funds had a really bad effect on journalism. And they criticized their own owners, they took it upon themselves. And this kind of decline in local journalism was noticed, first by the journalists themselves. And they were the canaries in the coal mine to tell the story to everybody else.

So when I found out about this uprising, the Denver Rebellion, there were several things that jumped out at me. One was, why would somebody try to intentionally run down journalism? And two, the hedge funds were taking on a business that was failing: Why would they do that, and how would they make money? And then, three, was, here were the journalists who usually don’t even report on their own industry, and they were the ones telling the story. So for me, that was rich enough to get into it and say, “What the heck is going on here? And can I add something to this story?”

JJ: I think that’s especially interesting, because accounts of what Amazon is doing, or what the auto industry is doing, they’re almost always about what the owners and shareholders are doing. And if it’s a story about the workers, that’s going to be another day, on another page. And it’s especially, maybe, true in media, in that, as you’ve just said, workers, reporters, photographers usually don’t feel that they can or should speak as workers. For a journalist, “making yourself the story,” so-called, is anathema. So it wasn’t so much…what you’re saying, you didn’t have to get reporters to talk. Reporters were like, “No, we want to get this story out.”

RG: That’s right. And that was unique about their story, but I still had to—I think that the thing you said at the top, about gaining their trust, I think was really, really important. And maybe it was because of my background, and maybe it was just because of the approach, or maybe it was because of the passion and the anger that they were feeling at the time at being downsized by this hedge fund, that they were open to talking to me. And I think those first interviews after the Denver Rebellion were very, very rich, because it was so fresh in their mind, and they were so fired up about it.

JJ: What did you learn? If you had to explain to someone, why would a profit-interested corporation buy a paper and destroy it, essentially, run it into the ground? How does that make sense? Does that make sense?

Rick Goldsmith: “They could buy the newspaper for a song, sell the building, maybe sell the printing press…and they’ve already made their money back.”

RG: Well, it makes sense if you understand what this particular hedge fund, and many like it, are in the business of. And the key phrase here is “distressed asset investing,” which is maybe a kind of Wall Streetish term. But what it means is they could buy something on the cheap that was a failing business, and then figure out what their assets were. And like a used car that is basically junk, they could strip it for parts.

And in this case, it was usually the real estate. The newsroom itself was downtown, was centrally located, and they could buy the newspaper for a song, sell the building, maybe sell the printing press and move the printing operations out of town, and they’ve already made their money back, and then everything else is gravy.

So then the next key step is, let’s cut the staff, because we don’t need these—Heath Freeman, who’s the president of Alden Global Capital, he walked into the newsroom and he famously said, “What do all these people do?” So he had a certain disdain for the people that worked for the newspapers, but it was a gleam in his eye, because he said, “We can make some money, we can make lots of money out of this.” And that’s exactly what they did.

JJ: And the public facing part of it, when Alden Global Capital or any hedge fund takes over a paper, they never say, “We’re going to strip this for parts.” That’s never the PR move. It’s, in fact, grotesque, because it’s often, “We’re going to save this failing outlet.”

RG: That’s exactly right. And in fact, after I got into the business, I mentioned the Denver Rebellion. Well, there were many, many events that then unfolded in the several years that followed. And one was that Alden Global Capital went after Gannett, which was the largest publicly owned newspaper chain in the country. USA Today was their flagship paper, but they had local newspapers all around the country. And Alden Global Capital, that was in their materials to the shareholders: “We saved newspapers.”

The Nation (2/8/19)

Unfortunately for them, at the time, people like Julie Reynolds, who was an investigative reporter that’s highlighted in our film, had done a lot of reporting, and by now she’s done over a hundred articles just on Alden Global Capital and newspapers. And what Alden didn’t see coming was they were going to lose the public relations battle, and they tried to take over Gannett in 2019, and they failed.

Now, there were other events that followed that, that made it not so great for the public, but at that time, that was a big victory for journalists, and it was because now the news about Alden Global Capital and what they were about was out in the public, and they couldn’t just do their machinations behind closed doors.

JJ: That sunshine or that transparency is, maybe it’s the baseline or the bottom line, but it’s a necessary starting point. Clearly, this work is of particular meaning for people who work in journalism, sure, but also for everybody who sees and cares about the effects of media coverage on the whole range of issues that shape our lives, and on the relationship, as we at FAIR always talk about, between the business of media and journalism’s actual and potential societal impact.

So I want to ask you about the Impact Campaign. What is the work that is going with this film that’s different than just having a series of screenings of the film around the country? What do you hope to be adding with the Impact Campaign?

RG: Our Impact Campaign is just underway, and we’re going to be in New York in this coming week with a couple of screenings at the Firehouse Cinema DCTV on Tuesday, March 26 and Wednesday, March 27. And we’re going to be following that up with going to Minneapolis and Santa Cruz and Vancouver, Washington, and later Baltimore, New England, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, all over the country.

What’s the point of all that? Well, the film itself is a jumping off point for discussion about journalism. And we show, not only the causes of the hedge fund takeover of newspapers, which is massive in this country, but also some of the solutions that are happening, with startups—there’s over 400 nonprofit newspapers, with newsrooms from two to three people to maybe ten or 20 people. Not exactly taking the place of newspapers, but very, very substantial. There’s also movements to get public funding of local journalism.

And so we have the showings of the film followed by Q&A with, generally, I might be there, either in person or virtually, and maybe somebody from the local community who’s been paying attention to the local journalism crisis, talking about it, and interacting with the audience.

And what can you do? It might be getting in touch with your local representative, because some legislation is addressing this problem, or it’s expanding your knowledge of what are the local journalism outlets in your community that you’re not even thinking about? And it’s a way of getting people who are from the community and the journalists from that community to interact, get them in the same room, get them talking.

And I think it’s only by raising the public consciousness, and raising the amount of discussion about this crisis in local journalism, and how it affects democracy, that we’re going to find our way out of it. And the solutions in each community are somewhat different, because of the particulars of that community. And I think that’s actually a wonderful thing, because then the solutions become somewhat locally generated.

JJ: And how can folks learn more about this, or maybe even bring it to their town?

RG: Great question. Come to our website, StrippedForPartsFilm.com, just like it sounds. If you somehow have trouble reaching it, just Stripped for Parts and google it. You’ll get to our website. You can get in touch with us if you want to help arrange a screening in your community. We are here, and we have the ways to make that happen. And we can do that with you and with your help.

JJ: All right, then; we’ve been speaking with documentary filmmaker Rick Goldsmith. You can learn more about the film Stripped for Parts, and the Impact Campaign that goes with it, at StrippedForPartsFilm.com. Thank you so much, Rick Goldsmith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RG: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for reaching out to me.

 

The post ‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’  appeared first on FAIR.

What the Chuck? Murdoch Defends Bibi From Senate Leader

FAIR - March 22, 2024 - 5:38pm

The United States government has historically exercised a lot of opinions when it comes to who should be in charge of Middle Eastern countries. Former President Barack Obama on several occasions called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “to go” in order to end that country’s civil war (Washington Post, 8/18/11; BBC, 9/28/15; Wall Street Journal, 11/19/15).

Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (CBS, 10/20/11)  joked about Libyan leader of Muammar Qaddafi’s summary execution, saying of the US role in the Libyan civil war, “We came, we saw, he died.” The US has battered the Iranian economy with sanctions (Al Jazeera, 3/2/23) and has supported anti-government protests there (VoA, 12/20/22).

When it came to Obama’s policy on ousting Assad, Wall Street Journal (5/31/13) editors lamented that they were “beginning to wonder if he means it.” They said (10/24/11) of Qaddafi that he shouldn’t be “pitied for the manner of his death,” and that Libyans have “earned their celebrations.” They said “President Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and even the Arab League deserve credit as well” for militarily aiding Libyan  rebels.

A bylined op-ed in the Journal (6/11/18) not only celebrated  the idea of regime change in Iran, but rewrote the history of  the 1953 CIA-sponsored Iranian coup as ultimately the fault of a democratically elected leader who governed poorly in the eyes of the West.

‘An obstacle to peace’

The New York Times (3/19/24) reported that the Republican Jewish Coalition said that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back.”

One might expect, therefore, that the Journal would not be shocked to learn that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish American in US politics, had called for new Israeli elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (New York Times, 3/19/24).

Schumer, after all, didn’t call for an anti-government mob to remove Netanyahu from the Knesset and send him into exile. No, he just suggested it would be in Israel’s interest to hold elections to replace Israel’s longest-serving leader, whom Schumer described as “an obstacle to peace.”

Schumer’s view shouldn’t be surprising, because Jewish American voters are still overwhelmingly liberal (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6/26/23), while in recent decades Israel’s political center of gravity has moved far to the right. Polling shows that Netanyahu is deeply unpopular among Americans as a whole (Jerusalem Post, 1/8/24).

Yet the Journal—along with the Murdoch empire’s other main US newspaper, the New York Post—professed outrage at the idea of an American official intervening in the politics of another country.

‘Unwelcome interference’

The Wall Street Journal opinion page (3/14/24) expressed umbrage that Schumer would engage in such “unwelcome interference” in a democracy, which it argued was entirely unwarranted:

Precisely because Israel is a democracy, accountability for Mr. Netanyahu is baked in. The prime minister at this moment represents a broad consensus in Israeli society that the country can’t afford to allow Hamas to continue its violent and corrupt control of Gaza after the horrors unleashed on October 7.

Of course, the primary form of accountability to voters in a democracy comes with elections, so if Netanyahu truly represented a broad consensus in Israeli society, why should he or the Journal fear them?

In fact, a large majority of Israelis want early elections—a recent poll put the number at 71% (Haaretz, 2/6/24). Prior to October 7, Israelis regularly took to the streets to protest the Netanyahu government’s anti-democratic judicial overhaul.

And let’s not forget that Israel isn’t really a “democracy” at all, by the standard definition of the word: The approximately 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, over whom the Israeli government exercises its authority, have no say in that governance, and the 2 million Palestinians in Israel are relegated to second-class citizenship (FAIR.org, 5/16/23). Leading human rights groups have used the word “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s domination of Palestinians (B’Tselem, 1/12/21; Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Amnesty International, 2/1/22).

The Journal board (3/18/24) followed up to complain that President Joe Biden “has also endorsed Sen. Chuck Schumer’s extraordinary declaration last week that Israelis must depose the elected Mr. Netanyahu.” The word choices here—”deposing” an “elected” leader—paint an early election as an anti-democratic coup.

Counter that, for example, with how an op-ed at the Murdoch-owned New York Post (1/15/20) said of Iran, just weeks after the US military assassinated the country’s top general:

Can US policy afford to tip the internal balance against the mullahs, even as Trump tries to extricate us from the region? The answer is yes. These goals—regime change in Iran and ending endless  wars—are, in fact, complementary.

‘Wrong to raise the issue at all’

Joe Lieberman (Wall Street Journal, 3/20/24) complained that Schumer “treats Israel differently from other American allies by threatening to intervene in their domestic democratic politics”—as if the United States hasn’t overthrown the governments of US allies (e.g., South Vietnam, 1963; Australia, 1975; Ukraine, 2014) when they weren’t to its liking.

Bylined opinion pieces in the Journal agreed that Schumer was overstepping his authority by encouraging Israel to hold an election. Journal columnist William Galston (3/19/20) said Schumer “was wrong to raise the issue at all,” because Israel “is a sovereign nation with robust if imperfect democratic institutions,” rather than a “banana republic.” (In “banana republics”—that is, poor countries with nonwhite populations—US meddling is apparently unobjectionable.)

In another Journal op-ed (3/20/24), Joe Lieberman, a former Connecticut senator and one-time Democratic vice presidential candidate, castigated Schumer for his position. The Middle East hawk said:

This is a shocking statement that treats Israel differently from other American allies by threatening to intervene in their domestic democratic politics. In making American support for Israel conditional, Mr. Schumer harms Israel’s credibility among its allies and enemies alike.

Mr. Schumer’s statement will have every other democratic ally of the US worrying that America may try to bully our way into its domestic politics.

For anyone who knows about the pro-Israel lobby’s influence over US elections (Guardian, 5/17/22), or the history of the US toppling democratically elected leaders in Chile, Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, this objection comes off as both ignorant and hypocritical

Placating the anti-Israel left’

In the looking-glass world of the New York Post (3/14/24), Israelis are solidly behind Netanyahu, Americans enthusiastically back Israel’s war, and Gazans are “suffering far less than in most Mideast wars.”

Another worry Murdoch outlets expressed was that the US might change its foreign policy in response to US public opinion. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/14/24) worried that Schumer was “placating the anti-Israel left in his party,” which reflects a “political neurosis developing among Democrats,” in which the party wants “Israel to ‘win’ the war against Hamas in a way that would minimize the anger of the anti-Israel left” inside and outside of the party.

In its follow-up editorial about Biden’s support for Schumer’s comments, the Journal (3/18/24) similarly warned that the president was “catering to the anti-Israel left without alienating the bulk of US voters who would find it unconscionable to turn on the Israeli people in wartime.”

Meanwhile, the New York Post editorial board (3/14/24) wrote that the once-reliably pro-Israel Democrat is “now echoing Hamas’ line,” because a faction of “Arab-Americans and most Muslim voters, plus the rising number of hard lefties” within the party, is growing in influence.

If we can get past their blasé conflation of protesting the killing of innocent Palestinians with the agenda of Hamas, the Post and Journal editorial boards aren’t wrong: Protests against the massacre of Palestinians, outspoken pro-peace lawmakers, “uncommitted” votes in Democratic primaries and voters generally turning against Israeli policy are all putting pressure on Democratic leadership.

That’s the kind of “democracy” Murdoch’s papers can’t get behind.

The post What the Chuck? Murdoch Defends Bibi From Senate Leader appeared first on FAIR.

Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’—Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine

FAIR - March 22, 2024 - 2:59pm

 

Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.

Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.

 Linguistic gymnastics

This New York Times headline (2/29/24) was described as “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”

On the day of the massacre, the New York Times (2/29/24) published this contrivance:

“As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll”

It was met with ridicule as it slid across online platforms. Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/1/24), author and research director at the Iranian American Council, called the piece of work “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”

Another Times headline (2/29/24) read, “Deaths of Gazans Hungry for Food Prompt Fresh Calls for Ceasefire.” Nima Shirazi, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed  (Twitter, 3/1/24), noted that “the New York Times just can’t bring itself to write clear headlines when Israeli war crimes are involved.” Shirazi offered this revision: “Israel Slaughters Starving People as It Continues Committing Genocide.”

Professor Jason Hickel (Twitter, 2/29/24), along with Mint Press‘s Alan MacLeod (2/29/24), flagged the use of the neologism “food aid–related deaths” when it turned up in a Guardian headline (2/29/24): “Biden Says Gaza Food Aid–Related Deaths Complicate Ceasefire Talks.” MacLeod noted, “Virtually the entire Western media pretend they don’t know who just carried out a massacre of 100+ starving civilians.”

Linguistic gymnastics—a longstanding plague pervading Western media coverage of Palestine (FAIR.org, 8/22/23)—were so popular in news headlines and reporting that Caitlin Johnstone (Consortium News, 3/1/24) compiled a list of them, adding  “chaotic incident” (CNN, 2/29/24) and “chaotic aid delivery turns deadly” (Washington Post, 2/29/24) to those already mentioned.

Sana Saeed, media critic for Al Jazeera, decoded the latter kind of construction for AJ+ (3/29/24), arguing that such passive language has been used “consistently to sanitize the violence that a powerful state is unleashing against civilian populations.”

As the genocide enters its sixth month, media analysts, investigative reporters and social media users have become adept at recognizing pro-Israeli contortions and patterns of language that justify Israel’s war on Gaza. This has become an essential aspect in exposing Israel’s genocide.

‘Anarchy rules in Gaza’

Economist (2/29/24): “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.” 

The Economist (2/29/24), under the headline, “A New Tragedy Shows Anarchy Rules in Gaza: A Shooting and Stampede Kill 122 and Injure Hundreds,” went into the worst pro-Israel spin, with reporting that seemed to blame Palestinians for their own murders. Parroting Israeli press directives, the piece claimed Palestinians were killed by “trampling” each other in their own “stampede.”

The piece was written in literary prose: “Death descended on a coastal road in Gaza,” the reporter (not present at the scene) wrote. Then “catastrophe befell an aid convoy,” as if it merely happened upon bad luck.

Then the writer made a prediction: “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.” That’s likely to come true, especially when major media outlets abdicate their responsibility for evaluating claims.

Timeline of changing denials 

Even in special “Verify” mode, the BBC (3/1/24) can’t bring itself to say in a headline who it was that killed Gazans.

Many other writers and journalists have documented the string of vacillating Israeli statements that help explain the contorted reporting. Al Jazeera reporter Willem Marx (Twitter, 3/1/24) traced a timeline of how the Israeli military changed its story over the course of the day.

The IDF began by claiming there had been trampling and pushing that led to injuries around the aid truck. Then, hungry Palestinians had “threatened their soldiers,” or “appeared in a threatening manner,” so the IDF shot at them. Later that day, Israeli officials claimed there were two separate incidents, one that involved trampling and the other that led to shooting. By the end of the day, they alleged only to have provided support to a humanitarian convoy, and that no shots were fired at all by the military.

When the BBC (3/1/24) verified that a video released by the Israeli military exhibited four unexplained breaks in the footage and was therefore invalid, the outlet still used the passive voice, referring in the headline to “Gazans Killed Around Aid Convoy.” One sentence of the detailed, confused article quoted Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah: “Israelis purposefully fired at the men…. They were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour.” Earlier, however, Awadeyah was problematized when identified “as a journalist for Al Mayadeen, a Lebanon-based news station whose broadcasts are sympathetic to groups fighting Israel.”

Independent and international media 

“Israel’s use of food as a weapon of war reaches new heights,” Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported.

If we compare corporate outlets to independent media, in which reporting was based on ground sources, humanitarian actors and aid workers, we find very different content.

Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul (2/29/24), who was at the scene of the massacre, said that “after opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies. It is a massacre, on top of the starvation threatening citizens in Gaza.”

EuroMed staff (2/29/24) on the scene confirmed that the Israeli military had fired on starving Palestinians. EuroMed’s findings were summarized in a videotape by Palestinian news agency Quds News Network and posted by the Palestine Information Center (3/4/24).

Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported details of the massacre from eyewitness accounts. One survivor recounted how an Israeli checkpoint “split the crowd in two,” preventing those who had entered the checkpoint from passing back to the northern side. Then Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowd. International observers visited the injured survivors at al-Shifa’ Hospital, “confirming that the majority of wounds from the hundreds of injured people were due to live ammunition.”

In context of famine

Middle East Eye (2/29/24) put IDF claims in the context of a Gaza “on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade.”

Reporting in the alternative press also placed the massacre within the context of the rapidly increasing famine in Gaza.

The headline for the Electronic Intifada (2/29/24) read, “Palestinians Seeking Food Aid Killed as Israel Starves Gaza.” The outlet said an “engineered famine has taken hold in Gaza, with people resorting to eating wild plants with little nutritional value and animal feed to survive.”

Middle East Eye’s reporting (2/29/24) included the dire condition Palestinians are currently facing: “Much of Gaza’s population is on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade, according to the UN and other humanitarian organizations.”

The day of the massacre, Democracy Now! (2/29/24) opened its broadcast with a clear statement and the relevant context: “Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as UN Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza.” Its first guest, UN special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri, said, “Every single person in Gaza is hungry.” He accused Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation. He emphasized that famine in the modern context is a human-made catastrophe:

At this point I’m running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians.

Common Dreams (3/3/24) reported on Israel’s obstruction of aid convoys, and cited UNICEF on the deaths of children who

died of starvation and dehydration at a hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces continue to obstruct and attack aid convoys, fueling desperation across the territory…. People are hungry, exhausted and traumatized. Many are clinging to life.

It concluded, “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”

In the days before the massacre, numerous outlets had been documenting the growing famine looming over Gaza. This is the material independent media made use of for contextualizing the massacre.

The New York Times, on the other hand, put the massacre into an entirely different context. A piece (3/2/24) headlined “Disastrous Convey Was Part of New Israeli Effort for More Aid in Gaza,” cited as confirmation “Western diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” It said that international aid groups “suspended operations” because of “rising lawlessness,” as well as Israel’s refusal to “greenlight aid trucks.” It blamed starving Gazans by claiming that aid convoys had been looted either by “civilians fearing starvation” or by “organized gangs.”

‘How is this not a bigger story?’

“How is this not a bigger story?” one observer asked of this Al Jazeera report (3/6/24).

As Common Dreams and Mondoweiss reported, the flour massacre was not the first time the IDF killed starving Palestinians, and it would not be the last. As Mondoweiss (3/4/24) put it: “In less than a week, Israel has committed several massacres against the hungry. On Sunday, March 3, Israel bombed an aid convoy, killing seven people.”

Quds News Network (3/2/24) reported that Israel targeted hungry civilians again at Al Rasheed Street in northern Gaza while they were waiting for humanitarian aid. And  Quds (3/4/24) reposted Al Jazeera footage that captured the moments when Israel’s military opened fire at other hungry Gazans, this time at the Al Kuwait roundabout, as they looked for food aid.

Al Jazeera (3/6/24) continues to document the murders of Palestinians desperate for aid as they come under Israeli fire. On a longer videotape, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch says these attacks violate ICJ orders:

The idea that these people are being killed as they scavenge for meager rations of food is just appalling, and is a reminder why there must be international immediate action to prevent further mass atrocities.

Following the Al Jazeera report, Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/6/24) expressed dismay:

Israeli attacks on Palestinians waiting for or attempting to get aid have repeatedly happened this week, yet there has been no media coverage since the massacre that killed over 100 people. Israel is attacking civilians it’s deliberately starving. How is this not a bigger story?

Normalizing starvation and massacres

The Floutist (11/16/23) addresses “the perversion of language that the defense of Israel’s violence requires.”

Sana Saeed (Twitter, 3/4/24) observed:

So just to be clear: Much like how Israel normalized attacking and destroying hospitals, and it was accepted by the international community, Israel is now normalizing shooting and killing the people it is starving as they seek food.

Media have failed to inform the US public on the horrific conditions experienced by starving civilians in Gaza. They blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, covering for the Israeli military as it carried out a massacre. They further dehumanized Palestinians by characterizing starving people as an unruly mob who trampled one another.

To paraphrase Patrick Lawrence (Floutist, 11/16/23) on the distortion of language in defense of Israel’s violence against Palestinians: It corrupts our public discourse, our public space, and altogether our ability to think clearly. This corruption is as vital as US bombs to the Israeli genocide against Palestine: Without these verbal distortions that justify, distract, deny and consume corporate information spaces, the genocide could not be carried out.

The post Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’—Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine appeared first on FAIR.

Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts

FAIR - March 22, 2024 - 11:17am

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322.mp3

 

KXAS (3/19/24)

This week on CounterSpin: 2023 was the warmest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced records once again broken, “in some cases smashed” (their words), for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea-level rise, Antarctic sea ice and glacier retreat.

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. At the same time, we’re told that basic journalism says that when it comes to problems that people need solved, yet somehow aren’t solved, rule No. 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis they still…can’t… quite…connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Cooper.mp3

 

Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor”—the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage.  It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how what you may think of as your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way—with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Goldsmith.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Banter.mp3

The post Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts appeared first on FAIR.

Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges

FAIR - March 21, 2024 - 4:19pm

 

South Africa on December 29 presented a historic case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the highest court in the world. In an 84-page lawsuit, South Africa asserted that Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza—following the October 7 Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis and foreigners—constitutes genocide. So far, more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been slaughtered, while over 71,000 have been injured in Israeli attacks.

Establishment media in the US were slow to cover South Africa’s “epochal intervention” in the ICJ—initially providing the public with thin to no reporting on the case. While the quantity of coverage did eventually increase, it skewed pro-Israel, even after the court in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and ordered Tel Aviv to comply with international law.

Thin early coverage

In the Wall Street Journal (12/29/23), the initial accusation of genocide got second billing even in the subhead.

FAIR used the Nexis news database and WSJ.com to identify every article discussing the genocide case published in the print editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for one month, from the announcement of the case on December 29 through January 28, two days after the ICJ’s preliminary ruling.

Under international law, genocide is one of the gravest charges that can be brought against a state. Since its 1948 ratification by the UN, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has only been presented to the ICJ on a handful of occasions, and the historic nature of the complaint was not lost on its applicant: “South Africa is acutely aware of the particular weight of responsibility in initiating proceedings against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention.”

Unfortunately, the two most widely circulating newspapers in the US cannot say the same. In the lead-up to the hearing (12/29/23–1/10/24), the New York Times only published three articles focused on the case (1/8/24, 1/9/24, 1/10/24), while another Times piece (1/10/24) included a brief mention of the genocide charges.

The Wall Street Journal ran no pieces focused on the charges prior to the hearing. The Journal‘s only mention of the genocide case in the pre-trial period came in a broader article about the war (12/29/23), which included six paragraphs about South Africa’s application. The paper did not reference the case again until the trial began.

‘Without any basis in fact’

The New York Times (1/11/24) seemed to feel that the accusation of genocide was so serious that it should offer readers as few clues as possible as to whether it was true or not.

During the two-day hearing, each paper ran two articles about it in their print editions. Each published an overview of the case (New York Times, 1/11/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/11/24). For their second piece, the New York Times (1/11/24) looked at both Israeli and Palestinian reactions, while the Journal (1/12/24) focused only on Israeli reactions; the one Palestinian it quoted was identified as an Israeli citizen.

After the trial’s January 12 conclusion, and through January 27, two days after the court’s announcement of its preliminary ruling, the Times ran five more articles in its print edition primarily about the case, while the Journal ran only one.

Experts have said that “all countries have a stake” in South Africa’s application, and that the case “has broad implications” (OHCHR, 1/11/24), but the papers’ thin coverage suggested to their readership that it is of little consequence.

US news outlets’ dismissive reaction to the hearing was consistent with the Israeli narrative surrounding the genocide charges. Israel’s denunciations of Pretoria’s accusation were widely reported—they were “blood libel” (CNBC, 12/30/23); “nonsense, lies and evil spirit” (The Hill, 1/31/23); and “outrageous” (Jerusalem Post, 1/5/24). US officials followed suit, brushing off the allegations as “meritless” (The Hill, 1/9/24) and “without any basis in fact whatsoever” (VoA, 1/3/24).

So while the ICJ case was met with spirited support from the global human rights community, establishment media’s initial choice to treat it as unnewsworthy may have convinced some audiences to believe what Israel and its allies want them to believe—that South Africa’s application has no basis in reality.

Uneven sourcing

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The coverage the two papers did offer largely perpetuated US media’s longstanding tradition of skewing pro-Israel (FAIR.org, 8/22/23; Intercept, 1/9/24 ). Though Palestinians are at the center of the case, they often seemed to be an afterthought in the newspapers' coverage of it.

The papers were mirror images in terms of their frequency of quoted pro-Israeli and pro–South African positions in their coverage. The Wall Street Journal’s three articles that focused on the ICJ case included 23 quoted sources. Of these, 11 (48%) expressed or supported Israeli government positions, and 8 (35%) expressed or supported South African government positions. (Four were not clearly aligned with either party.) In the Times' 10 articles focused on the case, the paper featured 65 quoted sources. Those taking a clear position on one side or the other expressed or supported the South African position more often, with 30 sources (46%), compared to 23 expressing or supporting the Israeli stance (35%). (The remainder did not have a discernible stance.)

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Palestinian voices, however, were marginalized in both papers. Fourteen of the 65 Times sources were Palestinian (22%); 22 (34%) were Israeli. Five of its 10 articles on the genocide case that appeared in print quoted no Palestinian sources. By contrast, only one—a piece about South African domestic politics (1/27/24)—quoted no Israeli sources.

Of the Journal's 23 sources, five (22%) were Palestinian, and 9 (39%) were Israeli. Two of its articles were evenly balanced between Palestinian and Israeli sources, while one (1/12/24) quoted five Israelis and only one Palestinian—the citizen of Israel mentioned above.

The lack of Palestinian representation is consistent with establishment media trends, which often neglect Palestinian voices in Israel/Palestine coverage. In fact, a 2018 study conducted by 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, found that, in five major US newspapers’ coverage of Israel/Palestine between 1967 and 2017, Israeli sources were cited 2.5 times more often than Palestinian ones.

Consequently, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s media resource guide advises reporters: “Interview Palestinians. Your story is always incomplete without them."

Unchallenged Israeli talking points

The only independent legal expert quoted in this New York Times article (1/10/24) suggested that it was impossible to say whether a genocide was going on while there was still time to stop it.

While the New York Times' sourcing was somewhat more balanced, that did not reflect the absence of a pro-Israel skew. The paper failed at the basic task of evaluating arguments, reducing the grave charge of genocide to an unresolvable he said/she said back-and-forth.

In the Times' most extensive pre-trial article (1/1o/24), Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner and Johannesburg bureau chief John Eligon provided an overview of the hearing. Of 11 quoted sources, only a single independent legal expert was included: William Schabas of Middlesex University, London, who averred that it would be months before South Africa assembled all of its evidence, and "only then can we really assess the full strength of the South African case." Meanwhile, four Israeli sources and a US official were quoted in support of Israel, against three South African sources and one Palestinian source.

The Times piece also uncritically presented easily refutable Israeli claims about the legality of the IDF military campaign in Gaza:

Israel’s military insists that it is prosecuting the war in line with international law. Officials point to the millions of messages, sent by various means, telling Gaza’s civilians to evacuate to safer areas ahead of bombings, and say they are constantly working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza.

Israel's insistence that it follows international law is contradicted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, all of which have documented evidence of war crimes committed by Israel in this conflict, as well as in past conflicts. Journalists' job is to hold the powerful to account, not to simply relay their claims, no matter how flimsy. Yet the Times offered no hint of pushback to Israel's assertions.

Moreover, those “millions of messages” are often inaccessible to Gazans under rocket fire. The designated “safe zones” are usually announced on social media posts or via leaflets dropped over Gaza containing QR codes to maps (Guardian, 12/2/23). As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, “It is unclear how those residing in Gaza would access the map without electricity and amid recurrent telecommunications cuts.” Since October 7, Israel has purposely cut Gaza’s electricity and internet supply—another violation of international law (Human Rights Watch, 10/21/23; Al Jazeera, 12/4/23).

Even if Gazans make their way to the designated zones, there is no guarantee that they will find safety; many of the areas that Israel allotted as civilian safe zones have been targeted and bombed by the army (New York Times, 12/21/23). As UNICEF spokesperson, James Elder, told the BBC (12/5/23): “There are no safe zones in Gaza.”

Unscrutinized statements

The Wall Street Journal (1/12/24) provided no questioning of the claim that "Israel’s inherent right to defend itself" required the killing of thousands of children.

The idea that the Israeli military is “constantly working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza” is also patently incorrect. A Human Rights Watch report (12/18/23) found that

Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.

Nearly the exact same paragraph about Israel sending "millions of messages" and "constantly working to increase the amount of aid" appeared in the Times the next day (1/11/24), without any analysis.

Another Times piece, by Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley (1/12/24), offered a brief explanation of the accusations leveled by South Africa, followed by Israel's rebuttal that it is taking “significant precautions to protect civilians.” Again, the Times offered no evaluation of such claims.

The Wall Street Journal (1/12/24) advanced a similar assertion from Tal Becker, chief lawyer for Israel’s Foreign Ministry: “Israel…recognizes its obligation to conduct military operations in line with international humanitarian law, which requires efforts to minimize civilian casualties.”

With no scrutiny of Israeli officials’ statements, US news becomes little more than a bullhorn for government propaganda.

Research assistance: Xenia Gonikberg, Phillip HoSang

The post Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges appeared first on FAIR.

‘The US State Department Is Complicit With Juan Orlando Hernández’ CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran ex-president conviction

FAIR - March 20, 2024 - 4:50pm

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Pitzer College’s Suyapa Portillo Villeda about the conviction of Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández for the March 15, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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

 

AP (3/8/24)

Janine Jackson: The lead on AP‘s March 8 piece told the story:

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in New York of charges that he conspired with drug traffickers, and used his military and national police force to enable tons of cocaine to make it unhindered into the United States.

US Attorney Damian Williams said he hopes the conviction “sends a message to all corrupt politicians who would consider a similar path: Choose differently.” Heady stuff.

The US attorney added that Hernández “had every opportunity to be a force for good in his native Honduras. Instead, he chose to abuse his office and country for his own personal gain.” Well, that sounds horrible, not caring about the good of everyday Hondurans.

Nowhere in AP’s account is the role of the United States, here presented as bravely bringing criminal Central Americans to justice for their efforts to pollute our country with their drugs, nowhere is the role of the US in shaping the political landscape in Honduras.

So that’s the storyline corporate news media are selling right now. But what is missing from that, that might complicate it, or deepen our understanding of current events?

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College. She’s also author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda: Thank you for having me.

JJ: First and foremost, I would ask you to please fill in some missing history for us, in terms of US involvement in Honduran elections and Hondurans’ ability to choose their own political future. And you can go back as far as you want on that timeline.

Suyapa Portillo: “The United States, through the coup d’etat, was in cahoots with elite power in Honduras that replaced a democratically elected president.”

SPV: I’m glad that you’re raising and questioning corporate media, because they don’t really tell you the story of US involvement in Honduras. And I’m a historian, so whenever I teach about this, I go back 200 years, 300 years, to the US becoming the neo-colonial power over Latin America after independence movements, and being involved in Central America, throughout the 20th century, through warships, financial deals, through dollar diplomacy, the United Fruit Company. We can go on and on and on.

But I wanted to, specifically with the Juan Orlando Hernández case, talk about how the US put him in office for two terms. We don’t know what the inside machinations were, but we do have WikiLeaks that do tell us that the United States, through the coup d’etat, was in cahoots with elite power in Honduras that replaced a democratically elected president, or actually kidnapped a democratically elected president. The US embassy was involved, during President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, were involved in the kidnapping of the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, putting him on a plane to Costa Rica in his pajamas.

What’s eerie about this whole scenario in 2009 is that a similar thing happened with President Ramón Villeda Morales, who was also a Liberal Party member, in 1962, was also kidnapped in his pajamas and taken out of the country. So the US has its hands all over this kind of activity in Central America, and all over the world, the developing world and the South.

When this happened, President Obama denies the coup d’etat, denies it, and we academics, scholars all over Latin America, as well as the United States, spent a lot of time talking to press and anybody who would listen, and US Congress, as well as news media outlets all over the world, about why this was a coup d’etat. And it almost felt like we were in the Twilight Zone.

HuffPost (3/12/16)

But then later in 2011, we saw WikiLeak cables that revealed that the US embassy was definitely in cahoots with the elite and the military in Honduras, who wanted to oust Manuel Zelaya Rosales for his “connections” to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela at the time.

And that coup d’etat changed everything in Honduras. And it spearheaded the decline of human rights, and the decline in civil and political rights for people, for women and children specifically. It was extremely violent for women and children, and has led to the 2017, 2018 migrant caravans that people have been seeing on TV.

The femicides have increased. We’re looking at 700 women killed per year. We’re looking at transfemicides also. We’re looking at 200, 300 women killed per year, trans women. So it’s an incredible level of violence against young people who fight for their rights.

What that does is then it opens a door for someone who would’ve never been elected as president, who had run two or three times before, and that’s Porfirio Lobo. And Porfirio Lobo, who’s also been linked to narco trafficking and the whole apparatus, gets into power through sham elections, which the State Department supported and the US embassy supported. But over 68% of the Honduran population abstained, because they felt, why should we vote if we had a democratically elected president? Why should we go to an election after this coup? What needs to happen is a reversal of the coup.

CounterSpin (5/1/15)

And something really important gets born then. And some of the proponents were Xiomara Castro Zelaya, Zelaya’s wife, who’s now in power, but also Berta Cáceres, Miriam Miranda, leaders of the Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous movements, began to propose this notion of refounding the country. So while there was a lot of calamity happening, a lot of violence, there was also a resurgence in popular movements. The idea that you could have a different Honduras was also born in 2009, out of this calamity.

When Juan Orlando Hernández was elected, it was a contested election. I was an observer at the time, and it was the first time the Libertad y Refundación party ran. The party itself was just beginning to organize. The resistance movement had gone through a split. There were some people that wanted to continue the social movement aspect, and then there was another group that wanted to organize it into a political party. And there were fierce debates about this.

And when you go to the polls, there was just a lot of corruption. It was very contested.

And so Juan Orlando gets into power. The United States supports this sort of stabilizing force; they see the National Party as a stabilizing force. So one of the first things he does is he establishes the military police, which is something that had been eradicated, with the Peace Accord post-the wars in Central America in the early ’90s.

And the military police is this weird sort of police force that are military men with bayonets and war armament walking around the cities acting as police, right? So you have these multiple police entities in the city, but the military police is to be feared. These are the people that committed the disappearances. These are the people that engaged in violence against people in the ’80s, during the dark years of anti-Communism.

Bringing them back was almost a suggestion of the US embassy, which then, after, came out and said, “No, no, no, we never suggested this.” But it was something that Juan Orlando Hernández did in cahoots with the US embassy.

And, in fact, the military police then comes back into power, and begins to be the entity that harms most in the cities. He also begins to work with the elites, right, with the Evangelical churches, and an agenda that’s extremely anti-women, anti-children, anti-LGBT, anti-human, really, right?

Youth are the enemy of this administration. We just witnessed this extremely violent repression of young people, right? People who defended territorial rights… Berta Cáceres, one of the brightest leaders in the resistance… I think at one point, he issued 330 concessions on environmental lands that had been hard-fought protected, rivers and flora and fauna that were going to be stripped for mining.

CounterSpin (12/24/21)

One thing I want to say is, during his elections, the second time he was reelected, there were so many inconsistencies. I’ve served as an election observer on all those elections, and the second time, I brought students, so we could cover a larger ground in San Pedro Sula. And it was clear from all of our observations, the winning parties—because you stay till the end, til the counting—and at one point, I had to shelter with my students in one of those locations, because we had gone until one in the morning, during counting.

And the military started throwing tear gas into the voting center, and there was a skirmish there between the military and who knows who. We were kind of sheltered in a room. And with the counting, we didn’t want to leave the voting machines!

I think about what an experience that was for my students, because when we think about protecting our rights in the United States, and voting rights, we rarely see that level of violence inside a voting precinct. It’s completely illegal.

There was trafficking votes, there were all kinds of irregular things happening, like the National Party people were setting up offices within the voting precinct; you’re not supposed to see that. Just outright mayhem. It was like the wild, wild West under Juan Orlando Hernandez. It was the most extreme dictatorship, that can only be compared to Carias Andino in the ’30s.

And people just wanted this man out, because of the rampant violence, the abuse of power, and stealing from the coffers. I mean, at one point, $90 million stolen from the Social Security Administration, which is sort of like what workers pay into.

But at state hospitals, there were fake pills given to people who had cancer; there was no response to Covid except extreme lockdown, which, people died because he instituted a curfew law, and anybody that was out after 10 o’clock could be shot or could be thrown in jail. And sometimes people are coming back from work, or didn’t have transportation. A young woman in Berta Cáceres’ hometown died because she was arrested at 10 o’clock, because she was out, and then appeared dead the next day, right?

Just the extreme violence that the police and the military all engaged with, looking back as a historian, I think these are crimes against humanity. This guy went down for engaging in drug trafficking, but really he needed to be tried for crimes against humanity, as do many other presidents, right, across the world.

But what’s a little scary about this ruling is, people knew he was trafficking drugs, but you couldn’t say anything, because you would be dead. And so many, many journalists died trying to tell the story, but it was held down and shut.

And in fact, many of the newspapers in Honduras cannot be trusted, because they were, first of all, not telling the story of the protest. So if you go searching those newspapers, La Tribuna, El Heraldo, right, for these years, as a historian, I think there was this complicity between the elite, the rich, the landowners, those who wanted more land and more land, taking it away from Indigenous people, and Juan Orlando profiting from narco trafficking, allowing narco trafficking to happen, and the narco traffickers, to hurt people in the areas where they did in the north coast of Honduras, the Garifuna territories, to go after leaders of those local environmentalists, protecting the environment, protecting the rivers, protecting the oceans from encroachment.

I wanted to say, yes, everybody knew Juan Orlando Hernández was a narco, but how do you challenge the Honduran people who are organizing? There needed to be more awareness from the US embassy, and I think the US embassy was complicit. And, true, maybe the DEA built this case from the beginning, and it took them many years, but they were also not in support of the resistance, and the fact that he did not win that election, the second time, and that there was a blackout right at the end that lasted a couple of hours, and all of a sudden, three days later, he’s president.

University of Texas Press (2022)

The US allowed for this man to lie to the Honduran people, to steal from the Honduran people, and to sit in that office that is the highest office for Honduras, while all these people were dying, and they committed this crime with him, they’re complicit with him. The US State Department is complicit with Juan Orlando Hernández.

So when he’s extradited, I think for Hondurans, it was a relief to be rid of this pseudo-dictator narco-president. But there’s a concern as well. There’s something kind of malignant about that, you know what I mean? That the US becomes all-powerful, and the decider of a country’s fate, and that’s scary.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Suyapa Portillo Villeda of Pitzer College in California, and also author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras, where you can find much more information about what we’re talking about today. Thank you so much, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, for speaking with us today on CounterSpin.

SPV: Thank you for having me.

 

The post ‘The US State Department Is Complicit With Juan Orlando Hernández’ <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 Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran ex-president conviction appeared first on FAIR.

‘They’re Marketing to Us That We’re Too Stupid to Fix Our Stuff’ CounterSpin interview with Gay Gordon-Byrne on right to repair

FAIR - March 20, 2024 - 10:37am

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the Repair Association’s Gay Gordon-Byrne about the right to repair for the March 15, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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

 

Dayton Daily News (2/15/24)

Janine Jackson: The president of the Ohio Farmers Union wrote an op-ed—I saw it in the Dayton Daily News—lamenting that “the needs and interests of family farmers have been ignored time after time by state and federal office holders.” A key complaint: manufacturers’ refusal to share the software needed to fix their products, forcing people to deal with a limited number of “authorized” shops, or to just throw away the broken thing and buy a new one.

Joe Logan wrote:

Frustrating enough for ordinary consumers, but for a farmer in the short window of harvest time, dealing with a breakdown of a half-million-dollar piece of equipment like a tractor or combine, it can be devastating.

Farmers versus faceless corporations—sounds like a ready-made storyline. So why don’t we hear it? Why is the right to repair controversial?

Gay Gordon-Byrne is executive director of the Repair Association, online at repair.org. She joins us now by phone from upstate New York. Welcome to CounterSpin, Gay Gordon-Byrne.

Gay Gordon-Byrne: Thank you very much for having me!

JJ: I think the right to repair is a keystone issue, affecting and reflecting a lot of other ideas, rights and relationships. But first, we’re talking with you now because the terrain is changing, in terms of the law around people’s ability to access the data and tools they need to fix, instead of replace, machines like tractors, like washing machines and, yes, like phones. The meaningful action seems to be at the state level. Can you bring us up to date on what’s happening legislatively, statewise?

Gothamist (12/29/23)

GG: Sure. We’ve been working with state legislatures since January of 2014, so we’ve now got a full 10 years under our belts. And over that time—I didn’t get a completely accurate count, because it does keep changing—we’ve actually been able to introduce bills in 48 out of 50 states, and over the years, that’s coming up to about 270+ pieces of legislation. So we’re pretty mature now, in terms of what we know needs to be done and can be done by states, and what that wording looks like.

So we’re pretty experienced at this point. We’ve had some good success lately. We got our first couple of bills through to the end and signed by the governor, starting in the end of 2022, in New York. Three more states—I think I could be miscounting, because my brain’s a little fried—but three more states in 2023, and we’ve got a bill in front of the governor in Oregon. So things are looking good.

JJ: So when you go in at a state legislative level, what do you concretely ask for? What is that language in the bills that you put forward?

GG: It’s actually pretty much consistent. There’s really only one active sentence, and it says that, “Hey, Mr. Manufacturer, if you want to do business in our state, you must provide all the same materials for purposes of repair that you’ve already created for your own repair services.” That’s pretty much it.

JJ: Right. So it means that you don’t have to only go to the Apple store to fix your Apple tech. But that, though, leads me to another question, which I know you’ve worked on, which is some companies are kind of saying they support this, but they have important compromises involved in their compliance.

GG: Yeah, some compliance is slightly malicious. And we keep trying, every time we file a new bill, we try to basically kick that malicious idea down, and make sure that the bills, as they go forward, are more and more explicit, and eliminate some of the loopholes that have been stuffed into bills, because legislators are really not necessarily technologists. We don’t expect them to be, but when a company like the big fruit company says, “Hey, I want to support right to repair in California,” they’re kind of helpless. They’ll take the support, and they’ll give away what they have to give away to get the bill done.

Verge (2/9/24)

JJ: So what does that malicious compliance look like? It’s a rhetorical support for the right to repair, but when it actually pans out, it doesn’t look like what you’re actually calling for.

GG: Yeah, the best example right now is what we call “parts pairing.” That’s been a problem all along, and we thought we had it nailed down in our template legislation, which we wrote back in 2015, that you can’t require specifically that you buy a part only from the manufacturer, and only new. And Apple got around it. They just said, “Well, we’re going to make sure that if you order a part from us, it’ll only work if you give us the serial number of your phone, and we preload that serial number into the part that we ship you, and that’ll work, but nothing else will.”

Which is really malicious, because it eliminates the ability to even use a part that might be brand new out of a phone that’s busted, and it eliminates the opportunity for a repair shop to stock any kind of inventory. It ruins the opportunity of restoring donated devices so that they can be reused, because who’s going to spend $300 to buy a brand-new part when the phone is only worth $200?

JJ: The right to fix things that we’ve bought and paid for—it shows up a kind of conflict between one narrative that Americans are told and tell ourselves, about Americans as scrappy, as individuals who rely on themselves, and then this other, different, unspelled-out story about how, no, you’re stupid, you’ll probably only hurt yourself; the only responsible thing to do is to pay the company whatever they want to charge you. And you know what, why don’t you just buy the latest version? Wouldn’t that be easier?

Not everyone can or wants to fix their own stuff, but the idea that, even though you bought it, you don’t ever really own it, it just seems like it should be a hard sell to people. So how did we get here?

Gay Gordon-Byrne: “States have the ability to simply say, ‘You can’t sell this stuff…and then unsell it using an unfair and deceptive contract.'”

GG: Companies have had basically a full generation, like 20 years, to perfect their marketing. And what they’re marketing to us is exactly what you said, that we’re too stupid to be able to fix our stuff, concurrently with the stuff that’s “too complicated to repair”—which is also baloney, because they create the repair materials that can be used by the least technologically expensive person to make repairs for them. We’re not paying people $300 an hour to repair cell phones. They’re getting paid 20 bucks, if that.

So the tools that are there are made to make repairs easy and efficient and less costly for the manufacturer, but we’ve been told we can’t do them. We’ve been told it’s too sophisticated, it’s too complicated.

And the emperor really has no clothes. And the fun part about doing this legislation is seeing the eyes light up when we talk with legislators, saying, this is actually not right. It’s not legal. There are supposed to be protections and antitrust law that prevent this behavior. But the Department of Justice has had about a 40- or 50-year hiatus on antitrust. It’s coming back, but it’s very, very cumbersome to go that way.

So the states have the ability to simply say, “You can’t sell this stuff, on the one hand, and then unsell it using an unfair and deceptive contract,” which is typically an end-user license agreement. Those agreements are of no value to anybody, except to remove your rights to fix your stuff.

JJ: Right, and they’re in the tiniest print you could ever imagine. And I just, finally, for anyone who’s missing it, this isn’t just a consumer rights failure, which is big enough, but it’s also an environmental disaster, to have industries based on buy it, throw it out, buy the new one. That’s a lose/lose.

GG: It’s pervasive. When we’ve taken a look at it and evaluated a lot of the contracts, we come to the conclusion that something more than 90% of the equipment on the market today literally cannot be repaired by anybody other than the manufacturer, if it’s repairable at all. And this is an environmental catastrophe. And it applies to everything that has a chip in it, which is now including toasters and blenders and coffee grinders, and all sorts of little stuff that, really, why do you have to throw it away? First of all, it’s made like garbage, but second of all, you can’t fix it.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association. They’re online at repair.org. Thank you so much, Gay Gordon-Byrne, for speaking with us today on CounterSpin.

GG: Oh, my pleasure. Anytime.

 

The post ‘They’re Marketing to Us That We’re Too Stupid to Fix Our Stuff’ <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 Gay Gordon-Byrne on right to repair appeared first on FAIR.

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

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

 

(image: Repair.org)

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

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

 

Juan Orlando Hernández
(photo: Alan SantosPR)

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

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

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

House Votes Against TikTok—and for More Cold War

FAIR - March 14, 2024 - 3:03pm

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

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

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

‘Profound implications’

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

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

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

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

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

Bipartisan support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vehicle for anti-Chinese fervor

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAIR - March 14, 2024 - 10:18am

 

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

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

 

Yes! (Winter/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAIR.org (11/8/19)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radical Elders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AL: Thank you.

 

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

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